If I Were Free

In the early days of talking pictures, it wasn't uncommon for Hollywood to obtain the rights to plays that had recently been on the stage since those were a ready-made source of material that a lot of the movie-going public hadn't seen. Also, since the stuff had been designed for the stage, the fact that sound cameras were more limited at the time than silent movies had been wasn't such a big problem. Recently, I watched another one of those creaky old plays-turned-into-a-movie: If I Were Free.

The movie opens up in Paris in the early 1930s. Gordon Evers (Clive Brook) is a British barrister apparently on vacation, talking to his friend Hector (Henry Stephenson) about his bordeom with life as well as revealing that he's got a war wound from the Great War, that being bullet fragments still in his chest. To top things off, he's in one of those proverbial loveless marriages with a wife who's waffling over whether to grant him a divorce. At first she says yes, then no.

Hector has some other friends, the Franco-American couple the Casenoves. Wife Sarah (Irene Dunne) was a decorator/antiques dealer before her marriage to Tono (Nils Asther). Tono is a drinker and a womanizer, and is about to head off to the south of France with his latest mistress, leaving Sarah in the lurch. Since you've got two people each in a marriage without love, and since one's a man and the other a woman, it doesn't take too much to figure out what happens next, which that they commiserate about their respectively similar plights and fall in love along the way.

So Gordon suggests that Sarah follow him back to England and set up an antiques dealership there. That will get her some money, and allow the two of them to be able to continue their "friendship". As you might expect, however, the relationship does not come without all sorts of baggage attached. The two would be willing to get married, but there's the question of whether both of them will be able to get out of their marriages. And then there's the perceived class difference which nowadays wouldn't be such a big deal and frankly looking at it as an American is something I don't see as that big of a class difference anyway. But for the people in Gordon's social circle it would have been an issue. And that's even not taking into account the other spouses part. Gordon is up for a judgeship, and if news of his relationship with Sarah were to become too public, there goes his chances at becoming a judge. With that in mind, Hector suggests to Sarah that she write Gordon a break-up note because it would be the best for Gordon's career.

At this point the movie takes a sudden and frankly ridiculous veer into the melodramatic. That old war wound Gordon has starts acting up, and like Bette Davis in Dark Victory, it's "prognosis negative". Well, almost negative, in that there's a very risky operation that has maybe a one percent chance of success. But it doesn't take much to figure out where the rest of the movie is going.

If I Were Free is based on a play by John Van Druten, a name you might recognize since he also turned the stories that became I Remember Mama into a stage play, along with turning some of Christoper Isherwood's stories into the play I Am a Camera that would later get adapted to Cabaret. If I Were Free has all the feel of a stage play, and it has a very dated 1930s feel to it. This is material that I can see audiences back in the day liking. And, to be fair to the cast and crew, they do a very professional job taking the material they're given and turning it into a programmer. But boy is it something else 90 years later.

To be honest, if I were introducing people to early sound movies, If I Were Free wouldn't be my first choice by a mile. But people who are already big fans of early 1930s movies probably won't mind watching the cast go through their paces on this one.

TCM End of July 2025 briefs

Apparently TCM is running another of those AFI nights tonight; I find myself wondering what sort of relationship TCM has with the AFI to be able to keep running these things. Anyhow, this year the honoree is/was Francis Ford Coppola -- I don't pay attention to when these are recorded so I don't know how old it is. At any rate it should give me the chance to record Apocalypse Now, if YouTube TV has streaming rights to it.

Tomorrow being August 1, it means the start of TCM's Summer Under the Stars. So, as always that means no traditional Star of the Month, nor features like Silent Sunday Nights nor Noir Alley. I've got half a dozen or so films on my DVR that are showing up in August, so expect quite a few posts about films coming up on TCM, and hopefully I've scheduled them all properly. Two of the posts were written before the release of the August schedule and have been sitting in drafts for a while. You can read a bit more about Summer Under the Stars here.

As for the Summer Under the Stars schedule, it stars off with Lana Turner tomorrow, including a fun early role in Dancing Co-Ed, which isn't necessarily a great movie but still fairly entertaining.
Saturday brings Christopher Plummer, and what looks like the the premiere of The Sound of Music at 8:00 PM, followed by a movie I recently learned about, The Last Station at 11:00 PM. The Last Station deals with Leo Tolstoy and how he tried to get rid of worldly things at the end of his life.
To end the weekend, we have Audrey Hepburn. Exciting, I know, since she didn't make all that many ovies so there's not much original TCM can choose from.

Recent obituaries have been more about musicians that Hollywood types, even though some of the dead did the odd cheesy movie here and there, like Hulk Hogan. And Chuck Mangione more or less played himself on King of the Hill in several episodes.

Hour of Glory

TCM had a spotlight late in 2024 on the professional partnership of Michael Powell and Michael Pressburger. This gave me the chance to record a couple of movies I hadn't seen before, as well as one I had seen but hadn't done a post on according to a search of the blog. That latter film is The Small Back Room.

The movie starts off with a title card telling us the setting is London, 1943, which of course is smack in the middle of World War II. A man walks into a building that looks like it could be used by the War Department or some other military-adjacent organization. The man walking into the building is indeed military: army captain Richard Stuart (Michael Gough), and he's looking for explosives expert Sammy Rice (David Farrar). The Nazis have apparently come up with some new type of booby trap that's killed several civilians, and Capt. Stuart thinks that perhaps Sammy would come up with some idea of how the Germans may have set the traps so that future types of this bomb can be defused without going off and killing anybody.

This is a welcome change for Sammy, who has a difficult personal life. Sammy isn't fighting in the war, which is entirely because he has a prosthetic foot. Worse, that foot causes him all sorts of pain, and the painkillers the doctors prescribe don't do anything for him. As a result of not being able to serve in active duty Sammy takes pity on himself; as a result of the pain, Sammy has turned to drink and become a raging alcoholic much to the chagrin of his girlfriend and co-worker Susan (Kathleen Byron).

It's also not only personal life that's tough for Sammy. He works for a company that tries to design new weapons systems as part of the war effort. One thing that the War Department is working on is something called the Reeves gun, that may not work out in the field as well as is needed for the soldiers to be able to use it effectively and survive. This is leading to all sorts of political infighting. It doesn't help that Sammy's boss Waring (Jack Hawkins) is basically useless, trying to flirt with the secretaries while bamboozling the politicians and taking credit for things that really should be the responsiblity of Sammy and the other men in the laboratories. It's all amost enough to make Sammy start drinking the bottle of Scotch he's got ready for victory day.

And then the climax comes when Sammy gets a telegram from Stuart that another of the German booby traps has been found at the coast without having gone off, which will give Sammy and Stuart a chance to figure out what the Germans have done. Except that Sammy gets to the coast only to find out that one of the two booby traps when off while Stuart was trying to defuse it, killing Stuart and forcing Sammy to defuse the other one with no help from anybody else.

As I was watching The Small Back Room for the first time in many years, I realized that in some ways it's almost two movies in one, somewhat along the lines of Just the Way You Are that I did a post on a couple of days ago. However, I think that Powell and Pressburger handle the two disparate parts much better. It helps that the material is stuff that naturally lends itself to dark suspense, and that Farrar is up to the task of dealing with it.

The Small Back Room is a smaller film than what one might normally think of when it comes to Powell and Pressburger, and as a result, it's a bit of a shame that this one isn't nearly as well remembered as the pair's other movies. It definitely deserves to be better known.

One can always use another women-in-prison movie

I'm always up for a women-in-prison movie, if only because every time Hollywood makes on, whoever does it can't help but be lurid and exploitative, and even if the movie isn't overall all that good, that luridness makes watching the movie a lot of fun. So when I saw the synopsis for the movie House of Women the last time it showed up on TCM, I just had to record it to do the eventual post on it.

The movie starts off with a woman named Erica Hayden (Shirley Knight) being brought into the women's prison, against her protestations of innocence. They all say they're innocent. As part of the intake, she's given the obligatory physical examination, and like Eleanor Parker's character in Caged, Erica is pregnant. She doesn't want to have the baby be born in prison, which she considers quite the shame, but this is a slightly more progressive prison, in that the authorities let mothers keep custody of their babies at least until the babies turn three. At that point, it's make arrangements for somebody to take custody of the baby, or else have it put up for adoption.

Not that the warden, Frank Cole (Andrew Duggan) likes any of this. Or any type of progressive reform, for that matter. His philosphy seems to be that the same sort of discipline that would be used in men's prison should be used in women's prison. Put a woman in solitary for 10 days? No big deal. Make lights out a half hour earlier, and take away their radios? Also no big deal. The prison doctor, Dr. Conrad (Jason Evers), disagrees with the warden, but as if this prison movie doesn't have enough tropes, Conrad is also an alcoholic.

Fast forward three years. Erica has been a model prisoner, and even gets a job as a maid in the warden's house. But her kid is about to turn three, and the timing of her parole application means that even if the application is accepted, she won't get out of prison until about a month after her daughter's third birthday. She tries to get one of her fellow prisoners who's going to get out before she does to take the child for a month or two, but none of them are able to. The prison welfare officer takes the daughter away one day early, when the prisoners are planning a birthday party for her, and that leads to a riot.

But things are about to get even worse. Somehow, the kids are able to get enough free run of the prison that one prisoner's inquisitive child goes climing staircases that give access to the roofs of various buildings. It's something that's clearly dangerous, and it's also a bit of obvious foreshadowing as to what's going to happen to that kid. That kid's mother starts an even bigger riot in which the prisoner takes one of the members of the parole board hostage.

House of Women doesn't really break any new ground, but when you're watching a women's prison movie, you have to ask yourself whether you really want any new ground broken. The tropes that make up women's movies are fun enough that if you have a prurient interest -- and who doesn't -- you can't help but be entertained by how over the top the stuff is, even if it's formulaic.

Reikugun

Another of the foreign-language films I had to watch off of my DVR before it expired is a fascinating little Japanese movie called Army.

