End-of-month briefs for June 30, 2025

I probably should have mentioned the passing of noted film composer Lalo Schifrin last Thursday a few days after his 93rd birthday. Among his film scores were Cool Hand Luke and Dirty Harry, but of course he's probably even better known for the theme to the TV series Mission: Impossible. I suppose TCM could do a full night's programming tribute to him, although I'd think one film at the end of the year is more likely.

I was looking at the upcoming schedule on TCM, and noticed that Coquette shows up first thing tomorrow at 6:00 AM. Mary Pickford won the Best Actress Oscar for it, although the general consensus is that this is more of a career Oscar since most of her career is from before the Academy Awards, and the movie is way, way, over the top with fairly poor performances from the rest of the cast. But it's one of thos movies that, for whatever reason, rarely shows up on the TCM schedule even though it's one of those "Oscar list" movies.

I was also looking at the statistics on my blog recently. Somebody on another form who also does a blog was talking about the surprisingly high number of hits he'd gotten over the past month, and that perhaps he could monetize the blog. So just for kicks I decided to check how many hits I'd gotten, and something's clearly screwy with them. A six-figure number of hits over the past month, with a significant plurality of the views coming from Brazil?! Really? At the same time, I found myself thinking about what all those AI bots scraping any sites they can get their tentacles for content are going to learn from my little blog.

I've also been putting up a bit less in the way of "extra" posts; that is, days where I have two posts. I think it's largely because I've been more focused on getting through the backlog of stuff I've watched and being ahead of the game in having stuff scheduled for three or four weeks ahead. And then sometimes I have to reschedule stuff when I find something coming up on TCM that's on my DVR. In any case, the blog is going to carry on more or less as it is as long as I keep enjoying movies and don't have so many other obligations that prevent me from posting.

Not a William Castle movie

Producer/director William Castle was known for the gimmicks he put into his horror films. So when I saw the opening of Chamber of Horrors, I was expecting the end of the credits to have Castle as either the producer or the director, but in fact this isn't the case. Still, the movie is interesting enough to be worth watching.

The movie opens with a pre-credits warning that there are four scenes so intense that they're proceded by a flashing red light and a "horror horn" to allow people to look away. Of course, the four scenes aren't so scary; that's just one of the gimmicks of the film. After the credits we get a fun if bizarre scene of a man in Baltimore circa 1890 named Jason Cravette (Patrick O'Neal. He's getting married, but it's to a beautiful blonde corpse, with the minister conducting the ceremony doing so at gunpoint! So we already know at the start who the killer for the rest of the movie is and, thanks to the Production Code, we know he's going to get justice in the end, but there's a way to go.

Anthony Draco (Cesare Danova) runs a wax museum focusing on lurid crimes, together with Harold Blount (Wilfrid Hyde-White) and dwarf Señor Pepe. Jason's aunt approaches them, which is how they get involved in the case. Their sleuthing eventually reveals that Jason is hiding in a brothel run by Madame Corona (Marie Windsor), so the police raid the brothel and arrested by policeman Jim Albertson (Wayne Rogers), and put on trial by judge Randolph, with a Dr. Cobb testifying that Jason is perfectly sane. Jason is sent to prison and sentenced to hang.

All of this happens in the first third of the movie, so we know that Jason isn't going to hang, at least not yet. On his way to the prison, he's handcuffed to the police guard taking him to prison, except at one key point where the policeman puts the handcuff on one of those iron wheels used to couple and decouple cars. Jason, in a desperate attempt to escape, removes the wheel from the shaft and jumps off a bridge. But since he can't break the chain of the cuffs, he chops off his hand!

We then see Jason in New Orleans, sans hand but having contracted with someone who has made not only a nice prosthetic hook but a series of other prosthetic attachments that are going to get use. Jason goes to another brothel in New Orleans, and finds a pretty young lady named Marie (Laura Devon), who is willing to let herself be used in Jason's revenge scheme since Jason, having the family money, is rich enough to pay her well. That scheme, as you might imagine, is for Jason to use Marie to lure all the people who helped put him behind bars come to their own deaths. Of course, since there's that pesky Production Code, we know he won't quite succeed.

The ending of the movie is weird, as though things are being set up for a sequel. In fact, on looking up this movie, I discovered that Chamber of Horrors was originally conceived as a TV movie of the week-length pilot for a TV series that obviously never got produced. Supposedly the suits considered Chamber of Horrors too violent for episodic TV, so the material was released to theaters instead.

As for the material, I have to say that it's on the level of episodic TV of the 1960s, which means that the story isn't exactly great. It is, however, a heck of a lot of silly fun. And, of course, it's nowhere near as scary as the opening "warning" would try to get you to believe. Definitely worth a watch.

Mad Dog and Glory

Ben Mankiewicz sat down with Bill Murray several nights back to present two of Murray's films. Since I was in college in the early 1990s, I have to admit that there are a bunch of smaller films from that era that I don't know so much about. An example of this is one of the films that TCM showed that night, Mad Dog and Glory. But since it sounded interesting, I recorded it and eventually got around to watching it in order to be able to do the blog post about it.

Interestingly enough, Bill Murray is neither glorious nor a mad dog in this one. Instead, the "Mad Dog" character is played by Robert De Niro and is a Chicago police officer named Wayne "Mad Dog" Dobie. The movie begins with a drug deal that goes bad, or perhaps doesn't quite go so much bad as one of the dealers is intending to murder both the guy presumably ferrying the drug money as well as his own partner in crime, leaving both of the bodies in the car to dispose of them. Mad Dog and his partner Mike (David Caruso) investigate and, as Mad Dog goes into a convenience store to pick up some snacks for a fellow cop back in the precinct, sees that the cashier has a gun on him, from a guy who would fit the description of the killer.

Now, this is also where Bill Murray's character comes in. Bill plays Frank Milo, who happens to be one of those behind the scenes gangsters who never gets his own hands dirty, but just happens to be at the convenience store when it's getting robbed and when Mad Dog shows up. Mad Dog's quick thinking saves the day. Frank, to thank Mad Dog, has one of his underlings meet Mad Dog at a cafe and give Mad Dog tickets to, of all things, a comedy club. Here, we learn that Frank has dreams of doing the stand-up comedy thing and, since he owns the club anyhow, is able to indulge his own fantasies by doing shows at the club. Who's going to stop him?

When Mad Dog shows up, he gets a cup of coffee from one of the hostesses, a young woman named Glory (Uma Thurman). A mishap occurs in which Glory accidentally spills hot coffee on Mad Dog's hand. Mad Dog really only has first-degree burns, but this is lousy customer service, and something that Frank just doesn't want to see happen. Since Glory is one of Frank's employees, Frank gives her another job to do, which is to show up at Mad Dog's apartment and basically give him anything he wants short of non-consensual sex for one week. (Mad Dog, not being married, doesn't have to worry about having a relationship with a strange girl.) Glory doesn't have much choice in the matter, as it's not just a case of her keeping her job. In fact, she's got a brother who owed a debt to Frank and the Mob, and Glory is in service to Frank as a way of paying off that debt. Of course, as things stand, Glory is never really going to be able to repay that debt.

Things get complicated when something that is to be expected by the viewer happens: Mad Dog begins to fall for Glory, even though he's supposed to give her up at the end of the week. And Frank certainly wants Glory back after the week is up. The fact that Mad Dog is getting favors from somebody known to be involved in organized crime doesn't help either. (Oddly enough, Frank ingratiates himself to Mad Dog's fellow detectives by doing impromptu stand-up in the precinct house.) Frank and Mad Dog both want Glory, leading to the climactic conflict.

Having watched Mad Dog and Glory, I can see how it had slipped under my radar and isn't well-remembered today. It's not exactly a bad movie by any means, but it feels like one of those formulaic cop comedies from the era. Everybody does well enough, but Mad Dog and Glory isn't the most memorable movie. If you've got a rainy day to fill, Mad Dog and Glory will certainly fit the bill and be entertaining enough. But is it a truly great movie? Not particularly. The leads have all done better work, I think.

Broadway to Hollywood

Mickey Rooney was TCM's Star of the Month last December, and I suppose I should probably start getting through some of the movies that I recorded not having blogged about before. First up will be one of his juvenile roles which is actually fairly brief, in the movie Broadway to Hollywood.

Rooney is, as I mentioned above, not the star here; that honor goes to Frank Morgan and to a slightly lesser extent Alice Brady. They play Ted and Lulu Hackett respectively, and as the movie opens it's probably some time in the 1880s, although I don't think everything quite fits in terms of the movie's timeline. Ted and Lulu are stars on the vaudeville circuit, which as I understand it would be the early days of vaudeville at least in the US. Ted and Lulu love each other, although Ted has difficulties being faithful, sometimes cavorting with women and sometimes cavorting with the bottle.

Eventually they have a son together, Ted Jr. (played by Jackie Cooper as a juvenile and Russell Hardie as an adult) and bring him up in the world of vaudeville, training him to become part of the act and turn it into a true family act instead of a double. Unfortunately, Ted Sr. and Lulu don't really do anything to innovate or keep the act up with the changing times, with the result that the parents become a bit less successful over time while Ted Jr. grows up to be a success on his own and having the clout to get his parents bit parts in a revue which will star him.

One generation follows the other, and Ted Jr. meets a nice woman in the show named Anne Ainsley (Madge Evans), falls in love with her, and eventually marries her, although she gets the distinct feeling tht Ted's parents don't really approve of the relationship. Perhaps she should be worrying about her husband, though, as the Hackett and Ainsley partnership seems to be going the way of the relationshp Ted Sr. and his parents had. Ted Jr. takes to both drink and women, which causes Anne all sorts of anguish, even though they have a kid of their own, Ted III (Mickey Rooney as a juvenile and Eddie Quillan as an adult). Eventually, Anne confronts Ted Jr., leading to tragedy. Ted Jr. deals with it by leaving Ted III with his parents while going off to fight in the Great War and getting himself killed in action.

