Two by Popeye

I think I mentioned some time back that I started recording the Popeye cartoons that TCM has been running in the Saturday matinee block so that I could have something short to blog about when I had a second post lined up on a day for some reason for another. Recently, I watched a pair of Popeye shorts from 1940, Wimmin Hadn't Oughta Drive and Puttin on the Act.

A couple of things about these two shorts are interesting. One is that Bluto, who had been introduced to the print comic strip back in 1932, does not appear in either short. There's also the fact that the shorts are still in black and white, even though the Fleischer brothers had made full-length shorts in color, so one would guess that they would have the contractual right to use color here. Mae Questel is also not providing the voice of Olive Oyl, this being the period of about half a dozen years where Questel was not involved before coming back.

In Wimmin Hadn't Oughta Drive, Popeye gets a new car and of course wants to show it off to Olive. She wants to learn how to drive, but Popeye, instead of teaching her, basically just lets her take the wheel. This leads to all sorts of predictable consequences, especially when you consider the old stereotype about women drivers. (I suppose back in the earliest days of cars when the engines had to be cranked and people wore goggles and overalls because of the muddy roads and topless cars, women might have less of a desire to drive, but those days were long gone by 1940.) Some of the sight gags work, although I have a feeling most people will find this short even more dated than other Popeye shorts.

Puttin on the Act involves Olive Oyl finding a newspaper headling saying that vaudeville is coming back; as you'll know from my mention of lots of 1930s movies about the performing arts, vaudeville had been dying for years. Apparently in this timeline of the Popeye universe, he and Olive had done a vaudeville double act back in the day. So they decide that they're going to restart it. This again gives the opportunity for sight gags thanks to Olive's rather elastic limbs and Popeye's use of Olive as a baton. But there's also the chance to lampoon other Hollywood types as Popeye does a series of impersonations. Those are the funniest bit of this short.

Both shorts last a shade over six minutes, and thankfully my DVR got the timing on these correct so that neither the beginning nor the ending was cut off.

Note to Eddie Muller: the movie is not called Noir

Eddie Muller, in his Noir Alley wraparounds, mentions from time to time that some of the movies he picks are things that some people will only consider noir-adjacent, if that. I think a good example of a movie he selected but that I would not call noir myself was Suspense.

Barry Sullivan stars as Joe Morgan, a drifter who has moved west from Chicago, leaving behind a girlfriend named Ronnie (Bonita Granville) who is going to show up later to cause trobule. He's got an acquaintance out west who might be able to offer him a job, but that acquaintance says sorry. Perhaps Joe should try the theater across the street; such a big going concern probably always needs a new staff member.

That theater is an ice palace putting on a show with star Roberta Elva (Belita; a former Olympic figure skater in real life). Harry Wheeler (Eugene Pallette) is the assistant manager to theater owner Frank Leonard (Albert Dekker). Unfortunately, the only job available for Joe is in concessions. It doesn't exactly pay well but gives Joe the chance to watch Roberta skate, and she's good-looking enough to turn any man's head. So of course Joe starts lusting after her. The only thing is, she's already married -- and to Frank Leonard of all people. Oops.

So Joe has to come up with some other way to get closer to Roberta. He comes up with an idea when he sees that the box office isn't all that hot because, frankly, the show is getting boring as there's only so much that can be done in such an act. Joe is smart enough to know that there's is more that one can put into an act, and has the idea of coming up not with a ring of fire for Roberta to jump through, but a ring of knives. These will be allegedly sharp knives that are secured to the ring in such a way that Roberta has a small area to jump through. The new act is such a hit that Frank promotes Joe to another assistant position.

Joe continues, rather stupidly, to pursue Roberta, leading Frank to take Roberta off to the mountains while the show is on hiatus. Joe follows along with some papers only Frank can sign, which really ticks Frank off. Frank decides he's going to shoot Joe, but the plan doesn't go to plan. Frank misses, and the loud echo of the gun disturbs the large amount of snow, causing an avalance that kills Frank. But at least with Frank dead Joe and Roberta can marry and live happily ever after.

Yeah right, since the movie isn't anywhere near its running time. In fact, Frank's body is never found, and soon enough, back in Los Angeles, Joe gets the distinct feeling that Frank did not die in the avalanche but is happy enough for everybody to think he's still dead so that he can do whatever to Joe and get away with it, at least until the snow melts and there's no body where there should be one. And wouldn't the authorities have noticed where Frank dug his way out of the snow if it's really him?

Suspense is certainly a good idea for a movie, but the execution here is slightly subpar, I think in part because this was made at Monogram who didn't normally have the highest budgets. Suspense did get a bigger budget than normal, but it still comes across as a movie on a tight budget, with skating scenes feeling like they're padding things out and a surprisingly slow pace. It's not that Suspense is a bad movie so much as it feels like there's something that would make it a much better movie missing.

Missouri loves company

In looking through the offerings on Tubi to see what was available, I came across a movie I had never heard of with a halfway prominent cast and a premise that sounded interesting enough. At the very least, there was one member of the cast who would go on to win an Oscar some years later in the form of Lee Marvin. That movie was The Missouri Traveler.

Unfortunately, the print that Tubi ran had washed-out color and was panned-and-scanned from the original 1.85:1 aspect ratio down to 4:3, since the movie has apparently fallen into the public domain and got lots of video releases in the days before TVs went to 16:9. Brandon De Wilde is the nominal star here, and he too seemed destined to go onto big things before the car accident that killed him at the age of 30. De Wilde plays Biarn Turner, who as the movie opens is walking through rural Missouri circa 1911. He's picked up at the side of the road by Tobias Brown (Lee Marvin), a local farmer with a lot of land. Biarn, it turns out, is an orphan who claims to want to get to Florida, but goes to the town of Delphi instead because there's no marshall to capture him and return him to the reform school or wherever he came from.

In town, Tobias shows himself to be not particularly popular, as he parks his carriage next to the statue of the town's founding father and that brings out seemingly everybody in town, played by a whole bunch of character actors, with a couple of exceptions. One is Doyle Magee (Garry Merrill), who publishes the local newspaper and has a past of his own that we're going to learn about as the movie goes on. The other is local socialite and granddaughter of the town's founder, Anne Price. She's played by Mary Hosford, who didn't go on to become a successful actress but instead married extremely well and became Marylou Whitney, the eventual doyenne of the Saratoga racing scene. These two are going to be somewhat against Tobias for the rest of the movie, and try to give Biarn a better shot at life.

Not that Biarn wants their help that much. He wants to be independent and self-sufficient, and figures that the only way he can do it is to become a farmer, just like Tobias is. However, Biarn doesn't have any money of his own to get a start, or any land. He wants to learn from Tobias, but Tobias isn't exactly going to be generous. At least, not in the way one normally thinks of when one thinks generosity. Tobias is one of those tough people who knows how tough life can be and figures Biarn is going to need to learn that lesson. As an example, one of the running plot points in the movie is how Biarn should always make certain to get everything in writing.

Over a series of episodes, Biarn learns to plow land, is allowed to raise crops on it by Tobias, and then eventually wins the town's hearts over in the run-up to the big finale set on the Fourth of July. The Missouri Traveler is another of those movies where I can see why the people who made it would have wanted to make it. However, it's also another of those movies that comes across as less than the sum of its parts. The movie was distributed by Buena Vista, a company set up by Disney in the early 1950s to distribute live-action movies. As such, the movie comes across very much like a lot of the other Disney family-friendly movies of that era, both for good and bad. Families of today with younger children, especially boys, may still enjoy it. But The Missouri Traveler comes across as awfully saccharine too.

Tarawa Beachhead

TCM did a night of Julie Adams movies some time back. I could have sworn that I recently did a post on one of the other movies that night, although as it turns out that movie is going to be coming up some time later, on the Elvis Presley movie Tickle Me. I've got a different Elvis movie to do a post on since it's coming up on TCM later in the month. In any case, today's post is on a movie I hadn't heard of until TCM ran it the last time: Tarawa Beachhead.

Julie Adams is nominally the female lead here, although she's got a smaller role and doesn't show up until later in the movie since, as you might have guessed from the title, men are the main characters here. The movie opens with the battle for Guadalcanal back in 1942. A platoon of American marines under the command of Lt. Joel Brady (Ray Danton) is storming the island, although they face stiff resistance since the Japanese are hiding in caves on the island. Sgt. Tom Sloan (Kerwin Mathews) thinks a frontal attack on the Japanese is ill-advised, and he's right. When Brady tries just such an attack, the platoon is devastated, with only Brady, Sloan, and one other soldier, Pvt. Campbell, surviving. Worse, Brady shoots Campbell dead, in the back no less, when Campbell runs in horror.

Brady, for obvious reasons, doesn't want news of this to get out, and tries to threaten Sloan not to say anything about it. Back at base, when it's time for the debriefing, Brady tries a different tactic, suggesting that Sloan should be promoted for heroism. Sloan does indeed get promoted and gets sent to a different outfit under a general down in New Zealand away from the action. He doesn't get the chance to tell the truth about what happened, and since he didn't do it immediately, there are going to be questions about it if he does come clean later. But he's still planning on trying to make certain that the truth comes out and Lt. Brady gets what's coming to him.

This is where Julie Adams comes in. Sloan found that Pvt. Campbell had been writing letters to his wife Ruth (that's Julie Adams), and that Ruth lives close to where Sloan is now stationed. So he can go see her in order to deliver the letters, but also to find out more about what's going on in order to get justice for her husband's killing. Ruth lives on a ranch with her sister Paula (Karen Sharpe) and their father. But Sloan has another shock coming to him. Lt. Brady, as part of his duties, went to see the Mrs. Campbell (née Nelson) and the rest of the family to offer his "condolences", not that he's going to tell them the truth about how Campbell died. But Brady took the opportunity to start putting the moves on Paula. This only makes Sloan more determined to take Brady down, and also causes each of them to hate the other even more.