Intertitles at the beginning of the movie (definitely the English subtitles, although I think the Japanese text says it too) say that the movie was completed in November 1944, and that the movie was sponsored by the Army Ministry of Japan. From the date, this is clearly during World War II, although also a time when the tide of war was turning against Japan. But because it's a country at war, you have to expect there's certain political considerations made. More on that, however, later.

The movie starts off with a brief introductory scene in 1866, which was just before the Meiji era started in Japan, and is in the movie referred to as a time of turmoil. The Takagi family is one is a merchant family of the aspirational class, and their fortunes are at risk because of the warring. But they serve their lord and are rewarded for it.

Fast forward to 1895, which was the time of the first Sino-Japanese War and how the Japanese wound up in control of both Taiwan and the Korean peninsula. Tomohiko Takagi (Chishū Ryū) is a descendant of the family from the first scene, and wants to do his duty for the emperor by serving in the war. He goes off to the military and trains as hard as he can, but unfortunately he's consistently sickly, which means that he can't do any real military duty, which is a matter of great shame. Some time after the war, Tomohiko gets married to Waka (Kinuyo Tanaka), resumes the family business, and eventually has two sons.

The movie goes through this era pretty quickly as well, along with the Russo-Japanese War of 1905 and more action during what would be World War I in the west. By this time, Tomohiko and Waka's first kid, Shintaro, is a young boy who's way too sensitive for his own good, something which bothers Tomohiko since he knows you have to be tough to make a good soldier, and dammit, being a good soldier and serving the Emperor is what matters. Heck, Waka says that parents only have custody of their sons until they can hand the adult sons over to the Emperor.

Eventually we get to the early 1930s, when the Japanese attack on Manchuria begins the Asian theater of what would in the west become World War II. Shintaro is about 20 now, which is old enough to take the draft exam and to try to become an officer. That would be a great point of pride for any Japanese family. But is Shintaro fit for such duty?

The synopsis that I've written above already makes it reasonably obvious how the movie has the sort of propaganda that a movie made smack-dab in the middle of a total war would require. More interesting, however, since the movie never reaches the point where Japan is fighting the west in World War II, is the way Army handles those western powers. Already in the opening 1866 scene, there's mention of how Britain and America are trying to destroy Japan. The US is mentioned at several other places as a country that's going to pose real, existential danger to Japan. Perhaps more interesting is how, in one of the scenes mentioning the wars on the Korean peninsula, it's mentioned that foreigners welcomed the Japanese forces, with specific mention made of an Italian family. Italy, of course, was on the Axis side, so not one of the countries fighting against Japan. The final scene also shows that the director, Keisuke Kinoshita, wasn't exactly on board with the war, but had to be subtle about how he presented anything that might go against the Japanese government line.

All of this makes Army a fascinating little movie, and one that I think is surprisingly well made considering what must have been a difficult time for a filmmaker in a country not only at total war, but losing that war.

Not the Billy Joel song

In the latest installment of "80s movies I was too young to have seen in the theater when they came out", it's time for one that I hadn't heard of until it showed up on TCM: Just the Way You Are. The synopsis sounded interesting enough, so I recorded it and only recently finally got around to watching it so that I could schedule the post on it here.

Kristy McNichol stars as Susan Berlanger, a flutist with the orchestra of the local ballet company with a good friend in ballerina Lisa (Kaki Hunter). Susan's got a complicated love live in that she's got someone she's kinda-sorta with, banker Frank (Tim Daly). The problem is, Frank is gay and this would be a marriage of convenience, so while the two are friends, an actual marriage isn't on the cards because ultimately each realizes it would be bad for both of them. Meanwhile, Susan has someone she's never seen hounding her, in the form of Jack, the man at her answering service she usually deals with as he answers her professional calls and takes the messages to deliver to Susan. Nowadays, everything would just go to voice mail.

But there's another problem. Susan suffered from viral encephalitis as a kid, with the result that it left one of her legs lame and her needing to wear a brace on it. Everybody naturally thinks polio even though she'd be a bit too young to have had polio, and takes pity on her. They may be well meaning, but if you have to go through your life getting this from everybody, it gets tired fast. At least she's trying not to let it limit her life, as her rich parents with some sort of connections have been trying to get her on a concert tour of Europe.

So after we've been introduced to this complex personal life of Susan's, the movie ditches all of these characters to send Susan to Europe. And then one of her concert dates in Europe gets cancelled, leaving Susan with some spare time in the dead of winter. Susan comes up with an interesting idea: she gets a doctor to agree to take off the leg brace and put a traditional plaster cast on the leg instead. Susan's plan is to go to a ski resort with the cast on and pass herself off as somebody who had the bad luck to break the leg skiing. People may still pity her, but at least it will only be temporary, and they don't have to know about the true leg injury.

Except, of course, that things aren't quite going to go that way. First is that Susan's room hasn't been cleared out yet and the one she wanted was going to cost more anyway because she mixed up the prices for the high season. So she doubles up with a nice enough young woman who's the mistress of a rich married man, waiting for that man to ditch his wife. And then Susan gets the attention of multiple men: American photographer Peter (Michael Ontkean) and ski equipment scion François Rossignol. Both of them pursue her, but what's going to happen when it's time to reveal that Susan has a different leg injury?

Just the Way You Are is a mess of a movie for multiple reasons, the biggest of which being that it feels like two separate movies since everybody from the American half save McNichol gets ditched once the movie goes to the Alps. The material also feels like it's being glossed over in TV Movie of the Week-style, or perhaps even worse, like an after-school special that tries to handle some sort of big issue but does it in a horribly superficial way.

As a result, it's no wonder that I hadn't heard of Just the Way You Are until it showed up on TCM. But as always, watch and judge for yourself.

More faces than Eve!

The next of the movies that's sitting on my DVR and is coming up on TCM is 7 Faces of Dr. Lao. You can see it overnight tonight, or early tomorrow (July 27) at 2:30 AM. Note of course that if you're in the Pacific time zone that still means it will be this evening (July 26), as that will only be 11:30 PM.

Tony Randall stars as Dr. Lao. As the movie opens, he approaches a sign pointing to the town of Abalone, Arizona Territory, circa 1900, riding on a donkey and carrying on the donkey a fishbowl with a goldfish. This seems like it would be a major plot hole, except that it turns out Lao is a sort of conjurer (I'm not giving much away, to be honest) so conjuring up a new goldfish might not be a big deal. At any rate, Lao is an itinerant conjurer, looking to set up a circus in town for a couple of days where his magic will earn him enough to keep going until he reaches the next town.

In Abalone, he stops at the office of the local newspaper publisher, Ed Cunningham (John Ericson). Since back in the old days of printing, it was also the job of the newspaperman to do print shop stuff, Lao wants Cunningham to print up a bunch of handbills promoting the circus. Not that he should need so many since this is a small town. It also seems to be a town in a parlous state, as Clint Stark (Arthur O'Connell) is trying to buy everyone out. He claims that the town's water supply pipe is going to go bust and the town won't be able to afford a new one, which is why buying up an entire town that and the land around it might just make sense economically. Except of course that the real purpose is because a railroad is going to be built and just this land is going to be worth a fortune.

In addition to the land-grabber and the publisher who wants to bring civilization to the west, there's another trope of movie westerns: the widow with a young child. That widow is Angela the librarian (Barbara Eden), and her son Mike is captivated by Lao, wanting to learn how to do tricks and the like. Instead, Lao imparts wisdom to Mike, telling him to treat the entire world as a circus.

In fact, Lao is going to impart wisdom on the entire town once the circus starts, and it's that circus which is really the point of seeing 7 Faces of Dr. Lao, not the story around the townsfolk. Lao has a series of disguises, each of them giving Lao the opportunity to have an individual a lesson in life. There's Pan, the god of joy; a blind ancient Greek fortune teller; and for the finale, the famous magician Merlin. There are also a couple that are stop-motion creatures rather than Randall in a different sort of make-up.

Now, the one thing that audiences of 2025 are immediately going to comment on is Tony Randall as Dr. Lao. Lao is, of course, Chinese, and, well, Tony Randall isn't. However, Lao himself is race-fluid since he plays Anglo-Saxon Merlin as well as ancient Greek. Lao is also gender-bending as Medusa and even species-defying as a serpent, although this one is clearly just George Pal's stop motion compared to makeup jobs on some other things. Obviously, nobody can credibly be all these things, but audiences of 2025 are trained to complain when the white guy masquerades as non-white and ignore cultural appropriation when it's the other way around. I suppose if it weren't for the fact that this was based on a book they could have just given the "Lao" character a name and backgound that don't imply any ethnicity.

The plot, or the framing device about the town's future, is more or less beside the point as that's just a frame on which to hang the stock characters and George Pal's special effects. Some of the set pieces work well; others, not so much. To me there just wasn't enough of a story to sustain a full-length film. But younger audiences may well enjoy that to them will probably seem like old-fashioned special effects.

His Majesty O'Keefe

I've mentioned it in the past, but I'm still surprised that after 17-plus years of blogging, it's still not uncommon for me to find an old movie that I had never heard of before, and not even just obscure B movies or foreign stuff. One such example from a big studio (Warner Bros.) and with a big star (Burt Lancaster) is His Majesty O'Keefe.

Lancaster plays David O'Keefe, a ship's captain in the early 1870s who, just as the movie opens has been subjected to a mutiny by his crew somewhere in the Pacific. He's put on a rowboat and has the great good luck of drifting to an inhabited island called Yap (a real place in Micronesia although the movie was made in large part in Fiji) that has a westerner on the island. That westerner is Tetins (André Morell), a German who has the job of getting the locals to pick the coconuts for the copra that the coconuts yield when the coconut meat is dried; copra was in the 19th century valued for its oils that were useful in making soap.

