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.

Rock Hudon Romantic Comedy #8857432896578234768902

Another of the stars in the 2025 Summer Under the Stars was Gina Lollobrigida. She made a pair of movies with Rock Hudson. I already did a post on the first of them, Come September. The second is Strange Bedfellows, which, being a Universal movie, hadn't shown up on TCM before. (That would also explain why I hadn't heard of it.) In any case, I recorded it and recently got around to watching it to put up this post on it.

The movie starts off with an opening scene told in narration. In London in what would be the late 1950s, Carter Harrison (Rock Hudson) is an American working for the American-Allied Petroleum company in London. He's the sort of stereotypical conservative businessman type, but on his first day in London he meets bohemian Italian artist Toni Vincente (Gina Lollobrigida). They go to bed together that night, already married. And then they wake up the next morning to find out that they have nothing in common and that Toni can have a rather violent temper. So the two separate, which is also a bit unsurprising considering that Carter's work takes him to all sorts of oil-rich sheikdoms and similar places.

Fast forward to the present day. Although the husband and wife haven't seen each other for seven years and don't really have any intention of ever seeing each other again, they also haven't really bothered to go through the motions of getting a divorce. At least not until now, when TOni starts the proceedings which is also going to have them meet, at least with their solicitors in tow. But there's also a catch that comes up.

Carter's PR man with the firm, Richard Bramwell (Gig Young), informs Carter that he's up for a promotion to an executive position when he gets back to Boston. However, this being a conservative business, the president J.L. Stevens (Howard St. John) would like a family man in the position. Carter getting a divorce might be a problem, but then having Toni as she is would also cause issues. In addition to the bohemian artist type, she also involves herself in the sort of social causes that would make conservative executives blush. Since this is the 60s, there's nothing environmental here; it's more helping the third world and more importantly, freedom of expression, complaining about the American museum not wanting to display a supposedly controversial sculpture (never actually shown). Harry Jones (Edward Judd) is the point man for the organization, and you get the impression that he'd like to romance Toni if that divorce ever went through.

So Carter is trying to convince Toni that he really loves here, while Bramwell is working on a scheme that might prevent Toni from going ahead with the anti-American protest. Bramwell's scheme involves another oil-rich region where the restive natives are busy killing UN diplomats, and saying that Carter is going to be sent there to negotiate following a briefing in the Bahamas. That fake briefing is just a ruse to get Carter and Toni on vacation together before the board meeting in Boston. Harry, as you might well guess, figures that there's something hinky first about Carter trying to repair his relationship with Toni, and then all this stuff about Carter having to go on a potentially fatal diplomatic mission. So he sets up a ruse of his own to try to determine what's really going on.

This is the sort of romantic comedy where you have to figure that the Rock Hudon and Gina Lollobrigida characters are going to end up together at the end, so the question is how exactly they get there. There are parts of Strange Bedfellows that are good, but the resolution relies on stuff that's way too much a series of coincidences that feel more forced than funny. It's a bit of a shame considering the cast who all put in respectable performances. It's not really their fault that the scrip is letting them down.

Sister Carrie

Jennifer Jones was honored last August in Summer Under the Stars, which once again gave me the opportunity to record some movies I hadn't seen before. One of those was Carrie, the adaptation of the Theodore Dreiser novel Sister Carrie.

Jones stars as Carrie Meeber, daughter in a small-town Missouri family at the turn of the century who have already had one daughter go off to Chicago for better economic opportunities. It's Carrie's turn, as her parents buy her a one-way ticket to Chicago. One the train, she's keeping to herself, except that she's pestered by one of the male passengers, Charles Drouet (Eddie Albert). Charles is a traveling salesman and is immediately taken by Carrie although he's really much too forward about it, especially for circa 1900. And he doesn't seem too happy when Carrie gets off the train in South Chicago, since that's considered the slum area.

Life with her sister isn't the greatest, since money is tight and Carrie's brother-in-law is tough in a sensible way: you have to be a bit strict to survive in such conditions. Carrie has a job as a seamstress in what is essentially a sweatshop, but injures her hand in an industrial accident and gets fired, this being the days before workers' comp and other such benefits. Carrie goes to see Charles, who takes her to Fitzgerald's, an upscale restaurant managed by George Hurstwood (Laurence Olivier).

Carrie, having lost her job, winds up moving in with Charles, which is rather scandalous. Just as scandalous is the idea that Hurstwood is also smitten with Carrie. The thing is, Hurstwood already has a wife Julia (Miriam Hopkins) and two teenaged kids. The restaurant manager job is a good one that puts the Hurstwoods on the cusp of being upper-middle-class, with the prospect of marrying off the kids to people of better economic status. But if it were to be found out that George is lusting after someone young enough to be his daughter, well that might be a problem.

