55 Days at Peking

This year's Summer Under the Stars concludes today with a day of films devoted to actress Ava Gardner. And concluding her day, in the wee hours of tomorrow morning at 3:00 AM (so even if you're on the west coast but only have the east coast feed it's still technically on Sept. 1) is 55 Days at Peking.

After the opening titles, voiceover narration informs us that it is the summer of 1900, a restles time in Chinese history: the Manchu/Qing dynasty was weak, having been forced to give a lot of economic concessions to the various western powers that wanted to trade with China. Originally, the Chinese government had been in a powerful enough position to bar whole families from coming over and keep the westerners isolated in special communities much like the Japanese did with the Dutch in Nagasaki. But by the end of the 19th century the west had the upper hand. This combined with a bad harvest emboldened more radical Chinese forces, in a group commonly called the "Boxers" because of their closed-fist salute. They were trying to drive the west out wholesale, and the government was in a bind because trade duties with the west and taxes on the concessions were actually bringing in a sizeable chunk of money to the Chinese treasury.

It's against that restive background that the Americans rotate in a fresh platoon of marines to the American legation in the diplomatic quarter of Peking, under the leadership of career Marine Maj. Lewis. He shows up looking for rooms at the hotel just as a Russian, Baroness Natalie (Ava Gardner) is being evicted because her visa was revoked by her brother-in-law (Kurt Kasznar) for family reasons. Maj. Lewis doesn't know much about the local politics, but he's about to learn, and fast.

The day after he arrives, the Boxers assassinate the German ambassador to China, leading to an ultimatum from Dowager Empress Cixi (Flora Robson): all of the westerners must leave. The assembled ambassadors take a vote, with all of them voting to leave except for the American who is absent because he's dying in hospital, and the British ambassador, Sir Arthur Robinson (David Niven). The other countries, however, decide that they can't afford to give up all of their concessions to the British, so they change their minds and stay. And that causes the Boxers to start besieging the city.

The westerners are badly outnumbered, but all they have to do is hold out long enough for relief to arrive, which is supposed to get to Beijing fairly soon. Except that Imperial forces are mustered to prevent this from happening, and the westerners have to hold out longer until they can somehow get someone out of the area from below and get word that relief is still needed. Against the backdrop of all this, various personal dramas play out. These include a mixed-race child, Sir Arthur's family, and the relationship between Maj. Lewis and the baroness, which is turning romantic because apparently a movie like this needs a love interest in it.

The technical aspects of 55 Days at Peking are quite good, although it's Spain substituting for China in the backgrounds. This isn't terribly important, since the besieged quarter is all sets anyhow and mostly doesn't need large vistas. The sets and costumes work well as does the music. The weakness, however, is the story, which runs over 2½ hours and sags quite a bit, especially with the baroness character who's not really needed to advance the plot. There are also enough Hollywood-style reimaginings of the history that are probably going to bother some viewers. So it's easy to see why a movie like 55 Days at Peking got mixed reviews and hurt the career of its director, Nicholas Ray.

Captain Applejack

I'm always up for a pre-code movie I haven't seen before. So when Captain Applejack showed up on the TCM schedule quite some time back, I recored it. Having watched it, it's more of an early talkie than a pre-code, but there's still a lot about it that makes it interesting.

Ambrose Applejohn (John Halliday) is the latest -- and last -- of a long line of Applejohns, living in a manor-type house in southwest England along the English Channel. It's the type of place that is isolated and subject to bad weather, reminiscent of the place in Jamaica Inn. Ambrose has an elderly aunt Agatha (Louise Closser Hale) and a ward Poppy (Mary Brian) who pines for him although he doesn't realize it. Ambrose considers this a boring life, and has been thinking about putting the house on the market so that he can use the money to travel and lead a life of adventure.

This being a place subject to bad weather, sure enough we get a storm and a bunch of people looking for help getting out of the storm because reasons. First up are the Pengards, with Mr. Pengard claiming to be a clairvoyant, although of cource clairvoyancy is a bunch of nonsense. After that is Madame Valeska (Kay Strozzi). She's a woman of mystery, and she tells Ambrose that she's being pursued by a guy and needs to be kept safe. Sure enough, a man named Borolsky (Arthur Edmund Carew) shows up looking for Valeska, and threatening to kill Ambrose if he doesn't give up Valeska.

After dealing with Borolsky, Ambrose plans to retire for the night, although Poppy thinks she hears something. In the investigation, they notice that a window latch has been jimmied, and that somebody seems to have found a secret hidden panel that nobody in the Applejohn family ever knew about, which is the sort of plot point that makes no sense. Making even more lack of sense is the fact that the panel contains a parchment that whoever came in through the window didn't find. The parchment says that the Applejohns are really the Applejacks, descended from the pirat Captain Applejack who absconded with a bunch of treasure and hid it somewhere in the house. So clearly we're in the realm of nonsense plot.

After a dream sequence, the various visitors show up again. As it turns out, they were all imposters, and are actually thieves looking for the treasure that's supposedly in the house. This leads to a madcap climax, and a happy ending for our protagonists.

Captain Applejack was based on a play, and most of the movie apart from the pirate dream sequence is set in about two rooms. Indeed, the movie starts off slowly enough that I was thinking it wasn't all that good. But then the parchment shows up and things start to get really weird, especially with the pirate sequence and then the finale which seems to be trying to change the movie from drama to comedy. It ended up coming across to me as one of those early talkies where the filmmakers didn't quite know what to do and decided to through anything they could think of at the audience. The result isn't always successful, but that finale is certainly different, making the movie more fun that it probably ought to be.

What if The Exorcist were a comic heist movie?

I found myself with a couple of Zero Mostel movies unwatched on my DVR and getting to the point where both of them were getting close to expiring. I've watched both of them now and am writing up the reviews, as usual spacing them out because I try to avoid posting about movies with the same star in close proximity unless they're both showing up on TV soon. In any case, the first of the two Zero Mostel movies is The Great Bank Robbery.

A train is heading for the town of Friendly, TX, and we see several people watching the train from afar, with the implication being that they're casing the train for a possible robbery. One group is led by Papa (Akim Tamiroff), father of Juan (Larry Storch); these are Mexicans who have come across the border and, one would guess, are planning to abscond with the presumed gold on the train back to Mexico. There's also Slade (Claude Akins), a gunman who knows a bit more about the bank in Friendly which is part of why he's scouting out the train.