The good people of Yap, for their part, aren't that interested in doing this sort of work as they're happy with what they've got and don't understand western ways of doing business. Besides, their own culture sees something known as "fei", a type of giant stone used as currency and seemingly unavailable on Yap, as more important than the western stores of value. However, they also have a tradition where someone can challenge the traditional chieftain to trial by combat. O'Keefe does this and earns the respect of the local Yap leader to the point that he's able to earn some money from the copra and get passage to Hong Kong on the next German ship that comes to collect the copra.

At this point, O'Keefe begins to let power go to his head. He has visions of grandeur that are going to require his getting a boat and getting back to Yap to be able to harvest the copra on an industrial scale. On one of his voyages, O'Keefe winds up on the island of Palau, which just happens to be where the fei comes from. Also on Palau is an Australian serving the same function as Tetins on Yap, a man with a mixed-race daughter Dalabo (Joan Rice). O'Keefe takes to Dalabo but goes too fast which results in his having to get married to her.

Even more power goes to O'Keefe's head when he organizes the locals on Yap to fight off an invasion by a would-be slave trader who has been preying upon Pacific islands. But there are still powerful business interests in the copra trade out there, and they've got the backing of nations that can bring much more to bear than any one business interest.

His Majesty O'Keefe is based on a real person, although I don't know exactly how much the story here holds to the real O'Keefe's story. In any case, it's the sort of material that well suited Burt Lancaster at this point of his career when he was still doing action stuff that highlighted his physicality. The location cinematography is also quite nice. The story is a bit formulaic, but just about good enough.

City Hall

When I write up posts on movies and schedule them, I generally try to do it in such a way that I don't have a couple of movies starring the same person or being in closely related genres coming up in rapid succession. But at the same time, I've got enough extra posts written up that, combining it with moving posts around when the following month's TCM schedule comes out, I sometimes wind up with stuff that in a perfect world I wouldn't have right next to each other. With that in mind, the next post is on a relatively recent (by the standards of my blog) movie set in New York City politics: City Hall.

John Cusack plays Kevin Calhoun. He's a Deputy Mayor in New York under Mayor John Pappas (Al Pacino). Deputy Mayor, in New York, is an appointed, not elected position, and the job duties are, as I understand it, not clearly defined in the legal sense. Kevin is a bright young thing who moved from the South to be someplace more to his liking politically, and thinks he can change the world, which is why he's gotten into politics. He's also an acolyte and admirer of Mayor Pappas and a very capable underling.

One morning, at the same time Pappas is giving a speech in Manhattan, things are happening in the outer boroughs, specifically Brooklyn. Tino Zapatti is a member of one of the Mob families, which of course means that he's involved in crime, although he's not at the top of the food chain. Cops such as Eddie Santos are trying to maintain law and order so that parents can send their children to school safely. All of this is about to come together when Santos and Tino get involved in a shootout. Both of them die, but there's another bullet that hits an innocent bystander: a young boy on his way to school. Worse for the political class is that this is a young black boy, which causes all sorts of political considerations thanks to the class and ethnic divides in New York's seemingly hegemonic Democratic Party. (OK, I don't think political parties are actually named here. But when you get a jurisdiction where one party seems to have a huge majority, the political fight is really within the party.)

Mayor Pappas comes across as someone who's come up from the bottom and made good, and can present himself well to the Manhattan grandees who represent the rich old money, the people who are fine with mass immigration and ethnic strife because that's happening in the outer boroughs instead of their leafy districts. But he also understands the corruption inherent in the system and is willing to make deals with the aldermen and others who are spokesmen for some of the other coalitions within the Party, such as Frank Anselmo (Danny Aiello), who has considerable sway within Brooklyn's Italian-American working class. They've been haggling over how to get a new transportation connection from Brooklyn to Lower Manhattan built, and the shootout between the cops and Mob threatens to complicate that even further.

Marybeth Cogan (Bridget Fonda) is a lawyer for the police union. She has a different view of the corruption that's going on behind the scenes, as she realizes that various parts of the Party are going to try to turn on the cops for their own political benefit. Her job is more to protect Santos, the cop who's been killed, but Santos isn't squeaky clean himself. The closest to squeaky clean, and that's only because he's so darn naïve, is Calhoun, who wants to get to the bottom of what happened in the shooting. He has no idea what he's getting himself into as the conspiracy grows.

City Hall is an interesting movie that, however, probably should have been written as one of those limited-length TV series that you get on cable nowadays. There's a lot going on here for a movie that runs a bit under two hours, and the material I think would have worked better over several hour-long episodes, giving the various subplots time to open up and make character development work.

One thing I did find interesting about City Hall is watching the movie in the light of current-day political developments in the city. I watched the movie before the Party's primary election that put an avowed socialist in the catbird's seat to win the general election in November, although obviously this post didn't get scheduled until well afterward. The current (as of this writing) mayor was rejected by the Party in the wake of conveniently-timed corruption charges made when the mayor squawked about some of the Party's bad policies on a federal level. You don't get to the top without being corrupt, and none of the do-gooders avoid the corruption, either. It's more a question of when internal Party politics results in the so-called do-gooders falling out of favor.

Getting back to the movie City Hall however. As a story of its own it works reasonably well with good enough performances. It's just the sort of thing that feels like it could have been so much better.

Hero at Large

Quite some time back TCM did a double feature of movies starring John Ritter. I've already done a post on one of the two films, They All Laughed; now it's time for the other film, Hero at Large.

Like They All Laughed, Hero at Large takes place in New York just as the 1970s were turning to the 1980s, and is filmed largely on location. John Ritter plays Steve Nichols, a struggling actor who can't pay the rent and isn't all that good with relationships as he's bickering with a girlfriend as he's walking down the sidewalk at the film's opening. Living across the hall from Steve is J. Marsh (a young Anne Archer), who has been able to carve out at least a bit better of a living in the entertainment industry by working behind the camera as a production assistant on commercials.

Steve's next "acting" gig is a particularly degrading one. There's a new superhero movie, Captain Avenger, coming out, and the PR brains behind the promotion is Walter Reeves (Bert Convy, probably better known for his game show hosting). One of his ideas is to send out a Captain Avenger to a many of the theaters at which it's playing for the opening weekend; there's a dozen or more in New York alone, all on a bus going from theater to theater and Steve is one of those.

After the movie ends one night, Steve, still dressed in his Captain Avenger outfit, stops off at a bodega to pick up a carton of milk, barely able to get in before the store closes. Another young man takes the opportunity to come in the store, except that this other young guy is a hoodlum who's looking to hold up the place. Steve isn't right at the register at the time of the hold up, so he uses his presence to startle the stick-up man enough to get him out of the store and save the lives of a very grateful older husband-and-wife pair who own the store. They naturally run to the local TV news, and since this was the era in which New York was only beginning to get cleaned up, the idea of a masked man in a superhero outfit foiling a crime is a big thing. It's also a perfect opportunity for Walter to promote the movie.

But Walter also has a second PR job his agency is handling. There's a mayoral election coming up, and the mayor's campaign manager Donnelly (Kevin McCarthy) thinks that a superhero fighting crime and working for the current administration would be just what the mayor's campaign needs. So perhaps Donnelly could get Walter to figure out a way to get this crime-foiling Captain Avenger to join the mayor's campaign. Not that Walter even knows which of the Captain Avengers is the one who foiled the crime, as Steve isn't being that open about it. He didn't do it for the publicity.

Meanwhile, Steve both gets injured in another vigilante event, while also getting locked out of his apartment for not paying the rent, leading him to spend a good deal of time with that lovely Miss Marsh across the hall. So she's the one person who learns his secret, although she isn't going to let on either. The Mayor's offer could be lucrative, but it would also be dishonest. Does Steve want to sell his soul for this?

Hero at Large is a pleasant enough little movie, thanks almost entirely to John Ritter's charm. A relatively slight and unrealistic story shouldn't work, but dammit, Ritter's Steve Nichols is just such a nice guy that you can't help but root for him. I can understand why, in the past 45 years, Hero at Large has fallen through the cracks to become a relatively forgotten movie. But it's more than entertaining enough to spend a good 90 minutes with and is definitely worth a watch.

The Movie Man

Some months back, TCM ran a pair of documentaries about people who have a love for the movies. As part of a day of movies about movies TCM is running tomorrow, July 23, TCM is giving another airing to one of those movies: The Movie Man, tomorrow at 10:00 AM.

The Movie Man is the story of Keith Stata, who grew up in a small town in "northern" Ontario called Kinmount. (I don't know what Ontarians refer to as "northern" Ontario, but to me I'd think of anything north of about a line from Ottawa to where Michigan's Upper Peninsula meets Ontario, and Kinmount is well south of that, albeit not in a heavily populated part of the province.) Stata grew up with a love of movies from his days as a child seeing the Saturday matinees in the next bigger town that had a movie theater, with a particular fondness for the Rod Taylor version of The Time Machine. But being from that part of the world and in that time, there was no way he could go to film school to fulfill his dream of making movies.

So, since there wasn't much opportunity, he went into construction, which allowed him to become adjacent to movies in a different way. He bought a property and turned it into the town's movie theater in the late 1970s, opening it for the summer. It became enough of a success that, over the decades, he was able to add on to the building, eventually winding up with five screens as well as collecting enough memorabilia to include a nostalgia museum which is partly movie-related with props, posters, and vintage projectors. But how is a man in his 70s going to keep the theater a going concern, and who's going to take over when he dies?

There are scenes in the film that are dated 2019, and as we all know, the following year governments everywhere fucked over a whole lot of businesses with coronavirus lockdowns. (I survived several rounds of layoffs, having to work close to 60 hours a week when the volume of work finally returned, and then another bigger round of layoffs when we lost one of our contracts, but none of the powers that be or the lockdown supporters gave a shit about people like me.) Stata's theater was forced to close for two summers in a row, and the climax of the movie deals with the plans to reopen in 2022.