And then George does something profoundly stupid. At the end of the day at Fitzgerald's, George makes a mistake with the time lock on the restaurant's safe, leaving him with about $10,000 that he can't get in the safe. Now, the right thing to do would be to contact the owner of the restaurant, although that would have been a bit time consuming for 1900. Instead, George decides he's going to run off with the money, but not before picking up Carrie and bringing the two of them to New York. George also rather stupidly blows through the money in double-quick time. Sure enough, Fitzgerald sends men to New York to look for Hurstwood, who can't really keep a job in the restaurant business once his past is discovered.

Things get even worse when George's son is about to get married. Julia wants to sell the house, but George has to co-sign to sell. The thing is, he's still married to Julia, despite having told Carrie that he'd gotten a divorce. And by this time Carrie has gotten knocked up. But while George keeps going downhill, there's a third act for Carrie. She lies about her past and says she's been on the stage in Chicago, which gets her a job as a chorus girl with the opportunity to move up in the world. She splits from George hoping that George's son will forgive him, and eventually becomes reasonably big in the theater world, big enough to have a name in noticeable letters on the posters. Both Charles and George see that name, and show up (at different times) at Carrie's dressing room....

I haven't read Sister Carrie, so I can't be specific on what was changed from the book to the movie, although when Alicia Malone presented Carrie on TCM she mentioned that the book had floated around Hollywood for quite some time while people tried to figure out how to make it conform to the Production Code. The movie was not a success at the box office, and having seen it, I think I can understand why. This was supposed to be a prestige production, and the leads all give good enough performances. But at the same time, it feels like there's something a bit off with the movie, like the various characters don't really have the appropriate emotional connection with each other. There's just something flat about the final product.

But give Carrie a try and see for yourself if you like it.

Die Austernprinzessin

Another of the silent films that's been sitting on my DVR until close to the time that it was going to expire is one that comes from Germany: The Oyster Princess.

Directed by Ernst Lubitsch, an early intertitle (the print TCM ran had intertitles in English only, although a few things like a calling card were still in German with an English subtitle) informs us that this is a grotesque comedy in four acts. The first act is set at the mansion of Mr. Quaker (Victor Janson). He's an American "Oyster King" having made a fortune in oysters, and for whatever reason having brought hs daughter Ossi (Ossi Oswalda) over to Germany, which to me presented a bit of a problem. The movie was released in June 1919, which is only seven months after the end of the Great War, making me wonder about the timeline of everything here. But put that aside. Ossi is a spoiled brat, who is willing to break everything in the mansion she and her father live in if that will help her get her way. She's having another of her tantrums because she just learned that one of her fellow socialites has just gotten married to a count. If a count is good enough for that young lady, then certainly somebody of a similar social standing, or higher, is needed for Ossi. And get her one now! Or even yesterday, if not sooner.

Cut to a matchmaker, the early 20th century equivalent of a dating service, never mind apps like Tindr (somebody should have directed Ossi to Farmers Only). The matchmaker has lots of contacts, but all of them have one flaw or another or else they wouldn't need such a service. An example is Prince Nucki (Harry Liedtke), who is heavily in debt and disinclined to marry. We then see he apartment, where he lives with Josef, whose real relationship to the Prince is never quite explained. In any case, a representative from the matchmaker shows up, and the Prince decides to send Josef over as a sort of go-between. But there's a mix-up when it turns out that the only calling card Josef has is one from Prince Nucki himself, leading Ossi and her dad to think this is the actual prince.

Ossi, being an impetuous young woman, decides to run off and elope with the man she thinks is Prince Nucki, returning home to a huge reception that you wonder how her dad could arrange on such short notice. But since this isn't designed to be a realistic movie, don't worry about things like that. Meanwhile, the real prince is visited by several of his friends, who suggest they the all go out on a "spree", which means painting the town red. As they walk through a park the next morning, one by one the friends pass out on the park benches, leaving only the prince himself, who drunkenly ends up in a carriage and winds up at...

A meeting of the women's temperance association. The association is staffed by all the daughters of the business magnates, with Ossi heading this morning's meeting. They basically sober up the drunks, who look for the most part like you'd expect chronic drunks to look. Until, of course, the much more handsome prince shows up. The two start to fall in love, Ossi not realizing this is Prince Nucki, while the prince, thinking he's supposed to be engaged to somebody, not knowing this is the woman he's engaged to.

Jacqueline Stewart, in her wraparounds, mentioned how The Oyster Princess was one of the earliest movies to display the "Lubitsch touch". Lubitsch at this early date is already in fine form, with the sort of movie that I think would have been easy for audiences around the world to follow, with none of the arthouse stuff that foreign films of a later era would get a reputation for. The comedy works, plot holes aside. It is, however, still a silent film from 1919, so there's going to be a fair bit that might seem a bit old-fashioned to people who aren't that used to watching silent cinema.

