Hearts of color

Last year as part of TCM's Veteran's Day marathon, TCM ran a movie that I hadn't heard of before: Purple Hearts. But since it sounded interesting, I decided to record it in order to be able to watch it and do a post on it here.

The movie is set in the Vietnam War and released in the mid-1980s before more acclaimed films like Platoon, which would probably explain in part why I hadn't heard of it. A bunch of soldiers are going on a mission when one of them gets pretty badly wounded. The solder is brought back to the Vietnam War equivalent of a MASH unit, where he's operated on by Don Jardian (Ken Wahl). The soldier has serious enough wounds that, despite the surgery, Jardian feels the soldier needs more advanced medical care out of theater which means transport to a base like Danang. However Jardian's commanding officer sees more pressing needs for the resources it would take to get the patient to safety.

Still, Jardian offers to take personal responsibility, and gets the soldier on a transport and is even willing to do the more advanced surgery himself although medical staff points out that with his fatigue he should let somebody else do it. He's allowed to observe the surgery. One of the attending nurses is Deborah Solomon (Cheryl Ladd), who also helps Jardian obtain a fresh change of clothes. The two seem kindred spirits and, with the people serving close to the not having too many white women around, Jardian falls for Solomon and would like a more physical relationship with her. Whether they're ever going to see each other again after Jardian goes back to Vietnam is an open question.

Well, in real life it would be an open question. But this is a Hollywood movie, so of course we know that they're going to meet each other again. Jardian comes up with an excuse to go back to Danang in the form of getting some sort of medical supplies, although of course the minute he gets there he starts asking around for where Lt. Solomon is. Things get complicated, both in Jardian's relationship with Solomon as well as in his military service, with the latter getting sent even closer to the front lines to do surgery there.

Meanwhile, Solomon gets herself sent to where she thought Jardian was serving, so she starts asking after him too. After quite a lot, the two are eventually able to meet one last time. And then Jardian gets shanghaied into a super-secret mission that results in his being declared missing in action. Likewise, Lt. Solomon is at a base that gets attacked, and she's declared killed in action. So when Jardian finally makes it back to the American lines, he finds out that the love of his life is killed.

Having watched Purple Hearts, I can see why it's a movie that I hadn't heard of before. It's not a bad movie, but it came out at a time and is the sort of modest war movie that it's only natural for it to have had a fairly brief run only to fade into obscurity. And then when the "prestige" movies looking at Vietnam came along, of course something like this was never going to get a second chance.

Still, Purple Hearts is an OK enough movie if nothing great. I think it deserves a better fate than it had, even it nobody is ever going to consider it an all-time classic.

Illegal

Edward G. Robinson is, in my mind, one of those actors who can take second-rate material and make it worth watching. "Second-rate" may be a bit harsh for describing our next movie, but Robinson's presence still elevates the film: Illegal. It's a film that I saw quite a few years back, but for whatever reason never blogged about it. So when it showed up on TCM agan, I recorded it to be able to finally write up that post.

Robinson stars as Victor Scott, a district attorney who uses histrionics and stunts to help sway juries emotionally. That is, until he prosecutes a man named Clary (DeForest Kelley in a bit part) in a capital case and sends Clary to death row. An hour before the execution, another man gets shot by police and confesses to the crime that Clary is just about to be executed for. The other guy then dies, but it's too late anyway to get another stay for Clary. Victor decides that he's going to quit as DA, and start drinking heavily.

This continues until he gets into a drunk and disorderly, something that probably ought to bring him before the state bar on ethics charges, and possibly even disbarred. But in night court for his hearing, he sees another man who has a preliminary hearing for a manslaughter charge and realizes the he knows exactly how he would get this man off if he were the man's defense attorney. He takes the case and wins, and starts taking other cases and winning using the same underhanded and manipulative tactics that prosecutors use. He should know, having been one himself.

And then, a man comes to Scott's office. The man, Parker, has embezzled $90,000 from his employer and already spent $30K of that money. Scott comes up with a scheme where Parker will return $50,000 of the money with the rest being Scott's fee, in exchange for the employer not pressing charges, which they may just agree to because they want to avoid the bad publicity. However, the employer in question is really a front company for mobster Frank Garland (Albert Dekker), and Garland is pissed. So Garland tries to scheme a way to get Scott more or less on his payroll.

Complicating things is that Garland is also trying to compromise the DA's office. Garland has one of Scott's former underlings, Ray Borden (Hugh Marlowe) on his payroll. Ray is married to co-worker Ellen (Nina Foch), who was in love with Victor, although it was unrequited and frankly icky considering the thirty year age difference between the two stars. This leads to the new DA trying to set a trap for the leak, with Ellen getting caught up in it and put on trial in a way that threatens everybody.

Illegal is an entertaining enough little movie, and Edward G. Robinson is worth watching all by himself. But it certainly has its flaws. It's another of those films where there's not really a good way to resolve everything and satisfy the Production Code. It also feels like material that's been done before, and I don't just mean this as the fact that it uses a story that had already been done two other times.

There's also a few points of trivia I should mention. One is the presence of DeForest Kelley, which I already mentioned above. Another is that Robinson supplied some of the works of art he owned for a scene in which he discusses art with the Dekker character. But there are also connections with other movies. At one point, a marquee shows the movie Miracle in the Rain, which coincidentally had the same producer as Illegal. There's also a scene in which Robinson walks into the DA's office to meet the new DA, with a certain movie prop very noticeable:

For Kirk Douglas' Summer Under the Stars day: Champion

I'm pretty certain that I've briefly mentioned the Kirk Douglas movie Champion on several occasions, without doing an actuall full-length review of it. TCM ran it again last November when Ruth Roman was Star of the Month, so I made a point of recording it to be able to watch it again and do that full-length post. And now that it's getting another airing, tomorrow August 30 at 6:00 PM, it's time to post that review.

Douglas stars as Midge Kelly, a boxer who as the movie opens actually is champion. But as in so many other boxing movies, the story is how he gets to the top, so we get the inevitable flash back. At some time in the past, not quite fully mentioned since the timeline of how long it takes to become a champion boxer and the end of the war a few years earlier would seem to conflict, Midge and his bother with a lame leg Connie (Arthur Kennedy) are trying to make their way west to California, since there's the promise of an ownership share in a friend's restaurant.

On the way there, they hitch a ride from a boxer and his girlfriend who suggest they could get temporary jobs at the arena where he's going to be competing. Instead, one of the boxers on the card can't go, and Midge is willing to step in, especially once it's revealed all Midge has to do is survive the fight. He does survive, and a manager from out west, Haley (Paul Stewart) offers to take Midge on as a real professional. Midge wants an easier life, so turns Haley down.

One they reach California, they find that there is no ownership share in the restaurant, so they have to do menial work for the owner on the condition that they stay the hell away from the owner's daughter Emma (Ruth Roman). Midge disregards this, with the consequences that Emma's father forces them to go through with a shotgun wedding. Midge, being unable to support Emma, abandons her and decides to take up Haley's offer to become a real professional boxer.

With the right training, Midge shows himself to be pretty good. But then he learns that the boxing world has a lot of corruption. Midge just knows that he's so damn good that he can just fight to win and not have to deal with this corruption. Midge's single-minded competitiveness is something that both Connie and Haley find off-putting. Worse, it endangers them when Midge is told in no uncertain terms that he's going to throw a fight and then refuses to do so.

Worse, the forces of corruption are much brighter than Midge could ever hope to be, so they're eventually able to bring him into the fold and make him a champion, something we knew was going to happen anyway considering the title of the movie and how it opens. But Midge has basically burned all his bridges with his old friends and family. Will he be able to put things right? Does he even want to?

Champion is a harsh -- at least by the standards of the late 1940s -- look at boxing, filled with a whole bunch of extremely fine performances. Kirk Douglas is at the top of the list and got his first Oscar nomination. Arthur Kennedy also does well and got his first nomination too. Paul Stewart doesn't get the credit he deserves, but he too delivers a fine performance. TCM showed this for Ruth Roman's turn as Star of the Month, but this is a movie she made before becoming a star. She's not bad; it's just that she understandably doesn't have much to do.

Champion is another of those movie where, as I like to say, if you haven't seen it before, do yourself a favor and make a point of watching it. It's that good.

The part of George Bailey is now being played by... Richard Pryor?!

I've mentioned before that I was born in 1972, which means there are quite a few movies from the 1980s that I have a good memory of being talked about when they came out, but that I was too young to have seen in the theater on their original release. Another one that TCM showed some months back is one that I remember hearing being savaged by the criticis back in the day: Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling. Not having seen it before, I wanted to record it so that I could watch and judge for myself.

Richard Pryor plays Jo Jo Dancer, who as the movie opens is a successful comedian living in Los Angeles. At least, he's successful professionally; he personal life has long been a mess. He's also addicted to cocaine. Having dropped a crack rock in the shag carpeting of his house, Jo Jo crawls on the floor to find it, because he's desperate and that stuff is pricey. He finally finds it and goes to light it... but the next thing we see he's being wheeled into a hospital room with severe burns.

Standing next to the hospital bed is a man who looks surprisingly like Jo Jo, asking Jo Jo how he could do such a thing to himself. Jo Jo flatlines, until the other man's hitting him starts his heart again. This is Jo Jo's guardian angel, and like Henry Travers in It's a Wonderful Life, he's here to go back over Jo Jo's life....

Flash back to small-town Ohio, some time in the 1950s. Jo Jo is just a boy, going home after school to a grandmother who loves him and a mother who is raising him in a brothel, since it's where she works to make ends meet. Jo Jo as a child is able to see the guardian angel, and in one or two other scenes, other people like Mom can too. Fast forward several more years, and Jo Jo is about 20 years old. He has dreams of going into entertainment, and a young wife, but a crummy job because something needs to pay the bills and this is what Dad (Scoey Mitchell) was able to get for his son. Dad kicks Jo Jo out of the house for insubordination, leading Jo Jo to go to the big city.