Another decade or more passes, with movies taking over for vaudeville. Ted III grows up and is discovered by Hollywood to have great talent, although there's not much use for his parents. Ted III becomes successful enough that he can bring his parents out to Hollywood and give them a comfortable retirement. But, like his father and grandfather before him, Ted III lets success go to his head, having problems with both drink and women that threaten to derail his career too.

Broadway to Hollywood was released in 1933, and the first thing that I noticed is that the musical numbers in the movie are all badly filmed, as though they didn't know of the influence of Busby Berkeley and 42nd Street which came out early in 1933. Apparently, the bigger production numbers were archive footage: MGM had planned to make a sequel to The Hollywood Revue of 1929 in 1930 but never released it. Eventually, they used some of that footage in Broadway to Hollywood, which would explain what those musical numbers are so creaky. They're actually from 1930.

That fact, combined with Broadway to Hollywood being a decided programmer instead of a prestige picture, give the film an atmosphere of being not quite up to snuff in terms of production values. That's a bit of a shame, since even though the idea isn't terribly original, is one that could have wound up much better instead of a dated time capsule. Broadway to Hollywood is still worth one watch, but is definitely just a pedestrian movie in the end. Watch also for some famous names in small parts, and see if you spot Curly and Moe Howard without looking up their roles in the credits first.

World in My Corner

TCM did a tribute to actress Barbara Rush after she died last year, which included a movie I'd never heard of, World in My Corner. It sounded interesting enough, so I recorded it and eventually got around to watching it to do a post on it.

Barbara Rush is the female lead, but the real star here is Audie Murphy. He plays Tommy Shea, a would-be boxer who isn't very successful. As the movie opens, he's fighting in a bout where boxing "owner" Harry Cram (Howard St. John) is in attendance, but loses. However, he seems to impress at least one person in the crowd, Dave Bernstein (John McIntire), who works out on Long Island for wealthy ball-bearing manufacturer Mallinson (Jeff Morrow). Dave gives Tommy a business card with Mallinson's address and tells Tommy to come see him if he's interested in a better class of training.

Tommy isn't really interested, at least not until he loses his blue-collar job over in Jersey City, which is definitely the wrong side of the river. So on a lark, he heads over to Long Island, only to find Dave isn't currently. So he talks with the guy who is training at the makeshift gym, and is rather dismissive, not realizing that he's talking to Mr. Mallinson himself. Mallinson is so impressed that he offers Tommy a job on the estate while Dave can train him up to be a real professional boxer.

And then Tommy sees Mallinson's daughter Dorothy (that's Barbara Rush). She's so beautiful that Tommy immediately falls for her, except that there's no way he can possibly be in her league because of the class difference. And besides, Dad certainly wouldn't appreciate it. But then, this is a Hollywood movie, so you know things aren't going to go as expected, or at least you expect things aren't going to go the way real life would expect. In this case, that means that Dorothy wants to become a writer, but she's constantly thwarted by her father who wants to run her life and, one can guess, marry her off to someone suitably of her social class. So it goes without saying that Dorothy is going to fall in love with him.

Tommy finally makes it to the top of a card, and Cram shows up again, together with Tommy's old manager Ray (Tommy Rall). And, in the audience unbeknownst to Tommy, is Dorothy: she took the ticket Tommy gave for her father. Tommy wins the fight, and Ray informs Tommy and Dave that Cram wants to horn in on the racket and "arrange" better fights for Tommy, in exchange for his share of the purse. Tommy isn't so sure because of Cram's bad reputation and suspected Mob ties.

The dilemma for Tommy is that the money made fighting for Cram could be good enough to be able to marry Dorothy. But it would be in exchange for selling his soul. Matters come to a head when Cram wants Tommy to throw a match against someone else he's promoting.

World in My Corner is another of those movies that feels like it's breaking no new ground. Murphy does the best he can, although he was always an actor who was generally competent without the sort of performance that could earn an actor awards nominations. Barbara Rush is in the same boat, and the rest of the cast is the sort of character actors who aren't bad, but not normally given to bigger roles, especially not in anything with the pretense of being an A movie.

Sisters

Once again, we've got another movie coming up on TCM that's been on my DVR for several months, so now is the time to post it and do a review of it. That movie is Sisters, and it's on tonight (June 26) at 11:30 PM.

The movie starts off oddly, with a local game show called Peeping Tom which is basically Candid Camera style video-clips asking the contestants what the mark in the video is going to do next. After the clip, the mark, a man named Phillip Woode, and the actress paid by the show, a woman named Danielle Breton (Margot Kidder) come out and get their prizes for participating in the show. The two meet outside the studio and go for dinner, since Phillip's prize was dinner for two at a nice Manhattan restaurant. There, a man named Emil shows up, claiming to be Danielle's ex-husband from Quebec warning her that she can never marry another man.

Danielle and Phillip go back to her apartment on Staten Island for a night of love-making which reveals that Danielle has a scar on her pelvis. In the morning, she asks Phillip to go out and get her a prescription as well as a birthday cake, since it's the birthday of her and her twin sister, who was apparently in the bedroom while Danielle and Phillip made love out on the couch in the living room. Phillip comes back and... Danielle stabs him to death!

Meanwhile, journalist Grace Collier (Jennifer Salt) is looking out her window and just happens to see Phillip struggling before trying to write something on the window with his blood and then dropping dead. Grace calls the police to get them to investigate, but they're somewhat reluctant to do so since some of Grace's articles have been about police incompetence. But they're more or less required to do so. Naturally, they don't find anything. Grace knows what she saw, so she calls up a private detective, Larch (Charles Durning), who comes up with some way to get into the apartment. Larch finds he can't move the sofa-bed, which is a clue that perhaps the dead body is hidden there, although he doesn't have time to open it before Danielle and Emil return to the apartment. In his escape, however, Larch is able to abscond with a medical file suggesting that Danielle is really Danielle Blanchion, one half of Canada's first surviving set of conjoined twins. Except that Danielle is the only one that survives since Dominique died in an emergency operation to separate the two.

Emile and Danielle have called in movers to clear out the apartment and move somewhere else, leading Larch to follow the moving van while Grace tries to determine where Danielle and Emil have gone. She finds them, although this leads to some really wild plot twists that I can't go into detail about because it would spoil even more than I've already spoiled.

"Wild" is, I think, a good word to describe Sisters. It feels like it was made on a low budget, with the result that it certainly has some flaws consistent with a film needing more money. (One major plot hole is that certainly Phillip would have been reported missing by somebody who knew him.) But it's a heck of a lot of fun even if the ending is totally unrealistic. I'm glad I got the chance to watch it, and you should see it, too.

Insignificance

Another person who was honored in Summer Under the Stars back in 2024 was Tony Curtis, and among the films of his that I hadn't seen before TCM ran them was one from later in Curtis' career called Insignificance. The synopsis sounded interesting enough, so I recorded it in order to watch and write up a review here.

It's sometime in the early 1950s, in New York City, and it looks for all the world like the famous subway grate scene from The Seven Year Itch is being filmed. Except that none of the characters are actually given names so the actress who looks like it's supposed to be Marilyn Monroe is just The Actress, played by Theresa Russell. After shooting wraps for the day, her taxi driver is supposed to take her back to her hotel. But she has him stop at a newsstand and then, wanting to get away from everybody, she goes to a different hotel.

In that hotel is a Professor (Michael Emil), who looks a lot like Albert Einstein and is clearly working on some sort of advanced physics as he's got a ton of papers around him. Einstein, like this professor, was open about the idea that using nuclear as a weapon was something with which he was uncomfortable. As a result, after the Americans won World War II and then Soviet spies got the knowledge to make their own atomic weapons, some in high political office considered the atomic scientists politically suspect. Tony Curtis plays The Senator, based obviously on Joseph McCarthy, and he shows up at the Professor's hotel room trying to get the Professor to testify in front of the Senate committee, which the Professor doesn't wish to do.

And then The Actress knocks on the Professor's door. Each of them is happy to be in the presence of a kindred soul, and each of them seems to be intellectually curious, so they start talking about each other's lives, with the Actress describing how she understands the theory of relativity. The Professor, having a full suite and not just a single room, is willing to let The Actress crash for the night as well since she clearly wants to get out of the limelight for the evening.

Complicating matters is that the Actress is in the middle of a marriage that isn't going well, to a prominent baseball player (Gary Busey). This is an obvious reference to Joe DiMaggio. It's posited that one of the reasons that the marriage isn't going well is that the Actress is unable to carry a pregancy to term, and as the movie reaches its climax, such as the climax is, it seems as though she's currently pregnant but about to suffer a miscarriage from all the stress she's going through in her life. Or this could just be an illusion on her part, as the movie plays with time and has characters go through flashbacks and have thoughts about the future.

It's the way the movie goes back and forth in time that makes Insignificance a tough picture to get into. That, and the fact that for me the movie feels a bit like Boomerporn, or at least the sort of personalities that the first half of the Baby Boom generation would be thought to have as cultural touchstones are the subject here, thirty years removed from when the movie is set. I've stated before that I'm not the biggest fan of movies that take a doe-eyed look back at that era, and Insignificance has a decided visual look of artificially trying to recreate the early 1950s. So Insignificance is definitely not the sort of movie that's going to be for everybody.

Another ensemble hotel picture

Some months back I did a post on the movie Hotel Berlin, which is based on a story by Vicki Baum but is not the remake of Grand Hotel. As I mentioned at the time, the remake is Week-End at the Waldorf, and with that having been on my DVR, I eventually watched it in order to be able to do a review of it here.