Phaedra

Another of the movies that I recorded some time back but never got around to watching until recently was one that Anthony Perkins made when he was over in Europe: Phaedra. Now that I've seen it, I can write up the review and post it for all of you here.

We don't actually see Perkins, who plays a young man named Alexis, for 20 minutes or so into the movie. Instead, we see his father, Thanos (Raf Vallone). Thanos is a shipping magnate in Greece who is about to celebrate the launch of his new ship together with a whole bunch of people on one of the Greek islands, together with second wife Phaedra (Melina Mercouri). Thanos is divorced from his first wife (never seen in the movie), who took Alexis back with her to her native England. Alexis is a student at the London School of Economics, but he seems to have a greater interest in painting.

Thanos has a lot of business in other parts of Europe, and Phaedra is about to go to Paris on a shopping trip. Thanos decides that now would be a good time to bring Alexis back to Greece where he can be groomed to take over the family business. And since Paris isn't all that far that London, perhaps Phaedra could go over to London to meet Alexis and convince him to come back to Greece. Since Thanos is a powerful man, Phaedra more or less agrees to go to London.

Phaedra meets Alexis in London, and the two hit it off despite apparently never having met before. (I don't think the movie explicitly states how long Thanos and Phaedra have been married. She has a son, and I couldn't quite figure out if this is Thanos' biological son or stepson. The latter would make sense if Thanos wants Alexis to take over the family business.) Alexis talks about his "girl", which is actually an Aston Martin sports car. Other than that, Phaedra and Alexis don't just hit if off well, they hit it off enough that the two eventually have sex with each other, which is highly transgressive even though the two have no known blood relation. For fairly obvious reasons, Thanos would be none too happy if he found out what was going on.

Alexis decides he is going to go back to Greece after all, although he soon begins to get the impression that he did't make the right decision. He and Phaedra still have feelings for each other, but they can't exactly act on them because Thanos would find out. Worse, Thanos and a fellow shipbuilder have decided that a good thing to do would be to marry their kids off to each other as a way to consolidate their businesses. Phaedra decides she's not going to let this happen if she can do anything about it. And then the ship launched at the beginning of the movie, named after Phaedra, sinks. It's not the only tragedy that's going to happen.

Phaedra is based on a Greek tragedy by Euripides, so there's fairly good source material here. And the movie starts off promisingly enough. However, for me, the movie started to lose steam in the final third of the movie as it felt to me like it was going on too long at a shade under two hours. The other issue for me was that, when Perkins got behind the wheel of that Aston Martin, I couldn't help but think of him driving like a maniac in Rome in the movie Mahogany, which is of course a riotously bad movie.

Still, I'm glad I finally got the chance to watch Phaedra, even if it isn't the greatest movie out there.

Who knew insects could be so funny?

A movie that I didn't know much about until the last time it showed up on TCM is The Grasshopper. The synopsis made the movie sound like it might be interesting, so once again I decided to record it so that I could eventually watch it and write up this post on the movie.

Jacqueline Bisset stars as Christine Adams, a young woman who lives in a small town in British Columbia but apparently has a boyfriend who's moved down south to the States. (I don't recall seeing the boyfriend in the movie, and looking at the credits, the boyfriend doesn't seem to appear.) As the movie opens, Christine has decided she's just going to get in her car and drive down to Los Angeles were said boyfriend lives to go live with him. Unfortunately for her, her car breaks down along the way, so she takes to hitch-hiking. Danny Raymond is a comic who is riding with his agent, and the two stop and pick her up. However, they're not going to Los Angeles but to Las Vegas, and they don't drop her off at the turnoff, suggesting that everybody needs to see Las Vegas at least once.

Christine needs a job, and she meets a guy who runs one of the smaller night spots in Vegas. This being Vegas, the floor show involves the women dancing topless. Christine says she acted in a production of Little Women in school, to which the manager asks if she did it topless, because this is the sort of club where people only come to see women's breasts. Not that he puts it quite that way, instead using a euphemism. But Christine gets the point and eventually responds by dropping her blouse and showing her prospective boss her assets, which gets her the job. There, she meets Jay (Christopher Stone), a seemingly nice young man in the house band who, it is intimated, is gay. She's introduced to Tommy Marcott (Jim Brown), a former NFL player now working as a greeter at one of the big hotels, living off his name. Christine and Tommy have a Las Vegas wedding.