Jo Jo finds a club where he thinks he can get a job as the talent, but it doesn't quite work that way. After a series of reversals, he runs into a stripper named Satin Doll (Paula Kelly) backstage at another club, and she helps him get a tryout doing comedy. His first attempt goes very badly, but he keeps trying until finally he has a bit of success, except that the club has Mob ties.

More hardship follows, but Jo Jo starts to become more of a professional success. Still, as he keeps climing the ladder of fame professionally, he personal life becomes more of a mess as he's not able to have a stable relationship with a woman. There's a white woman who eventually starts sleeping with other men, and then a second wife Michelle (Debbie Allen) who becomes the mother of Jo Jo's kid, except that she's horrified by his increasing drug use and erratic behavior.

As I said at the beginning, Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling was a critical disaster on its release back in 1986. Having seen it, I have to say that's unfair. It's not great, or to put it more accurately, it's uneven. Richard Pryor is clearly drawing from his personal life in this movie, and he was stretching himself by directing as well as writing and starring. I think this is the sort of movie where Pryor clearly needed somebody else to be directing him.

So, even though there's a lot about Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling that's a mess, it's still an interesting mess, an something that I think should be seen if you get the chance.

Not the Snap song

Another movie that I had surprisingly not heard of before the last time it showed up on TCM is The Power. It was released by MGM in the late 1960s, but somehow I don't recall it showing up on TCM before now. In any case, the plot sounded interesting, so I recorded it and recently watched it.

George Hamilton plays Jim Tanner, who works at some sort of government facility in the Los Angeles area with a group of scientists calling themselves the Committee on Human Endurance. They put all sorts of fit twentysomethings through the sort of physical tests designed to make even such fit people cry uncle, the reason being that the government is looking for people who can spend long periods in outer space and need to see how the human body can handle such stresses. One of the other scientists, Prof. Hallson (Arthur O'Connell), has given his fellow professors an IQ test and determined that one of them -- although he doesn't know which -- has some sort of superhuman intelligence. Nobody believes this, so to test things Hallson sets up a telekinesis test with a piece of paper on an pencil (as an axle). Amazingly, the paper starts spinning, seemingly of its own accord.

Tanner goes back to his apartment with his girlfriend who is also one of the scientists, Prof. Margery Lansing (Suzanne Pleshette). Sometime that evening, they get a call from Hallson's wife, who says he hasn't returned home. Now, it's not uncommon for such scientists to work late, so Tanner and Lansing go back to the facility and learn from the guard that Hallson never signed out. They go to his office and find not him, but a paper with the name Adam Hart. And then they do find Hallson, in a centrifuge designed to simulate high g-forces. Hallson is trapped in it, and the emergency switches don't work, so poor Hallson gets killed.

Worse for Tanner is that when the police come in the form of Detective Corlane (Gary Merrill), it's determined that Tanner's academic records can no longer be found in the original sources. Because of this, Tanner's boss, Prof. Nordlund (Michael Rennie) has to suspend him. Tanner decides that he's going to investigate. But before this, he passes by one of those boardwalk-style arcades where all the on-human attractions team up with the apparent intent to kill him. Tanner determines that whoever or whatever this Adam Hart is, Hart knows Tanner is onto him, and wants to use whatever powers he has to kill Tanner before Tanner can unmask him.

Tanner goes first to Hallson's home town out in the desert since Hallson seems to have been the first person to have known Adam Hart. Everybody there acts strangely, which gives Tanner the sinking suspicion that Hart had whatever superhuman powers he had already back then and there, and followed Hallson out to Los Angeles. That, and Tanner's body gets dumped out in the desert around a military bombing range. So it's back to Los Angeles, and back at the facility, where all of the committee members' lives seem to be in danger.

The Power is an intriguing little movie that certainly entertains well enough even if it doesn't have all that much basis in reality. But then, with a paranormal story like this, one probably shouldn't expect reality. The acting is OK at best, with a cast and production values that mostly feels like it's in TV movie of the week range. Still, even with all its limitations, The Power is a fun ride. Just don't go looking for too much out of it.

Billy Liar

Today in Summer Under the Stars is a day devoted to British actor Tom Courtenay. As it turns out, I've got one of his movies on my DVR from the previous time TCM aired it, so I decided now would be a good time to watch it so that I could write a post on it for the upcoming airing. That movie is Billy Liar, which kicks off prime time at 8:00 PM.

The scene is one of those northern towns, where the housing stock is old and twentysomethings who aren't married are still forced to live with their parents becuase good luck finding a place to live on your own. Tom Courtenay plays young Billy Fisher, who lives in one such house together with not only his parents (Wilfred Pickles and Mona Washbourne), but his elderly and sickly grandmother (Ethel Griffies). Billy has a steady job, but one that's unexciting, working as a clerk for local funeral home director Shadrack.

It's the sort of life that one dreams of getting away from, and Billy has an active imagination that could be well-used to figure out how to escape such a humdrum life. Unfortunately, Billy uses that imagination in the wrong way. He has some sort of made-up country called Ambrosia that you could imagine somebody writing a book about, but instead, Billy fantasizes about being the leader of Ambrosia. He claims that he's writing a book, but that's all just nonsense. Worse for him is that he lies to everyone around him about all sorts of things, such as the idea that he's going to get a job writing comedy for a comedian who's made good and is about to visit town, Danny Boon.

While these lies are bad, there are other lies that are worse because some are immoral and others actively illegal. Billy has been stringing two different young ladies along, Rita and Barbara. You'd think that since everybody knows about Billy's propensity to lie and make stuff up and that he's pretty much a laughing stock for it, no self-respecting woman would want a man like Billy. But somehow, he's got multiple women interested in him, as a third, Liz (Julie Chrisite) comes back from London for a short stay.

As I implied above, there are lies that could get Billy in legal hot water. One of Billy's tasks at the funeral home was to send out all the promotional calendars to various would-be clients. However, Billy could never bring himself to do this, storing all of the calendars in an armoire in his bedroom while basically embezzling all the money that he was supposed to use on postage to send out all of these calendars. Shadrack is understandably miffed about it, and could certainly press charges against Billy although he seems to be a bit lenient in that he's only docking Billy's pay until Billy pays it off.

But then Liz is about to go back to London and Billy might just be able to escape his life. At the same time, however, Grandma is rushed to hospital and Billy's father is furious that Billy was out of the house when this happened. Will Billy be able to find happiness in life? Will he be able to satisfy the demands that society puts on normal working people?

Billy Liar is the sort of movie that I can see why some people really like. I didn't exactly dislike it, but I have to admit that I don't have as high an opinion as others. That's because of Courtenay's character. Not Courtenay's acting; he does a fine job. But the character is such an obnoxious liar that I found it hard to have any sympathy for Billy, which is a bit of a problem for a movie like this.

So Billy Liar is definitely a movie worth watching, albeit with some caveats.

Hiram Maxim

Movies from the classic era of Universal Pictures, especially lesser-known films from the studio, don't show up so often on TCM because of TCM's having to pay for the rights to show them. One old Universal movie that did show up some months back that I recently got around to watching is one that's technically a biopic, or at least about a real person: So Goes My Love.

The movie opens up in 1867 in Massachusetts. Myrna Loy plays Jane Budden, a woman who has been raising pigs but doesn't want to do that any longer. So she sells all her pigs and buys a train ticket to Brooklyn (not yet a part of New York City at the time). She's got a cousin there, and her plan is to find herself a rich man to marry so that she can settle down and live a life of comfort. However, the first man she meets is decidedly not rich, but the struggling inventor who lives next door, Hiram Maxim (Don Ameche).

Even if Ameche and Loy weren't top-billed, you know they're going to wind up together, because of the way Hiram keeps comedically approaching Jane and just coming across as so darn charming, even though he's not particuarly successful and tells her not to marry him since he can't give her what she wants. Hiram keeps it up long enough that Jane eventually asks him to marry her, and they live happily ever after.

Well not quite, and even the movie version doesn't have you believe this. Hiram continues to struggle as an inventor, working on among other things improvements to curling irons as well as arc lighting. Jane bears Hiram a son, called Percy here (Bobby Driscoll) but Hiram Percy in real life. The movie is based on a book written by Hiram Percy, which was basically a series of vignettes about growing up with an unconventional father like Hiram.

Percy is an incorrigible child, and it's his antics, and the way he relates to his parents and his parents' relationship with each other that forms the second half of the movie, concluding with the birth of Percy's kid brother. Hiram, in this movie telling of the story, becomes successful enough that a committee wants to commission a portrait to hang in their museum of advancements in engineering. But the movie ends when Percy is maybe 10.

That's a shame, because as far as it goes, So Goes My Love is an OK nostalgia piece about growing up in the late 1800s. When watching the movie, I thought that the name Hiram Maxim was a real person, and on doing a bit of research, I found out that my suspicion was correct. And that's part of why So Goes My Love is only OK. Hiram Percy's book apparently only goes up to about the time Percy was 12 or so, and Hiram the father had an extremely interesting second act after all this that could make for a much more interesting movie, with inventing advancements to the machine gun, as well as becoming a naturalized British citizen and having a second marriage that may or may not have been legitimate.

Still, Ameche and Loy do a creditable job with the material they're given. It's just that they could have been given so much better material.

A Ticklish Affair

Another of those movies that I had seen show up on TCM several times in the past, but had never actually watched beyond a few small snippets, was the family romantic comedy A Ticklish Affair. So with that in mind, the last time it showed up on TCM I recorded it, and only recently finally got around to watching that recording. It's showing up on TCM tomorrow, August 25, at 8:00 AM as part of a Summer Under the Stars day of movies dedicated to Shirley Jones, so with that in mind I've schedule the post for today.