It's mildly unfair to refer to Week-End at the Waldorf as a remake of Grand Hotel, since it's not so much a remake as a reworking, with the story lines all getting substantial reworkings. The setting is moved from Weimar Berlin to New York's Waldorf-Astoria in the latter days of World War II as well. Walter Pidgeon is the nominal male lead here, and his character doesn't really exist in Grand Hotel. Pidgeon plays Chip Collyer, a war correspondent who's returned stateside for some rest and wants exactly that. His editor, however, wants Chip to get the goods on shady businessman Edley (Edward Arnold), who is trying to secure the oil rights from the Bey of Stock Arab Country (George Zucco), possibly by trying to involve non-shady businessman Jessup (Samuel S. Hinds) who has an apartment at the Waldorf. Except that Jessup doesn't use the apartment on a full-time basis, so he's decided to let a war hero and his newlywed wife use it since with the war on hotels are fully booked up with people moving in and out of the city.

Another connection to World War II is wounded soldier Capt. James Hollis (Van Johnson) who wants to go back to his old home town and start a business there. He's also written a song which, though a mix-up, winds up in the hands of Xavier Cugat. James meets the hotel stenographer Bunny (Lana Turner, since Joan Crawford was now much too old for the role and besides had already decamped to Warner Bros.) and the two fall in love, although Bunny wants financial security and thinks she sees that in Edley who keeps calling her up to his suite on actual work matters. He's also got the financial security -- or so she thinks -- to get her to do his bidding.

One of the main story lines from Grand Hotel is that of the world-weary actress, played in the original by Greta Garbo which is why the role is so big. Here, that actress is played by Ginger Rogers, a woman named Irene Malvern who is in town for the opening of her new film before heading back to Hollywood. Chip shows up in her suite thanks to a botched attempt to get the story on Edley. Instead, Irene thinks Chip might be the jewel-thief who is rumored to be in the hotel and rumored to want Irene's jewels. Chip uses this as an excuse to get involved romantically with Irene, as she has to use him to help out somebody else as well as explain how he wound up in her room.

There's more to the cast of characters, notably a young Keenan Wynn as the reporter Chip's editor sends in Chip's place to get the story on Edley when Chip claims to need that rest, along with story lines coming together and drifting apart until the final reel when the good guys get the requisite happy ending and the bad guys get their comeuppance.

Week-End at the Waldorf runs 15-20 minutes longer than Grand Hotel, and frankly, it shows in the final product. It consistenly feels long, in the sense that nobody was able to find the spark that made Grand Hotel one of the classic all-star movies of the early 1930s. Walter Pidgeon is, I think, not quite right as that war correspondent, while Ginger Rogers doesn't really give off the sense of wanting to be left alone.

Having finally watched Week-End at the Waldorf, I think it's with good reason that it's not as well-remembered as Grand Hotel.

Last Tango in Paris

I had more Marlon Brando movies to go through from his time as TCM's Star of the Month last April than I realized, and had to watch several in quick succession and do the posts on them before they expired from the DVR. But I've written up the post and saved them as drafts to put up on the site after a sufficient period between posts on Brando movies. At any rate, the next Brando movie up is Last Tango in Paris.

Maria Schneider plays Jeanne, a young woman in Paris who has been living with her mother, but has reached the age where she wants to go out on her own. That, and she's engaged to be married anyhow, to Tom (Jean-Pierre Léaud), who makes documentary films. Indeed, much to Jeanne's consternation, he's going to be making one on her, reality TV style, although in those days they didn't do "reality" TV in the way they do it today. In any case, she's looking for an apartment, and asks the concierge for the key to look at one.

However, there's a man up in the apartment, who is also looking for an apartment. That man is Paul (Marlon Brando), an American living in Paris who seems rather depressed for reasons that will be revealed later in the movie to the audience, although not necessarily to Jeanne. Paul comes up with an odd proposal, which is that he and Jeanne should have a sexual relationship, but that the relationship should be only for the sex. Indeed, neither of them should even tell the other their first names. They can use this particular apartment for the sex, but left unstated is how will one of them know when the other is going to show up.

But because we wouldn't have a movie otherwise, Jeanne agrees to this wacky arrangement. She does, however, try to get Paul to reveal something about himself, not that he really will. (Jeanne already figured out Paul is an American as he's not a native French speaker.) We, however, see Paul go back to a hotel, and learn that this is the hotel he manages with his wife. Well, managed, since his wife has died by her own hand, as one of the maids is cleaning out the bathtub where Paul's French wife offed herself.

Jeanne, for her part, didn't exactly have the most virginal upbringing either, in that she had her first sexual experience some year back with a cousin in what looks like one of the small towns in the suburbs of Paris. She grows up and thinks about leaving Paul, but can't bring herself to do it, continuing to have sex with him, including one infamous scene where Paul uses butter since other sexual aids weren't so freely available back in those days. Eventually Paul is the one to break off the relationship, although he decides perhaps that wasn't the best thing. By that time, however, it's too late to start anew.

Last Tango in Paris is one of those movies where it's easy to see why the critics gave it such high reviews. I didn't exactly hate it, but it's another of those movies that rather left me cold on watching it. To be honest, I'm not the biggest fan of sex scenes in movies -- I don't particularly care to watch other people having sex. Other people are going to have issues with the sex scenes on the grounds that director Bernardo Bertolucci wasn't fully honest with his lead actress about where the sex scenes were going to go. (I actually didn't know this going into the movie.)

But while Last Tango in Paris is a difficult movie to watch, it's one of those that definitely would have belonged in a season of the old TCM's Essentials series. Watch it if you haven't seen it already.

Another musical biopic, this time about Marilyn Miller

I mentioned back in the run-up to St. Patrick's Day that in the decade or so after World War II, Hollywood put out a bunch of biopics about various figures in the world of music. Somehow, I wound up with a glut of them on my DVR, so now it's time for another of those musicals, Look for the Silver Lining.

This time, the subject of the movie is Marilyn Miller, a Broadway star who died tragically young, although that early death isn't mentioned in the movie, at least not explicitly. Miller is played by June Haver, and as the movie opens rehearsals are starting for a revival of Sally, one of Miller's biggest hits. But she has a headache of some sort (in real life, Miller's alcoholism led to a sinus condition that was, as far as I can understand, a contributing factor in her death in 1936), so she goes back to her dressing room. There, a man knocks on her door. He claims to be from Findlay, OH, where Marilyn got her start, and has a poster of her family's vaudeville act, the Five Columbians. As you can imagine, the film then goes into flashback.

Charlie Ruggles plays Pop Miller, who is traveling around the vaudeville circuit with his wife (Rosemary DeCamp) and two elder daughters, while younger daughter Marilyn, too young to work legally except as part of a family act, has been staying with grandma in Philadelphia. The family, currently the Four Columbians, does typical vaudeville numbers and is currently in Findlay, which is where Marilyn shows up to meet them at Christmastime because Grandma says she can dance and should be part of the act.

Marilyn shows up backstage while her family is performing, and there she sees another dancer. She doesn't realize this is Jack Donahue (Ray Bolger), an apparently very talented dancer whom Marilyn claims is her influence. They trade dance moves in his dressing room until her parents show up; after the show there's an opportunity for a Christmas performance by all the cast.

In this telling of the story, Donahue gives the juvenile Marilyn her first break. She's about to go on with the rest of the family, until Pop gets the mumps, forcing the rest of the family to quarantine. So Jack sets up a number in which Marilyn is a sort of shill, sitting out front and being "invited" on stage to dance with Jack. This gets Marilyn her start, and eventually the family makes its way to London. In London, an American producer shows up looking for talent, and loves Marilyn's talent, not realizing she's actually American. But given the chance to appear on Broadway in one of the revues of the day, she takes it.

However, she's still a juvenile, which means she's technically not able to work legally. She's paired in a musical number with Frank Carter (Gordon MacRae), who defends her when the authorities come looking for proof of age. The two fall in love and Marilyn's career starts taking off, but World War I comes, and Frank for some reason wants to serve. He also wants to marry her before he leaves, although she only wants to do it after he returns.

Marilyn's career takes off during World War I; Frank eventually returns, leading to an elopement, and a happy marriage, except for the fact that Marilyn is on Broadway while Frank's career has him traveling around. Marilyn eventually gets the lead in Sally, which is a big hit, except that Frank gets in a fatal car crash while traveling to New York for opening night. (In real life, Frank died some months before the opening of Sally.) Somewhat humorously, one of the characters in the play-within-the-movie version Sally is played by S.Z. Sakall, in lederhosen:

Reading up on Marilyn Miller, there's a lot that Look for the Silver Lining doesn't cover, especially her alcoholism and early death. But she also went to Hollywood and made a few not terribly successful films, notably a film version of Sally that I blogged about back in 2016. Look for the Silver Lining sanitizes Miller's life, and includes a lot of dancing. Having said that, it's Ray Bolger's big number that's really more worth watching than June Haver's songs and dances.

Hang 'Em High

I've mentioned the Blind Spot blogathon before, where a blogger comes up with a dozen movies that are ostensibly "classic" or "essential" but that the blogger hasn't seen before, and watches them over the course of a year. Not that I take part, mostly because I don't know what movies I'm going to be getting to that far in advance. But one movie that would have been a blind spot was the western Hang 'Em High. So the last time it showed up on TCM I watched it in anticipation of doing a post on it for the next time TCM aired it. That next TCM airing is overnight tonight (or very early tomorrow morning, June 22 depending on your time zone), at 2:00 AM, right after Noir Alley, which means that now is the time to do the post on it.