But it doesn't quite work out. A piece of crap at the casino uses Christine to try to get to Tommy, and when she doesn't play along, he beats her, with Tommy responding by beating the shit out of this guy. Unfortunately, the guy has Mob connections. So when Tommmy and Christine move to Los Angeles, and just as it looks like Tommy is going to be able to get a legitimate job in the construction industry, that old guy from Las Vegas has one of his henchmen shoot Tommy dead in a hilariously badly staged scene.

It gets more hilarious when, on the way home from the funeral, Christine has her driver stop so she can pick up two random guys sitting at a bus stop because they look like the sort of guys who can ply her with good drugs. She supposedly spends several hours threatening to jump off the roof of her apartment building. Joseph Cotten (billed much too high for his smallish role) shows up as a sugar daddy offering Christine a better life that she ultimately doesn't care for. The story finally meanders its way to an airport where rich guys like the Cotten character hangar their private planes. Christine and a mechanic at the airport who is also a would-be pilot, steal one of the planes for the film's rather ridiculous finale that also has the two of them smoking what's presumably marijuana.

The Grasshopper is one of those movies that came out not too long after the Production Code finally disintegrated and filmmakers thought they could be more daring. You get the impression they wanted to be daring, but the finished product is less daring and more ridiculous. Also, the plot, such as it is, is a mess; to be fair, one might think of The Grasshopper as more of a character study. However, it has its points of being so ridiculous that it's a unintenionally funny. Bisset also gives a reasonbly good performance early in her career.

The Grasshopper got a Warner Archive release, so you can watch it whenever you want.

Bedside

A movie that for some reason I thought I had already written a post on that doesn't seem to be showing up either in a search of the blog, or a file serach on either of my systems, is Bedside, which seems a bit of a surprise to me since I only saw the movie a few months back and would have written up the post then. So now I'm making certain I've written up that post and scheduled it on the blog.

Warren William stars as Bob Brown. He's a man who'd like to be a doctor and by all accounts he has a promising knowledge of medicine. But somewhere along the way he ran out of money to finish medical school without which he can't get that license. So instead of practicing medicine as a doctor, he's working as an X-ray technician in a clinic along with his girlfriend, the nurse Caroline Grant (Jean Muir). Caroline, for her part, is responsible and has saved up some money, and is willing to help Bob complete his medical school education. Presumably they'd get married afterwards and be able to live a secure life.

But Bob isn't the most responsible person, and the same issues that caused him to drop out of medical school the first time screw up this second attempt to finish medical school. Bob likes to drink and, worse, gamble, with the result that he gambles away the money he should be using on medical school. How's he going to tell his girlfriend that he's been stupid and lost all of the money that was supposed to go to something important?

Well, something happens that's a great stroke of luck for Bob. Working at another of those clinics late one evening, Bob is approached by a shifty-looking Smith (David Landau), who is asking Bob to supply himn with morphine and who clearly seems to know more than he's letting on. Bob concludes that Smith must have been a doctor in a previous life who screwed up by getting into his own supply of morphine (in the 1930s, it wasn't uncommon for doctors to fill prescriptions themselves and have the medicines on hand), and is now an addict who needs to keep finding a source of morphine. Smith still has his medical school diploma, so Bob blackmails him in a way: sell me your diploma or you don't get the morphine. This will allow Bob to hang a diploma on the wall, although he still technically isn't licensed, not having passed the licensing exam.

Because Bob hasn't got an official license, he's technically not supposed to be practicing medicine. So when he opens up his tony private practice with Caroline as a nurse, he needs another doctor to do the actual medical work. He finds one in Dr. Wiley (Donald Meek), and is able to keep manipulating things in such a way what it's always Dr. Wiley who's doing the doctoring. And with the help of tout Sam Sparks (Allen Jenkins), Bob gets a lot of patients.

But of course people are going to notice that there's something not quite right, and even Caroline cottons to what's going on. But in a stunning twist, one night when she's leaving the clinic she gets hit by a car when getting off the sidewalk. When she's taken to the hospital, the only doctor who's around to operate is... Dr. Bob, who of cousre is not a doctor.

Bedside is in many ways nonsense, in that I can't help but thing that even in the 1930s in a big city, it wouldn't be possible for Bob to get away with this stuff. Maybe in a small town that doesn't have access to any real doctor, someone like Bob could serve the function of something between a nurse practitioner and a full MD. But the movie is interesting, thanks to the fine performance from Warren William as the cad and even more so David Landau as the morphine addict. It's a shame that Landau was soon to suffer the stroke that led to the end of his career and his early death, as Landau was a really good supporting actor in a whole string of movies in the three or four years he was in Hollywood.

La bataille de San Sebastian

Next up among the movies that's been sitting on my DVR waiting for me either to get around to watching it just before it expired or for the next TCM showing is Guns for San Sebastian. This time, that means another TCM airing, tomorrow, May 13, at 11:00 AM.