A bunch of sailors from the Coronado Naval Air Station in the San Diego area are on an excercise in the Pacific Ocean just off land. Looking off to shore, one of the sailors sees coming from some place on shore the same sort of blinking light that ships use to communicate to one another in Morse code. (Technically these lights aren't blinking, of course; it's that the venetian blind-like slats that obscure the light make it look like it's blinking.) The only thing is, this light is blinking "SOS", which unsurprisingly gets their attention. The Navy sends a couple of people out to investigate, and find that it looks like the signal is coming from a regular house.

A group led by Cmdr. Key Weedon (Gig Young) walks right in, thinking it's a real emergency, and find a woman under the sink. That woman is Amy Martin (Shirley Jones), a widowed mother with three sons who are a bit of a handful since they have a knack for getting into trouble even when they don't mean to. The kids, not having a father, immediately like Weedon and Weedon, for his part, likes Amy. Amy would be perfectly willing to consider Weedon a friend, but she absolutely doesn't want to go any farther than that. Her husband was in the navy and died in service, which would explain why she doesn't want to get involved with another Navy man. That and having to move around, since she feels, not without reason, that the young boys need a stable home.

As for the Morse code light, that was given to the boys by their uncle Simon (Red Buttons), a pilot who has a bit of an eccentric streak himself, since who would give young boys that sort of blinker as a present. His next gift for them is even more eccentric: a canister of helium and the sort of weather balloons that the navy used in those days. He then explains to the boys that such balloons are used in astronaut training: gravity on the moon is lower than that on earth, so putting a bunch of balloons on men with a ground harness supposedly simulates what walking on the moon would be like.

Meanwhile, Key keeps pursuing Amy, and would like to propose marriage, but he gets a transfer to Italy, which is really going to make Amy hesitant to accept. But the romantic relationship between Key and Amy gets interrupted by another SOS signal coming from the house. Grover, is trying out the helium balloon thing when he slips the tether and starts floating off, although he seems blithely unware of the danger. Somehow the phone line at the Martin house is out, so Key is going to have to go over to the Martin house to find out what's going on. This leads to the climax as the entire naval base is put into action to save Grover.

A Ticklish Affair starts off as a relatively conventional, if inoffensive, family rom-com. Indeed, just a few months earlier, Jones appeared in The Courtship of Eddie's father, only as the woman gaining a family as the next-door widower is pushed into a relationship with here character. But then that climax comes, and that really takes the movie in a direction that doesn't suit it was as it makes for a finale that's supposed to be zany but is more tedious. Even without such a mishandled climax, however, A Ticklish Affair wouldn't have been as good as The Courtship of Eddie's Father. So you might want to watch this one once just to see how a reasonably premise can go wrong.

A Big Hand for the Little Lady

As I've mentioned on a reasonable number of occasions, I've got a bunch of movies on my DVR that I need to get around to watching before they expire from the DVR. With that in mind, I've got movie posts scheduled a good three weeks in advance, along with several left in draft form either so I don't have a bunch of movies in the same genre or with the same star coming up in rapid succession. Some draft posts then get re-edited if I seem them on the TCM schedule only after I write the first draft, so things might look a bit off. Such is the case with our next movie, A Big Hand for the Little Lady. I had written a post some time back and scheduled it, and then saw the Summer Under the Stars schedule release. Henry Fonda is being honored tomorrow, August 24, and A Big Hand for the Little Lady shows up at 2:00 PM.

It's sometime in the late 19th century, possibly in the New Mexico Territory or west Texas, although there's reference to a "Laredo Territory" which I don't think ever existed. Benson Tropp (Charles Bickford) is driving his hearse as the town's undertaker, picking people up, although he's not picking up the dead, and the people he's picking up seem to want to be picked up. The other men he picks up are Drummond (Jason Robrds), a cattleman whose daughter is about to get married; and prominent attorney Habershaw (Kevin McCarthy); another rancher named Wilcox is already in town as is storekeeper Buford (John Qualen). They all gather in the back room of Sam Rhine's saloon, and everyboy in town seems interested in their presence.

The reason for this gathering is that it's that time again for the annual high-stakes poker game, which seems to have as its only rules that they'll play a marathon session until one person has all the money, and that if you can't call the current bet, you're out. This, combined with no mention being made of a maximum bet, is something that I'd think would cause a problem if one person could just bet everyone else out of the game, but then maybe their game doesn't work like this. You get the impression that these men have been coming together for years, and budgeting to take part in the match.

Into town comes Meredith (Henry Fonda). He's got a wife Mary (Joanne Woodward) and son Jackie. They're traveling through Texas to San Antonio, where Meredith is intending to buy a plot of land for the family to make a new start in life. That also means that Meredith has the money for that plot of land on hand, in cash since this wasn't an era of electronic funds transfers. And he's going to be in town for a night because the wheel on their wagon needs to be repaired before the family can get back on the road. Everybody else in town is interested in the poker game, so it seems natural for Meredith to be interested in what's going on too. But he also has more interest as he's an inveterate gambler, with the assumption that the family is moving in part to escape Meredith's past gambling losses.

As you can guess, Meredith gets really interested in the poker game. The others have never really been interested in bringing somebody new into the game, but they get the feeling that Meredith might make a good mark: if you don't know who the mark at the table is, it's probably you. So they do let him into their game, and he predictably starts losing money, up until it comes time to make the big wager, at which point he suffers a medical issue that will force him out of the game and giving him no more chance to win back the family money he lost. At that point, Mary makes the insane request that she should be allowed to finish the game for her husband, even though she doesn't even know how to play poker.

A Big Hand for the Little Lady is another of those movies where you can see why the people involved would read the script and think it's the sort of material they could have a lot of fun making. And to be fair to all of them they do a reasonable job with the film, while looking like they're enjoying making this one. The only thing is that the material is pretty darn thin, the sort of thing that in the generation before World War II probably would have been written to be a two-reel short instead of a feature-length movie. So A Big Hand for the Little Lady will probably appeal more to other people than it did to me. Not that it's not worth watching, however.

The influence above a woman

Actress Gena Rowlands died last year, and TCM ran a programming tribute to her from which I already posted about one of the movies since I had it on my DVR at the time of the tribute. I haven't really gotten around to watching the others, although recently I finally sat down to watch A Woman Under the Influence.

The movie starts in what seems the middle. Peter Falk plays Nick Longhetti, the father of a family married to Mabel (Gena Rowlands) and works for the Los Angeles sewer department, a job which entails long shifts because emergencies happen in a city of that size. It's been a bit of a strain on Mabel, and just after the opening credits, we see Mabel packing up the kids in her mother-in-law's car (played by Rowlands' real-life mother-in-law Katherine Cassavetes, mother to the film's director John Cassavetes) so that they can spend a day with grandma and Mom and Dad can have some alone time for, well, you can probably guess.

Except that Nick gets called out on another emergency, and Mabel responds by going to a bar where she has way too much to drink and gives a strange man the idea that she's coming on to him. So he takes her home and presumably sleeps with her, as she's none too happy in the morning and has to get him out of the house before Nick comes home. Nick would clearly misunderstand and think of Mabel as a loose woman.

The erratic behavior continues when Nick brings all his co-workers from the emergency overnight shift home, only for Mabel to make them spaghetti instead of a traditional breakfast food. Worse, Grandma brings the kids home to pick up some schoolbooks, and both Nick and Mabel react very badly, albeit in different ways, with just as much of Nick's anger seeming to be directed at Mabel. Is this the cause of Mabel's erratic behavior, or his having no idea how to deal with it.

There's more unstable behavior from Mabel, and finally Nick, not knowing what to do, calls in the professionals, who diagnose that Mabel has some form of mental illness and would be best served by a stay at a psychiatric institution. She spends six months there, and when it's time for her to come home from the hospital, Nick and his friends think the best thing to do would be to hold a big party for Mabel. Nick's mom knows better and thinks that everyone who isn't family should leave. Mabel comes hom, and it's obvious to the viewer that she hasn't gotten any better, although everyone around her seems to want to deny that obvious thing.

To be honest, there's not much to a plot synopsis of A Woman Under the Influence because it's more of a character study than a traditionally plotted movie. Not just a study of Mabel, but of Nick too, and neither one really passes the test, at least not as characters. Peter Falk and Gena Rowlands both pass, giving outstanding performances, albeit performances that can be harrowing at times. The movie also runs a good two and a half hours, which is rather too long for material like this. As well-made -- and even more so how well-acted -- A Woman Under the Influence is, it's not necessarily an easy movie to watch. An important one, yes, but not easy.

Technically it could use more sin

Way back in 2011, I did a brief one-paragraph mention of a movie called They Call It Sin, noting how it had somehow gotten a TV-G rating despite being a precode. The last time it aired, I recorded it, not having done a full-length post on it. Recently, I finally got around to watching it. TCM still gave it a TV-G rating, but that's not really the point of this post.

David Manners plays Jimmy Decker. As the movie opens, he's getting on a train from New York bound for Kansas, where he's supposed to try to secure a business deal. He's leaving behind a fiancée, Enid Hollister (Helen Vinson), who happens to be the daughter of his boss. Fast forward to a small town in Kansas that's preternaturally boring. One Sunday morning, it seems the only person who's doing any work is the soda jerk at the pharmacy; pretty much everybody else is at church.

Jimmy goes to the church, since another trope of these small towns is that everybody in town goes to the same non-denominational Protestant church. After the service ends, everybody leaves with the exception of Jimmy and the church organist, a young woman named Marion Cullen (Loretta Young). She's an aspiring composer, playing some of her own music after the service, and a woman who absolutely hates this stifling small town. It's later revealed that her ridiculously strict parents are in fact her adoptive parents, as her biological mother was a traveling entertainer who died here. Marion is taken with Jimmy when he mentions that he's from New York. He encourages her to pursue her musical dream, even suggesting he might be able to give her pointers if she ever gets to New York. But he can't be bothered to tell Marion that he's got a fiancée waiting for him back in New York.