Riding on the train is the Rev. Pious Blue (Zero Mostel), leader of a Salvation Army-style itinerant missionary group. His companion and second-in-command is sister Lyda (Kim Novak), and they're accompanied by a bunch of older character actor types, including Peter Whitney, Sam Jaffe, and John Fiedler. They, as it will be seen, have ulterior motives for making their way to Friendly.

We then learn that the bank in Friendly has two sets of books. One is the official set, although there's a second set and extra vaults because the bank supposedly holds the loot of a bunch of famous bank-robbing outlaws. Why, however, gangs like the James brothers would rob one bank and then trust the proceeds with another, is not answered. Texas Ranger Ben Quick (Clint Walker) has a feeling something is up in Friendly and is there to investigate.

Little does he know how much is up. Rev. Blue's group is, of course, there to rob the bank as well, with their plan being to tunnel under and blow their way into the vault during the Independence Day celebration and then get away with the gold somehow. Of course, they're going to have to stay one step ahead of the law but also one step ahead of the other robbers, who are going to feel aggrieved at having what they think should be "their" money stolen right out from under their noses.

The Great Bank Robbery is played for laughs, so there's a lot of comic styling in the reverend's plans to rob the bank as well as in their planned getaway, including using Sister Lyda to seduce Ben Quick. Complicating matters is the fact that Lyda finds herself legitimately falling in love with Ben.

It's fairly easy to surmise that The Great Bank Robbery was produced in part because there had been a spate of comic westerns in the 1960s as well as a spate of comic heist movies. Unfortunately, The Great Bank Robbery, coming at the end of both of these cycles, suffers greatly from being derivative. I'm also not the biggest fan of Zero Mostel, finding his humor much too broad, which is also a weakness of this movie. Instead of being genuinely funny, the whole thing comes across as the tiresome brand of zany. Ooh, let's have the climax be a hot-air balloon trying to flee the area! The movie is directed by Hy Averbaack, who worked mostly in television, and that shows, too.

Surprisingly, the screenplay is by William Peter Blatty of The Exorcist fame. The Great Bank Robbery does not rise to that level.

Several months before Black Sunday

Today's (August 28) star in TCM's Summer Under the Stars is Brock Peters. This gives me the chance to do a post on a movie that's been sitting on my DVR and I hadn't seen before. That movie, Two-Minute Warning, comes up in the wee hours of the overnight at 2:15 AM, which is technically August 29 on the east coast although technically very late on August 28 if you're in the Pacific time zone and only have the east coast feed.

The movie starts off by sort of giving away something that's going to be the main plot point later in the movie. A man with a rifle and telescopic sight looks out a high window and sees a couple of bicyclists in what looks like a typical Southern California suburb. The man with the rifle then proceeds to shoot one of the cyclists dead. We don't see the shooter, which is a good thing as it adds suspense to the movie.

Cut to the Los Angeles Coliseum. "Championship X", the big football game is going to be held there the coming weekend. We do get Howard Cosell and Frank Gifford, although nothing closer than that to the NFL because they didn't permit the use of any of their properties for Two-Minute Warning the way they would for Black Sunday which was released a few months later. (I don't know the full production schedule for both movies. It's possible the NFL had agreed with pre-production on Black Sunday and didn't want to be involved in two movies with similar themes.) Brock Peters works at the Coliseum in maintenance and security, looking after the Dobermans who are partly responsible for security.

But, before the game, we have to be introduced to the requisite character types, much like any other disaster movie. Among them are a family man, Mike Ramsay (Beau Bridges) and his wife and kid; a husband and wife (David Janssen and Gena Rowlands); a pickpocket (a very elderly Walter Pidgeon a few years after Harry in Your Pocket); and Stu (Jack Klugman), a gambler who's heavily in debt but thinks he can make it back by betting on the big game. Oh, Stu also winds sitting next to a Catholic priest (Mitchell Ryan) at the game because the priest knows one of the quarterbacks.

The big football game has always had security although back in the 1970s it wasn't quite as tight as it is today. Sam McKeever (Martin Balsam) manages the Coliseum, and has the local police precinct run by Capt. Holly (Charlton Heston). Meawhile, since the sniper already killed that cyclist, we've got the SWAT team out looking for the sniper. They're headed up by Sgt. Button (John Cassavetes), and for obvious reasons wind up at the Coliseum too.

That's because the sniper, seen only in long shots until the very end of the movie, has holed up behind the scoreboard at the top of the Coliseum tower where the Olympic flame would have been in 1932 and 1984. Eventually Mike Ramsay looks through his binoculars and spots the sniper, who has also already been spotted by people in the control booth since they've got shots from the Goodyear blimp above. At this point, it's not known if the sniper has a particular target, which isn't entirely unlikely since there was talk of some elected officials showing up; or whether the sniper just wants to kill random people the way he did with the cyclist. And when is the guy going to start shooting?

Two-Minute Warning is a movie which has some decided problems, in large part down to the lack of character development. Nobody gets to be much more than a stock character, and we have no real reason to care about any of the fans. On the other hand, the main idea of the story is a good one, and fairly well executed. The plot device of not giving the sniper any discernable motive, and not showing him until the very end, is an inspired move that I thought heightened the suspense.

Two-Minute Warning is an overlooked and underrated movie in the disaster film genre of the 1970s, but one that works well despite the one-dimensional characters.

James Barton

I've mentioned a lot how I think Warner Bros. made some really fun B movies, while B movies from other studios aren't quite as good. This is a bit true of MGM which has the whole MGM gloss that makes the B movies look a bit artificual. In the case of RKO, it feels more like the ideas are lacking. I couldn't help but think of that as I watched His Family Tree.

James Barton, who was apparently a vaudeville dancer, stars as Patrick Murphy, a former boatswain who now runs a pub of that name in Ireland. His son emigrated to the States, and is living in the sort of small city -- this time in Iowa -- that features a lot in movies of the 1930s. Supposedly they're small, but they've got so much of everything that you wonder how the US could have so many such cities with a population about 40% what it is today. But the bigger point is that Patrick's son Charles (William Harrigan) hasn't written to Dad in a while, so Dad decides that he's going to go over to Iowa to look up his son and see what the deal is.