The movie has some opening intertitles that imply this is based on real history, but as far a I can tell it isn't. In Mexico in the 1740s, the Spanish still hold the place as one of their many colonies in Latin America, although there a lot of rebellious sorts among both the native peoples and those of mixed race. Leon Alastray (Anthony Quinn) is one of those mixed-race people, and as the movie opens he's been chased into some village after having been shot. But he's been fortunate enough to make into the church of parish priest Fr. Joseph (Sam Jaffe), who's enough of a radical that he's not going to give Leon over to the government. Fr. Joseph, for his secular sins against the state, is given the assignemnt of going to the God-forsaken middle of nowhere village of San Sebastian to find out what happened to that parish's previous priest.

But, Fr. Joseph is able to hide Leon out under the cart he's taking to the village. Or at least intends to, since getting to the village involves crossing a stretch of desert. Eventually, the two men do make it to San Sebastian, where the find that the church is crumbling and there don't seem to be any inhabitants left. Fr. Joseph, pious man that he is, starts ringing the bell anyway to summon any Christians who may be in the area. Except that what it summons is not a Christian, or at least not one that's coming to pray. Instead, a bandit fatally shoots Fr. Joseph.

There were villagers at one point, and in some way still are, as they eventually come out of their hiding up in the hills. The mestizos as well as the local Yaqui tribe have been engaging in predatory raids on the land in part because the locals have good grain stores and in part because the Yaqui want what they see as their land back. Every time there's a raid, the locals flee to the hills. This time, however, due to a series of misunderstandings, the locals see Leon, think he's the new priest, and think that there's been a miracle performed. So their intention is to stay in town, with Leon as their new parish priest even though Leon really doubts the existence of god. He just happens to have been bequeathed Fr. Joseph's cassock.

Leading the mestizo raiders is Teclo (Charles Bronson), who is at times in league with Yaqui leader Golden Lance (Jaime Fernández) and at times wokrking with just the other mestizos. In any case, they're enough of a threat that Leon is determined to tell the local to stop being such cowards for god's sake and start fighting back! They do so first by rebuilding their dam, and then petitioning the colonial governor to send arms so they can fight the Yaqui and Teclo themselves. Along the way, Leon falls for one of the locals, Kinita (Anjanette Comer), although this is a problem considering that he's supposed to be a Catholic priest and priests are, after all, supposed to be celibate.

The locals try to make peace with the Yaqui, but Teclo doesn't want to see that happen, so he scuppers things leading to the final showdown. Of course, there's still also the issue that Leon himself is supposed to be an outlaw still....

Guns for San Sebastian is another of those international co-productions that for me always seem to be a bit of a problem because the required dubbing in post-production always feels a bit artificial. The visuals are nice and the story is pretty good, although it does drag a bit. The movie could probably have been 90 to 95 minutes instead of the 110 that we get. Still, it's not a bad movie and definitely worth watching at least once.

Father of the Bride (1991)

Tonight and next Monday, TCM is running a two-night salute to comic actor Steve Martin. As it turns out, one of the movies that they're running is on my DVR thanks to my having recorded it during TCM's memorial tribute to Diane Keaton back at the end of January: Father of the Bride, which comes on tonight at midnight (so Technically May 12 in the Eastern time zone but the evening of May 11 in more westerly time zones).

Now, as you can probably guess, this is a remake of the 1950 film Father of the Bride starring Spencer Tracy as the father and Elizabeth Taylor as the bride. Indeed, the screenwriters on the original, Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, get a writing credit here too. This time, it's Steve Martin as the father George Banks, with the late Diane Keaton as George's wife Nina. The two of them have a happy life in a Los Angeles suburb where George manages a comapny that makes athletic shoes. They've got a surprise baby who's now eight or nine (played by a young Kieran Culkin), as well as an adult daughter Annie (Kimberly Williams), who up until a few months ago was studying architecture in Rome for her master's degree. But the movie opens up with George doing a voiceover just after the wedding ended, and with the title, it's fairly obvious that the wedding is going to take place.

So we get the flashback to the day Annie returns from Rome. At the dinner table, she's got a big surprise for her father. While in Rome, she met a nice man who works as a "communications consultant". The two fell in love and have gotten engaged, which is a pretty big shock to Dad, who doesn't yet seem ready to "lose" his daughter to whom he's devoted in the way that fathers are to their daughters. Unsurprisingly, Dad also expects the worst as Annie's fiancé Bryan (George Newbern) comes over for a visit.