As you might guess, Marion goes to New York, and looks up Jimmy. She shows up unannounced at his posh apartment just as he's getting ready for a visit from Enid and her parents, which would be mighty awkward. Fortunately for Jimmy, his personal physician, Dr. Travers (George Brent), is also there, and is able to take Marion back to the hotel where she's staying. Travers, for some reason, doesn't tell Marion about Jimmy's fiancée, so she only learns when Jimmy goes to see Marion and then Enid shows up.

Marion tries to get jobs on her own, eventually meeting aspiring actress Dixie Dare (Una Merkel). Both of them get a job with producer Ford Humphries (a young Louis Calhern), Marion as a rehearsal pianist and Dixie as one of the stars. But Humphries has selected Marion for her looks, and when she resists his advances he not only fires her from the show, but steals one of her uncopyrighted compositions and claims writing credit for it himself. Jimmy finds out from yet another trope of 30s movies, the gossip column blurbs, and goes to see Humphries about it, leading to a climax that could threaten everyone's happiness.

They Call It Sin is fun enough, but even for late 1932 it doesn't feel like it's doing that much to break new ground. All of the plot devices feel like things we've seen in a dozen other movies. And, despite the title, any "sin" there is is mostly fairly tame, with Humphries' actions (which nowadays would be considered sexual harassment) being the worst. But the cast pull it off well, and it's definitely worth a watch the next time it shows up on TCM.

Hell to Eternity

I recorded several movies that I hadn't blogged about before during TCM's day of military movies last Veteran's Day. Some of them got shown again as part of the Memorial Day marathon, so I haven't quite had to worry about them expiring from the DVR, but thare are a few I need to get to. Among them is Hell to Eternity.

The movie opens up during the height of the Great Depression. Guy Gabaldon is a young student of Hispanic descent at a multiethnic school in Los Angeles who has a tendency to get in trouble. When Mr. Une, the father of one of his classmates, who also happens to be a teacher at the school, inquires as to what's going on, he learns that Guy's small house is a mess because Dad is dead and Mom has gotten sick and in the hospital. So Mr. Une takes Guy home with him to stay until Mom gets better. She doesn't get better, but dies in hospital, so the Unes make guy their foster son. Guy takes an interest in the Une family's Japanese culture, especially since the two grandparents have a relatively poor command of English.

Some years pass, and it's December, 1941, which as we all know means the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that sends the US into World War II. The other thing that it means is that Franklin Roosevelt orders all the Japanese-Americans rounded up and sent inland to be away from the Pacific coast where they're seen as a threat to America, even though grown-up Guy (Jeffrey Hunter) knows fully well that the Une family is no such thing. There's nothing Guy can do about it, and he doesn't particularly want to fight against Japan. He gets his draft notice, but it's revealed that he's 4-F thanks to a perforated eardrum.

And then, when visiting Mama-san at the internment camps, Guy learns that his Japanese "brothers" are fighting for America over in Italy as part of a regiment of Japanese-Americans that we saw profiled in the film Go for Broke!. This makes Guy change his mind and think about seeing if he can enlist, because his Japanese language skills could be useful. He just wants to make certain Mama-san doesn't object to his possibly having to kill Japanese.

The Marines accept him, and during basic training he becomes good friends with a couple of them, Sgt. Hazen (David Janssen) and Cpl. Lewis (Vic Damone). The three of them get sent to Hawaii before shipping out, which gives us time for a long and in my opinion pointless scene where the three go out on a triple date with women who are like the Donna Reed character from From Here to Eternity. They then get sent farther west, as that's where the fighting is. Eventually they wind up on Saipan, where the battle against Imperial Japan is raging. Guy, as prologue titles tell us, engages in heroic actions on Saipan that it was thought likely saved the lives of thousands.

Hell to Eternity is a moderately good World War II movie, made more interesting by the fact it's about a real subject. But it's also a movie not without its flaws, with the first one being that it's a good half hour too long, clocking in at 131 minutes. It also feels a bit too pat, in that the tragedy of having to deal with the internment camps is not something that's explored in great depth. The real-life Gabaldon was just shy of 16 on December 7, 1941, which makes me wonder what would have happened to him in real life when his foster family was sent to the camps.

All in all, Hell to Eternity is an entertaining enough movie that's worth one watch at least.

Briefs for the third week of August, 2025

I probably should have done a briefs post over the weekend to mention that James Gleason was the star for Summer Under the Stars on Monday (August 18), as it would have been nice to give you a heads-up on the Hildegarde Withers movies as well as Night of the Hunter. But alas, I've been a bit remiss in doing extras around here, since I'm usually writing up a post and leaving it in the queue to schedule for some later time.

Tomorrow, August 20, brings James Cagney. Quite a few of the movies are worth mentioning, starting at 6:00 AM with The Doorway to Hell. Cagney isn't the star here -- that honor goes to Lew Ayres -- but Cagney shows why he was very soon to become a star as he's much more noticeable when he's on screen. And, at 6:00 PM, you have a chance to catch Cagney doing a western, Tribute to a Bad Man. I actually had this one on my DVR and watched it, but when I went to put it back on for a refresher, I discovered that it had already expired. So, as with Five Steps to Danger last week, I decided that I had enough posts for movies coming up on the TCM schedule that I'd wait for tomorrow's recording to end up on the DVR to do a post on it at some later date.

I'm not overly excited for Patricia Neal on Thursday or Frank Sinatra on Friday, but Saturday is the day for Gina Lollobrigida. Several of the movies are the same ones that TCM ran when they did their programming salute to her last year and that I already did posts on. Apparently she was also in a production of The Hunchback of Notre Dame which comes on overnight between Saturday and Sunday.

Still nothing on FXM that I haven't blogged about before, but tomorrow at 4:45 sees a young Linda Darnell in Day-Time Wife, which I think TCM premiered recently. It's been quite some time since I mentioned Satan Never Sleeps, and you can see that at 6:00 AM Friday (August 22).

Of course, what really prompted me to do a briefs post was news of the passing of British actor Terence Stamp, who died on Sunday at the age of 87. Depending on what sort of movie fandom you're in, you may best remember him for starring opposite Robert Ryan in Billy Budd. Or, you may think of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. Some of the more mainstream if you will fans, who don't normally know a lot of the movies I mention, posted his obit remembering Stamp as General Zod in the Christopher Reeve Superman movies. I wouldn't be surprised it TCM has a programming tribute for Stamp at some point, but getting enough films might be a bit of an issue.

Beast of the City

Mickey Rooney was TCM's Star of the Month in December 2024. As a juvenile actor at MGM, he made a lot of movies, including small roles before he became more of a leading actor with the Andy Hardy movies. One such child role that I haven't done a post on before is in The Beast of the City. Since I like pre-Codes and hadn't seen this movie before, I made a point of recording it to do a post on it. I finally got around to watching it and scheduling a post on it.

Rooney is obviously not the star here, although he plays the young son Mickey of the main character, a man named Jim Fitzpatrick (Walter Huston). Jim is a police detective with a big-city police department (I don't think a specific city is mentioned). He's got a reputation as someone who's so ticked off with the underworld violence that was plaguing America during Prohibition that he does things that step on some people's toes but that other people lionize him for doing. As the movie opens, we see a police dispatcher (uncredited character actor Edward Brophy) sending cops out for a bunch of petty stuff, like a skunk in a basement. But then the dispatcher mentions dead bodies in a place that clearly implies a gangland killing.

Fitzpatrick is the detective given the task of investigating. To Jim, it's obvious that these are two low-level gang members, and that the leader of the rival gang, Sam Belmonte (Jean Hersholt) is responsible even if he didn't actually pull the trigger. So Fitzpatrick goes to the nightclub that Belmonte runs to arrest him. But for a bunch of reasons, Belmonte is able to get off. One is that he didn't actually pull the trigger and has an alibi, but there's also the assumption that Belmonte has a bunch of pull with any number of corrupt members of the police department, which may include the police chief.

Jim has a wife and kids, as well as a brother Ed (Wallace Ford) who is also a policeman, serving on the vice squad. Jim wants to engage Ed's help in trying to bring down Belmonte. At a police lineup, we see Daisy Stevens (Jean Harlow), although eagle-eyed viewers will already have seen her in Belmonte's office. She's a stenographer, and presumably has an in to Belmonte. Ed meets Daisy and begins to fall in love with her, although this is a serious problem as it's a bad idea to have a relationship with gang-related molls. And Daisy is certainly going to try to get Ed into the gang's good graces.

Jim gets sent to a distant precinct in what's clearly political retribution, although he's got friends who are able to help his career by getting him involved with foiling a bank robbery. Combined with public outrage over the political types having demoted him, the old police chief is forced to resign and Jim is given the chief's job. He immediately sets about going after Belmonte. But there's the question of how legal his methods are, combined with the fact that his brother's relationship with the gang is an issue.

The Beast of the City opens with intertitles quoting then-president Herbert Hoover about the nature of the Mob and how what America needs is movies glorifying the police going after the Mob, as opposed to films like The Public Enemy. This is MGM's attempt to make the cops look good, although they didn't quite yet have the gloss that they would after Irving Thalberg died where movies would be technically well made even if that doesn't quite fit what the genres need. The Beast of the City is still clearly more MGM than, say, Warner Bros. which was a lot grittier in dealing with social issues. Walter Huston does well, although Jean Harlow in her supporting role is fabulously sexy. Although TCM ran this for the presence of Mickey Rooney, he understandably doesn't have much to do here (not that that's his fault).

The Beast of the City is a well-made early talkie that definitely deserves to be seen, even if it's not one of the all-time greats.

