Harry & Son

Yet another of the people to be honored last August in TCM's Summer Under the Stars was Ossie Davis, as I mentioned several weeks back when I did a post on Hot Stuff. Another movie in which he had a smallish role and therefore TCM could use for their programming, was Harry & Son. I had never heard of it, and having watched it, I understand why I'd never heard of it.

Davis is, of course, not the star here. That honor goes to Paul Newman, who also directed and co-wrote the screenplay. He plays the titular Harry, last name Keach. Harry lives in the Miami area where he works in construction although for some inexplicable reason he doesn't wear any safety equipment while operating the wrecking ball. One day he goes out with his co-workers to the bowling alley, where he has some sort of attack that screws up his vision. My first thought was that this was going to be a brain tumor, but when he finally does see a doctor later in the movie, it's explained as some sort of heart issue.

Harry lives with his adult son Howard (Robby Benson), who as the film opens is working detailing cars while wearing just a pair of cut-off jeans shorts. Now, you'd think he could make money by doing this in front of his female clientele, since Benson was clearly cast for his perceived sex appeal since the Robby Benson of this era couldn't act to save his life. But no. And in any case, Howard really wants to be a writer, a desire that his father doesn't get since being a writer has so far done nothing to pay the bills.

Harry has another attack while on the job that causes him to lose his job. You'd think he could go on disability since he's close to retirement age, but again that's not really discussed especially since he's a proud man and that pride has made his relationships with everybody else in his life difficult: his daughter Nina, his brother Tom (Wilford Brimley), and Lilly (Joanne Woodward), who operates a pet store nearby and who was a good friend of Harry's now deceased wife.

Lilly's daughter Katie (Ellen Barkin) was Howard's girlfriend back in high school, but they broke up, or rather Howard ghosted Katie even though they didn't use that word back in the 1980s, when rumor got out that Katie was promiscuous. Indeed, she's now pregnant and doesn't seem to care who the father was, although we're led to believe that it's definitely not Howard who's the father. Along the way, Howard gets a series of jobs trying to please his father. The first he gets thinking he's going to do PR thanks to a nymphomaniac who is one of his detailing clients. Instead, he winds up in a box factory working under Morgan Freeman. Then he tries to get a job repossessing cars, although I was wondering during that scene whether this was in fact a front operation for a chop shop. It's here that we meet Ossie Davis as a man whose truck Howard is asked to repo.

Harry & Son doesn't work for a whole bunch of reasons. One big one is the screenplay, which as I've implied above has several plot holes. The script also seems to both meander and jump from one plot point to the next, making it feel both slow (lasting a shade under two hours) and disjointed. But an equally big problem is Robby Benson, who just isn't (or certainly wasn't in the 1980s; I see that his later career seems disproportionately based on having voiced Beast in Disney's Beauty and the Beast) a very good actor. So all these flaws are a good reason why I'd never heard of Harry & Son before TCM ran it last August.

Lord of the Flies

TCM's lineup for tomorrow (April 25) is a bunch of movies set on islands, and includes a movie that I happen to have on my DVR: the 1963 adaptation of the novel Lord of the Flies. That movie comes on at 2:30 PM.

Now, I think this is another of those movies where most people have at least a basic knowledge of the source material and story before going into it, because of the way in which the original book has gained a lasting sense of endurance. In a sequence that's done, like La jetée, with mostly still photos, we're shown how England is faced with another non-nuclear war and bombardment from the air as in World War II. This leads to the evacuation of children not only from the big cities, but from the country itself to places abroad. One of the flights carrying a large group of boarding school students, however, is hit by a missile somewhere over the Pacific.

We now head to the live action, and discover that two boys have survived the crash. One is Ralph, while the other is a chubby, bescpectacled, and presumably more intellectual boy who was given the nickname Piggy at school. Here, Piggy does something stupid, which is to tell Ralph that everybody gave him the nickname Piggy, rather than give out his real name. Eventually, Ralph and Piggy come across a conch shell, which can be blown to produce a distinctive sound that any other possible survivors can hear. Sure enough, there are other survivors, but they're all young boys like Ralph and Piggy.

Ralph and Piggy bring the group together to try to figure out what to do next, until they hear voices and find another group walking along the beach, wearing not only the standard school uniform but robes that seem to mark them as part of a choir, which makes you wonder how this group of students knew each other but nobody from either of the two groups knew the people in the other group. Things need to be done to figure out whether they're on an island and whether there might be any civilization to save them, along with building shelter and finding out whether there's any possible food on the island. That involves electing a leader.

The election, such as it is, immediately devolves into a sort of tribal conflict, as the choir kids all vote for their leader Jack, while the other boys outvote them and select Ralph as the leader. Jack is none too pleased with this and, having a knife, immediately sets out turning his clique into hunters by fashioning spears to hunt for any possible meat. They find wild boars and something that suggests there might be a "beast" on the island. This, combined with deteriorating relations between the two cliques, leads to despotism and tragedy....

William Golding's original story is a parable on how it doesn't take much to destroy civilized norms, and that's something the movie version does quite well. Director Peter Brook, a stage director by training, gave the child actors, all non-professionals at the time, copies of the book and basically had the kids improvise the action which he would then edit together. I had the fear that this would make the editing extremely choppy at some point, but surprisingly, that doesn't happen, and the movie mostly works.

This version of Lord of the Flies is definitely worth watching. There was another version made around 1990 that I haven't seen.

Operation Frankton

Another person who was honored last August in TCM's Summer Under the Stars and whose movies are getting close to expiring from my DVR as a result is José Ferrer. A movie of which I'd heard the title but had never actually seen the movie is The Cockleshell Heroes, so I recorded it to do a post on it.

Intertitles just after the opening credits inform us a bit about the history of the Royal Marines, which were founded in the late 17th century but didn't get the "Royal" appellation until April 1802. Fast forward 140 years, to early 1942. This is, of course, the middle of the European theater of World War II. The Nazis have occupied a goodly portion of the continent, and are using various ports to make a mess of Allied shipping and naval movements in the Atlantic. Maj. Stringer (José Ferrer) shows up seemingly unannounced at a British military base, since he decided to kayak in which seems like a serious military breach.

Of course, that's part of the plan. Maj. Stringer is sent to where he's going to have his office, next to Capt. Hugh Thompson (Trevor Howard). Capt. Thompson has been in the military since 1918, but is only a captain, so outranked by Maj. Stringer, which is a bit of a plot point since it implies that Thompson did something that prevented him from rising above the rank of captain. In any case, Stringer informs Thompson of his plan, which is to come up with a type of collapsible two-man kayak (they us the word "canoe" because British English considers kayaks a type of canoe) and paddle up the estuary of the Gironde to the city of Bordeaux, where the Germans have a base from which they're attacking the British. Then, the commandos will attach magnetic mines to the hulls of the ships, which should blow up and sink the ships.

Now, if you've seen enough war movies, you'll know that there are several standard tropes. One is that the first part of the plot involves preparations for the operation. Maj. Stringer brings in a bunch of Marines to see who might be most suitable for the operation, and eventually whittles the crew down to about a dozen who were able to get across Britain dressed as Nazis in a way that frankly makes the British populace look stupid. But the men don't really respect Stringer, with the result that their first practice event trying to paddle up the Thames at night is a total disaster. There is, however, one funny scene involving what is actually a live mine and the marines' attempt to dispose of it at sea dressed only in their swimming trunks. (I did, however, wonder why they trained in trunks since the real operation would have them in a frogman's swimming outfit.)

And then they head off to the southwest of France for the difficult operation. One of the boats gets damaged, and those two men quickly get captured by the Germans, although they refuse to give up any information. The others do make it to Bordeaux, as you might guess since the title of the movie is The Cockleshell Heroes. But can they escape?

As you might have guessed from the title of this blog post, The Cockleshell Heroes is based on a real operation called "Operation Frankton" that tried to destroy German ships in Bordeaux. However, the real Operation Frankton was a failure because of its secrecy: it apparently interfered with another operation that likely would have had a higher chance of success and didn't cause as much damage as the British might have liked. José Ferrer directed, and the direction feels formulaic, although that may be down to the script as well, from actor/director Bryan Forbes.

Having watched The Cockleshell Heroes, I can see why it's not so well remembered. It's by-the-numbers, but something that in the end is entertaining enough if unmemorable.

Gotta love how the Code treated women

I always enjoy the Warner Bros. B movies, so when one that I haven't done a post on before shows up on TCM, I try to make certain to record it so I can watch it. One such movie that I only recently got around to watching despite it having been on my DVR for some time is The Law in Her Hands.

The main "her" in the title of the movie is Mary Wentworth, played by Margaret Lindsay. As the movie opens, she and her friend Dot Davis (Glenda Farrell) are getting sworn into the New York State bar, having passed the bar exam. They had been working at a restaurant to pay their way through law school, and plan to start their own law firm together. After the bar ceremony, they go back to their old restaurant to celebrate. A man shows up there, obviously from a protection racket, and trying to induce the boss to join the "benevolent association" voluntarily. When that doesn't work, the guy sets off a smoke bomb.

Frank Gordon (Lyle Talbot) runs the protection rackets in New York, and he's none too pleased about the violence his underling used. Now he's going to have to get the witnesses to find a reason not to show up at the trial. He's almost successful enough that ADA Robert Mitchell (Warren Hull) is unable to prosecute, at least until Mary, who also happens to be Mitchell's girlfriend, shows up with a photograph taken with the defendant in the background, convicting the defendant.

Mary and Dot's law practice isn't particularly successful, although a process server who is only in the movie for comic relief tries to help them. Mitchell tells Mary that perhaps she should give up practicing law and just marry him and start a family together, as all good women were supposed to do back in the 1930s. Gordon, for his part, has a different way of dealing with Mary, which is to try to get her on a very highly-paid retainer.

