Cry For Happy

Another of the stars who was honored in the 2025 Summer Under the Stars was Donald O'Connor, as it was his 100th anniversary of his birth. Once again, I recorded several of his movies that I hadn't seen before, one of which was the service comedy Cry for Happy.

O'Connor is the second lead here, behind Glenn Ford. Ford plays CPO Andy Cyphers, who as the movie beings is in US-occupied Japan in 1952. Cyphers officially works for the Navy's publicity office, developing the photographs and film reels that will be distributed to press outlets back in the States. It's not glamorous work, and with the housing situation in Japan Cyphers works out of a disused bank vault. He also engages in other unauthorized work, such as leasing cameras to a Japanese producer Endo in exchange for other services.

One day Cyphers gets new staff in the form of junior officers Murray Prince (Donald O'Connor), Suzuki (James Shigeta), and Lank (Chet Douglas). They get an assignment to go over to Korea, which is something they really want since the movie is set while the Korean War is still a hot war, and cover the military's propaganda of having low-ranked servicemen speak to the people back home about why they're fighting. Somehow, the military press liaisons not only didn't include any members of the Navy to talk to, but the people who do talk actively make fun of the military. To counter this, Cyphers wants to talk about why the navy is fighting, and makes up a story about them helping out an orphanage back in Japan. Cyphers is, of course, enough of a grifter that this is a completely made up story. So to keep everyone from putting too much of a spotlight on them, he doesn't reveal the location of the fake orphanage and says they've wanted to do it with no publicity.

Now, this is where Endo comes back in. He has a way of doing favors for Cyphers in exchange for getting those movie cameras he needs to make the movie he wants (which turns out to be a Hollywood-style western only with an all-Japanese cast). So now Cyphers needs an orphanage and his staff need a place to stay. Endo finds a place where one of his cousins is living that's a geisha house, with four geishas still paying off their apprenticeships. It might be a good place to turn into a pretend orphanage, if only they had children. There's also the fact that there are four women there and of course the Navy men begin to fall in love with the geishas, notably Murray with Chiyoko (Miyoshi Umeki, who had portrayed a similar character in Sayonara).

Worse for Cyphers is that the orphanage becomes such a story that there's no way they can keep things under wraps. Besides, folks back in the States were so touched by the story that they've been donating money without even being hectored by Sally Stuthers. But this is the sort of romantic service comedy that really has to have a happy ending, so the question is how the story gets to that requisite happy ending.

I didn't particularly care for Cry for Happy, and if you've read this blog long enough you can probably guess some of the reasons why. The big one is CPO Cyphers. He's the sort of con artist whom I tend not to find a very sympathetic character. Worse, it's the sort of thing I've called a "comedy of lies" before, where the Cyphers character starts off with one lie, and then has to make up bigger and bigger lies to keep the original lie going. It's the sort of thing that's supposed to be funny, but that I've always just found grating. I have a feeling that viewers 65 years on will probably also have some issues with the portrayal of Japan here. There's quite a fair bit of what Americans would have thought the Japan of the era was like, with probably little of what the actual Japan was like. The cultural difference is supposed to be funny but once again feels more uncomfortable and a bit degrading than funny.

Nine years on

Another of the movies that was sitting on my DVR for quite some time and nearly about to expire before I finally watched it was 2010: The Year We Make Contact. It's another one of those movies where I'm old enough to remember it having come out in theaters, but not old enough to have actually seen it in the theater. So when it showed up on TCM again I made a point of recording it to be able to do this review.

I'm assuming most people will be aware that this is a sequel to 2001: A Space Odyssey, along with knowing what 2001 is about. As the sequel opens, Dr. Heywood Floyd (Roy Scheider) is a college administrator working in radioastronomy and tending to one of those radio telescope arrays. He's approached by a Soviet scientist who informs him that the Soviets have been preparing a mission to Jupiter to find out what happened to the Discovery, the ship that Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea) and crew were on when the HAL 9000 computer (voiced again by Douglas Rain) malfunctioned, dooming the mission. The Soviets are going to get there first, but don't have the expertise to deal with the American computer systems. The Americans, of course, aren't going to get there first, so the scientist, knowing that Floyd was the Earth-bound commander of the failed Discovery mission, wants Floyd and the Americans to cooperate on the Soviet mission to Jupiter.

Now, in the real world, we know that the Soviet Union was dissolved in 1991 and had somewhat less bad relations in the years following. Understandably, there's no way people in 1984 when this movie was made could have known all this was going to happen, so the Soviets are still portrayed as a rival to the United States. More specifically, and coloring the plot of the movie, is a story about the US trying to blockade Central American countries -- that whole Monroe Doctrine and all -- and the Soviets trying to break the blockade, which is going to have repercussions even in outer space. But Dr. Floyd agrees to go on the mission. Also on the mission for the Americans are Walter Curnow (John Lithgow), who designed the Discovery, and R. Chandra (Bob Balaban), who designed the HAL 9000.

The Soviet ship Alexei Leonov (named after the first cosmonaut to do a spacewalk) approaches Jupiter, and finds something alarming: it seems as though there might be chlorophyll on Europa, the moon of Jupiter where the monolith that was the point of the original Discovery is located. Perhaps the monolith has something to do with that. In any case, the Soviets running the Alexei Leonov, led by Tanya Kirbuk (Helen Mirren), need Dr. Floyd to help figure out what's going on. He sees this as a warning sign.

But there's still that mission to get on the Discovery and figure out what might have happened to Dave and why the HAL 9000 malfunctioned. As for the HAL, it turns out that the politicians interfered with the mission, and gave HAL direct orders to keep certain information secret from the astronauts on board the Discovery, which led to HAL becoming paranoid and going on the blink. However, things get much more alarming when Dave Bowman himself, or maybe the ghost of Dave Bowan, shows up on the Discovery, to tell Dr. Floyd that they have to leave immediately for reasons Dave can't really explain.

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This is a problem for reasons of orbital mechanics. The mission was designed with the planets being in certain positions at set times, and the fuel on the Alexei Leonov to be used at just the right time to be able to get back to earth. However, if Dave's comments are correct, the early forced departure would result in the crew going to interstellar space rather than being able to get back to earth. And political conditions back on earth are at the point where international cooperation on board the spaceship may have to be suspended.

2010 is certainly an interesting enough idea, and one that's reasonably well executed. But of course anybody who watches this is going to compare it to 2001, and probably not so favorably. For me, the big issue is that the ending is one that I think would violate a whole bunch of scientific principles, although I can't really go into detail about that without giving away the ending of the movie. Somewhat more humorously is the fact that the production design clearly took the Russian language into account -- but somewhere along the way like a game of "telephone" things got just screwed up enough to have all sorts of typos. What it's supposed to say is obvious to anybody who speaks Russian (I studied Russian in college), but is often a bit off.

More teens in trouble

I somehow wound up with a handful of disparate movies about teens who are not exactly model citizens on my DVR. I think the last of them is Bronco Bullfrog, a little-known British film.

This one was made in 1969, on location in an East London that no longer exists, something that made me think of the movie 10 Rillington Place where the row houses that made up that street were soon to be torn down as part of Notting Hill's urbn renewal. Anyhow, Del (Del Quant, although these are all non-professionals doing the acting) is a young man in this run-down part of London who is doing an apprenticeship to become a welder, which at least would pay the bills even if it's not an exciting life. He lives with his dad in a crappy block of flats, and wanders the streets half the time with his group of friends, engaging in petty crime from larceny to beating up unwanted people.

Somewhere along the way, Del meets Irene, a girl of 16 who has about a year or so more to go in school before she's expected to make some sort of decision of what she wants to do in life, which for a young woman like her is going to mean at best a secretarial job before she gets married. These are the working class people who were already being overlooked by society in favor of people who could be more "properly" educated along with a more vibrant population. Irene, for her part, lives with her mother, seemingly no father around. Neither Del's father nor Irene's mother seems all that enthusiastic about the prospect of the two dating.

Del and his friend group learn about the fate of a guy they know named Jo, nicknamed the titular Bronco Bullfrog for reasons that aren't really made clear and aren't important anyhow. He's been in "borstal", which as I understand it is a rough British equivalent to reform school. But he's finished his sentence and is about to be released despite that the fact that he hasn't reformed one bit. He's got some ideas about crimes to commit and wants to bring Del in on them. Del eventually introduces Irene to Jo, mostly because the young couple can't be alone together in either of their own flats. But this gets the two of them in trouble since Irene is underage.

Del has an uncle living outside of London, but the uncle informs Del that this isn't really a good place for him either, as the only work available is farm work, and Del would be better off sticking with the welding apprenticeship since that at least is rather more lucrative work. And there's still the specter of the police nicking Del because of the relationshp with an underage girl even if she's clearly consenting and nowadays this likely wouldn't be seen as statutory rape under the "Romeo and Juliet" exemptions.

Bronco Bullfrog was made on an extremely low budget, which is part of the reason why it's become nearly forgotten. To be honest, that low budget means it's not exactly a great movie as there's not a truly coherent story here. However, what it is quite good for is the look at a London that no longer exists. Like any number of other movies of the era such as the aforementioned 10 Rillington Place or the produce markets in Frenzy, there's a bit of a documentary nature in the cinematography that makes Bronco Bullfrog well worth watching.

When Bronco Bullfrog was originally released, there was what to me seems like a bit of a gimmick in treating these authentic teens as speaking an exotic accent of English that for some audiences might need subtitling. There were apparently some prints that didn't use subtitles. The one TCM ran did, although I didn't find the accent particularly impenetrable.

Wanda

Last September, TCM ran a night of movies dedicated to the UCLA Film and TV Archive. If you've watched enough TCM, you'll probably have seen the title cards before any number of the movies that show they've been restored in part by the archive, as well as the people who helped donate toward the restorations. One of the movies that TCM ran on that particular night was the independent drama Wanda. As always, not having seen it, I recorded it to be able to watch later.