So you can guess what's going to happen next, which is that the two are going to be tasked with going on another mission together, this time on Tarawa atoll hence the title of the movie. The mission might just give Brady the chance to issue orders to Sloan that would lead to Sloan's death. Then again, there's still a Production Code in force....

Tarawa Beachhead is decidedly a B movie, although it's certainly a surprisingly dark idea for such a film. It's not bad, but it is certainly still a B and, as with a lot of these movies, there's a reason why it's not well remembered all these years later.

Briefs for October 28-29, 2025

I used to use Just Watch to look up what's available on what FAST platform, but they no longer seem to search either TubiTV or Pluto. I looked up a movie or two that I know are available on demand on Tubi and/or Pluto (including one I just re-watched last night to do a review of scheduled for next month). That, and the presentation of the reults seems to be much more skewed toward pushing people to various paid streaming services, notably Crunchyroll. Makes me wonder how much of a commission Just Watch is getting for the clicks.

I'm not certain whether I mentioned it in the previous briefs posting, since I've been seriously remiss on doing one of these, but YouTube TV's version of the box guide only seems to be going out about 36 hours into the future, which makes things seriously annoying for trying to schedule what movies to record. I've missed recording a couple of films I was hoping to get, and wouldn't you know it, but two of them weren't available on the Watch TCM app.

Tonight on TCM sees a line-up of "essential" pre-codes, which is in conjunction with another book that they're hawking. To be fair, TCM does have to make money any way it can, not that publishing another book is going to net them a ton. Wednesday night is dedicated to Lee Grant, before the Halloween marathon on Thursday and Friday.

I should have mentioned a couple of obituaries. First up is Samantha Eggar, who died on October 15 at the age of 86. I'll always remember her for Walk, Don't Run, although of course that's not the movie she received her Oscar nomination for; that would be The Collector. I happened to look her up on the TCM schedule, and she's got a couple of movies airing in November, although not together. The Brood shows up overnight between November 17 and 18. The morning and afternoon of that day is given over to David Hemmings, and one of his movies also has Eggar: The Walking Stick. Finally, on Thanksgiving, there's Doctor Doolittle as part of a day of family-friendly movies. I'll be watching the Packers that day while cooking the Thanksgiving turkey, thank you very much.

There's also June Lockhart, who is probably better known for her TV work as the mother in Lassie and also one of the mothers on Lost in Space; she died on October 23 a few months past her 100th birthday. But she was the daughter of Golden Age supporting actor Gene Lockhart, and her mom was also an actress. The Lockharts all appeared together in the 1938 version of A Christmas Carol, which I'm pretty certain is getting at least one airing on TCM in December as part of its Christmas programming. June was in Meet Me in St. Louis, which will also be on the December schedule.

Bedlam

With Halloween coming up, it might be a bit surprising that I haven't done much in the way of horror this month. But a nominal horror movie I recorded some months back is coming up on TCM again in the run-up to Halloween, so I watched it in order to be able to do the post here. That movie is Bedlam, which gets a showing tomorrow (October 28) at 3:30 PM.

It's 1761, which an opening title card informs us is the Age of Reason in Britain. St. Mary Bethlehem, which understandably got shortened to "Bedlam" and is a real place that is indeed the source of the word "bedlam" in modern English, is an insane asylum treating -- for some values of treating, as we'll see later in the movie -- mental patients. One of the patients tries to escape and falls off a roof to his death. At the same time, wealthy Lord Mortimer (Billy House) is driving by the asylum and, seeing the commotion, realizes the dead man is an acquaintance.

Mortimer has a girlfriend Nell (Anna Lee), who hears about this, and is horrified. What she doesn't know is things are a whole lot worse than this. Quaker stonemason Hannay (Richard Fraser) sees the head of the asylum, George Sims (Boris Karloff), about a job, and is offered the job on the understanding that he quote an official price more than what he told Sims he could do it for, with each of them pocketing some of the difference since the money is coming from the government. This sort of graft is a sign that there's more going wrong in the management of the asylum.

And then Nell learns how truly bad things are when Sims brings some of the patients to a party Mortimer is giving and having them provide "entertainment" that is in general degrading and even fatal to one of them. Nell is in attendance and is even more horrified by this, asking Mortimer and fellow politician John Wilkes to do something. The two seem willing to do something, but then Mortimer may be in on the graft too. Sims is no dummy, and starts whispering in Mortimer's ear that the improvements Nell would like would cost Mortimer hundreds of pounds in taxes. This is enough to get Mortimer to say no.

Worse, Mortimer and Sims realize what a danger Nell is to them. So they come up with a fairly ridiculous scheme, which is to have Nell committed involuntarily to the asylum through a committal hearing which seems like it has no real basis in law, although I'm not quite certain what the laws on these things were in early Georgian Britain. Thankfully, Nell had previously run into Hannay at some point, and Quakers have a reputation for wanting to institute the same sorts of social improvements that Nell did even if Nell isn't a Quaker herself. So Hannay tries to get in to see Nell, having to resort to trickery. Nell, for her part, tries to keep her sanity, and tries to find the closest to sane fellow inmates to try to see if she can enlist them in some sort of aid.

The opening credits to Bedlam state that the story is based loosely on that told in The Rake's Progress, a series of paintings by William Hogarth. Indeed, dissolves from one scene to the next use the paintings as a template, giving the movie a stylish appearance for a low budget 1940s horror film. The story is OK if not great, and the acting is certainly good enough. So while Bedlam is not an all-time classic, I think it certainly deserves to be better remembered than it is 80 years on.

Not to be confused with Sayonara

Another one of those movies that shows up on TCM from time to time where I recognized the title, but never watched it, is Cynara. With that in mind, the last time it showed up on TCM I made the point of recording it so that I could watch it and do a post on it here. Eventually, I got around to watching it, writing this post, and scheduling it in the queue of movies to blog about.

The movie opens in Naples, Italy. Jim Warlock (Ronald Colman) is talking to his wife Clemency (Kay Francis), about his desire to get on a boat to South Africa (at the time still part of the British Empire, with the apartheid system still a good 15 years away) since he's badly screwed up his life and relationship with Clemency and needs to leave his native England to put his life back together. But what did he do that's so bad, and why is Clemency seemingly OK with his desire to go to South Africa? As you might guess, we're about to get yet another flashback, as though that's never ever been done in the movies before....

In his native Britain, Jim is a barrister working with his freind John Tring (Henry Stephenson) and married to Clemency coming up on seven years. Theirs is an impossibly happy marriage, and Jim is planning to celebrate their seventh anniversary by buying his wife the sort of jewelry that you only see in the movies that nobody in real life could possibly afford. But when he gets home to give his wife the gift, he finds that things aren't going so well, albeit not through any fault of his or Clemency's. Instead, she's got an idiot sister who chases after men, this time the sort of parachute jumper who might have been a character in the Bette Davis movie Parachute Jumper. Clemency needs to abscond with her sister to get said sister away from this man, and is planning to do so by taking the sister to Venice.

Jim and John are both baching it, so one night they go out to dinner at the sort of restaurant people went to in 1930s movies when they wanted to go slumming, if they were in the class of people who could afford to go slumming. Of course, other patrons are not slumming, like the pair of girlfriends in the next booth, Doris (Phyllis Barry) and Milly (Viva Tattersall). They're sitting in booth next to the one in which Jim and John are sitting, and Doris decides to take Jim's hat on a lark and try it on. So the two pairs are introduced to each other.

Now, as you might guess considering where the movie started, there's going to be a sort of illicit love affair during the time while Clemency is still away in Venice. Jim takes Doris and Milly back to their apartment, where Doris gives Jim their address as well as where they work. Now, Jim should probably have told Doris here that he's already married and that his wife is away for reasons, but he can't be bothered to do that, instead ripping up Doris' address in the taxi. John, for his part, decides to have Jim be the judge in a swimsuit contest where Doris is one of the contestants.

Finally, Jim tells Doris about his wife, but while she claims she can handle it and knows she can never really have Jim, she eventually reacts very badly when Clemency returns from Italy -- by committing suicide. Because of this death under adverse circumstances, there's going to be a coroner's inquest, and the relationship between Doris and Jim is going to come to light. And while it could theoretically be seen as innocent, Jim is a barrister and there is the whole matter of legal ethics....

Cynara is a well-enough made movie, but it's one of those early 1930s movies that, looking back on it 90-plus years on, is badly dated because of how much morals have changed in the intervening 90 years. Colman does a fine job with his role, but for the audiences of 2025, it's a role that we're probably going to find difficult to identify with. Still, for anybody who's a fan of old movies, if Cynara is one you haven't seen before, it's definitely one that's worth watching.

Artists and Models (1955)

Jerry Lewis was honored in TCM's Summer Under the Stars in 2024. I recorded several of the movies, but since YouTube TV's cloud DVR only keeps stuff for nine months, there was a fair bit that I didn't get to before it expired. In the intervening period, TCM ran one of Lewis' films with Dean Martin that wasn't part of the Summer Under the Stars programming and that I hadn't seen before. So I recorded that as well, and recently finally got around to watching that movie: Artists and Models.

Dean Martin is one of the artists. He plays Rick Todd, who is a comic book artist, except that he's not having much success getting jobs. He shares an apartment with best friend Eugene Fullstack (Jerry Lewis). Eugene would like to write children's books, and has a couple of characters, a goose and a field mouse. But he has a thing for comic books, specifically reading The Bat Lady, which I'm surprised passed trademark muster since it's clearly a riff on Batman. The comic books give him nightmares however, and his loud screaming during the nightmares causes everybody in the apartment building except Eugene to have a problem with it.