Of course, working for the man behind the protection rackets is bound to cause problems, and that eventually becomes the case. Mary is successful enough, but the way she gets acquittals challenges judicial ethics, jokes about the idea that lawyers actually care about ethics aside. The breaking point comes when Mary learns that in trying to spoil the milk of people who didn't want to join the dairy protection racket, Gordon's men actually poisoned it. Mary doesn't want to defend Gordon, but how can she get him convicted without violating attorney-client privilege?

The Law in Her Hands is entertaining enough for a B movie, which is to say that it does entertain although it won't be well-remembered after watching and doesn't bear much resemblance to reality. But then there's a coda at the end which I have a feeling would have dissatisfied a lot of women even in the 1930s. Glenda Farrell doesn't get as much to do as I would have liked, and Eddie Acuff as the comic relief isn't the most relieving person. But then again, The Law in Her Hands, being a B movie, is the sort of thing that the studio probably had no expectation that people 90 years in the future would be watching.

The Gun Hawk

Somehow I wound up with a bunch of westerns on my DVR several months back, which is why a few of them are going to show up in relatively close proximity. Up next is one I hadn't heard of before it showed up on TCM: The Gun Hawk.

We don't meet the titular gun hawk in the opening scene; that instead introduces us to the second lead, singer turned actor Rod Lauren. He plays "Reb" Roan, a drifter who winds up drunk in a town that's the old home town the "hawk" came from and is about to come back to. The sheriff, Ben Corey (Rod Cameron), is a childhood friend of the "hawk" but suggests to Roan that he settle down here since it's a growing town.

It's at this point that the "hawk", named Blaine Madden (Rory Calhoun) shows up in town, and has a conversation with the sheriff about not having been in town for three years. Not that he's planning on staying, since he has a new home that shows up later in the movie. But he runs into Roan, who is in the middle of being attacked by a couple of brothers for no good reason, other than we need a good plot reason to have Blaine and Reb fall in together.

While they're at the bar together, those two brothers who attacked Reb earlier show up again, this time harassing a drunk who happens to be Blaine's father. This is really a way to get at Blaine, although in the resulting gunfight it's Dad who gets killed. Against the advice of the sheriff, Blaine goes searching for the two men wanting to bring them to justice, even is his form of vigilante justice is illegal. Worse, he gets shot in the arm by the sheriff who has in turn followed Blaine, but is able to get away.

Reb goes after Blaine as well and eventually catches up to Blaine, removing the bullet from Blaine's arm and giving Reb some power over Blaine since he knows a crucial secret about Blaine. The two of them go back to Blaine's new home a town called Sanctuary that has a reputation for allowing people in regardless of their past, but with the proviso that it's a place where you go to cool off, which means no violence. And there's a man there to make certain everybody follows the rules: the gun hawk who we of course know is Blaine. But if he's been shot in his shooting arm, will he be able to maintain justice? And, of course, Sheriff Corey is going to be coming after Blaine.

The Gun Hawk was made at Allied Artists and released in 1963, at a time when there were still a lot of B westerns being cranked out. The Gun Hawk fits in well enough with the cycle of B westerns, which is to say that it's not doing anything particularly groundbreaking, and feels as though it could have been made easily enough for episodic TV. Western fans will probably be mildly entertained, although nobody will ever mistake this for one of the great westerns.

Tony Curtis in Merry Olde England

Another person who was honored last August in Summer Under the Stars is Tony Curtis. TCM showed a couple of hs movies that I hadn't seen before, or even heard of. First up is a period action movie from fairly early in his career: The Black Shield of Falworth.

The movie is set in the reign of English King Henry IV (played by Ian Keith showing up briefly toward the end), so around the beginning of the 15th century. The Earl of Alban (David Farrar) is traveling through the countryside with his retinue, and stops at a farm in search of water. The farmhouse is owned by Bowman (Rhys Williams), who is guardian to siblings Myles (Tony Curtis) and Meg (Barbara Rush). Alban and his men see a pretty young woman, so of course they think they can have her, which ticks off poor Myles. Myles fights back, which is a dangerous thing to do, so the three of them are forced to leave.

At the local church, the friar informs then that Myles' late father left a signet ring with a heraldic shield on it, as well as a letter of introduction to the Earl of Mackworth (Herbert Marshall) stating that this is the son of Falworth. Apparently, the elder Falworth did something than him afoul of the monarchy, with the punishment that that Falworth shield be stricken from the heraldic record and that the entire Falworth family be wiped from the face of the earth, which is why Myles and Meg are in danger. Mackworth is, however, a friend, and puts Myles and Meg into service: Myles as a squire, and Meg as a servant to Lady Anne (Janet Leigh).

Myles immediately proceeds to be a truculent little bastard, rebelling just for the sake of rebellion while trying to find out the truth about the shield on the ring. He also meets Anne and immediately falls for her, which is a problem since the two are, as far as everybody knows, not of the same social class. She's also going to be betrothed to Walter Blunt (Patrick O'Neal), who is at this point head squire and not yet knighted. Anne eventually falls in love with Myles as well. But all of this is buildup to the climax.

It's really the Earl of Alban who has been plotting against King Henry. When Henry plans to visit Mackworth Castle, part of the festivities require jousting against Henry's companion, a count from Burgundy. Mackworth names Myles, but only someone who's been knighted and joust against a count. Alban recognizes the Falworth shield and demands that Myles should be killed. Henry gives Myles the chance to save himself in trial by combat against Alban. Alban, however, has an even more devious trick up his sleeve, which is to have Henry killed while observing the trial by combat.

Henry IV was a real person, but most of the rest of the dramatis personæ in The Black Sheild of Falworth are wholly fictional. Universal conceived this as an action movie in color and widescreen as an attempt to get people to shut off their TVs and come back to the theaters. So while the movie is short of plot, it's another movie that's more than entertaining enough. This, even if Tony Curtis doesn't exactly personify late medieval England; this is the movie about which the legend of Curtis saying "Yonder lies the castle of my fodder" sprung, although Curtis doesn't say anything like that.

So The Black Shield of Falworth certainly isn't great, and it's easy to see why this isn't one of Tony Curtis' most remembered movies. Much better was still to come for Curtis in his career.

Easter 2025 briefs

I blogged about the 1959 version of Ben-Hur yesterday. I'm a couple of weeks ahead in doing blog posts, and one of the things I've been doing is to look at the TCM schedules a month-plus in advance to see what's been scheduled that's currently on my DVR so that I can do a post on it. As a result, I didn't notice at the time I wrote that post that the silent version is also tonight's selection for Silent Sunday Nights, at midnight tonight.

The rest of TCM's Easter schedule is nothing especially noteworthy, largely because it feels less than in previous years and in part because there's a small enough number of movies that they seem to get repeated. And, of course, there's the second showing of Noir Alley mixed in. Two things are worth mentioning: one is the showing of Harvey at 10:00 PM, which is of course not an Easter movie at all but a movie with the presence, or lack of presence, of a rabbit playing a major part. The other thing is that TCM Imports is not part of the Easter programming, as it includes two of Yasujiro Ozu's films, Late Spring and Early Summer. I was thinking I might be doing a post on Late Spring in May, but it turns out that the May TCM schedule includes a different Ozu film, Early Spring.

I looked at the FXM schedule a few days before Easter and noticed that they weren't doing anything holiday-related, which is part of why I kept procrastinating about doing another briefs post. I was probably also a week late with ABC's annual airing of The Ten Commandments, since it wasn't on last night, what with the NBA playoffs having begun. I've got that on DVD now and might have done a post on it if it weren't for the fact that I've got such a ridiculous backlog of stuff on my YouTube TV cloud DVR as well as stuff I've put in my "save" lists of various FAST services.

By the same token, there are several obituaries that I failed to mention, with the biggest being Val Kilmer, who died at the beginning of the month. One of the movie channels on Pluto has actually been doing off-and-on marathons of Kilmer's movies over the past few weeks. More recently was the death of Patrick Adiarte, a name I immediately noticed because Adiarte played the kid brother in Flower Drum Song which I had just watched not long before the news of Adiarte's passing was announced. Flower Drum Song shows up on TCM again in May, so the post for it is already scheduled.

Oh, tomorrow is Easter

Tomorrow, April 20, is Easter Sunday, at least for those who follow western strands of Christianity. There's a set of Hollywood films dealing with the biblical tellings of Jesus' crucifixion and resurrection that seem to get trotted out every year, one of which is the 1959 sound version of Ben-Hur, which kicks the day off at 6:00 AM.

This version of the story runs something like 3½ hours, depending on how you want to count the overture and intermission. Judah Ben-Hur (Charlton Heston) is a reasonably well-off man in Jersualem during the era when Pontius Pilate was the Roman governor and that famous carpenter was roaming around Judea preaching the gospel. He lives with his mom and sister, as well as servant to whose daughter Esther (Haya Harareet) Judah has been betrothed. Judah learns that his childhood friend and Roman citizen Messala (Stephen Boyd) is coming back to Judea. Unfortunately, Messala wants to exploit his friendship with Judah to get Judah to betray rebellious Jews, which Judah refuses to do, knowing fully well this will mean trouble should things go any more sour.

Of course they will, as a good 50 minutes into the movie the Romans are parading past Judah's villa when his sister knocks a roofing tile off, falling just inches from the governor. That's unforgivable, so Messala makes Judah a galley slave and imprisons Mom and sister, who eventually get leprosy, although that story line is at least another 90 minutes away. Judah is put on the ship captained by consul Quintus Arrius (Jack Hawkins), eventually saves Arrius' life, and gets freed and made Arrius' adopted son as a result, enabling him to go back to Judea to look for his family. Esther, rather than telling Judah his mom and sister are lepers, tells him they died, which leads Judah to seek vengeance on Messala.