Clint Eastwood stars as Jed Cooper, a former lawman now hoping to get into ranching in the Oklahoma Territory. He's driving cattle when he's stopped by a group of nine men led by Captain Wilson (Ed Begley). It seems that somebody has been rustling cattle, and Cooper's cattle look like the ones that were rustled. Eventually, Cooper mentions that he has a bill of sale, except that the signature on it doesn't match what the posse knows as the signature of the man who supposedly sold the cattle. Worse, Cooper can't give a proper identification of the man whose signature that's supposed to be. And, the posse know that the man and his wife were murdered. So it's not unreasonably that they think Cooper is guilty. Except that they decide not to bring him in for trial but to hang him on the spot.

Fortunately for Jed, the hanging doesn't quite succeed. Oh, he's hanging from a rope, all right, and it leaves him with a nasty scar on his neck, but it didn't succeed in it stated aim of killing him dead. Another man, Marshal Bliss (Ben Johnson), comes along, and cuts Cooper down. Bliss has to assume that Cooper is a possible criminal, so Bliss puts him in an 1890 version of a paddy wagon and takes him back to Fort Grant, where the judge, Fenton (Pat Hingle) will put Cooper on trial and then execute Cooper after the inevitable guilty verdict.

Except that the real guilty party is found before Cooper can be found guilty and put to death. Cooper is theoretically free to go. Fenton, however, knows that Cooper will simply go on a revenge tour, and doesn't really want that. Fenton is perfectly happy hanging people, he wants it to have a veneer of legality about it so that Oklahoma can eventually become a state. So Fenton strongly suggests that Cooper become a deputy marshal again, and bring in the men who tried to lynch him, only to do it legally, thank you very much. None of that vigilante justice please.

So much of the rest of the movie is Cooper trying to track down the men who came after him, while Wilson and the rest of the posse try to find him first so they can have another crack at eliminating him and not fail this time, since they know that their necks are on the line, too. Along the way, there's also a running subplot involving Rachel (Inger Stevens), one of the women at the local bordello who, like Cooper, has a past of her own. She takes care of Cooper every time the posse catches up with him, nursing him back to health. She also realizes that everybody around has some sort of ghosts in their past.

Hang 'Em High is considered a classic, but I have to admit that I found it surprisingly pedestrian. I think part of that is that there's quite a bit less going on than the script might have you think. But more of it comes down to the direction by Ted Post, who was better known for his work in television. It feels as though Post was thinking that he had more tools at his disposal working in the media of film rather than a cramped TV studio, and decided to use things like zooms and pans as well as the big vistas of widescreen without having any real purpose in using them. That and the slow pace came across as distracting to me.

Best Friends

I ended up with a couple of Burt Reynolds movies on my DVR. I already did a post on The Man Who Loved Women, which I think aired during a night dedicated to Julie Andrews; the other movie is an early 1980s film I had surprisingly not heard of before TCM ran it: Best Friends. Once again, having watched it, I can finally do a review on it.

As the movie opens, Richard Babson (Burt Reynolds) and Paula McCullen (Goldie Hawn) are sitting in a house together reading the sort of dialogue that sounds like it would come from a bad imitation of Tennessee Williams. You could be forgiven for thinking that they're actors auditioning or rehearsing for a play. In fact, they're screenwriters working on a film for producer Larry Weissman (Ron Silver), and they're a successful screenwriting team.

Richard and Paula have been working and living together for years, but... they're not married. Obviously, during the Production Code this could never have been a thing, but it's the early 1980s so now it's not such a big deal. Except that it's beginning to be a thing for Richard, who feels that maybe the two of them should get married. Paula isn't so sure, because she believe the two of them being unmarried gives them greater spontaneity; presumably, she's also seen how a lot of Hollywood marriages don't really work out in the end. But Richard pushes enough that Paula eventually agrees to get a quickie marriage, only it's in a Spanish-language wedding chapel in Los Angeles instead of Las Vegas where you'd think quickie marriages would normally take place.

Having finished the movie and gotten married without telling anybody, they decide to go visit the respective sets of families to tell them the good news. First up are Paula's parents Eleanor (Jessica Tandy) and Tim (Barnard Hughes), who live in Buffalo, several days' train ride from Los Angeles. They're about to celebrate their 40th wedding anniversary, and they're getting to the age where their age is beginning to show, which is understandably worrying to Paula. For the audience, it's supposed to be an opportunity for laughs concerning things we don't necessarily want to hear our parents talking about like the geriatric sex drive.

After that, it's time for the two to visit Richard's family. His parents live in a giant condominium community in northern Virginia, with father Tom (Keenan Wynn) having worked for the federal government and still being married to Richard's mother Ann (Audra Lindley). Where you get the feeling that Paula's parents were always a bit more reserved, Richard's are more outgoing to the point that it really starts to irritate Paula. It also doesn't help that Richard's sisterhas moved back in due to yet another failed marriage, this time with two children in tow.

And then, to make matters worse, it turns out that the movie Richard and Paula was working on has hit a snag and that the script is going to need rewrites which necessitate their going back to Los Angeles before they planned. The couple has already begun to bicker over finding out their families aren't all they're cracked up to be; can they survive having to fix the script under a tight deadline?

Best Friends is another of those movies where you can see why everybody involved would want to be involved with it. There's fodder for what should be incisive comedy about whether married life is better than staying single; also, the was the chance for some pretty talented people to work together: apparently, Goldie Hawn and Burt Reynolds really enjoyed working together. And yet, somehow, the resulting movie winds up sterile. It feels as though the movie went for the obvious humor instead of something thought-provoking, and everybody is going through the motions. It's not exactly a bad movie; it's more that it's yet one more movie where things feel like they could have been so much better.

A Lady Without Passport

I didn't realize that I had a bunch of movies with second-tier actor James Craig on my DVR, largely I'd guess because he wasn't the memorable actor and for the most part didn't get to be the lead in bigger movies. Some months back, Noir Alley ran a film with him in it, which I recently got around to watching: A Lady Without Passport.

The movie starts off in New York, with a man named Ramon walking down a street and looking nervous. A car pulls up alongside ramon, with a man inside telling him that he can't get away with "it", whatever "it" is, and that Palinov wants his money. Ramon tries to get away, and gets run down for his troubles, much like "Christopher" at the beginning of The House on 92nd Street. The police investigate, and find half of a $1,000 bill in his pocket. More interestingly is the CSI-type examination that finds traces of sugar cane, and soil of a type most common to Cuba. This, they believe, is a case for Immigration and Naturalization.

Cut to the INS, where investigator Frank Westlake (that's James Craig) is responsible for the case. He knows that he's going to have to send one of his agents down to Havana. This being the early 1950s, it was a time when people could still travel easily between the US and Cuba, at least if they were citizens of one of the two countries. However, there are a lot of peopl from Europe who fled the continent after the war and got the idea that getting into the US via a third country might be a good idea. It isn't, but has resulted in a bunch of people flooding the American Embassy with their applications. And if they can't get in legally, perhaps they might get in illegally.

So Westlake finds an agent who can speak a suitable European language to be able to pose as a refugee. That man is Pete Karczag (John Hodiak), who speaks Hungarian and is sent down to Havana to get the dirt on the people responsible for trying to smuggle in people who can't get to America properly. They already have a good idea that that man is Palinov (George Macready), so Karczag goes there and immediately tried to befriend Palinov.

While at Palinov's bar, he also meets Marianne Lorress (Hedy Lamarr). She, like all of the others, is someone who fled the European troubles, and would like to get into America. Things get worse for her, however, when she tries to work at one of the nightclubs. She doesn't have a work permit, so Pete covers for her by claiming to be married to her. This is also a good way for him to try to get more information on the sly regarding Palinov. But of course, as Karczag walks around Havana (apparently, real location shooting was done), Karczag begins to fall in love with Lorress. Worse, Palinov figures out Karczag is an American agent.

But the real climax comes when some of the refugees finally get on a clandestine flight bound for Florida. The race is on to find these refugees, who are in danger because who knows what will happen to them if the Americans find them. I'm reminded of Secret Service of the Air, where the smugglers simply opened up the bomb bay and dropped the immigrants out of the plane to their deaths.

Unfortunately, A Lady Without Passport is little more than a programmer, with a worn out plot and longer sequences of not much happening. It's also not really a noir, but Eddie Muller keeps stretching the definition of noir.

I don't think I've done a post on a Bowery Boys movie before

And, to be honest, this review isn't going to be about a Bowery Boys movie, at least not technically. TCM has on multiple occasions run through the entire set of four dozen or so movies that the Bowery Boys made after World War II. The Bowery Boys were what eventually came out of a group of players from the movie Dead End (which I did a post on ages ago). At some point along the way, first Universal and then Monogram wound up with those "Dead End Kids" under contract, and called them the "East Side Kids". And it's one of those movies that I have on my DVR and recently watched: Ghosts on the Loose.

The movie starts with the Kids rehearsing musical numbers, led by the "conductor" Mugs (Leo Gorcey), who seems to know the technical aspects of music about as well as the rest of the kids do. Another of the kids, Glimpy (Huntz Hall), has a sister Betty (Ava Gardner in a very early role, and yes, the idea of Ava Gardner and Huntz Hall being siblings is ridiculous), and she's about to get married to a guy named Jack (Rick Vallin). Betty and Jack are going to be moving to the edge of town because that's where they were able to get a really good deal on a house.

We then learn that there's a reason for the good deal, which is that the previous owners of the house are convinced that the neighboring house is haunted. There are mysterious goings-on, but of course no actual ghosts; think the Scooby-Doo cartoons with the bad guys thinking they would have gotten away with it if it weren't for those meddling kids. The kids are about to meddle, albeit not intentionally.

Betty and Jack go off on their honeymoon, and Glimpy and his friends decide they're going to do a favor for the new couple by helping to decorate the new house for when the new couple gets home. The only thing is, they get the address wrong, and go to the house that's allegedly haunted. In fact, it's not haunted, although it has a lot of the tropes of haunted-house films like secret passages and paintings with the eyes cut out so that people can look into another room without getting caught.