One night something happens that causes Eugene to go upstairs to the apartment immediately above his, and when he knocks on the door he finds two women. One is another artist, Abby Parker (Dorothy Malone), while the other is a model, Bessie Sparrowbush (Shirley MacLaine). The important thing, however, is that Bessie is modeling for Abby, dressed as... The Bat Lady! Meanwhile, Bessie is into astrology, and has some idea in her head that her horoscope is going to have her falling in love with someone whose description Eugene just happens to fit to a T, even though he has no clue that Bessie out of the Bat Lady getup is the same person he met that night. Abby and Bessie both work for the Murdock publishing company, which isn't too happy with Abby's stories since they're not shocking enough. She quits, and Rick tries to get an in with Murdock since the company needs a new comic book artist.

Meanwhile, Rick tries to get ideas for his comics by listening to Eugene's nightmares, taking down what he says, and then incorporating those ideas into his new comic book series, Vincent the Vulture. Along the way, he and Abby start a relationship of their own although it gets complicated by other women always being around. The comic book sells well, although there's an issue with the violence in it, since there's a growing chorus of parents not wanting their children to be influenced by comic violence. (In real life the Comics Code had been instituted a year before the release of Artists and Models, rendering this a timely issue.)

The bigger problem is that Eugene dreams up a sequence of letters and numbers that just happens to coincide with half of a formula that the US military is using in its attempts to get into outer space and set up space stations (this was two years before Sputnik). How does a comic book artist know this formula, and is the artist releasing it to the Soviets? The bad guys somehow know this is a formula, and send sexy spy Sonia (Eva Gabor) to try to get the other half of the formula, leading to a madcap finale.

There's a fair bit in Artists and Models to like, although it's certainly not a perfect movie. The idea is certainly a good one, but having to fit it into the Martin and Lewis formula certainly presents problems. There are any number of spots where it feels like the movie is stopping for some of Jerry's physical humor that doesn't really advance the plot (the chiropractor scene being an obvious example). There are also musical numbers for Dean's singing, some of which work well although again they don't quite advance the plot. Director Frank Tashlin, who got his start in cartoons, uses visuals effectively. Shirley MacLaine was only in her second movie, and is quite appealing here.

So despite its flaws, Artists and Models is definitely worth watching.

Love Is a Headache

I'm going through the movies that I recorded when Mickey Rooney was TCM's Star of the Month. Next up is a movie made a year or so after the first Andy Hardy movie, but with Rooney still playing a juvenile role, and a supporting one at that: Love Is a Headache.

The male lead here is Franchot Tone, although first we see the female lead, Gladys George. She plays Carlotta Lee, a New York stage actress who, as the movie is opening, is seeing the play she's in closing. And it's not an uncommon occurrence, as the last four plays she's been in have all flopped. Tone plays Peter Lawrence, a gossip columnist who writes for a paper and has a radio show. He knows Carlotta from back in the day, and has always held a torch for her, to the point that he uses his columns to try to advance her career.

One of the problems is that Lee has had a knack for picking scripts that aren't right for her and aren't going to succeed on Broadway, so when Peter writes about them, his comments enrage Lee since she naturally figures he's being mean by writing horrible things about her. He's been known to do the same thing to other actors, without any real interest in advancing their careers. Why would it be any different for Carlotta.

And then the Mickey Rooney subplot takes over. Mickey plays Mike O'Toole, elder brother of Jake (Virginia Weidler). Their mother died a year or so ago, and they've since been raised by a single father who is a window washer. But Dad just died in a tragic accident, news of which reached Peter apparently before the next of kin could be notified. Peter knew Mr. O'Toole, and doesn't want the two kids to wind up in an orphanage where they'll be separated. So Peter uses his radio show to mention the plight of these two children, in the hopes that somebody will adopt them for real.

Carlotta's manager, Jimmy Slattery (Ted Healy in one of his final roles as the movie was released a few weeks after his untimely death), thinks this would be a great PR coup and get Carlotta's name in the papers in a good way which would make it more likely she could get better roles. SO the next morning the two kids are already in Lee's palatial apartment, which seems like it would violate all sorts of norms on the way trying to foster kids would work, but this is a 1930s Hollywood movie. Carlotta may not have a stable job, although she's got a wealthy man, Mr. Odell (Ralph Morgan), pursuing her.

Peter reads the news about Carlotta and the two kids and is pissed, as he wants a real family for the two kids and not a PR stunt. The kids realize, however, that they actually like Carlotta, and the feeling begins to become mutual. Remember, it wasn't her choice to do any of this as a PR stunt. But Peter decides that if Carlotta's agent is going to use the kids for a stunt, then Peter has to do anything he can to make certain Carlotta doesn't get the kids. It all leads up to the requisite happy ending that requires the audience overlook a lot of plot loopholes and threads that remain untied.

But then, Love Is a Headache runs a sprightly 73 minutes. It was never intended as anything more than a programmer, if not a straight-up B movie to keep people like Tone and Rooney in front of moviegoers. It's the sort of material that, 20 years later, would have formed the establishing story for some sort of TV sitcom. In that vein, the material works and is pleasant enough, but will probably not be considered memorable by anybody who watches. Certainly no more memorable than it would have been for audiences of the day.

Maybe boxing biopics should all be named after the boxer being profiled

TCM runs some more recent films during 31 Days of Oscar, which usually gives me the chance to record that more recent stuff that I haven't seen because I don't go to the local sixtyplex that often. Another such movie that I recorded during the 2025 edition of 31 Days of Oscar was The Fighter.

The movie opens up in 1993 in Lowell, MA (the movie was filmed on location there), one of those old mill towns that is in seemingly terminal decline. A camera crew is following Dicky Eklund (Christian Bale), a former boxer who claims to be training for a return to the ring and who is also training his half-brother, Micky Ward (Mark Wahlberg). The reason Dicky's career is in decline is that he turned to crack cocaine. That addiction has also led to a divorce and Dicky not having custody of his child. It's Micky's time to shine, and in addition to being trained by his brother his career is being managed by his mother Alice (Melissa Leo). Mom has decided ideas about the importance of family and how to manage her sons' careers, and woe betide anybody who gets in the way.

Micky, after losing a hastily-arranged fight where he's asked to go up against somebody multiple weight classes above him, isn't certain what he wants to do with his career, so he goes to one of the local bars where he meets waitress Charlene (Amy Adams) and starts a relationship that going to be difficult because she sees what a bad influence his brother and mother are having on him. Meanwhile, Micky has come to the notice of some more legitimate, or at least experienced, boxing types, who are willing to pay Micky to have him train year round. This would necessitate his going to Las Vegas, and no longer having family as his trainer or manager, so you can imagine how that's going to go over with Mom.

Dicky offers to match whatever the other promoters are willing to pay Mickey. But because he has no good way to do so, he turns to illegal means, which get him in all sorts of trouble with the law, even more so when he resists arrest and fights back. And because Dicky has a long arrest record already, he gets sent straight to prison for a substantial term. Micky gets his hand broken in Dicky's arrest. After a period of soul-searching, and while Dicky is still in prison, Micky decides he's going to start training again when his hand heals well enough to fight.

Micky does indeed start training, and with the help of Charlene, gets new management who insist that Mom and brother are not involved. Brother is easy enough since he's in prison, although Mom is going to be a bit more of a problem. Micky's career gets good enough to go up against a serious jump in quality. But of course, Dicky is eventually released from prison having served his sentence, and expects that he's going to be able to return to working with the brother he loves. The Fighter being based on a true story, the movie leads up to Micky's getting a title fight for one of the lesser governing bodies' titles against a British competitor in the UK.

A lot of reviewers made the point about The Fighter, and I think I'd have to agree, that the plot of the movie is one that doesn't really break much new ground, as a lot of the tropes in terms of things you have to deal with to make it to the top show up here, in part because they show up in a lot of people's lives. Or, at least, the lives of those people whose life stories are interesting enough to make a movie about. Oppenheimer had all that difficulty with the government after the war; Glenn Seaborg discovered plutonium and a bunch of heavier elements, but he didn't have an exciting personal life that would make a good movie. The point here is that for a boxing movie like The Fighter to rise above the fray it needs good acting performances. And The Fighter has that from all of its supporting actors especially, even if Mark Wahlberg isn't the greatest actor out there. The location shooting is a big plus as well. Boxing fans also point out that the fights were deliberately filmed using the same technique that HBO (which aired the originals) used and consider this a big plus. I'm not a boxing fan but the fight scenes are definitely different cinematically.

As I implied above, watch The Fighter for the stars' performances, and you'll get a very fine movie in the process.

Sydney Greenstreet is in the army now

Another of the movies that's been sitting on my DVR for a bit that's getting another showing on TCM is Pillow to Post. That next TCM showing is tomorrow, October 23, at 6:00 AM, so as always I made the point of watching it now so that I could schedule this post on the movie in conjunction with the upcoming airing.

The movie was released right at the tail end of World War II, and presumably set a bit since it's based on a play produced in 1943. With the war on, there's a need for men to fight and a consequent shortage of men in regular industry. This hits J.R. Howard (Paul Harvey), who runs a company producing oil rig supplies, which you'd think would be a key industry. Well, maybe so, but the salesmen aren't quite so key, and Howard has lost most of his salesmen. His daughter Jean (Ida Lupino), who for whatever reason hasn't been able to do anything for the war effort -- she says she's even been told the Red Cross doesn't want her blood -- overhears Dad having a talk with one of the draft boards. She suggests that perhaps she could take over the job, even though she's never done this sort of work.

