No pizza in this one

Another silent movie that I had to make a point of watching before it expired from my DVR was Tod Browning's The Mystic, which had a copyright date of 1925 but looked like a re-release print considering that it had what really seemed like a synchronized score. (Then again, it's possible that a new score was commissioned for a video release, although there's no modern title card mentioning this.) In any case, as I always do, I made it point to watch it before it expired so that I could write up this post on the movie.

The Mystic opens in Hungary, at a traveling circus where one of the acts is a young woman named Zara (Aileen Pringle) who is part magic act, part phony psychic, working with her father Zazarack (Mitchell Lewis) and knife-thrower Anton. The show goes from village to village (although there are some surprisingly large building from the MGM backlot in this village) with the act traveling in the 1920s equivalent of a motor home. In this village however, someone who's clearly out of place has shown up and seems to be stalking Zara. Dad and Anton are worried, although Zara doesn't seem to care.

That man turns out to be an American, Michael Nash (Conway Tearle, half-brother of Godfrey). While the magic act is a small-time phony thing and presumably everybody in the village knows it, Michael is a much bigger would-be con artist. He has an idea that would fleece people out of large sums of money, but he needs a phony psychic like Zara to pull it off. He's willing to offer everyone in the act a substantial sum of money to come to America, where they'll engage in the con that Michael has planned.

But first, they need to engage in a smaller con to get the higher society of New York to believe that Zara is really what they claim she is, and this is one of the best parts of the movie, as we see all the preparations Michael goes to to make the effects of the séance seem real. There's a way for him to eavesdrop on the room, and a baseboard panel that allows someone to get into the room where the séance is being held even though the doors are supposedly locked. Even though a police inspector (character actor DeWitt Jennings) shows up with the express intention of debunking things, he's not able too and things go off well enough for the con artists.

Well enough, in fact, that they get the impression of wealthy heiress Doris Merrick and her guardian Bradshaw who is managing the trust that holds Doris' wealth. Michael's plan is to gain Doris' confidence so that he can get the bonds and other securities that comprise Doris' wealth. But things don't go quite as planned for a bunch of reasons, in part because with all that money there's bound to be jealousy over who gets how much, and in part because the authorities are on the case. Several guns are involved, and there's also Anton's prowess at knife-throwing that's finally a useful part of the plot.

Tod Browning's movies are always interesting for how shocking they try to be. Unfortunately, The Mystic is hampered by a Hollywood ending that I can't help but think wasn't Browning's idea but that of somebody at MGM. The story up until the climax works fairly well, with the best part being the special effects, and the way we more or less get to see how they were created because the creation of those effects is an important plot point. Despite the flaws, The Mystic is still a movie that's worth a watch.

The Invisible Ray

TCM unsurprisingly ran a bunch of horror films last October. One that I didn't get around to watching until just before it expired from my DVR was The Invisible Ray. Having finally watched it, I wrote up this post and saved it in drafts to post at a suitable time.

Boris Karloff plays Dr. Rukh, an astronomer living in what is probably Romania together whith his blind mother (Violet Kemble Cooper) and his wife Diana (Frances Drake), who is the daughter of Rukh's deceased scientific partner. Rukh has supposedly come across some great scientific discovery, involving looking at distant galaxies as a way of seeing Earth's own past. It's a hypothesis that brings researcher Dr. Benet (Bela Lugosi) in from the more civilized parts of Europe together with his sponsors, the British Sir Francis Stevens and his wife Lady Stevens (Beulah Bondi) together with their nephew Drake (Frank Lawton).

Rukh's experiments appear to show that a meteorite hit Earth in what is now Africa some time in the planet's distant past, and that this impact produced something that people in the movie call "Element Radium X". Now, at the time the movie was made, radiation therapy was in its infancy; people knew about radium and how the Curies discovered it as well as how it killed Marie. But the movie extrapolates from that into a bunch of stuff that's factual nonsense albeit entertaining nonsense. In any case, since the source of Radium X is in Africa, everybody goes off to Africa to find it.

During the expedition, Dr. Rukh separates from everybody else mostly because the rest of the cast is as much interested in doing charity work performing medical services on the natives while Rukh is obsessed with finding that Radium X. Rukh does find the meteorite, but it comes at a cost. He gets some form or radiation poisoning which results in his having a "deah touch" in that if he touches anybody else, it quickly kills them. Benet is the only person he can tell, and Benet comes up with some sort of, if not antidote, at least a treatment that will temporarily stop the effects of Radium X.

Meanwhile, Rukh also learns that during the expedition, his wife has fallen in love with Drake, which is none too surprising considering that she pretty much only married Rukh out of convenience sinces she was stuck in eastern Europe when her father died. But apparently another effect of Radium X poisoning is insane jealousy.

Everybody returns to Paris, and Dr. Rukh's plan is to kill the rest of the people in the expedition as a form of revenge. After all, all he has to do is stop taking Benet's antidote and he'll just be able to touch them and render them really quite dead. He even fakes his own death to aid in this. But Benet is no dummy, and after a couple of murders he figures out what's going on and comes up with a way to lure the supposedly dead Rukh out of hiding for the climax....

In terms of science, The Invisible Ray is a bunch of nonsense. But it's very entertaining nonsense, thanks in large part to the acting of Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi. Thanks as well to the Production Code, you know where the movie is going to end up, but it's still an enjoyable watch.

Kirk Douglas, Mafioso

Kirk Douglas played a gangster in Out of the Past. Twenty years later, he would go back to the world of organized crime, this time as an Italian-American in the more modern Mob. That film, The Brotherhood, ran on TCM some time back, so I recorded it and watched it.

Vince Genetta (Alex Cord) is on an Alitalia flight to Palermo, on the Italian island of Sicily. He gets off the plane looking for his brother, Frank (Kirk Douglas), who has of course sent representatives to pick Vince up. Well, not quite, since Frank doesn't know Vince is coming but has been expecting someone from America. And the men Frank has sent to the airport call Frank up to warn him of this visitor before taking Vince to a pre-determined rendezvous point.

Of course, as my introduction gave away, although it wouldn't take too much guessing even if you didn't know the plot of the movie, Frank is a member of the Mob who has fled America for the ancestral home of Italy out of a fear that some rival mobster is going to put a hit on him. Frank is happy to see his brother, although as his wife Ida (Irene Papas in a criminally underused role) points out, it's not out of the realm of possibility that Vince could be the one the Mob sent over to get Frank. At this point Frank starts to think back to how things arrived at this point....

Vince was a college man who also served some time in the Army. He's finally been demobbed and, on meeting Frank again, informs Frank that he wants to go into "the business", meaning that he wants to be part of the Mafia family branch that Frank is the head of ever since Dad was rubbed out in a hit. Vince is also going to be getting married to Emma Bertolo (Susan Strasberg), head of another Mafia Don, Dom Bertolo (Luther Adler).

Frank is one of those people who believes in the old style of mobbing up, which means things like flashy hits, or at least stylized enough that they serve as a clear warning to other people who might cross him. As an example he has a couple of goons kill a guy in a brownfield site and stuff a bird in the guys mouth: don't be a stool pigeon. However, Mafia ways are changing. The Italians are beginning to work more with the Irish and the Jews, making democratic decisions among a board meeting of sorts. They want to diversify, doing things like buying up small defense contractors in new technologies like electronics, with the plan of bilking the government out of what would be tens of billions today. (Perhaps opening learing centers might have been more efficient.) Frank isn't so sure of this, because directly scamming the feds seems to him like a bad idea.

Frank's old ways alarm the other bosses, while Vinnie sets out to work as an accountant who can come up with two sets of books to minimize what they pay to the government, getting him in good with the other bosses. But Frank's really going to alarm the others when he comes into more direct conflict with them, learning about just how his family's branch of the Mob has become less influential. Now, as we already know from the beginning, Frank has decamped to Italy, which means something is going to happen to make Frank think that's a good idea. What that something is, and what Vince's role with his brother is, are things that I don't want to spoil.

The Brotherhood is another one of those movies that's got a really good idea behind it, but where the execution falls a bit flat. I think part of that is the flashback structure: we already know Frank is on the outs as the movie opens, which is a bit too much to reveal, I think. It also doesn't help that Alex Cord is a fairly wooden actor who's being asked to play a cipher. Kirk Douglas tries, but he's also not a particularly sympathetic character here. I'm glad, however, that I got the chance to see The Brotherhood, even if it's not the best film out there.

The attic around toys

I think I've mentioned quite a few times in the past that Southern Gothic is not one of my favorite genres of movies, in part because of how "loud" the movies are, and even more because they tend to be full of characters for whom it's difficult to have any sympathy. In any case, another Southern Gothic movie was on my DVR and getting a TCM airing at the end of Gene Tierney's day in Summer Under the Stars: Toys in the Attic, early tomorrow (August 10) at 4:15 AM.

Carrie (Geraldine Page) and Anna (Wendy Hiller) Berniers are a pair of sisters living together in the old family house in New Orleans, neither of them ever having apparently married. They've got an itinerant brother Julian (Dean Martin) who's gone north, supposedly to earn money, although the source of the money is a big point of discussion over the course of the movie. In any case, Julian is expected to return to New Orleans as the movie opens together with his new bride Lily (Yvette Mimieux).

Except that Julian is already in New Orleans, holed up at a hotel with Lily with the hotel owner expecting him to pay off a substantial bill. Julian has business to attend to with Cyrus Warkins, the nature of which will be revealed later in the movie. But the business ends with Julian in possession of a very thick envelope full of cash, which Julian in an incredibly stupid move does not deposit into a bank account.

Julian arrives at the old family home, bringing a whole bunch of gifts since one of the things the two sisters had hoped for was to be able to take a trip to Europe together. However, the sisters wonder about the source of the money, with one theory being that Julian was paid to marry Lily. Lily, you see, is the sort of woman who acts as though she's never going to grow emotionally beyond being an adolescent: she's physically marriageable, but not mentally. The two Berniers sisters even ask Lily's mother Albertine (that's Gene Tierney) directly about it.

