Love Begins at 20

I've mentioned a lot how I like the Warner Bros. B movies. But even they produced some that are stinkers. One that's a mess because of how much it's trying to do is Love Begins at 20.

Hugh Herbert is the star here, which may be a red flag for some people because I know he can be a bit of an acquired taste. He plays Horace Gillingwater, a man who seems to be surprisingly wealthy considering his working at a broom factory. He can support two adult daughters, Lois (Patricia Ellis) and Alice (Mary Treen), although he has an overbearing wife Evalina (Dorothy Vaughan) as well as an overbearing boss Ramp who wants to cut Horace's pay. Lois wants to get married to Jerry (Warren Hull) who helps run deliveries for the local grocer, but Mom is so overbearing that she hates the guy and has no desire to let her daughter marry a man like this. Indeed, Mom makes Dad's life hell by constantly telling him she should have married some guy named Harold Macauley.

Horace gets tasked with going to the next town over to retrieve some bonds that the boss has at the bank in that town: couldn't the boss go himself? And wouldn't the boss have to do so to fetch the bonds? But it's a plot device for Horace to have the bonds in his hands when a couple of bank robbers come in and rob the joint, taking the bonds as well as a bunch of cash, which is an obvious problem, even though there's not really anything that's Horace's fault.

And then Mom decides to go out to the movies with Alice. This gives Jerry the chance to show up and hopefully convince Dad to give his permission for him and Lois to elope. Also coming over is Horace's lodge friend Jacob Buckley (Hobart Cavanaugh). Buckley also has some alcohol with him. Horace would never drink in the presence of his wife, because she's so controlling that she'd have an absolute fit. Indeed, she did the last time Horace had too much to drink, which was before Prohibition.

Jacob convinces Horace to go to the lodge, and a bunch of plot points start to come together. The bank robbers have fled here not knowing that one of the witnesses to the robbery lives here. Horace's boss shows up at the lodge and Horace, now drunk, picks a fight with his boss. And then the robbers plant the bonds on Horace so they won't be caught red-handed when the cops show up. But they go looking for Horace at his home.

Love Begins at 20 is based on a play that apparently starred Bette Davis before she went off to Hollywood. The material is something that probably worked better on the stage where everybody is coming and going on the same set. Trying to open it up, ironically, didn't really work. Then again, I'd expect that the play would have run longer than an hour, so everything wasn't so rushed.

Ultimately, I didn't particularly care for Love Begins at 20, but I can see why some people might find it interesting.

The Story of Esther Costello

Another actor who has several movies that wound up on my DVR without being part of any particular tribute is Italian actor Rossano Brazzi. This time, the movie that features him is The Story of Esther Costello.

As you might guess, Brazzi does not in fact play Esther Costello. Nor does the female lead, Joan Crawford, although we get to see Crawford quite a bit before we get to see Brazzi. We first get to see Esther herself. In a prologue scene, it's 1948 Ireland in one of those dirt-poor villages, and Esther is playing with a couple of boys. Esther has found a cellar where a cache of explosives from either the war of independence from Britain or perhaps the civil war that followed remains hidden a quarter century on. The kids must be too young to read, or else they'd know that these are dangerous explosives and not toys to be played with. But they're stupid, and one of them pulls the pin on one of the grenades. In the resulting explosion, Esther's mother is killed as, presumably, are the two boys.

Fast forward to 1953. Margaret Landi (Joan Crawford) is a childless American woman who is apparently rich enough to travel to the village where she grew up, and even buy chocolates for the village children. The parish priest, Fr. Devlin (Denis O'Dea), informs her there's one more child, which is how Margaret gets introduced to Esther (Heather Sears). In the accident, Esther became deaf-blind, and is living in squalor with an alcoholic granny. Margaret is horrified, and decides that she's willing to become the child's guardian and take her over to England and then the US, where there are schools that teach the deaf-blind how to use their sense of touch to learn Braille as well as finger-spell and things like that.