She goes around the country with not much success, until she hears of a possible lead just outside San Diego, Slim Clark (Johnny Mitchell). The job is going to keep her there a couple of days, which is however an issue. When she gets to Travelers' Aid at the train station, she learns once again how there's a war on. And because San Diego is an important port of departure what with Camp Pendleton (not named) and other military installations, there are constantly people traveling in and out of town such that all of the hotels are booked solid and there's no way Jean is getting a place to stay. However, thanks to a misunderstood comment, the woman at the help desk thinks Jean is an Army bride. There's an opening at the Colonial Auto Court, which is for military couples with no children.

Jean, I suppose, could tell a little white lie since she's only going to be there a couple of days maximum. But the manager, Mrs. Wingate (Ruth Donnelly), kind of expects both halves of the couple to sign the register. Jean needs a fake husband, and for whatever reason thinks she needs a lieutenant specifically. On her way back from talking to Clark, who says he needs time to think things over, she flags down a couple of cars looking for a lieutenant who can pretend to be a husband and who can come up with an excuse not to have to stay the night. One car has a colonel, Otley (Sydney Greenstreet, whose shape is a plot point), but eventually she stops Lt. Mallory (William Prince), who goes along with it although it's more because he feels he doesn't have much choice.

And it's unsurprising why Lt. Mallory would be uncomfortable about doing this. Clark wants to take Jean out for the day to discuss the business deal, and all of the other women at the motor court get all the wrong ideas. Never mind that dinner with Clark goes badly enough that it comes to blows between Clark and Mallory. Worse for Mallory is that Col. Otley is staying at the motor court with his wife, and when he hears about Mallory's surprise marriage, he wants to do all the right things in terms of getting paperwork and whatnot done. It will cause substantial discipline problems if it comes to light that Mallory is in fact not married to Jean. And then Mallory's mom and Jean's dad both learn about the sudden marriage and show up for the climax.

Now, since this is a wartime movie and a decided comedy, you know that it's going to have to have a happy ending; Lt. Mallory ending up in prison just isn't going to do. So how are they going to resolve the plot problems? You'll just have to watch Pillow to Post to find out.

To be honest, Pillow to Post isn't quite my favorite, I think for several reasons. One is the fact that the plot is going to have to get itself into contortions to resolve things. Another is that it's another of those movies where a little white lie snowballs into bigger lies, and as I've said a lot, that's a type of movie I don't generally care for. There's also the supporting characters, with several quirky subplots that are just too quirky for the good of the movie. Those plot issues serve to make it feel like everybody's trying just a bit too hard. It's not so much that Pillow to Post is bad; it's more that it's another of those movies that could have been better than the finished product is.

For some values of sin

Tomorrow, October 22, is the birthday of actress Constance Bennett, but I already have a post planned for tomorrow for a movie that's airing early in the morning of October 23, so my Bennett mention is coming a day before her birthday. And, it's not as if TCM is doing anything for Bennett's birthday this year since they're running a bunch of horror stuff. But I had a movie on my DVR starring Bennett, and saw that I hadn't done a post on it before, so I watched it, wrote up, and scheduled this review. That movie is Sin Takes a Holiday.

Constance Bennett stars as Sylvia Brenner, who ekes out a living as a secretary to upper-crust divorce lawyer Gaylord Stanton (Kenneth MacKenna). As such, she sees all the ways wealthy women try to obtain divorces but have trouble doing it since no-fault divorce was not a thing back in the day. The low income also forces Sylvia to live with roommates, which isn't really that germane to the plot beyond highlighting Sylvia's economic circumstances and allowing us to mention ZaSu Pitts' presence in the cast as Sylvia's roommate.

Sylvia has a flame for Gaylord, not that she could talk about it, and not that he has the same feelings. Gaylord isn't a jerk; he just sees Sylvia as a co-worker and at best a friend. After all, he is her boss. Gaylord prefers dalliances with married women, largely because he's not ready to marry and knows how they can't really get a divorce quickly so the relationship can never progress too far, which is how he likes things. That is, until one such married woman, Grace (Rita LaRoy), decides that she's planning to get a divorce from her husband so that she can marry Gaylord.

Poor Gaylord is in a quandary, so he offers a proposal to Sylvia. One is that it is in fact a marriage proposal. But the other point is that it's a business proposition. Sylvia should enter into a sham marriage with Gaylord, with the agreement that they can get a divorce in a year. Gaylord will even provide Sylvia with the money to live abroad for a year. What Gaylord gets is the ability to tell Grace that he's already got a wife, and the evidence to prove that he's not lying about it. Sylvia accepts, and promptly sets off for Paris.

On the boat there, she meets one of Gaylord's acquaintances, Reggie Durant (Basil Rathbone), who is a decided bachelor who avoids relationships in New York but not in Europe. So he decides to help Sylvia out, falling in love with her even though she's technically married. But then the agreement is that she only has to be married to Gaylord for a year. This, even though she should know that it might not be so easy to get a divorce once that year is up since she and Gaylord will need to show cause. Eventually, Sylvia decides to go back to New York to have it out with Gaylord so that the two can decide their futures.

Sin Takes a Holiday is one of those early talkies (this one was released in late 1930) that show a decidedly different set of social mores than what we have nowadays, and for that, it's interesting. But it's also the sort of material that's going to be a bit difficult for people who aren't big fans of old movies already, largely because trying to understand people's character motivations within the confines of those social mores can sometimes seem baffling. Sin Takes a Holiday also doesn't sparkle the way that some comedies dealing with upper-crust divorce from that era did. In short, Sin Takes a Holiday is another of those movies where nobody involved should have felt embarrassed about having been involved with it, but where it's also obvious why it's not well-remembered almost a century on.

Technically, there is a dance

Quite some time back now TCM ran a spotlight on actors before they became stars. One of the films they selected was the sort of 1980s film that I remember coming out in theaters but never got the chance to see back in the day because I was much too young for it. That movie is Taps, which helped launch the careers of Tom Cruise and Sean Penn.

Bunker Hill Military Academy is one of those venerable old private schools that uses military theory and education to mold young boys into men and prepare them to become the next class of officers in the American military. Harlan Bache (George C. Scott) is the school's commander general, leading a non-denominational military service to close out the academic year and name the end-of-the-alphabet alumni who gave their lives on the field of battle in wars of the past.

That evening, Bache meets with Brian Moreland (Timothy Hutton, who at the time was the star among the young cast members) to inform Moreland that he's going to be the school's Cadet Major the following year, which is basically the highest-ranking position any of the students can hold. Moreland returns to his dorm to his two best friends and seconds-in-command, Cadet Captain Dwyer (Sean Penn) and Cadet Captain Shawn (Tom Cruise), as well as to get ready to help run the school's summer programs and prepare formation for commencement the following day.

At commencement, Bache has a shocking announcement: the trustees of Bunker Hill have decided to sell the land and buildings that comprise the school to developers. But because everybody who's enrolled for the following year isn't going to be able to get a place in a different school at this late date, the trustees have generously allowed the school to remain open one more year, which will also allow seniors like Moreland, Dwyer, and Shawn to graduate. All of the students as well as Bache are none too pleased with this, but any protestations they make are going to fall on deaf ears.

Later that evening is the commencement dance, with Bache in the cadets all in full dress uniform. News of the school's impending closure has reached locals who apparently don't think about whether having this school here has economic benefits simply having more residential space might not. I'm guessing there have been other long-standing animosities between town and gown as it would be called with a traditional college, as some of the local boys of the same age as the cadets show up to taunt the cadets as everybody is coming to the dance. A scuffle ensues, and as Bache is trying to break things up, somebody goes for his gun, which is loaded and which goes off, seriously injuring one of the locals. In reaction to this and all the stress he's been under, Bache suffers a heart attack and is taken to hospital.

Cadet Major Moreland more or less sees himself as the highest ranking person around campus now, since there doesn't seem to have been any succession plan in place for Bache -- not that there needed to be since the school was going to be shut down after one more year. But Moreland comes up with the daring plan of occupying the school in order to get the trustees to listen to the cadets' message and possibly change their decision to sell off the school. Likely the contracts have already been signed so it's a fait accompli, but the cadets understandably would have overlooked that.

What happens is a standoff. The authorities could easily shut off water and electric and drive the students out in a day or two, but they'd like to do things more peacefully, because even Moreland is a kid who may at most only recently have reached the age of majority. Some of the younger cadets think of it at first as a jolly old game of war like the kids in No Greater Glory, while others only refuse to give up because they feel they're acting on orders and it would be desertion to give up. Moreland tries to act like a seasoned leader and use mature military tactics to keep the occupation going, but as time goes on a lot of kids do want to give up. Others, like Cadet Shawn, grow more radical.

I've read reviews from people who actually attended military schools that there's a lot about Taps that's fairly unrealistic. That's a fair criticism. However, I think that at heart Taps isn't really a military movie, but one that uses a military school to set up a character study. After all, there's a fair bit less action than you would expect from a real war movie. As a character study, and exploring themes like honor and duty, Taps works fairly well, thanks to good performances from the young stars. George C. Scott doesn't have quite as much to do, since he's out of the movie a third of the way in.

Taps isn't perfect by any means, but it's still a decidedly watchable movie.

Elisa, My Love

I've mentioned several times in the past how I have a backlog of foreign-language movies on my DVR that I need to watch before they expire. With that in mind, I watched one that I hadn't heard of before its last showing on TCM: Elisa, vida mía, and wrote up a quick post to queue for some time in the future. That time is obviously now.