Charles seems to have done reasonably well for himself, with a wife Maggie and daughter Elinor who is engaged to be married to one of the wealthier guys in town. The good government types even want Charles to run for mayor against long-time mayor Holtsapple (Ferdinand Munier), who isn't quite as corrupt as the local politicians in other movies, but is definitely the villain of the piece if there is one. Apparently the election is set to come down to which candidate the fourth ward comes down to, led by Irish-American community leader Nellie Oulihan (Maureen Delaney).

And herein lies part of the rub. Charles, when he came to Iowa, changed his name the way a lot of immigrants did. Except that he made up a bogus story to go along with the name change to Murfree (not much disguise there) that involves having a family in Murfreesboro, Tennessee that goes back generations. Now this was only seven years or so after Al Smith lost the presidential election, so maybe small cities in the midwest still weren't ready for an Irish Catholic mayor. But for whatever reason, it's decided that the idea that Murfree isn't Charles' original name is something that's totally going to sink his election chances, which you'd think he would have told his backers before running. And having one's Irish father come over certainly wouldn't help in that regard.

But Patrick is Movie Stereotype Irish, the guy who's got a charming brogue and Irish jig and all that goes with that, along with being able to bring everybody over to his son's side regardless of whether the thing about Charles having changed his name is true. Mayor Holtsapple and his campaign managers see this, and realize that the only way they're going to win is to stop Patrick from campaigning for his son, using force if necessary.

I've also stated before on a couple of occasions that I find Hollywood's doe-eyed view of Ireland to be detrimental to films because of the treacly attitude it induces, but that's not the big problem with His Family Tree. Instead, it's that the script is so unintelligent and unoriginal that I found myself rolling my eyes at it all. People who are interested in seeing what James Barton was all about may enjoy the couple of scenes where he gets to do his dance routine, but the movie as a whole doesn't quite hold up.

Ivan the Terrible, Part I

Two of the foreign films sitting on my DVR are the two parts of Sergei Eisenstein's proposed three-part film on the first Tsar of All Russia, Ivan the Terrible. Only two parts were completed in part because Eisenstein died and in part because of the political reaction to the second part. Recently, I watched Ivan the Terrible, Part I.

To understand this film requires a bit of an understanding of Russian history. Before about the middle of the 16th century, Russia was rulled by a bunch of local princes along with noblemen called boyars. This internal conflict left Russia weak and subject to predation by various forces on its borders including Poland, Baltic Sea kingdoms, and the Muslim khanate of Kazan in what is now central Russia. In 1547, the teenaged Ivan rises to the throne of the principality of Moscow and pretty much crowns himself Tsar of All Russia, a move that understandably creates a whole bunch of political enemies. Russia was also, at this time, despite being Christian, very much not western compared to the rest of Europe; it wasn't really until Peter the Great went to Holland to study shipbuilding that Russia really began to become more westernized.

To deal with all of this, Ivan needs to do a bunch of things. One is to try to ally himself with the Orthodox Church and the common peasants against the boyars and competing princes. Another is to get himself married and set about creating an heir to the throne. The third is to try to unite Russia, for which a common enemy would do nicely. Thankfully for him, the wedding celebration is interrupted by envoys from Kazan. It seems that Kazan is planning to attack Moscow again, and this is the declaration of war.

Ivan is no dummy, and decides that the best defense is to attack himself, so he besieges Kazan and blows up the fortress from below, earning him a major military and political victory as well as gaining some key allies among the people who served under him. However, there's still quite a bit of opposition from the boyars, as they're going to be throughout Ivan's life. Ivan nearly dies but miraculously recovers, earning himself more allies.

But there's still opposition, including quite close to him in the form of his aunt who is plotting to poison his wife. And she actually succeeds. This emboldens the boyars, and Ivan eventually announces that he's going to go away from Moscow for a while to regroup, gather his strength with the peasants and other people allied to him, and return to Moscow triumphant. Since there's a second movie in the Ivan the Terrible story, the first one ends on a rather uncertain note.

As I watched Ivan the Terrible, Part I, released in early 1945 and filmed in 1943 and 1944, I couldn't help but think of how the movie mirrors the situation Russia was facing against Germany at the height of World War II. Indeed, Eisenstein had to decamp to Central Asia to film much of this. But more relevant here is how Eisenstein was able to make a hagiographic movie about the first Tsar against the repressive dictatorship of Joseph Stalin. Indeed, it's quite easy to look at this and argue that a case is being made for the idea of a present-day leader with an iron fist. The need to unite all the principalities is also a natural parallell to the need to unite the Soviet people against Germany.

Although I have mostly positives for this movie, there are some negatives to note, which is notably in the stilted dialogue. Eisenstein was moving away from the sort of realistic storytelling which was common in Hollywood and commercial films, instead focusing on a style that has a lot of closeups. I wonder whether part of the dialog issue is also because of the backdrop of medieval Russia and also liturgical Russian.

Holiday (1930)

I mentioned earlier in August the birth anniversary of actress Ann Harding, and how I'd come across the 1930 version of Holiday on Tubi. As it turns out, it was still there, so I finally watched it.

Now you may know the more famous 1938 version of Holiday, which I blogged about back in 2015. This earlier version has pretty much the same plot, which I suppose is unsurprising. As the movie opens, Johnny Case (Robert Ames) is being brought home to the house of Julia Seton (Mary Astor). The two of them had met on a ski vacation up in Lake Placid, and Johnny proposed to Julia knowing little about her background. Now, it turns out that Julia is fabulously wealthy, as the older daughter of banker Edward Seton (the original William Holden, not the one from films like Stalag 17). Julia has a younger daughter Linda (Ann Harding), and a cynical alcoholic brother Ned (Monroe Owsley). Julia isn't quite so certain how to break the news of her engagement to Dad, since he's morally traditional, and this sort of quick engagement is anything but.

Linda offers to help, largely because she's the one person in the family who is decidedly not stuffy, and resents the sort of buttoned-down upbringing that Dad and his social class represent. To Linda it's stultifying and takes away one's individuality. So she sees Johnny as a breath of fresh air, especially because considering taking a sort of sabbatical before finally settling down to life, again the sort of thing that Mr. Seton would find shocking.