It's a lot of work, but Esther is a good student and eventually reaches the point where Margaret it willing to bring her to a school assembly at a school for children with all five senses for a talk about overcoming hardships. One of the girls is overcome by emotion, and it's there that the idea is born, in part with help from newspaper reporter Harry Grant (Lee Patterson) who has already met Esther. Esther's could be an inspiring story, and that inspiration could be used to raise money for other deaf-blind people. Those schools need quite a bit of money, after all.

Margaret decides it's a good idea, and has good intentions, so she takes Esther around and parades her to large audiences as the donations start pouring in. And then Margaret sees a check she'd rather not see: it's signed by one Carlo Landi (that's Rossano Brazzi). Carlo is Margaret's estranged husband, the sort of man who cheated on Margaret and likely cheated his clients in whatever work he did, to the point that for the first half of the movie I was expecting Margaret's husband to be in prison.

Carlo works his way back into Margaret's life, although it's also a bit of a ruse. Carlo sees all that money coming in, and figures it's a good way for all of them to live a life with at least some luxury in it. Or, at least, a good way for Carlo. He has the idea of bringing Esther back to Europe and going on an extended engagement tour, lying as well about how much money is coming in so that he can skim some of it off. You'd think Margaret might have figured this out by now.

She eventually does figure it out, as does Harry, who wants to rescue Esther from all this because he thinks he's in love with her. But there's the question of what it would do to Esther if she found out that people around her whom she trusted are basically scamming her. And if that's not enough, the story takes a plot twist just in time for the finale....

The main idea of The Story of Esther Costello dealing with charities scamming gullible people, isn't a bad one. And for the most part The Story of Esther Costello really isn't a bad movie. But it does have some plot holes that do bring it down a peg or two. One is the plot's requiring that Margaret be a bit too dim to figure out that her husband just wants to scam people again. She's incredibly quick to bring him back into her life. And really would a charity of that size be run by only one or two people, especially someone like Margaret who had no experience doing such things?

Still, overall, The Story of Esther Costello is definitely one that's worth watching.

Your annual Father's Day reminder

Tomorrow is the third Sunday in June, which means that in the US and a lot of other countries it's Father's Day. Since TCM is of course an American channel, it's no surprise that their programming aligns with the US scheduling of the observance. Apparently, a fair number of Catholic countries use March 19, the feast day of St. Joseph, to mark the occasion since as the husband of Mary he's the Catholic patron saint of fathers.

In any case, there's a relatively limited set of Father's Day movies TCM can run, and once again the day's lineup is interrupted by the second airing of Noir Alley since there aren't all that many noir films with fatherhood as a them. Moms at least get Mildred Pierce. Tomorrow's lineup is:

6:00 AM Our Vines Have Tender Grapes
8:00 AM East of Eden
10:00 AM The Man I Love (Noir Alley re-air)
Noon Love Story (OK, I guess there's a complicated father-son relationship here)
1:45 PM Judge Hardy and Son (There are actually a bunch of Hardy Family movies they could have picked)
3:30 PM The Courtship of Eddie's Father
5:45 PM Life With Father
8:00 PM Father of the Bride (1950; the Spencer Tracy version)
9:45 PM To Kill a Mockingbird

Now, I put the whole Father's Day schedule down here because I was curious to see how many of the movies are repeats of last year, seeing how I have TCM schedules going back quite a few years. So, let's go back in time to those thrilling days of 2025 and see what TCM was doing:

6:15 AM The Entertainer (another difficult father-children relationship)
8:00 AM Our Vines Have Tender Grapes (ooh, there's the first repeat)
10:00 AM Crack-Up (another Noir Alley re-air)
Noon Midnight (I'm assuming this was part of some noon on Sunday programming feature the way we get the Musical Matinee at noon on Saturday)
1:45 PM Judge Hardy and Son (a repeat, and at the same time!)
3:30 PM The Courtship of Eddie's Father (LOL)
5:45 PM East of Eden (better at dinner; I remember when TCM's morning intro was "Look for the Silver Lining", which doesn't quite go with a movie like East of Eden)
8:00 PM Father of the Bride (and once again, the Spencer Tracy version)
9:45 PM Life With Father (you knew it was coming)
Midnight The Kid (unlike this year, Silent Sunday Nights included a movie with a father-son relationshp

So, no surprise at how much there was in common. But if anybody at TCM is reading this: pick a different Hardy Family movie next year.