Geraldine Chaplin, who at the time of making this movie was the partner of its director Carlos Saura, plays Elisa Santamaria, one of two daughters of elderly writer Luis (Fernando Rey). As the movie opens, Elisa's sister Isabel and her husband and kids are driving down from Madrid to see Dad for his birthday, with Elisa already being there and a narration from Elisa's point of view being read out in Luis' voice. Apparently Elisa's marriage isn't a happy one, so when she heard that Dad was sick after having had an operation, she figures it's a good time to get away from her husband Antonio for a while.

At this point in the movie, Dad is looking surprisingly well, able to bike into whatever little village he lives closest to in order to pick up bread for dinner. And it's a relatively happy dinner, with the kids being happy to see their grandfather and the adults talking about old times. Isabel's husband is a lawyer working on an important case, so he has to get back to Madrid, leaving Elisa and Luis alone and giving Elisa a chance to talk about things with her father and maybe get some advice.

I say maybe because things start switching back and forth between the present and the past. There's a scene of Dad taking Elisa to be part of a drama class he's teaching to elementary school girls; another scene where Dad admits to not loving Mom and hoping that she had actually died when some assailant stabbed her; and Elisa talking about finding out that her husband Antonio was having an affair with her best friend back in Madrid, which is why she wanted to get away from Antonio for a while.

And then things get really weird. The same narration that we have at the beginning is re-read, only this time the action is set in Madrid in the apartment that Mom kept once she and Dad split. Antonio shows up in the village and tries to get Elisa to come back to him, only to find out that there's no way this is happening. So Antonio suddenly shows up again and, well, what happens in that scene is something I'm not going to mention. And then we get the opening narration read a third time.

Now, I read one review which argues that the scenes in Elisa, vida mía are actually supposed to represent scenes from the book that Luis is working on, which the possible message as well that time is not linear. Maybe that's the case, although if you ask me the movie starts making less and less sense as it goes along. Then again, I've always argued here that I'm not the biggest fan of art-house stuff, and even more so of the idea of how there's a certain type of movie buff that seems to go gaga over foreign films precisely because they're art-house material. (If that weren't the case, why is the vast majority of what Americans get in the way of foreign films, at least before the last few decades, decidedly not the sort of stuff that was made for the domestic market?) Elisa, vida mía is decidedly that way, and worse, it runs a good half-hour too long at close to 130 minutes.

If I wanted to introduce people to foreign films, Elisa, vida mía is decidedly not the one I'd pick. But as always, watch and judge for yourself.

The part of Lassie is now being played by Laddie

One of the movie genres that I haven't done many posts on are animal movies. I'm not certain how many Lassie movies MGM put out in the 1940s, but I think the first one I did a post on was The Sun Comes Out and that was only early in 2025. In any case, when Son of Lassie aired on TCM, I recorded it and finally got around to watching it to be able to do this post.

Son of Lassie is, apparently, my not having paid attention to the first movie, based on the same characters as in the first movie, although not all played by the same actors. Nigel Bruce plays the Duke of Radling, a wealthy landowner in England who does his part for the war effort by giving over some of his hunting dogs to the British military to be trained for war purposes. Those dogs have been raised and trained by Sam Carraclough (Donald Crisp), whose son Joe (Peter Lawford) is in the British military, although currently back home on a few days' leave.

This gives Joe time to spend with his favorite dog, Lassie's son Laddie, who is unfortunately completely ill-suited to doing any sort of hunting work and certainly not for any military duty. In fact, Laddie completely screws things up around the estate unlike Lassie, except that one of Laddie's escapades brings Joe in contact with the Duke's granddaughter Priscilla (June Lockhart). Despite the class differences, Priscilla and Joe like each other.

Joe goes back to the military base where he's stationed doing flight duty, and Laddie is such a blankety-blank that he follows Joe all the way to the base, which is a good 30 or 40 miles away. You'd think this alone would have gotten Laddie killed in a road accident or a scrape with a wild animal, but since this is a feel-good movie of course that's not going to happen. Worse for Joe is that the dog gets out on the runway which you'd really think would be dangerous and would result in Laddie getting put down, but again, Hollywood.

The final straw is that Laddie somehow gets into the cockpit of a plane where Joe is the co-pilot on a reconnaissance mission over Norway which, as you'll recall, was occupied by the Nazis at the time. The plane gets shot down, and Joe has to bail out, Laddie in his arms, as he parachutes to the ground somewhere in the fjords of a Norwegian village.

Now, Laddie turns out to be bright, but it isn't to be expected that he already knows the difference between a British military uniform or a Nazi uniform. So when he tries to bark for help, he winds up barking at the Nazis. At this point of the movie, the Nazis aren't yet stupid so they follow the dog and get the impression that somebody unauthorized has been here. The rest of the movie is Joe trying to stay one step ahead of the Nazis, Laddie trying to find Joe, and the mostly good people of Norway, especially a bunch of movie kids, trying to help out as best they can.

On reading about Son of Lassie, I noticed that it didn't get as good reviews as the first movie, which frankly doesn't surprise me. Son of Lassie is mawkish and full of just-so coincidences to keep Joe and the dog safe, most of which would never have happened in real life. But the movie was released late in World War II, when audiences on the homefront wanted stuff that would make them feel good. I think Son of Lassie would have done that in 1945, even if it might seem eyeroll-inducing to audiences of 2025.

The Spiritualist

Another of the movies that's on my DVR that is getting another airing on TCM is The Amazing Mr. X. At least, that's the title on the print TCM ran the last time and how it showed up on the YouTube TV guide; the current TCM guide lists it as The Spiritualist with a mention in the synopsis that it's also known as The Amazing Mr. X. In any case, the next airing is tomorrow, Oct. 18, at 6:45 AM.

Lynn Bari plays Christine Faber, who lives in one of those ridiculous gothic beach houses situated practically on a cliff with a long ladder down to the beach. She's been widowed from Paul for two years and has a boyfriend Martin (Richard Carlson) who is planning on proposing to her. Her kid sister Janet (Cathy O'Donnell), who still lives with her, really thinks Christine should say yes to Martin. But Christine isn't so certain, in part because she keeps thinking she hears Paul's voice.

That voice gets Christine so nervous that she starts running haphazardly along the beach, as one does. On the beach, she runs into a man calling himself Alexis (Turhan Bey), no last name because that would be so gauche. And besides, having a last name would reveal Alexis' past that he'd like to keep secret. That's because he styles himself a spiritualist, which any normal person would realize means a phony. Now, for some people, it might be OK just to have somebody to talk to and keep loneliness at bay, even if you have to pay for that privilege. But there are too many grifters who would take advantage of that, and Alexis is one of them, as we see from the tricks he uses to learn about his marks.

Indeed, Janet and Martin are no dummies. They suspect Alexis, so turn to a detective named Hoffman who is an expert in this sort of thing. He proposes that Janet set up an appointment with Alexis, at which point the plot turns nuts. Janet apparently is a dummy, as this one meeting with Alexis suddenly turns her into a true believer. Alexis is of course a grifter who served time in jail back in Chicago, and knows full well that Janet is trying to get the goods on him. But that's only the half of how the plot turns absolutely bonkers.

Alexis holds a séance for Christine and Janet where he plans to summon the spirit of Paul, which is as we all know a complete phony. Except that at the end of the séance we learn that Paul is in fact still alive, and has a habit of getting rich women to marry him and him faking his death and absconding with at least some of the women's estates. He did it to another woman in Las Vegas before doing it to Christine, and now he's back with a plan to kill Christine and get at the rest of her estate. I told you things turn crazy.

So despite the absurd unreality of The Amazing Mr. X, it's actually one that's quite entertaining. Just don't think to hard about the plot or the stupid character motivations of people in the movie, especially Janet. The airing I recorded on TCM does not have Eddie Muller, although I could easily see him picking this movie for Noir Alley with a justification for why it's noir-adjacent even if it's not really noir.

The Amazing Mr. X is a movie I hadn't heard of before the previous TCM showing, but I'm glad I was able to see it.

For the love of God, stop calling us Boys Town!

Actor Darryl Hickman died in 2024 and was one of those people honored in TCM's end of the year night of movies of people who died during the year without getting a more traditional programming tribute. The film they picked for Hickman was one I hadn't seen before, Fighting Father Dunne.

The movie opens up yet again with an establishing scene leading to a flashback. Well, not quite, as even before that there's explanatory information about how good the boys who deliver newspapers today (1948) have it compared to the boys who stood on the street corner hawking papers back in the day. Responsible for that was, in part, Father Dunne. Only then do we go to the settlement house Dunne ran, which is portrayed as having two footprints on the front step, and a man who as a boy had lived in the settlement house wanting that bit of concrete saved as the building is undergoing renovations. Cue the flashback to why this man might want those footprints....

We flash back to St. Louis in 1905. Selling newspapers in those days is portrayed as being like On the Waterfront, where you have to muscle your way to the front to get newspapers to sell, and other people will try to stop you by force if necessary. Worse is that a circulation war is going on, leading to more violence. One cold winter's day, a couple of the boys seek out the help of Fr. Dunne (Pat O'Brien). The two boys and their friend are living in what looks like a cardboard crate in back of the stables. The friend has gotten sick so can't sell newspapers and the other two don't know what to do.

Fr. Dunne visits the sick kid and is unsurprisingly horrified by what he sees. So he takes the three kids back to the rectory and makes certain they get a hot meal and a place to stay for the night, even though he doesn't have much money. You'd think he could trot these kids out at his next Sunday Mass and get his parishioners to fill the collection with money or goods to help look after these kids. But as it is, Dunne has to make do with his sister Kate (Ruth Donnelly) who is the rectory housekeeper and her husband Emmett (Charles Kemper) with what he can bring in.