There's also the suggestion that Julian earned that money by selling a factory up in Chicago, which he may well have done although he probably didn't earn that much money. He's also been way too profligate with the money he does have, the way that some poor people who win the lottery spend themselves into bankruptcy.

Meanwhile, Julian has also been seeing Cyrus' wife Charlotte, who as it turns out also has something to do with the money that Julian got although that's only going to be revealed later in the movie. But continuing to see her after Julian's got married to Lily is now going to be twice the issue: where it might only have been a problem with Cyrus, now there's Lily to worry about too. And Carrie, who seems to look up to Julian much more than Anna does. This warped relationship is ultimately going to lead to the climax of the movie....

There's a lot in Toys in the Attic that I can't really mention since it would give away too much information. But let's just say that Toys in the Attic is an overheated movie. Julian comes across as a dishonest grifter. Lily and Carrie are both obnoxious blankety-blanks who deserve to be slapped. Anna is the closest to a sensible person, but even she is not quite a prize. The crazy plot and unlikable characters make Toys in the Attic a difficult movie to warm up to.

But, as always, watch and judge for yourself.

Die Mörder sind unter uns

Every now and then, Eddie Muller dips into foreign films for his Noir Alley segment, leading to films that I'm likely not to have seen as well as a glut of foreign films on my DVR that I have to get through before they expire. One such foreign film was one of the earliest to be made in Germany after the end of World War II, The Murderers Are Among Us.

It's Berlin in 1945, not long after the defeat of the Nazis, with the city largely in ruins and people having to resort to various means, not necessarily ethical, to survive. Among the people returning to Berlin is Dr. Hans Mertens (Ernst Wilhem Borchert), who had worked as a doctor before the war but who was clearly scarred by his war experiences that will be revealed later in the movie. He gets an apartment in a building that was less badly damaged than some others: it seems to have four walls, but a lot of the windows are broken.

What he doesn't know is that the previous occupant of the apartment is still alive. Susanne Wallner (Hildegard Knef) was sent to a concentration camp for reasons not mentioned, although I'd guess it's political rather than being Jewish. She survived the war and expects that she might be able to return to her old apartment, only to find that Mertens has taken the apartment. With the housing crunch, it's not as though there are a lot of apartments out there, so the two agree to live together.

It's not long before Susanne finds a letter addressed to a Mrs. Brückner, which was written by Mr. Brückner and is only to be delivered to her in case of the husband's death. Obviously Mertens had served with Brückner in the war and was supposed to give that letter had Brückner died, only for Mertens never to hear of Brückner's death. With the war over, Susanne figures that Brücker probably died and that perhaps it would be a good idea for her to deliver the letter to Mrs. Brückner by hand.

However, what Susanna finds is that Mr. Brücker survived the war, and is making a reasonably good living in what is effectively the scrap metal industry, taking old military helmets and turning them into cookware. (One would guess that Brückner was of a fairly high social class before the war although this isn't quite mentioned.) Susanne returns home and tells Mertens that Brückner actually survived, something that will probably relieve Mertens.

However, Mertens is decidedly unhappy about this. It turns out that Brückner was involved with whatever it is that gave Mertens that emotional scarring, and in a bad way. Mertens, upon learning that Brücker is actually very much alive and doing quite well for himself, decides that Brückner needs justice, and that the only way for that justice to be meted out is if Mertens does it himself.

The Murderers Are Among Us is an interesting movie, partly on its own merits and partly for the atmosphere in which the movie was made. Germany was of course occupied in early 1946 when the movie was made, and for better or worse the occupying powers influenced how the film was made. This means that the director couldn't get the ending he wanted. However, the movie is filmed on location in Berlin, with all the ruins and deprivation that the city was facing in 1946. That alone is worth the price of admission. Never mind that the movie is pretty good despite the problems the ending has.

The Murderers Are Among Us is absolutely worth a watch.

Good Morning, Eve!

One of the shorts that TCM ran as part of the Saturday morning block was the early three-strip Technicolor short Good Morning, Eve!.

Leon Errol stars as Adam, looking much too old and certainly not the stereotypically handsome sort or Adam you'd see in other Bible-themed movies. Of course, he's in the Garden of Eden with Eve (June MacCloy), and is tempted with a bite of the apple.

This time, however, the apple sends them out of paradise, if you will, by going on a tour of history. This is an excuse for some sight gags since Adam and Eve are people out of place, as well as an excuse for musical numbers since that's the sort of thing audiences back in 1934 would have loved.

Adam and Eve make a stop in ancient Rome under Nero (Vernon Dent), who is holding some sort of musical competition that allows Adam and Eve to enter since Nero is bored of the traditional competition where he's always declared the winner. There's also a rural-style quartet from the days before it was commonly called country music.

Second is a stop in the England of King Arthur, four years before Warner Bros. made The Adventures of Robin Hood. Finally, Adam and Eve make it to the present, and a beach full of nubile young women in bathing suits, before the ending that reveals....

There is naturally very little plot to Good Morning, Eve!. The humor is dad joke level, but the audiences would have been OK with such dumb humor around the musical numbers. What is the most interesting about the short is that it's one the earliest live-action examples of three-strip Technicolor, coming after maybe Service With a Smile and La Cucaracha as far as shorts completely in the new process. The print TCM showed is excellent, with stunning color:

Briefs for August 7-8, 2026

A bit of the TCM schedule for September is available, and it looks as though there's already one movie on the schedule that I'd written up a post for recently and scheduled for in between now and when it's going to air, so I've got to move a bunch of stuff around since if I can schedule a post on a movie in conjunction with when it's going to air (or, less frequently, FXM), I like to do that. Once again, however, as always, check a listings site yourself, since my writing up posts some time in advance tends to make me do double takes over whether I've scheduled them on the right day.

Today in TCM's Summer Under the Stars is a day of movies with Basil Rathbone, while tomorrow is given over to Steve McQueen, including the first version of The Thomas Crown Affair at 6:00 PM. It got a remake in the 1990s, of course, and apparently there's going to be a third version coming out next year, starring Michael B. Jordan. Not that I'm likely to watch it since I don't go to the movie theater very often. As I think I've stated, our local sixtyplex is in a dead mall which I think is down to about the theater and Target, which was only attached to the mall at some later date. It's depressing to go there, and the service roads are badly maintained.

There's actually a couple of movies in the FXM rotation that I've got on my DVR but haven't watched or written up posts about, and they're coming up in the near future: Wee Willie Winkie at 7:20 AM August 9 as part of a morning of Shirley Temple movies, and Daniel Day-Lewis in Lincoln a couple of times next week. I have to admit part of the reason I haven't gotten around to watching them is that I'm always a couple of weeks ahead in my post scheduling, and besides, FXM repeats stuff often enough that I can keep seeing it if I missed the previous airing. The one FXM movie on my DVR that doesn't seem to be repeating is Anastasia, which I've mentioned in passing a few times but never actually done a full-length post on.

Today is the birth anniversary of actress Billie Burke (born 1884), who is probably best known for playing Glinda, the good witch, in the Judy Garland version of The Wizard of Oz although I always think of her as Lionel Barrymore's wife in Dinner at Eight. It's also the birth anniversary of Ann Harding (born 1901). That reminds me that I really need to get around to watching the 1930 version of Holiday, if it's still available on demand at Tubi. I noticed that among the films to put in my Tubi library ages ago, and rarely get around to watching anything from it.

The Arnelo Affair

I mentioned a few months back that I somehow wound up with a whole bunch of movies starring George Murphy on my DVR, not from a programming theme of his movies. Another of the movies was The Arnelo Affair, which I watched and wrote of this post that I could schedule at a suitable time after other posts on Murphy's movies.

Murphy is technically the second male lead here, and we don't see him at first. Instead, we see the female lead, Frances Gifford, who plays Ann Parkson. Ann is in a car with Tony Arnelo (John Hodiak), and in a voiceover talking about how much she regrets this. And how she wishes her husband had never brought this guy home. So, as you might be able to guess, we're about to get Yet Another Flashback, to the time when Ann's husband Ted (that's George Murphy) brought Tony Arnelo home.

Ted is a Chicago lawyer who's trying to advance his career, and one of his clients is nightclub owner Arnelo, whom Ted is representing in a bunch of tax-related stuff. Ann and Tony have a kid, Ricky (a young Dean Stockwell), and a seemingly wonderful life, except that Ted is spending a lot of time on his work, to the point that he can't take Ann out for a night out on the town with friends like upstairs neighbor and couturier Vivian Delwyn (Eve Arden). But Tony shows up, and he immediately starts telling Ann how striking she looks. When he learns that Ann has a hobby of interior decoration, Tony offers her the chance to make a bit of money by decorating some of his places.

Ann being a bored housewife, she decides to take Tony up on the offer. However, she quickly learns that Tony is really interested in her for other reasons, and that she's not the only woman he's interested in. He's also seeing a local actress named Claire Lorrison who shows up one afternoon when Ann thinks she's going to be alone with Tony. Worse, Tony starts smacking Claire around, leading Ann to want to break off the relationship with Tony. Tony, for his part, is rather persistent, constantly calling Ann up.

Things take an even worse turn when Claire winds up dead, clearly quite murdered. Ann is innocent of the murder, although not necessarily of adultery, which is still an issue under the Production Code. But Tony being a nasty piece of work, he's able to blackmail Ann by making certain that the dead Claire is found with a compact that has a big letter A that can likely be traced back to Ann. But of course, since there's that Production Code, we know that the real murderer has to be caught and get his just desserts.