Barbara Loden, who co-wrote the movie and directed it, plays Wanda, a woman living in one of those decaying Rust Belt towns. Or, should I say, just outside of town, as the ramshackle place she lives in together with her sister and her sister's family that's located next to a waste heap from a coal mine where poor people like her father pick through it to find bits of coal. Wanda has a husband and kids, but he's up and left her with the kids and filed for divorce because she's basically the sort of mother who would abandon the kids. In fact, Wanda can't get herself to court on time for the hearing and willingly grants the divorce and gives up custody.

She tries to get a job and, being pretty much out of money, goes to a bar where a man picks her up and pays for her beer pretty much in exchange for sex at one of the local motels before leaving her to who knows what. Poor Wanda has pretty much no money, with things about to get even worse for her as she gets her purse and wallet stolen in a movie theater. Can't she just go home to her sister to try to get some sort of help? Well, not yet at least. She goes to a bar looking for a place where she can use a bathroom.

What Wanda doesn't realize however, is that the man, Mr. Dennis (Michael Higgins), has just robbed the bar and killed the bartender who is lying quite dead behind the bar. Dennis takes Wanda with him to another motel, where he treates Wanda like absolute dirt first for screwing up his hamburger order by getting onions on the burger, and later by complaining that she's wearing slacks when he pays for her to get some new clothes. In any case, the two go on the road in no small part because it was seen that a couple was leaving the bar where the dead bartender was found, making them the obvious suspects.

Mr. Dennis is a no good man at all, and even his father knows this. But Dennis doesn't seem to know anything else, while Wanda doesn't have any money or any place to go so she stays with Dennis. Dennis, for his part, is planning his next crime, which is a rather bigger one, robbing a bank by kidnapping the bank president to force him to open the vault while the president's family is being held hostage. But Wanda gets pulled over on a traffic violation and doesn't have her driver's license, threatening to make the entire operation go awry....

I didn't realize at the time I watched Wanda that Barbara Loden was actually the wife of director Elia Kazan, as well as the actress playing Warren Beatty's older sister in Splendor in the Grass. So it's slightly odd that she ended up directing what was such an utterly low-budget affair her. Although, to be fair to the people who might have funded it, she wasn't that prominent an actress, and had never directed anything before. As for the direction, Loden did a very good job finding locations that show a side of society that wasn't normally shown in Hollywood movies before this time. Even a studio like Warner Bros. with its social movies of the 1930s couldn't have created an atmosphere as depressing as the locations and interiors in Wanda. (The climax was filmed in Scranton, PA.) The script to Wanda is also promising. But, unfortunately, Barbara Loden couldn't get good actors on the budget she had, so the acting is mostly amateurish at best, making the movie a bit of a tough go at times.

It's a shame that Barbara Loden never got the chance to have a bigger budget and direct again, because perhaps she might have been able to do something with a better cast. So all we have is the potential of Wanda.

Dulcy

I've mentioned when I reviewed a movie like The Owl and the Pussycat how there are certain characters who are just so obnoxious that the character would be better as the victim in a murder mystery. I couldn't help but have the same thoughts as I was watching the movie Dulcy.

Dulcy, played by Ann Sothern, is Dulcy Ward, the kid sister of Bill Ward (Dan Dailey, credited here as Dan Dailey Jr.). We don't see their parents, but presumably the parents left them loaded since they've got a big New York place, servants, and a place on a lakeside island up in the mountains. In any case, it's Bill we see first, trying to take a shower in the morning but being foiled by Dulcy's having tried to "fix" the boiler, a fix that only makes things worse. And, as we'll see over the course of the movie, it's not the only thing Dulcy makes worse.

Bill works in advertising, seemingly running his own agency. This has enabled him to meet lovely young Angela Forbes (Lynne Carver), daughter of an aircraft executive Roger (Roland). Indeed, Bill is engaged to Angela and is about to meet the family as they (Mrs. Forbes is played by Billie Burke) return from a transatlantic cruise. (The movie was released in 1940, by which time Europe was already at war again, but is based on a play by George S. Kaufman from before he met either Edna Ferber or Moss Hart.) Also on the boat is inventor Gordon Daly (Ian Hunter).

Gordon is working on a new sort of aircraft engins that probably violated the laws of physics, but is in some ways just a macguffin for Gordon to be able to meet the Forbes family as part of Dulcy's creating all sorts of complications. As you might guess, Dulcy sees Gordon's invention and thinks that Mr. Forbes would be the perfect person to talk to since Gordon needs venture capital. You might also guess that Dulcy is going to fall in love with Gordon along the way.

Now, that island vacation home I mentioned earlier comes into play. Bill is hoping to win Roger's approval for the marriage by inviting the Forbes family for a vacation there. Dulcy, of course, screws things up first by driving the boat to the island like a maniac. Then, she schemes to get Gordon onto the island with his invention so that he can have a chat with Forbes to try to get him to back the new engine. This, unsurprisingly, doesn't go well at first.

Further complicating matters is one Schuyler van Dyke (Reginald Patterson). He's the not-quite-sane brother of a wealthy man, taking his brother's plane for a flight and crashing it into the lake thinking it's a sea-plane and not a land plane. He also claims to be rich, so when he hears about the new engine he starts acting like a big shot investor and offers to get in on the plan in a way that would screw up what Forbes could do if he wanted.

Now, in a movie like Dulcy, she's supposed to be a sympathetic character despite her screwing everything up; also, everything is supposed to come out right in the end. Now, that latter half is in fact the case. But I found Dulcy to be so obnoxious that it made the movie difficult to watch. Somebody should have smacked her upside the head, or at least done what Bette Davis does to Miriam Hopkins at the end of Old Acquaintance. But no, that doesn't happen here at all. Then again, the original play was first staged in 1921, and audiences of the early 1920s may have enjoyed such a character a lot more than I did.

Berlin: die Sinfonie der Großstadt

Some time back I did a post on the silent film Man With a Movie Camera. Jacqueline Stewart followed it up on Silent Sunday Nights with a movie that has a similar theme, but actually came a few years before: Berlin, Symphony of a Great City. I eventually watched it and left this post in the unscheduled drafts, since at the time I wrote it it was still a bit too close to having watched Man With a Movie Camera and I had not too far in the past done posts on a couple of other German movies.

Berlin, Symphonie of a Great City is similar to Man With a Movie Camera, but not quite as stylized. The movie looks at the city of Berlin as it was during the time of filming in 1927. This is noteworthy because it's smack dab in the middle of Weimar Germany, before the Nazis took over and completely changed German film culture (Karl Freund, who did the cinematography, was one of many people in the German-langauge film industry who fled Nazi Germany). It's obviously also well before World War II, which led to the bombings which destroyed a whole lot of Germany, so the movie can be seen as a bit of a document or time capsule of Berlin as it was in 1927.

There's no real plot to this movie, and also no characters or dialogue. The movie more or less looks at Berlin as it might have been over the course of a day, except that of course the action was not filmed in one day. That is to say, the movie is structured in five acts, with the only title cards announcing the beginning and end of each act, starting in the morning and going through the night. So, the opening act begins with a train coming in to one of Berlin's railroad stations early in the morning, at a time when most of the city is still asleep, although the early birds are just beginning to wake up. The movie then goes on with the start of the workday, lunch, mid-afternoon, and a final act set after dark.

It's a bit tough to say how much of the action is spontaneous and how much of it might have been set up, although I have a feeling at least some of it was not scripted. The homeless people who are depicted in one scene seem fairly real to me. It's also always possible that the cameramen stood in one spot for a while and only filmed when something interesting was happening, or else knew what interesting things were going to happen (eg. the funeral procession) and make a point to film that.

Since the movie was filmed a few years before Man With a Movie Camera, it's unsurprising that it's not quite as technically radical as the Soviet film. That, and the fact that Dziga Vertov was much more open about his desire to be experimental than Walter Ruttmann who directed Berlin, Symphony of a Great City was. As a result, this one can look a bit old-fashioned at times.

However, Berlin, Symphony of a Great City is still quite good technically, while as a piece of cinematic history it's even better.

Under the bluebirds

June Lockhart died last year at the age of 100. For some reason I thought I mentioned the programming tribute TCM gave to her a some months back, but a search of the blog says I didn't. In any case, I had a movie with her in it on my DVR which TCM ran before she died, but which I didn't get around to watching until rather more recently, largely because I didn't realize she had a role in it: The White Cliffs of Dover.

The star here is Irene Dunne, and as the movie opens she's working as a nurse in Britain named Susan Ashwood, tending to the soldiers who are returning home from wherever it is they were bravely fighting World War II. (The movie was released a few weeks before the D-Day invasion, so perhaps these were bomber crews or people evacuated from North Africa.) Once again, as you might guess, she's about to have a flashback as to how she wound up in the situation she's in....

Let's go back to the spring of 1914. Obviously, if you know your history, you'll know that this would be shortly before World War I began in Europe, although of course it would be a good three years before that piece of shit Woodrow Wilson got the US involved in the war. Susan, at the time Susan Dunn, is traveling on an ocean liner with her father Hiram Dunn (Frank Morgan) over to England to spend a couple of months on vacation where they'll be staying with Col. Forsythe (C. Aubrey Smith) and his family. While there, Forsythe introduces Susan to a nice youngish nobleman, Sir John Ashwood (Alan Marshal). The two have a bit of a romance, although there's the question of whether it can work out since Hiram expects his daughter to return to America with him.

Susan eventually decides more or less to elope with Sir John instead of going back to America, but she has the great bad luck of marrying John just as war is being declared between Britain and Germany. Sir John comes from a long line of men who did military service, so of course he gets mobilized, and it's off to those horrid trenches of France for him to fight.