We're told from George's opening narration that everything's taken place over about four months, so we get the preparations for the wedding in a way that displays the truth of Murphy's Law: anything that can go wrong will. Annie and Nina want the best to the point of hiring a wedding planner Franck (Martin Short) who's an extreme parody. Franck's suggestions result in the price of the wedding going up and up to a point that seems a bit expensive even for today, not that I've priced out a wedding and reception recently. Bryan's parents are also wealthier than the Banks, which at least in George's mind creates a bit of conflict. And as in the original, there's even a point where Annie thinks of breaking off the engagement because she thinks Bryan has disrespected her.

As I said a few paragraphs ago, we already know from the beginning that the wedding is going to go ahead, and it seems as though everybody is going to live happily ever after, so the conflict of the plot, such as it is, involves exactly how we get to the joyous occasion and the reception. It's been an age since I've watched the original, but there are enough minor differences between the two versions.

I have to say that of the two, I think I prefer the original. They're both supposed to be comedies, but with Spencer Tracy leading the original, it's more of a gentle comedy. Steve Martin is certainly talented, but with his known quantity as a comedian, the result is something that often plays as a bit more zany. That's not necessarily bad, but I personally like the gentleness of the original more. The other thing in the remake that I think is a bit of a weakness is the enlargement of Martin Short's character. He's certainly a talented actor too, but Short is really overplaying his character.

Still, there's definitely a lot to enjoy about this version of Father of the Bride, and certainly anybody who's been through a wedding recently is going to like it.

I think we can guess who the beauty is

Red Skelton was TCM's Star of the Month back in 2025, and I recorded several of his movies. I don't think I got around to watching all of them before they expired, but since he worked at MGM his movies show up often enough on TCM. One such film is the star-making turn for Esther Williams: Bathing Beauty.

Bathing Beauty was made when Red Skelton was still the bigger star, so we get him first in the credits and the story is more about his character. Skelton plays Steve Elliot, a Los Angeles-based songwriter about to get married to college swimming instructor Caroline Brooks (that's Esther Williams, as if you couldn't tell). Steve talks to Caroline about starting a new life after getting married and finishing up his current job of writing a musical for producer George Adams (Basil Rathbone). George is none too happy about this, so he comes up with a way to scupper the marriage by claiming that Steve is already married to somebody else and producing that fake wife. With that, Caroline leaves him and goes back to her college back on the other coast.

Unsurprisingly, Steve wants to put things right, and follows her back to the college in New Jersey where she teaches, accompanied by singer Carlos Ramirez, who is clearly only in the script because the movie was made in early 1944 during the "Good Neighbor" policy with Latin America. However, the two men are blocked from entering campus because Caroline teaches at an all-girls' school. But this is a comedy, so we have to have a way for Steve and Caroline to end up in close proximity under odd circumstances. That happens when Steve meets one of the trustees and learns that the charter hasn't officially delared the college an all-girls' school. So Steve tries to enroll and, since the trustees can't legally stop him, come up with a way to admit him but with a plan to get him expelled for demerits.

Much of the rest of the movie deals with Steve's attempts to get back to Caroline, who is also being pursued by a botany professor Willis (Bill Goodwin), along with the comic predicaments the only male student at an all-girls' school is bound to get himself into. One such involves Steve's having to do ballet, in a skit that Skelton would reuse in the movie The Clown. There's also a whole bunch of musical numbers, including Harry James and his orchestra, along with Xavier Cugat and his orchestra. Oh, there's that Good Neighbor policy again. As you might guess with a movie like this, the film climaxes with an aquacade, along with Steve and Caroline winding up together at the end of the movie.

Bathing Beauty is one of those movies that was made in part as a morale-booster; indeed, the movie ends with a card mentioning that movies like this were also being sent overseas to entertain the troops who were off fighting the war against Germany and Japan. As such, the plot doesn't particularly matter here. Don't try to pay too close attention to the plot because that's not the point. Instead, the movie is more about the musical numbers along with the final big swimming number, along with Skelton's comic antics. The Technicolor is vibrant here, especially for that final aquacade. It's easy to see watching Bathing Beauty why it was a box office hit and the sort of movie that would get sent abroad to cheer up the troops.

If you're interested in Hollywood history, Bathing Beauty is a good entry into the phenomenon that was Esther Williams.

TCM schedule heads-up

Tomorrow is Mother's Day, and as always TCM is running a number of movies that are appropriate for the occasion. As usual, that includes another showing of Mildred Pierce, at 12:15 PM, which seems to be the one constant that shows up every single Mother's Day.

Another movie that shows up quite a bit is I Remember Mama. Indeed, it was originally scheduled to be on in prime time tomorrow night. Unfortunately, Ted Turner died earlier this week, and TCM has scheduled one of the quicker memorial tributes out there. Apparently Ted Turner's favorite movie was Gone With the Wind, which would also make sense as to why it was the first movie TCM ran when it went on the air back in 1994. So TCM is running Gone With the Wind at 8:00 PM tomorrow, along with a tribute that was given to Turner at the TCM Classic Film Festival some years back.