I can see why all the people involved in The Arnelo Affair might want to be involved with it, but the final result is something that's rather a misfire. If I had to guess why, I think that it feels like it's devoid of emotion. George Murphy isn't a very charismatic actor at the best of times, and he's certainly very much a second banana here. Tony Arnelo may be a piece of work, but Hodiak doesn't give off that vibe. And Gifford is a bit of a cipher too. The Dean Stockwell character is somewhat superfluous. And, not that it has anything to do with the movie itself, the print TCM ran looked like one of those older 16mm prints that TV stations would run of old public-domain movies.

Manhattan Murder Mystery

Tomorrow, August 6, is Diane Keaton day in this year's installment of TCM's Summer Under the Stars. Since Keaton died late last year and TCM had a programming tribute to her, this gave me the opportunity to record a couple of her movies that I hadn't seen before. One that I recorded that's part of her day tomorrow is Manhattan Murder Mystery, airing at 4:00 PM.

Keaton plays Carol Lipton, married to Manhattan editor Larry Lipton (Woody Allen) and living in a nice Manhattan apartment. One night, she agrees to go to a hockey game on the grounds that Larry will then go with her to the opera, a sign that there might be a bit of tension in their marriage. As they get home, on the elevator up to the apartment they meet some neighbors they haven't met before, Paul (Jerry Adler) and Lillian (Lynn Cohen) House. The Houses invite Larry and Carol over for a nightcap, and the two couples seem to get along moderately well.

That all changes the following night when Carol and Larry return from the opera, only to find the paramedics there. It seems Lillian has suddenly died of a massive heart attack. Not that there's much that Carol and Larry can do to console the old guy, who in any case thinks that perhaps he should take a vacation to Florida to go visit his brother and do a bit of snorkeling.

Some time later, Carol, who was already revealed to be a good cook, decides to bring over some dessert to cheer up Paul. He happily lets Carol and Larry in, but when Carol goes to put on a pot of coffee to have with dessert, she can't find the percolator. In one of the cabinets, she finds... an urn with Lillian's ashes! This surprises Carol, not only because it seems like a slightly odd place to keep a cremation urn, but also because Paul and Lillian had mentioned having bought a pair of cemetery plots up in Rockland County to be buried in. My first thought was that it's not uncommon in places with family plots for people to be cremated and have the ashes interred in the family plot/crypt.

This, however, is not Carol's first thought. She has a feeling that Paul must have been lying about the plots up in Rockland County; that, combined with a cremation that precludes any sort of autopsy, suggests to Carol that perhaps Lillian could have been murdered! So what does Carol do? She tells her and Larry's friend Ted (Alan Alda) about this, and gets the bright idea that perhaps one day while she knows that Paul is out of the apartment she can get the superintendent's key and search Paul's apartment for evidence proving that Lillian did not in fact die of natural causes.

This is understandably a crazy idea for poor Larry. But he keeps getting dragged further and further into things, as Carol discovers one inconsistency after another that only strengthens her belief that Paul in fact killed Lillian. And dammit, like a 1930s husband/wife comic murder mystery movie, she's going to investigate until she gets to the real truth!

Complicating things are a pair of possibly romantic subplots. Since Ted is more willing to believe Carol than Larry is, Larry gets the impression that perhaps there's something romantic going on between Ted and Carol. Larry, meanwhile, is working on the newest book from client Marcia (Anjelica Huston), so Carol starts to wonder whether perhaps Larry has some sort of romantic involvement with Marcia. Eventually, the four team together when the evidence that there really was a murder becomes too strong to ignore.

Frankly, the plot of Manhattan Murder Mystery is, like a lot of the 1930s mysteries, wildly unrealistic. You're going to have to suspend a lot of disbelief here. However, the movie is decidedly well made. I think it's going to appeal more to fans of Woody Allen than the more casual movie fan, but it's not hard to see why it got mostly positive reviews upon its release.

That Glenn Ford version of Cimarron again

Edna Ferber's novel Cimarron was famously made into a motion picture not long after its publication, and that version is notorious for winning the Best Picture Oscar for RKO where time has been extremely unkind to the movie. Somewhere along the way MGM got the rights to the book. After RKO closed up shop, and after MGM's own best days had gone by, a second version of Cimarron made it to the screen. That version airs early tomorrow morning, or overnight tonight if you wish to look at it that way, at 3:30 AM.

Glenn Ford stars as Yancey Cravat, and despite the opening title cards going on about the first (1889) land rush in what is now the state of Oklahoma, we don't actually get to the rush for about a half hour. Instead, we have to hear Yancey talk about how this land rush is going to be the biggest thing in history, along with meeting Yancey's new bride Sabra (Maria Schell). She seems to be from fairly well-to-do immigrant stock, and her parents are none too happy with her marriage to a man they barely know and who is going to take her away to some god-forsaken place.

We also meet a couple of other people who are going to take part in the land rush. The Wyatts (Arthur O'Connell and Mercedes McCambridge) are the parents of a large family. Dixie Lee (Anne Baxter) knows just the piece of land that Yancey wants in Oklahoma, and has no qualms about beating Yancey to it and claiming it for her own, even though there's no way she can farm that much land. And then there are the Peglers (Robert Keith and Aline MacMahon). Mr. Pegler was the publisher of a newspaper in Texas, together with his printer Jesse (Harry Morgan, oddly credited as "Henry 'Harry' Morgan" despite already having some credits as Harry). Unfortunately, in the land rush, Mr. Pegler gets trampled to death, and the Cravats wind up as owners of a newspaper.

It's one step on the way to the family becoming wealthy, but that's not going to be an easy road. For one thing, there's a lot of prejudice in Oklahoma. Some of it is towards a Jewish merchant, Sol Levy (David Opatoshu), although Sabra doesn't have any issues with him, repeatedly going to him to ask to borrow money. Somewhat surprisingly is that Sabra has a lot of problems with the Cherokees who have populated the area ever since being forcibly relocated there by Andrew Jackson and the Trail of Tears. Imagine Sabra's horror when her kid marries a Cherokee near the end of the movie.

The other problem is that Yancey just can't stay in one place. He's always searching for the Next Big Thing which in some ways would be admirable, if it weren't for the fact that that next thing isn't something that can be achieved in the same location. Heck, that's why he took part in the first land rush. He takes part in another one in what is now the Oklahoma panhandle, and goes off to join the armed forces first for the Spanish-American War and then for the Great War fighting for France. This latter even though his character would be past 50 by this point.

Yancey also has adventures involving dealing with a couple of outlaws, as well as being asked by old friend Mr. Wyatt, himself wealthy from swindling the Cherokees out of oil rights, to become governor when the territory is about to become a state. Yancey just can't do it, which brings us to another half-hour of adventure.

Part of the problem with this version of Cimarron is that it runs nearly two and a half hours, and boy does it seem slow. The story also doesn't feel all that coherent, but like a series of vignettes in a bad way. The one thing the film has going for it is some nice cinematography, but that's not enough to save it.

The Private Life of Don Juan

Merle Oberon was TCM's Star of the Month late last year, and that gave me the opportunity to record a movie or two that I hadn't seen before. This time out, the movie is one she made over in the UK: The Private Life of Don Juan.

Now, as you might guess, Merle Oberon is not playing Don Juan; that honor goes to Douglas Fairbanks (Sr.) in his final film role. And, as you might also guess considering this is a movie about Don Juan, there are a bunch of actresses in the movie with a fairly similar role, that being a woman who might want Don Juan.

Fairbanks was 51 when he made The Private Life of Don Juan, and that's part of the conceit of the movie. As they say in sports, "Father Time is unbeaten", and time is catching up to Don Juan too. He and his friend/assistant Leporello (Melville Cooper) have returned to Sevilla in part to get medical advice because Don Juan is at the age where he's not as spry as he used to be. However, Sevilla is also the home of Don Juan's wife Doña Dolores (Benita Hume), who basically has a warrant for Don Juan's arrest.

Complicating things is the fact that word of Don Juan's return has reached the city, so there are young men who idolized Don Juan. One of them, Rodrigo (Barry MacKay) is even imitating Don Juan by climbing up to women's balconies to try to seduce them, a fact that needless to say gets the women's husbands irritated.

And then, something happens that may or may not solve Don Juan's problems. Rodrigo goes after the wrong man's wife, resulting in the angry husband killing Rodrigo. Except that everybody thinks this is Don Juan, which at least in theory solves Don Juan's legal issues as well as any financial issues he might have. Don Juan and Leporello go off to a small village where nobody will recognize them. But then he realizes that women are no longer interested in some random middle-aged guy who isn't known to have the reputation that preceded Don Juan wherever he went. But how can Don Juan convince people that he's still alive, and that this claimant really is Don Juan? Never mind the fact that if his real identity were to come to light, he'd still face criminal proceedings.

In any case, Don Juan does try to tell everyone that no, he's not really dead. Some writers tried to cash in on Don Juan's death by writing a pulp fiction pamphlet about the exploits of Don Juan, a book that got turned into a play. Don Juan goes to a performance of that play and tries to tell everyone that hey, he's still alive, but unsurprisingly he's just laughed out of the theater. Perhaps Doña Dolores can vouch for Don Juan....

I really like the premise of The Private Life of Don Juan, which made me think of a movie like From Noon Till Three. Douglas Fairbanks does well as an aging Don Juan, and since he's the focus of the movie, that's important. However, there's something in the movie that's a bit off. I think the story is a bit too slow, or maybe barebones, for the movie. Despite the obvious charm, there's not a lot of there there.

Vacation from Humor

I've stated before how much I generally prefer the Warner Bros. B movies. MGM had the sort of class and production values that made things like highbrow literary adaptations suitable for the studio, while for whatever reason, things like B comedies weren't particularly up MGM's alley. A good example of this is the 1938 screwball comedy Vacation from Love.

Dennis O'Keeffe stars as Bill Blair, a saxophonist in the big band led by Barney Keenan (Edward Brophy in a rather odd casting choice). He's not playing in time or tune with the rest of the band during the rehearsal. The reason for this is that he sees a picture in the paper of socialite Patricia Lawson (Florence Rice), who is about to be married. She was apparently recently in the nightclub where the band plays, and Bill immediately fell in love with her without even having talked with her. So Bill vows that he's going to see her again.