Lair of the White Worm

A new-to-me horror (well, for some values of horror) movie that TCM showed last year during their annual October horror-fest was a 1980s British film, The Lair of the White Worm. The movie's synopsis sounded interesting to me, so I recorded it, and eventually got around to watching it.

The movie starts off at a bed-and-breakfast being operated, not particularly successfully, by the Trent sisters, Eve (Catherine Oxenberg) and Mary (Sammi Davis). Visiting, and doing some digging nearby, is archaeology student Angus Flint. He digs up some Roman coins, but more oddly, what looks like bones from some sort of snake-like creature that's much too large to be anything that would naturally appear in this part of northeastern England. However, there is one possibility. There's an old legend of the "d'Ampton worm". Sometime in the middle ages, a d'Ampton ancestor killed a worm-like animal that was menacing the region, and this made the d'Amptons lords of the manor to this day. Perhaps there's some truth behind the legend.

The current head of the d'Ampton line is Lord James d'Ampton (Hugh Grant in an early role), who still owns a lot of the land and has tenant farmers. He's never really believed the legend, but this skull may just change his mind. There's also more evidence that comes out that might get him to believe as well, and put the people on his lands in grave danger.

Kevin is an adolescent rambler hiking through the area when he gets picked up by Lady Syvlia (Amanda Donohoe), who lives in another manor house in the area. Sylvia takes him back to her place, Temple House, and treats him like this is going to be some wild sex fantasy. Oh, it's wild, all right, only it's not going to be a sex fantasy for Kevin. Instead, Sylvia is going to inject some sort of venom into him and then bite him with her fangs, showing that she's some sort of snake hybrid!

This is getting weird, and it's only going to get weirder. The legend of the d'Ampton worm involves decidedly non-Christian snake worship, and an undead acolyte in Sylvia who might only be able to be killed in a certain way. And, she's got certain people in the area she decidedly wants to turn into similar snake-like creatures with her bite. James and Angus most definitely don't want to become snakes, so when they figure out that the legend might be real, they have to come up with a way to stop Sylvia before she destroys too many other people.

The Lair of the White Worm is based in part on a Bram Stoker story, and in part on some traditional legends from the part of England where the movie is set. It's definitely a weird little movie, but at the same time it's one that I found quite entertaining precisely because it's so nuts. Sure, if you were to try to analyse the plot rationally you'd find something that makes little sense, but then I don't think the classic Hammer horror films make all that much sense either if you're trying to watch them seriously. Just sit back and enjoy the off-kilter ride, and I think you'll have fun.

Remind me again why I'm not a fan of Jean-Luc Godard

Another of the foreign films that TCM ran quite some time ago that I finally got around to watching just before it expired from my DVR was Weekend. As has been the case for some time with my being a bit ahead of the game in terms of posting, I wrote up this post not long after watching the film but by the time this post goes live it may already have expired.

The movie opens up at what looks like it may be a vacation resort, with a couple staying in a place with a nice balcony. They get a phone call, and the wife in the couple, Corinne (Mireille Darc), discusses what to do with getting her father from the clinic. Later conversations reveal that she and her husband Roland (Jean Yanne) are waiting for her dad to die, and that hopefully it will be before he can re-write his will: they've been poisoning him slowly. Hence why they want to be the ones to pick him up from the clinic. After the phone call, we see some random violence in the parking lot below, as a fender-bender results in one driver getting shot by another.

But before our couple can head off to get Dad, we get a bizarre scene of Corinne talking to her analyst about some sort of BDSM threesome she's a part of, which doesn't involve her husband. The scene goes on, and on, and is badly underlit. After that the couple finally sets off for Dad's home town of Oinville (Google suggests there are a couple of Oinvilles, all an hour or two from central Paris depending on traffic). But they cause a fender-bender of their own, and the bratty little kid whose parents own the hit car tries to cause a violent scene.

That's about the least violence in the movie. Along the road to Oinville, the couple pass a long, long, long stretch of parked cars as though we're in a traffic jam, although the couple continually passes on the left. Some of the cars are clearly broken down or have been in accidents, but not all of them, which makes one wonder why those other cars decided to stay in this traffic jam. Apparently director Jean-Luc Godard is trying to make some sort of message with this scene. It is, however, about the least blatant of the political/cultural messaging in the movie.

The rest of the movie seems to be the couple trying to get to Oinville and either passing more violent auto wrecks, or getting involved with people who are famous historical political philosopers or revolutionaries trying to impose their own radical political views. The couple eventually does get to Oinville, only to find out that Dad has already died and they're not getting much of an inheritance.

The problem with Weekend isn't what those political philosophers are talking about so much as that these non-narrative scenes are not only in the movie, but drown out the movie as a whole. I got the impression watching Weekend that Godard had this idea of himself being oh-so-clever by trying to make such a film, when in fact it gets tedious quickly. But then again I also get the impression that people like me who find a film like this tedious deserve to have it inflicted on them. Don't they know what's good for them?

I've mentioned quite a few times on this blog my belief that a lot of people over the years have it in for foreign films because of the perception of them being arthouse stuff. Godard might well be the apotheosis of arthouse. So if you like arthouse you may well love Weekend; if you don't you'll probably hate it.

One of those Bela Lugosi non-horror films

Bela Lugosi was TCM's Star of the Month in October 2024, since that's the month with Halloween and Lugosi is known for a bunch of horror pictures going back to at least Dracula. Early in his career, he made some movies that can't be classified as horror by any stretch of the imagination. One such film that TCM ran has Lugosi in a small role: Fifty Million Frenchmen.

Lugosi isn't the star here, as I implied above. Instead, top billing goes to a pair of comedians called Olsen and Johnson, although they're really more supporting characters. The nominal male lead is an actor named William Gaxton, playing an American named Jack Forbes. As the movie opens, he's on a boat about to dock at Le Havre, the disembarcation point for transatlantic liners going to France, where he meets Lu Lu Carroll (Claudia Dell) and immediately falls in love with her because that's how dumb Americans abroad act.

All of the rich Americans stay at the Hotel Ritz in Paris, which is where we meet Ole Olsen and Chic Johnson. They're playing a pair of detectives -- or at least that's their claim -- named Simon Johanssen and Peter Swanson respectively. Also at the hotel is Michael Cummins (John Halliday), who happens to be a friend of Jack's. They get to talking about women, and the end result is that Michael bets Jack that he can't get Lu Lu to become engaged to him in two weeks, with the caveat that he's not allowed to use his father's letter of credit. For no good reason other than to advance the plot, such as it is, Jack takes the bet.

Simon and Peter have run up a large bar tab that they can't pay. Just after making the bet with Jack, Michael runs into Simon and Peter. He finds out that they really are detectives, so he offers them a job. They're supposed to make certain not only that Jack holds to the terms of the bet about not borrowing money, but also if they have any chances to do whatever they can to keep Jack from actually getting engaged to Lu Lu.

Complicating matters is the presence of another American woman, Violet (Helen Broderick). She meets Michael when he's working as a tour guide to try to earn money on his own to satisfy the bet, and is going to serve as "the other woman" when the plot requires it to make it uncertain whether Jack is going to wind up with Lu Lu or not. The plot has Jack and the rest go through a number of scenes, such as a society party where the Bela Lugosi character is hired to do a magic show. There's also the horse races, before we get to the comedic finale.

The plot to Fifty Million Frenchmen is a mess, and the movie is decidedly not helped by the fact that Olsen and Johnson are decidedly unfunny. Maybe their brand of vaudeville humor was funny back in the early 1930s, but their antics haven't stood the test of time. The movie is based on a Cole Porter musical, only all the songs have been removed. (Wikipedia says the songs were there originally, but were removed because by the time the movie was released, musicals were less popular.) In any case, the movie just didn't work for me.

The Magnificent Seven

We're halfway through August and up to the day honoring actor Charles Bronson. Surprisingly enough, I'd never actually sat down before and watched The Magnificent Seven end-to-end in one sitting, and certainly never done a post on it before, although I have posted about the Japanese movie of which it is a remake, Seven Samurai. So the last time The Magnificent Seven showed up on TCM, I recorded it in order to be able to do a post in conjunction with a future airing. That airing is tomorrow, August 16, at 12:45 PM.

I assume most people know the basic story, and that a lot of readers here have even seen the movie already. The action is moved from medieval Japan to 19th century Mexico, where a village in the middle of nowhere is being predated upon by bandit leader Calvera (Eli Wallach) and his substantial band of bandits. In this most recent raid, one of the villagers gets shot dead, which is the breaking point. They want to fight back, but they don't even have effective weapons. So they head north to the American border since guns are easier to get in the US, trading some of their few possessions for those guns.

When they get to the border town, they find a stalemate where the locals don't want to bury an Indian in their cemetery, so a couple of gunslingers drive the hearse past them, shooting those who actively resist. Those gunmen are Chris (Yul Brynner) and Vin (Steve McQueen). On hearing from the Mexicans, Chris realizes that the villagers would still be ill-equipped to defend themselves even if they had guns. That, combined with a sense of adventure, leads him to tell the villagers that he'll form a band of American gunslingers who will help the villagers defend themselves, even if the pay won't be good.

Over the next half-hour of the movie or so, we get set pieces introducing the rest of them Chris hires. Harry (Brad Dexter) assumes that Chris is only taking the job because there must be a gold or silver mine near the village, so he wants in; O'Reilly (Charles Bronson) needs the money, as does gambler Lee (Robert Vaughn). There's a knife expert, Britt (James Coburn) as well. Finally, there's the young hothead Chico (Horst Buchholz) who wants to be part of the group, only to not reach Chris' standards. But he's so determined, following the other six through Mexico, that eventually Chris does let him join.

When they reach the village they start to teach the villagers how to fight, even without guns, and prepare for Calvera's eventual return. Along the way, some of them start developing emotional bonds to the villagers, notably O'Reilly, who had a Mexican mother and Irish father. It's all leading up to the return of Calvera and his men for the final showdown.