The kids continue to sell papers when they can, while Fr. Dunne is eventually able to find an empty place for the kids. Not that he can afford the rent on it. But he's got a charismatic personality, so he's able to use that to convince everybody he meets to contribute to his cause in one way or another, most notably wealthy Mr. O'Donnell (Arthur Shields, sounding mighty like Barry Fitzgerald since he was in real life Barry's kid brother) or Miss O'Rourke (Una O'Connor) who lives across the way from the first settlement house and becomes a sort of house mother since she's got time for it.

Hickman comes in later as Matt Davis. Matt is one of a trio of kids who steal a pony and cart from Mr. O'Donnell. The other two get caught by the police while Matt is able to escape. Fr. Dunne brings the other two back to the settlement house, and when Matt sees that they've got a much cushier life now, he decides to break his way into. Part of the point of the house is to try to reform the kids since they have to turn to petty crime just to survive. Matt eventually graduates and acts like he's been reformed and is making a good enough living, but that's just a lie, as he's turned to a life of crime that turns tragic when he shoots a cop.

It's no wonder that I and a bunch of the reviewers I read compare Fighting Father Dunne to Boys Town. The movie isn't terrible, but it certainly feels derivative and predictable since we all know where Boys Town went. Pat O'Brien and the supporting cast all do a professional job with the material they're give. But there's a reason Fighting Father Dunne isn't well remembered today, which is because it doesn't quite stack up to Boys Town.

Who knew Danesploitation was a genre?

In the "yet another of those 1980s films I was too young to have seen in the theater growing up" series, some months back TCM surprisingly ran Red Sonja. To be fair, it was part of a night on movies based on pulp-fiction sci-fi and fantasy novels, and the movie is 40 years old now. In any case, I recorded it and recently got around to watching it.

A group of priestesses is doing a ritual involing the Talisman, a glowing green orb that only woman can touch and that mostly has to be kept in darkness lest its horrendous power destroy the world. While only women may touch it (we see it kill a man who touches it), it's the menfolk, or at least those in the lineage of Lord Kalidor (Arnold Schwarzenegger) who have the duty of making certain that the power of the Talisman does not destroy the world, with the capacity to destroy the Talisman if necessary to prevent its power from being used from serious harm. Kalidor is, in fact, on his way to the current rites since there are serious plans afoot to destroy the Talisman since its power is getting too great for mere mortals to handle.

Unfortunately, he doesn't make it on time, being beaten by Queen Gedren (Sandahl Bergman) and her forces. They murder the priestesses while Gedren takes the Talisman with her to her castle at Berkubane. There, Gedren puts the Talisman in a room of lights specifically so that the Talisman will grow in power that Gedren believes she will be able to control. In fact, she won't, and in two weeks' time its power will be sufficient to destory the world. In one bit of bright news, Gedren's soldiers didn't succeed in killing all of the priestesses. One of them, Varna, escapes, running into Kalidor before dying of the arrow wound she received trying to escape.

Varna is the sister of Princess Sonja (Brigitte Nielsen), known as Red Sonja for her flaming red hair, and Varna wants Kalidor to find Sonja and warn her that the Talisman has been stolen. After all, it's going to take both men and women to deal with the Talisman since only women may touch the thing. Sonja is currently taking swordsmanship lessons from the Grandmaster, and he's the only man Sonja trusts. She thinks all other men are evil, and she's going to show them what a badass she is. So when Kalidor finds her and tells her about the talisman, she sets off by herself, ignoring the fact that in the real world men have much more physical strength than women (sorry, ladies) and would be able to dispatch Sonja easily if they weren't portrayed as preternaturally stupid.

Well, not just stupid, but fat or obnoxiously hubristic. Along the way to Berkubane, Sonja goes through the kingdom of Hablock, where the child king Tarn, who is a spoiled brat, refused to surrender. He and is court jester Falkon are the only two who survived, and they follow Sonja, providing help at key points along the way. It's a journey of redemption for the two of them two. Eventually, Kalidor finds Sonja again and the four make their way to Gedren's palace to try to find the Talisman before Gedren can kill them all.

Red Sonja was savaged by the critics, and it's easy to see why. The acting is terrible, as is the dialogue. The girl-boss trope is unrealistic, but as with blaxploitation icon Pam Greer, people watch the girl-bosses for the vicarious thrills and the skimpy outfits that show off the women's fit figures to good effect. (Sorry, but I don't think very many people want to see Misery-era Kathy Bates as a girl-boss.) But all the things that make Red Sonja a critical failure combine to make the movie a cult classic, and there's a reason why it's remembered well enough that somebody came up with the brilliant idea to do a remake that got a limited release earlier this year.

The Witness Chair

Another movie that I forgot to record when it was on TCM some time back and watched off of the Watch TCM app before it expired is The Witness Chair. With that in mind, I immediately wrote up this review to be able to post at some time in the future.

The movie opens up in one of those big New York office buildings that were another staple of movies of the 1930s. Leaving a company called the Whittaker Textile Co. is secretary Paula Young (Ann Harding), who makes a point of not getting on the elevator. When she walks down the stairs to the second floor, she then calls the elevator, which comes up and leaves an elevator operator to find an empty floor while she walks out the building. All of this implies that she's done something wrong.

Paula takes a taxi home, and not long after she gets home, there's a knock on her door. It's Connie Trent (Frances Sage), happens to be the daughter of the Whittaker company's sales manager, Mr. Trent (Walter Abel). Connie has a suitcase in hand, as she's just been left at the pier by none other than Mr. Whittaker. It seems as though young Connie had been planning to elope with Mr. Whittaker, which is something Connie's father wouldn't approve of. Paula doesn't particularly think it's a good idea either.

Cut to the morning, and the cleaning lady finds that the door to Mr. Whittaker's private office is locked, which is unusual, since only the front door to the businesses are locked normally. When the super unlocks the door for the maid, she finds... a dead body! It's Mr Whittaker, lying down on the floor next to his desk, gun in hand. There's also a note on the desk signed by Whittaker that says that Mr. Trent is not responsible for the $75,000 that was embezzled from the company.

But the police who come to investigate quickly figure out that there are way too many things wrong with the case for it to be a suicide: why would Whittaker go to the side of his desk, turn the light off, and lock the door before killing himself? And how could he wipe the gun of prints after he killed himself. The police interview the various people who work at the Whittaker company, and when it's figured out that the gun had belonged to Mr. Trent, he's the obvious suspect. He's put on trial, and the rest of the case is the trial, although various characters' testimony is replayed through the form of flashbacks.

So why, then, was Paula furtively descending the stairs at the start of the movie? Well, that, combined with the fact that there's a Production Code, should give you a few clues as to how the climax of the movie is going to go, if not the denouement. It's all handled in a shade over an hour, however.

The Witness Chair is another of those movies that, a couple of decades later, would have had the plot slightly reworked to fit within the confines of episodic TV. Something like, say Perry Mason, although in that case not so many clues would have been given early on as to what really happened. The Witness Chair isn't a terrible movie, helped by the performance of Harding and the rest of the cast which is mostly character actors. But it's strictly B material, something that back in the mid 1930s audiences would have gone to see, enjoyed well enough, and forgotten about before the following week's B movie came to theaters. Fans of 1930s films will certainly enjoy it, but it's another of those movies that wouldn't come to mind for recommending to people who aren't already movie buffs.

Without Lying Down

Tonight's lineup on TCM is a series of movies about musical groups. However, the night ends a bit early before the start of tomorrow morning's programming block. They've got 75 minutes to kill, and are doing so with a documentary that first showed up on TCM 25 years ago: Without Lying Down: Frances Marion and the Power of Women in Hollywood, airing early tomorrow (Oct. 14) at 4:45 AM.

Frances Marion was a screenwriter in the early days of Hollywood, when it was not uncommon for women to take on roles that they wouldn't do so much of one the Production Code came into being and the studio system really became an assembly line. Quite a few women worked as directors, with Marion herself directing a few, and women were active in screenwriting to an extent they weren't after about 1935. But Marion was probably the best at it based on the output and quality of her work. This documentary isn't quite a biography, but more of a sketch of her career and a discussion of women in early Hollywood.

Marion grew up in San Francisco, and was 17 at the time of that famous earthquake. In some ways, that turned out to be a blessing in disguise for her. With her family suddenly in a bad financial situation, Frances had to go out and earn a living, which she did in various arts-related ways, such as creating posters for stage plays. At some point, she decamped to Los Angeles and its nascent movie industry.

Fame, or at least a reputation as someone who could do an excellent job screenwriting, came when she was asked to handle the screenplay for the Mary Pickford movie Poor Little Rich Girl, and Marion was one of the top screenwriters for the next 20 years, eventually moving to MGM and working closely with Irving Thalberg until his untimely death, which was a disaster for Marion professionally. TCM did a documentary on Thalberg quite a few years back which included a discussion on how Thalberg trusted Marion's judgment, specifically on a movie like The Champ which does not have the traditional Hollywood happy ending. But along the way, Marion wrote some outstanding screenplays, picking up two Oscars.

Uma Thurman does the narration, with Kathy Bates providing the voice of Marion when the documentary is quoting letters or other writings of Marion's. It's an interesting enough look at early Hollywood, although some of the reviews have mentioned that it's decidedly incomplete as a look at Marion's life. There's some mention of husband Fred Thomson, but the documentary doesn't mention any of Marion's other marriages. There's also the requisite "OMG, Hollywood did so much to minimize women's contribution" vibe as well. Yeah, we get it already.

Still, Without Lying Down is a good introduction for anybody who hasn't watched a bunch of other documentaries about early Hollywood and definitely worth one watch.