That desire for vengeance is why Judah finally decides to take part in the famous chariot race, which we know he'll win, and spend the last 50 minutes or so looking for Mom and Sis since Messala tells him the truth. Along the way at several key points, Jesus shows up, filmed only from the back, and has a profound effect on the various characters in the story, including ultimately Judah.

I said at the beginning that this version runs long, and I do mean long. It's a good hour longer than the Ramon Novarro silent, as I mentioned in a brief post in 2013. I stand by the comments I made in that post. The 1959 version of Ben-Hur won a ton of Oscars, and the technical categories it won are probably mostly deserved, since I can't really be bothered to look through the entire list of Oscar nominations to determine whether some other movie had better costume design. The music, art direction, cinematography, and all that stuff are indeed of a very high standard.

But the acting and screenplay? I think they take a back seat to the much tighter Novarro version. A lot of the scenes feel like they go on way too long, notably for me being the time between being sentenced to the galleys to actually winding up rowing a boat. And then there's Best Supporting Actor Oscar for Hugh Griffith playing an Arab sheik and the financial backer of Judah in the chariot race. I'm surprised I didn't come across a bunch of modern reviews arguing he was a bad stereotype.

My criticisms aside, Ben-Hur is considered an epic, and for understandable reasons. Becuase of that, it's one that should definitely be on any film buff's list of "Essentials", even if you only watch it once.

Judex (1963)

I've mentioned several times how I've been recording too many foreign films, with the result that I've got a bunch of films that I have to watch before they expire from my DVR. This time, however, is different in that I've got a movie I recorded only a couple of months ago the last time it was on TCM but is showing up again: Judex, early tomorrow (April 19) at 4:15 AM.

Favraux (Michel Vitold) is a banker living in a French chateau sometime in the years not long before World War I. (The end has a title card mentioning 1914; the cars look like they could be 1910 vintage but could just as easly be 1920s; but the hairdos all scream 1960s.) He lives with his widowed daughter Jacqueline (Edith Scob) who has a young daughter of her own; and Marie (Francine Bergé), the governess hired by the family to help raise Jacqueline's daughter. Eventually, we learn that Favraux has developed the hots for Marie and would like to marry her, although she turns him down.

Meanwhile, Favraux has pressing problems. His daughter is about to announce her engagement, but that party may be disturbed when Favrau gets a letter signed by "Judex", which is a pseudonym comming from the Latin word for "avenger". It seems as though Favraux was fairly ruthless in getting to the top, starting off with finding some illicit information of powerful people and using that more or less to blackmail them. He is also alleged to have sent a man Kerjean to prison for a crime Kerjean didn't commit, while also having swindled a lot of people out of their money. This Judex supposedly knows all this, and says that if Favraux doesn't reimburse the people who harmed, bad things are going to happen to him. Favraux responds to this by running Kerjean over in his car, so we know he really is a bad guy.

Favraux hires a detective to play the part of a guest at the costume ball where he's going to announce his daughter's engagement, although the real intention is to figure out who this Judex is. At the ball, everybody is entertained until midnight, when Favraux is just about to announce that engagement for his daughter. Favraux is handed a glass of champagne... and promptly drops dead!

Except that it turns out Favraux is not really dead, only having been drugged by Judex who promptly robs the grave with help from his underlings since Judex turns out to be one of those Batman types. His plan is to keep Favraux prisoner for the rest of his live. But there are problems with this, as a Diana, who is a gangster, knows the location of those files Favraux had. And she plans to kidnap Jacqueline. Favraux is able to escape long enough to call Jacqueline, further complicating things.

This version of Judex is a remake of a serial from the silent era, and that's a bit of a problem, if you will. The reason why I say this is because the serial ran to a dozen chapters and five hours or so, with obvious points in those five hours to end one chapter. Trying to adapt this to a feature film that runs only about a third of the time is difficult, and at times makes it very difficult to figure out what's going on. Add to that the fact that characters are often wearing disguises, and it's in a language that I only studied for a couple of years in high school, and you can see why it has flaws.

Still, the idea is good, and the movie is entertaining enough if you're willing to stick with it, so give this version of Judex a try.

Two Guys from Milwaukee

In getting through the backlog of movies that I've watched off my DVR but have yet to do a post on, it's time to write about one of those movies that shows up on TCM often enough but that I'd never gotten around to watching before, Two Guys from Milwaukee.

The movie technically starts off at Pennsylvania Station in New York, although the opening scenes are really on a train. The two important passengers on that train are Prince Henry (Dennis Morgan) of one of those central European monarchies that in real life would have been overrun by Soviet-backed Communists a year or two after the movie was made, together with his advisor Count Oswald (S.Z. Sakall). Henry is on a goodwill tour of America, before his country votes on a plebiscite regarding whether to stay a monarchy. Henry thinks that if the vote is going to be rigged, he's going to want to meet real Americans.

Showing up at Penn Station and not realizing that a celebrity is about to get off the train is cab driver Buzz Williams (Jack Carson). He doesn't know anything about royalty, and if anything has mild contempt for them. In a plot twist that's fairly obvious, Henry decides he's going to escape from the train and pass himself off as a regular American, only to wind up taking the cab driven by Buzz. Unfortunately, Henry forgot to get any money when he absconded from the train, which is going to make paying for a cab difficult, as well as paying for dinner or getting a hotel room or anything like that.

Buzz lives with his sister Nan (Rosemary DeCamp), and since Henry has lied about where he was from and just happened to pick Buzz's hometown as where he is from, Buzz takes Henry home with him. Buzz also has a girlfriend Connie (Joan Leslie), and Buzz suggests the idea of a double date as Connie has a girlfriend Polly (Janis Paige).

As you might guess, Henry and Connie begin to develop feelings for each other, which is a problem since she's already got a boyfriend who's done nothing wrong, and because of that upcoming referendum. If monarchy wins, Henry getting married to a foreign commoner might be a problem. Meanwhile, there's still the issue that Henry is technically missing. Because this is a programmer, however, we know that it's going to resolve all its problems with a requisite happy ending.

Two Guys from Milwaukee is, as I just mentioned, little more than a programmer of the sort that Warner Bros. and the other studios churned out in the years before World War II. This one, however, was made just after the war, in 1946, so it does have the feel of being a bit out of place. That's not to say it's a bad movie, of course. Dennis Morgan and Jack Carson work well together, and the movie has a fun little coda at the end. But the sort of monarchy that Henry was a part of would have been destroyed by the recently-ended war, and the consequences of that are totally glossed over. Still, Two Guys from Milwaukee is entertaining enough, and definitely worth one watch at least.

William Shatner, monk

It's easy to forget that William Shatner was a classically trained actor before becoming Captain Kirk on Star Trek more or less turned his acting career into a bit of a parody, albeit a very successful one. So, a role that looking back seems terribly out of place is one of his earliest film roles, in the 1958 adaptation of the Fyodor Dostoevsky novel The Brothers Karamazov.

As you can guess from the title, there are multiple brothers, and that the action is set in Tsarist Russia. Yul Brynner is the star, playing Dmitri Karamazov, an officer in the army who is constantly getting himself into debt because of his high-living ways. Ivan (Richard Basehart) is a writer and a radical, while Alexei (that's William Shatner) is a young monk and in many ways the conscience of the family. Their mother -- well mothers, since they're the product of two marriages in the original book -- has died, but Dad Fyodor (Lee J. Cobb) is still alive, and a towering presence over the rest of the family.

Dad has a reasonable sum of money that could be a nice nest egg inheritance for three sons, and there may be a fourth son as well. Epileptic Smerdyakov (Albert Salmi) is rumored to be Fyodor's son, fathered out of wedlock, and now he's working as a servant to Fyodor and whom Fyodor treats very badly. Although, to be fair, Fyodor treats everybody badly, with the possible exception of his mistress Grushenka (Maria Schell). Dmitri, constantly being in debt, would like to be able to get that inheritance now, although in 1870s Russia I don't think they had those dishonest companies that would buy annuities for pennies on the dollar. Meanwhile, Dmitri has a mistress of his own in Katya (Claire Bloom) but starts to get interested in Grushenka, although that may only be for her money.

There are threats to kill Fyodor, and as you can surmise, Fyodor does ultimately wind up murdered. Alexei the monk clearly wouldn't do such a thing, while Ivan has the airtight alibi of having been in Moscow. Dmitri is the obvious candidate and gets put on trial for it, but we learn that Smerdyakov is smarter than he seems and has been plotting to have a confrontation between Dmitri and Fyodor. With that in mind, Dmitri proclaims his innocence at trial, and has Alexei as a character reference, even though there's a ton of circumstantial evidence that makes Dmitri appear guilty.

Fyodor Dostoevsky's original novel runs to something like 800 pages, depending of course on the size of the page. Suffice it to say that it's a pretty darn long novel. It's also as much a character and philosophical study as it is a narrative novel. Both of these things mean that it's the sort of book that can be tough to adapt to a more visual and narrative-driven medium like film. (Tolstoy is even more difficult in that regard.) Here, the 800 pages are distilled down to a bit shy of two and a half hours, but even this feels long because the characterizations don't allow for quick action.

As for the acting, Yul Brynner and Lee J. Cobb both get the opportunity to give outsized performances. Brynner, despite having been born in Vladivostok and being authentically Russian, feels like a caricature of Tsarist officer stereotypes. Cobb, as always, chews the scenery wildly. William Shatner is a decided supporting role, and he does the best he can with the material. If he hadn't gone on to Captain Kirk, I think his performance would be better regarded.

The Brothers Karamazov definitely has flaws because of the difficulties in translating the source material to the screen. But it's still interesting to see how the studio tried to pull it off.