The Magnificent Seven is a highly entertaining film, and it's easy to see why over the years it has gained a reputation as one of the iconic westerns. It's definitely worth watching if you haven't seen it before.

Somerset Maugham's Circle

British writer Somerset Maugham is one who seems to have had a surprising amount of his work turned into movies, at least when it comes to contemporary writers. A movie that I recorded because it sounded mildly interesting and I'm always up for an early talkie, but that I didn't realize was based on a Maugham play until seeing the opening credits, was Strictly Unconventional.

Tyrell Davis plays Arnold Champion-Cheney, a man who 40 years later might have been up for Monthy Python's "Upper Class Twit of the Year" sketch: living in a large manor house and insisting that everything be just so, as an opening scene with an antique chair he just bought shows. God forget anyone ever get even a speck of dust on it, much less sit on it. So of course everybody else wants to sit there not realizing it's an expensive antique. The scene doesn't have much to do with the main plot other than characterization to show what kind of man Arnold is and why his wife Elizabeth (Catherine Dale Owen) acts the way she does.

We first meet Elizabeth while she's going horseback riding. But she's not riding with Arnold; instead she's accompanied by a visitor from Canada, Ted (Paul Cavanaugh). In the original play, Ted went off to Malaya to run a plantation, but here he's Canadian. He's not well to do like Arnold, but he's handsome, virile, and most definitely not a twit. So it's easy to see why Catherine would be attracted to him. So much so that she's thinking of leading Arnold for Ted, although the question of whether Arnold would grant a divorce is an open one.

Arnold is also dismayed by the news that his mom is back in the UK. Three decades earlier, Mom, Lady Catherine (Alison Skipworth) walked out on Dad, Clive (Lewis Stone), to get married to someone she considered no so much a stick in the mud in the form of Lord Porteus (Ernest Torrence). They've traveled the world for the past 30 years, but now that they're back in the UK, Elizabeth wants to see them, to the point that Elizabeth has invited them to the big party that's going to be held in that manor house. It's also at that party that Elizabeth plans to run off with Ted at the end of the night.

But then Elizabeth meets Lady Catherine, who is no longer glamorous at all, and Lord Porteous who is even less so. Lady Catherine was shunned by polite society for pretty much abandoning her husband, and she certainly hasn't aged gracefully, trying to fight it every step of the way and losing that fight badly. She's a sign to poor Elizabeth of what Elizabeth faces for the rest of her life if she runs off with Ted. SO what will Elizabeth do?

Strictly Unconventional is another one of those movies from the very early days of sound when the studios were buying up the rights to short-run plays, especially plays set among the upper social classes. It's an interesting enough idea, although as the movie adapts it it's an idea that fees like it doesn't have enough meat on its bones. It runs under an hour (although it was edited down from 72 minutes after its original release) but even then there's that very slow opening scene with Arnold as well as a bridge-playing scene that typifies how Hollywood portrayed the upper classes in a way that doesn't necessarily make for successful entertainment.

While I certainly didn't hate Strictly Unconventional, it's also definitely not something that would come to mind when it comes to recommending any genre to people. There are better upper-class stories; better play adaptations; and better Somerset Maugham adaptations out there.

Barney Bear

I think I've mentioned a couple of times recently that I've started recording parts of TCM's Saturday matinee block on my DVR. There are the Popeye cartoons which come roughly at 10:00 AM, as well as other cartoons which kick off the block at 8:00 AM. For a while TCM was showing cartoons featuring a character I didn't know much about, Barney Bear, but it gave me the chance to record one called Bear Raid Warden.

As you might guess -- and I'm not giving away much since this is a one-reel cartoon -- Barney here plays a World War II air raid warden working out of a cabin deep in the forest. The short opens up with an own that's asleep but still hooting, and when Barney hears it the hooting sound just like an air-raid siren should sound to him, which gets him out of bed looking for the source. Now, of course, one was also supposed to put out one's lights, or at least black out the windows so that light sources didn't escape from inside the house, and when the owl's eyes open, they let out a ridiculout amount of light.

But that's not the real source of aggravation for poor Barney Bear. He next finds a firefly, and in the fly's defense, it can't not glow. Not that Barney seems to understand this, as he tries to extinguish the fly's glow. That only serves to make the firefly angrier and more determined to keep on glowing, leading to all sorts of sight gags which, to the movie's benefit, mostly work.

Barney Bear was devised some time early by Hugh Harman and Rudolf Ising, who were part of MGM's animation department in the days before the studio had the Tom and Jerry cartoons and, I think, before people like Tex Avery or Hanna and Barbera came to MGM. By this time, however, with the war on, Harman and Ising left the studio to do their part for the war, so this was directed by people not original to the character. From what I've read, MGM "dumbed down" the shorts after Harman and Ising left, but that doesn't really seem to be the case here.

I looked up Bear Raid Warden on YouTube, but it doesn't seem to be available in its entirety.

Briefs for August 13-14, 2025

Summer Under the Stars continues; as I mentioned yesterday, today is the day for Shirley MacLaine, which unfortunately does not include What a Way to Go!. I didn't realize it, but apparently TCM is inflicting Mario Cantone on us in prime time tonight and next Wednesday. I found him obnoxious 20 years ago when he was one of the celebrities on Pyramid, constantly stepping over then-host Donny Osmond's lines; obnoxious when he was a Guest Programmer, treating Robert Osborne the same way; and still obnoxious during his guest hosting duties last October (or was it October 2023?). Sorry, but that's the way I see Mario Cantone.

Thursday brings Sterling Hayden. I recently watched a movie of his that's not part of his day, Naked Alibi which Eddie Muller selected for Noir Alley. But there are several interesting films including Zero Hour! at 4:00 PM; The Asphalt Jungle at 6:00 PM; and Five Steps to Danger at 11:15 PM. I actually have the latter on my DVR and have mentioned it briefly a couple of times a decade or so ago, but I've never done a full-length post on it. It last aired as part of Ruth Roman's turn as Star of the Month, and I've got some other of her movies with posts coming up, which is part of why I decided to wait on doing a full-length post on it.

And now for a couple of stories that I heard on some of the international broadcasters I listen to. The first one is interesting for several reasons, one having to do with Oscar scheduling. Apparently there was a fair bit of controversy over the way the Czech film academy was handling its selection for Best International (formerly foreign-language) film. I knew each country submitted one film to the (US) Academy which then picked the nominees from among those movies, but apparently when those submissions has to be made disadvantages some films, which made me think that perhaps AMPAS should set a specific 12-month period for when would-be nominees have to be released, as this doesn't seem to be the case. In any case, the Czechs are going with a documentary instead of a narrative film. The photographer at the heart of that documentary did a longer-form interview with Radio Prague three years ago if you want to learn more about her.

From KBS World Radio out of Korea, I heard a story about Oldboy director Park Chan-wook getting expelled from the WGA for continuing to work during the last strike. Now, while I understand not actually working on any productions, the question of how you can expect a writer not to write is one that doesn't really get answered. And there's also for me the issue of any number of great stories turned into movies being labors of love for the people who wrote them: Sylvester Stallone, after all, wrote Rocky before becoming famous. Why should he be punished simply for not paying the protection racket? I also wonder when somebody is going to break the closed-shop blacklist the way Kirk Douglas broke the 1950s blacklist by putting Dalton Trumbo's name on the screen for Spartacus.

For some values of "loves"

Up next on TCM is a day of movies dedicated to Shirley MacLaine. One that I hadn't heard of before the last time it showed up on TCM is Two Loves; it gets a showing tomorrow, August 13, at 8:15 AM. And now, having watched it, I can see why I hadn't heard of it before.

After the credits, some titles inform us that the setting is North Island, New Zealand, although I wonder how much northern California stood in when they have establishing shots and how much is the MGM back lot. A car shows up at a severely underfunded school, and getting out of the car is one of the teachers, Anna Vorontosov (Shirley MacLaine). She's an American who wound up teaching here presumably to get away from America, and perhaps to do good work, since she's teaching a class of mostly Maori children. Anna has unorthodox ideas about teaching, but fairly orthodox ideas about life, which might be part of why she ended up in New Zealand, as she never found anyone to marry.

As she makes it to school today, she's informed that there's a new chief inspector of school who will be visiting, William Abercrombie (Jack Hawkins). But before that, we meet another of the teachers who's come here from far away to teach: Paul Lathrope (Laurence Harvey). Now, as you might guess from a title like Two Loves, Paul is likely to be interested romantically in Anna. But there are a couple of catches, like his having served in the war and that scarring him emotionally. It's also led him to drink and take all sorts of inappropriate risks on his motorcycle. Anna also doesn't want to go too far too fast with him.

Eventually, Abercrombie also gets to know Anna better. Abercrombie is originally from the UK but came over to New Zealand. His wife and kids, however, didn't like New Zealand, so they went back to the UK although the wife will never grant him a divorce. Abercrombie reads a book that Anna has put together of stories from the Maori kids that talk about social issues "proper" white kids would never discuss and, while Abercrombie is shocked about it at first, he thinks their stories have potential.

One more subplot involves an adolescent Maori student, Whareparita (Nobu McCarthy), and the way she fits into the life of the school with the teachers. She's asked to be an assistant with Anna as it's thought this will make Anna's clasroom look better in the eyes of Abercrombie. But it's really Lathrope who is of more importance to Whareparita's subplot.

I mentioned at the top that I hadn't heard of Two Loves and that this was for good reason. The reason is that the movie got savage reviews at the time of its release. It's based on a book, and apparently the author of that book said the movie deserved the bad reviews and that the direction mangled her story. The story lines here are very muddled and it feels hard to have much interest in any of the characters: the Maori are almost cartoonish; Lathrope is, at least as played by Laurence Harvey, over the top; and Anna isn't really given much depth.