The master, if you will, of the allegedly haunted house is Emil (Bela Lugosi), and he's really the leader of a ring of fifth columnists who have been printing Nazi propaganda out of this house which Mugs and Glimpy figure out when they find a printing press in one of the basement rooms along with a bunch of said propaganda that's been left there with the baddies not expecting anybody to trespass. (Ghosts on the Loose was released in 1943; right in the middle of US involvement in World War II.) The Kids go to inform the authorities, but thanks to those secret passages it takes a while for everything to work out right in the end. Not too long however, as this is only a B movie with a running time of about 66 minutes.

After leaving the big studios -- Dead End was a Goldwyn film IIRC and the Dead End Kids made multiple films at Warner Bros. -- the East Side Kids and then Bowery Boys films became low-budget affairs with formulaic plots. Ghosts on the Loose is definitely that way, although I think it's ultimately watchable for the ridiculousness of the Bela Lugosi half of the movie. It's also not a bad way to introduce people to what Leo Gorcey, Huntz Hall, and company were all about.

Ralph Bellamy is not the "other" man

If you've watched enough romantic comedies from before World War II, you'll probably have seen Ralph Bellamy as the man who repeatedly winds up second-best in the end, with the leading man and woman ending the movie (back) togehter. Recently, I saw a movie that had two women fighting over Bellamy, although it's a drama, not a romantic comedy: This Man Is Mine.

Bellamy plays Jim Dunlap, who has been married for several years to Tony (Irene Dunne) and seems to be in a happy marriage and independently wealthy: nobody seems to work, while Tony is able to indulge her hobby of painting landscapes by putting up a new canvas for Jim's birthday. (I immediately thought of Chekhov's gun, but the picture does become a real plot point later in the movie.) Tony's best friend Bee McCrae (Kay Johnson) pops in with some bad news: Bee's sister in law Francesca (Constance Cummings) is going to be coming back to town having secured a divorce in Reno, this being the days before no-fault divorce where that was the jurisdiction for one party to a divorce to head to get dissolve the marriage.

This is bad news because before Jim married Tony, he was engaged to be married to Francesca. She jilted him at the altar for reasons that aren't quite made clear, although it seems that Francesca has a habit of pursuing one rich guy after another. But Jim being left at the altar was a big scandal at the time, and even though it's been six years, the sort of set the Dunlaps and McCraes hand out with are certain to remember it. There's also the question of whether Jim still has any feelings for Francesca. But they can't stop Francesca from showing up, and she is supposedly family to Bee.

Francesca comes along, and sure enough, she starts trying to put the moves on Jim. And Jim seems OK with all of this, which frankly makes no sense. Jim goes off on a car ride with Francesca; their car breaks down; and when they show up together later everybody thinks Jim is going to leave Tony for Francesca. This despite Francesca's claims that she only wants Jim for one night to prove to everybody that she could still have him.

Jim and Tony bicker about it, with Jim eventually leaving to stay at his club, one would guess. Tony, however, comes up with a brilliant idea. Instead of going to Reno to obtain a divorce, she says at first that she's not going to do anything for six months to see if Jim and Francesca are still going to be an item. Then, she come up with an even more brilliant plan, which is to file for divorce, but in their current residence, which means she can only file on grounds of infidelity and get a ton of money from Jim and Francesca as alimony.

So how is all of this going to be resolved? Unfortunately, the ending the screenwriters pick isn't a particularly satisfying one. Even though the movie was released in April 1934, a couple of months before Joe Breen started really cracking down, the ending in This Man Is Mine feels like the sort of cop-out that writers would have had to come up with in the second half of the 1930s. This Man Is Mine is also based on a stage play, and it feels like the screenwriters did nothing to try to open the play up. (OK, there is one garden scene.) Maybe in 1930 that would have worked, but by now it doesn't. The only highlights are future B western star Charles Starrett as Bee's husband, and Sidney Blackmer in a small role as another wealthy man being pursued by Francesca.

Dancing at Lughnasa

Meryl Streep was one of the stars selected in August 2024 for TCM's Summer Under the Stars. One of her movies that I hadn't heard of before, probably because it was a little film made on location in Ireland, was Dancing at Lughnasa. Since it sounded interesting enough, I decided to record it and watch it to be able to do a post on it here.

The movie opens up telling us the scenes we're watching are set in the summer of 1936. However, the little boy flying a kite at the beginning, young Michael Mundy, is all grown up now and giving us some narration at various points in the movie, with a coda at the end telling us what happens to many of the main characters. Michael lives in a village called Ballyegg in a rural part of County Donegal in Ireland (the county due west of what is now Northern Ireland, although the movie was apparently filmed in a different part of Ireland) with his mother Christina, and his four aunts. Christina never got married, and that's something that's obviously a bit of a scandal in rural 1930s Ireland where the Catholic Church still held a great deal of sway.

The family ekes out a living from subsitence farming, with income supplemented by Kate (that's Meryl Streep) being the one sister to have a permanent job, as a teacher at the local primary school. However, attendance at the school has been falling as more families move to larger towns, so her job at the school may be under threat. Christina and sister Maggie don't seem to have any real work at all beyond tending the farm, while the other two sisters, Rose and Agnes, earn a small amount of money by doing custom piecework knitting. Those knitting jobs, like Kate's teaching job, may be under threat as there are rumors that a textile factory is going to open up in a nearby town. Nice if you can get a job, but people in the middle of nowhere? Good luck. Complicating things is that Agnes clearly has some sort of developmental disability and thinks that married Danny, who lives across the lake, is as in love with her as she is with him.

If that's not complicated enough for the family, the return of two people makes things even more of a mess for the family. One is eldest brother Jack (Michael Gambon). He went off a good quarter century ago, when Ireland was still wholly a part of the UK, to serve as Fr. Jack, a chaplain to the Catholics in the British armed forces, and stayed away from Ireland to work at a leper colony in what is now Uganda. He's returning home in part because he has what seems to be dementia, but in part because the Church hierarchy seem to think he's losing his faith and taking up the native African religious beliefs. Not a good idea for a Catholic missionary. Then there's Michael's dreamer father Gerry (Rhys Ifans), who left Ireland looking for adventure, and is now showing up possibly to say goodbye one last time as he's thinking of going off to Spain to join the International Brigades that fought against the Francoist forces in the Spanish Civil War.

Dancing at Lughnasa is more of a slice of life movie than one with a fully fleshed-out plot, as it's based on a play and the end of the movie before the coda really leaves a lot of questions badly answered. The location shooting is lovely, and the acting is mostly good, although for me Dancing at Lughnasa falls a bit in the screenplay and storytelling. In addition to what I felt were plot holes, this is another of those stories where it feels like the writer (Irish playwright Brian Friel) is trying to make everybody a bit too quirky for their own good. Still, despite the fact that Dancing at Lughnasa has some flaws, it's one that I think has more positives than negatives.

TCM's Richard Chamberlain tribute

Claude Rains, Joan Blackman, and Richard Chamberlain in Twilight of Honor (2:00 AM)

Actor Richard Chamberlain died at the end of March, and it's only now that TCM is getting around to doing a programming tribute on him, not that he was quite as well remembered for work on film compared to work on TV, I think. Anyhow, that tribute is tonight in prime time, and includes five films:

8:00 PM The Last Wave
10:00 PM The Four Musketeers
12:00 AM Joy in the Morning
2:00 AM Twilight of Honor
4:00 AM Petulia

Of the films, I don't think I've seen either The Last Wave or Joy in the Morning before, so those should be getting a recording, followed at some point by a blog post.

Another delicate balance

A few months back, I did a post on the movie A Delicate Balance. Based on a play by Edward Albee, the movie was released as part of a project called the American Film Theater that was designed to bring plays by prominent playwrights to the screen. I've actually got two more films on my DVR that were part of the American Film Theater that I haven't watched yet, but I was thinking of A Delicate Balance and the American Film Theater as I watched today's movie, A Master Builder.

Halvard Solness, played by Wallace Shawn, is the master builder in question, and as the movie opens he's sick enough that you wonder if he's going to die, as he's got a hospital bed in a front parlor and attended to by a team of nurses. Paying a professional visit is old friend Knut Brovik (André Gregory), who also worked for Solness. Knut's son Ragnar also works for Solness, and is good enough of an architect to go into business on his own if he could only have the professional success Solness seems to have denied him. This has also prevented Ragnar from getting married to his long-suffering fiancée Kaia, who is also Solness' bookkeeper. Halvard is married to Aline (Julie Hagerty), who seems to be so prim and proper that you wonder what she's hiding.

Into all of this comes young Hilde Wangel (Lisa Joyce). Apparently, Solness had designed a building for Hilde's father a decade earlier, which happened in a town some distance away. (Everybody has Norwegian names since the original play was written by Henrik Ibsen, but the opening credits are clearly in modern America as is the medical equipment, and Solness' location is referred to as "our city" instead of someplace specific.) Halvard kinda-sorta remembers the job, but doesn't really remember young Hilde, which is somewhat understandable since at the time of the job she was only 12 years old, and now she's all grown up.

But, Hilde claims that at the time Solness was working for her father, he told her that he was going to build her a castle and make her a princess and have her live in that castle. Now, as I was watching the movie I couldn't help but think of it as a bad thing in light of the "Me Too" movement, but since the movie came out before that and the play dates to the 1890s, that's not quite the focus of Hilde's presence here. Instead she seems to have believed Solness when he told her these things, and seems to expect him to make good on his pledge. Or, at least, she'll serve him to the point that of course he'll want to make her a princess.