Beau Brummell (1954)

Stewart Granger was cast in a whole bunch of movies that were period pieces from various eras of British history. When last I posted about Granger, it was for the Victorian-era film Blanche Fury. This time, we go back a couple of decades to the Regency, for the MGM costume drama Beau Brummell. It's airing tomorrow (April 16) at 3:30 PM as part of a morning and afternoon of movies dedicated not to Granger, but to supporting star Peter Ustinov.

You probably know that "Beau Brummell" is, even to this day, a byword for stylish fashion, and the term comes from a real person named George Bryan Brummell, who got the nickname Beau (played here by Stewart Granger). As the movie opens, Brummell is a captain in the British army in the late 1790s, when the real-life Brummell would have been about 20. Brummell's regiment is doing a military parade, and showing up for inspection is the Prince of Wales, the future King George IV (that's Peter Ustinov). Brummell shows himself to be good with a sword on horseback, in exercises involving cutting melons, and putting the sword through rope rings. Brummell gives the rings to another attendee, the socialite Lady Patricia (Elizabeth Taylor). But Brummell gets himself in trouble when he comments to the Prince of Wales that the epaulettes are too big, seemingly designed to make his highness look slimmer and not for ergonomics.

Brummell eventually quits the army, in part because life in the army is expensive since in those days officers had to provision their own uniforms and horses. Brummell runs across a candidate running for Parliament, and makes more comments, partly about fashion, such as the wasteful expense of powdering one's hair and how the flour could be used to feed the poor, as well as some comments about the royals, which again brings Brummell to the attention of the Prince of Wales. This time, however, Brummell is able to ingratiate himself to the prince, in part because of his views on the king, George III (Robert Morley in a small role). If you remember from The Madness of King George, the king's mental capacity had long been a question, along with his testy relationship with the Prince of Wales. The King wants his son to marry a suitable royal from Germany, while the prince is in love with a different woman.

The Prince of Wales, having become friends with Brummell, helps Brummell rise in society, but there are storm clouds on the horizon. One is that Brummell has been spending freely to maintain the appearances of being a member of the aristocracy, and this has led to heavy debts that he's going to be unable to pay off. If he can't pay them off, eventually the debtors are goingto come for him, with the likelihood of debtors' prison looming. The other issue is Lady Patricia. Brummell loves her, and she certainly likes him. But she's long been betrothed to a man who is of her proper social class, Lord Mercer.

Eventually, Brummell and the Prince of Wales have a falling out after he becomes regent and assumes more power. This means he no longer has a protector and is going to have to flee to France post-Napoleon to stay out of debtors' prison. The movie at least gives Brummell the chance at reconciliation with the former Prince of Wales, who by this time has assumed the throne and is George IV.

The problem, if you will, with Beau Brummell, is that it's a fairly fanciful version of history. Lady Patricia is not a real person, but the bigger issue is that in real life, Brummell outlived George IV by a decade. Additionally, from what I've read, he didn't particularly have public political views the way he's presented here. But the total Hollywood lack of historicity aside, Beau Brummell is a good example of how MGM could make a fine color costume drama. Granger is OK, Taylor doesn't have much to do, and Peter Ustinov steals the show. Morley is quite good too, although he only has one or two scenes. If you want to see an example of what MGM could do well, Beau Brummell is definitely a good example.

Lady Be Good

Red Skelton is TCM's Star of the Month for April, and as I mentioned last week, I've got a couple of his movies on my DVR that are showing up as part of the salute to him. First up is a movie that has Skelton in a supporting role: Lady Be Good, early tomorrow (April 15) at 5:00 AM.

Eleanor Powell gets top billing here, although that was a ruse by MGM to get audiences into the theater. In fact, the female lead is Ann Sothern, whom MGM was trying to turn into a musical star. She plays Dixie Donegan, and as the movie opens, she's in divorce court, trying to obtain a divorce from her husband Eddie Crane (Robert Young). This introductory scene is a pretense to go to a flashback, as Donegan tells Judge Murdock (Lionel Barrymore) how the two met and why she wants a divorce. Before the marriage, Crane was a composer, and his girlfriend Dixie sees him and his lyricist have difficulty collaborating. Somehow, Dixie is able to come up with lyrics for Eddie's latest music, and the song they release together becomes a big hit, leading them to get married as well.

Eleanor Powell plays Marilyn Marsh, who is a friend of Dixie's and to a lesser extent Eddie's. She's also a star on Broadway who dances to the sort of music written by people like Eddie. She's happy to see the two married, but distressed by the fact that after they get married, Eddie lets success go to his head, where Dixie just wants to go on writing music for another Broadway show. This is what leads to the Dixie deciding she needs a divorce, even if we all know the two of them are still friends. They just can't work together as husband and wife, at least not until Eddie learns how to combine the two.

After the divorce, Dixie tries to find other composers, while Eddie seems unable to create new music. Eventually he calls Dixie and she thinks he's looking once again for a lyricist. Except that he wants someone to clean up his apartment, as if he thinks this way she'll come back to him. She's already got a new boyfriend, but once again we know this drip isn't right for her. Mutual friends like Marilyn, or Red Willet (that's Red Skelton) who plugs Eddie's and Dixie's songs, try to bring Dixie and Eddie back together. They're even seemingly successful, except that their second marriage hits a snag for the same exact reasons the first marriage did. Still, we know that Dixie and Eddie are going to wind up together in the final reel, so the question is how are they going to resolve their problems.

The on-again, off-again romance story in Lady Be Good is serviceable, and Young and Sothern are able to handle this light drama material well. Red Skelton was on his way up here, and was I think brought in for comic relief which he is unsurprisingly good at providing with his brand of physical comedy. But Lady Be Good is really to be watched for the music and dancing. Arthur Freed, who was of course a lyricist before he become a producer at MGM and made those big post-war Technicolor musicals, provides the song "Your Words and My Music", while some famous composers have old songs of theirs borrowed, with a couple of songs by the Gershwins (including the title number), and "The Last Time I Saw Paris" having been done by Oscar Hammerstein and Jerome Kern. Eleanor Powell has a very good dance number she does with a dog, but most critics mention a different Powell number as the highlight of the film, one danced to "Fascinating Rhythm".

Despite the story which feels like a retread, fans of MGM musicals and dancing will, I think, love Lady Be Good.

Pat O'Brien grows a moustache

Ever since moving and getting access to reliable high-speed internet two years ago, I've been able to watch the FAST services. Tubi seems to have access to a whole bunch of stuff that wound up in the public domain. One that I hadn't heard of before seeing it in the "classic" movies section was Slightly Honorable.

The movie starts off with the idea that perhaps there's an island somewhere in the South Pacifc that doesn't have corruption, but we're in America, 8,000 miles away. Cut to a shot of the highway commissioner in some state getting killed in a road accident, which is the height of irony because the commissioner was the one more or less responsible for the shoddy state of the roads, what with all the graft in the highway department. At his funeral are newspaper publisher Vincent Cushing (Edward Arnold), who is in on the graft and getting wealthy from it; and attorney John Webb (Pat O'Brien), who wants to eliminate corruption and graft.

Complicating matters is that one of Webb's clients, Alma Brehmer (Claire Dodd) just happens to be the mistress of one Vincent Cushing. Webb and Cushing are brought together again when Alma invites Webb to a swanky party at a nightclub hosted by Cushing. It's also a place for Webb to meet chorine Ann Seymour (Ruth Terry), who thinks of Webb as someone to look up to as well as woo once he saves her from one of the brutes at Cushing's party trying to slap her around because he's jealous of her dancing briefly with Ann. Ann, however, seems mostly to be comic relief, which is surprising considering that Eve Arden is also in the film playing the part of Webb's secretary.

Up to now the movie has been more comedy than drama, although things are about to take a turn. Alma being one of Webb's clients, she wants him to see her about some jewelry Cushing gave her and that she wants appraised so she can have it added to her insurance policy. Webb goes up to her swanky apartment, and finds that somebody's stabbed her! Needless to say, since he's the one to have found her, he's an obvious suspect. Cushing's wife has good reason to worry that perhaps her husband could be held responsible, what with his having an obvious motive of trying to silence poor Alma. So she tries to keep anything bad about Cushing from being released. Worse for Webb is that Cushing's daughter actively wants to implicate Webb. Helping to save Webb is his legal firm partner Sampson (a young Broderick Crawford).

I mentioned above that the movie starts off on a somewhat humorous tone, and in the years before the US got involved in World War II there was quite a cycle of comic murder mystery-type movies. However, Strictly Honorable takes a slightly different tack of being humorous up to the murder and then tacking a much darker turn. It's an odd strategy, and one that doesn't always work. However, the flaws in the movie are also in part to it being a low-budget independently produced movie.

Not that Strictly Honorable is a bad movie; it's more that it's the sort of thing where it's easy to see why it's fallen through the cracks and become largely forgotten.

The American Film Theatre

Back in the 1970s, producer Ely Landau tried a bold experiment of taking prominent, mostly modern playwrights, and producing more minimalist versions of their plays as movies. Tickets for these movies would then be sold together, like buying a subscription to a stage theater or the ballet or opera. This project, called the American Film Theatre, only lasted two years and produced about a dozen movies in all. Among them is a version of Edward Albee's play A Delicate Balance.

The leads here are Katharine Hepburn and Paul Scofield. They play a married couple, Agnes and Tobias respectively, who have made it in life and are living an upper middle class life in suburban Connecticut of the generation of American prosperity that followed the second World War (the play was first produced in 1966 and the movie was released in late 1973). The sort of older couple who would stay in on a Friday night and enjoy the fruits of their life of hard work. Or, at least it seems they've made it.

Unfortunately, Agnes has a sister Claire (Kate Reid) who drinks too much and has been in and out of Alcoholics Anonymous and has as been rather less of a success at life. As a result, Claire lives with Agnes and Tobias. I imagine it can't be much fun for Tobias, but then they're at an age where life it more about a pleasant enough routine than fun. They can settle down to a nice dinner before enjoying the weekend.