To this end, Bill drags Barney along to the house where the wedding is going to be held, commits a ruse to get somebody else's invitation, and walks in to where the wedding is taking place. When the bit about "speak now or forever hold your piece" comes up, Bill speaks up. Patricia's father (Reginald Owen) is none too pleased for fairly obvious reasons. But his daughter is an absolute ditz, and is willing to listen to what Bill has to say. Now, in this sort of movie, it's already obvious that the would-be groom in this sequence is going to be a total drip, so Patricia decides Bill is right, and is willing to run off with him and get on the boat to Europe where she and the original groom were going to be in the honeymoon suite. They get married with the vows being love, honor, and obey -- and have fun doing it.

Patricia's dad gives his new son-in-law Bill a job at his advertising agency, and Bill proves to be adept at it. Except that the job requires a lot of travel, so he's away from his wife and misses a lot of social engagements of the sort that rich people in the 1930s go to. And then, one day, Barney shows up at the ad agency's office with the band's singer Flo (June Knight). This is just about the same time when Bill and father-in-law get an important client to re-up with the agency so the four go out on the town to celebrate. Unfortunately, it's also Bill and Patricia's first wedding anniversary, so she's brought a lot of people over to celebrate. When Patricia gets so angry at Bill that she won't let him in her bedroom to explain what happened, Bill decides to take Barney up on his offer and start playing sax in the band again on the band's European tour.

Patricia follows in the hopes of getting a divorce, because French divorce laws are presented as somehow more permissive. But once again, this is the sort of movie where we know that the male and female leads are going to wind up together in the final reel, so we know that something is going to stop the divorce from going forward.

The premise behind Vacation from Love is totally nonensical. That, and the characters, certainly Bill and to a lesser extent Patricia, seem to have radical changes to their personalities over the course of the movie. It's supposed to be a comedy, but it's also the sort of material where you want to take the main characters and smack them upside the head to knock some sense into them. Thankfully, this being a B movie, it's over fairly quickly and you haven't wasted too much time.

Sterling Hayden, Frenchman

Another person who was honored in Summer Under the Stars in 2025 was Sterling Hayden. Once again, TCM ran some new-to-me movies that I had the chance to record, such as The Golden Hawk.

Opening titles inform us that in the 17th century, England and Spain were allied together against France, at least against France. There were, however, some people who engaged in piracy for their own sake of adventure.... One such pirate is Kit Gerardo (Sterling Hayden), based on the French island of Basse-Terre (part of Guadeloupe) where he romances the ladies and talks about plundering loot with the men who would be sailing under him. One such boat is the Spanish boat the Garza, sailing out of the big Spanish Caribbean port of Cartagena captained by Luis del Toro (John Sutton).

In the middle of the fight against the Garza, a captive woman jumps overboard to escape del Toro and make her way over to Kit's boat. The woman (played by Rhonda Fleming) is a Dutch maid named Jane and therefore neutral, or at least that's her story at first, even though she doesn't have a Dutch accent. (Then again Sterling Hayden doesn't have a French accent.) In any case, the libidinous Kit immediate starts trying to put the moves on Jane, who understandably suspects Kit of trying to keep her captive. So she escapes from Kit just like she escaped del Toro.

As you might guess, Kit, Jane, and del Toro keep running into each other. Jane is also known as Captain Rouge, and wants to plunder other ships herself because she claims her family used to be wealthy but had their wealth stolen from them and she's only trying to take back what's rightfully theirs. She's also not really got any allegiances to anybody but herself, which will prove useful later in the film.

Kit keeps plundering and eventually takes a woman named Blanca de Valdiva (Helena Carter, no relation to Helena Bonham Carter) who claims to be betrothed to del Toro. And yet Kit immediately starts romancing her too despite her story about being betrothed. Action shifts all around the Caribbean as Kit also continues to search for Captain Rouge while also making war on the Spaniards.

Ultimately, Kit tries to invade one of the Spanish fortresses, which is going to put him in a lot more danger, leading up to the climax in which all the relationships are revealed and, as you might guess, the heroes come out all right in the end.

The synopsis of The Golden Hawk is, to be honest, a bit bare bones. That's largely because the movie is fairly formulaic. It's an entertaining enough movie, and the cinematography is actually quite gorgeous although nowhere near the Caribbean. There's nothing much new here, and that's part of the reason why the movie isn't so well remembered today. Still, you'll probably enjoy it for one watch.

Summer Under the Stars 2026

Today being July 31, it's time for the annual reminder that tomorrow begins TCM's annual Summer Under the Stars programming feature. As always, each day in August is given over to the films of a different actor or actress.

Looking through the schedule, I see several movies on the schedule that are currently on my DVR and that I haven't done posts on, so I already know what's going to get posts on certain days coming up. As always, check your schedule since I've got a couple of weeks of posts already scheduled and seeing what films are on my DVR means moving stuff around.

Summer Under the Stars also means that some of the other programming features are taking a break for the month of August. That includes Noir Alley, Silent Sunday Nights and TCM Imports, and Dave Karger's Saturday matinee musicals. There's been a summer theme kicking off Sunday afternoons with a romance movie, presented by Alicia Malone, although TCM's article for some reason says it's on Saturdays. In any case, the five Sunday afternoons in August all kick off with relatively romantic movies. I don't know if Alicia Malone is presenting those.

TCM's page for Summer Under the Stars is up and running.

Personality clash rom-com 57894276804278507

A very common trope in movies about romances is the way in which the two characters can have totally different personality types, with one being a free spirit and the other fairly strait-laced. Another movie of this type that I saw recently is Ginger in the Morning.

Sissy Spacek plays the free-spirited hippie-ish young woman, named Ginger; as the movie opens we see her hitch-hiking through New Mexico trying to get to Colorado Springs where she has a boyfriend working at the Air Force Academy. Cut to Albuquerque, where an airplane is landing. Getting off at the airport are Joe (Monte Markham) and Fred (David Doyle who gets a surprisingly high credit considering he's only in this one scene before the opening credits even show up). It's intimated that Joe has recently gotten a divorce and, with New Year's coming up, Fred is suggesting that Joe ought to be looking for a woman to spend the holiday with. Get back into the dating scene, although Fred is trying to present himself as the sort of man who considers himself God's gift to women.

Now, as you might guess, Joe comes across Ginger out on the road, and decides to pick her up. However, he engages in a series of lies about his real situation, saying he's driving up to Denver for business and similar things before saying he's got a friend who would happily him borrow the friend's house for the holiday. This is, of course, Joe's own house, where he spends time being an amateur artist while not working at whatever executive type job he has out in the real world. The two talk and seem to be OK with each other's company, and spend the night together although it's not made clear how far they go.

Things go wrong the following morning. Charlie (Mark Miller) served with Joe in Korea, before going back to ranching in Texas and starting a family of his own, although, like Joe, Charlie's marriage ended in divorce. In Charlie's case, however, it's because of his drinking, which causes all sorts of obvious problems. Among the problems is showing up unannounced at his old buddy's house to celebrate the new year, which irritates Ginger for obvious reasons. Now here, I was frankly hoping that the plot twist would be that Joe and Charlie were both gay as it certainly would have made for an intriguing movie. Instead, the plot twist is that Charlie's ex Sugar (Susan Oliver) calls up from the airport in Albuquerque saying tht she's got a layover. Since Charlie has screwed up Joe's assignation with Ginger, Joe decides he's going to get revenge on Charlie by setting him up with Sugar, only without telling him that it's Ginger he's going to pick up from the airport.

Things get complicated from here, although as I was watching the movie I kept expecting there to be the typical Hollywood happy ending. That ending does more or less occur, but I wonder how long all of the four principals would continue to be happy after the closing credits. Ginger in the Morning is an interesting enough premise, and clearly the sort of movie that couldn't have been under the Production Code. However, it also felt to me like the sort of film that hasn't dated all that well, in part because Ginger and Joe come across more like character types than fully fleshed-out human beings. The other thing that made Ginger in the Morning a bit difficult to love is that Charlie is a rather obnoxious character, from the time he shows up to when he starts getting way too drunk for his own good.

If you want to see a look at the cultural values of the first half of the 1970s, along with some nice location shooting in New Mexico, you could do a lot worse than Ginger in the Morning. But at the same time, there's a reason this is the sort of movie I had never heard of before it ran on TCM.

Rambling Rose

Actress Diane Ladd died late last year, and TCM did the requisite prime-time tribute to her. One of the movies that they ran was Ladd's Oscar-nominated performance in Rambling Rose. Not having seen the movie before, I recorded it and recently got around to watching it.

The movie opens up in 1971, as an adult Buddy Hillyer (John Heard) is driving to his old home town of Glennville, GA, to visit his father (Robert Duvall) who sent him a message asking him to come visit with the implication that there was something important to talk about. As he approaches the old homestead, Buddy starts thinking back to when he was a kid, smack dab in the middle of the Great Depression....

So we flash back to 1935. Young Buddy's mom (Diane Ladd) is a woman who apparently inherited some money that the family seems to be living off of, at least in part, because Mom is the sort of woman who was able to attend Barnard (the co-ordinate women's college to Columbia back in the days before official co-education) and is working on a master's thesis in American history. The family also still has the resources to bring in Rose (Laura Dern), a young woman who had a difficult past, to work as the family's maid in exchange for room and board.

Staying with the Hillyers is a way for Rose to escape that past which is implied to be something similar to what Barbara Stanwyck had in Baby Face before heading to New York and sleeping her way to the top. Rose didn't have the wherewithal to get to New York, so instead she's stuck in small town Georgia but still with a large sexual appetite. She kinda-sorta tries to put moves on Dad, which is a bit of an issue, before turning to adolescent Buddy (Lukas Haas) to give him his first sexual experience. But of course all of this presents a bit of a problem for the Hillyers since Dad really ouht to be faithful to Mom, while Buddy is too young to be having sex.