Lots of time passes, and Sir John gets brief leave as part of a program to reunite men in service with their wives, which brings Susan to Normandy for an all-too-brief weekend together. And wouldn't you know it, but a) Susan gets knocked up that weekend, and b) it's the same time that the US announces its entry into the Great War. Sadly, Sir John won't survive the war, leaving Susan a widow and mother, but a wealthy one.

Susan's son, John II (played by Roddy McDowall as a boy and Peter Lawford as an adult), grows up on the estate next to that of the Kenneys, who have a daughter his age named Betsy (played by Elizabeth Taylor as an adolescent and June Lockhart as an adult). They're going to fall in love but, as the 1930s go on Susan understands that there's another war coming and dammit, she doesn't want her son to be involved. She already gave up one man for Britain and she's not about to give up a second. Young John, however, intends to uphold the family tradition of going into military service. Since this movie was released in the spring of 1944, and since the story is told in flashback, you know whether mother or son is going to be the one to get their way.

To me The White Cliffs of Dover was one of those obvious message movies where the point of it is to show Americans at home why the US is fighting in Europe, and why they were making the sacrifices that they were. There's nothing subtle about this one at all, and that may affect your opinion on how good the movie is or isn't. It's almost as though Mrs. Miniver wasn't enough for MGM and they had to come up with more pro-Britain stuff.

Out west with Anita Ekberg

Another of the movies that TCM ran during their Summer Under the Stars day with Sterling Hayden was Valerie. Once again, not havng heard of it before, I decided to record it to be able to watch it later and write up what is not this post on the movie.

The movie opens up with the Sterling Hayden character, John Garth, and his ranch hand Jim Mingo (Jerry Barclay) riding up to a ranch house which they enter. We don't follow them inside the house, but hear several gun shots and the men exit the house. The next morning, the sheriff comes to Garth's house to arrest Garth on a charge of murder. It turns out that two people in the house were killed, although Garth thought that there were three dead. Indeed, Garth has just finished up writing what is a sort of confession -- or defense, depending on your view -- of what he did, which was to shoot his wife Valerie, née Horvat (Anita Ekberg), and her parents who had immigrated here from Europe. The parents died but Valerie is currently only severely injured although not expected to live.

Cut to a shot of the doctor's house where he and a nurse are treating Valerie, which is where we learn that there are a lot of people in town who might well take Garth's side of the dispute. In any case, with a couple of dead bodies, we've got a murder trial coming up. And here's where things get interesting: we get various witnesses giving accounts reminscent of the movie Rashomon, describing their view of what happened, and all trying to make themselves look good.

First is Rev. Blake (Anthony Steel, Ekberg's real-life husband at the time), who is new to this town and gets a message from Valerie to come and visit. Since this is one of those towns with only one church preaching some generic form of Protestantism where everybody goes to the same church, it's unsurprising that the Garths might want to see the reverend too, or at least Valerie. She's deeply unhappy about something, and she as well as her parents and possibly John's brother Herb (Peter Walker) seem to be taking Valerie's side. Rev. Blake starts ministering to Valerie enough that pretty much any man would be filled with jealousy.

Then John himself testifies, which seems a bit odd considering it wouldn't be the prosecution calling him. John was a major in the US Army during the recently-concluded Civil War, having dealt with getting information from Confederate prisoners, which probably gave him some dark cynicism and a propensity toward psychological manipulation and some outright torture-like violence. He only returned home when his father fell ill. The reason for the marriage isn't so happy, as Dad was an inveterate gambler who's left quite a bit of debt behind, and a marriage for John, the older brother, would be financially convenient.

Having heard those two views, we then get the fairly ridiculous premise of Valerie herself testifying, which is surprising since it was thought she was on her deathbed. But testify she does, and by the end of the movie we learn the truth.

Valerie is another of those movies where there's a good idea behind the movie, although in the telling it falls a bit flat. To be honest, it's always going to be tough to compare to a classic like Rashomon. And Valerie is like the old programmers of a previous generation, not necessarily a prestige movie. But still, Valerie is just there. There's no real excitement or tension to it. My guess would be that it's down to the director, Gerd Oswald, who had the great good luck of a debut film like A Kiss Before Dying but was mostly only good enough for B-level work and TV episodes.

Still, Valerie is one of those films you're going to want to watch and judge for yourself.

Nora Bayes

There's been a couple of days in the past year or two where the TCM lineup has been a bunch of musical biopics, of which there seem to be more than I realize. And here, by musical biopics I mean biographical movies of mostly composer/songwriter types; not movies about famous people that have for some reason been turned into musicals. Well, tomorrow, June 5, is another such day, and once again I've got one of the movies in the TCM lineup on my DVR just waiting more me to do a post on it. That movie is Shine on, Harvest Moon, which airs at 9:30 AM.

Shine on Harvest Moon is the purported story of the two people credited with writing it, Nora Bays (Ann Sheridan) and Jack Norworth (Dennis Morgan). They're certainly the ones who made the song a popular standard, although apparently in those days it was common practice for someone to buy all the rights to the song including being credited as the songwriters. As the movie opens, it's around 1905 in Milwaukee. Vaudeville is the big thing, and Jack is a single act in a traveling vaudeville show, as is Blanche (Irene Mallory), who is presented as someone you think is going to become romantically involved with Jack. Also in the show are the magician Georgetti (Jack Carson) and his ditzy assistant Margie (Marie Wilson) who eventually get married and become friends of Jack and Nora's, showing up several times throughout the movie.

Nora is only seen a bit later, when Jack sees her performing at a cabaret and realizes she'd be pefect for the sort of songs he's trying to get published. What he doesn't know is that Nora is being pursude by Dan Costello (Robert Shayne), who ones the place where Nora is performing. Nora resists Dan's advances, while Jack resists Blanche's, and Jack and Nora go off together, in part to do their own vaudeville act and in part for Jack to write songs for Nora to sing.

But what the two don't know is that they've made some powerful enemies. Costello becomes more and more successful as a producer and theater owner, while Blanche seems to become somewhat successful as a performer and wants to make certain that Jack sings with her. With that in mind, Dan pretty much blacklists Nora which effectively means blacklisting Jack too unless he wants to give in and do a double with Blanche or have her sing his songs. Even a good friend like "Poppa" Carl (S.Z. Sakall) can't help get them bookings. Oh, he does get them an audition, but Dan finds out before the scheduled time leaving Jack and Nora to audition for an empty theater.

Eventually Nora gives up and leaves Jack so that he can have some success, but we know the movie is going to have a happy ending, so Poppa Carl figures out a way to get Jack to bring Nora into the act that Dan and Blanche can't stop. They then perform the title song as well as another number, "Time Waits for No One", in a Technicolor finale (the rest of the movie is in black and white), before living happily ever after.

Or at least the movie Shine On, Harvest Moon would have you believe. Jack and Nora would get divorced and go on to have multiple spouses, while as mentioned above there's a question as to whether they even wrote the song. Indeed, the songs in the movie are mostly a pastiche of stuff from the first decade of the century. It's another of those movies that tries to bring turn-of-the-century nostalgia to audiences who were spending their time outside the theater worrying about the war raging over in Europe and the Pacific, having been released in the spring of 1944. Audiences of the day might have liked it, but it's one that, unlike Roughly Speaking, hasn't aged very well.

Roughly Speaking

Tomorrow, June 4, is the birth anniversary of actress Rosalind Russell, so it's unsurprising that TCM is going to be spending a morning and afternoon with her films. One that I hadn't seen before but that was on my DVR was Roughly Speaking, so as is always the case, I watched it in order to be able to write up this post for the upcoming TCM showing.

The opening credits inform us that the movie is based on the then-popular autobiographical memoir of the same title, Roughly Speaking, but author Louise Randall Pierson, who also wrote the screenplay and was credited as a technical advisor on the movie. Fast backward to 1902. Louise Randall (to be played as an adult by Rosalind Russell) is the younger daughter of John Chase Randall (Ray Collins), who unfortunately has just up and died a few weeks after his 25th anniversary leaving behind a wife and two adolescent daughters. Worse, he also leaves behind a mountain of debt, which forces Mom to sell off most of the family's remaining assets and the family to downsize rather severely.

Dad wanted Louise to get an education and shoot for the stars, but this is New Englans in the early 1900s, so Louise goes off to "business school", the sort of place that taught young women to become typists and other secretarial work, something that Louise takes very well to. She gets a probationary job (Alan Hale in a one-scene cameo is her boss) which is a springboard to a nicer position in New Haven, the home of Yale University. There's the possibility of finding a nice Yalie to get married to!

Sure enough, Louise meets nice Rodney Crane (Donald Woods), who is hoping to go into a career in finance as his father was a bank officer. The two have a whirlwind romance and get married, with Louise rather progressively for the time keeping her name. The two live happily, although not ever after. The couple have four kids before World War I comes along. After that comes the family moving out to the suburbs, only for the kids to get polio to varying degrees. Louise remains impossibly perky through all of this. So perky, in fact, that when Rodney loses his job in the post-war recession, it's then that he's had it with Louise's optimism, leaving for another woman. Louise is the one to seek a divorce, which is on rather amiable terms, and Rodney is never to be seen again.

In any case, Louise is able to find another man in the form of Harold Pierson (Jack Carson). Harold is the playboy son of a horticultural magnate; technically he works as a vice-president for Dad's rose greenhouses but he's never going to advance any further. Harold and Louise are a perfect match in that they'll always love each other for richer or for poorer, but with their personalities leading to it always being for poorer. They have another kid (future Oscar-winning screenwriter Frank Pierson), and go through a series of ups and downs. Harold builds his own greenhouses just in time to flood the market to such an extent that they can't pay the mortgages. He then gets a job promoting a new airplane (character actor John Qualen is the designer), again just in time for the Depression to hit.