After watching The Movie Man, I couldn't help but think of Errol Morris' first documentary Gates of Heaven, on the subject of pet cemeteries. Apparently I never blogged about that one before, but when I watched it, I got the distinct impression that Morris got material about two different subject both related to pet cemeteries, but not enough of either subject to make a feature-length documentary. By the same token, a goodly portion of The Movie Man deals with how Stata became Kinmount's cat rescue person, to the point that at the time the film was made he was taking care of some four dozen cats with that being as much of a full-time job as running the theater is. The two parts don't go quite so well together, but you get the feeling that director Matt Finlin didn't have enough material for either part of Stata's life. The fact that coronavirus lockdowns intervened also doesn't help, but that's not the director's fault.

Ultimately, The Movie Man is an interesting enough idea, but a movie that has its share of flaws.

The Very Thought of You

Another movie that I was surprised to find that I hadn't heard of before its most recent airing on TCM back in 2024 was the Warner Bros. World War II homefront film The Very Thought of You. It being from Warner Bros. and part of the old Turner Library that makes up the backbone of the TCM schedule, you'd think I'd have seen it before. But I hadn't, so I recorded it the last time it showed up. It's getting another airing on TCM, tomorrow (July 22) at 11:45 AM, so now is the time for the obligatory review.

The Very Thought of You was released in 1944, and starts off with a part of World War II that audiences of the day would have known well but not so much today: the Japanese occupation of a few of the Aleutian Islands. Any number of US soldiers were stationed there as a result (in real life Charlton Heston was stationed there), but as the attempted occupation failed the US could send many of the soldiers back stateside. Among them is a platoon with Sgt. David Stewart (Dennis Morgan) and his pal Sgt. "Fixit" Bilman (Dane Clark). They have a week's leave or so and their next deployment is going to have them ship out from San Diego, so they head down the west coast, winding up in Pasadena where David studied structural engineering at Caltech and he visits an old professor who doesn't realize David has been away for three years.

On the bus from Caltech to wherever the two soldiers are going to be staying, they run into two young women who are doing their part for the war effort by working at a parachute factore. Fixit tries to chat one of the women up, not so successfully, but it turns out that the other woman recognizes Sgt. Stewart. That woman is Janet Wheeler (Eleanor Parker), who worked before the war as a soda jerk and served Stewart pretty much every night since he was working his way through Caltech and stopped there after work for a shake. She developed a flame for him, although he doesn't quite remember her. The two men offer to walk the two women home. And then Janet offers David dinner with the family since it's Thanksgiving as well as her parents' anniversary.

You'd think the family would be happy to do their part for the war effort; if you remember the old Fox film Sunday Dinner for a Soldier this sort of thing was a pretty big deal. But the Wheelers are a dysfunctional family. Dad (Henry Travers) seems to have been a bit of a failure as a man, although the way the family can afford a nice middle-class house would suggest not. Mom (Beulah Bondi) can have a nasty temper and is unhappy that Janet brought a stranger home, even though you'd think it would be easy to explain his presence. There's an older brother who isn't serving because he supposedly flunked a physical, and older sister Molly (Andrea King) who married a sailor hastily before he went off to war and, thinking she'll never see him again, has decided to see a series of other men in the meantime.

As you can guess, Janet and David fall in love, but half of the Wheeler family is not only unhappy with this, they're willing to try to sabotage the relationship! It's really surprising for a movie from this era that family members would be doing such things. Janet has a quickie marriage to David before he goes back off to fight again, and even gets knocked up on one of their two brief honeymoons, yet still Mom and Molly try to make Janet's life hell to the point that Janet moves out and keeps the pregnancy a secret from Mom and sister. And then Molly's husband shows up, which really starts to change things....

The Very Thought of You is a dated movie, having been released in the autumn of 1944. It's the sort of homefront stuff that ultimately has a happy ending that audiences of the day clearly would have identified with. Audiences 80 years on probably won't, which doesn't make the movie bad so much as a bit more difficult for some people to get into. The stars do a good enough job, and I suppose I should also mention Faye Emerson as Cora, Janet's co-worker from the beginning of the film, who also winds up in a subplot relationship with the Dane Clark character. Henry Travers, unsurprisingly, is as good as ever here.

Although The Very Thought of You is a decided time capsule, it's one interesting enough to merit a viewing.

Briefs and upcoming for the week of July 21-27, 2025

I'm not certain if I mentioned it in the previous briefs post, but I've started recording some of the shorts in the Saturday matinee bloc to have shorts to post about to add to days where I might also want a post about, say, an upcoming month's Star of the Month or a TCM programming salute. Regarding teh shorts that show up in the time left over after a TCM feature presentation, I have to admit to being remiss about taking note of what shorts accompany what feature so that I can go back and watch the short at a later time, or rewatch it when I'd like to do the post on it.

This week is going to see a couple of posts on movies that are on my DVR that are getting another airing on TCM and that I haven't done posts on. However, there's other stuff on my DVR that I've already done posts on and is coming up again this week. It was only a couple of months back that I posted on Gunfight at Comanche Creek; that one you can see again Tuesday at 3:30 AM. Moonstruck and Mystic Pizza are two of the movies that are part of this week's segment on 80s actresses which serves as a pseudo-Star of the Month. But I'm also hoping to get a better copy of The Day They Robbed the Bank of England, which shows up at 6:30 AM Thursday. The last two times TCM ran it, the audio and video were out of sync.

Although she's better known for being a singer, Connie Francis had a brief career in the 1960s acting in movies such as Where the Boys Are and her remake of Girl Crazy titled Where the Boys Meet the Girls. She died last Wednesday at the age of 87.

Another death worth mentioning is that of songwriter Alan Bergman. He won three Academy Awards, notably including the title song from The Way We Were, over the years with his wife and songwriting partner Marilyn, while being nominated quite a few more times. Bergman was 99; his wife Marilyn died in 2022 aged 93.

Seven Keys to Baldpate (1935)

I think I've mentioned before how a property like Brewster's Millions has been turned into a movie a fairly ridiculous number of times, especially considering how the original book or play that inspired the movie is not so well known today. Another story that went from book to stage play to movie is Seven Keys to Baldpate, which got three different versions in the first 20 years of the talking picture era, along with a couple of silents although I don't know that any of them are extant. The 1935 version of Seven Keys to Baldpate was about to expire from my DVR, so I watched it and wrote up this post to schedule in the queue for eventual posting here.

I actually didn't know anything about the story going in beyond the fact that it's a mystery, although it's one of those comic mysteries. It's winter in Asquewan Junction, one of those towns that's Hollywood's depiction of what small towns in someplace like upstate New York or New England is like. Of course, this being the first half of the 20th century, small towns like this still had a train station. Coming to that station is William Magee (Gene Raymond), who has come to spend a night or two at the town's resort, the Baldpate hotel. Being winter, the resort is closed for the season, but that's just what Magee wants, as he's in need of solitude to finish up a novel he's writing.

Magee is told there's only one key to the resort, which means he'll have the place to himself. Except, of course that he won't considering the title and how we wouldn't have much of a movie if he did. (Well, I suppose we could have The Shining instead.) Coming into the lobby is a Mr. Bland, who makes a phone call that Magee can hear and talks about the money in the safe. When Magee confronts Bland, it turns out that Bland has a key to the place as well.

Also getting into the place is Mary Norton (Margaret Callahan), a young lady who is in part the love interest and in part more a part of the plot than she lets on. Her presence can also be a problem at times thanks to another person who just happens to have the "only" key to Baldpate, a reclusive handyman type named Peters (Henry Travers). He's the comic relief, and for some reason "hates" women, and is none too pleased at having to cook for Mary as well as Magee.

It's been established that there's supposed money in the safe, so other people show up looking for the money, namely detective Cargan (Moroni Olsen); Mrs. Hayden, who claims to be a blackmail victim regarding some stolen jewels and her husband (Grant Mitchell); a college professor who wants some solitude too; and a few local police and gangster types once the actual crime has been discovered necessitating a police presence. There really is money in the safe, and it gets taken out and moved to various places, leading to the climax and the resolution of the mystery with the requisite happy ending.

To be honest, I haven't seen any of the other versions of Seven Keys to Baldpate and can only comment on this version. It feels a lot like a cheapie B movie that RKO put out to keep a couple of contract players as well as the character actors working. There's nothing special or memorable here and a plot that's too convoluted for a 70 minute running time, but it's also the sort of material that would have kept audiences entertained back in the mid-1930s. In that regard, it's like a version of one of those NBC mystery shows from the 1970s such as Columbo that were designed to run 90 minutes minus commercials and have a bunch of guest stars. Only Seven Keys to Baldpate doesn't have the stars.

Not to be confused with West End Girls

Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald were big in the 1930s, but the sort of Hollywood stars whose appeal was a sort of acquired taste. Still, because they were at MGM, it's not uncommon for their films to show up on TCM thanks to those old MGM films being part of the library Ted Turner bought. One of their films that I recently watched was The Girl of the Golden West.

There's an establishing scene involving a wagon train heading west to California in the pre-statehood days. Little orphaned Mary is part of that train with her uncle (Charley Grapewin in a small role). Mary of course can sing, since she grows up to be the character played by Jeanette MacDonald. Hearing her sing is young Ramerez, although we don't learn more about him until later in the movie.

Mary grows up and the gold rush is here. She runs the Polka Saloon in one of those isolated gold rush towns, and all the men love her, particularly Sheriff Rance (Walter Pidgeon). Mary goes to see an old priest she knew as a child and who is the liaison between the Europeans and the Native Americans, Father Sienna (played by H.B. Warner). On the way, however, the stagecoach is stopped by a masked Ramerez (Nelson Eddy). He was raised by the local native tribe and is a bandit because he has no other way to make an honest living. But he hears Mary sing at Mass and he realizes this is the same woman he heard years ago when she was just a little girl. Ramerez wants to see Mary again, but how?