The Road to Ruin

Another of TCM's programming themes was a slightly more esoteric one of movies that had memorable party scenes. One that I hadn't heard of was an exploitation film from the 1930s, The Road to Ruin. Since it sounded interesting, I decided I'd record it, and eventually got around to watching it.

Helen Foster plays Ann Dixon, a "good" girl who lives in what looks like a middle-class area of Southern California and goes to high school where one of the boys, Tommy (Glen Boles) is interested in her. Ann has a friend in the form of Eve, although Ann doesn't want to bring all of her friends home in one go. One night, both of Eve's parents are out, so Eve invites Ann over and Ann's mom says yes because Mom can fend for herself and having the two teens together is better than having one home alone. Eve uses this as an excuse to introduce Ann to mixed drink and bodice-rippers. The horror.

Since this is an exploitation movie, such vices immediately begin to destroy poor Ann's morals. Tommy's got a jalopy, so he, Ann, Eve, and Eve's boyfriend start going off after school to secluded lovers' lane type places where it's intimated that Ann loses her virginity to Tommy although this is oblique since it's still a 1934 film. Less oblique is the way Ann starts spending her evenings, going out with Tommy, Eve, and Eve's boyfriend to roadhouses where they can drink up a storm.

One night Tommy gets drunk enough that he starts foolishly challenging the staff, which is bound to get him in trouble because management doesn't want rowdies here. Another of the patrons sees Ann's discomfiture. That is the much older Ralph (Paul Page), who is experienced enough and rich enough to show Ann a good time and leave her with the impression that she's getting something sophisticated. She's also getting a man who can hold his liquor, I suppose, which also makes him better than dumb Tommy.

Of course, being with an older man spells trouble since we have to have a moral lesson. Ann and Ralph start doing wilder and wilder things, until a party where everyone drinks, plays strip craps, and then goes into the communal swimming pool in just their undies. One of the neighbors calls in the police on a noise complaint, which is how Ann and Eve get taken down to the police station. The matron in charge has each of them given a physical, at which point poor Ann discovers she's gotten pregnant. Ralph doesn't want the baby, and that's going to lead to disaster of a sort you can probably guess.

Looking at the movie 90 years on, The Road to Ruin is surprisingly tame, although I'm guessing this is probably about as far as they could go. Censors in various states required all sorts of edits, and we get the message of how just one drink ruins poor Ann, but really, a movie from today would be much more explicit. The Road to Ruin is a museum piece-type curiosity, but it's not a particularly great movie.

Diane Keaton, 1946-2025

Diane Keaton (l.) and Woody Allen in Annie Hall (1977)

Diane Keaton, who won an Academy Award for playing the title role in the Woody Allen movie Annie Hall, died yesterday at the age of 79.

Keaton's career started on stage before heading back to Hollywood around 1970. She got a big break in The Godfather, along with being cast by Woody Allen in Sleepers, which lead to her being cast in a string of movies that Allen directed, notably Annie Hall in 1977 that won her the Oscar. It's not quite my favorite movie since I don't particularly care for the "neurotic" era of Woody Allen's filmmaking. Other Allen films with Keaton include Interiors, his homage to Ingmar Bergman, and a smaller role in Radio Days, which I much prefer.

Keaton's career continued more or less for the rest of her life, although I don't know that after about The First Wives Club which was almost 30 years ago that the movies are quite as memorable. Sadly, that's something that seems to happen to a lot of stars as they get older. In Keaton's case I can't help but think that the sort of smaller movie not marketed to a younger audience, a market segment which has become rather less prominent over the years, might have something to do with it.

Unsurprisingly, I haven't seen anything from TCM about when they're going to do a programming salute since it usually takes them a little while to come up with one and it's the weekend.

We're not quite in the money

Another of those classic movies that TCM shows often enough because it's part of the old Turner library, but that I'd never actually seen before, is Gold Diggers of 1935. So, the last time it showed up on TCM I made the point of recording it so that I could do a post on it eventually.

The movie opens up with a ridiculous number of staff members making final preparations for what seems to be the grand opening of a new hotel, except that it's not new but only open for the summer which is why you wonder how it can support such a large staff. Among the staff are desk clerk Dick Curtis (Dick Powell), who is taking on this summer job in his years between college, as he's really hoping to complete his studies to become a doctor and marry his girlfriend Arline (Dorothy Dare).

Coming to the resort are the ultra-wealthy who have decamped from New York or Boston, one supposes, since this is mentioned as being New Hampshire. One such family is the Prentiss family, led by a matriarch widow (Alice Brady) with two adult children: Humbolt (Frank McHugh) and Ann (Gloria Stuart). Humbolt is a playboy who has already been through four wives and cost Mom a ton of money to get out of the marriages as a result. Ann is set to be married to T. Mosley Thorpe (Hugh Herbert), which is in many ways more of a marriage of convenience since Thorpe is even more fabulously wealthy than the Prentiss family. Ann certainly doesn't seem thrilled with the idea of this marriage.

And then we see why. Thorpe will also be spending the summer at this resort, working on his book, a monograph on snuff boxes. He has the hotel send up a secretary to take dictation, getting sent young Betty (Glenda Farrell) who falls for him and also sees dollar signs. You can already guess how part of the romantic conflict is going to be solved. The other half comes when Mrs. Prentiss hires Dick as a chaperone for Ann. Those two fall in love, which seems a bit mean to Arline but things are going to turn out OK for her in the end too.

Mrs. Prentiss is asked to put on a charity show, something the family has apparently been asked to do every year, and it's at this point that we learn that she's no longer as fabulously wealthy as she used to be, thanks to the Depression cutting the dividends her late husband's business interests yield. Stage producer Nicoleff (Adolphe Menjou) shows up; he's heavily in debt and gets the idea of taking Prentiss for as much as he can while putting on that show. The show is, of course, the big excuse for all the musical numbers the movie has around the wafer-thin plot, with the highlight musical number being "The Lullaby of Broadway".

The plot of Gold Diggers of 1935 is even sillier than some of the previous musicals Dick Powell had made, although again one doesn't watch a Busby Berkeley musical for the scintillating plots. Hugh Herbert is playing such a drip that it's only logical the only thing anybody really sees in him is his money. Dick Powell is appealing, although he doesn't have much to do. It's no wonder he wanted to do a movie like Murder, My Sweet so that he could be considered a more "serious" actor.

Having finally seen Gold Diggers of 1935, I understand why it's not as well known as its predecessor Gold Diggers of 1933. It's watchable, and the "Lullabye of Broadway" number is worth the price of admission, but it's not an all-time great either.

The dominator of the seven seas

Sometimes, TCM runs a bunch of movies that have nothing thematically in common other than using a certain word in the title. One example from some months back was a day of films with the number "seven" in the title; this gave me the chance to record at least one version of Seven Keys to Baldpate as well as a completely new to me movie, Seven Seas to Calais.

The movie opens in 1577 in a port city. A man is looking for Francis Drake (Rod Taylor), but it's dangerous business as the man has a map that other people want, and for obvious reasons. The map has the locations of places on the Pacific coast of the Americas where the Spanish have supposedly gone ashore to mine for gold and silver. This is important for geopolitical reasons: England is militantly Protestant under Queen Elizabeth I (Irene Worth), while Spain is one of the guardians of the Catholic faith and has been agitating Catholic Mary, Queen of Scots into trying to start a coup against Elizabeth. Stopping Spain from getting all that New World wealth would really help England.

So Drake, with the help of that man from the opening scene, assembles a crew and heads for parts unknown, at least unknown to the crew who aren't quite happy about that, not that they have much choice. But the English are the virtuous ones here, so of course Drake is able to defeat the Spanish over in the New World and even liberate a bunch of the indigenous before heading back to England where he'll be knighted. This, of course, really pisses off the Spaniards since they know full well how he's been responsible for the depredations against the Spanish shipping crossing the Atlantic, which is part of why they're trying to help Mary.

History tells us that Mary was eventually beheaded in early 1587 for her presumptive part in what's known as the Babington (played by Italian actor Terence Hill) Plot to try to assassinate Elizabeth. Drake here helps foil the plot, although the foiling of it is what's going to lead the Spanish to try something much more dramatic, which is to send an entire armada to attack England and try to destroy the English fleet. Drake commands the English fleet against Spain and of course wins, saving England and enabling them to head across the Atlantic to start their own colonies.

What I didn't realize until starting to write up the review is that Seven Seas to Calais is actually another of those Italian historical action movies that used a popular Hollywood star along with a bunch of Italians and what were presumably funds a Hollywood studio (this one was distributed by MGM) was required to spend in Italy. Rod Taylor is rugged and handsome enough to play Francis Drake. Beyond that, the role isn't particularly demanding in terms of acting range although it does require some physicality. Seven Seas to Calais is also not breaking any new ground in the presentation of history, any more than most Hollywood historical dramas of the era did. Instead, it's simply meant as entertainment; in that regard, it more or less works. Seven Seas to Calais is nothing great by any means, but it's also not terrible.

The film you have just seen is an improvisation

I'm always up for something I haven't seen before. So some time back when TCM had a double feature of films directed by John Cassavetes, I recorded both of them. It took me a while to get around to watching either, in part because I also had A Woman Under the Influence on my DVR, but recently I watched the first of the movies, which was in fact Cassavetes' directorial debut: Shadows.

Hugh (Hugh Hurd) is a black jazz singer living in New York, although he's not exactly successfull because his style is no longer in style. He's got two younger siblings living with him, both of whom are lighter-skinned than him: Ben (Ben Carruthers) and Lelia (Lelia Goldoni), although thanks in part to the low quality of the film stock you wonder whether both of them could have passed as white, which is important to the plot such as it is.