The other surprise is that once Hilde shows up, Solness seems to make an incredible recovery, getting out of bed and moving around and even talking about taking a wreath and putting it on the tower of the new building that he's been working on. I found myself wondering how much of the action was really taking place and how much of all of this was a dream in Solness' mind. In any case, as the movie goes on, we learn that several of the characters, especially Halvard, have warts, and that Halvard and Aline haven't exactly had an easy life.

As I mentioned a few paragraphs back, this is based on a play by Henrik Ibsen, and the way the movie was directed (by Jonathan Demme of all people) makes it exceedingly clear that this is material originally for the stage and the limitations that the stage imposes. There is basically no effort to expand the material beyond a small number of rooms, much like A Delicate Balance. That, as a result, left me with some substantial problems with A Master Builder.

It's not that A Master Builder is a bad movie so much as it is the sort of material that even more than most films is decidedly not going to be for everybody. And it does have some good things going for it like Julie Hagerty's performance, which really surprised me since whenever I see her name in the credits I immediately think of Airplane! which, while a great movie, is definitely fluff. (According to IMDb today is her 70th birthday which is why I've scheduled the post for today.)

So, for the right person, you may very much enjoy the acting in A Master Builder.

The three presences of Miklós Jancsó

A year or so ago, I mentioned buying a box set of films of a director I hadn't heard of before, Hungarian Miklós Jancsó. The set has six feature films and a handful of shorts, one of which I already mentioned. I put the set back in the Blu-ray player again recently to watch some more shorts, specifically Presence, which had two follow-ups called Second Presence and Third Presence.

The three short films really deserve a single blog post because they're thematically related and use the same filming location. The first, released in 1965, shows two men who one might guess survived the holocaust. They're walking through the small town of Olaszliska, which before the war had a synagogue and a Jewish cemetery. Twenty years on, the synagogue is decaying since there are no longer enough Jews to form a minyan and have services. But the men still feel the need to pray and be faithful Jews, hence their trek to this synagogue.

A dozen years later, the synagogue has decayed some more, and two younger men show up, similarly to pray. This time, the movie is in color and a wider format, although it's clearly the same synagogue and cemetery. Then, in 1986, a group of elementary school-aged children show up with a pair of rabbis, presumably to learn about the history of the synagogue and the Jewish community in the area as it was long before they were born. They also say prayers over the site as well as having a bite to eat in the form of bread ritually dipped in honey. Third Presence is also the only film to have any dialogue, although it's just the students talking about how they want their slice of bread and similar; there's no narrative dialogue in any of the three shorts.

It's a bit tough to do a traditional review on these since there's no dialogue or even narration, just the ambient sounds and the chanting of Jewish prayers. It's interesting to see the documentation of what's happnening to a house of worship that has nobody to worship in it or care for it any longer, which I suppose also says something about the human need for commemoration. One other thing that's worth mentioning is how Jancsó deliberately put a composed shot of a train in the background in each of the three shorts. I'm not certain what if any point Jancsó was trying to make by doing this, but it seems evident these shots are there for a purpose since they look like an obvious decision to have them in the films.

These aren't films I would have thought to seek out, although I'm glad they were included in the box set.

Briefs for Father's Day Weekend, 2025

Tomorrow is Father's Day here in the US, which is the earliest it can be. Unsurprisingly, TCM is running a day of movies in honor of the day, although as always there are a lot of the same titles since there aren't too many movies that are generally happy movies and about fathers who are mostly good influences. A couple of the films are decidedly less than happy, such as The Entertainer which kicks off the morning at 6:15 AM and East of Eden at 5:45 PM.

For fare that might be considered more traditional for Father's Day, you might want to try Our Vines Have Tender Grapes (8:00 AM)>; The Courtship of Eddie's Father (3:30 PM), or of course, Life With Father (9:45 PM). Silent Sunday Nights looks to continue the theme with Charlie Chaplin in The Kid (midnight) while the rest of the schedule doesn't look all that fatherly. Thankfully, TCM will not be showing Mildred Pierce on Father's Day. Also, it doesn't look as though FXM is doing anything for the day, not that I would have expected them to any more.

I noticed a quirk about YouTube TV's cloud DVR that's kind of annoying. No, it's not that programs expire from the DVR after nine months, although I've got enough of a backlog of movies on the DVR that stuff invariably does expire. This time, it's in how specifically the movies get captured to the DVR. Last December, there was a night of Monty Python films on TCM, of which I recorded a couple. I looked ahead on the TCM schedule to see a couple getting another airing in July, so I set out to watch one of them to do a post about. There were several copies of the movie available on the DVR, since it records every showing of it. (Once in a while, the algorithm confuses different programs with the same title; I thought the late 1960s musical Star! was going to be on TCM so I recorded only to find out that is was the Bette Davis movie The Star and that the DVR thought it was recording some short-form series called Star.) Well, every showing except the one on TCM, which is the one I would have particularly wanted to watch since it wouldn't be larded up with commercials. In addition to showings on channels like Sundance or BBC America, it even included the copy on YouTube's video on demand, although that one also has commercials. Worse, that particular copy won't let you fast forward through the commercials, although I don't think it has as many obnoxious logos as the ones on the commercial cable channels. The rare TCM showing of The Godfather a year or so ago had the same issue. What's annoying about this for me is how I wanted to watch the "uncut and commercial-free" version but YouTube TV didn't tell me that TCM's rights apparently didn't extend to recording the movie.

This time, Joseph Calleia is the bad guy

A few months back, I did a post on a film I recorded when TCM did a double feature of films starring character actor Joseph Calleia. That movie, Man of the People, had Calleia playing a good guy; the other movie has him as the villain of the piece: Sworn Enemy.

The main good guy here is played by Robert Young relatively early in his career. He plays Hank Sherman, and is trying to work his way through law school. His current attempt to get a job is at Decker's produce, but when he shows up to move boxes of produce also showing up are representatives of the "protective association", which if you've seen enough 1930s movies you'll know is controlled by the racketeers. Hank says no, and for that the mob thugs are about to beat him up, when he's saved by Mr. Decker himself (Samuel S. Hinds) showing up. Decker doesn't want to pay the racket so takes kindly to Hank. Also in the car is his private secretary, Peg Gattle (Florence Rice).

It doesn't take too much to see that Hank and Peg are going to fall in love, although that's not the main story, which is of course the protection racket, ultimately run by Joe Emerald, the character played by Calleia. Peg has a good reason of her own for opposing the rackets, which is that they set up her father, Dr. Simon Gattle (Lewis Stone) to take the fall, and Simon is just finishing up a 12-year stretch in Sing Sing.

The racket gets so violent that it kills both Decker, as well as Hank's brother Steve, who was working as a promoter for the boxer Steamer Krupp (Nat Pendleton). Hank goes undercover with the DA to try to get the evidence on Emerald, whom they all know has to be behind the rackets but because of his cash dealings leave no evidence of his wrongdoing. If only they can find the safe with the evidence.

Getting a job in the rackets himself to try to get the evidence doesn't work, so Hank tries another idea, which is to start promoting Steamer himself, since Joe has an interest in boxing as well. Steamer gets good enough to come to the attention of Joe, although Steamer is so loyal that he can only fight with Hank around, which is how Hank is able to get into Joe's inner circle as well as physically closer to the place where the incriminating records are kept. Hank also brings Peg into his scheme as a sort of cat's paw to lure Joe away, leading to a surprisingly exciting climax.

Sworn Enemy is a decidedly B movie from MGM, which means it has a bit more of a moralizing tone than a movie from Warner Bros. might have, but it's still well done for an MGM B. That's down in part to the cast, which includes a pretty good level of talent. Then again, MGM had all these people under contract, so it shouldn't be such a surprise. Sworn Enemy is definitely worth looking out for as an example of the good B movies the studios could churn out in those days.

Crazy movie

TCM's schedule for tomorrow, June 13, is listed as "classic comedies", although to be a bit more specific, it looks as though a good portion of the morning is stars who did work in the silent era before transitioning to sound. Among them is Harold Lloyd, who made the talkie Movie Crazy that TCM is running tomorrow at 11:30 AM.

Lloyd plays Harold Hall, who as the movie opens is living in the small town of Littleton, KS, with his parents. But he has a love of the movies, reminiscent of Esther Blodgett in at least the first version of A Star is Born, and hears a radio story about Hollywood needing new faces, as well as reading an article about it. So with that in mind, Harold, a would-be actor, decides that he too is going to go to Hollywood to try to make it as a star, sending the fine people at Planet Studios unsolicited photos and a cover letter.

Somehow, the studio gets the wrong photos, because Harold with those glasses isn't what you'd think of as a matinee idol, yet he gets asked out to Hollywood for a screen test. On his first day at the studio he has no idea what he's doing or where to go, but a director, seeing him, gives him a job as a walk-on extra in a scene of the latest movie of Mary Sears (Constance Cummings). Now, you'd think that Harold being big on Hollywood and reading those old-style movie magazines, he'd know what Mary Sears looked like and possibly even that her next movie was going to star her as a Spanish lady, complete with brunette wig. But Harold seems oblivious to this or even how to act, completely screwing up his one scene to the point that the director doesn't want him on the lot any more.

That night, Harold gets caught in a rainstorm and loses a shoe right outside Mary's house, not realizing that this is Mary's house or that she's a star. Worse, since Mary isn't wearing the wig from her role, she's in her naturally blonde hair. But she takes to him, especially when Vance (Kenneth Thomson), the male lead in the movie she's currently making, shows up unnanounced to her house. Mary doesn't exactly get along with Vance outside of work because he drinks way too much and is also terribly possessive, thinking Mary should be in love with him and that if he can't have Mary, nobody else can. So Vance is going to be after Harold for the rest of the movie thinking that Harold is trying to horn in on Mary.