At least, they can until a couple of neighbors and best friends knock on their door. Harry (Joseph Cotten) and Edna (Betsy Blair) are a married couple who seem to have just as good a life as Agnes and Tobias. But somehow, suddenly, they've both decided they're going to have a midlife crisis at exactly the same time. The two have reached the conclusion that they're terrified of... something that they can't quite figure out what it is. Except that whatever it is, they know they can't live in their current house. So they're just going to knock on Agnes and Tobias' door and move right in. And Agnes and Tobias are willing to let them do this because they're such good friends and have enough spare bedrooms to do so. It's a turn of events that makes no sense in any sort of real life, but there you are.

Things go from bad to worse. Agnes and Tobias have an adult daughter, as well as a son who died some time back. The adult daughter, Julia (Lee Remick), has made an even bigger mess of her life than her aunt Claire, and has just announced she's getting a divorce from her fourth husband. So she's coming back to her parents' place since she needs a place to stay. And dammit, Harry and Edna have her room. So there's a lot now for everybody to bicker about and talk in unnatural stage dialogue.

I suppose that the material in A Delicate Balance is the sort of stuff that might work well on the live stage where you've got a live audience to play off of and play to with communal reactions. And I can certainly see why stage actors would read a script like this and jump at the chance to develop characters. But it's material that's decidedly not going to be to everyone's taste, as well as material that doesn't translate to film as well as other plays do. So definitely some people are going to like it. I'm just not one of those people.

Grosse Pointe Blank

It may seem hard to believe, but it's been 28 years to the day since the release of Grosse Point Blank. I have it on my DVR since one of the TCM Guest Programmers some months back selected it. Recently, I finally watched it to do a review on it.

John Cusack stars as Martin Blank, and as the movie opens up he's in Miami, and on the phone with his executive assistant Marcella (Joan Cusack). It's quickly revealed that Martin is in a hotel room on a high floor, working as a sniper to kill some figure. To lighten the mood, Marcella tells Martin that today's mail includes an invitation to his 10-year high school reunion in Grosse Point, MI, a tony suburb of Detroit.

The killing goes wrong and multiple people get killed thanks in part to fellow hired killer Grocer (Dan Aykroyd). Martin also gets a phone call from Grocer, about a plan Grocer has to consolidate the hired assassin business, something Martin doesn't want, even though they're about the only people who can understand each other. Certainly having trouble understanding Martin is Dr. Oatman (Alan Arkin), whom Martin has been seeing in no small part because being a hired killer leaves him with all sorts of mental issues. Well, that and ex-girlfriend Debi, whom Martin jilted on prom night ten years ago.

And then Marcella gives Martin his next assignment, which is to kill a guy who's about to blow the whistle on some sort of corrupt business or other. Obviously there's some bad guy who doesn't want this guy to testify in court, which is why the guy is a target. The thing is, the target is in Detroit. This would be the perfect opportunity for Martin to kill two birds with one stone, so to say. Not only can he do another job, but he can go home and attend his class reunion.

Except that, as Tom Wolfe wrote, you can't go home again. Well, you can go back to the place you used to live, but it will have changed, and not always for the better. Martin finds out that his old childhood home was sold and redeveloped into a convenience store, with his mom being forced into a nursing home with one or another form of dementia. Debi is still in Grosse Pointe, working at the local independent radio station, and not pleased at seeing Martin considering how he jilted her all those years ago.

Worse is the fact that there seem to be quite a few people who want Martin dead. There are two Feds following him around, while another hitman tries to blow up the convenience store while Martin is in it. He's convinced Grocer is responsible for at least some of the people on his tail. And there's still that reunion to attend. Perhaps Martin might be safe there, since you have to be a graduate, or guest of a graduate to be there. There's also that contract killing Martin is supposed to carry out, which has also not been resolved.

Grosse Pointe Blank is a quirky little movie where you never quite know where it's going to go next, and that's decidedly to the film's benefit. I think it also helped me that I was in high school in the late 1980s, so a lot of the nostalgia vibe was definitely in play. The performances are also all enjoyable, with a bit of a surprise turn from Dan Aykroyd since the movie is a dark comedy and not the sort of comedy he'd normally be more associated with. Alan Arkin is good in his small role too.

If you haven't seen Grosse Pointe Blank before, it's definitely worth a watch.

Sidewalks of New York

About twenty years ago, TCM produced a relatively brief documentary titled So Funny It Hurt: Buster Keaton & MGM, which discusses how Keaton's signing a contract with MGM at the end of the silent era more or less derailed his career as MGM terribly stifled Keaton's creativity. If you want to see a sad example of what MGM did to Keaton, try watching Sidewalks of New York.

Keaton plays Homer Van Dine Harmon, and as you might guess from a name like that, he's an idle rich guy. Specifically, one who owns several tenement apartment buildings. So, as the movie opens his assistant Poggle (Cliff Edwards) is down at the tenements to collect the rent, only to get beat up for his trouble by the sort of young hoodlums who a decade later would be played by the Dead End Kids, or maybe the East Side Kids or the Bowery Boys. Homer is going to have to collect the rent himself.

However, Homer's attempt also leads to the same sort of scuffle that Poggle got into previously. It also results in Homer's meeting Margie (Anita Page), who is the adult sister of Clipper, one of the delinquent boys. She's also his guardian, since 100 years ago it wasn't all that uncommon for there to be large age differences between siblings and the parents to die relatively young. In a trope that MGM probably liked but doesn't work for this version of Buster Keaton, Homer immediately falls head over heels for Margie, so Homer wants to do something for Clipper and the rest of the neighborhood boys.

Homer's plan is to take one of the buildings he owns and convert the ground floor into a YMCA-like gymnasium, where the local boys can blow off their steam and possibly get fit in the process too. But Clipper doesn't like Homer from the previous incident of trying to collect rent, and vows not to go to the gym at all, and convince he friends not to go either. Clipper prefers the company of Butch, who is much more of Clipper's social class. The only problem is that Butch is an actual criminal. Worse, Butch decides to bring Clipper into his schemes.

The final scheme is a plot to kill Homer. Homer, as part of his trying to do good deeds for the deprived neighborhood boys, is going to put on a play with the kids playing most of the parts. The plot of the play will have Clipper's character shoot one played by Homer with a prop gun and blanks. When Butch learns about this, he plots to have real bullets put in the gun so it will kill Homer!

Sidewalks of New York is, I'm sorry to say, fairly dire. That I think, is largely down to MGM, as well as to the fact that the movie was released in 1931, well into the sound era. MGM, instead of letting Buster come up with his trademark physical humor, wants a bunch of dialogue-based stuff, which doesn't work at all, as in a terrible courtroom scene. The movie also feels like a bunch of disjointed scenes. It's a shame that Buster Keaton wound up in stuff like this.

The Paleface

Another of the type of movie that I've said I wound up with a bunch of on my DVR that I need to watch and do posts on before they expire is westerns. One that aired during Summer Under the Stars was The Paleface, so recently I finally got around to watching it.

The star being honored in conjunction with the showing I've got on my DVR is Jane Russell, who plays Calamity Jane. As the movie opens, she's in prison, but is being busted out by people not known to her, and who force her to go with them. (Coincidentally, another western on my DVR that I'm going to be writing a post on before the recording expires has the same theme, Gunfight at Comanche Creek, although the breakouts in that movie are done for a different reason.) The men who break Jane out take her to the territorial governor Johnson, who offers her a bargain. Somebody is smuggling weapons to the Indians, who are obviously using them to attack settlers. If Jane can figure out who, the governor will give her a full pardon. Jane being a woman would be less likely to be suspected of being an agent of the government.

The plan is to have Jane go to a town called Port Deerfield, where she'll meet up with her contact from the feds. She'll pose as the guy's husband and the two will join a wagon train to their ultimate destination, Buffalo Flats. But Jane gets to Port Deerfield and finds that the federal agent she's supposed to work with has been discovered and killed. Worse, she realizes that the men who killed the agent are hot on her trail and coming after her, so she needs to get away, but how?

Also in Port Deerfield, and decidedly not part of the gang of men running guns to the Indians or trying to kill Jane is Painless Pete Potter (Bob Hope). Potter is an itinerant dentist who goes from one town to the next to provide dental work. Except that this being a character played by Bob Hope, Potter isn't the most competent denitst, which I suppose is part of why he has to go from one town to the next. His makeshift office is on the ground floor of a building that houses baths for women on the upper floor, which is how Potter and Jane wind up in the same building together, and then wind up in the same wagon when Jane has to jump from the balcony to escape the gunmen coming after her at the same time Potter is escaping irate patients.

They have a pretend marriage, and join the wagon train, but since Potter isn't good at that either they lead a bunch of wagons off course to spend a night at a cabin in an isolated part of the countryside where a group of Indians can attack. Unbeknownst to Potter, who doesn't know that he's with Calamity Jane or that she's working with the feds to stop gun-running, Jane helps repel an Indian attack while making it look like Potter is responsible for stopping them and thus a hero. It serves Jane's plans, as if the gunmen think Potter is the fed they won't suspect her, although of course this puts Potter into danger which is a bit of a problem from a Production Code point of view.

So eventually Jane has to kinda, sorta let Potter in on what's going on, which is also in part because she needs his help. The two both get captured by the Indians, but you know that this is the sort of movie that's going to have a happy ending.

If you've seen any of Hope's comedies from the 1940s, and I've reviewed several of them here, you'll know what your in for with The Paleface. The surprise here is Jane Russell, early in her career since Howard Hughes didn't use her much in the 1940s. She shows herself to be extremely adept at doing comedy with Bob Hope, and the screenplay, while not particularly realist, is simply a lot of escapist fun. The movie also won an Oscar for introducing the song "Buttons and Bows".