There is, of course, a price on Ramerez's head, so he has to go in some sort of disguise. He steals the uniform of a US Army soldier who is supposed to be escorting Mary to a ball held by the local governor. Ramerez is a bit too forward, however, and you might think that's going to scupper the relationship. Actually, if you think harder about it, you can see that MacDonald and Eddy are the two leads, but at the same time there's that pesky Production Code that says Ramerez is going to have to pay for his crimes.

Rance has a duty to try to catch Ramerez and to do so, he lays a trap. The men in the camp town where Mary runs the saloon have struck gold, which means there's a lot of it around for somebody who'd like to steal a shipment to try to take. Rance lets it known where it will get back to Ramerez that the gold is being held at the Polka Saloon. So of course Ramerez shows up, only to find out that the person in charge of the saloon is Mary. Ramerez and Rance would both like to marry Mary! But he's still the bandit, so how are the writers going to solve their dilemma and give audiences the happy ending they would have wanted out of an Eddy/MacDonald movie?

I have to admit that I'm not the biggest fan of the singing of either Nelson Eddy nor Jeanette MacDonald. But in the case of The Girl of the Golden West, there are other problems with the movie, mostly having to do with the plot and the screenplay. First, how we get to the requisite happy ending while still apparently satisfying the Production Code doesn't quite work for me. Plus, the movie runs a shade over two hours, and in this case, that felt like a long two hours. I don't seem to be alone in this assessment, as The Girl of the Golden West was not exactly a box office hit. But fans of the pair apparently loved it, so if you want to see what made fans love them you might want to give it a try.

What was wrong with the first nine forces?

One of the movies that aired last August when Robert Shaw was honored during Summer Under the Stars is one that I had long known about but never actually seen: Force 10 From Navarone. So, when it showed up I made certain to put it on the DVR and then eventually watch it to do the obligatory post on it here.

As you can guess from the title, the Navarone is the one referred to in the classic movie The Guns of Navarone. That movie being a big hit, the producers wanted to put a sequel into production. Unfortunately, all sorts of production issues resulted in no sequel being made until the late 1970s, by which time the cast of the original was much too old for a sequel. Instead, we get a bit of footage from the original reminding us of what the soldiers in that movie did before the action moves to our original story.

It's now 1943, with the Americans beginning to make their way up Italy. The Brits want to find Nicolai, who nearly made the Navarone mission go bad as he turned out to be a double agent. He's now believed to be working with the Germans in Yugoslavia, to Maj. Mallory (Robert Shaw) and Sgt. Miller (Edward Fox) would like to parachute into Yugoslavia to find Nicolai and eliminate him. The Americans have plans for their own secret mission in Yugoslavia, and to that end are looking so send their "Force 10" into the country. The British try to commandeer one of the planes, and in the resulting fight some of Force 10 get injured, and an American soldier not part of the force, Sgt. Weaver (Carl Weathers) more or less stows away on the plane to escape the military police.

Worse for all of them, the plane they're flying over the Adriatic gets shot down by the Nazis, so a skeleton crew of British and Americans, the Americans commanded by Lt. Col. Barnsby (Harrison Ford) have to bail out over enemy territory and try to make it to their objective even though they have no idea where they are and no way to distinguish between Chetinks working against the Nazis, Chetniks nominally working the Nazis to try to survive, or Croaitan Ustaše. So it goes without saying that they eventually get captured by some Serbs under Dražak (Richard Kiel).

Dražak's mistress Maritza (Barbara Bach) helps Mallory and Barnsby escape, and they make their way to those Yugoslavs working against the Nazis. Except that they may not be, since Mallory thinks one of them may be the original Nicolai. It also doesn't help that the Americans and British have different missions they're hoping to accomplish, or that there are still some of their soldiers being held by Dražak. Eventually, we learn that the Americans' mission is to destroy a bridge in Bosnia that is a major transit point for the Germans, and the attempt to destroy that bridge forms much of the second half of the movie.

If Force 10 From Navarone were called anything other than that; ie. if it hadn't been about some of the soldiers who were in that original movie, I think it would be remembered as a fairly minor film from the end of the cycle of action movies about World War II. However, because of its provenance with the original producer and writer of The Guns of Navarone, it has that reputation that it is unable to live up to, with the result that it's generally considered a rather inferior film. That's a bit harsh on Force 10 From Navarone, which isn't a bad movie, albeit also certainly not a great one.

By the Light of the Silvery Moon

TCM is for some reason running a morning and afternoon of Doris Day movies tomorrow, July 18. This, even though her birthday is in April. But, it give me the opportunity where I can finally schedule one of the posts I'd written for a movie that I recorded last August during Summer Under the Stars. That movie is By the Light of the Silvery Moon, which is on TCM at 2:45 PM.

Doris Day is the female lead here as Marjorie Winfield, a tomboyish woman in 1919 small-town Indiana who knows a bit about fixing a car and is the adult daughter in a middle-class family. There's banker father George (Leon Ames); mom and household manager Alice (Rosemary DeCamp), who can afford to have a maid in Stella (Mary Wickes); and obnoxious kid brother Wesley (Billy Gray). It's been almost a year since the end of the Great War, since Thanksgiving is coming up as a plot point in the movie, and Dad reads a story in the local paper that will be certain to please Marjorie: soldier Bill Sherman (Gordon MacRae) is coming home.

If you recall from On Moonlight Bay (immediately preceding By the Light of the Silvery Moon at 1:00 PM), Marjorie and Bill had been girl- and boyfriend before the war, with Dad not certain Marjorie should marry him then. But two years have passed and audiences might not have remembered that part of On Moonlight Bay. Besides, having to fight that nasty Kaiser should have softened Bill's radical views. Everybody's looking for normalcy now. So with Bill coming home, it would finally be a good time for him and Marjorie to get married and live happily ever after, or at least until their children have to go off and fight World War II.

But there's a catch. Bill has been doing a lot of thinking since he's last been in Indiana. He still wants to marry Marjorie. But he wants to be able to do it on solid financial footing. For him, that means coming into the marriage with a bit of a nest egg already, which, having been in the war, he decidedly does not have. So he tells Marjorie he'll marry her, as long as she's willing to wait. Marjorie can see the logic in that, although it's going to be an on-again, off-again thing until the requisite happy ending in the final reel.

The subplot, which also affects Bill's and Marjorie's thoughts about when the two of them should get married, involves the relationship between George and Alice. George, as an executive at the local bank, is in charge of the decision on what to do with some local properties the bank holds the rights to. An acting troupe is coming through town, led by Renee LaRue, and they're thinking about renting a theater the bank currently owns. However, George wants to see the play the troupe is looking to put on before going ahead with the lease, since this is a conservative town. As such, he finds a passage about divorce in the play and wants that edited.

However, in one of those things that can only be a misunderstanding in the movies or a TV sitcom, the kids and Stella find George's message to LaRue. They don't know anything about the play, and get the impression that George has fallen in love with Miss LaRue and is thinking about divorcing Alice, which would cause a major scandal in town. Marjorie finds it so unbearable that it even has her put off getting married to Bill. The misunderstanding, like the relationship between Marjorie and Bill, snowballs out of control until it can be resolved at the end of the film.

It is once again easy to see why Warner Bros. wanted to reunite Doris Day and Gordon MacRae not just in another movie, but in one that's a follow-up to On Moonlight Bay. Both of them are good for the old-timey nostalgia that On Moonlight Bay gave audiences who definitely wanted it in the early 1950s especially since the US had once again found itself at war, this time in Korea. However, By the Light of the Silvery Moon isn't quite as good as On Moonlight Bay. I think it's because, to me, the plot feels more contrived. Also, I think by 1953 the nostalgia for the 1920s was beginning to run out of steam. It's not that anybody here is bad so much as the script which is getting creaky. Still, anybody up for nostalgia, or who likes Doris Day, is probably going to find By the Light of the Silvery Moon pleasant enough.

Bud Abbott Lou Costello Meet Frankenstein

Bela Lugosi was TCM's Star of the Month in October 2024, which makes sense since that's the month with Halloween and Lugosi is generally remembered for his horror films. I recorded several films that aired as part of the salute, but I don't know that I got around to watching them all before they expired from the DVR. One that I did watch was Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.

Now, as you might guess, Lugosi isn't one of the title characters since Lugosi was better knwon for playing Dracula. Indeed, here Lugosi reprises his role as Dracula, although we're getting ahead of ourselves. Frankenstein's Monster is played here by Glenn Strange, but even before that we meet Abbott and Costello. The two of them, as Chick Young and Wilbur Gray respectively, are clerks at a middle-of-nowhere train station. A Mr. McDougal (Frank Ferguson) is expecting a couple of crates with statues for his wax museum. Before McDougal can pick them up, the Wolf Man (Lon Chaney Jr.) phones the station to tell Wilbur that the crates actually have real live monsters in them, not statues.

Of course, Wilbur doesn't believe any of this stuff, but when they open the crate to deliver what's inside, they find Dracula's coffin. Dracula is even able to open the coffin from inside, which is a pretty neat trick. Dracula has the power of hypnosis if you're stupid enough to look into his eyes, and believe me, Wilbur is that stupid. With this, Dracula is able to abscond with Frankenstein's Monster to an island lair owned by Dr. Mornay (Lenore Aubert). Their plan is to perform an operation on the Monster that will give him a much more obedient brain. Of course, they actually need a suitable brain, and Mornay has decided that Wilbur is just the person for the job.

The plan is to invite Wilbur to a costume ball from where Mornay can leave with him to take him back to the island for the eventual drugging and surgery. However, Wilbur actually has a girlfriend already in the form of Joan Raymond (Jane Randolph), and Wilbur was already planning on going to the party with Joan. Ah, at least there are now two women, which means that Chick has someone to go with, too. But this also means that there will be more help nearby when Dracula and Mornay try to carry out their nefarious scheme. This especially once the Wolf Man, in his human guise of Lawrence Talbot, shows up at the party. Remember, he's the one who knows of the danger of Dracula.