We can see just how square Dad is when Linda announces she wants to hold a small party up in what had been the children's play-room, with an intimate dinner for a few of Linda and Julia's friends, just calling them up. She specifically mentions not having engraved invitations, so what do we see in the next shot? You guessed it, an egraved invitation. Linda brings the few bohemian friends she has, Prof. Potter (Edward Everet Horton) and his wife (Hedda Hopper), and sulks up in the play-room, for good reason.

Now, at this point, it starts to become clear that Mr. Seton isn't going to be such a good influence on Johnny, either. Where Johnny wants to take a sabbatical, having worked hard in regular work to get to where he is, Dad wants him to join the family business and use the honeymoon to go to Europe to network with some of Dad's influential friends in the worlds of politics and high finance. Johnny begins to chafe, and you get the feeling that he might be better suited going off with Linda. Not that Linda would do such a thing to Julia. She genuinely likes her sister.

The Linda character is at the heart of the biggest differences between the two versions of the movie. In the remake, Linda was played by Katharine Hepburn, who was exactly the right person for the role. Hepburn could be obnoxious in a movie like Bringing Up Baby or getting her comeuppance in The Philadelphia Story, but since the character is supposed to be a rebellious free spirit, that sort of acting from Hepburn works. Ann Harding's Linda is much more the sort of person who's suffered in silence and is only now finally going to stand up for herself, even if she doesn't quite know how to do it. It's a different portrayal, and Harding does a good job, but the way Hepburn played it makes the movie much more lively.

Not that the Ann Harding version of Holiday is bad by any means. It's more that the remake is one of the all-time classics, while this version is a good movie that has the unfortunate luck of having been made at a time when movie makers were still figuring out sound along with having to compare to the remake.

Briefs for August 25-26, 2026

I apologize for the posting schedule last week that was a bit screwed up. As I've posted on a bunch of occasions, ever since moving house and getting high-speed internet that allowed me to do streaming stuff back in 2023, I've been getting ahead in terms of scheduling posts. Last week saw Marie Windsor's day in Summer Under the Stars, and I put up a post on one of her movies, Mail Order Bride, that was airing that day. However, as I wrote more posts, I started scheduling them after the post on Mail Order Bride, not realizing that I had a couple of days where I had no posts scheduled. I think as of right now I'm good for about the next three weeks, unless I come across something that I haven't noticed is airing and is on my DVR, in which case I might wind up juggling posts around.

The TCM September schedule is out in full, and I've already found several movies in the second half of September that are on my DVR. I think that's enough where I shouldn't be juggling stuff around. On the other hand, someone famous could die -- I actually have a couple of posts written up on movies related to some seriously old people whose death notices I haven't come across yet and have been saving them in draft for that morbid occasion. To be fair, legitimate news outlets have obituaries for famous people ready to go just in case.

Speaking of that Shelley Fabares died over the weekend at the age of 82. She was in multiple films with Elvis Presley, although she's better known for her TV work. I actually went to my YouTube TV cloud DVR because I thought I had Girl Happy on it. I haven't posted about Girl Happy, and as it turns out the Elvis movie sitting on my DVR is Girls! Girls! Girls! which was the subject of a post 2½ years ago. Oops.

The Paramount/WB saga is still going on; for some reason I thought the merger/buyout had been called off. Or maybe it was another of the proposed buyers backing out. The merger ideas have been going on long enough and there have been enough proposals that it's easy to mix them up. And it's not as if I'm paying particularly close attention to it. But the news now is that A bunch of state Attorneys-General want their pound of flesh and are grandstanding about it. I'd think the barriers to entry are lower than they've ever been, but then you have to remember that politicians find it easier to control a couple of large market players than a system with a whole bunch of small players. The big players also have less of a problem with regulation than you might think since they can handle the regulation for the most part while it's that barrier to entry for newcomers. So I'll sit back and largely not pay close attention to what's going on until it has a more direct impact on me.

And in more FXM programming notes, today's Retro block concludes with Alien at 1:00 PM, which in itself is not terribly interesting because it's been in the Retro lineup before and I blogged about it almost five years back. However, Alien is followed by the commercial half of the lineup which includes the rest of the movies in the Alien series, starting with Aliens at 3:00 PM and going through to Alien vs. Predator: Requiem at midnight. Or at least, that's the last one they're showing and it's nearly 20 years old; I can't recall whehter there have been any since as I don't go to the movie theater very often. The one thing I do find curious is that I can't recall Aliens being in the Retro block. It was released in 1986, and the Retro block has certainly had stuff more recent than that show up. It's also 40 years old, which is getting to be plenty old enough. For me, I think the first movie less than 40 years old I posted about was Yours, Mine, and Ours, subject of a February 2008 post, which would have made it about two months shy of 40. If not that, than the spelling bee documentary Spellbound. And consider that when TCM was launched, 40 years old would only have been 1954. On the Waterfront would have been less than 40 years old as it was released in July 1954.

Seven Miles from Alcatraz

The star for tomorrow, August 25 on TCM's Summer Under the Stars is Bonita Granville. Once again, I happen to have a movie of hers on my DVR that's showing up in the day and that I haven't blogged about before That movie is Seven Miles from Alcatraz, at 2:45 PM, so in order to be able to do a post on it before it airs, I watched it, which means that again you get a post on an upcoming movie.

Alcatraz, was, of course, famously used as a prison on an island in the middle of San Francisco Bay, a body of water with a lot of shipping traffic and difficult waters so they need a lighthouse too, although that's on a different island. Meanwhile, there's a war going on even though none of the prisoners are doing their part for America by fighting in it. Indeed, one of the prisoners, Champ Larkin (James Craig), is worried that San Francisco Bay is just the place for the Japanese to bomb, meaning there's a good chance a stray bomb or missile could his Alcatraz. Champ is having none of that, so he decides he's going to break out of the most secure prison in all of the United States.

And wouldn't you know it, but pretty much in the very next scene, Champ and his fellow prisoner Jimbo (Frank Jenks) are escaping and are able to evade all the patrol boats. They don't make it to the mainland, however, instead washing ashore on the island with the lighthouse. The lighthouse keeper, Captain Porter (George Cleveland), lives there with his daughter Anne (Bonita Granville). Also working at the lighthouse is a radioman, Brenner (Erford Gage), and the custodian Stormy (Cliff Edwards). Champ and Jimbo break in and immediately set about holding the four hostage, although there's the issue that Brenner is supposed to call in at a certain time as part of his duties. Not doing so would certainly be noticed by the authorities.