One night at a party, Lelia meets Tony (Anthony Ray), who seems like a nice enough guy, and also seems sincerely interested in Lelia. But of course, Tony is white, which is going to be a problem for some people since interracial relationships are still an issue for some people today. One of those people, in fact, is Hugh.

Meanwhile, Ben is flailing in his career as a would-be trumpeter, and seems to spend more time with his white friends Tom and Dennis going to bars and trying to pick up women than he does trying to get jobs. Ben is also obviously trying to find his place in the world, and as we'll see he's not always successful in this, although it's also not necessarily because of race since his white friends are just as aimless.

Hugh hosts a party where he tries to set Lelia up with a nice black man, and when Tony shows up later looking for Lelia who is out with the guy Hugh set Lelia up with, Hugh is none too happy. Will anybody be able to find love? Will everybody overcome racism to live in harmony?

The end of the movie contains a title card claiming that Shadows is an improvisation, which is only partly true, and also a big part of the problem the movie has. Cassavetes' original intention was for the entire movie to be an improvisation, but that proved to be a disaster when he showed the original cut to audiences. So he reworked the movie with some scripted stuff, and the result is the movie we have today.

I think Cassavetes should have spent more time coming up with a good script rather than trying to be daring and experimental. There's some good ideas here, but the actors don't come across as talented enough to be doing improv, so a lot of it feels rather amateurish. Ultimately Shadows is an interesting attempt, but one that doesn't quite succeed.

Darkness around footsteps

I've been adding a lot of movies to my YouTube TV cloud DVR, with the unsurprising result that a reasonable number of them get another airing on TCM that allows me to do a post on them in conjunction with the upcoming airing. This time, the movie in question is Footsteps in the Dark, which shows up on TCM tomorrow (October 9) at 6:15 PM.

Errol Flynn plays Francis Warren who, at the start of the movie, is being helped by his chauffeur Wilfred (Allen Jenkins) to climb up into his bedroom late one night, so that he won't disturb his wife Rita (Brenda Marshall). The following morning, Francis is at breakfast with his wife and her mother Agatha (Lucile Watson). The two women are aghast over the popular new book, Footsteps in the Dark, and want to sue author F.X. Pettijohn and his publisher, because the book takes prominent society women and, using thinly-veiled identities, skewers these women.

Francis goes downtown for his job as an investment banker, and at lunchtime is driven by Wilfred to a house on the Warner Bros. backlot that he's been renting. Here, it's revealed that Francis is in fact Mr. Pettijohn, who likes to ride with the police on murder investigations, which would explain why he gets home late at night. Of course, Francis hasn't told his wife any of this, which I'd think would be a much bigger problem in their marriage. Meanwhile, police inspector Mason (Alan Hale) knows Pettijohn but not Francis, and thinks Pettijohn doesn't really know how to solve murders.

Back at the office, Francis is met by a Mr. Fessue, who wants him to invest some money from the sale of jewels. But the financial arrangements are going to have to wait until after the close of business when Francis can go meet Fessue at his apartment since Fessue is going sailing for the afternoon. Francis goes there, and Fessue never shows up. When he hears of a boat adrift in the harbor with a man dead of an alcohol-induced heart attack, Francis puts two and two together.

Except that Francis has good reason to believe that it's actually murder, even though the coroner has determined that no, it's just alcoholism. In doing his investigation, Francis learns that Fessue has been seeing a burlesque queen, Blondie White (Lee Patrick). He gets the distinct impression that she's involved in the murder except that she has an airtight alibi, which is that she was at the dentist's office seeing Dr. Davis (Ralph Bellamy) for a dental issue.

Francis keeps investigating, spending time with Blondie, until one of Rita's gossipy friends goes slumming and sees Francis (claiming to be a Texas oil millionaire) with Blondie. Francis now has to try to solve the case without Rita thinking that he's having an illicit relationship with a burlesque dancer. Worse is that things get even more complicated when Blondie turns up dead too. Eventually the case is solved and all the good people wind up living happily ever after, but you know that was always going to happen since there's that pesky Production Code that has to be satisfied.

Footsteps in the Dark is another of those comedic murder mysteries that Hollywood made a lot of in the years before the US got dragged into World War II. Flynn had already done a couple of comedies, and once again, he shows himself to be adept at handling comedy. The supporting cast is also quite good here, although Brenda Marshall as the nominal leading lady doesn't really have a whole lot to do. The mystery itself isn't that much of a mystery, although in a movie like this the actual mystery isn't always quite the point.

Footsteps in the Dark is another fine example of the sort of movie that the Hollywood studio system could churn out back in the day. While it's never going to be remembered as an all-time great, it's definitely a worthy little movie that will entertain viewers even 85 years on.

The Journey

Another of those movies that shows up on TCM regularly enough but that for whatever reason I had never actually watched in its entirety, is The Journey. With that in mind, the last time it ran on TCM I recorded it so that I could later watch it and write up a review to post here.

The opening credits play out over scenes at the exterior of an airport. We then are taken to the inside of Budapest Airport early in November 1956. For those who don't know, at the end of October student protests led to a new, somewhat less Communist government in Budapets, something which the Soviets couldn't tolerate, so they sent in tanks. The authorities also closed the airport, with a whole bunch of passengers stranded.

Among them is Hugh Deverill (Robert Morley), a British television representative who represents the worst of the British stereotypes about Brits who think they can just dictate terms to everybody around them and get their way. There's also an American family, the Rhinelanders (E.G. Marshall and Anne Jackson, with a very young Ron Howard as their younger son), and various people from other countries, all wondering how they're going to get out of the country.

Into all of this walks Lady Ashmore (Deborah Kerr), accompanied by a man calling himself Flemyng (Jason Robards) who is feeling rather unwell. It's also obvious that Flemyng isn't who he seems to be. Worse is that Ashmore has met Deverill in the past back in England. And Deverill is an absolute prick about it, constantly not wanting to give Lady Ashmore any privacy. He also knows she's married, so shouldn't be traveling in dangerous Communist Hungary alone, and certainly not with a sick man who isn't her husband.

The stranded passengers get put on a bus traveling to Vienna, since it's the closest airport in a non-Communist country, and get stopped at a couple of roadblocks, with Flemyng fainting at one of them and it being revealed that he's traveling under a false identity. They then get to the last major town before the border with Austria. There, the passengers are forced to stop, and wait at the hotel that has been commandeered for just this purpose.

At the hotel is a Soviet Red Army officer, Major Surov (Yul Brynner). He suspects something is up, and demands everyone surrender their passports so that he can interview them individually before letting them go through. This is going to be a particular problem for Flemyng, since he's not actually Flemyng but a Hungarian freedom fighter named Kedes. Not only that, but his physical situation is getting worse to the point that it's fairly obvious to everyone, even Surov, that something is badly wrong.

Further complicating matters is that Surov finds himself taken with Ashmore, or at least acting like he is. You could get the impression that Surov is going to ask for sexual favors in exchange for letting Kedes go, or something similar. But then, this is a movie from the late 1950s released by MGM, so most likely something like that isn't going to show up in a film subject to the Production Code.

Still, The Journey isn't a bad movie, although it's one that's not without its flaws. It runs a bit over two hours, which is a bit too long. It also feels a bit too pat, with the ending being somewhat unrealistic. Then again, I think it's less about the plot and more about the characters and their dealings with each other, with the various stars giving capable performances. The Journey is not, I think, the best movie for anybody involved with it, but is also something not to be ashamed of.

Once again, musicals aren't my favorite genre

I've stated several times here how musicals aren't my favorite genre, in part because of how artificial they can be compared to Hollywood movies in general. A good example of why I don't always look forward to musicals is Camelot, which is coming up on TCM tomorrow, October 7, at 5:00 PM.

Richard Harris stars as King Arthur, and as the movie opens -- or, at least once the obligatory flashback takes place -- it doesn't seem to be that long since he's taken the throne at Camelot with England still being divided among a bunch of small competing kingdoms. But Richard soon meets Guenevere (Vanessa Redgrave), and marries her, although it's an arranged marriage so neither of the two is certain they'll like the other, something that's important for actions later in the movie.

Arthur's desire is to unite England, and to do that he envisages the idea of the Round Table which will bring together all the "good" and "noble" knights in England, as if anybody who is openly aspirational of such power is really good or noble. But it's a new and revolutionary idea, which means that the existence of the idea at least is going to spread like wildfire. It's even going to spread all the way to France, where Lancelot Du Lac (Franco Nero) lives. He hears of the idea and figures he's just the thing to join the Round Table, so he heads off to England.

The English knights don't necessarily care for Lancelot for a bunch of reasons, and in their defense some of their reasoning has to do with Lancelot's personality making things more difficult for himself. He just knows that he's more noble than everybody else, and a better jouster too. At least he's able to prove that latter point objectively in the jousting competitions. Along the way Lancelot and Guenevere fall in love.

Now, part of uniting England and bringing about the Round Table includes more bringing about the rule of law as opposed to the rule of one king. Arthur's plan involves reducing the power of the king to amnesty people. This is going to come back to bite him when Lancelot and Guenevere start having an affair. There's all sorts of political infighting in the court, instigated in part by Arthur's illegitimate son from a previous relationship, Mordred (David Hemmings). They make the Lancelot/Guenevere relationship public, forcing a trial that results in Lancelot fleeing into exile while Guenvere faces burning at the stake.

There's not much plot in Camelot, although in this case that doesn't mean that Camelot is a plotless movie. Instead, it means that the story has enough plot for an old programmer of the 1930s. In the case of this musical version of Camelot, however, the movie is bloated out to nearly three hours. And boy do I mean bloated. It's slow, and frankly, the music doesn't particularly sparkle either. Musicals were really losing their popularity by the mid-1960s, and with an outdated film like Camelot, it's easy to see why.