Three more musketeers

I've got a couple of movies from FXM that I hadn't seen before and was planning on blogging about the next time they came up. Now, as it turns, out, one, The Lieutenant Wore Skirts, is a movie I did blog about back in about 2018. But I know that I had not seen the 1939 Fox version of The Three Musketeers before. This one is getting another airing tomorrow, May 10, at 4:45 AM, so once again, now's the time to put up the post about it.

The movie informs us right from the start that this is a musical comedy version of Alexandre Dumas' famous story. Don Ameche plays D'Artagnan, the adult son of a Musketeer in the 1620s France of king Louis XIII (Joseph Schildkraut). D'Artagnan lives in Gascony in southwestern France, but is making his way to Paris in order to become one of the King's Musketeers. Along the way, he meets a couple of the Musketeers who aren't in uniform and pisses them all off to the point that he challenges them to duels in Paris.

So all three of them, who just happen to be Athos, Porthos, and Aramis, show up at the appointed place, at the same time: an inn/tavern where the proprietor seems to be off for the night and three dim-witted workers, played by 1930s comic team the Ritz Brothers, are running the place. The Musketeers challenge these men, whose characters are listed in the closing credits as Three Lackeys, to drink to every King Louis that France has had. Thanks to their incompetence, the lackeys spill most of their wine while the Musketeers get blackout drunk, prompting the lackeys to change into the much nicer Musketeer outfits. This is also how D'Artagnan finds the lackeys when he shows up, and since D'Artagnan wanted to be a Musketeer himself, he joins them, or has them join him.

Meanwhile, there's that palace intrigue going on that you might recall if you've seen a more serious movie version of the story. Cardinal Richelieu (Miles Mander) is the King's prime minister, but is trying to amass more power by having his own private security force that is working on diminishing the power of the Musketeers who, in Richelieu's mind, are too prone to random violence. There's also the matter of relations with England. Her Majesty the Queen Anne (Gloria Stuart) had been carrying on an affair with the Duke of Buckingham, and gave him a brooch to remember her by when he had to go back to England. Richelieu is pretty certain of this thanks to his spies among the court such as the Milday de Winter (Binnie Barnes).

Meanwhile, D'Artagnan and the lackeys meet Lady Constance (Pauline Moore), another of the Queen's ladies-in-waiting, who is the one who gets D'Artagnan involved in retrieving the brooch for the Queen since D'Artagnan is clearly more of a stauch supporter of the royals and not Richeliu. Along the way Don Ameche gets to sing some songs while the Ritz Brothers do their slapstick routines.

This version of The Three Musketeers is less about the Dumas story and more about the songs along with the Ritz Brothers' shtick. Whether you like the movie is going to depend in good part on what you think of the Ritzes, who are a decidedly dated sort of comedy. It also doesn't help that poor Don Ameche is saddled with some subpar songs. I'm reminded of the I Love Lucy episode where Lucy and Ethel write a song for a Camelot number Ricky wants to do, and come up with terribly inane lyrics. However, I think the movie as a whole is just more forgettable than actually bad. It's only a brief 72 minutes, so more programmer-length than ponderous prestige movie. And of course some people may actually enjoy the Ritz Brothers.

Another pirate movie

Some time back I did a post on one of the MGM historical mystery shorts, Captain Kidd's Treasure. I mentioned at the time that I had a different movie Captain Kidd, on my DVR, uncertain whether I had seen it before. I watched it, and in fact had not seen it, so now we get a post on it.

Charles Laughton stars as the famed pirate William Kidd. As the movie opens, it's 1699, and Kidd is on a ship not far off the coast of Madagascar, having turned to piracy because his privateer work has come to naught leaving him heavily in debt. (At least, that's the real-life William Kidd, the movie legends play fast and loose with the facts.) Kidd and his men sink a British ship called the Twelve Apostles, and bury the treasure on one of the islands off of Madagascar. However, one of Kidd's men chafes a bit under Kidd's leadership, and gets shot for his trouble simply because Kidd is that brutal of a man.

Kidd returns to London, with a crew including Orange Povy (John Carradine) and Jose Lorenzo (Gilbert Roland). Kidd's plan is to ingratiate himself with the king, William III, in the hopes of getting a new ship and going out ostensibly in the King's service, but with the real intention of returning to piracy as well as getting to that island to get the booty from the Twelve Apostles. To that end, he needs to pass himself off as a gentleman, hiring the valet Shadwell (Reginald Owen).