Harold's screen test turns out to be an absolute disaster, while Mary decides she's going to have a bit of fun with Harold. Harold likes both blonde Mary and the actress playing the Spanish lady, somehow still not knowing these two are the same woman. Mary obviously knows this, so she picks on unsuspecting Harold, although she really does like him and is looking out for his best interests as much as she can. Eventually everything comes together when Harold, trying to escape studio bosses, wanders on to the set where the climactic scene of Mary and Vance's movie is being filmed. Harold and Vance get in a fight for real, although the studio people don't realizes the two men dislike each other intensely and are not really acting.

I mentioned a few months back when I did a post on Sidewalks of New York how poor Buster Keaton got put in a bunch of lousy stuff at MGM once he lost his creative freedom and after talkies came along. Things weren't quite so bad for Harold Lloyd, although Movie Crazy is definitely not up to the level of Lloyd's silent movies. Lloyd shows that he still had a flair for designing visual gags, but the movie as a whole has the tendency of feeling more like a collection of scenes than a fully fleshed-out feature-length plot. Still, Lloyd and Cummings have the talent to pull off material like this, making the movie more hit than miss, even if not quite a classic.

A silence of some quality or another

Last month, TCM ran a spotlight on westerns, including a night of films that used the western genre to make social commentary on issues that were relevant at the time the movie was made. Among those movies was a spaghetti western that was new to me, The Great Silence. It's getting another airing on TCM not long after its first showing, tomorrow (June 12) at 10:15 PM as part of a salute to composer Ennio Morricone.

The movie is set in 1898, at a time when Utah was already a state, but since this is an Italo-French coproduction it gets all sorts of history wrong, including implying that much of the US west is still a territory. This is an exceptionally snowy winter, and people are having difficulty getting through the snow and having to resort to all sorts of things to survive.

Some men have become bounty hunters like the mute Silence (Jean-Louis Trintignant) or Loco (Klaus Kinski). But others are "outlaws" who don't seem to be quite so criminal and certainly aren't very well armed as we see at least one of them with a scythe. There are rumors that the new governor is going to institute an amnesty, with the implication that the outlaws ought to give themslves up. Loco, however, has a plan to kill a bunch of the outlaws who each have a small sum on their heads, although together they add up to something substantial.

The new sherif, Burnett (Frank Wolff), wants to do away with bounty hunting, while corrupt banker Pollicut wants it to continue because he's got the money to buy up the dead people's money, making a killing (pun intended) in the process. As for Silence, he's apart from the other bounty hunters, dishing out justice by being smart enough to make his victims always draw first, with his being a faster shot leading to his winning every fight.

Enter a widow of one of the outlaws killed. Pauline (Vonetta McGee) lost her husband and has the distinct feeling that her husband was set up precisely so they could get whatever modest property he had. She gets in touch with Silence, and offers him a substantial sum to get him to kill Loco. So Silence will be against Loco, while there's a third leg of the triangle in the form of those outlaws. Loco has also figured out a way to get rid of the sheriff. And then, in a series of flashbacks, we learn more about the relationships between these characters and why Silence and Loco wound up pitted against each other.

The Great Silence is one of those movies that has a good idea on paper, but doesn't come out quite right in the execution. I think part of that is that it's a spaghetti western with very few Americans involved, so the view of Americans is even more off than Hollywood's view of Europeans in the studio era (or the French view of Americans in Purple Noon). There's also, as I mentioned above, a lot of history that's off. But there's also the production style. The Great Silence was made in 1968, and director Sergio Corbucci makes ample use of the sort of zooms that filmmakers of that era began to use. This use of the camera, as well as the way Corbucci has his characters die "cinematically", doesn't really work as it's terribly distracting.

But perhaps it's also that the spaghetti western isn't my favorite genre. Having read up on The Great Silence, I noticed that the movie seems to have a cult following. I'm sorry to say that I don't quite get it. But if you do like spaghetti westerns, maybe you too will like The Great Silence.

Evil Lloyd Nolan

I'll have to admit that when I think of actors playing bad guys, somebody who is decidedly not at the top of that list would be Lloyd Nolan, a character actor whose appearances brightened the movies he was in for 50 years. A movie in which he does play the nominal bad guy, although at least one getting the chance to redeem himself, is the B western Apache Trail.

Nolan gets top billing here, although the good guy protagonist and as much a lead as anybody in the movie is a young William Lundigan. Lundigan plays Tom O'Folliard, and as the movie opens he's just gotten out of prison. He runs across his brother, Trigger Bill (that's Lloyd Nolan), who offers Tom his cut of the money from the robbery that put Tom, but not Bill, in prison. Tom, feeling hard done by Bill, wants nothing more to do with crime, and simply wants to go back to his old job with the stage company.

Now, riding shotgun might not be such a good idea for a guy who spent time in prison, so his old boss decides to give him a rather more dangerous and less glamorous job, that of managing one of the way stations in a part of Apache Territory where the threat of ambush from the Apaches is very much real. However, that also gives him the chance to reunite with Mrs. Martinez and her soon to be an adult daughter Rosalia (Donna Reed), who you get the feeling always thought she'd be paired by her mom with Tom.

A stage comes, and on it is the sort of motley group of passengers that you expect for an ensemble piece like this: a widow, Constance Selden (Ann Ayers), who is fighting to get her late husband's cavalry pension that the government denied because he committed suicide; British artist James Thorne (Miles Mander) and his wife (Gloria Holden); and a group of cavalry officers who are ferrying the pay in a strongbox. So, one of the subplots is going to involve the possible romantic conflict between Tom, Rosalia, and Constance, although as you might guess the presence of a strongbox is more important.

That's because Bill shows up again. The Apache are getting restless, as can be seen from the smoke signals, and Bill has done something to piss them off so looks for refuge, with the stagecoach station being the best place he can think of. Not that his brother is happy to see him. But Tom has to go out to try to determine when and where the Apaches are going to attack, and this gives Bill the chance to try to rob the station of the strongbox. You'd think he would have seen enough westerns to realize that trying to get away with a strongbox just at the same time the Apaches are signalling their intention to attack isn't a good idea. Never mind he's the bad guy and hasn't had to pay for it yet under Production Code rules.

Apache Trail is a B western from MGM, so much of the film feels and looks like it's on sound stages and maybe the MGM ranch somewhere out in southern California. But it also has the presence of a fine cast, and they mostly elevate the pedestrian material to something better if not a memorable movie. To be fair, however, the movie was released in late 1942, at a time when studios were still cranking out B movies (this one is only 66 minutes) to give disposable product to movie theaters where people wanted a new movie each week, especially if by this point they wanted something to take their minds off World War II. Just like nobody expects most episodic television to be that memorable, also nobody I think expected the second features to be remembered 80 years later. Apache Trail is definitely worth a watch.

The Harvey Girls

I generally try to avoid doing posts on multiple films with the same star in close succession. Every now and then, however, the films on my DVR that are showing up on TCM happen to include a pair with the same star. That happens again this week; a few days back I posted on The Pirate, and now The Harvey Girls is showing up on TCM tomorrow, June 10, at 3:15 PM as part of a birthday salute to Judy Garland.

Opening title cards inform us of what the Harvey Girls were, which is a good thing because while a few people still living in 1946 when the movie was released might have remembered Harvey Girls, audiences today wouldn't. Fred Harvey was a freight agent for one of the railroads back in the 1870s who had the idea of setting up a series of restaurants at those stations along the line where the trains stopped long enough for passengers to eat. The restaurants became known as Harvey Houses, and employed unmarried women who were required to fit a squeaky-clean image in exchange for good-for-the-era pay.

As the movie opens, Judy Garland is not one of the Harvey Girls, but instead a young woman named Susan Bradley who is traveling west to the town of Sandrock to meet the man she's going to marry, having corresponded with him by letter. Also on the train is a new set of Harvey Girls managed by Sonora Cassidy (Marjorie Main). Susan gets off at the same town where the new Harvey House is being built, and finds that the putative man of her dreams is no such thing, but a drinker and old coot named Hartsey (Chill Wills). She doesn't want to marry him now, and thankfully Hartsey is OK with that, telling Susan that the love letters were written as a sort of joke by Ned Trent (John Hodiak).

Ned Trent runs the local den of iniquity, a saloon with dancing girls called the Alhambra, and Susan is so pissed with him that she vows to become a Harvey Girl herself and help drive the Alhambra out of business by bringing Harvey House civilization to Sandrock. Ned and his friend Judge Purvis (Preston Foster) plot to put the Harvey House out of business, but of course Ned eventually finds himself falling in love with Susan. Complicating matters is the fact that the head of the Alhambra dancing girls, Em (Angela Lansbury), is in love with Ned.

It all leads to the predictable conclusion, but with a bunch of musical numbers along the way because audiences expected that from a Judy Garland movie. Indeed, when we first see Garland on board the train she's singing a song. The musical numbers are certainly well-done and lively, although as many of you may know I'm not the biggest fan of Judy Garland musicals. It's easy to see, though, why Garland fans and audiences of the day would enjoy The Harvey Girls.

Kisses for My President

Fred MacMurray was honored in last August's Summer Under the Stars on TCM, which means that as I write this in early May I still have a couple of his movies to get through watching on my DVR before they expire, although by the time this gets posted they will have expired. First up is the 1964 comedy Kisses for My President.

The new President of the United States is being inaugurated, and that president is... a woman! Her name is Leslie McCloud (Polly Bergen), and while no real mention seems to be made of her political career before the presidency, she also has a husband Thaddeus (Fred MacMurray) and two children, teenaged Gloria and elementary school-aged Peter.