Rose is young and nubile, which makes it natural that she's going to catch the eye of a lot of men in town as well. This causes more problems both in town and at the Hillyer house, especially after one of the men who's interested in Rose is caught in bed with her in the Hillyer house. It might be a bad enough thing if she were spending the night with the guy in town, but bringing him to the house? That's just unconscionable.

So Dad looks for someone else he can fob Rose off on, thankfully having a cousin who will fit the bill. Except that the cousin runs a dairy farm, and Rose has claimed her backstory involves an exceedingly rough childhood on a farm. And if that's not enough, Rose now claims she can't move away anyhow. Nobody will have her since she's pregnant, not having had a period in three months.

Rambling Rose goes on like this, with some pretty good performances, but a story that rather meanders and doesn't really go anywhere until just before the end where the script feels entirely too rushed and has to wrap up a whole bunch of loose ends in the last 10 minutes or so. I certainly didn't hate Rambling Rose, but I didn't quite love it, either.

Duffy of San Quentin

I didn't mean to watch a couple of movies in close succession that had San Quentin as a major plot point, but then that somehow is the one prison in California that came to prominence, much like Sing Sing in New York was at least before the Attica riots of the early 1970s. In any case, after Southside 1-1000, there's also Duffy of San Quentin.

Duffy here is Clinton T. Duffy, a real person who was the warden of San Quentin between 1940 and 1952 and son of a prison guard meaning he grew up knowing a lot about the prison; Duffy is played by Paul Kelly who apparently in real life served a stretch in San Quentin in the 1920s for manslaughter. As the movie opens, the state administration is on another one of its good government drives, trying to clean up corruption, meaning the current warden has got to go. Duffy at this time is only an assistant to the warden, and he's given the task of being interim warden for one month. Duffy knows the head of the guards, Pierson (Horace McMahon), is corrupt too, but Pierson figures he'll outlast any interim warden. Meanwhile, Duffy's wife Gladys (Maureen O'Sullivan) seems like she'd be OK with Duffy leaving San Quentin.

Duffy immediately sets about trying to effect a series of reforms, although there's a question of how much support he's going to be able to get in a limited amount of time and with institutional obstinacy. One thing Duffy can do is to say nobody's going to be a stool pigeon any longer. He also talks directly with an unorthodox prisoner, Harper (Louis Hayward), nicknamed "Romeo". Romeo doesn't fit the standard profile of a prisoner, and yet here he is, and constantly getting into trouble too. He understandably talks about being set up, but then, all the prisoners do.

Another of the reforms Duffy wants to try is to make the prison hospital experience less bad. One way to go about it is to bring in an outisde nurse -- a female nurse. The eventual hiree is Anne Halsey (Joanne Dru), who is good at what she does, although as you might guess prisoners might not be the most trustworthy people to be around a nurse working as nurse's assistants. Then again, it's also easier work than some of the other details in the prison. Things come to a head when one of the prisoners drinks some "medicinal" alcohol and screws up the treatment of a patient while on duty.

And then, the "good government" brigade shows up again. John Winant (George Macready) is the prosecuting attorney who put Romeo in jail. Not just Romeo, but a whole bunch of other prisoners too. However, it looks like he may have used dishonest and corrupt means to get his convictions, meaning that he's going to face jail time. Putting him in San Quention is a problem since naturally, one might expect there are a lot of prisoners who would like to get their revenge on such a prosecutor much like there are with cops who go to prison. Will Duffy be able to stop people from committing violence against Winant?

Duffy of San Quentin isn't the worst movie out there by any means, although I wonder how accurate this is compared to the real Duffy's time as warden. (Needless to say, I haven't read Duffy's memoirs.) However, the movie also feels relatively formulaic, and as though there's not all that much new going on from all the other prison movies we've seen where the warden is an important character. Duffy of San Quentin is worth one watch, but not much more than that.

Pinky Tomlin

Another of those B movies that I hadn't heard of before the last time TCM ran is is Times Square Lady. But once again, since the plot synopsis sounded interesting enough, I decided I'd record it and give it a go, and since it's only 68 minutes, it wouldn't be as if I wasted much time it it wasn't very good.

Robert Taylor is top billed here, right at the beginning of his career being top-billed, but of course he's not the Times Square Lady. That honor goes to Virginia Bruce, although we don't meet her either in the opening scene. Instead, the opening deals with the sudden death of King Bradley, a promoter who has his fingers in a whole bunch of different sports/entertainment businesses in New York, which are at various points on the spectrum of being maybe illegal. Certainly, the sort of people running them aren't the most ethical.

As for Taylor, he plays Steve Gordon, who manages the Casa Nova, a nightclub that Bradley owned, and which features a new singer fresh from Oklahoma, Pinky Tomlin (playing himself), who had beome big at the time for a song called "The Object of My Affection". Steve has a girlfriend in Margo (Helen Twelvetrees), and a manservant in Mack (Nat Pendleton), who is clearly on the wrong side of the law. Virginia Bruce plays Toni Bradley, who is the daughter of King Bradley but for some reason not clearly mentioned is living in Iowa as the movie opens. Dad's business associates didn't know anything about the daughter, so they're stunned when the will is read and discover that Toni inherits everything.

Their idea to deal with this is one that's not unreasonable. They suspect that Toni won't have any interest in running such businesses, and may not have the acumen to do so. So they're more than willing to buy the businesses out from Toni, in what I think today would be called a leveraged buyout. But of course they also want to get the businesses for the best price they can, which for them is the lowest, before reselling them to a promoter who would pay true market value. Steve's job is to wine and dine Toni, since Steve's the only one with the requisite looks that Toni might fall for. (The rest of them are played by middle-aged character actors you've probably seen in a bunch of 1930s movies.) But, since they're also businessmen with dubious ethics, they're not above doing things like injuring their own hockey players or poisoning dogs at the greyhound track.

But, as you can guess, Steve falls in love with Toni which presents multiple problems. One is that he's got that girlfriend already, while the other one is that the other business associates are going to be none too happy with Steve working with Toni not to sell the businesses. And since they've got those questionable ethics, they're going to use those to try to force Steve and Toni out of the picture if they can.

I titled the post after Pinky largely because I have to admit to not having heard of him before seeing this movie. He didn't have that much interest in the movies and got out of the music business fairly early, going into oil. He gets a substantial subplot here, involving singing a second of his songs in a scene where he also milks a cow. His character isn't really necessary to the story, and it's also easy to see why he didn't have a long movie career. Certainly World War II and the changing tastes that came along would have ended it in any case.

For a bunch of reasons, Times Square Lady turns out to be a mediocre B movie. But again, it's only 68 movies, and seeing how Hollywood deals with this sort of business as it was back in the 1930s is a mildly interesting time capsule.

Hey There, It's Yogi Bear!

Back in December, TCM ran a salute to Hanna-Barbera, the animators nowadays better known for their TV show characters like the Flintstones. They had, of course, gotten their starts decades earlier working at MGM in their animated division. But even then, TCM showed movies based on the characters that had become popular on television. One example is Hey There, It's Yogi Bear!.

I assume most people here already know the Yogi Bear character, an anthropomorphic bear (voiced by Daws Butler) in Jellystone Park who pals around with little Boo-Boo (voiced by Don Messick) and making life hell for the park rangers because he's more interested in the park visitors' food than anything else.

As this movie opens, winter is coming to an end and the runoff from the melting snow is what wakes up Boo-Boo, who is excited to wake up Yogi. Yogi immediately sets out to get more food, which again makes him a terror at the park and causes the rangers to want to capture him and send him to a zoo because the rest of the bears are nowhere near as bad. However, Yogi is smarter than the average bear, leading him to come up with a ruse that gets a different bear captured and sent off to the San Diego Zoo. SOmehow, the park rangers don't notice this.

Meanwhile, Yogi has a female bear, Cindy (voiced by Julie Bennett) who is romantically interested in Yogi, even though he doesn't seem to notice since all he can think of is pick-a-nick baskets. She hears that Yogi has been captured, since that's what the rangers believe, and she's devastated. She'll never see Yogi again. So she comes up with the idea that if she can get herself captured too, she will also be sent to the San Diego Zoo where she'll be reunited with Yogi and the two of them can live more or less happily ever after, or at least as happily as you can live in a zoo.

Now, as I mentioned, it wasn't Yogi that was captured. And when Cindy gets herself captured, she doesn't get sent to the San Diego Zoo anyhow. Instead, she's put in a cage and on a train heading to Saint Louis and the zoo there, much to her dismay. Worse, the door of the train car she's on isn't properly closed, which results in her cage falling out of the car and breaking, which gives her a sense of freedom. At least, she's free until she's cought by a couple of dishonest guys from the circus who take her captive in a much worse way.

Yogi and Boo-Boo learn that Cindy has been sent away, and go looking for her, having a bunch of adventures along the way. But once they free her from the circus, how are they going to get back to Jellystone without getting caught by those awful circus people?

Along the way, there are also several musical numbers, because the story had to be padded out to something feature-length. Still, Hey There, It's Yogi Bear! is fairly weak in the story department. The Hanna-Barbera animation is also decidedly inferior to what Disney was putting out too, and the songs aren't very good. Still, kids may enjoy Hey There, It's Yogi Bear! even if I didn't think it was ll that good.

Trois Couleurs: Rouge

I've mentioned several times that I've got a bunch of foreign films on my DVR, to the point that since YouTube TV "deletes" them after nine months I've had several foreign films I didn't get around to watching. One that was just about to expire and that I finally watched was Three Colors: Red, the final film in director Krzysztof Kieślowski's Three Colors trilogy following Three Colors: Blue and Three Colors: White.