On the other hand, what the Porters and the two criminals have no idea of is that Brenner is actually working with Nazis to send and receive coded messages. There's a pair of Nazis aboard a U-boat, as well as a "baroness" on the mainland who has a whole group of fifth columnists around her, because of course there's always one ringleader with a bunch of supporters in movies like this. Anyhow, the message Brenner has been sending is that that ringleader has targeting information that will allow the Nazis to target the coast better, and needs to rendezvous with the Nazis on the U-boat to give them that information.

Now, this being a World War II movie from Hollywood, you know that the two prisoners are going to have a change of heart and be instrumental in foiling the Nazis' diaboloical scheme. But it's also an RKO B movie, which means that it's all done in a shade over an hour with RKO's lesser production values. Seven Miles from Alcatraz is a fun enough premise, if one that would be done dozens of times over the course of the war. The script is a bit of a mess to the point I was wondering whether the Porters would turn out to be part of the Nazi ring, too.

Daisy Kenyon

One of those movies that I had seen part of somewhere along the way but never got around to seeing all of -- probably on the old Fox Movie Channel since it's a Fox movie and I can't remember the last time they ran it -- is Daisy Kenyon. So when TCM showed it as part of a night dedicated to director Otto Preminger, I recorded it in order to be able finally to watch it and write up a review. Tomorrow being Dana Andrews day in Summer Under the Stars, and with my realizing that the movie in tomorrow's schedule I was going to do a post on is one that I actually blogged about four years ago (Brainstorm, Aug. 24 at 6:00 PM), I figure that now is a good time to put up this post on Daisy Kenyon even though it's not airing on TCM tomorrow.

Dan O'Mara (Dana Andrews) is a lawyer at a prestigious firm who takes a taxi to what is probably supposed to be Greenwich Village to see fashion artist Daisy Kenyon (Joan Crawford). It fairly quickly transpires that Dan is carrying on a romantic affair with Daisy. There is, however, a fairly serious issue with this in that Dan is married to Lucille (Ruth Warrick) with two kids about to become teenagers. Not only that, but Lucille is the daughter and granddaughter of the founders of the law firm. So, because of family obligations, Dan has to break off the date he had hoped to have with Daisy.

As Dan is leaving the apartment building, he runs into another man who is about to ring to be let in, Peter Lapham (Henry Fonda). Peter is also seeing Daisy, which is possibly a response from Daisy to the less-than-stellar treatment she's been getting from Dan, although to be fair, Daisy really ought to know she's going to get that sort of treatment from a man who's cheating on his wife. Peter isn't cheating on his wife, because his wife is already really quite dead, having died in a car accident some years back. That's one of the things that prompted Peter to leave his Cape Cod home and serve in the US Army during the recently concluded war. Peter is thinking of going back to Europe to serve in the occupation army. So, as we can see, Daisy is going to have to choose between two men.

But then things get more complicated. Dan is approached by a man who wants to hire O'Mara to represent a man in an important legal case: that of a Japanese-American man who served in the army in Europe with some distinction, only to return home and find he had been dispossessed of his farm Bad Day at Black Rock-style. It's important, but not exactly remunerative. It's going to take Dan away from the clients who are paying him the big money; it's going to take him away from his wife and kids; and it's going to take him away from Daisy.

So eventually Dan returns from doing some research work on this case and finds that Daisy has suddenly gotten married to Peter! Dan probably ought to admit defeat and go back to his wife and the kids he really does love despite the way he treats their mom (who, to be fair, does have enough issues where one can understand why Dan might start looking at other women). Instead, he continues to pursue Daisy, to the point that he stupidly calls Daisy from the house and Lucille listens in on the call. She decides to file for divorce and try to get custody of the kids. In theory, this would have left Dan free to marry Daisy if she hadn't already gotten married. It's also a lot more complicated because Daisy could be the co-respondent in the divorce case.

Ben Mankiewicz, in his comments after the movie, commented that the movie didn't have much of a reputation for a long time, to the point that Otto Preminger claimed many years later not to have remembered much about it. Having watched it, I can see the reason for the lack of reputation. Everything about Daisy Kenyon is competent, and definitely not anything that the cast and crew should want to forget about having made. But, at the same time, the plot is a fairly ridiculous melodrama. It's not as extreme in having to jump through hoops to satisfy the Production Code as something like The Great Lie, but there's a lot here that strains credulity. That, and it feels competent, not an all-time great. Also to be fair, there are quite a few other 40s prestige movies that aren't that well-remembered 80 years on.

So definitely give Daisy Kenyon a watch. It's certainly interesting.

Adventure Girl

Another movie I recorded off of TCM knowing nothing about it beyond the synopsis was the 1934 release Adventure Girl. After watching it and looking it up, it turns out the movie has a very interesting provenance.

The movie is narrated by Joan Lowell, who plays herself and declares in opening title cards that she had made a voyage a year before the movie was released (so, 1933) and had adventures so incredible that she had to recreate them for the screen, or else nobody would believe her. This movie purports to be that retelling of true events which, for reasons that should become clear, should have everyone shaking their heads....

Joan Lowell's father Nicholas Wagner was a seaman, retired by the time of the events of the movie, and Lowell decided to give him a sort of present by fixing up an ocean-going schooner and taking Dad down to the Caribbean along with a crew of two men, Otto and former US Marine Bill. (Neither of them were professional actors, as far as I know.) On the way south, the boat gets caught up in a hurricane, this being the days when forecasting the weather in more remote parts of the world was next to impossible. The hurricane leaves them with a broken mast but in just the right place where there are a bunch of "shipwrecks" that are half above sea level that the motley crew can scavenve for supplies.

One such ship, allegedly a Spanish ship from 100 years earlier, has an intact logbook in a strongbox. The final entry purports to be the captain having found a ridiculously large emerald in a Mayan temple but being forced to leave it there because he would have been killed trying to take it at the time. In any case, despite Dad's belief that you shouldn't plunder other men's treasure, Joan is greedy enough that she plans to sail down to Guatemala to find that emerald and retrieve it for her father.