Still the couple perseveres, until the New York World's Fair of 1939 arrives and presents another opportunity. Except that in the middle of the fair, Germany attacks Poland, leading to the start of the European theater of World War II and the US getting involved a few years later. By this time there are three adult male children for Louise, and since the movie was released in 1945, you know the kids are all going to do their parts....

Roughly Speaking is another of those movies that is episodic in nature and relies much more on the strength of the actors than on the story itself. Unsurprisingly, with Roz Russell and Jack Carson you know that the stars will indeed pull it off. It also has the feel of something that was designed to be a morale-builder. It was released in January 1945, with World War II still raging. The story of a woman who suffered a whole bunch of personal setbacks and persevered is one that I can imagine would have resonated with audiences, capped with her making the sacrifice of seeing her kids go off to war.

Doing a bit of reading, it's interesting to see what liberties were taken with real life, but that's not such a big deal considering that's standard practice and for audiences 80 years on one can easily look at Roughly Speaking as though it weren't in fact about real people. It's a great example of the sort of entertainment Hollywood served up for the home front during World War II, and one you should take the chance to see.

International Velveeta

I was coming up against the day when the movies that I recorded as part of Christopher Plummer's day in Summer Under the Stars in August 2025 were about to expire, so I made the point of watching International Velvet. It's another of those movies that was released when I was a kid so remember hearing about the title but not knowing a whole lot about it; I would have been much too young to know about the original National Velvet from 1944 as well.

This is, as you could probably figure out from the title, a sequel to National Velvet, albeit set quite a few years later. Velvet Brown, all grown up and played by Nanette Newman (wife of the film's director, Bryan Forbes), is living in Devonshire together with her boyfriend but not husband, writer John Seaton (Christopher Plummer). Velvet is walking along the coast, talking about how, eight years earlier, her life changed when her niece Sarah (Tatum O'Neal) came into her life. It seems that Velvet's brother moved his family to America when Sarah was just an infant, and then Mom and Dad up and died in a car crash, leaving poor Sarah alone with no family in the US. So that's why Sarah is coming to live with her aunt and not-officially-an-uncle, although we'll call him uncle because it makes things easier to follow.

In any case, with all that upheaval in Sarah's life, losing her parents and being stripped from her friends, it's easy to see why she spends the first act of the movie being horrendously sullen and trying to run away on multiple occasions. The second time, she rides off on Pie, who was Velvet's horse that she rode to win the Grand National back in the original movie. Sarah's riding Pie as part of an attempted getaway really pisses Sarah off until she realizes that perhaps she can use horsemanship to try to get closer to Sarah. Pie has reached retirement age and gets a special ceremony for it before his last foal is born. (It's been ages since I've seen the original National Velvet but some reviewers say that the original Pie was a gelding. Good luck getting any foals out of a gelding!)

And Sarah wants that foal, dammit, even though she doesn't have the money for it. So she does odd jobs for Uncle John, at least until Velvet decides to buy the foal which is another thing that helps bring aunt and niece closer together. Sarah enjoys riding, and eventually becomes good enough at it to be entered into a local show-jumping competition. She doesn't win, but her performance brings her to the attention of Captain Johnson (Anthony Hopkins), who won an Olympic medal back in 1968 and is one of the selectors for the British equestrian team for the Olympics. He's a very tough taskmaster, but ultimately fair.

Sarah is good too, although there are multiple good riders so that Sarah's first international experience is only as an alternate. It's also a harrowing experience, as one of the horses doesn't take well to international travel. Sarah gets good enough to qualify for the next Olympics, and the final act of the movie deals with the Olympic three-day equestrian competition, which requires horse and rider to engage in three different aspects of riding: dressage, cross-country steeplechase, and show jumping.

Once again it's easy to see why someone somewhere along the way would want to take a property like National Velvet and write a story about what happened to Velvet when she grew up. However, the story we ultimately get is one that's full of plot holes (although to be fair, since the climactic Olympics are the Moscow games set a year and a half after the movie's release, there's no why Bryan Forbes could have known about the boycott). The story is also mawkish and slow at 127 minutes, with Tatum O'Neal giving a particularly poor performance. And it doesn't help that the print TCM ran is in such soft focus that you wonder whether they got a blurry print.

Maybe fans of the equestrian scene might like this one, but as for me I'm glad I checked this one off my list of movies to watch and don't have to revisit it.

Not a western, or a poker movie

One of the two-reelers that TCM ran on a Saturday morning at the end of their Saturday matinee block was an early Jack Benny short I had never heard of before: The Rounder. So I recorded it and wrote up this post for a day when I was planning on doing something like mentioning the new Star of the Month or some other shorter post on TCM programming.

This short starts with Benny, playing a man named Bartlett, doing what's supposed to be his drunk bit, stuck in a ladder and trying to get into his apartment because he's lost his key. Eventually, after some patter with a policeman, he gets in through the window, since nobody locked their windows in those days, although to be fair, this being an upper-floor window in an apartment building not directly connected to the fire escape, you'd think it would be hard for a burglar to break in without being noticed.

However, Bartlett doesn't wind up in his own apartment, but that of Ethel Dalton (Dorothy Sebastian). She's commiserating with her friend Mary (Polly Moran): Ethel was out with Mary, but saw that her boyfriend was dancing with another woman. Ethel needs a husband, or at least to be seen with the appearance of having a husband, so Bartlett's showing up unannounced is actually a good thing. Ethel asks Bartlett to pretend to be married to her and act as an escort, which Bartlett is willing to do for a fee.

But then Ethel gets a telegram from her boyfriend Alfred (George K. Arthur) saying that the women she saw dancing with him is in fact his sister. So Ethel's relationship with Alfred is back on, although of course Bartlett doesn't realize this. So things get awkward when Bartlett shows up the following afternoon and then so does Alfred, obviously knowing nothing about Bartlett.

The Rounder is one of the first films Jack Benny made where he wasn't playing himself; you may recall that he was the master of ceremonies in The Hollywood Revue where he was really able to show off his talent. Here, he's not able to do so in large part because the technical limitations of 1930 didn't quite fit with giving Benny's talky brand of comedy a fictional character. Benny, at the time, still really needed to be just behind a microphone. He'd quickly learn, of course, but this short doesn't do justice to his later talent. It's interesting to watch as a misfire, but it's not that great.

TCM Star of the Month June 2026: Marilyn Monroe

Marilyn Monroe, remembered for a scene in The Seven Year Itch (June 15, 10:00 PM)

We're into the month of June now, and that means it's time for a new Star of the Month on TCM. This time around, that's Marilyn Monroe, as today is her 100th birth anniversary. Monroe's films will be airing on the first four Monday nights in June, with the final Monday, June 29, being given over the a "Pride" film festival (and I've got a film for that day already).

Marilyn Monroe and Cary Grant in Monkey Business (June 1, 11:30 PM)

Now, Monroe famously died young, so she didn't make all that many movies, which means that unlke some other Stars of the Month, the films only take up part of the evening/overnight lineup. Tonight, for example, sees Armored Car Robbery at 2:45 AM after the final Monroe film, her debut performance in Ladies of the Chorus. And, she did a lot of her work at Fox, which probably also limited how many movies TCM was able to get the rights to, as River of No Return and All About Eve are not here along with some of the other stuff she did early in her career at Fox before How to Marry a Millionaire and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes really made her a big star by 1953.

It's not a big role, but Marilyn Monroe was clearly in The Asphalt Jungle (June 8, 11:30 PM)

After tonight's first night, the movies are relatively chronological, in that June 8 is from the early 1950s; June 15 is the middle of the decade, and June 22 the end of the 1950s and, well, Monroe's final film, The Misfits from 1961. But at only 13 films, it's not a whole lot.

At least they included Some Like It Hot (June 22, 8:00 PM)

For some values of good, and 20 years after the news

One of those movies that shows up often enough on TCM but that I'd never really gotten around to watching is the 1947 version of Good News, which I think I'd generally avoided because it's a musical and because the male lead is played by Peter Lawford, who is not one of my favorite actors. But in any case, the last time it showed up on TCM I finally recorded it so that I could watch it before the next showing. That next showing will be tomorrow, June 1, at 9:30 AM.

The movie is based on a 1927 Broadway musical that had already been filmed once before, in 1930, and unsurprisingly set in 1927. As the opening informs us, it's the time of flappers and the Charleston, with college football being a much bigger sport than professional football in those days. Tait College, clearly on the MGM backlot, is one of those movie colleges that look like the smaller schools that dotted the midwest and where football was in fact a big deal. Tommy Marlowe (Peter Lawford) is the quarterback and captain of the football team, and as such all of the girls are interested in him.

One girl, however, who does not show interest in Tommy at first is transfer student Pat McClellan (Patricia Marshall). That's because she's come from the sort of boarding school where one learns French and where one learns to look for a man who's got a lot of money to marry. Tommy isn't loaded, while non-football player Peter Van Dyne III (Robert Strickland) is. You can tell just by the name. Worse, Pat insults Tommy in French, so that he can't understand just how she's insulting him.

Connie (June Allyson), meanwhile, is a more bookish student, working her way through Tati with a job in the school library, but also the sort of student who's just right to tutor the jocks if you're OK with having the jocks tutored by women and aren't worried about the risk that tutor and tutee might become romantically involved. Peter falls for Connie, and in many ways the feeling is mutual.

There's a problem, however, in that everybody cares about the big game, which means one, that Tommy has to be in the right frame of mind and not worried about romantic complications; and, two, that he be in good academic standing. Both of these get complicated. One is by Connie's roommate Babe thinking she's doing a good thing for Tommy by telling Pat that Tommy comes from money so that she'll be interested in him again, never mind what this does to poor Connie. Second is that Tommy fails one of his exams so that there's the question of academic eligibility. The big game comes, and it looks like Tait may lose to their rival, so everybody has to re-arrange things so that the right people can wind up together.