Spoiler: There's really not that much crying

Another of the foreign-language films that I needed to watch off my DVR before it expired was one from German arthouse director Rainer Werner Fassbinder: The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant.

Petra von Kant (Margit Carstensen) is a fashion designer living in apartment in Bremen, in the northern part of what was the old West Germany, together with her assistant/secretary Marlene (Irm Hermann). Petra treats Marlene like dirt, seemingly making her work day and night, even when people like Petra's sister Sidonie (Katrin Schaake) comes over to visit. Complicating this sort of ill treatment is the fact that Petra and Marlene may be having some sort of sexual relationship, something that might have been controversial when this movie was released back in 1972, but is fairly passé today.

But Petra is more likely bisexual, as she's been in two marriages, the first of which left her a pregnant widow, with daughter Gaby away at boarding school. Gaby, along with Petra's mother Valerie, show up for the final act since that's set some months later on Petra's birthday. But, once again, we're getting ahead of ourselves. There's one more main character we haven't met. That's Karin (Hanna Schygulla), a young woman Sidonie and her husband met when they were in Australia. Karin and her husband are German but were living in Australia; she's decided to return because she couldn't take it in Australia.

Karin needs a legitimate job, and Petra offers her one as a model for her designs, although the presumption is that there are also going to be sexual favors involved. But with Karin modeling the clothes, Petra gets a chance as a major German department store is interested in the new designs. Those designs are in fact what the department store wants, and the major commission is good financial news for Petra.

However, it also gets Karin a job modeling, and one that means she's going to be away from Bremen a lot. Worse is when Karin gets a phone call from her husband saying that he's coming back to Germany, and could she come to Frankfurt to meet him. That's all too much for Petra.

There's not much going on in The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, as the whole movie is set in that apartment. It's not nearly as obnoxious as some of the other arthouse films I've mentioned here relatively recently, but I think it's also not likely to appeal to the more casual movie fan. Fassbinder is very deliberate both with the camera movement as well as focus (often to focus on a frustrated Marlene in the background), which to me heightened the feeling of the movie being slow. One other thing that doesn't help is that Petra has a bunch of wigs that she wears over the course of the film. That can make things harder to follow, especially if you don't speak German and have to rely on the subtitles.

No relation to Kevin McCarthy

TCM is doing a morning and part of the afternoon of Val Lewton's films tomorrow, April 8. I happen to have one of those on my DVR, so I'll put up a post on it now: The Body Snatcher, at 1:30 PM.

The scene is Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1831. Donald Fettes (Russell Wade) is a medical student who had been studying with Dr. MacFarlane (Henry Daniell), this being an era when dedicated medical schools weren't a thing. But he's going to have to give up those studies for monetary reasons. He's stopped by a cemetery for no other reason than to come up with an expository scene mentioning body snatching, which is digging up the grave for the body therein, not for any valuables that might have been buried. Body snatchers were a thing back in those days because the anatomist-doctors teaching the next generation of doctors needed bodies to do that teaching, and they couldn't get enough legally, say from people who would othewise be buried in potters' field.

Fettes goes to see Dr. MacFarlane at the same time a difficult paralysis case shows up: Mrs. Marsh is bringing her daughter Georgina, hoping that MacFarlane can operate on her. MacFarlane has no bedside manner to get Georgina to explain exactly what the pain is like which would help diagnose exactly where and what the injury is. Fettes, however, does have a bedside manner, so MacFarlane makes him his assistant.

Meanwhile, the Marshes were brought to MacFarlane in a cab driven by John Gray (Boris Karloff). What Fettes doesn't (yet) know is that John is in fact a body snatcher, bringing the bodies to MacFarlane. Fettes is disturbed by this, but MacFarlane explains that the bodies are absolutely necessary for the advancement of science.

This, however, is also where that opening scene at the cemetery comes back into play. While at the cemetery, Fettes met a woman whose son died and whose dog is mourning at the grave 24/7. Gray knows about the boy having died, but when he goes to the cemetery and gets confronted by the poor dog, Gray hits the dog over the head with a shovel, killing it. Good like getting bodies from the cemetery, now that all of them will be given police protection.

So what does Gray do? Why, turn to murder! Unfortunately, he decides to murder a woman who was trying to eke out a living by singing on the street in exchange for coins. He brings this body to MacFarlane but Fettes recognizes it and realizes that Gray is now murdering people and MacFarlane is complicit in it. (Granted, Fettes has his own problems by not going straight to the police.) This sets the denouement of the film into motion.

The Body Snatcher is based on a story by Robert Louis Stevenson, which explains why Val Lewton wound up making a movie set in 19th century Scotland. It's not quite in the same vein as the straight-up horror movies Lewton produced like Cat People or The Seventh Victim. Since we know who's doing the killing, it's more of a horror-tinged melodrama. That's not to say that The Body Snatcher is bad, although once again the fact that the ending is going to have to satisfy the Production Code office does raise some issues with the film.

Still, Karloff and the rest of the cast are effective enough for what was only ever meant to be a programmer and not some sort of prestige film. In that light, The Body Snatcher works quite well and is definitely worth a watch.

Star of the Month April 2025: Red Skelton

Red Skelton and Lucille Ball in Du Barry Was a Lady (midnight between April 14/15)

As we're in a new month, it's time for a new Star of the Month on TCM. This time around, that star is Red Skelton, who's known for his physical comedy. His movies are going to be showing up every Monday in prime time.

I didn't quite realize it when I was scheduling posts ahead of time -- and I'm getting to the point where I'm close to a month ahead -- but I've actually got two posts on movies that are going to be showing as part of TCM's Skelton salute. Given a choice, I try not to have multiple movies starring the same person show up in fairly close proximity, in part because I also prefer to watch a variety of movies rather than a block of one star or one genre like westerns. This post is a day early because for some reason I thought the first of the Skelton posts was going to appear tomorrow; in fact, it actually shows up in the second week of the salute.

By the same token, I've actually got two movies on my DVR that are part of the final night of the salute, but am only going to be doing a post on one of them, which is actually already scheduled. Also of interest is Du Barry Was a Lady, featured in the photo above, although I blogged about that ages ago, and it's a bit more of a vehicle for Lucille Ball, I think. Indeed, I had to go out and search for a good color photo of Skelton in the movie. There are a lot of black-and-white publicity stills out there.

Fate Without Music

I was looking at the upcoming TCM schedule, and noticed that tomorrow, April 7, at 8:00 AM, you can catch the Howard Keel musical version of Kismet. It's from 1955, based on a then-recent musical, with the musical being based on an old stage play from the turn of the last century. That play had already been turned into a non-musical movie on multiple occasions, most notably a 1944 MGM Technicolor production also titled Kismet. I have that 1944 version sitting on my DVR, so I figure that now wouldn't be a bad time to do a post on it.

Thankfully, the movie has some opening narration that greatly helps to explain everything that's going on in the movie. The setting is Baghdad in its golden age, or "old Baghdad when it was new and shiny" as the narrator tells us. Hafiz (Ronald Colman) is a beggar by day who has somehow obtained some fancy clothes that enable him to go out at night disguising himself as a prince, calling himself Prince Hassir. It's as his prince that he makes his way into the palace of the Grand Vizier where he meets the Vizier's Macedonian wife Jamilla (Marlene Dietrich). But we're getting ahead of ourselves here.

Also given prominence in the opening narration is the nominal ruler of the empire, the Caliph (James Craig). The Caliph is smart enough to know that his advisers are going to engage in toadyism and tell him whatever they think he wants to hear, and that those things aren't necessarily going to be the truth. So he escapes from his own palace at night, dressing in regular clothes and passing himself off as the son of the royal gardener. This he does in order to be able to find out what his subjects honestly think. What they think isn't pretty, of course. But this going out at knight is also what brings him into contact with Hafiz as Hassir. One other person the Caliph meets is Marsinah (Joy Page). He falls in love with her, not knowing that she's really the daughter of Hafiz. Hafiz, meanwhile, has been feeding Marsinah a bunch of lies about how she's going to marry a prince and her life will be one of luxury.

Now, as I said earlier, Hafiz meets Jamilla, and is taken with her. The feeling is mutual, although Jamilla is smart enough to know that Hassir is a disguise as there's no real Prince Hassir in Baghdad. After all, the arrival of a prince would be big news, especially in the palaces. In any case, Jamilla is also the wife of the Vizier, played by Edward Arnold. Edward Arnold's casting is a sign that the Vizier is the baddie in the piece. While the Caliph is the nominal power, the Vizier fancies himself as the real power, and he's going to get into a power struggle with the Caliph. He also meets Hassir when Hafiz gets himself invited to the Vizier's place by posing as the prince. This is, unfortunately, going to cause a great deal of legal difficulty for Hafiz when the Vizier figures out the deception. But it also is what really puts the plot into motion for the second half of the movie.

Kismet received four Oscar nominations (which is why TCM aired it -- as part of 31 Days of Oscar) in various technical categories. It's easy to see why the movie picked up those nominations, but not for any of the more traditionally prestigious categories like acting or direction. The movie is certainly lovely to look at, and to be fair to the actors they do a reasonably good job with the material even if none of them look Arab. What makes this version of Kismet a movie that's not as well remembered as other 1940s classics is, I think, the screenplay, which is slow to develop and tends to meander, as if the screenwriters couldn't quite decide what to do.

That isn't to say this version of Kismet is bad. It's more to say that you wonder whether a truly classic movie could have been made from the material. I have yet to see the musical version, so maybe that musical will be the classic.

Assignment in Brittany

Another of the movies that I needed to watch before it expired from my cloud DVR is an MGM World War II morale-builder, Assignment in Brittany.