Now, this is part of where my disbelief really kicked in. Another title card at the beginning of the film thanks the then ruler of Guatemala, Jorge Ubico, for allowing them to film in Guatemala using native actors. Yet, if this portion of the story is to be believed, why would the natives want to film a re-telling of it and let Joan get away with it? In any case, this portion of the film deals with Joan and Bill heading up river to the Mayan (well, descendants of the Mayans) village from which they'd do the overland trek to the temple, guided by a Mayan princess and surreptitiously followed by a bunch of men. To get at that emerald would involve desecration of the temple, an act which the Mayan princess says carries the death penalty. And, a bit suprisingly, Joan Lowell says that she knows what she was doing was wrong, something that very few other explorer-type characters in that era would admit. Now, we know that Joan escapes, since the premise of the movie is that this is all a re-enactment of what happened the previous year.

After having watched Adventure Girl, my first thought was that perhaps if there were any incident with natives in a Central American country, it might have been a country other than Guatemala, and that Ubico would have been happy to use Guatemalans to insult another Central American country. The reality, of course, is that this whole thing is a complete fiction. But that's not the end of the story. What audiences of the day would have known, but would be largely unknown to anybody watching in 2026, is that Lowell had already written a completely fictitious "autobiography" back in 1929 that had been easily debunked. The best guess I read is that Lowell did in fact go on a schooner voyage with her father and the other two men in 1933, and filmed establishing material reminiscent of what Errol Flynn would later do in Cruise of the Zaca. This was then supplemented by staged footage that tells the narrative portions of the story. Since the cameras on the schooner wouldn't have been set up for sound, that requires the narration by Lowell. More interesting is that, after Adventure Girl was debunked as utter fiction, Lowell decamped to Brazil and spent the last 30 years of her life there, which from what I've read might make an interesting movie of its own.

As for Adventure Girl, it's ridiculous nonsense, but interesting because it's utter nonsense.

Don't blame it on Rio

TCM celebrated director Terry Gilliam last year on his 85th birthday. They showed a couple of Monty Python films I haven't blogged about before, but unfortunately YouTube TV's glitch on how many showings of a program it saves left me with a bunch of commercial versions rather than the TCM showing. There was another of his movies I had never gotten around to seeing before, which is Brazil, so I've recently finally watched it and now you get this post.

In a not quite specified time in a non-specified English-speaking country, the country has somehow devolved into a totalitarian state, but one that has a bunch of seemingly private businesses, notably Central Services which handles things like ductwork and HVAC services. How the country never made it past antiquated-looking ducts and pipes taking up valuable space isn't mentioned. But Central Services is the target of a terrorist bombing, with this not being the first.

Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce) works for a government body in the Ministry of Information that doesn't seem to do much but push papers around. It's a job that doesn't require much imagination, so Sam finds himself having a sort of Walter Mitty existence. He's got a wealthy mom (Katherine Helmond) who has been trying to get him a promotion to the more prestigious Information Retrieval, but Kurtzmann (Ian Holm), Sam's current boss, doesn't want that. Sam is just too good an employee.

And then a glitch happens in the investigation into the Central Services bombing. Much like the original computer bug, a bug gets stuck in the teletype machine, so instead of instructing the authorities to investigate Archibald Tuttle, they're told to look up a Mr. Archibald Buttle. The botched investigation results in Buttle being killed. Worse, there's another mistake made. As part of the dystopia, people are charged for their own investigation, so the mistaken identity requires a refund check be sent to Mrs. Buttle, who apparently can't handle direct deposit.

In trying to deliver the check, Sam meets Jill Layton (Kim Greist), who has reported the treatment Buttle got to the proper authorities. Unfortunately for her, the proper authorities in this case means those people who are going to turn around and investigate her because you can't go around making the state look bad, can you?

Further complicating things is that, when Sam's own AC goes on the fritz and he calls Central Services, who should show up but Archibald Tuttle? Except that he's no longer working for Central Services, and the real repairmen show up, which is obviously a problem for him and Sam. Sam is also trying to protect Jill although she seems to have disappeared into the world of the paperless....

There's a lot to like about Brazil, but for me it's also a movie that's not without its share of issues. One is a problem for me personally that may not be a problem for others, which is that it's never really explained in a lot of totalitarianism movies how we get to the totalitarian point we did. Hollywood's (or filmmakers' views more generally) view of totalitarianism never seems to match what we get in the real world, and is always more of a way to hang the social/political/moral points one wants to make onto it.

The other issue, which I think is a more general one, is that movie runs a bit too long for its own good and has an overly complicated plot that makes it hard to figure out exactly what's going on at times. But in the 40 years since its original release, Brazil has become a cult classic, so watch and decide for yourself.

Out west with Keir Dullea

Tomorrow, August 21, on TCM's Summer Under the Stars is a day of films devoted to actress Marie Windsor. While Windsor got big showy roles in movies like The Narrow Margin (8:00 PM), some of the movies presented have Windsor in rather smaller roles. One example of this is Mail Order Bride, which you can catch at 4:45 PM.

The movie opens up in Montana, with Will Lane (Buddy Ebsen) camping out along a creek on his way to the town of Congress. A stranger (Keir Dullea) shows up and treats Will like dirt but gets his comeuppance by not recognizing a drop-off in the riverbed. Both men make their way to Congress.

In Congress, Will stops by the grave of a Mr. Carey. It seems that the two were old friends, and when the elder Mr. Carey died, he left his ranch to Will but with strings attached. Those strings were that Carey had a son name Lee who really should inherit the ranch, but isn't yet a responsible enough man to run it. Will should serve as some sort of trustee to see that Lee becomes that responsible man at which point Will is to handle the ranch over to Lee.

It doesn't take much to figure out that Lee is in fact the stranger Will met in the opening; nor does it take much to see how irresponsible Lee is, as he gets drunk, cavorts with the women at the local house of ill repute, and loses his money and cattle playing poker against alleged friend Jace (Warren Oates). Will finds Lee at one such poker game, and after the fight that breaks out, Will takes Lee home. Lee, as you might guess, is none too pleased about finding out the terms of his father's will since Lee understandably expected to be inheriting the ranch.

Will realizes that Lee needs a wife who can tame him, along with the responsibility being a husband should bring to Will. To that end, Will sets off for the nearest big city, Kansas City, to find a suitable wife from the women who have been writing to the mail-order agencies. The gives the opportunity for a bit of humor with Kathleen Freeman playing a Salvation Army missionary, with Marie Windsor getting her one scene that also is some obvious foreshadowing for what the coda at the end of the movie is going to be. Windsor plays saloonkeeper Hanna, who isn't right for Lee. But Hanna has an employee who has no prospects and is in need of a husband, so offers that woman, Annie Boley (Lois Nettleton), up to go off to Montana and marry Lee sight unseen.