Kissing Time

Back in 2013, I briefly mentioned a night of Busby Berkeley movies and the shorts that aired in between. One that got about a line was Kissing Time, which got no further mention because I had never seen it before. Eventually, it got another TCM showing as part of the Saturday matinee block and, not remembering having brought it up 13 years ago, I recorded it.

Jane Froman is the female lead here, and as I mentioned back in 2013 she's famous for having survived a plane crash in 1943 that was the subject of the biopic With a Song in My Heart starring Susan Hayward as Froman. She plays Miss Sullivan, traveling in an unnamed Latin American country with her father and having met some guy named Ferdie on what is the local festival day, leading the locals to do a song and dance number.

Showing up is an army lieutenant Segovia (Georges Metaxa) togethr with "El Toro" (Don Zelaya), who is the dictator of the country. They're driving a car which was manufactured by the Sullivan company, of which Dad is an executive. When the car breaks down, they think Mr. Sullivan can fix it, not realizing he's only an executive and not a mechanic. But it's an excuse to detain the Sullivans to try to get Dad to service the car.

Lt. Segovia meets Miss Sullivan and immediately falls in love with her as they sing a couple of songs to each other. And then El Toro shows up and sees Segovia singing, and is ticked because he's got a thing for Miss Sullivan and, as dictator, naturally believes that what he says goes so he should be the one to wind up with Miss Sullivan. Screw what she thinks. In any case, El Toro plan to have Lt. Segovia executed.

What you think of Kissing Time is going to depend largely on what you think of the type of music that is being performed in it. The short is from 1933, so the musical stylings are going to be extremely dated to a lot of people. And, I have to admit, this isn't my favorite type of arrangement. That having been said, the stars here do have talent, and for people who like to see the sort of stuff that audiences of the day considered entertaining above and beyond the prestige movies, Kissing Time is a good example.

The Amazing Quest of Ernest Bliss

One of those movies that fell into the public domain such that I firstl learned about it by seeing it show up as a DVD for purchase on sites specialising in public domain stuff is The Amazing Quest of Ernest Bliss. (It was released in the US under the title The Amazing Adventure.) Some time back I found that it had made its way to one of the FAST platforms, so I decided I'd finally give it a try.

Cary Grant plays Ernest Bliss, one of those men who seems to have inherited a bunch of money and who is able to live off that wealth as a result, not that he'd have known World War II would be coming along to destroy the wealth and way of life of people like him. In any case Bliss, despite having a wonderful apartment, finds that he's just not satisfied with life, something that's understandable considering he doesn't have any sense of purpose. After talking to his friend Lord Honiton, Bliss goes to see doctor to the wealthy Sir James Alroyd, who coes up with the wacky diagnosis that Ernest is suffering from affluence, which sounds like something a scammer would say to get wealthy people to part with their money.

Ernest, for his part, doesn't like Alroyd's suggestion, so tells him that he could make it on his own without that wealth. To that end, he makes a wager with Sir James, to the tune of £50,000. Bliss says he can survive for a year being staked to a measly £5, not using any of his wealth in any way that might benefit him personally. If he fails the bet, Alroyd's clinic will get the £50,000.

Ernest has no difficulty getting an attic room to let, but getting a good job that will allow him to pay the rent and survive is rather more difficult. Eventually, he gets work as a door-to-door salesman selling kitchen stoves, but the work is based on commission and Bliss doesn't seem able to make any sales. That is, until he comes up with a brilliant idea for a promotion, but one that's going to cost £500. He can use his own money for it, but that would cause him to lose the bet. Except that since the wager called for him not to use the money for his own benefit, he figures if he quits the job immediately after the promotion works, it can't be seen as using the money for his own benefit. Also working for the company, as the boss' secretary, is Frances Clayton (Mary Brian). She and Ernest become friends, and she too leaves the company because her boss is trying to pressure her into marrying him.