Thaddeus was a successful businessman before Leslie was elected president, and for ethics reasons since the business apparently contracts with the federal government, Thaddeus has had to sell the company. That would naturally leave anybody a bit disgruntled, I would think. But then Thaddeus gets to the White House and really gets irritated. Apparently nobody had thought of the term "First Gentleman" at the time. Not only that, but everything designed for the First Lady is, well, designed for a woman, right down to the décor in the separate bedroom that the First Lady has from the President. (At least in the context of the movie there's an explanation that since the President has to be ready for a 3AM emergency, there's an office adjoining the presidential bedroom so the President can't really use the other bedroom.)

So what's a First Gentleman with no direction in his professional life supposed to do? Madame President has him entertain a visiting foreign dignitary, President Valdez (Eli Wallach) of some Latin American tinpot dictatorship. Valdez likes any number of stereotypical masculine things like fast cars and bar-hopping that need a male companion. But the visit goes wrong, and since Valdez's country is important during the Cold War conflict with the Soviets, this is a problem.

Also going wrong is when an old friend of the McClouds, Doris Weaver (Arlene Dahl), decides to hire Thaddeus for the McCloud name. She tells him that he's going to develop a line of male cologne and hygiene products, but this is a ruse, in part because as mentioned she wants the McCloud name to help sell product and in part because she seems to want Thaddeus romantically. All of this gets Thaddeus brought before the Senate committee headed by Leslie's political enemy Sen. Walsh (Edward Andrews).

Further complicating matters for the president is that the two kids both let the influence of having a parent be president, with the concomitant Secret Service protection, go to their heads. It's not as bad as anything Hunter Biden did, since these are just kids, but using the Secret Service to get into fights with your classmates or to deal with your boyfriend's hot-rodding are definitely things that would redound negatively on the president herself.

Kisses for My President is a bit of a mess, in part because there's really only the one joke here, and because the movie doesn't know how to resolve the conflict. Interestingly, at the time the movie was made Polly Bergen was only 34 years old, which would have rendered her ineligible to be US President thanks to the requirement in the Constitution that the president be 35 years old. Of course, Leslie McCloud couldn't be 34 and have a high school-aged daughter, at least not in that generation. The movie is also slow, running its joke out for 110 minutes. Maybe the material might have worked in the days of the B movie (with a similarly short running time) before World War II. But not really in 1964.

The Enchanted Cottage (1924)

There's a "National Silent Movie Day" in late September, and in each of the past two years that I've been in the new place with the technically unlimted cloud DVR, I've been able to record a bunch of silents off of TCM since they tend to pick stuff for the day that doesn't show up quite so often. This time around, one of those movies was a silent version of a movie that has a more famous sound remake: The Enchanted Cottage.

Richard Barthelmess stars as Oliver Bashforth. He fought in the Great War, like a lot of men, and returned home scarred for life, at least mentally; his physical injuries aren't scars but some sort of paralytic limp. Before the war, he was engaged to be married to lovely Beatrice, with the plan being that the two get married and continue to live their idle rich lifestyle happily ever after. But Oliver's injuries don't leave him very happy, while Beatrice fell in love with another man while Oliver was away.

But that's OK by Oliver. He doesn't want to force Beatrice to marry him in his current condition, so he goes off to a place where he can be alone and live out his days, this being the spare cottage on an estate. Of course, he's not the only one there, as there's another soldier recuperating from the war, Major Hargrove (Holmes Herbert), who was blinded in the war. There are also a lot of orphans there, and tending to the orphans is Laura (May McAvoy), who decided to make this her life's work because of how homely she is.

Now, even if you haven't seen the 1945 version, you can probably guess what happens next, which is that Oliver and Laura, having nobody else around, start seeing past each other's physical appearance, and find the inner beauty in each other. There's also a legend about the cottage being enchanted, which is part of why Oliver and Laura see not only inner beauty, but also external beauty not only in each other but themselves. With that in mind, they decide to get married and tell Oliver's family about the amazing recovery they've had.

Except that they're not really recovered, which Major Hargrove can see even without having to resort to running his hands over Laura's face (although he does that, too). How is Oliver's family going to react when they see him still unwell when he insists that he's better? Will Oliver and Laura ever be able to live anywhere outside the cottage, and will they be able to find true happiness?

This version of The Enchanted Cottage is well-enough made, although the material is based on a stage play, which presents a bit of a problem when trying to convert it to a silent film. Indeed, I think it would have been a bit easier to follow with dialogue. Barthelmess is capable if not the best actor out there, while McAvoy is suitably pretty after the transformation. I'm glad I saw the silent version of The Enchanted Cottage, but if I were going to recommend silent dramas to people not very into silents, I think there are other things I'd pick first.

Tanin no kao

Once again, it's time to do a post on a foreign-language film that had been sitting on my DVR long enough that it was about to expire. This time, it's a Japanese film, The Face of Another.

Dr. Hiro works with prosthetic body parts, but he says that he's not really a plastic surgeon, but by training a psychiatrist. The prostheses really only serve the purpose of filling holes in the psyche caused by the loss of body parts, and that his job is to deal with the underlying psychiatric problems.

Mr. Okuyama (Tatsuya Nakadai) is a man who works in some sort of industrial design company that utilizes cryogenics as part of its manufacturing processes. Unfortunately, he was doing an experiment in which he was supposed to use liquid air (disproportionately nitrogen) with enhanced oxygen, but was given liquid oxygen instead. This resulted in an industrial accident that badly disfigured him, leaving him permanently wearing bandages around his face. At least the rest of his body doesn't seem to have been damaged. Okuyama is married, but worries that his wife (Machiko Kyo) is falling out of love with him because of the bandages and the fact that the injuries have caused other issues like sensitivity to noises.

With that in mind, Mr. Okuyama goes to Dr. Hiro for help. Hiro comes up with an idea, but it's an experimental one, and also an idea that highly tests the limit of medical ethics. (To be fair, the job of a medical ethicist is to come up with rationalizations for things normal people would consider totally unethical.) Hiro's idea is to create a facial mask that looks exactly like a real human face that Okuyama could wear. The small problem is how to get a face that will suit Okayama, although at least unlike Eyes Without a Face, Dr. Hiro only needs to cast a mold of somebody else's face. The bigger problem is that that Hiro believes having a different face will completely change Okuyama's personality. Indeed, if science could change everybody's faces, all sorts of human problems could be solved, which is ridiculous but thankfully not overly explored in the movie, at least not explicitly beyond one speech from Hiro. Okuyama goes through with the operation, getting a mask that has to be taken off at night (how it doesn't get damaged is not mentioned). But does it really change his personality?

Meanwhile, there's a subplot. Miki Irie plays a character who I don't think has a name in the film, only listed as "Girl With Scar". She's from Nagasaki, suggesting she survived the atomic bombing there but left with a badly scarred right side of her face. She works at a different psychiatric clinic, dealing with the men whose psyches were destroyed by serving in World War II. She lives with her brother, and worries about another possible atomic bomb falling.

The Face of Another is a movie that has some interesting ideas and certainly some interesting visuals, but one that I think is going to be a bit difficult for people who, like me, don't speak Japanese. It wasn't until I read the synopsis that I realized that the Girl With a Scar is not in fact one of Dr. Hiro's nurses, and that the two storylines never really intersect. Some of the philosophical ideas are also presented clumsily, as well, making the movie feel a bit slow and bloated coming in at right about two hours. (Eyes Without a Face, which I mentioned earlier, clocks in at a spritghtly 90 minutes.)

So, while there's some worthwhile stuff in The Face of Another, there are certainly other movies I'd recommend more highly.

The Pirate

Next up on the list of movies that I have on my DVR that's coming up again soon on TCM is The Pirate, which TCM will be running tomorrow (June 6) at 8:00 AM.

The movie opens up with some title cards telling us about the legendary pirate Macoco, who preyed upon shipping in the Caribbean in the second half of the 18th century. Having read those tales is Manuela (Judy Garland), who lives on one of the Spanish islands in the caribbean with her aunt Inez (Gladys Cooper), who has raised her since her parents died. As Manuela is technically an orphan, aunt Inez wanted to marry her off, which she's about to do with Don Pedro Vargas (Walter Slezak), who has been shipped in by the Spanish authorities to be mayor of the provincial town where Manuela and Inez live.

Manuela, having been fascinated by the tales of Macoco, wants to see the Caribbean before she gets married, so she goes off to the port town serving the island, ostensibly because her trousseau should also be arriving and she can have alterations to her wedding dress made there if need be. Also arriving in port is an acting troupe led by Serafin (Gene Kelly), sporting a ridiculous moustache and wig, and in one of the dance numbers an extremely short tunic.

Part of the shtick of Serafin's show is mesmerism, at the time a sort of parlor trick since people didn't really understand hypnosis. Serafin hypnotizes Manuela, who does a musical number about loving Macoco. Since Serafin was struck by Manuela's beauty and that was the whole reason he put her under hypnosis in the first place, Serafin decides to pose as Macoco to try to win over Manuela, never mind that she's betrothed to Don Pedro.

And then Serafin has a run-in with Don Pedro. It turns out that this isn't the first time the two met, as Don Pedro is the real Macoco, and had at some point in the past taken Serafin and his acting troupe hostage off the coast of Africa. But nobody else knows the real Macoco. The Spanish want Macoco, and Don Pedro sees an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone. Except that this would violate the Prodcution Code, and besides, Gene Kelly is a much more romantic leading man than Walter Slezak, so you can guess who winds up with whom in the final reel.

The story in The Pirate isn't terribly original, but that's beside the point. The Pirate is a vehicle for its stars: Gene Kelly gets to do a lot of dancing, while Judy Garland gets to sing. They both get to show off their ample talents in that regard, and the song and dance numbers are all exceedingly well executed technically. The only thing for me, however, is that because the story is so week, all the musical numbers left me a bit cold, as if the movie just has no heart.

However, if you like either Judy Garland or Gene Kelly, chances are you'll be able to overlook the story weaknesses and really enjoy The Pirate.