Irène Jacob plays Valentine, a woman living in Geneva and studying at the university there while paying the bills by doing modeling work. She's got a difficult personal life, revealed in dribs and drabs over the course of the movie, involving a mom who is in England for some reason; a brother who has issues with drugs; and a difficult relationship with her boyfriend Michel. (None of these characters are actually seen, although we hear Michel's voice in phone calls with Valentine.) In a seemingly unrelated incident, law student Auguste drops his law books and meets his girlfriend Karin.

Some time later, Valentine is driving home one evening when a dog runs out in the street and Valentine is unable to avoid hitting the poor dog. Fortunately, the dog has a name tag: Rita, and the address of the dog's owner. So Valentine loads Rita into her car and takes her to Rita's owner, Joseph (Jean-Louis Trintignant). Joseph declares that he doesn't want the dog, so Valentine is welcome to keep Rita. Valentine takes Rita to a vet, who informs her that Rita is also pregnant with puppies and is going to make a full recovery.

The next day, Valentine takes Rita for a walk, but she escapes and goes to Joseph's house, which isn't a bad thing since Joseph had sent Valentine money for the vet bill but much too much money so Valentine wants to return some of it. When she goes to see Joseph this second time, she discovers a shocking secret: he likes to listen in on the phone conversations of his neighbors! This is for all sorts of obvious reasons illegal, and the sort of thing that for similarly obvious reasons disturbs Valentine. She plans on telling the neighbors about it, except that when she visits the neighbors, she finds that the daughter of the man on the phone is also listening in, so knows fully well that her father is not exactly faithful.

Eventually, everything comes together when Joseph hands himself over to the law and wouldn't you know it, but the judge at his trial is Auguste, who has had issues of his own with his girlfriend. Joseph takes Rita back although Valentine wants one of the puppies; Joseph and Valentine continue their platonic relationship as Joseph reveals more of his past and why he never married. Eventually there's a sort of twist ending that I won't give away.

Three Colors: Red received a lot of critical praise upon its release, although it was considered ineligible for a Best Foreign Film Oscar due to the Academy's rules on foreign films having to be credited to one country as opposed to international productions like this that don't quite neatly fit into being a film from a certain country. Having said that, I don't quite get the inordinate praise. It's not so much that Three Colors: Red is a bad movie so much as it's the sort of film that doesn't quite go anywhere. It's unbelievably talky, and leads up to an ending that doesn't satisfy. It's certainly competently made, and I can see why some people are going to love it. I just couldn't get all that invested in the characters.

For some values of spirit

Another movie that was sitting on my DVR when I noticed that it was about to get another airing on TCM is The Spirit of St. Louis. That airing comes up tomorrow, July 26, at 5:30 PM, so once again I made a point to watch it in order to be able to schedule a review for the TCM showing.

As you probably know The Spirit of St. Louis is the name of the plane that Charles Lindbergh (played by James Stewart) flew across the Atlantic Ocean in the first non-stop transatlantic flight in May, 1927. This right away brings up two issues with the movie. One is that we know how the movie is going to end, which is that Lindbergh is going to succeed in his attempt to cross the Atlantic, which removes much of the dramatic tension. The other is that Charles Lindbergh was a young 25 when he completed his fight, while James Stewart was 47 at the time of filming, and looks it for the most part despite the horrendously dyed blond hair. It's worse than Peter O'Toole as Lawrence of Arabia.

The movie opens about a day before Lindbergh takes off. He's already on Long Island, where the flight started, waiting for the weather to clear for take-off. Having time and nothing else to do, Lindbergh starts thinking both about the upcoming flight, and about how he got here. This is the lead-in to the requisite flashback, although since the second half of the movie is the actual flight, the flashbacks don't take up the entire movie. There are, however, multiple flashbacks to various points of Lindbergh's flight.

Lindberg was working as an airmail pilot around 1926 or so when he's forced to land in bad weather and reads a newspaper article about a couple of pilots who had an even worse flight trying to do that transatlantic flight. For several years there had been a prize offered to the first pilot (or pilots if a plane wasn't manned by one person) to make that non-stop transatlantic crossing. This gives Lindbergh the idea that perhaps he could be the pilot to make that flight. Except that he doesn't have enough money to buy a plane of his own and modify it so that it can carry enough fuel to make it all the way across the Atlantic.

The next section of the movie deals with Lindbergh getting the financial backing to buy a plane, although the contract with the plane manufacturer falls through since they want to pick the pilot. This leads to a different manufacturer being selected, but one based in San Diego. So they have to fly the plane cross country before it can make the actual flight to Paris.

The flight to Paris is going to take about 36 hours and, as there's no autopilot, it means Lindbergh is going to have to stay awake the entire time, which is a significant plot point. Worse is that Lindbergh didn't get enough sleep before taking off. To try to stay awake, Lindbergh has more flashbacks to other points of his flight career, whcih in the movie included a stint in the military as well as stunt flying. In addition to lack of sleep, there are other technical issues that threaten the success of the flight. But as we know, and it's not much of a spoiler, Lindbergh succeeds and becomes a hero.

For me, the big problem with the movie is the fact that we know fully well how it's going to turn out. Also, with half the movie being Lindbergh on the titular plane, there's not a whole lot that can be done to open up the action. Stewart and writer/director Billy Wilder try, but fall into a bunch of Hollywood tropes. I've seen worse, but then again I've also seen better.

To the Victor

Another of the movies that was sitting on my DVR, about to expire, was one that doesn't seem to show up all that much on TCM, which is a bit surprising considering that it's a Warner Bros. film. It also doesn't have that many reviews on IMDb. That movie is To the Victor.

It's post-war France, and the authorities are still de-Nazifying the country by going after collaborators. One such collaborator is Lestrac, who will very likely be convicted on the evidence of his Swedish-born wife Christine (Vivea Lindfors). However, Lestrac has some powerful friends, and those friends are looking for Christine to prevent her from testifying. So they send someone to shoot her, causing her to run though the streets of Paris. She's obviously able to escape, considering the fact that if she weren't we wouldn't have much of a movie. (Well, I suppose we could have a movie like The Killers.) Christine runs into the Hotel Anivers, which seems to cater to the sort of American involved with rebuilding France after the war.

Or, at least, the sort of American who wants to make a buck helping to rebuild France. Holding court in a private office in the hotel is Paul Taggart (Dennis Morgan), who, as it turns out, is actually a black marketer. He takes Christine to an upper-story room, but various bad guys are able to determine their location. One tries to shoot through the door of the room, while there are snipers in other rooms who get into a firefight until police on the ground are able to shoot one of the snipers. In any case, it's fairly clear that Paul and Christine are going to have to get out of town.

So they go to Normandy, where they stay with some people whose relationship with Paul or Christine isn't made particularly clear. But, this is also an excuse for Warner Bros. to do a bit of location shooting on the shores of Normandy where the D-Day invasion took place and some of the scuttled ships from that era are still there as a breakwater, which is frankly the one big reason to watch this film. Paul begins to fall in love with Christine, while thinking he can get out of France by taking a job in Cairo. He doesn't quite yet know just how complex Christine's personal life is. Never mind the fact that she's married; the police detective who's been investigating the case, Beauvais (Victor Francen), also has a yen for Christine. And, of course, the Fascist friends of Christine's husband are able to determine where Christine and Paul have fled to, and show up in Normandy.

It goes on like this for an hour and a half or more, along with a whole lot of political speechifying about what morally needs to be done in postwar Europe, with the eventual climax that I suppose satisfies the Production Code.

As I mentioned in the opening, I'd never heard of To the Victor before it showed up on TCM. Having watched it, I can see why I'd never heard of it. There might be the seed of a good story here, but boy is the presentation of that story slow, combined with a whole bunch of Marshall Plan-type commentary about what needs to be done in Europe now that the war is over. There's no particular reason to care about the Viveca Lindfors character, while Dennis Morgan is entirely the wrong Warner Bros. actor to play a black marketer. It's a mess of a movie, with the one big reason to watch it being the location photography, both in Paris and especially on the Normandy coast.

The Jerk

TCM ran a two-night salute to actor Steve Martin back in May, which gave me the chance to watch one of his movies that, somewhat surprisingly, I had never seen before. That movie is the one which made him a movie star in addition to his TV and stand-up comedy work: The Jerk.

Steve Martin unsurprisingly plays the titular jerk, although his character isn't so much a jerk as a man named Navin Johnson who's just so profoundly naïve that you wonder how such a person could ever survive in the real world. As the movie opens, in fact, he's a bum with little to his name except the clothes he's wearing and a thermos, and he tells the other assembled bums how he wound up in this condition.

Navin was a foundling left on the porch of a family of very poor black sharecroppers in Mississippi (although, as a shot just before the closing credits reveals, it's the Universal backlot as we can see the Magnificent Mountains of Mississippi in the background). His adoptive family are good people, except that they haven't been able to bring themselves to tell him before now that he's not their biological child, let alone not black. When they do tell him, he feels he has to make his way to St. Louis to find his true purpose in life.

Navin gets hired as a gas station attendant at a station run by Harry Hartounian (Jackie Mason), where he deals with robbers before meeting inventor Stan Fox (Bill Macy, not to be confused with William H. Macy). Navin has come up with an idea for a device that will prevent eyeglasses from slipping down your nose, and Stan offers to find a buyer for the idea. But Navin has to leave the gas station when a crazy sniper (M. Emmet Walsh) tries to kill him.

Navin next makes his way to a traveling carnival where he's seduced by fellow carny Patty (Catlin Adams) before meeting fairgoer Marie (Bernadette Peters), who is sweet and just the right person for Navin, although they can't get married yet because Marie wants someone who can provide for her, which Navin can't do yet. At least, not until Stan finds him to let him know that his invention has paid off and boy is Navin going to be rich. Not that Navin has any idea what to do with the money: you'd think he goes bankrupt through overspending. And yet, that's not really what happens. He loses his fortune in a different way, and here I'm not exactly spoiling things considering that the movie opens with Navin as a bum telling us how he ended up that way. So you know things are going to go wrong somewhere.