The movie doesn't start in Brittany, but in North Africa, where the allies are fighting the Germans. Captain Metard (Jean-Pierre Aumont) is a spy doing espionage work, dressed as one of the local Arabs. However, it's a ruse to murder a Nazi officer, and one that works. Metard, being French, can't go back to France since the Nazis occupy it, so he returns to the London headquarters of the Free French. But they have a plan for him that's going to allow him to go back to France, as if you couldn't tell from the title of the movie.

Bertrand Corlay is a farmer and poet from Brittany, but he was believed to have been collaborating with the Nazis since they occupied France. The British got him, and found out that he and Metard look surprisingly alike. So perhaps the British and Free French can train Metard in what Corlay is like, so that he can go back to Brittany as Corlay and move around the area the way that Corlay could to get vital information that the Allies want. Now, to me, it seems silly that somebody like Metard could learn to become Corlay in the short time period that the movie requires, but in those days apparently it wasn't considered so far-fetched.

Now, you might guess from my comment that Metard is caught out fairly quickly, but that's not the case. Only Mme. Corlay (Margaret Wycherley) figures out the deception right away. She's opposed to the Nazis even though here real son isn't, so she's not about to betray this interloper. The bigger issue is that Bertrand had a fairly complicated personal life. He's got a fiancée, Anne (Susan Peters), but also has a mistress in Élise (Signe Hasso). And everybody around knows that Bertrand Corlay is liked enough by the Nazis to be able to go to Paris (which is how the British are able to make the switch).

However, since this is a World War II movie and the Nazid obviously can't win in the end, we can assume that Metard is able to get information, which is that the Nazis have taken a seaside village, Saint Lumaire, and turned it into a port for their U-boats, forcibly evacuating all of the locals. Metard has to get the information back to the Allies, and that's going to require a radio broadcast. If you've seen enough World War II movies you know that the Nazis and Allies were going around searching for the location of illicit transmitters. This results in Metard getting captured, and the movie reaching its climax.

Assignment in Brittany is typical for the sort of movie released during World War II and dealing with resistance to the Nazis. It's well enough done, although it was designed to be jingoistic in order to keep up the spirits of the people on the home front. Audiences of the day probably would have enjoyed it, although watching 80 years on it might appear dated to some.

Invaders from Mars

I didn't pay much attention to the 2024 selection of films to the National Film Registry when those selections were announced back in December. Apparently, one of the films named was the science fiction film Invaders from Mars. That would probably explain why it's shown up multiple times in the past several years on TCM. It's got yet another airing coming up, tomorrow, April 5, at 1:45 PM, which means it's time for me to watch it and do a review on it.

Child actor Jimmy Hunt plays David MacLean, one of those space-obsessed kids of the 1950s, although in his case it's slightly more understandable since his father George (Leif Erickson) does some sort of classified space research at one of the nearby military facilities. Mom Mary is slightly worried about the kid's overactive imagination, thinking that the kid needs more sleep. One night during a thunderstorm, David looks over to the sandpit just across a field from his bedroom window, and sees what for all the world looks like a flying saucer coming to rest behind the fence. David tells Dad, who suggests he and the kid go out and look in the morning. But Dad goes out alone, and when he gets to the sand, he suddenly falls through.

Dad isn't back by morning, so Mom calls the police, with two policemen showing up, only for them to fall through the sand too. By this point Dad returns home, although to David it seems like something has changed, as Dad has no emotion other than anger at David for asking questions about that supposed spaceship. Dad also has some strange scar on the back of his neck. Worse, David also sees his friend from nearby, little Kathy, fall into the sand. And when she comes back, she burns down her house!

David is understandably fearful that something has gone terribly wrong, so he runs away to the police station to look for help. The police bring in a doctor, Pat Blake (Helena Carter), who gets the impression that perhaps David is telling the truth when she learns that he has a bit of a scientific bent and is not known to be given to making stuff up. She talks to a friend of the MacLeans, astronomer Dr. Kelston (Arthur Franz), and brings up the idea that not only is there life on Mars, but that they may well already be sending research ships to Earth. The working theory is that the Martians have already arrived, and they have a way of controlling the minds of earthlings.

Thankfully, there's a lot of military around that they can bring manpower and weapons to the situation, as well as the scientific minds of David, Blake, and Kelston. Sure enough, there are Martians in that field, although the Martians aren't stupid and have moved to a different part of the field. What's left behind is the tunnels they've left. The search is on for the Martians, and that search gets more desperate when David and Dr. Blake fall into another of the traps the Martians have set up.

Invaders from Mars was directed by William Cameron Menzies, who is probably more prominent for his set designs although he also directed the 1930s scifi film Things To Come. It's that earlier film I found myself thinking of as I was watching Invaders from Mars. The underground Martian sets are imaginative, while the sets above ground are decidedly 1950s B sci-fi stuff. But, with Menzies at the helm, we're given to some imaginative camera work as well. That's definitely a good thing, since the story is rather straightforward and resolved way too quickly. Reading reviews from people who first saw the movie as a kid, they say they were frightened by the film, and I can see why. As an adult, however, it's not scary but just another fun 50s scifi genre film. Definitely worth watching.

Margie

Tomorrow on TCM is a morning and afternoon of movies with screenplays written by F. Hugh Herbert, not to be confused with character actor Hugh Herbert. However, there's a movie airing on TCM on Saturday, April 5, that I'm planning on doing a blog post about tomorrow, so F. Hugh Herbert gets a mention today. As it turns out, I have one of his movies on my DVR, although it's not one of the movies that TCM is showing tomorrow. That movie is Margie.

The credits are done as something that wasn't uncommon for book adptations, which is the turning of pages with another batch of credits on each page. However, in this set of opening credits the pages are pages of a scrapbook with old photos on the pages accompanying the credits. After the credits, the camera pans into the attic of the house where Margie (Jeanne Crain) lives, together with teenage daughter Joyce (Ann E. Tood, not the same person as Ann Todd despite the middle initial E not being in the opening credits). Joyce finds some of Mom's old stuff from the 1920s when Margie herself was a teenager in the same small Ohio town where they still live, such as a scrapbook, and an old pair of bloomers. Joyce asks Mom to tell her about when she was in high school, so we get the requisite flashback....

The flashback is to 1928, since Herbert Hoover is running for President, although this seems a bit off since the movie was released in November 1946 which means Margie would have had to get married immediately out of high school and been knocked un her wedding night to satisfy the Production Code and have a 16-year-old daughter. Margie is in high school, living with her grandmother (Esther Dale) since Mom is dead and Dad (Hobart Cavanaugh) has to travel a lot for business. Margie has a best friend in Marybelle (Barbara Lawrence) who has a boyfriend Johnnie while Margie doesn't (yet) have one.

That pair of bloomers Joyce found is about to play a part in the plot. The elastic is no longer holding as it used to, and since is the 1920s, it's not as if you can go to your local big-box department store and buy a half dozen pairs of underpants cheaply, which is why the same pair of bloomers keeps falling down and causing all sorts of trouble for poor Margie. She escapes into the library, just as the school's new French teacher, Mr. Fontayne (Glenn Langan) comes in. Margie claims she's doing research for the upcoming debate, but she's as taken with the hot (by the standards of 1940s teens as Hollywood saw them) Fontayne; indeed, all the girls are talking about him.

Margie thinks she's in love with Fontayne, even though he's entirely the wrong age for her. Perhaps one of her fellow classmates would be better, even though she thinks they're all immature. She does have a crush on Marybelle's boyfriend, while pursuing her is nice but inept Roy (Alan Young). Over the course of the movie, Margie prepares for the big debate, on the topic of whether the US should have troops in Nicaragua; goes ice skating with her fellow students; and worries about who's going to take her to the big dance. It all leads up to the reveal at the end of the movie of which of the men she wound up marrying.

I've mentioned in the past that the post-war years at Fox saw a series of nostalgic musicals that were either straight-up biopics, or biopic-like movies. Margie isn't really a musical, although one might be forgiven for thinking you're getting into a musical. Fox probably didn't mind the confusion back in the day since those musicals seemed to be successes and I think audiences of the day liked the nostalgia value of a simpler time. If you're up for nostalgia, Margie certainly fits the bill. However, at the same time I have to say it's dated and definitely not the sort of movie that's going to be for everybody. It's not bad by any means; it's one of those things where I think there are other movies from the era that would be easier for people not necessarily fans of old-time stuff to get into. (For Jeanne Crain, Leave Her to Heaven immediately comes to mind.)

Piranha (1978)

Roger Corman died last year, and TCM did a programming salute with three nights of movies that he either directed or produced. I still have a couple I want to get through before they expire from the DVR, both some of the Vincent Price horror-type stuff from the 1960s and some of the later drive-in B fare. Up next is one from the late 1970s, Piranha.

OK, with a title like Piranha going into it there's probably a lot that you can already guess what's going to happen at the end of any given scene, starting with the opening pre-credits scene. A young man and women are going hiking in the a backwoods mountainish area when they come upon a fence that has an old "no trespassing sign". Naturally, they trespass, and quickly find a pool that's not a traditional swimming pool, but something they're not certain what exactly it's used for. Since this is a low-budget horror film, these two strip down to their undies and start swimming, only to be killed by somthing they have no idea what it is, although we can obviously guess since we know the title of the movie.

Maggie McKeown (Heather Menzies) is sent by her boss, private detective Earl Lyon (Richard Deacon), to try to find the two missing people. We then get a scene with some of the locals whom Maggie will be meeting, Paul (Bradford Dillman) and Jack (Keenan Wynn), talking about how idyllic life is up here on the mountain with the river going by their cabins. When Maggie's jeep breaks down, she goes to Paul's cabin. He informs her that it's just his and Jack's cabins. Well, those two cabins and a secret military facility that was closed down some years back in conjunction with the US ending its official involvement in the Vietnam War. Once again, you can guess that they too are going to go to the military facility.