Along the way, there are any number of subplots about various teammates of Tommy's and their romantic issues, as well as the romantic isues of Connie's sorority sisters. Notably among the supporting cast is a young Mel Tormé. Also, this having been based on a musical, there's also a lot of musical numbers in the MGM style, with vibrant Technicolor and energetic dancing.

Having said all that, whether or not you like Good News is going to be dependent upon whether you like Peter Lawford and June Allyson on the one hand, and on the other whether the MGM musical style is your thing. I'm not the biggest fan of a lot of the MGM musicals, and Good News hasn't changed my opinion on Peter Lawford either. It's not that Good News is a bad movie by any stretch of the imagination; it's just that I'm not the sort of person MGM was trying to appeal to. If you like musicals you'll probably enjoy Good News.

Neither to have nor not to have

Warner Bros. made the movie To Have and Have Not back in 1944, which rather famously brought together Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. Some years later, the studio heavily reworked the script for a remake, called The Breaking Point. That remake shows up on TCM tomorrow, May 31, at 3:00 PM.

The action is moved from the Caribbean to the Pacific coast. John Garfield plays Harry Morgan, the captain of a charter boat working out of Newport Beach and taking rich people on fishing trips, at least when he can drum up business. That hasn't been as much as he'd like, leading him to have trouble supporting his loving wife Lucy (Phyllis Thaxter) and kids. He's even having trouble keeping the boat, as he's got payments on the boat as well as all the dock fees.

So he and his assistant Wesley Park (Juano Hernández) are pleased when Leona Charles (Patricia Neal) and her husband charter the boat to go down to Baja California for some fishing. When they get down to their destination, however, things go sour. First is that there's an obnoxious lawyer Duncan (Wallace Ford) who tries to get Morgan to smuggle stuff back to America. Worse is that Leona seems to be hitting on Harry; she is a sort of femme fatale, after all. And it turns out that not only is she not married, but the man she was with snubbed both her and Harry and Wesley by blowing all his ready cash betting on cockfighting and then drawing on his bank account to buy one plane ticket for himself back to California!

So now Harry has to go back to Duncan because he neeeds to make money. Worse is that he finds out that what he's asked to smuggle is actually humans, not any sort of inanimate contraband. And of course, both Duncan and Sing (Victor Sen Yung), the Chinese underworld boss who wants the Chinese illegal immigrants smuggled into the States, try to stiff Harry. This leads to Sing getting killed, the immigrants having to wade back to shore, and all sorts of legal complications when Harry gets back to California.

And then there's the fact that Duncan survived all of this. Leona did too, and she's still hanging around for some reason, leading Lucy to get the impression that perhaps Harry isn't being faithful with her. No wonder she's been begging him to give up the idea of being a sea captain and go into her father's lettuce farm business up in the agricultural part of California.

Finally, as if Harry doesn't have enough problems, Duncan returns, this time wantng Harry to smuggle some gangsters and their ill-gotten loot from a racetrack heist out to sea for the pick-up. Harry doesn't want to do it, but doesn't exactly have much choice considering the extent to which Duncan has been blackmailing him to this point.

I'm not the biggest fan of either Lauren Bacall or Ernest Hemingway, so To Have and Have Not isn't exactly a favorite of mine. The Breaking Point, on the other hand, feels like a more modest remake of the movie. John Garfield is just the sort of actor for this sort of role. Patricia Neal has hair dyed blonde, and frankly, it doesn't suit her. That having been said, it does enhance the sort of trashiness of the character and she also pulls her role off well. Also of note is the complete lack of mention of any "race issues" despite the Wesley Parks character being played by Juano Hernández. He's the copilot, not the man bravely confronting the racism and segregation of the day that poor Sidney Poitier had to do over and over. Everybody treats the Wesley character in what feels the same way they'd treat any ship's second officer.

The Breaking Point is definitely a movie to watch, and tomorrow is your chance.

Briefs for the end of May 2026

As I write this early on the morning of May 30, the full TCM schedule for June hasn't been released, missing the last three days. The TCM site only lets me go out through June 19. I know most channels don't go even that far out, but for TCM fans, loyal bunch that we are, it's somewhat distressing to see the deterioration in what I'd class as the customer service that people at TCM performed for the fans. I mean, these fans are the sort of people who will drop thousands to go to a TCM Film Festival or the TCM Cruise. Not that I can afford either in terms of money or time away from my elderly father who wouldn't be interested in doing such things (and, to be honest, I'm not interested in that sort of giant cruise ship either). But there are a lot of people who are, and who have looked forward to planning out the month's viewing weeks in advance.

Also, again, I'll repeat my mention that from the first 27 days of the month, there are several movies coming up that are on my DVR and where I had to reschedule other posts since I'm somewhere between three and four days ahead in terms of how far I've got posts scheduled here. So, as always, check the listings for the time that a movie is scheduled in case I've put up the post on the wrong day.

As for FXM, I've still got a couple of movies on the DVR that are in common rotation in the Retro block, notably the 1940s version of The Lodger and the surprisingly recent for the Retro block Lincoln. I also recorded Anastasia since a search of the blog suggests I hadn't done a post on it even though I watched it once ages ago. That one, somewhat surprisingly, doesn't seem to have gotten a second airing since I recorded it.

The Naked Truth

Peter Sellers was TCM's Star of the Month last September. Some years back I bought a box set that had several of Sellers' early British movies, in part for I'm Alright Jack, and have done reviews on all of the movies in that set. TCM unsurprisingly ran a goodly amount of Sellers' British work as well, but included a movie that wasn't in that box set and that I hadn't heard before: Your Past Is Showing. (Note that the movie was originally titled The Naked Truth; the print TCM ran included a card from the British Board of Film Censors with that title, but with an actual title card of Your Past Is Showing.)

Back in the 1950s in the US, there were scandal sheet magazines like Confidential that raked up dirt on celebrities. Less ethical people in the business offered to spike stories in exchance for some sort of quid pro quo or cash, a practice which is effectively blackmail. In this movie, Nigel Dennis (Dennis Price) is the publisher of a magazine called The Naked Truth that prints similarly nasty gossip and who is also the sort of man who has no compunction about blackmailing the people he writes about. We then get introduced to four such people, and Dennis' attempts to blackmail each of them:

Melissa Right (Shirley Eaton of Goldfinger fame) is a model with an American boyfriend and a shady past;
Lord Mayley (Terry-Thomas) is a respected British peer with a wife (Georgina Cookson) who has the tendency to go out chasing younger women;
Flora Ransom (Peggy Mount) is a murder-mystery writer in the Agatha Christie sense with a daughter (Joan Sims) but who may have stolen the plot to one of her big-selling murder mysteries; and
Sonny Macgregor (Peter Sellers) hosts a show that seems somewhat like You Bet Your Life, only he's not really Scottish, and he also owns some apartment buildings that aren't in particularly good condition.

Dennis, having threatened each of them (and a whole host of unseen others), leaves them with the uncomfortable decision of whether to pay up or to let their secrets be revealed. Then again, there's a third option, which might be to use other means to get Dennis to lay off. Or to make him incapable of going ahead with his plans to publish that information -- even if their plans to do so are highly illegal. Flora, being a mystery writer, decides to come up with a way of killing Dennis that won't be detcted, while Macgregor, who is also a master of disguises, has his own plans to kill Dennis. Unfortunately, both of them are less competent than they think, and poor Lord Mayley, who doesn't know anything about the other two, rather haplessly walks into these schemes.

Eventually the four, having found things out, decide that they're better off teaming up to come up with a murder that nobody will be able to pin on any of them individually. Of course, this scheme doesn't quite work either, and in fact leads to a whole new set of complications.

Your Past Is Showing is the sort of British farce that a studio like Ealing was quite good at making. Here, however, with the presence of Sellers and Terry-Thomas, things get a bit more zany. However, this doesn't always work to the movie's benefit, especially when it coms to Flora and her daughter; these two characters are way overplayed.

Overall, though, the positives outweigh the negatives of Your Past Is Showing, and it's definitely a movie that's worth watching, even if there are more sparkling British comedies of the era out there.

Carter didn't go over there

Another person who was honored in Summer Under the Stars in 2025 was Glenda Farrell. I've seen a lot of her movies since I like 30s films and she worked at Warner Bros. to whose films TCM can more easily get the rights. One I hadn't seen was the B movie Here Comes Carter.

Glenda Farrell is nominally the female lead here although we don't see her about 10 minutes in to a movie that only runs an hour. Also, she's not the love interest for the lead male. The lead male is played the titular Kent Carter, played by Ross Alexander. Carter works in the promotions department for Premier Studios, and has a personal secretary Linda Warren (Anne Nagel, Alexander's real-life wife). She's an aspiring singer, but wants to get to the big time on her own and not have Carter push her.

One of the stars Carter is expected to promote is Rex Marchbanks (Craig Reynolds), a man Carter doesn't like for some reason. So when Carter is informed that waiting outside his office is Rex's ex-wife, accompanied by a policeman who is looking for the alimony payments Rex has stiffed her on, Carter doesn't do what is supposed to be his job of smoothing over scandals like this. Instead, he lets the case go to court, and for that the studio quite rightly fires him.

It takes a little while for Carter to find new work, until he's outside the studios of radio station KLA. Their Hollywood reporter Mel Winter (Hobart Cavanaugh) is a drunkard who doesn't exactly have a successful show, so Carter offers to make the show a success. Winter's secretary is Verna Kennedy (Glenda Farrell). Carter is able to make the show a success, but it's by getting Winter off the show and replaced by Carter himself, who has an extremely obnoxious delivery.