But, as always, judge for yourself when you watch Two Loves.

The Coming of the Titans

TCM had a spotlight in July of movies based on mythology. One of those movies is getting another airing during Summer Under the Stars: My Son, the Hero, at midnight tomorrow (ie. between August 12 and 13, or late in the evening of August 12 in more westerly time zones) as part of a day devoted to Pedro Armendáriz. I'm putting up this post a day early because I already have another post planned for a movie that's airing relatively early on August 13 as part of that day's star, and that post has to go up early tomorrow, August 12.

Armendáriz plays Cadmos, an ancient Greek king who isn't exactly faithful to his wife. Indeed, although she's just given birth to a daughter, he's been stepping out with Ermione, and eventually kills his wife. For this, the gods punish Cadmos with the curse that if the daughter, Antiope, ever falls in love, Cadmos will die. Cadmos responds by making himself a god and shutting Antiope off in the ancient Greek equivalent of a nunnery, where she's raised by women and the only "men" she'll ever meet are priests who, although they're biologically men, have no interest in being with anybody but the gods. Antiope, too, will be betrothed to a god, which presumably won't violate the terms of the curse.

The gods, however, are not happy with this. So they turn to the Titans, who had been defeated by Zeus' lot but could still be useful. Zeus frees Crios (Giuliano Gemma), who is physically the Titan with the least strength, but also the cleverest one, which is just what is needed to defeat Cadmos. Crios goes to Crete, where Cadmos is the king. There, he fairly quickly meets Achilles, who here is a mute who apparently can't write, although to be fair writing material wasn't as common in those days. So he has to use some form of sign language. Crios' job is to send Cadmos to Hades for eternity, and since Achilles is one of Cadmos' retainers, even if not so loyal to Cadmos, could be useful to Crios.

Crios gets another ally in the form of Rator, a slave who is good at trial by combat at least until Crios uses his wits to come up with a way to defeat Rator. The punishment should be death, but Crios convinces Cadmos not to kill Rator. Meanwhile, Crios has seen Antiope and fallen in love with her, which is pretty much as good as sending Cadmos straight to Hades. Or, at least it is if Crios can marry Antiope and consummate the marriage. Ermione is no dummy, and figures out what's going on, so does everything to thwart Crios, such as by sending Antiope to the island of the Gorgons. Cadmos, for his part, tries to kill Crios and Achilles.

There's a fair bit more to go on until the eventual happy ending, with quite a few fights and a surprising minimum of special effects. My Son, the Hero is one of those Italian sword-and-sandal movies that got picked up by an American distributor for release in America. I have a feeling that if we in America had a subtitled version of the movie, the movie we'd have gotten wouldn't have been all that bad, but also not all that great. Of course, once an American distributor picked it up back in the early 1960s, the result was going to be that the movie got dubbed. Worse, the original ad campaign apparently implied that the movie was going to be reworked as a comedy. Indeed, the synopsis in the on-screen listings guide implied that it is. It isn't, although some of the dialogue is inane. But as a result the movie is wildly uneven, and not helped by the pedestrian at best acting.

Belle Starr's Daughter

Ruth Roman was TCM's Star of the Month back in November 2024, and as always, this gave me the opportunity to record some movies I either hadn't seen before, or had seen but had not yet done a blog post on. Among the former is an early film in Roman's career, Belle Starr's Daughter.

Belle Starr was a minor bandit who was killed in 1889 under circumstances that were never fully cleared up, leaving behind two children, including an adult daughter Rose (that's Ruth Roman). In this telling of the tale, Belle had retired to a place called Cherokee Flats, near a town called Antioch where she had a sort of truce with the town marshal: keep everybody out of Antioch, and we'll leave you alone. But Belle's second-in-command, Bob, nicknamed "Bitter Creek" (Rod Cameron) is not happy with this arrangement. He goes into town to rob the bank, a major no-no, and kills the old marshal.

Rose and Belle (Isabell Jewell) have no idea that any of this is happening. And when Bob returns to Cherokee Flats and Belle finds out what's happened, she's pissed. So Bob responds by killing her, which is really going to tick off Rose. Worse, Bob has burned the place down and puts the idea in Rose's head that perhaps it might be the new marshal, Tom Jackson (George Montgomery), who is responsible. After all, if the old marshal was killed, it's only logical that the new one would want revenge.

But Rose also has the suspicion that Bob isn't being completely honest, so she goes into town partly to investigate for herself and partly to try to start a new life as she didn't want to get involved in any violence. (In real life, Rose started a brothel, but needless to say Hollywood couldn't exactly show that since Rose is supposed to be the heroine here.) Rose meets Tom, and at first things are rather frosty. You can guess, however, that this is going to change along the way, although there's still the pesky little matter of the Production Code.

Worse for poor Rose is that Bob and his men show up. Bob is no dummy, and he figures out that Rose wants to go straight and is more than willing to turn him in. So Bob pretty much kidnaps Rose and forces her to ride with his outlaw gang. From here it's a fairly standard western until we get the conclusion in which the good guys win and the bad guys get what's coming to them.

Belle Starr's Daughter was another of those B movies that wasn't designed to be much more than entertainment -- it certainly doesn't have much in the way of historical accuracy -- but it succeeds in entertaining while being nothing terribly special or memorable. Roman didn't really have anything to be embarrassed about with the movie, but better things were certainly on the way for her.

Dead Calm

Several months back, TCM ran a night of "before they were stars" movies. With them about to expire from my DVR, I made a point of watching them before they expired and writing up the posts to schedule at some point in the future. First up is a very young Nicole Kidman in Dead Calm.

Kidman is a native Australian, and this movie was made in Australia even though I think the other two leads are not in fact Australian. Sam Neill is John Ingram, an officer in the Australian navy who as the movie opens is returning home for Christmas leave with a bunch of other sailors. At the train station, he's stopped by a couple of policemen who have some terrible news for him: his young child was killed in a car accident, and his wife Rae (that's Kidman) is in hospital badly shaken. We get a brief synopsis of the accident to see why Rae is in the state she's in.

To deal with their personal grief, John and Rae decide to take their personal yacht out to sea for a long voyage in the tropical Pacific (the movie was filmed near islands that are part of the Great Barrier Reef), together with their dog who is good about fetching things out of the ocean, which is a bit of foreshadowing. After a month or so at sea, the pair come across a boat that looks like it's adrift with nobody on it, at least not at first. There does turn out to be one man, who is barely able to make his way to the Ingrams' boat.

That man, Hughie Warriner (Billy Zane), has just his trunks and one backpack-sized bag, from which he fishes five passports, which he says are the passports of the other five people on the boat. Hughie then informs the Ingrams that the other passengers died of what he thinks is food poisoning (although why he didn't get poisoned himself is an obvious question), and that the boat is taking on water. He's sick enough that he's about to pass out, so the Ingrams put him in one of the below-decks cabins and lock the door.

John finds the log among Hughie's stuff, and reading it, he's got some questions, so he takes the dinghy over to the other boat to investigate. While there he's able to generate just enough power to run a monitor that has a videotape running that looks like it was taken on the boat and has two escort-type young women asked to be involved in some sort of morally questionable activity, with Hughie getting involved in it in a way that the man who chartered the boat clearly doesn't like. Obviously more reason for John to suspect that there's a lot more going on with Hughie than he's letting on.

And then Hughie wakes up and, finding out he's locked in the room, wants to get out. This is sensible enough, but rather than calling out for Rae when he gets the skylight opened, he breakes the hinges and escapes from the room to physically subdue Rae and start a sort of mutinty, steering the ship away from the one that he was originally on and that John is still (and which by now is fairly clearly takin on water, leaving it with an only partially functional radio). There's not much need for more of a synopsis, as the questions raised by Hughie's actions are fairly obvious. How they resolve themselves, however, is not necessarily what you might expect.

Dead Calm is a very well-made movie, with one small exception and one slightly larger exception. The small exception is that the story doesn't quite give a good explanation of how Hughie came to be so psychotic. The second deals with the ending. Apparently multiple endings were filmed and the one wet get is based on preview audience reactions. I would have preferred something else, although I also have to say that this comment in itself might be giving something away.

Dead Calm is another of those movies that came out when I was an adolescent and still too young to drive myself to the movie theater. That, and I don't know whether it would have shown up in my local not-big-city sixtyplex. So I hadn't heard of it until the TCM showing. However, I'm extremely glad that I have had this chance to watch Dead Calm. I highly recommend it to any movie buff.

Code Two

I've mentioned in the past how I often find the little black-and-white programmers from the early 1950s at MGM to be more interesting than the lush Freed Unit musicals that the studio is better remembered for. Recently, I had the opportunity to watch another such movie, Code Two.

The movie starts off with opening credits and a voiceover sequence about the damage caused by car crashes that give the distinct impression Jack Webb could have produced this if it came about several years later, but Webb is not involved. After the intro, we get sent to the Los Angeles Police Academy, where a new group of recruits is about to start training. They're given the chance to introduce themselves to one another, which is a device to introduce the three main characters to the viewer: Chuck O'Flair (Ralph Meeker) is the know-it-all you know is going to get taken down a peg later in the movie and need to redeem himself; Russ Hardley (Robert Horton) is the husband with a wife Mary (Sally Forrest) and kid living in one of those Los Angeles bungalows next door to Mary's sister Jane (Elaine Stewart); and Harry Whenlon (Jeff Richards), a shy but kind-hearted man. A subplot involves Chuck trying to pursue Jane, although she prefers Harry.

The recruits get put through their paces, with Chuck, Harry, and Russ becoming friends, although Chuck is always getting into a bit of trouble since he just knows better than everybody else how to do things. The police academy version of a DI, Sgt. Culdane (Keenan Wynn), does think a good officer could be made out of Chuck, while his boss Lt. Redmon (James Craig) isn't so sure. But all three are graduated and put onto the force in boring-to-them positions.