Now Annie, as it turns out, also has a son from a previous marriage (played by Jerry Mathers' kid brother). If Lee isn't exactly thrilled at the prospect of having a forced bride, he's definitely not going to be happy about becoming a stepfather. Annie isn't particularly thrilled herself, although she's a bit more willing to make a go of it. Lee's plan is to fake it until Will signs the deed to the ranch over to him, and then allow Annie and the kid to have their freedom.

Once again, you might guess that things aren't going to turn out that way. That's because Jace is still in the background, trying to figure out a way to get the rest of the cattle from the ranch. They're no longer Lee's to lose in a poker game, and Jace has absolutely no respect for Will. But this is also the sort of movie that's going to have a requisite happy ending, never mind the fact that the Code hadn't been completely destroyed yet.

Mail Order Bride is a little movie that isn't exactly great, but it's also certainly not bad. It feels like a predictable story where you know where everything is going to go by the last reel, but it's pleasant enough getting there. Keir Dullea isn't exactly the sort of person you'd expect to see in a western, or at least wasn't whom I expected to see in a western. This also isn't nearly as comedic as you might thing. But it's good enough to pass the time with.

Briefs for August 19-20, 2026

I suppose the first thing I should do is mention the passing of director Mark Rydell, who died last Thursday at the age of 97. He directed On Golden Pond, which I saw ages ago but have not done a post on according to a search of the blog, which means I must have seen it before I started blogging. I came across the end of Bette Midler's The Rose ages ago on the old Fox Movie Channel, I think again before I started blogging, and haven't found it since. However, looking at the list of Rydell movies, it turns out that I do have one of his films in my list of films to blog about, Harry and Walter Go to New York which aired on TCM for Diane Keaton's day. So that will be scheduled for sometime in September.

I just noticed recently that I've been misspelling "Paul Henreid" for years as "Henried", which might explain why searches for him haven't shown everything on my blog, and why the tags are a bit screwy. So I've been going through the archive of old posts and changing the tags, although the actual posts themselves are a bit more of a pain to change.

Also having died recently is actress Peggy Webber, who appeared in Orson Welles' adaptation of Macbeth as well as driving the plot of Alfred Hitchcock's The Wrong Man. Webber was 100 when she died on Saturday.

In news of the odd, apparently grifting Meghan Markle produced a documentary on Girl Scout cookies. The interesting thing isn't that it bombed at the box office per se, but that accodring to the article it was beaten by a movie called CatVideoFest 2026. Not only that, but CatVideoFest has been going on for a decade. Then again, I'm also not in an area that would get it in its limited theatrical run.

Hattie McDaniel is being honored today in Summer Under the Stars, which means another showing of the 1936 version of Show Boat (2:00 AM overnight) which I had on my DVR from the last TCM showing but didn't get around to watching. That will be followed tomorrow by Marlon Brando. I don't think I've actually watched his version of Mutiny on the Bounty (1:00 PM) in its entirety before. There's also The Nightcomers (August 21, 2:15 AM), which I know I hadn't heard of before seeing it show up on the TCM schedule.

The Last Station

I mentioned last August when Christopher Plummer got a day in Summer Under the Stars that I was interested in the movie The Last Station because of its subject matter. Naturally I recorded it, but having recorded so many of Plummer's movies, I had to space out watching them since I didn't want to put up a bunch of posts on one star's movies in close proximity if I could avoid it.

Leo Tolstoy (Christopher Plummer) was one of the best-known writers of the second half of the 19th century, writing from his estate in the country south of Moscow. However, he had some rather idiosyncratic ideas on Christianity that displeased the Orthodox Church as well as the Tsar. On the other hand, those views gained a modest but extremely devoted following to the point that there was a Tolstoyan colony on some lands near Tolstoy's estate. As the movie opens, it's 1910 and Tolstoy is past 80, so there's naturally some thought being given to what's going to happen after he dies. He's got a devoted wife of many years, Sofya (Helen Mirren), and a couple of adult children. Sofya wants to ensure that she and the family will be looked after financially after Leo dies.

Meanwhile, Chertkov (Paul Giamatti) heads the Tolstoyan organization in Moscow. It's something that comes with some political risk and he feels like he's being watched by the authorities. But he's also worried about what's going on down at the Tolstoyan estate. He and the other Tolstoyans feel that, in conjunction with Tolstoy's stated beliefs, the copyrights to Leo's works ought to go into the public domain after he dies. He's trying to get Leo to sign a new will that will do just this, while Sofya is understandably concerned that such a will not be signed. Chertkov, in order to see that his interests are seen to, and wanting to know exactly what Sofya is up to, sends a new secretary, young Valentin (James McAvoy) down to the estate partly as personal secretary and partly as a sort of spy.

Valentin finds a, shall we say, interesting situation that's not quite like the family in You Can't Take It With You, but something that's not too far off. There's that farming commune, while there are all sorts of hangers-on at the actual estate. And a lot of them want to get in Leo's good graces, in part by showing just how Tolstoyan they are, in a belief system that supposedly requires chastity. Valentin does the same thing, although as time goes on he begins to develop quite a bit of sympathy toward Sofya. Meanwhile, one of the working girls, Masha (Kerry Condon), whom you might think is almost a sort of groupie, decides to seduce Valentin: these Tolstoyans apparently need to learn about sex.

As the dispute over whether a new will is going to be signed rages on, we also learn that the marriage between Leo and Sofya is hitting a rough patch. That's partly because of Leo's advanced age; familiarity breeds contempt and all that. There's also Sofya's understandable feelings that Leo isn't looking after her. And with as busy as the estate is, matters are bound to come to a head, and sooner rather than later.

Now, you may not know this bit of history if you didn't study Russian in college like I did, but the end of Tolstoy's life involved him basically getting sick of it all and literally running away from home. However, he wasn't able to run too far as the strain of this resulted in his final illness and death in a country train station, with a bunch of assembled press holding vigil since Tolstoy was after all a prominent celebrity.