Unsurprisingly, they don't find the two missing people, since we know they're both very much dead already. But they do find a piece of jewerly the woman would be missing. So they look for a way to drain the pool, thinking that perhaps the dead bodies wouldn't have floated to the top yet. And they also find they're not alone, which should have been insanely obvious the minute they discovered the place still had electric service. There are mutant creatures, as well as a man who tries to stop them from draing the pool.

That man is Dr. Hoak (Kevin McCarthy), a scientist who was working at the facility when it was closed down, and stayed on in part to be a caretaker and in part because he wanted to keep working surreptitiously on that research. What he was working on was breeding piranha to be extra vicious, to release them in Vietnamese rivers and kill Communist resistance or some such. And Maggie and Paul stupidly released those piranhas into the river....

Sure, the plot of Piranha is dumb and unoriginal, but one goes into a movie like this looking not for intelligence or new cinematic vistas, but for entertainment. And Piranhas certainly entertains enough. On my first run-through, I was going to argue that there was a big plot hole as to how the piranhas survived all these years: wouldn't they have starved or something? But now the plot hole is how Dr. Hoak got the money to keep the place going, which I'd guess you could claim is because some arm of the government was funding it through a slush fund. Heaven knows the events of the past few months have given people enough evidence to believe the US government maintains a plethora of such slush funds.

But Piranha doesn't really have any of the sort of political overtones my previous paragraph might have implied. It's just dumb mindless entertainment for the drive-in crowd back in the day, or people who want to sit around a bowl of popcorn with friends today.

Criminal Court

Someone whom I haven't given much attention to over the many years that I've done this blog is Tom Conway, brother of more prominent supporting actor George Sanders. But Conway was more than capable of doing a good job and bringing energy to an otherwise pedestrian movie. A good example of this would be the RKO B movie Criminal Court.

Conway plays Steve Barnes, a defense attorney who has a reputation for producing theatrics and gimmicks in the courtroom. He's currently defending a man who is accused of a gangland killing. This defendant isn't so important; what is important is the fact that the defendant has run afoul of underworld king Vic Wright (Robert Armstrong). Barnes is hoping to use this case as a jumping-off point in his campaign to become the new district attorney, running on a clean government campaign since the current DA is using "witnesses" paid for by Wright.

Complicating things is the fact that Barnes has a girlfriend, Georgia (Martha O'Driscoll), who is an aspiring nightclub singer. She's about to get an interview for a job... at a nightclub owned by Vic Wright. Steve isn't particularly thrilled with this, although he also realizes that he can't really get in the way of his girlfriend's career. She makes it past the first test and gets an interview with Wright himself later that evening.

But she's not the only person who's going to be seeing Wright at his club in the evening. Barnes has come across some pictures of Wright's kid brother Frankie (Steve Brodie) that will put a big dent in Vic's career. Not only that, but he plans on showing them at a campaign event. Vic tries to bribe him, and when that doesn't work, claims that he's got some sort of incriminating evidence of his own that Barnes really ought to come over and see.

The meeting doesn't go well, and devolves into a struggle between Vic and Steve, although it's also witnessed by Steve's secretary Joan since she's also on Vic's payroll to feed information from Barnes' office to him. She slips out the back way just as Steve comes in to Vic's office, but stays to listen. She knows that durin the struggle, Vic pulls out a gun, and the two men try to grab it since it's now clearly a matter of life and death. The gun goes off in such a way that Steve isn't really guilty but that could destroy his campaign. Vic gets shot and killed.

Worse, after Steve leaves, who should show up but Georgia? She sees the dead body and rather stupidly panics, picking up the gun. Dumb, dumb, dumb, although I suppose you can't fault her for panicking. But with her having been seen in Vic's office and having been seen by Frankie with the gun, she's an obvious suspect. Steve could get her off for reasons the audience knows why, but of course nobody in the film but Steve knows what those reasons are. Well, almost nobody.

Criminal Court is a B movie that doesn't cover any new ground. It was actually released in 1946, but has the feel of something that would have been right at home in the 1930s. This doesn't mean it's bad; instead, I'd say it feels overly familiar. We've seen all these plot devices before, but thanks to Tom Conway and director Robert Wise early in his career, the material is still entertaining enough.

My Beautiful Laundrette

TCM ran a double feature of films starring Daniel Day-Lewis a while back. I already did a post on My Left Foot, and now it's time to do a post on the other film they ran, My Beautiful Laundrette.

Day-Lewis plays Johnny, who is squatting in a derelict apartment building somewhere in London together with his friend Omar (Gordon Warnecke), at least until some sort of thugs come in and drive all the squatters out, forcing Johnny and Omar to beat a hasty retreat out the back window. Johnny is a sort of street punk who goes back to his all-white gang, while Omar goes back to see his alcoholic father Hussein and take care of him. Hussein and Omar are part of the Pakistani immigrant community, but Hussein is the sort of immigrant who believes in whatever the British equivalent of the American Dream for immigrants is, where you assimilate and the children's generation becomes wealthier, not having to do the terrible physical labor that immigrants generally have to do.

With that in mind, Dad wants Omar to go to university. To help with that, Dad thinks Omar should have a stable job in the off term. Omar's brother Nasser (Saeed Jaffrey) is the sort of immigrant like the brothers in Avalon who worked hard and became a success, now having a finger in multiple pies. Nasser, in fact, also has a white British mistress. Nasser offers Omar a job detailing cars at the car park he runs, London being one of those big cities where people don't have their own dedicated parking spaces outside their houses.

Omar takes to the work, but is also confronted by the presence of his cousin Salim. Salim is one of those children of immigrants who takes a different view of life as an immigrant and ethnic minority from people like Omar. Instead, immigrants should take what they "deserve" from the host country by whatever means, even if those means are scammy, and keep up ties with the old country to the extent of practically being bi-national. (Nowadays, you wonder if a character like Salim would become more of an Islamist, but that theme isn't explored in My Beautiful Laundrette.)

One night while Omar is driving Salim around London, the car is surrounded when it's stopped at a light. Wouldn't you know it, but the gang that surrounds them just happens to be Johnny and his friends. Johnny and Omar are able to resume their relationship, which as it turns out is more than just a friendship as the two have homosexual feelings for each other. Omar realizes that having Johnny around as a bit of "muscle" could be a good thing, and Nasser starts to give Omar bigger duties, such as trying to turn a laundrette (laundromat for American viewers) profitable. Omar is bright and hardworking, but also finds he has to get a bit of money via illicit means to make things work, which could get him in trouble with Salim.

My Beautiful Laundrette is an interesting if uneven movie. It presents a lot of ideas that in the wrong hands wouldn't just be controversial, but used as a laundry list for a morality play; think the movie No Down Payment that I blogged about back in 2013. Here, though, a lot of the stuff (homosexuality being the obvious one) are just presented as this is what the characters are and the viewer has to have the intelligence to figure out how this would play out in real life.

One thing I do wonder about as an American, however, is how much the director and screenwriter might have been trying to make a commentary about the Britain of this time. Being 1985, it was smack dab in the middle of Margaret Thatcher's time as Prime Minister, and as with Donald Trump here in the US, her being in power drove the arts "community", or the people in creative arts fields who saw themselves as a "community", hysterically around the bend. If there is commentary, however, it's certainly not to the level you see from contemporary Hollywood. And in any case, My Beautiful Laundrette is definitely a worthwhile, offbeat movie.

March 2025 end of month briefs

It's been a while since I did a briefs post, since I've been a bit busy trying to keep up with watching stuff before it expires from the DVR as well as putting in some overtime out in the real world. Heck, I don't think I even did a post for the clock change on Daylight Savings Time a few weeks back, although it's really more important to do a post when the clocks go back since that's when there's an extra hour in the schedule to fill.

The first order of business would be to mention the passing of actor Richard Chamberlain, who died yesterday at the age of 90. I think he might be better remembered for his TV work, especially the early 1980s TV miniseries Shogun. But TCM fans may recall that Chamberlain did a Star of the Month piece on Claude Rains, with whom he worked at the end of Rains' career making Twilight of Honor. Unfortunately, I don't think that piece seems to be on YouTube, although Warner Bros. does have a preview for Twilight of Honor.

Tonight's Silent Sunday Nights feature is the Clara Bow film It, starting at midnight. YouTube TV has it as a 72-minute movie in a 2-hour slot, which of course led me to wonder whether there would be a short to fill out the time slot. A two-reel silent would make sense, but as it turns out the short is 24 Hour Alert, supposedly starting at 1:25 AM and leading up to the 2:00 AM start of TCM Imports. TCM's site actually does have shorts listed at least a couple days out, and at least for the daily schedule; as far as I can tell they still only have a monthly "highlights" listing rather than a full monthly schedule.

Monday morning and afternoon on TCM are dedicated to director Lloyd Bacon in honor of his birthday on December 4. Wait a second, that wouldn't be his birthday. But since he worked at Warner Bros. in the 1930s it's easy for TCM to do a programming salute to him, starting at 6:00 AM with the Joel McCrea film Kept Husbands. Also of interest might be Marked Woman at noon. If you've seen the piece on Bette Davis that was done for one of her turns as Star of the Month, they use a clip of her from Marked Woman where she talks about being smart enough to know all the angles. Watch enough TCM, and you'll know exactly the clip I mean.

Tuesday is April 1, which means the start of a new quarter. I can't tell if FXM's Retro block as any new movies in the rotation, mostly because I haven't been paying close enough attention since I've done posts on the vast majority of what that block airs. Not their fault so much as it is that there are only so many films Fox made. Titles that I did posts on ages ago that are showing up in April where I don't believe I've seen them show up recently include Something for the Boys and Satan Never Sleeps.