Now, a lot of this sort of show, which I guess was in those days a sort of precursor to Entertainment Tonight, was to run puff pieces on celebrities based on what the studio press agents fed to the "gossip" columnists. Carter, having been a press agent himself, has no desire to do a show like that, and instead has that contratrian attitude, even talking about gangsters and seemingly trying to paint Marchbanks as having an in with the gangsters. Linda doesn't like Carter for this, even though she does get an audition not knowing Carter has arranged it for her.

Marchbanks goes to the gang leader, Moran, and gets Moran's henchmen to rough Carter up in an attempt to stop Carter. But Carter continues his potentially libellous broadcasts about Marchbanks. The stuff wouldn't be libellous if Carter can prove it to be the truth. But can he?

Well, of course he can, considering that he's the hero and this is one of those light Warner's B movies. Tragic Ross Alexander has no difficulty with the material here, and neither does Glenda Farrell. Anne Nagel, on the other hand, is rather bland. There's nothing particularly new going on here, just the sort of stuff you'd expect from the days when a studio had to keep churning out new stuff to keep supplying the theaters. It entertains well enough for what it is, however.

Quick Change

TCM did a prime time spotlight on actor Bill Murray on his 75th birthday last September. One of the movies that they ran was new to me: Quick Change. As always, the plot synopsis sounded interesting, so I put it on my DVR to watch it and write up a post on it.

As the movie opens, Bill Murray's character Grimm is on a subway in Manhattan, wearing a clown outfit and made up like a clown, complete with balloons and big clown shoes. But that's not all he has. He's got a bunch of explosives attached to an alarm clock wrapped around his torso, and is carrying a gun. He makes his way to the Intercity Bank, where the guard doesn't want to let him in because it's close enough to closing time to let in new customers. So of course Grimm forces his way in, considering that it's obvious what he's planning to do.

Grimm proceeds to pull out his gun and tell everyone in the branch that this is a robbery. One of the bank workers, however, presses the silent alarm, so the police come with a large contingent led by police chief Rotzinger (Jason Robards) and his second-in-command, along with a ton of cops setting up a cordon around the building and basically besieging the place. Grimm has planned for this, however, what with the explosives. He's also put everybody in the bank in the vault and locking it, setting up negotiations with the police outside that eventually result in Grimm releasing three of the hostages.

But we learn that this is a ruse. As the second and third hostages are outside while the police are planning to take them for debriefing, the woman, Phyllis (Geena Davis) sees that there's a bit of white paint on the third hostage's face. That's because the third "hostage" is actually Grimm, who was using this as a way of getting out of the bank branch despite it being otherwise surrounded. Phyllis, the woman with him, is actually an accomplice as well as Grimm's fiancée. The man who was let out as the first hostage, Loomis (Randy Quaid), is also in on the bank plot, and left the scene to get his car and pick up Grimm and Phyllis for the getaway.

Grimm's plan was to get the three of them on a plane to Tahiti, with the money taped to each of their bodies, getting away while Rotzinger would still be under the impression that Grimm was in the bank with his hostages. To keep up that ruse, Grimm goes to a pay phone to call Rotzinger, these being the days before caller ID, especially on the sort of oversized mobile phone that Rotzinger is using. However, this is where the first crack in Grimm's plan occurs. Loomis is a bit incompetent, and accidentally honks the car horn, a sound that Rotzinger can clearly hear and gives him the impression something is up. Rotzinger becomes more suspicious when the debriefing occurs, and the first three hostages released are not there. And how did Grimm get out anyway?

Meanwhile, everything that can go wrong for our three bank robbers does. Some of the road signs have been taken down, so they can't find the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway to get to Kennedy Airport and their flight to Tahiti. Then they get robbed by a con artist; their car gets towed for being illegally parked; and on, and on, and on in ways that are ever more absurd. Will they be able to escape, or will Rotzinger nab them? Fortunately, the movie was made well after the disintegration of the Production Code, so it's not a foregone conclusion that the robbers have to be caught.

Quick Change is a fun idea, and a movie that's mostly successful in being entertaining. However, it's a movie that I felt lost a bit of stem in the third act, mostly because things get too absurd and manic. We get it already. Then again, it's not a bad movie, just one that I felt could have been a bit better.

She Loved a Fireman

Another of the short B movies that I recorded during one of the Saturday matinee blocks some months back, was She Loved a Fireman, which runs a shade under an hour. As is once again the case, I eventually got around to watching it so that I could write this review and put it up here.

The main character is the fireman, not the she. And the fireman doesn't start off the movie as a fireman. Instead, the man in question, Red Tyler (Dick Foran) is a ward-heeler type who would be more comfortable making book and getting manicures than you'd think he'd be in a fire department. But for reasons that are vaguely suggested might be related to political corruption, he follows a fire captain, Smokey Shannon (Robert Armstrong), out of the salon where Smokey is getting a shave and Red is getting that manicure. Red thinks he's more masculine than the fire fighters, so he and his best friend Skillet (Eddie Acuff) decide to take the civil service exam to become firefighters.

The two both pass and go to the fire academy in one of the movie's better scenes showing some of the training the recruits go through. After graduation they both get assigned to Smokey's station. Red immediately makes everyone else hate him because Red thinks he's hot stuff. Meanwhile, he decides he's going to hook up with Margie (Ann Sheridan) who walks into the fire station one day. It's only later tht he finds out that this is Margie Shannon, the captain's sister. And boy is the captain none too pleased that Red is trying to pursue his sister.

Worse, Red decides he's going to cut corners so that he can get out of the station and go visit Margie. This includes some obvious foreshadowing of a shot of a hook that's supposed to keep the ladder connected to the fire truck. As you might guess, the station gets called out to a fire, Skillet is holding on to that ladder as the fire truck races to the fire, and then the ladder falls off, giving Skillet a lovely broken leg in the process.

Smokey gets Red transferred to the harbor fire station when Red should probably have been prosecuted for negligence and gone to jail for it, but then we'd have a lot less of a movie. As you might guess, there's a warehouse fire near the harbor, and both Red's new precinct and Smokey's get called to the scene. Smokey gets trapped on the roof, and this gives Red a chance to save Smokey and give the movie a happy ending.

There are a lot of problems with She Loved a Fireman, with most of the issues stemming from the fact that Red is just such a jerk of a character. You can't understand why anybody would like this guy, and then the obligatory redemption arc doesn't really work either There's some good footage of training as well as some good stock footage in the warehouse fire, but that's not enough to save the movie. Ann Sheridan was at the beginning of her career here, which is part of why Warner Bros. only put her in a trifle of a B movie like this. She's not enough to save the film either.

Scanners

Quite a few months back, TCM ran a night of movies on the theme of body horror. Unsurprisingly, if you're going to do body horror you would do well to include a David Cronenberg movie among the showings, and the movie TCM picked was Scanners.

The movie opens in what looks like a food court in a downmarket mall. A scruffy guy, Cameron Vale (Stephen Lack) sits down at one of the tables. At a nearby table, a copule of women are eating, and one of them makes derogatory remarks about bums like this Cameron seems to be. But there's more to Cameron than meets the eye, and he starts staring at the woman to the point that she has a seizure! This comes to the notice of a couple of men who act like plainclothes detectives, chasing Cameron through the mall until one of them shoots him... with a tranquilizer dart. Cameron is taken to a converted warehouse, where scientist Dr. Paul Ruth (Patrick McGoohan) informs him he's something known as a "scanner", a small group of people who have telepathic communities but have mental issues because they don't know how to deal with being able to hear everybody else's internal conversations. Dr. Ruth gives Cameron a drug called "Ephemerol" that dulls the other people's voices inside his head.

Meanwhile, at a company called ConSec which is obviously one of those evil defense contractor type companies that dotted conspiracy theory movies of the 1970s and 1980s, the executives also know about the scanners. But they have a rather more sinister plan, which is to use the scanners as weapons. They set up a demonstration event where they show what scanners can do, asking for someone to volunteer to be scanned. But what they don't know is that the man who volunteers, Darryl Revok (Michael Ironside), is himself a scanner. Worse, he's more powerful than the guy scanning him, so the end result is that the ComSec scanner's head explodes in what is one of the movies most memorable sequences.

Guards try to chase Revok, but they don't have any nice tranquilizer darts or the like, so he's able to kill several of them in an extended car chase sequence. Dr. Ruth learns of all this and is horrified. But he also knew this was coming, which was part of the reason he was looking for Cameron. Apparently the belief is that Revok is not only a renegade scanner, but that he's looking for other scanners to join him in a plot to take over the world from the normies. And woe betide anybody who's a scanner but doesn't want to be a pawn in Revok's evil plot. Anyhow, Cameron's job is to infiltrate Revok's inner circle and take down Revok.

Cameron find an artist named Pierce (Robert Silverman) who is also a scanner, just in time for Revok's men to murder Pierce because Revok has obviously learned about Cameron and his being the second most powerful scanner behind only Revok himself. This also leads Cameron to Kim Obrist (Jennifer O'Neill), who is actively opposed to Revok and obviously in substantial danger because of it. Cameron and Obrist try to stay one step ahead of Revok while also trying to figure out exactly what's going on, which is rather more than Dr. Ruth has been letting on.

The idea of people with telepathic abilities fighting each other is an interesting one; indeed, it's something that had already been done in The Fury a few years earlier. The overarching plot of Scanners is frankly a bit silly, but this is the sort of movie that you don't watch so much for the plot, instead just sitting back and enjoying a ride through a dark and twisted world. That, and the special effects.

That having been said, I suppose that if Scanners had a more airtight plot, like, say, Alien, it might be remembered as an all-time classic and not just the interesting cult movie that it is. Either way, it's definitely worth your time to sit down with it and decide for yourelf just how much fun it is.