A lot of people love The Jerk, and it's easy to see why. At the same time, the movie opened to mixed reviews, and I think that's easy to see why too. Not that this is so much a movie that divides critics and audiences the way movies do today depending on the political or culture war message the movie is trying to make. Instead, The Jerk is more of a showcase for Steve Martin's comic stylings than it is a movie with a fully fleshed-out plot. At times it feels like more of a series of episodes than a coherent whole. And Martin hadn't learned to tone things down the way he would in later movies, especially where he had a better script. So I definitely have some issues with The Jerk.

The Lovesick Maidens of Cuddleton

Going back to another of the box sets I've got, there are still two and a half discs worth of shorts on the Vitagraph Comedies collection. This time, it's the 1912 short The Lovesick Maidens of Cuddleton.

Once again, the short is only about 12 minutes, so there's not a bunch of plot. Charles Eldridge plays the venerable doctor in the town of Cuddleton, IN, with some sort of advisor who's constantly in his office. Apparently, they need a way to drum up business, and the idea is to bring in a younger doctor to his practice, that being Dr. Baldwin (Earle Williams).

Baldwin is, so we're supposed to figure, considered young and handsome by the standards of 1912, so suddenly, all the young unmarried women in town become hypochondriacs who want Dr. Baldwin to treat them. It's reminiscent, I guess, of the the relationship the Jean Harlow and Edumnd Lowe characters were having in Dinner at Eight. If it's funny how these young women all want to see Dr. Baldwin, it's even funnier when one of the women feigns illness, but it's th old doctor who comes to see her!

Unfortunately, the movie loses steam in the second half. Dr. Baldwin is married, and his wife has finally decided to follow him to town. Only she's supposed to pretend for some reason that she's his sister instead of his wife. Whatever the reason they give, it's not something that makes much sense, and not anything I can imagine the doctor's wife wanting to go along with.

The Lovesick Maidens of Cuddleton isn't bad by the standards of 1912, but it's also as technically limited as most of the shorts I've seen that were being churned out in the early 1910s when new theaters needed new content to show their patrons. I'd also say that there are better shorts from the era, too.

Norman Jewison centenary

According to Wikipedia and IMDb, yesterday, July 21, was the centenary of director Norman Jewison. However, Tuesday nights in July on TCM have been given over to American independent directors, I'm\ guessing because that and the "singers acting in movies" Star of the Month were both things TCM wanted to spend four nights on, and the calendar worked out such that Monday and Tuesday were the weeknights in July that had only four nights.

What that means is that TCM's centenary salute to Norman Jewison is being held tonight in prime time. Now, it looks as though TCM has run enough of Jewison's movies over the years that perhaps they could have done a 24-hour salute, but as it stands we get four of Jewison's movies in prime time:

8:00 PM The Thomas Crown Affair
10:00 PM In the Heat of the Night
Midnight A Soldier's Story
2:00 AM Fiddler on the Roof

The very end of the overnight is an episode of the MGM Parade, at 5:15 AM, which mean there will be filler before the start of tomorrow morning's schedule.

Now, I didn't notice it until I looked up Jewison's filmography, but he directed Only You, which ran I think on New Year's night. If I had known that was a Jewison movie, I would probably have watched it in conjunction with his centenary.

Daddy's Dipsomania

Another of the movies that had been sitting on my DVR for a while that I needed to watch before it expired was Papa's Delicate Condition. Once again, having finally gotten around to watching it, it's time to write up a review and schedule it on the blog.

Jackie Gleason stars as Jack Griffith, who works as a railroad superintendent in a small town in northeast Texas in the early part of the 20th century. (The movie is based on the memoirs of silent screen star Corinne Griffith, born in 1894, but the sets look closer to a pastiche of small-town American between about 1900 and 1915.) Jack has a wife Ambolyn (Glynis Johns), and two daughters: younger daughter Corinne (Linda Bruhl) and Augusta (Laurel Goodwin). Corinne is a bit of a mischief-maker, but also unfailingly honest. Dad, for his part, eschews church, which is mildly scandalous for the early 1900s. But that's not the real focus of the movie.

Instead, the main plot driver is what's referred to as the titular "delicate condition". Dad has a tendency to drink "medicinal" alcohol, which is of course not medicinal but just to get Dad good and sloshed. And when Dad does drink, he also gets rather irresponsible with the family's money. Now, he's trying to do good-hearted things with the money, but what he does is still not fiscally imprudent, to the point that you wonder how the family can afford to live in the nice house they have. One would think Dad's spendthrift ways had been going on for years and that Mom would have taken the kids home to her father. After all, her father Mr. Ghio (Charlie Ruggles) is the mayor of Texarkana.

The first time we see Dad spending the family money unwisely, it's to "help" a man who's painted his house in a garish color that Ambolyn doesn't like get the house repainted in white. Sure, it's dumb to see Jack do this, but you can understand him wanting to make his wife happy. Next up, however, Jack stops by a drug store where the guy behind the counter has a wife who's going into labor and can't get the time off bcause of nasty boss Mr. Cosgrove (Charles Lane). Jack takes over for an hour and gets into big trouble by service a kid a banana split. To get out of his trouble, Jack comes up with a plan to have a "syndicate" of his friends buy the place. He then blackmails his friends into co-funding the scheme!

And then the circus comes to town. Corinne like the pony and wishes she could have one. Unfortunately, the only way Jack can buy the pony is if he buys the whole damn circus. And, of course, he's stupid enough to pay the two crooked proprietors cash. They run off, leaving Jack owning a circus that's heavily in debt and has lots of process servers chasing them. Yeah, he really is that dumb. It's here that Ambolyn finally has the good sense to go off to Texarkana to be with her father. Jack, having screwed things up badly, realizes that he has to go where they can't find him, and takes a job as a railroad superintendent with a railroad in Louisiana. But this is also the sort of movie that you know is going to have a happy ending. So how is it going to get there?

I can see why people think a movie like Papa's Delicate Condition has its charms. For me, however, it had a bunch of problems, which are mostly down to the script. Jack Griffiths is, if not a nasty character, one for whom it's hard to have sympathy. He's causing all his own problems, and you keep wanting Ambolyn or perhaps her father to knock some sense into Jack. The other big issue is that Jackie Gleason is miscast for a period piece like this. It's as though he's still playing Ralph Kramden and not Jack Griffith.

For some values of luck

TCM's schedule for most of the morning and afternoon tomorrow, July 21, is films with have the word "lucky" or a variation thereof in the title. One that's been sitting on my DVR is Lucky Me; not having seen it before, I once again wanted to watch a movie in order to be able to do a full-length post on it. The movie comes up at 2:15 PM tomorrow, so now is your chance to watch it, too.

Doris Day stars as Candy Williams, opening with a well-choreographed musical number singing a song about superstition, before winding up backstage at a theater in Miami. She's part of a troupe called the Parisian Pretties managed by Hap Schneider (Phil Silvers), who also appears in the troupe. They put on a sort of vaudeville revival show with song and dance acts but no overarching plot. It's a nostalgic sort of show that time has passed by. Audiences have passed it by, too, causing the show to be canceled and leaving Hap and Candy stranded in Miami together with two other members of the troup, Duke (Eddie Foy, Jr.) and Flo (Nancy Walker).

Hap, playing fast and loose with the truth, comes up with a scheme to get a free dinner at the hotel across the street involving a cop friend of theirs "arresting" them just before the check comes; however, the scheme fails when the cop in question gets rotated out on his shift so is no longer there to arrest them. Since this was a fancy hotel, they're going to have to pay their way out of the bill by doing various forms of work for the hotel. This is how we get to the male lead. One of the guests in the hotel is Dick Carson (Robert Cummings). He's a Tin Pan Alley songwriter who's had a fair deal of success writing for other people. But he wants to strike out on his own and write a complete show of his own. To that end, he also needs a backer, and thinks he might have one in Texas oilman Otis Thayer (Bill Goodwin). Otis has a daughter Lorraie (Martha Hyer) who is kinda-sort Dick's girlfriend, with the obvious implied threat that if she's not his girlfriend, he's not getting her daddy's money.

One evening at a gas station, Candy runs into Dick but doesn't know him. For various reasons, especially involving the fact that he doesn't want more people trying to audition themselves for him since he already had to deal with Flo doing just that, Dick passes himself off as a mechanic at the station named Eddie. From here, it's not too difficult to guess what happens the rest of the way. First, Dick and Candy fall in love although Dick has to keep up the ruse. Then, Candy learns the truth from a meeting between Dick and Hap, who does recognize Dick. This causes Candy to believe Dick is just trying to take advantage of her. Worse is that when they patch things up and Candy sings for Dick, Lorraine finds out. Lorraine decides that if she can't have Dick, she won't let her father back the show.

This leads to a finale at a birthday party for Otis where Dick was planning to play some of the songs for Otis. Dick decides to abandon the show, and Candy and her friends come up with an idea to put everything right. This involves crashing the party and coming up with a ruse to get Lorraine away from the party just long enough for Candy to sing some of the songs Dick was writing. Unfortunately, they can't keep Lorraine away long enough, although as you'll have figured out the film is bound to have a happy ending. You'll also know who ends up together in the last reel.

Lucky Me is, like the show the Parisian Pretties put on, a hoary old chestnut of a story. The story idea might not have been a bad one in the early 1930s, although it's decidedly dated here. It also doesn't help that Doris Day gets a subpar set of songs to sing. Day tries, and the film's weaknesses are definitely not her fault. But there's a reason Lucky Me got lukewarm reviews when it was released. Doris Day fans will probably still enjoy it, but anybody else watching it will see fairly quickly why it got those tepid reviews.