The characters all wind up back on Mornay's island for the comic finale, although you know that because of the Production Code, Mornay and Dracula aren't going to succeed in their plan of putting Wilbur's brain into the body of Frankenstein's monster.

Despite the presence of some of Universal's great horror monsters, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein is comedy first and horror second. As a comedy, however, I think it works well precisely because of the monsters and the fact that the two sets of characters are radically different. The movie is a pleasant little light comedy with a bunch of horror movie tropes, but nothing that anybody can seriously think of as frightening. Sit back and allow yourself to be entertained for 80 minutes.

Far from the Madding Crowd

Another movie that I watched recently largely because it was about to expire from my DVR was the 1960s adaptation of Thomas Hardy's novel Far from the Madding Crowd.

Now, the first thing that I need to point out is that I haven't read the original novel, so I don't know how much the movie differs from the book. That, and any of you who have read the book will, I presume, already know the basic story. In mid-1860s England, one of those parts in the southwest where there are cliffs overlooking the ocean, lives sheep rancher Gabriel Oak (Alan Bates). Well, he's not really a rancher since he's poor and doesn't own any land; he just raises sheep. He lives near Bathsheba Everdene (Julie Christie) and loves her and would like to marry her, except that he's terribly poor and she would like at least a bit better of a living than Gabriel could currently provide her.

And then disaster strikes. One of Gabriel's two border collies is evil, breaking down the fence to the pen where the sheep are held, not only allowing the sheep to escape and stampede, but literally driving them to their mass death on the beach at the bottom of the cliff! Now Gabriel has no land, no sheep, and no money to buy new sheep, leading him to look for a job with one of those gentry farmers who employs a bunch of people. On his way to the village where farmers look for new labor, we meet Sgt. Frank Troy (Terence Stamp). He's got a girlfriend Fanny (Prunella Ransome getting an "introducing" credit but winding up with only a modest career) in these parts, who stops him while his platoon is traveling by horse and ask him about the promise he made to marry her. Frank says he'll marry her when the time is appropriate.

Gabriel gets to town, and looks to get hired as a shepherd. On his way to a possible new job, the cart comes across a fire in the servants' houses, and Gabriel takes charge in how everybody tries to put the fire out, leading to some notice for him. The next day he shows up with the rest of the workers at a farm owned by... Bathsheba!? It seems Bathsheba's uncle died, bequeathing her his farm, and she's decided to take it on even though she doesn't really have anybody to run the place. She and Gabriel recognize one another, but now that there is a class difference between them any thought of marriage is out of the question.

Living on the farm across the way is William Boldwood (Peter Finch), to whom marriage would seem to make sense, at least in the class system of Victorian England. Indeed, William would like to marry Bathsheba after she on a lark finds a valentine left in her uncle's papers and sends it to William on a lark. But she's not serious about marrying him. Bathsheba meets Sgt. Troy because, as it turns out, Fanny is one of the workers on Bathsheba's farm. Fanny's presence there brings frank to Bathsheba's presence. When William finds that Frank is there, he gets jealous and tries to get Frank to leave, only to find out that Frank has already married Bathsheba, not Frank.

Frank, however, doesn't really love Bathsheba so much. And he's decided he's not going to marry Fanny because, in the meantime, he did set a wedding date. The only thing is, she went to the wrong church, the one at the garrison instead of the one in the village. That led the hot-headed Frank to decide no, I'm not going to marry you if you're so damn stupid. Plus, Bathsheba also has at least some money that Frank can burn through. All of this leads to quite a bit of sadness for the various characters, although I can't go into much more detail without giving away some serious spoilers.

This version of Far From the Madding Crowd is one of those 1960s films made on location in Britain with some lovely cinematography and production design. The performances are pretty good, too. However, the film runs close to 2:45 plus an overture and intermission music (the print TCM ran didn't have exit music). And, I have to admit, the movie does feel like it has a leisurely pace. So if you have a rainy day without much else to do, Far from the Madding Crowd is definitely a reasonable way to spend some time with.

Gösta Berlings saga

There is, as I think I mentioned the past few years, a "National Silent Movie Day". With an occasion like that, it's unsurprising that TCM would show a day full of silent films, including some that don't get very many airings. Last year, I recorded a couple of those lesser-seen silents, including a Swedish film, Gösta Berlings saga.

It's the 1820s (roughly; I think early intertitles suggest the action happened a century ago and the movie was released in 1924) in the province of Värmland, which is in the western part of Sweden on what is now the border with the southern part of Norway -- take a train from Stockholm to Oslo and you should go through Värmland. There's a manor house called Ekeby right near a group of iron foundries, and Ekeby has now been given over to a group of "Cavaliers". These "Cavaliers" are men who had some sort of adventure followed by misfortune and, having suffered such misfortune and having no other home, are allowed to live here.

Among the Cavaliers is the titular Gösta Berling (Lars Hanson). A flashback story in a later act of the movie (the movie is divided into two parts and about ten "acts") tells how Berling was a country priest in the Lutheran church, although he was given to drinking heavily. Enough that his parishioners petition the bishop to relieve him of his duties. Berling does indeed get sacked, although not quite for his drinking. Instead, it's because he calls his parishioners hypocrites since they're all given to drinking too much on various occasions as well.

Gösta then gets hired by Märta Dohna to be the tutor to her stepdaughter Ebba. Märta's real reason is that there's a clause in her late husband's will that the estate should go to Ebba, instead of Märta's son Henrik. However, if Ebba marries a commoner, the estate will go to Henrik. So Märta would love Ebba to marry a commoner. Henrik had been spending time in Italy, where he, under no such restrictions, married an Italian girl Elizabeth (Greta Garbo in the role that made her a star).

At this point the movie starts to get complicated. The woman who owns Ekeby and the foundries, Margaretha, reveals that she was in an illicit relationship and that this resulted both in ostracism, and in getting Ekeby because the previous owner was the man she loved but couldn't marry. Elizabeth realizes that she too might have a thing for Gösta. This would normally be a huge problem, until Henrik gets word from Italy that because certain documents weren't signed properly, he and Elizabeth are technically not legally married even though they've been living together under the belief that they were in fact married. Imagine the fun the Production Code office would have had with that if the movie had been made in Hollywood in the Code era. Events continue like this until an eding that you can probably guess.

Having watched Gösta Berlings saga, I can see why audiences in Sweden in 1924 would have loved it. Apparently it was released in two parts in Sweden, while for international audiences it was edited down. What we have today is the most complete reconstruction known to exist from extant materials. This version is one that, I'm sorry to say, is going to be a bit tough to get into, largely because the movie is way too complicated for its own good. Not only is it long at a shade over three hours; I felt like it had way too many characters and subplots that it's difficult to keep everyboy and their individual subplot straight. The flashbacks definitely don't help in that regard. Still, Gösta Berlings saga is the movie that made Greta Garbo a star, and for that reason alone it's a movie that should probably be seen at least once.

Born in Flames

Last year in the run-up to the presidential election, TCM did a spotlight on "political" films, with at least one title that I had never heard of: Born in Flames. Once again, this was a movie where the short synopsis sounded interesting, so I eventually got around to watching it to be able to do a review here.

Born in Flames was made in the early 1980s, and set around the 10th anniversy of a putative socialist revolution in the US. However, as socialist revolutions tend to do, a lot was promised and little given, to the point that that's a lot of discontent from people who want good jobs. Some of this discontent comes from women who think the revolution hasn't gone far enough, because in their eyes women are still getting a raw deal.

These women have gone about getting a better deal in different ways. Some have taken to generally peaceful, albeit illegal means like pirate radio, with the existence of black station Radio Phoenix and white station Radio Ragazza. There's more militant means too, with an older black radical acadmeic nominally advising a Women's Army which the authorities aren't certain is lead by either a particular white radical feminist or the black activist Adelaide Norris. They are more of a guerilla operation doing things like trying to stop rapists rather than anything that would be considered military or even overly violent against normal people.

At least, not yet. They're certainly planning (nowadays, people would probably use the term "larping"), getting firearms training and doing target practice somewhere outside New York. Things go too far, however, when Adelaide gets in contact with a woman from Polisario. (A quick explainer: after Spain left Spanish Sahara, Morocco claimed the territory. Polisario started agitating for independence, largely funded by Algeria who set up refugee camps where Polisario gained more or less dictatorial control.) Adelaide comes back from an international flight at which point she's taken into custody by US police eventually to be found dead in her holding cell. The authorities say suicide, while the Women's Army believes Adelaide was murdered. At this point they start taking much more direct action.

Born in Flames is an extremely low-budget movie, and that's the cause of both the film's greatest strengths and its biggest weaknesses. The raw footage of a New York which was still trying to recover from a lost decade or, as I like to refer to it, the era when Gerald Ford told the city to drop dead, is something that really works. Also working is the way newscasts are used to show how the authorities are completely out of touch with the people in the real world. (The movie obviously doesn't think that if the Women's Army were successful, they would still be out of touch with the great mass of the population.) Working less well is the screenplay, which doesn't really posit any way the US would have come up with this socialist revolution.

A lot of reviers talk about the politics of the movie and that whether you agree with them is largely what's going to dictate if you like the movie or not. I'm not quite so sure. I am certainly not on the side of "socialist revolution hasn't gone far enough", and I'm certainly not a lesbian, or even a woman. Yet I found Born in Flames a movie that had some intriguing ideas even as I felt it has more misses than hits. So definitely watch for yourself while drawing your own conclusions.

Rock-a-Bye Baby

I mentioned a couple of times how Jerry Lewis got a day in TCM's Summer Under the Stars last August, and how I recorded a ton of movies, because even though I have a box set of some of Lewis' films, a lot of what TCM selected was not on that box set. Unfortunately, I didn't get around to watching all of them before they expired, but one that I did watch is Rock-a-Bye Baby.