The trees of size

There are different types of westerns out there, notably the cavalry/fort type movies on one hand and the marshall-in-town type. Western movie channels like to lump in a third type of movie that's definitely western-adjacent at times, which is the sort of period piece set in a frontier town. Think movies like Revolutionary War films set in the Indian theater of the war, or movies set against the backdrop of the Klondike gold rush. Something that's similarly adjacent to more traditional westerns is The Big Trees.

Kirk Douglas stars as Jim Fallon, who doesn't host a late-night TV show because the movie is set in 1900 when there was no TV. Instead, he runs a lumber camp in northern Wisconsin where he's a bit of a dreamer and a bit of a chancer. Fallon has trouble making payroll, to the point that his right-hand man Yukon (Edgar Buchanan) has to run interference for him. He's also got a long suffering girlfriend in Daisy (Patrice Wymore). Recently, however, Fallon has learned of a new federal law. Apparently, changes to the old Homestead act are going to change who has the logging rights to some of the land in the national forests of the western states. There's big money, and Fallon wants a piece of it, despite never having been to California.

So Fallon sends Yukon out west to size up the lay of the land, while Fallon himself follows not too much farther behind when he can get the money. What he finds is a bit of tension, as a lot of different people are laying claim to various bits of land. Some, who have apparently been living on the land for a goodly length of time, are at risk of being priced out of "their" land in favor of whomever can afford to file a claim. At least Yukon has gotten the current land office man to slow-roll the claims, although in his case it's so that Fallon and the men he's bringing from Wisconsin can make the claims.

The people at threat of being dispossessed are a group of Quakers, led by the Elder Bixby and young Alicia Chadwick (Eve Miller). They're proto-environmentalists in the John Muir mold who see these fabulous redwoods as a sign of God's majesty and providence, and really only want to take what they need for their own use and to make a modest living. Fallon, of course, sees dollar signs in those giant redwoods, and sets out to come up with a way to pull the forest out from under the Quakers even though he claims to be on their side (and even though Alicia is an obvious love interest for Fallon in the romantic conflict subplot of the movie).

Also trying to dispossess the Quakers, and there first, is Frenchy (John Archer), who has a bunch of men who have been trying to file claims and aren't about to let a little thing like Fallon's men stop them. The conflict gets much more severe when Yukon gets named the local sheriff and really starts to take Alicia's side. This he does even to a greater extent than being on Fallon's side, as his belief is growing that Fallon is letting hubris get in the way of morals.

There's also still the Production Code, meaning that the "good" characters are going to have to win more or less in the end, or at least the immoral characters get what's coming to them. And clearly the script has already been set up to have Frenchy and not Fallon be the true villain of the piece.

From what I've read, Kirk Douglas considered this to be one of the least worthy movies of his entire career. I can see why, although I also think that assessment is a bit unfair. It's not that The Big Trees is bad by any stretch of the imagination. It's more that the movie is a bit formulaic, and definitely a modest thing compared to the much more memorable movies with great performances that Douglas had in his long career. This one, for example, was made just before Douglas went over to MGM and made The Bad and the Beautiful. But The Big Trees I think successfull does what it set out to do as a programmer, which is to provide reasonable entertainment. It's just a shame that Cinemascope wasn't around yet, as widescreen Technicolor would have been a big enhancement for the movie.

Il gatto a nove code

Some months back, I recorded a movie with an interesting premise not realising that it was one of those international co-productions that has actors from different countries who get dubbed into one language or another depending on which market the movie is being released in. That movie was Dario Argento's The Cat O'Nine Tails.

I didn't realize this movie was an Italian picture because TCM's synopsis listed the stars as Karl Malden and James Franciscus. They are of course the stars, although they're over in Italy for this one. Malden plays Franco "Cookie" Arno, a blind man who had worked as a reporter who now sets crossword puzzles and raises his niece Lori as his foster daughter. One night he and Lori go for a walk through their neighborhood in Rome, passing the Terzi medical institute which does some sort of genetics research in the era where DNA was still a relatively new thing. Somebody drives into the Institute, having assaulted the watchman at the gate, and goes into an office where he steals something.

One of the doctors claims to have a good idea as to who might have done it. The next day, a bunch of reporters are at the train station awaiting the arrival of a famous actress, when who should show up at the station but Calabresi, the doctor at the Institute who claims to know who was trying to steal something from the Institute. However, Calabresi gets pushed in front of the train! We viewers know it's murder, although the murderer was fairly clever to the point that the police think it's an accident.

Carlo Giordani (James Franciscus) is a reporter who is writing a story about the break-in at the Institute. When Arno learns this, he goes to the newspaper to see Giordani, asking whether the photo of Calabresi's death has been cropped: Arno, having been a reporter, knows something is up. Sure enough, the photo has been cropped, and shows that Calabresi has been pushed and the death is not accidental. Not that it reveals who actually committed the murder. Worse, the photographer gets strangled to death in his dark-room! So now Giordani and Arno definitely know that there's a much bigger story on their hands.

Both of them being (or having been) journalists, they naturally want to investigate. There are a lot of people who could theoretically be suspects of course, if the case were one of professional envy. There's Dr. Terzi and his daughter Anna (Catherine Spaak) and several researchers. Meanwhile, Arno and his daughter go to see dead Dr. Calabresi's girlfriend, Bianca. She too gets murdered for her trouble. And someone tries to kill Anna along the way with Giordani and Arno also facing significant danger.

Eventually, the reporters learn of something known as XYY syndrome. The movie doesn't clearly explain it, but normal humans are born with 46 chromosomes, with the 23d pair determining women (XX) or men (XY). About one man in 1000, however, is actually born with 47 chromosomes, with the 23d pair being XYY. This doesn't have a significant enough effect to result in a diagnosis early in life. However, when the syndrome was first discovered, there was a belief that men born with XYY were disproportionately violent. SO there's a feeling at the institute that one of the men might have been born XYY and he'd be the killer.

The Cat o' Nine Tails is a movie with a good idea, but another one where for me the execution didn't quite work. I think in this case that's specifically down to the international nature of the production. It needed to be either a Hollywood movie, or else something entirely in Italian with everybody playing it straight and the movie being subtitled. The movie we get, however, feels slightly off in an artificial way. Some of that may also be due to the point-of-view shots Dario Argento used. Still, The Cat o' Nine Tails is an interesting misfire.

A rather tame bus

I have a soft spot in my heart for B movies and tend to record a lot of them when they show up on TCM. One that had a synopsis that sounded vaguely familiar, probably because B movies don't have the most original plots, was Wildcat Bus. Having watched it, I realized I hadn't seen it before, so with that it's time to write up this review.

Charles Lang plays Jerry Waters. As the movie opens, he's being evicted from his swanky apartment because he's a wastrel playboy who won't get a job. (It's revealed later in the story his father died tragically and Jerry has some sort of survivor's guilt.) His sidekick and chauffeur Pete (Paul Guilfoyle) suggests he get a job, and the two look for various jobs until winding up at the Federated Bus Line. Jerry kind of ticks off mechanic Ted Dawson, only later learning Ted is both a woman (Fay Wray) and the daughter of the owner of the line! Jerry obviously is not bus driver material, but Paul is.

Jerry still has a car that he can drive for two more weeks until it's going to be repossessed for missing payments, so Jerry responds to a classified ad about the wildcat limousine services. Now, the fact that this is on the second floor walk-up apartment should be a tell that this isn't quite a legitimate business. The guy who runs is certainly seems dishonest, and his insistence that the drivers live in the apartment building also ought to set off alarm bells.

And, as it turns out, the business really is a front. The bus line is in tough straits because the buses keep breaking down and a shyster lawyer is suing them over accidents. Mr. Dawson some time back sent his business partner to prison for embezzlement, and the jailed guy's wife, Ma Talbot (Leona Roberts), is trying to get revengs on the bus line! This involves sending out cars to cut the buses off and cause accidents; put passengers on the buses to tout for the wildcat limousines; and if none of that works have a mole in the bus company as one of the mechanics who can sabotage the buses.

So to try to figure out what's going on, Ted decides she's going to employ the services of one of these wildcat chauffeurs, who are really closer to the sort of ride-sharing/carpool thing one might have done in college when a bunch of people needed to go to the same city to get home at the end of term, except that these are fully adult people. In any case, the car Ted gets in just happens to be driven by Jerry, who also begins to start doing some investigating of his own since he's trying to put the moves on Ted.

Wildcat Bus is nothing more than a B movie, but it works well enough for the sort of thing that would have been a second-bill for people in the years before World War II and then television who didn't have any other outlets to see this sort of stuff. It's slightly odd in tone because it feels like the movie is trying to put a bunch of stuff in: part gritty drama about a crime ring; part romance; and even some attempt at comedy. As long as you're not expecting anything more than a B movie, I think you'll enjoy Wildcat Bus as a sort of time capsule.

Darby's Rangers

Another of the movies that will be airing as part of this year's TCM Memorial Day weekend marathon of war movies is Darby's Rangers. It shows up tomorrow, May 23, at 3:45 PM.

Darby's Rangers is based on a real person, Maj. (later promoted to colonel) William O. Darby (James Garner in his first starring role). As the movie opens, Darby is stuck in an office in Washington with his adjutant, Master Sgt. Saul Rosen (Jack Warden, who also narrates the movie). There's a war going on, this being 1942, and Darby as a West Point graduate wants to fight. However, as Gen. Truscott informs him, Darby has excellent skills as a planner, and planning is in fact something that the war effort needs just as much as people who can do the actual fighting. Darby's idea is to have the army have its own form of Rangers, who would do much the same sorts of commando work that the Marines do. They can't use the Marines in Europe because the Marines are stretched too thin in the Pacific theater.