The face don't care

TCM had a night of body horror movies some months back. One of the movies that I hadn't seen was The Hand, which I recorded in part because of its star, Michael Caine. I finally got around to watching it and, as always, that means that now you get the review.

Michael Caine plays Jonathan Landsale, a cartoonist living in Vermont with his wife Anne and daughter Lizzie. However, it's become a bit of a strained marriage. Anne has an offer for a job at some new age institute down in New York City, and she thinks having their daughter studying in New York instead of middle-of-nowhere Vermont might be better. Jonathan doesn't want that, and besides, there's more space to do cartooning in Vermont and it's cheaper, too.

So the husband and wife drive down to New York to see the apartment, but get in an argument along the way while also having to deal with lousy drivers. Anne tries to pass a truck when a car comes in the opposite direction, and in the ensuing accident Jonathan's right hand is severed at the wrist. Obviously nobody wants to lose a hand, but it's even worse when you're a cartoonist and you make a living using that hand to draw things. Anne and the police stay behind to look for the hand in the hopes it can be re-attahed, but since they're in a field with thick grass, they can't find it.

Jonathan does get a prosthetic and and learns how to use it, as well as dealing with the residual nervous system sensations that amputees apparently film. Jonathan's agent suggest somebody else take over the strip, but Jonathan hates the direction the other guy wants to take it. Worse, Anne seems to be having a romantic relationship with a yoga instructor at the institute.

Oh, but that's not the worst thing at all. Jonathan starts having something that might be nightmares, or might be some sort of dark hallucinatory premonition, in which he has visions of the severed hand doing really nasty things like strangling people to death. To deal with that, Jonathan decides a change is in order, and takes a job as an adjunct professor at an unorthodox college in rural northern California, where he's going to teach cartoon drawing to people who are about as talented as Billy Crystal's students in Throw Momma From the Train.

Unfortunately, Jonathan continues to have those horrible visions. He makes a friend in the form of fellow instructor Brian Ferguson (Bruce McGill), and then suddenly, one of his students shows up at his house in the woods. That student, Stella, doesn't know what she wants to do in life, but is more than comfortable having sex with Jonathan which ought to be a big no-no not just because Jonathan is married but because sex between teacher and student is way wrong. Then again, it also turns out that Stella had been thinking of going down to Los Angeles with Brian for the Christmas holidays, which leads to the movie's climactic finale.

The Hand received poor reviews at the time of its release, and having watched it it's not hard to see why. The movie has a glacial pace, and a lot of the time it feels like there's not a lot going on. And for what is supposed to be a horror movie, it's not as if there's that much horror, not even of the sort in a Val Lewton movie where the horror is not explicit but desiged to be in the viewer's mind. Michael Caine tries, but even he can't save this one.

However, The Hand has apparently become a bit of a cult film in the intervening years, so watch and judge for yourself.

High Aces

Another movie that TCM ran during their Summer Under the Stars salute to Christoper Plummer was a World War I aviation drama called Aces High. I'd never heard of it before and, as it turns out, this was a TCM premiere, which might explain why I hadn't heard of it. Well, that and, after having seen the movie, I understood why it doesn't get shown all that often.

Plummer plays Capt. Sinclair, a pilot during World War I, although we don't see him at first. Instead, the action opens at Eton in 1916, where the next group of students is about to be graduated. John Gielgud, in a cameo role as the headmaster, leads the students in prayer before introducing them to a former student of theirs now serving with distinction, Maj. John Gresham (Malcolm McDowell). One of the students he speaks to, Stephem Croft (Peter Firth), is the kid brother of Gresham's girlfriend.

A year passes, and Croft is now a lieutenant who is serving with the air corps precisely because he looked up to Gresham and wanted to serve under Gresham. However, what he finds isn't all that it's cracked up to be as the air base is a bunch of bombed-out houses in some god-forsaken French village not far from the front lines. Croft doesn't yet realize how stressful and difficult aerial combat is, or the high attrition rate that it leads to, with the concomitant fatalism. Sinclair is Gresham's second-in-command, and warns Croft not to look up too highly to Gresham because of what war does to people.

The pilots go up and engage in dogfighting -- this is, after all, a World War I movie -- and in one of the first dogfights Gresham saves Croft's life, which is only going to make things more difficult for Gresham who doesn't want Croft to look up to him. There's a German pilot shot down and the alleged custom that a pilot shot down is for 24 hours the personal prisoner of the pilot who did the shooting. And then there are also unsuccessful missions that result in English pilots getting shot, which greatly darkens the mood in the British camp.

One way to deal with all of this is to see the proverbial "girl in every port", which Croft is given the opportunity to do as well, although this leads to more disillusionment as well when Croft goes back to see the girl again and finds that she's seeing a French officer. Finally, the pilots are asked to take part in a more dangerous mission to deal with some German balloons that are being used for surveillance. The balloons are harder to get rid of, and defended to the point that going after them results in a lot of surface-to-air shooting.

I suppose that if you're an aviation buff, there's a good deal to like in Aces High, as there's a fair bit of aerial combat footage. But as for the movie as a whole, it didn't quite work for me. The plot feels really muddled, with too many cameos (Ray Milland and Trevor Howard also appear) leading to extraneous scenes. The various pilots at the base are also too alike that it's a bit difficult to keep track of everything that's going on.

Briefs for July 18-19, 2026

I have to admit that I haven't been watching as many movies recently with the soccer World Cup on. For a while, I was about four weeks ahead in my posts here, but it's gone down to a bit over two weeks. The tournament ends tomorrow, which I suppose is also a good time for me to hunt down my DVD of Victory and watch it again. Not a great movie by any means, but a lot of fun.

Where I've really been remiss is in not posting obituaries of people who have died, although to be fair that's become a bit of an issue ever since I started getting ahead in terms of my movie posts instead of having the discipline of writing up one new post and putting it up that day. I think the first one would be Louise Lasser, who appeared in several of Woody Allen's early films before reaching even greater fame on TV with Norman Lear's comic soap opera Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman. Lasser, who died on August 6, was 87.

British actress Joanna Pettet, who appeared in some 60s movies I've blogged about like Night of the Generals and The Group, died on August 7 at the age of 83. One of the movies that Wikipedia's deaths page mentions is the 1970s horror film The Evil, which is one of those films I kind of wonder whether I've seen since those 1970s horror films have a way of blending together. But a search of the blog doesn't bring it up. I guess I'll have to search it out and add it to the pile of movies I've got to get around to watching.

Sam Neill is probably the best-known of the current crop of obituaries, as he appeared in some highly underrated little 1980s movies like Dead Calm and A Cry in the Dark. Of course, those get a bit overlooked because in 1993 he starred in a movie you might have heard of called Jurassic Park. Neill died August 13 at 78, and apparently has a couple of posthumous releases currently scheduled for next year.

And there's Oscar-winning actress Brenda Fricker. Fricker won the Oscar for playing Christy Brown's mother in My Left Foot, although would probably be better known to casual film fans from bigger-budget Hollywood films like the second Home Alone movie or the remake of Angels in the Outfield. Fricker died on Thursday; she was 81.

Over the Edge

Teens in trouble have been a staple in movies, although during the studio era it was more an exploitation movie thing. With the end of the Production Code Hollywood started giving us somewhat less unrealistic fare. One of those more recent films showed up on one of the FAST channels, giving me the opportunity to catch the second half of it: Over the Edge. So when TCM ran it, I recorded it to be able to watch the whole thing commercial-free.

Opening narration about vandalism gives way to a new-build community called New Granada, CO, which is not fully built out yet, which seems like a bit of a problem because who would want to bring their family to a community that's still half under construction? And as such, you can understand why the teens are in such a state of discontent. One such teen, Mark (Vincent Spano) takes his BB gun out on an overpass and shoots at a police car, which is obviously a problem. Seeing this is Richie (Matt Dillin in his film debut), who races away, but gets found by the police Carl Willat (Michael Kramer), the "good kid". They're taken to the police station, and it's intimated that this isn't Richie's first go-round with the juvenile justice system.

Carl is shown as being from an upper-middle-class family where his father (Andy Romano) is a car salesman and one of the community leaders trying to bring new business to New Granada. It's community leadership that leaves him terribly out of touch about the state of the teens in town, and a sharp contrast from what Richie's family is like. Their one hangout isn't a mall like it would be in Southern California, but a youth rec center that's a construction site of its own, with a corrugated metal roof and the one do-gooder adult in the movie running it. When the Willetts drive by what was originally planned to be the sort of bowling alley/sports place that kids could hang out at and find that its use is changing to an industrial park, it's enough to hurt poor Carl.

Since Carl isn't going to have much else to do, he falls in with Richie and the rest of the teens in town. This isn't the sort of place that has the well-defined cliques of later teen movies in the 1980s, so they all go to the same house party and otherwise hang out together at an abandoned house, as well as doing target shooting with a gun that Carl's would-be girlfriend found.

Unfortunately, all this petty criminality goes wrong, leading to Richie "borrowing" his mom's car, picking up Carl, and going for a joyride that tresults in the police following the two and shooting Richie when the policeman sees Richie's gun. Richie dies, and poor Carl is really in trouble now, much too young to be off on his own but not really able to go home. The adults are increasingly alarmed. They already held one assembly that obviously didn't work, and now they're going to hold another. This time, however, the teens come up with a way that's bound to get the parents' attention. I don't want to say exactly what happens, but I will say I was quite surprised to see the climax that the movie had.Over the Edge is supposedly based on a real story, or perhaps inspired by a story about a new-build community where things went badly wrong with the teens. I'm not certain quite how realistic the movie is, but then I should admit that my childhood was quite a lot different from a lot of people's. That, and I'd be about 10 years younger, so a late 80s adolescence was probably also rather different from a late 70s adolescence. Over the Edge is interesting, although I do have to say that I found the acting rather variable in quality. And really, is every single adult in this town that stupid and clueless?

Still, Over the Edge is a movie that's absolutely worth watching.