The King buys Kidd's assertion that the captain of the Twevle Apostles was an actual pirate, and grants a commission to Kidd. Kidd goes to various prisons to round up a crew, seeing as most other men wouldn't want to go to sea if they could avoid it and condemned prisoners would be more likely to take up the job with the prospect of a pardon coming at the end of the tour at sea. They've got nothing to lose, after all. However, one of the prisoners seems a bit odd. Adam Mercy (Randolph Scott) is, among other things, able to write, and doesn't talk like the people of the social classes that make up the rest of the crew.

Out at sea, Mercy both ingratiates himself to Kidd and tries to spy, telling Kidd when he's caught out that His Majesty obviously wanted a representative on board to make certain everything is on the up and up. If something were to happen to Mercy, it could be bad news for Kidd. How much of that story is true is, well, something you'll have to watch to the end of the movie to find out. Meanwhile, Kidd is already plotting to kill the other men who were with him when they buried the treasure off of Madagascar.

In the Indian Ocean, Kidd's men destroy another British ship, although this one comes with more booty than just the traditional treasure. There's a good looking woman, Lady Anne (Barbara Britton), whose father was on board as the ambassador to one of the rajes in India looking to curry favor with King William. Lady Anne has the feeling she's seen Mercy before, while Kidd gets a stronger feeling Adam isn't what he seems or has claimed to be. Now, we know that the real-life Captain Kidd was hanged for his crims, so he's likely not going to get away with his perfidy here.

I have no idea how much of this version of Captain Kidd is real. From what I've read of Kidd's life, some names from Kidd's real life are used here, but that seems to be the extent of the basis in reality. But regardless of that lack of reality, Captain Kidd is entertaining enough, thanks to a production that knows how to get a lot out of a little, along with a pretty good cast. Laughton overacts, although that works here because Kidd is in many ways a larger-than-life figure. Scott isn't exactly British, but is OK with what he's asked to do here.

There are higher quality seafaring movies out there, but if you're looking to be entertained, Captain Kidd will fill the bill.

Här har du ditt liv

I've mentioned a couple of times how I have a tendency to record enough foreign films that I don't quite get around to watching all of them until they're just about to expire from my YouTube TV cloud DVR. One night of TCM Imports included a pair of Swedish films, and I finally watched one of them: Here Is Your Life, from director Jan Troell.

The movie opens up around 1916. Olof (Eddie Axberg, who would appear in Troell's later films The Emigrants and The New Land) is a boy of around 14 in northern Sweden who has been forced to enter the working world because his father has some sort of terminal illness. Olof gets a job with a bunch of rather older men in forestry, specifically getting logs downstream to the lumber mills. It's difficult work and the sort of thing that led to industrial accidents and workers dying. Olof eventually takes a job in the mill part of forestry, and this time one of the workers is even younger, a boy named Oskar who really shouldn't be doing this work except that a good portion of rural Sweden was still poor enough that families had to send their children into work like this. Poor Oskar gets seriously injured when a pile of logs falls on him, and he later dies in hospital although we don't see the actual death.

In any case, all of this gets Olof to take a new job, especially since he's been doing some reading and shows some aptitude for intelligence even though he obviously hasn't had a lot of traditional schooling. That job is in a small town at a movie theater, although it's not a custom-built theater but the sort of space that would have been converted from something else into showing movies. Olof's job is to put up handbills for the coming attractions, as well as take tickets and sell snacks. If he's good enough, he might even be able to get a promotion to become a projectionist. This is also where Olof meets his first girl, although his love life, such as it is, isn't going to be straightforward. Olof also meets a socialist, although my reading of the timeline of the movie is that the October Revolution of 1917 in Russia had not yet taken place.

Olof's next job is indeed as a projectionist, although it's not with the theater he started at, but with an itinerant theater that sets up shop wherever it can. One stop is with a traveling circus, and it's there that Olof meets the woman who runs the shooting gallery. This too is going to be a complicated relationship. Olof eventually gets another job with Swedish Railways, which is a state-owned enterprise. That's worth mentioning since Olof is getting more heavily into socialism and workers' rights, railing against capitalism. He and his friend at the railway discuss getting the workers to strike as an anti-capitalist move, even though the railway is technically a socialist outfit. Olof goes on like this, until the movie ultimately ends with no clear resolution.

Then again, Here Is Your Life isn't a traditionally-plotted movie, but a coming-of-age story about one character, which is partly why I didn't mention the actors playing the other characters. Max von Sydow does appear, although I didn't recognize him. Axberg does a good job, and the cinematography is also quite good. However, I have to criticize the film for having a very slow pace and a way-too-long running time, at 160-some minutes. Either the movie should have been written to run into something under two hours, or it should have been conceived as something episodic like a TV miniseries. The adventures of Olof might work as a multiple-part miniseries, or what would nowadays be a limited series, but not as quite so well when it's one movie running close to three hours.