So when a motorcycle cop comes into the diner where all the cops hang out, Chuck gets the idea that perhaps he should apply to become a motorcycle cop. The pay is better and it's more glamorous. He uses his charisma to get Russ and Harry to follow him, although Russ is reluctant to tell Mary since he just knows (rightly) that she's going to be uncomfortable with the idea of Russ being out on a motorcycle in traffic for an eight-hour shift. It's dangerous, after all.

Mary is right to worry. Chuck and Harry are on a shift together when a truck blows through a stop sign. Chuck hasn't done maintenance on his bike so can't get it to start, forcing Harry to go after the truck alone. The two men in the truck say they're carrying a cargo of furniture, but Harry goes to inspect and finds a liquid that seems a lot like blood. For his trouble, Harry gets pistol-whipped and then run over and killed. Analysis at the lab reveals the blood is not human but bovine, so we've got urban cattle rustlers. The last third of the movie gives Chuck that obligatory shot of finding the men who killed Harry and redeeming himself.

Code Two is the sort of thing that you could easily see having been done on episodic TV just a few years later, certainly on one of the Jack Webb shows like Dragnet or Adam-12. The story mostly works, although having to go all the way through the police academy to introduce the main characters to us is a bit slow. Once everybody gets on their motorcycles the action really picks up. Code Two is entertaining, although it's unsurprising that it's one of those movies that isn't well remembered. It's definitely worth watching, however.

The Jackie Robinson Story

We've got a third straight day of someone in TCM's Summer Under the Stars who has a movie on my DVR that I haven't blogged about before. This time that star is Ruby Dee, and her film is The Jackie Robinson Story, which concludes Dee's day early tomorrow at 4:15 AM.

For any non-Americans who don't know Jackie Robinson (playing himself here) is the baseball player who began the desegregation of baseball by becoming the first black player allowed to play Major League baseball, for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. This was at the time a controversial decision since it was bound to bring out the bigotry in a substantial proportion of the white population. (Note that at the time, MLB didn't extend south of Washington DC, so it was only in spring training that players had to go to the traditional south, although there was still a lot of bigotry and even segregation in the north.)

The movie starts off well before this, with Jackie Robinson as a kid in the late 1920s, growing into a young man who shows an aptitude for all sorts of sports, eventually getting a partial athletic scholarship to play at UCLA in the late 1930s. He's in love with Rae (Ruby Dee), but also worries about life after college and the difficulties black people face in the wider professional world: how is he going to support a wife?

After getting drafted into the Army and then getting out, Jackie is able to play for the Brooklyn Dodgers' minor league team based in Montreal, where he shows himself to be a baseball player of the caliber to make it to the majors. But of course, as the 1946 season opens, there still hasn't been a black player in the majors, a fact well-known to everybody, especially the Dodgers' general manager, Branch Rickey (Minor Watson). Rickey is insistent on breaking the color barrier, just needing somebody who can handle the bigotry that he knows is going to come that player's way, and thinks he's found it in Jackie Robinson.

Now, of course we all know how history plays out, which is that Robinson was on the Brooklyn Dodgers' roster in 1947 and eventually became a top-level player, so as our movie ends we get a more or less happy ending, with Robinson giving a speech before Congress on race relations that makes him sound hopeful for the future and puts him squarely in the gradualist camp of "black people should be model citizens" as opposed to the more more militant "equality by any means" group.

If all of the above sounds like a superficial plot summary, well, that's because the movie itself comes across as fairly superficial, like pretty much most other movies I've seen where the subject is playing himself. Most recently on this blog that was football player Elroy Hirsch in Crazylegs, although it goes back at least as far as Babe Ruth in Headin' Home. Robinson isn't much of an actor, and the rest of the cast was not well served by the material. I read once somewhere that Ruby Dee said she didn't get to meet the real-life Rae Robinson until the last day of shooting, which bothered her since once she met Rae she finally had a good idea of what to bring to the role. Not that it's a very big role that would stretch any actress.

On the whole, The Jackie Robinson Story feels almost like a vanity project, albeit one that's trying to make an important social message. It's an interesting little time capsule, but not a particuarly good film.

A Star Is Born (1954)

A Star Is Born is one of those classic Hollywood tales that's been don a bunch of times: four under that title, and some would argue that the 1932 film What Price Hollywood? is pretty much the same story. I haven't seen the most recent remake with Lady Gaga, although I think I've done posts on the 1930s and 1970s A Star is Born as well as What Price Hollywood? I saw that the 1954 version starring Judy Garland is on tonight at 8:00 PM, so I watched it off my DVR to do a sort of review on it.

Now, I call it a sort of review because this is the sort of film where I'd guess most people already know the story. Esther Blodgett (Judy Garland) is struggling in her career until she's seen by Hollywood star Norman Maine (James Mason) who is painting the town red for the umpteenth time. Maine gets Esther a screen test, and she eventually changes her name to Vicki Lester, becomes a star, and marries Norman. But as Vicki's career rises, Norman drinks more, until the tragic ending.

So, in discussing this version, I think it's a bit better to talk about some of the things that distinguish it from previous versions. The first one is that as the movie opens, Esther is already a singer in a big band, with a maybe-boyfriend in Danny McGuire (Tommy Noonan). Esther having to suffer in the Dakotas during the Depression but with a grandmother with a heart of gold who helps Esther get to Hollywood isn't here at all. (Indeed, the May Robson character is totally written out.) I think that having Esther already have at least a halfway successful career isn't such a good choice. I couldn't help but think of her traveling singer in comparison to the one her real-life daughter Liza Minnelli goes on to play in New York, New York, where it doesn't seem to be that bad a career.

Judy Garland being a singer, there are a lot of musical numbers for her to perform, as that's a talent she definitely had as opposed to Janet Gaynor. Fans of Judy Garland's singing will obviously love the plethora of musical numbers. I have to admit that I'm not the biggest fan of Garland's singing. The songs help push the movie out to a shade under three hours, which includes a few minutes here and there of production stills with the dialogue track. This last conceit, however, is not like the "restored" version of Greed which added on a good 100 minutes of production stills.

On the plus side is the casting of Charles Bickford in the role of studio boss Oliver Niles, a character played by Adolphe Menjou and done reasonably well. Bickford doesn't have quite the elegance that Menjou always did, although I think that for the dark story line that's something that works even better. Bickford has a sort of bitter elder statesman dignity that I don't think Menjou did. Jack Carson gets a beefed-up role as the publicity agent and is good, although there's that one scene where he's gratuitously nasty to Norman Maine. A reading of the 1937 synopsis points out that the scene is in that movie too, although I didn't remember it, probably because the publicity agent there was played by Lionel Stander who is much lower down the status list than Jack Carson was.

Personally, I prefer the 1937 A Star is Born, but I'm sure many people will greatly enjoy tonight's showing of the 1954 version.

For some values of passion

Claude Rains will be TCM's star in Summer Under the Stars coming up in a few hours, and his day concludes with a movie I didn't know about until the last time it ran on TCM a few months back: The Passionate Friends. That airing comes up overnight tonight, or early tomorrow morning depending upon your point of view, at 4:00 AM.

Rains may technically be the star here, at least the male star, as the real leading character is played by Ann Todd. She plays Mary Justin, and as the movie opens it's some years after World War II and she's on her way to a well-deserved vacation at a resort on a lake in the Alps. (The Alps scenes were filmed in France, although the plot synopses have the action taking place in Switzerland.) While lying in bed at the resort waiting for her husband, she hears a voice that sounds very familiar, and she has a flashback....

At the start of 1939, Mary is married to Howard Justin (that's Claude Rains), who does some sort of banker's work which is soon going to take him to Germany and Italy to assess the situation in those two countries with the possibility of war on the horizon. But at a New Year's party, Mary runs into Steven Stratton (Trevor Howard), a science professor. It turns out that they had known each other in the past, before Mary married Howard, and that the relationship ended in a breakup that wasn't really a breakup, something shown in another flashback.

But in 1939 with Howard away on the Continent, Mary and Steven are able to see each other again and resume their relationship, at least until Howard returns. Howard is no dummy, and figures out that something is up, and when Mary and Steven return ostensibly from the theater, Howard knows this is a lie, and forces Mary and Steven to break up their relationship again. He's not going to grant Mary a divorce.

So as we go back to the present day, we learn that it's Steven who's wound up on vacation at the same resort as Mary, who is in a day or two going to be joined by Howard. Mary and Steven haven't seen each other for years, since Mary and Howard spent the war on government business in Washington. And it's just by pure dumb coincidence that the two wound up at the same hotel together. Still, not having met each other in years, they decide to spend the day on an excursion to one of those alpine peaks you can get to by cable car. They're safe, since Howard isn't supposed to show up until tomorrow.

Except, of course, that Howard is able to get an earlier plane, which enables him to get to the resort as Mary and Justin are coming back across the lake by water taxi. If Mary had been with any random stranger, it might not have been a big deal, but it's Steven, again, which really ticks off Howard.

I, and a lot of other viewers, couldn't help but think of Brief Encounter as I was watching The Passionate Friends, as both movies were directed by David Lean. I think I've mentioned before that I'm not the biggest fan of Brief Encounter mostly because I had difficulty sympathizing with the Celia Johnson character. By the same token, I found it hard to feel for Ann Todd's character. But worse is that The Passionate Friends feels like it has an even more muddled plot than Brief Encounter. The leads here all do fine acting jobs, but they're betrayed by that story structure.

Still, The Passionate Friends has that very British quality of seeming like a prestige film on a lower budget than what Hollywood would have done with the material. That, and the fact that I always think you should judge for yourself, are things that make The Passionate Friends worth watching and drawing your own conclusions.