Bliss gets a job as a chauffeur for the 1930s British equivalent of a limousine service, and finds that one of the assignments he gets is actually to his own old apartment that he's left his valet in charge of. His valet rather stupidly decided to wager a bunch of money on dog racing, such that he's been blackmailed into letting the people who lent him the money live in Bliss' apartment. They've been thinking of forging Bliss' signature to get money out of his bank accounts, so when they see a chauffer who looks like Bliss they see a great chance for their scheme to work.

Bliss is able to foil this, but we're still not at the one year mark, and the requisite happy ending that a movie like this is bound to have. How we get there, you're going to have to watch for yourself.

The Amazing Quest of Ernest Bliss was originally released in Britain in 1936 with a running time of about 80 minutes. But when it was released in the US, it was edited down to about 62 minutes. It's that edit that TubiTV has, along with all of the public domain sites. (Supposedly the BFI has a 77-minute version.) The result of getting and edit but by almost a quarter is that it really does feel like something is missing from the movie.

In any case, Cary Grant does a professional job on a movie that would be more or less a programmer. It's not great by any stretch of the imagination, but it's also certainly not bad, and would have fit the bill of entertaining audiences of the day while keeping Cary Grant in the spotlight with another film.

Fun if not macabre

Another movie that's been sitting on my DVR for a while is the early William Castle horror effort Macabre. This is the one that had Castle show up to the premiere in a coffin and offer insurance policies to anyone against dying of fright during the movie. Well, the movie isn't exactly that frightening, but it's fun for what it is.

William Prince stars as Rodney Barrett, a doctor in a small California town who doesn't have a particularly good life. Some years back his wife Alice died in childbirth (the child, a daughter named Marge, survived), and the gossip around town has been that the not-so-good doctor probably could have done something to prevent it rather than getting good and drunk. Alice was the daughter of the town's banker, Jode Wetherby (Philip Tonge), but the child lives with the doctor who has a nanny Miss Kushins (Ellen Corby). About the one other person who supports the doctor is his assistant Polly (Jacqueline Scott).

Well, there is one other person, Sylvia Stevenson (Susan Morrow), whom Dr. Barrett is planning to marry and make her Marge's stepmother. Again, however, the gossip around town is that Barrett was having an affair with Sylvia before Alice died, which might explain as well why the town doesn't much care for him. And if that's not bad enough, things are about to get a whole lot worse for Dr. Barrett.

Barrett returns home where in theory Miss Kushins is supposed to be looking after Marge. But Marge isn't there. And then the phone rings, and Polly answers it. She hears a strange voice telling her not only that Marge has been kidnapped, but that the caller has already held a funeral for Marge! That might also fit with the fact that the local undertaker Quigley has called the police chief Tyloe (Jim Backus, decidedly playing against type here) to report that a child-sized coffin has been stolen from his funeral parlor!

Now, since the call says a funeral has already been held, Dr. Barrett suggests that she must have been buried at the cemetery, leading him and Polly to head off there. He also tells Kushins not to say anything to Jode, since Jode has a notoriously bad heart and the information might trigger a heart attack. Naturally, the first thing Kushins does when she's alone is go right over to the Wetherby place. Add in a blind sister-in-law who carries on wanton relationships with various men in the town, and it all leads up to a climax in the cemetery where everything is explained to some level of viewer satisfaction.

William Castle was obviously a good promoter, as Macabre was a commercial success. That having been said, being such a low budget movie it's not exactly good. There's more smoke than fire here, with mostly subpar acting. There's also a scene in the climax at the cemetery that made me think of Alfred Hitchcock's Foreign Correspondent. William Castle certainly had ideas, even if he couldn't always translate them into truly good movies.

Still, Macabre is thoroughly entertaining because of how off it is, and how frankly silly the payoff is once we get to it, which is thankfully not that long since the movie only runs 71 minutes. It's definitely worth your time.

Dated "edgy" 1960s comedy #95258672804678437580276

When Ted Turner bought the rights to the films that became the so-called "Turner Library" that formed the backbone of the programming in the early days of TCM, I think the Warner Bros. movies only went through about 1950; in any case the 1950s and 1960s Warner Bros. stuff always seemed to show up rather less frequently. That's been changing in recent years, giving me the chance to catch a lot of new-to-me stuff. One such movie was the 1966 sex comedy Any Wednesday.