So Darby suggests his idea to another general, and is able to convince that general to give him the role of commander of the first batch of Rangers, who are going to go off to Scotland to train with the British since at the time it was considered that the British had the best commandos going. This also gives us the opportunity to meet some of the supporting characters. Hank Bishop (Stuart Whitman) meets bus conductor Wendy Hollister (Joan Elan) in London; she just knows she's going to get Hank to propose to her even though he doesn't know it yet. There's also Sutherland, who beds a girl in every port, or the army equivalent; Rollo Burns (Peter Brown); and some others. They all wind up in Scotland, and since the base where they'll be doing their training is short of barracks, the men are billeted with local families which also provides a couple to meet women they're going to fall in love with, notably Burns meeting the daughter of the Scot training them.

Eventually the training is done, and it's time for the Rangers to go off and do actual fighting, which starts in French North Africa in what is now Algeria. The Rangers serve with distinction, which puts them at the forefront of the next phase of the war, the invasion of Italy. As you may recall from your history or from having seen enough other war movies, the invasion started in Sicily as that's the closest point in Italy to Africa. After taking Sicily they established a beachhead in the southwestern most part of the boot of Italy, only to get bottled up by the Germans. So the Allies decided they were going to try to jump ahead of the German position by doing an amphibious invasion at Anzio.

This being a war movie, some of the Rangers die, which is the opportunity to bring in another character, Lt. Dittman (Edd Byrnes), a commander who's come straight from West Point and is just as by the books and humorless as you'd expect somebody who hasn't experienced combat and the stresses of having killed people and lost friends. As part of a delousing operation, he meets local girl Angelina (Etchika Choureau) and falls in love with her, which becomes another sub-plot in the movie.

If you read carefully, you might have noticed that I didn't talk all that much about the war action in Darby's Rangers. That's because there's not a whole lot of it, with a copious amount of military footage from the Army subbed in. The portions of the movie dealing with the training and then the romantic subplots take up a lot more of the film, which is fairly formulaic anyway. Darby's Rangers apparently didn't get the best reviews at the time it was released, and having watched it, it's not too hard to see why.

Accent on Crime

TCM ran a spotlight last summer on "Teens in Trouble". One of the movies they ran was an ultra-low-budget film from PRC, Delinquent Daughters. Since the synopsis sounded interesting, and I'm always up for low-budget exploitation stuff like this, I decided I'd record it so that I could eventually watch it and put up this post.

At what looks like a nice high school in one of those small cities that populated America, a group of the female students are discussing a shocking incident that occurred: one of their female classmates committed suicide by jumping off a pier! The various students have different attitudes. One, June, is sad; one is ditzy; a third, Sally, doesn't want to talk about it either with her classmates or the authorities and is incredibly truculent about it. Sally is obviously not one of the Good Girls.

This is further made clear by the fact that Sally has a boyfriend, Jerry, who owns one of those hot-rod type cars that can go just as fast as any police car. Not only that, but on the way to take Sally and one of her classmates home, Jerry stops and holds up a candy store! The kids also like to spend their evenings at a place called the Merry-Go-Round, a nightspot that is certainly not like anything Andy Hardy and his friends would have gone to to get a milkshake. Instead, it's run by the worldly Mimi (Fifi D'Orsay) and her friend Nick who is clearly connected to the local crime scene. Indeed he suggests to Jerry a good way to get rid of a car so that the police won't be able to recognize it.

Meanwhile, June is continuing to get herself in trouble by hanging out with the wrong crowd at the Merry-Go-Round. Her boyfriend Rocky brings a gun to the place to try to get in good with Nick, while Sally fakes her mom's voice to tell June's dad that they're studying at Sally's house. June's dad actually calls Sally's mom to confirm, finds out this is a lie, and basically throws June out of the house, which is a sure way to get June into deeper trouble.

There's a lot more crime to come, but Delinquent Daughters is one of those morality tales where the adult criminals are going to get caught, the kids are going to learn a lesson, and the "good" adults are going to change the Merry-Go-Round into something more benign. But there are a lot of twists and turns to get there.

Unsurprisingly, if you were to rate Delinquent Daughters on a technical scale, it's not a particularly good movie with its bad acting and shoddy production values. It's also hard to figure out what audience PRC intended to bring in to ensure that the movie would turn a profit. I can't imagine the teens of 1944 watching this one, and only a small set of do-gooder parents would think of watching it.

However, watching it 80 years on, all of the things that make Delinquent Daughters a technical dud make it fun to watch just as a time capsule of how the adults of 1944 considered the teens of the day. It's also interesting to see how there's basically no mention of that pesky little war raging on over in Europe and the Pacific.

Flareup

TCM had a Raquel Welch double feature some time back. Of the films, I already did a post on Kansas City Bomber. Now it's time to do a post on the other film, Flareup.

We don't actually see Welch at first, unless that's her in the opening credits which seem obviously inspired by Maurice Binder's work on the James Bond title sequences. Instead, we see a woman named Nikki Morris, who is exiting one of the Las Vegas resorts and getting in a taxi. She's tailed by a man who follows Nikki to a meeting with her friends Michele (Raquel Welch) and Irish for an outdoor lunch by the pool. The man stalking Nikki is her ex-husband Alan (Luke Askew), who wants to patch things up with Nkki, although she obviously doesn't for good reasons: the guy is a creep. What she didn't expect, however, is that Alan was going to pull a gun out and shoot her, and then try to shoot at Michele and third friend Iris.

The police for fairly obvious reasons want to talk to Michele and Iris, warning the two women that they're both in danger and need police protection until Alan can be caught, although Michele doesn't really want the protection. That night, as Michele goes to the hospital to find out how Nikki is doing, she learns that Nikki just died. Alan learned that too, and he shows up outside the hospital where he shoots Iris and her police protector, although Michele is able to escape, which makes sense considering Raquel welch is clearly the female lead hear.

Michele goes to the go-go club where she dances for a living (sorry, she's not topless like some of the other women). She's got a sympathetic boss in Lloyd. He has a past working in burlesque, so he knows a Jerry Benton who runs the Losers Club in Los Angeles, which is a similar sort of club. Just mentiod Lloyd to Jerry and Jerry will be happy to give you a job. It's also a good way to get out of Vegas unseen.

Jerry turns out to be a female Jerri (Jean Byron), who does indeed offer Michele a job without even an audition. Joe (James Stacy), the valet parker, recognizes that something is wrong with Michele, and starts being nice to her to the point that she shows up at his apartment when she has nightmares about what happened in Vegas.

And that's not the only way in which what happened in Vegas does not, in fact, stay in Vegas. Alan kills a fourth person, this time one who offers him a ride. It's an excuse for Alan to get a car to get to Los Angeles since he was able to threaten someone at the go-go club to tell him where Michele went. Alan blames Michele for the breakup of his marriage, and he plans to get revenge by killing her.

Flareup doesn't have much of a reputation, and it's not too hard to see way. Having said that, the movie isn't quite as bad as some people would have you believe. It's more pedestrian than anything else, but it's entertaining enough. And that's really all one looks for in a movie like this. Well, OK, it's also got great vintage location shooting in Las Vegas and Los Angeles that will probably be of interest to anybody who's from either of those areas

Another penthouse

It wasn't uncommon for studios back in the studio era to remake their old properties. They had the scripts lying around, and since there wasn't much opportunity to see those old films until television came along, a lot of movie goers might not remember the original. Another example of this is Society Lawyer.

Walter Pidgeon plays the title character here, playing a character named Christopher Durant who's nominally a society lawyer in that he works for the high-class sort of law firm. But he's known to get terribly drunk at parties he hosts, which seems to me to run the risk of ethics violations. Also, he's taken on the defense of Tony Gazotti (Leo Carrillo), who is the nightclub-owning sort of gangster but still, someone with the sort of connections a firm of the sort Durant works for wouldn't want to associate with.

Durant's personal life is also a bit difficult in that he's got a fiancée Sue Leonard (Frances Mercer) but the two are about to break up partly because of those gangster ties. The other part of it is that for Sue, there's another man in the form of Phil Siddall (Lee Bowman), who himself has an ex-girlfriend Judy Barton (Ann Morriss). Ann seems to have fallen for the wrong sort of man and wants to rub Phil's face in it. So she invites him to a swanky party, only for her to get murdered at the party by an unseen assailant who drops the gun to make it look like Phil was the only one there. Even more stupidly, Phil picks up the gun so he'll be caught with it and anyway, his fingerprints would have been on it!

So obviously Phil is held for booking, and Sue is out of her mind not knowing what to do about her boyfriend facing a murder rap. So she goes to Durant for help getting Phil off. After all, if Durant can get someone like Gazotti off, surely he can prove Phil's innocence. Meanwhile, someone's calling Durant up telling him not to take the case.

Gazotti, for his part, has an idea that the murder was committed at the behest of a rival underworld type, Jim Crelliman (Eduardo Ciannelli). So Gazotti is willing to help Durant with what one would guess is the ulterior motive of getting a rival out of the way. Gazotti has a nightclub singer Pat Abbott (Virginia Bruce) in his employ who also lived in the same building as the murdered woman and who might be able to help Durant. However, there are any number of red herrings and Pat herself may or may not be a 100% trustworthy character. Pat and Durant both continue to face threats until the case is solved, which it be since this one was made in 1939, well after the Production Code started being strictly enforced.

Society Lawyer is a remake of a pre-Code called Penthouse, which I blogged about all the way back in 2012 and frankly don't think I've seen since, which might explain why I didn't notice the connection until looking up the reviews for Society Lawyer. The remake is more than adequate, although it's only a programmer and once again not meant to be anything special. Just another movie that kept the audiences of 1939 entertained until the next movie came off the assembly line. Not that it's bad by any means, however.

One other thing is worth mentioning, and that's Durant's butler played by Herbert Mundin. Mundin was a character actor whose credits include a fun turn in The Adventures of Robin Hood where he's the love interest of Una O'Connor. Unfortunately, Mundin was killed in a car accident before Society Lawyer was released, obviously ending his career.