Marilyn Maxwell plays Carla Naples, one of those small-town girls like Esther Blodgett who couldn't stand the small town and went to Hollywood to try to make it big. She's done so, but with a squeaky-clean image. Unbeknownst to the studio, she went and blew up that image by getting married to a bullfighter in Mexico and getting pregnant on her wedding night before the bullfighter was killed in the ring the next day. So there's a kid on the way and no husband or marriage license, Carla having ripped that up.

Carla's agent Harold Hermann (Reginald Garidner) suggests that she go off somewhere to have the kid like Bette Davis in The Great Lie and then have someone she can trust take care of the kid until they can figure out what to do that will be all nice and legal and not ruin Carla's image. Unfortunately, Carla's Italian immigrant father has never forgiven her for wanting to do the Hollywood thing, so he's right out.

But Carla does have a one-time boyfriend in her midwestern hometown from back when both were very young, that being Clayton Poole (Jerry Lewis), who is now working as a TV repairman, although this being Jerry Lewis, the word "repair" is doing a lot of work. Clayton loved Carla even more than she liked him, and he's always wanted to be a father although he's never found the right woman. In fact, the right woman is right under his nose in the form of Carla's kid sister Sandra (Connie Stevens). Carla discovers that she's actually pregnant with triplets, and drops the kids off on Clayton's front step.

Clayton tries to raise the kids as a single father with some help from Sandra. A lot of complications ensue because Clayton isn't quite up to raising triplet infants. Not because he's a bad person or negligent, but he does have to work and somebody has to look after the kids. That's going to lead to a climactic courtroom scene since there are understandably people who think there's something better for the kids than this low-earning single father who is not the biological father. Being a Jerry Lewis comedy, however, there's going to be a requisite happy ending.

Rock-a-Bye Baby is a loose remake of The Miracle of Morgan's Creek, reworked for the abilities of Jerry Lewis. Lewis wasn't directing himself yet, here being directed again by Frank Tashlin who was adept at directing boundary-pushing, mildly subversive comedies (his previous film was Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?), and had directed Lewis a couple of times before. So he's able to tone down Lewis, although some of the physical comedy, as in the initial TV repair scene involving Lewis adjusting a rooftop antenna, does veer into over-the-top territory.

Rock-a-Bye Baby is competently made if not great, more the sort of thing that would serve as comfort food to fans of Lewis.

Hollywood Goes to Town

I watched another of those movies off of my DVR where TCM had enough time after the feature to program a short. This time, it wasn't quite a traditional short, but one that was in part a promo for one of MGM's features: Hollywood Goes to Town.

The movie starts off with an odd bit about different parts of the US having different local traditions: Mardi Gras for New Orleans, the Indianapolis 500 for Indianapolis, and so on. For Los Angeles, that tradition is the star-studded movie premiere, this back in the day when such premieres were still broadcast nationwide on a coast-to-coast hookup. Think Janet Gaynor at the end of A Star is Born telling America that she is Mrs. Norman Maine. We then get behind-the-scenes footage of the Carthay Circle theater, where preparations are being made for the big premiere of MGM's prestige film Marie Antoinette.

After preparations are finished, it's time for the big night, and the narrator helpfully tells us who's walking down the red carpet, which isn't necessarily limited to MGM's contract players although several of them show up. There's Claudette Colbert, as well as the spouses of some of MGM's big stars, namely Carole Lombard (married to Clark Gable) and Barbara Stanwyck during her marriage to Robert Taylor. This being a one-reeler, that's pretty much all there is to the film.

Well, there are a few other points to note. IMDb lists this as being released in July 1938. With that in mind, I wondered when exactly Marie Antoinette was released. The IMDb page says the Hollywood premiere was July 8. This short definitely looks like it was rushed into production. More interesting is the soundtrack. Herbert Stothart is credited with the music on Marie Antoinette. On the other hand, Hollywood Goes to Town has a credit in the opening for music by David Snell. And yet, the print TCM ran has several scenes (notably of fireworks) that sound like they should have music but are silent. I looked up David Snell, and there's no indication that he was caught up in the Hollywood blacklist, which was the one reason I could think of why music might be removed from a movie. But in that case MGM probably would have edited out Snell's credit entirely. And I find it hard to believe they'd go back and edit an obscure short like this. So I don't know why there's so little music, and why MGM might pick shots of fireworks with the deliberate intent of running them with no music backing them.

TCM's David Lynch tribute

Director David Lynch died back in January, but it's only now that TCM is finally getting around to doing a programming tribute to him. Tonight in prime time, TCM is going to be showing five of Lynch's films:

8:00 PM The Straight Story, based on a true story about a man who drove his riding lawn mower to visit his ailing brother;
10:00 PM Blue Velvet, a mystery starting off with a severed ear;
12:15 AM Wild at Heart;
2:30 AM Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, the wrap up to the Twin Peaks TV show, a show that as I've implied on several occasions here I never really cared for; and
5:00 AM Eraserhead, about a mutant child in a seemingly post-apocalyptic world.

Ten Little Indians

TCM has a half-night programming block of movies with Christopher Reeve tonight. That means they've got some overnight hours to fill up. The overnight ends with the 1960s adaptation of the Agatha Christie story Ten Little Indians, early tomorrow at 5:00 AM.

This film moves the action from an island to the top of a mountain in the Austrian Alps. The opening shows people arriving in one of those ski-resort villages, each of them getting onto a cable car that takes them to the top of a mountain otherwise only accessible by a dangerously steep trail. (This should make you wonder who wanted to build up here and how they were able to get the building materials here as well as getting a cable car for only one purpose built. But don't think about a plot hole like that.) At the large house where these people are going to be staying for the weekend, they're greeted by the house's two servants, Herr and Frau Grohmann.

As the invited guests meet in the parlour, the introduce themselves to one another as none of them have had a proper British introduction. Indeed, most of the guests are British, except for American pop singer Mike Raven (Fabian) and civil engineer Hugh Lombard (Hugh O'Brian). The others include a secretary, Ann Clyde (Shirley Eaton); acress Ilona Bergen (Daliah Lavi); a doctor, Armstrong (Dennis Price); general Sir John Mandrake (Leo Genn); judge Cannon (Wilfrid Hyde White); and a detective, Blore (Stanley Holloway). They talk and find that they've all been invited by a man named U.N. Owen, but that none of them have ever met this Mr. Owen. Three of them (the Grohmanns and Clyde) were at least hired by Owen, albeit through an agency, while the others you wonder why they showed up.

And then, after dinner, the fun begins. A reel-to-reel tape begins to play with the voice of Mr. Owen, giving some, but not complete, details of how each of the invited guests is guilty of causing the death of one or more people and that they need to pay for this. So all of them are going to pay over the course of the weekend. Not only that, but there's a copy of the old rhyme "Ten Little Indians" in each of the bedrooms and a centerpiece with ten little Indians on the dining room table. Everybody is horrified but also thinks this is nonsense. Mike admits that he is in fact guilty of having driven drunk and killing two people in a hit and run, but that he was already punished by having his driver's license revoked. He then takes a drink, and promptly chokes and dies. That choking is important because it's what the nursery rhyme says happens to the first little Indian.

From there, other characters start dying, which leads the survivors to realize that there really is a crazy Mr. Owen, and eventually reach the conclusion that one of the survivors must be Mr. Owen. But who? And how are the survivors going to figure it out when they're no longer able to trust each other?

Now, if you've read the original Agatha Christie story, you'll know that the story here, as well is in the previous film version from 1945, change the ending. I don't think the Hollywood Production Code would have allowed Christie's original ending. The story here works well enough, although the acting and photography aren't the best. Still, the story makes Ten Little Indians worth a watch.

One note: TCM has put this in a 90-minute slot, with the following movie starting at 6:30 AM. IMDb lists it as 91 minutes, the TCM schedule says 92, while timing it out on my DVR has the running time as about 89:40, although that doesn't include the TCM bumpers before and after the movie. So if you plan to record this you may want to add some padding especially at the ending.

House by the River

Another movie that I saw pop up on one of the FAST services that sounded interesting was the Fritz Lang movie House by the River. Because it sounded interesting, I decided to watch it and, having done so, can now do a post on it here.

The movie is set around 1900, although that's not made explicity clear at the beginning. In a house by one of thos dangerous-looking rivers in that it has a faster-than normal current and all sort of stuff floating in it lives the writer Stephen Byrne (Louis Hayward). Apparently he makes enough money to have a maid, young Emily (Dorothy Patrick in a small role). One day while Stephen's wife Marjorie (Jane Wyatt) goes out to town for the day, Emily uses the bath since nobody else is there to use it. She comes down the stairs, where Stephen is at the foot of the stairs attracted to her as she's underdressed and he's had a bit to drink. Stephen starts putting the moves on Emily, who clearly doesn't want the moves put on her and tries to get Stephen to stop. She starts screaming for help, and in trying to get her not to scream, accidentally strangles poor Emily to death!

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Now, Stephen has a dead body in the house, and that presents a big problem of how to get rid of the body since nobody will believe that Stephen is only guilty of manslaughter and not murder. But Stephen has a brother, John (Lee Bowman), with whom he has some sort of dysfunctional relationship. Stephen claims that Emily fell down the stairs, which we all know to be a complete lie, and that nobody would believe this, which makes sense since there's no broken bones or even bruising. But one would have to guess, even though it's not well explained, that Stephen has some sort of blackmail he can hold over John's head, as John eventually agrees to go through with helping Stephen dispose of the body.

The two put Emily's dead body in a sack and dump it in the river, with the hope that either the body will decompose or that the sack will make it all the way to the ocean, the opening shots of the river making it look like some sort of delta area close enough to the sea to make this a possibilty. Or course, none of that happens since this is the era of the Production Code and there's no way Stephen is going to get away with what he's done. So as you might guess, the body is eventually found.