Jane Fonda stars as Ellen Gordon, who lives in a Lower East Side ground floor apartment with a couple of friends. She works at an art gallery, in charge of some rented artworks at a swanky party. There, she's impressed into service by John Cleves (Jason Robards). He's just called his wife, and for reasons that will soon become obvious needs to make it sound as though he's calling from out of town, which is why Ellen has to play the part of the long-distance operator. (Nowadays, of course, John would just call his wife on the cell phone and caller ID would identify the number regardless of where in America John was calling from.)

As it turns out, John is stepping out on his wife Dorothy (Rosemary Clooney), claiming to be on business trips while he really stays in New York every Wednesday evening for his assignations. He immediately falls for Ellen, who is smart enough to say hell no to John's ideas. But circumstances change for her as she gets appendicitis, while both of her roommates move out because the apartment building is turning to co-ops and none of them can afford the price of the new co-op.

This gives John his in. He'll buy the co-op for Ellen, or at least have the conglomerate he runs buy it so that he can claim it's an "executive suite" and get a tax write-off. Ellen can live there, and John can visit every Wednesday evening for those assignations with nobody being any the wiser. Except, of course, that this arrangement is going to be found out eventually, or else we wouldn't have much of a movie.

That discovery is courtesy of John's secretary Miss Linsley (Ann Prentiss long before she screwed up her life). A man with whom John is doing a business deal, Cass Henderson (Dean Jones), is coming in to town and can't get a hotel room. So Miss Linsley helpfully offers Cass the executive suite, since logically it should be used for things like this. But we all know that there's a woman there, and boy isn't everybody going to be surprised when Cass shows up and finds Ellen. He gets the not-quite-right idea about what Ellen is, since he has no way of knowing that Ellen lived there before John turned the place into the executive suite.

And, as you can also guess, Dorothy is going to find out about the suite and walk in on Cass, Ellen, and John. So Cass and Ellen have to play the part of a married couple to keep the ruse going. Dorothy, meanwhile, hears Ellen's voice and knows she can recognize it from somewhere, although not yet from the fake telephone operator. All sorts of complications are going to ensue before the film reaches an ending that may or may not be happy for each of the characters.

Any Wednesday is based on a Broadway play, and it's again the sort of material that I can kind of see being popular with the self-styled urbane theater-goers of the mid-1960s. On the big screen, however, it's fairly stagey, and 60 years on it's decidedly dated. It also doesn't help that Jason Robards is playing a sort of character I don't much care for, that being the man who lies his way through everything, with the lies having to get bigger and bigger to maintain the ruse.

People who like this sort of look at New York City as it was in the 1960s may enjoy Any Wednesday, but I was glad to see the end of it.

Hawaii

The latest in the series of movies that I had sitting on my DVR and is getting another airing on TCM: Hawaii, based on part of the sprawling novel of the same title by James Michener. Hawaii will be on TCM early tomorrow morning, or overnight tonight depending on your time zone, TCM feed, and perspective, at 2:00 AM.

I mentioned above that Hawaii was based on part of Michener's novel; as you may recall, a few years later there was another movie titled The Hawaiians that was based on a later section of the novel. Now here, I need to point out that I got something wrong in my synopsis of The Hawaiians, which was the suggestion that the Hoxworths were the main characters of the movie. They may have been the main characters of the novel, which I'll admit I haven't read, but in this movie the main character is Rev. Abner Hale (Max von Sydow). He's a very proper New England Protestant minister fresh out of Yale's divinity school.

As Hale starts off on his career in the pulpit, it's around 1820, so a few generations after Capt. Cook became the first European to discover those islands that make up Hawaii, and the fact that there are Polynesians living there. For both economic and religious reasons, a lot of people had interest in the land, and Hale's superiors in the missionary society want to convert the native Hawaiians to Christianity. However, they also have a rule that the men of the cloth they're sending out to heathen lands have to be married already, which Abner isn't, so they have to find him a wife.

A good choice would be Jerusha Bromley (Julie Andrews). She comes from reasonably good New England stock too, and had/has a boyfriend in a whaling captain, Rafer Hoxworth (Richard Harris). Marriage to a whaling captain might not be the best thing, and besides, he's been away for a long time to the extent that who knows when he's coming back? (Obviously, we know that he will show up later in the movie.) So getting Jerusha married off to Abner and sending her to Hawaii seems like a good idea for the rest of the family.

After a suitably arudous journey, since there was no Panama Canal in the 1820s and no roads all the way across the US to the Pacific, the Hales arrive on Maui to find a bunch of Polynesians who seem reasonably happy with their way of life under the queen (Ali'i Nui), Malama Kanakoa (Jocelyne LaGarde). But their way of life shocks Rev. Hale, notably the way that the royal family has to resort to incest to keep unwanted influence out of the royal bloodline considering the relatively small population. Couldn't they get someone from another island? After all, they were well aware of the existence of the rest of the islands in the archipelago.

Rev. Hale wants the locals to ban incest for well-intentioned reasons, since it was clear to Europeans that inbred royalty produced health issues even if they too were still decades away from understanding genetics. The native Hawaiians are realtively OK living alongside these white people, and do develop some sympathy for Hale because, despite his rigid Christianity, he and especially Jerusha are attempting to be kind.

But all sorts of problems afflict the people of Maui thanks especially to less-enlightend whites encroaching on them from the other islands. Hoxworth shows up again, none too pleased to find Jerusha married to another man. The Hales, and Malama, are also displeased with the sailors taking a liking to the native women; this wasn't all that long after the Bounty mutiny, after all. So the natives and Hales form an alliance resulting in a deathbed conversion of convenience from Malama, but all of this only leads to more disaster.

Eventually, the missionary society and other whites decide that just as important as conversion is the economic gains the bounty of the islands could bring them. Since they see Abner as too enlightened, they want to get him off the island by making him take up a position at a church back in New England. Hale isn't so sure.

One of the reviews I read of the movie version of Hawaii is that it's the sort of material that probably would have worked better as a TV miniseries, and I have to say I can't disagree with that. The print that TCM ran runs 161 minutes, and feels every bit of that as it's exceedingly slow at times, not that there was much to change the rhythm of the islands before the white man showed up. The cinematography, mostly on location, is unsurprisingly gorgeous; the acting is adequate; but, the story is the weak point here.

Stolen Holiday

I think I mentioned a while back having a string of Kay Francis movies that I hadn't seen before on my DVR, and writing up posts on them and leaving them in draft to space out when the posts show up here. The next of the Kay Francis movies is from her later years at Warner Bros. after Bette Davis started taking over the role of queen of the Warner Bros. lot: Stolen Holiday.

Francis stars as Nicole Picot, an American model who has made her way over to Paris in 1931, and is successful showing off the clothes others pay her to wear, although she'd really rather own her own business, confiding in her friend Suzanne (Alison Skipworth). One day at work, Nicole is approached by Russian émigré Stefan Orloff (Claude Rains), who is willing to put up Nicole at a fashionable mansion for a night in exchange for posing as his wife. Nicole agrees for the money, and although she quickly discovers the ruse, she remains friends with Orloff.

The thing is, Stefan needed to look fashionable because he's running a chain of pawn shops with some of his friends, on the grounds that France is the only country where one can issue bonds on the assets of what's been pawned. Stefan is the head of this scheme, although it's not quite honest, and it's his partners who seem to be taking more of a risk as their names are the ones on the documentation. But Nicole doesn't know any of this. She gets the money she needs to open the Maison Picot, which eventually becomes successfull.

When it looks like Orloff might be in trouble and it's suggested Picot get out of town until the thing blows over -- after all, Orloff doesn't really want to hurt Picot -- she goes to Geneva, which is where she meets Anthony Wayne (Ian Hunter). Wayne is a British diplomat who can travel wherever on his diplomatic passport. He immediately falls in love with Nicole, and the two become platonic friends much in the same way that Picot is friends with Orloff. In fact, it's that friendship with Orloff that leads Picot to decide she's not going to marry Wayne.