But, in a stroke of good luck for Stephen, the sack in which he and John put Emily's body contains markings that implicate John and not Stephen in having killed poor Emily. Not that John is actually sent to prison as that would be too conventional a move. This also makes Stephen notorious enough that it draws interest in his novels, which become best sellers. But Stephen, being too arrogant for his own good, sets out to write another novel. This one is a thinly-veiled account of the murder of Emily, and written by Stephen in such a way that somebody who has inside information could put two and two together and recognize that it was Stephen and not John who killed Emily. John obviously knows all this but can't say anything since he's an accessory after the fact. Marjorie, however, is able to figure it all out and realize that Stephen is the real killer.

There are more twists and turns, but as I said in previous paragraphs there's also the Production Code, which requires the guily to expiate their since, which will result in an ending that involves Stephen getting what's coming to him.

It's the Production Code requirements that make House by the River another of those movies that could probably be really good if the writers weren't constrained in how they could end the movie. That, and the fact that House by the River was made at Republic, which gives it more the feel of a B movie. Still, even in spite of all those issues, House by the River is not a bad movie and is certainly entertaining enough. It just could have been better.

Sleazy Paul Anka

I mentioned yesterday that there was another movie coming up on TCM tomorrow that I had on my DVR. That movie is Look in Any Window, so once again I decided to watch it in conjunction with the upcoming TCM showing, tomorrow (July 9) at 3:00 PM.

The movie starts off after dark a couple of days before Independence Day in one of those tract housing suburbs that were springing up out in the Los Angeles area during the Baby Boom (IMDb says Reseda, which is apparently a part of Los Angeles proper, although I don't know the area well). Eileen Lowell (Gigi Perreau) is watching TV dressed in a mildly revealing outfit, trying to escape the heat wave that the area is experiencing. The camera pulls out to reveal from behind somebody in a mask looking into the window, and when Eileen realizes somebody is out there, she draws the curtain while our masked man heads off. The Lowells, understandably disturbed, call the police.

Mildly more interesting is the fact that Eileen's dad Gareth (Jack Cassidy) is not there. That's because he works late, owning a car dealership. Or, at least, that's his excuse, as it's quickly revealed he's a ladies' man who is carrying on with a woman who is not his wife Betty (Carole Matthews, a name I didn't really recognize from anything significant (IMDb shows a lot of TV roles, and bit parts in movies). Living next door are the Fowlers, who have about as good a family life as the Lowells. Mom Jackie (Ruth Roman) is a bored housewife, while Dad Jay (Alex Nicol) is an alcoholic airplane mechanic who has just lost his job and is going to hit the bottle even harder.

The Lowells have a son Craig (Paul Anka) who is about the same age as Eileen, and about as much friends with her as with anyone else. His parent's decaying relationship has hit him hard emotionally, to the point that he's a bit of a social misfit who doesn't seem to know quite how to act appropriately with other people, especially girls, ultimately resulting in his getting too handsy with Eileen and sending her to hospital for a night.

As for the police, they don't have much to go on, since the assailant was dressed in one of those white T-shirts which in those days looked thinner than today's, with shorter sleeves. So many men wore such shirts that it's not much to go on. One of the cops is old school and has no compunction about beating a confession out of whoever he thinks is guilty (like a dog who escapes its owner's yard), while the other is the "new" pyschological type. Meanwhile, Jackie escapes her humdrum life by seeing her other neighbor, as well as by going off for a bit with Mr. Lowell, leaving Craig alone to have his big emotional scene with his drunken father, although Paul Anka grossly overacts in this scene.

We get to the Independence Day pool party, which the cops wanted the Lowells not to cancel specifically because it would be likely that the peeping Tom would show up. That does indeed happen, while they older folks' relationship issues come out in the open. Things wrap up with the inevitable hopeful ending after the peeping Tom is found.

Look in Any Window isn't particularly good, although it's at least entertaining for its badness. Unfortunately, it could have been one of those "so bad it's good" movies except that it's not nearly as sleazy as it could be (consider a film like The Brain that Wouldn't Die); nor is it as grossly overacted as would be required to fit the "so bad it's good" genre. Still, there are reasons to watch it. There's a bit of a time capsule of Southern California as it was in the early 1960s, and there's also the evidence for why Paul Anka didn't become a movie star like some of the other young singers of that generation.

Working Girl

Khane-ye dust kojast

I've mentioned a handful of times, albeit no so much recently, that I've got a backlog of foreign films on my DVR that need to be watched and posted about. Indeed, I don't think I got to much of what I recorded during Jean-Paul Belmondo's day in Summer Under the Stars last August before the stuff expired in May. With that in mind, I watched some of the other foreign films that were about to expire from the DVR and so that I could do posts on them and schedule them some time in the future. There were two Iranian films from a TCM Imports block on Abbas Kiarostami, and first up I'll post on Where Is the Friend's House.

Ahmad is a young student at one of those old-fashioned-looking elementary schools where the students sit in a small room on bench type desks. It's a poor part of Iran (at the southwest edge of the Caspian Sea, although this particular village is in a part of the province farthest from the sea), where most people walk to where they're going and there doesn't seem to be running water, and certainly no phones. Ahmad's best friend is the kid who sits next to him, Mohammed Reza Nematzadeh. However, Mohammed is a bit lazy or absent-minded about bringing his composition book for doing homework home, to the extent that he's had several instances of doing homework on loose-leaf paper, which really bothers his teacher. It's so bad that the teacher threatens to expel the kid if he doesn't another time.

So what happens? On that very day, Ahmad walks home only to discover that he's taken both his and Mohammed's notebooks home with him. He feels like he absolutely has to get Mohammed's notebook to Mohammed so that Mohammed can do his homework and not get in trouble. But Ahmad's mother is insistent that he do his homework first before doing anything else, even though she keeps pestering him with things to do around the courtyard and in the few rooms of the house. Ahmad feels like Mom doesn't understand him, so eventually he runs off without telling Mom, in order to take the notebook to Mohammed in the next village over.

However, since Ahmad and Mohammed only know each other from school, they haven't really been to each other's village, and Ahmad certainly doesn't know which part of the village his friend lives in. It's also a good ways away on foot. As Ahmad makes his way to Poshteh, Mohammad's village, he finds that the adults on the way seem to have about as much interest in his plight as his mother did, which is to say none at all. Not even his own grandfather, who lives in Poshteh cares. Grampa, for his part, tells the other men he's talking to that part of this treatment is that a boy like Ahmad needs to learn discipline in order to become a responsible adult.

Darkness falls and so far Ahmad hasn't found his friend's house. Worse, it means he'll be walking home in the dark and his parents would be understandly angry with him for running off like this. At the same time, Mohammad won't have much time to do his own homework since the kids from Poshteh are told by their teacher to go to bed earlier since they have to wake up early to walk to school on time. Will we get a happy ending?

Where Is the Friend's House is a mostly interesting movie, although I had a few problems with it. It's a surprisingly slow movie even though it only runs 85 minutes. At the same problem, I couldn't help but think some of the characters had poor motivations as the adults come across as particularly mean at times. (One thing that I thought would be a plot hole is fixed by Ahmad being told there are a lot of Nematzadehs in this village, which helps explain why nobody can give him a good answer of where the one he wants can be found.) The story mostly works, and it's a visually pretty movie to watch.

Confidential Agent

Lauren Bacall was TCM's Star of the Month last September on the occasion of her centenary, and it gave me the opportunity to record a movie I wasn't certain whether I had seen before. That movie is Confidential Agent, and as it turns out I hadn't seen it. So I've rectified that situation by watching it in order to be able to do a review now.

Opening intertitles inform us that the movie takes place in October, 1937; as you may recall, that's smack dab in the middle of the Spanish Civil War. On a boat heading from somwhere on the Continent to England is Luis Denard (Charles Boyer). He's working for the Republicans, and has a thing against the fascist Loyalists since they killed his wife and daughter. When they reach the port of Southampton, Luis gets delayed by a customs search, and misses his train as a result.

Also missing the train is Rose Cullen (Lauren Bacall), who isn't British at all although she's playing one, the daughter of industrialist Lord Benditch (Holmes Herbert). Rose being a well-to-do daughter, she's able to rent a car to drive back home, and takes Luis with her. The trip doesn't go smoothly, however, as the car breaks down and Spanish Loyalist Licata tries to pressure Denard into selling a letter of credit that he's got and which is essential for his business in England.

That business is to buy a bunch of coal from the mining magnates, which includes Lord Benditch, in part because it's vital for the Republican war effort but also to keep it out of the hands of the Loyalists from whom it's also vital. So you can see why both sides would want the letter of credit. Denard eventually makes it to London and registers at a hotel where he thinks the owner is sympathetic to the Republican cause. That owner, Mrs. Melandez (Katina Paxinou), turns out to be on the side of the Loyalists which, as you might guess, puts Denard in all sorts of danger.

Denard meets his contact, Contreras (Peter Lorre), only to discover later that Contreras is yet another Loyalist sympathizer. Denard doesn't seem to have much support, but he's got a couple of important people his side. One is Rose who, once she learns Denard is there to buy coal, tries to help him get an in with her father, and is also willing to lie to the police to get Denard out of trouble. (I'm guessing that since she's doing it to aid the antifascist cause and the movie being released in 1945, the Production Code office let this one slide.) The other person helping Denard is young Else (Wanda Hendrix), the hotel maid. But Melandez figures out that Else is helping Denard, which also puts Else in severe danger. Eventually, people die from negligent manslaughter, forcing Denard to go on the run. But again thanks to the Production Code, the good guys are going to win in the end.

I think for me Confidential Agent had several flaws. One is in the casting, since Lauren Bacall is not British at all. (In her defense, she knew this and felt miscast while making the movie.) Another issue is that the plot has to do a lot of contortions to get both a happy ending and one that satisfies the Code office. But more than that, the plot is too convoluted for its own good, with sections of it feeling like they're putting in macguffins to drive the movie forward. It also doesn't help that Confidential Agent runs nearly two hours, which is a good 15 minutes longer than Casablanca. Sadly Confidential Agent often feels overlong as well.

It's not that Confidential Agent is a bad movie so much as it's another of those movies where something so much better could have been made considering the cast.