Meanwhile, the walls are beginning to close in on Orloff again, so he asks Picot to marry him! He's got ulterior motives. If he can invite all the people he's scamming to the wedding, who are basically the highest of high society, they won't be able to turn on him for fear of the public scandal they'll have to face when the fiscal chicanery comes to light. Or at least that's the theory. One of Orloff's business partners is taken away from the wedding by the police for questioning, which really begins to put the heat on Orloff and lead to the finale.

Stolen Holiday is little more than a programmer from Warner Bros., although unsurprisingly they do a good job making it look like a million bucks. The plot, however, is a bit of a mess. Then again, this is the sort of material where everything looks so glossy that you won't really notice how little the plot resembles any sort of reality. Claude Rains is as pleasant to listen too as always; Kay Francis looks good in all those fashions; and everybody should have listened to Alison Skipworth's advice.

Briefs for June 14

Today is my birthday, a fact I think I've mentioned here in the past. It's also the birth anniversary of a couple of noteworthy Hollywood stars, which was also the subject of one of my brief post back in 2012: Oscar-winner Burl Ives was born on this day in 1909, while Dorothy McGuire was born in 1916. Marla Gibbs, who is remembered for her TV work, is still alive at 95; while Boy George, who sang the theme song to The Crying Game, is 65.

As for obituaries, I should mention the passing of Gene Shalit, 2½ months past his 100th birthday. Shalit was the long time movie critic on the Today show here in the States, which I think is how most people in America would remember him. Well, that and the moustache.

I've also stated a few times over the past couple of months that it seems as though, since the start of 2026, FXM's Retro block has has more movies in it, although of course most of them are things I've blogged about before. I think it's been a while since I've mentioned Two for the Road, which comes up tomorrow at 10:00 AM.

A sign of the times, for me at least, is how much of the time any more when Jeopardy! has a movie-related category, everything is way too recent because nobody cares much about the past. On Thursday, for example, there was a "Movie Musicals" category, and the earliest movie in the category -- and the only one from the 20th century -- was Grease.

On the other hand, on Friday, one of the contestants mentioned doing a weekly movie night that's run to several hundred movies now. When Ken Jennings asked him to recommend something we'd be likely not to know, he selected Don't Think I've Forgotten. I'd agree with the guy that the movie is definitely obscure, although surprisingly enough it's one that I've blogged about despite how relatively recent it is.

It Happened in Brooklyn

I didn't expect to do posts on multiple Peter Lawford pictures in brief succession, but it turned out that two of them were on my DVR as well as being on the TCM schedule. The second of them is It Happened in Brooklyn, which TCM is running again tomorrow, June 15, at 9:30 AM.

Peter Lawford is technically in a secondary role to Frank Sinatra. Sinatra plays Danny Miller, a Brooklyn-born man who as the movie starts is in England just after the end of World War II waiting to be demobbed and sent back to America along with a bunch of other soldiers. A conceit of the movie is that Brooklyn is full of very outgoing people but, in England, Danny just doesn't want to associate with anybody other than a pretty nurse (Gloria Grahame) tending to him. He's at a party for the soldiers about to go home, and is ordered to mingle. It's there that he meets Jamie Shellgrove (Peter Lawford), who might be even more timid than Danny but who happens to be the grandson of a duke. Danny suggests that Jamie come over to Brooklyn.

Danny gets demobbed, just in time for a housing crisis in Brooklyn, which basically forces him to room with an old friend, school custodian Nick Lombardi (Jimmy Durante) who has an apartment attached to the school where he works. Teaching at the school is music teacher Anne Fielding (Kathryn Grayson). Anne had wanted to be an opera singer, but she didn't get to study which is why she's in a backwater like this. One of the students is a piano prodigy, but he comes from a poor family, and he can't apply for the big music scholarship because he's a couple of months too young, which is going to be one of the plot points later in the movie.

Danny, having returned from the war, has the right to his old job back, reminiscent of Dana Andrews in The Best Years of Our Lives, but he naturally dreams of something better. He was working as a shipping clerk for a music store, when what he really dreams of doing is putting over the songs by singing them, the sort of job that seems more out of the 1910s than the 1940s, but whatever. He's actually able to get that job thanks to a little help from Nick that teaches Danny to be not quite so shy. Also, by this point, you expect Danny and Anne to wind up together in the final reel.

But then Jamie shows up from England since the Duke really wants Danny to help Jamie become successful enough that he'll overcome his timidness and be able to make it back in England. Jamie falls for Anne, and as it turns out she really likes him too, thanks in part to Danny's playing a bit of matchmaker. But Jamie is just too damn shy to tell Anne how he really feels, which is going to cause all sorts of conflict in the final act of the movie. This last act also involves the main characters teaming up to get a piano concert for that young prodigy in the hopes that they can get someone important to attend the concert and give the kid that scholarship.

It Happened in Brooklyn is one of those movies that doesn't really have any bad guys in it, although there is some conflict along the way. However, that's one of the things that doesn't quite work in the movie's favor here. Indeed, it feels like It Happened in Brooklyn is a bit of a mish-mash of plots that might have been lying around the MGM studio offices. (It's not related, but the characters pass movie theaters on a couple of occasions and there are a lot of MGM movies from the era being advertised on posters.) It's also a musical with a plot that doesn't really lend itself to being a musical even with two of the main characters working in music. Kathryn Grayson has an operatic number from Leo Delibes' Lakmé toward the end of the film that brings things to a screeching halt.

Somewhat surprisingly, even though I'm not a fan of Peter Lawford, he isn't the sort of weak link here that he was in some of his other movies. I think that's because the screenplay plays to his limitations as an actor by having him play a totally uncharismatic character. You wonder how much actual acting he had to do.

I suppose I could save this for June 13, 2027

Next up on the list of movies that are currently on my DVR and getting another airing on TCM is Same Time, Next Year. This one will show up on TCM tomorrow, June 14, at 2:00 PM.

The movie opens up in early 1951. George (Alan Alda) is dining alone in what looks like one of those restaurants attached to an inn. Also there dining alone is young housewife Doris (Ellen Burstyn). They, seeming to be the only two people in the place apart from the help, start talking to each other, and the next thing you know, it's the following morning. The two are in bed together, with George clearly naked since the camera strategically pans to show him putting on his boxer shorts, implying that the two had sex.

Now, in theory, that's not the biggest deal, as people do have one night stands. Except that in this case the two are married... but to other people. (The script doesn't really explain why either of the two is here alone, although later in the movie Doris talks about going on retreats. This would at least explain later events in the film but not the opening act.) In any case, neither of the two has any real interest in getting a divorce, so the two decide that they'll both make arrangements to come back in a year's time.

Maybe they did come back the following year, but the film uses a montage of current-events photos to show what was going on between that visit in 1951, and the next one shown on screen, which is in 1956. The film shows four further visits, in 1961, 1966, 1972, and 1977. Along the way, each of the two goes through the various ups and downs of life, while at the same time being swept up in the various current events going on around them. George goes into analysis, while the Vietnam War clearly has a bigger effect on both of them. There's even the possibility of one or another of the spouses (never actually seen) finding out that something's going on.

Beyond that, there's not a lot of plot to Same Time, Next Year as it's pretty much a two-character play turned into a movie, with a lot of talk and not very much action. Whether or not you're going to like this one depends a lot on the two stars. Ellen Burstyn does a good job, while I personally think that Alan Alda is clearly the weaker partner here. There's also the issue that there's really nothing that can be done to open this one up from its stage origins, since part of the point of the meetings is that they meet in a secluded place so as not to be seen together.

As I watched Same Time, Next Year, I found myself thinking of the film 84 Charing Cross Road which is much better precisely because it doesn't have to deal with the limitations that Same Time, Next Year does. It can introduce all the other people in the two main characters' lives, as well as opening up the action, which takes place in two cities anyway. Same Time, Next Year isn't bad, but it's also another of those films which clearly isn't going to be for everyone.

Cry For Happy

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nine years on

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More teens in trouble

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wanda

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dulcy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Berlin: die Sinfonie der Großstadt

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

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

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

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

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

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

Under the bluebirds

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Out west with Anita Ekberg

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nora Bayes

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

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

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

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

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

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

Roughly Speaking

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

International Velveeta

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not a western, or a poker movie

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

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

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

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

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

TCM Star of the Month June 2026: Marilyn Monroe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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