The Last Station is a movie looking at something that I don't think has gotten much attention in English-language cinema, although Tolstoy's works themselves obviously have. The movie gets high marks on all of the technical aspects, although filming was done with eastern Germany standing in for Russia. Plummer and Mirren both take the roles they're given and play them for all they're worth, which means extremely showy. I, however, was left at the end wondering why anybody became a Tolstoyan in the first place.

War Hunt

When Robert Redford died last year, TCM responded with one of their 24-hour programming tributes. This gave them a chance to show a couple of movies that I hadn't seen before. One of those was Redford's first big role (he gets an "introducing" credit), in a modest Korean War movie called War Hunt. It's getting an airing tomorrow, August 18, at 6:00 AM as part of Redford's day in Summer Under the Stars, so now is the time to schedule it.

As the movie opens, it's May 1953 in Korea, which means that the Korean War is about to end, or at least the fighting, not that the men on the ground doing that actual fighting know that it's about to end. The negotiations have been going on for ages and they grouse about it. Pvt. Roy Loomis (Robert Redford) is a man fresh out of boot camp who's been shipped over to Korea, and from there to a platoon that's pretty close to the front line, under Captain Pratt (Charles Aidman). Among Loomis' fellow soldiers are a couple of people who would go on to have well-known careers: Sgt. Van Horn (Sydney Pollack), Pvt. Crotty (Gavin MacLeod), and Sgt. Showalter (Tom Skerritt).

But the one guy everybody gives a wide berth to is Pvt. Ray Endore (John Saxon). The only person who doesn't give Endore that wide berth is young Charlie, a Korean orphan who was rescued by Pvt. Endore and now serves as Endore's private aide. Well, Pvt. Loomis doesn't really avoid Endore either, largely because he's new here and doesn't know yet just what Endore is like. The other guys in the outfit certainly try to warn Loomis.

And then one morning Endore returns to camp and wakes up Loomis with his whistling. He's also got a face covered in military-black of the sort used on a night operation when you don't want to be seen in the moonlight. Endore goes out on night patrols by himself, technically AWOL, because Capt. Pratt knows that Endore is able to get good intelligence information. The negatives, especially the big one that Endore likes to knife North Koreans to death, are things that Pratt overlooks because it's war, and war is hell and all that.

Loomis, again being new to all this, doesn't get any of it, and is concerned about the influence all of this is going to have on poor little Charlie. It's bad enough that Charlie has had the horrors of war visited upon him at such a young age; worse is that he's learning all the wrong lessons from a soldier who's showing himself to be increasingly mentally unstable. When Loomis brings up the point about what's going to happen to Charlie after the war, Endore thinks he's going to be able to stay in Korea after the hostilities end and continue to fight his own war.

And then the armistice does get signed, which means that the following night, everybody who's right at the front line with that little bit of demilitarized zone between them, is going to have to be on their best behavior. That's not something that Endore is going to like, and you can guess what he does when the sun goes down and the panic that this engenders in the other guys in his outfit.

War Hunt is a very modest, low-budget affair that somewhat surprisingly got extremely positive reviews back when it was released. It's not that I didn't like it or anything; it's more that the low-budget nature of the movie definitely reveals some of its flaws. Redford and Saxon both do good jobs with their roles, but everyone else is more or less a stock character. Perhaps it's the fact that in 1962, when the movie was released, this side of war was very little seen on screen. The heroic side is what most of the war movies delivered.

What a Woman!

Tomorrow, August 17, is given over to the films of Rosalind Russell as part of TCM's Summer Under the Stars. If I had known this ahead of time, I would have scheduled my post on Roughly Speaking to show up here, since it's airing at 4:15 PM. Instead, I'll post about another of Russell's films that TCM aired around the same time as the last showing of Roughly Speaking but is not getting an airing during Summer Under the Stars: What a Woman!.

The movie opens with the great success of a novel called Whirlwind, a notoriously steamy and scandalous historical romance novel written by an author named Anthony Street. At least, that's the author's pen name; Street doesn't want anyone to know his real identity for professional reasons. At Knickerbocker magazine, they want to cash in on the success of Whirlwind, but there isn't any way they can possibly get an interview with Anthony Street. So the next best thing is decided, which is to write about something and someone tangentially related to Whirlwind.

The book has been optioned for a movie, and Carol Ainsley (Rosalind Rusell) is the agent who has been doing the liaison work between the publisher and the studio to make certain the adaptation goes off well and is a success for all involved. Knickerbocker magazine sends one of their reporters, Henry Pepper (Brian Aherne) to get an interview with Ainsley and do a puff piece on her which really ought to be good publicity for her as well as everybody involved with the adaptation. There is, however, a snag with that adaptation: Hollywood feels it can't find anybody currently in Hollywood who's suitable to play the part of the male lead.

Carol, as the woman who's the go-between between Hollywood and the publisher, so technically also the writer, has access to information on who the real Anthony Street is, although she's supposed to avoid using it if at all possible. But she feels she has to, and she finds out that Anthony Street is actually a professor at Buxton College, one of those small liberal arts colleges that populated Hollywood movies of the era. Carol sets off for Buxton, PA. Henry, who by now is acting a lot like the Melvyn Douglas character in Theodora Goes Wild, gets wind of Carol's travels and follows Carol to Pennsylvania and starts acting obnoxious enough that you wonder why anybody would like him.

As for "Anthony Street, he's really college professor Michael Cobb (Willard Parker), who teaches a course on Elizabethan literature and most definitely doesn't want it known that he wrote the novel. Indeed, his boss is shocked and not entirely happy to find it out. Worse, Carol realizes that Cobb based the physical description of the male lead on himself, and that he would be the perfect person to play that character in the movie, which one supposes would also make a great human interest story. Carol convinces Cobb to come to New York with her and make preparations to train in acting.

Meanwhile, Cobb acts like he's falling in love with Carol, which further complicates the story and sends it to a place where it really starts to lose steam, unfortunately. Cobb, as it turns out, isn't much of an actor, but by now there's too much invested in the movie for him to back out. Henry is still around, continuing to be an obnoxious snoop. Cobb pursues Carol even though she's not certain she wants to marry him, never having been the marrying kind. Eventually the movie gets to the Washington, DC, mansion of Carol's senator father for the finale, which is another plot twist that makes the movie lose steam.

I didn't exactly hate What a Woman!, but it's definitely a movie that's got its fair share of script issues. It was released in late 1943, so at the height of World War II. I can imagine audiences of the day wanting the sort of romantic escapism the movie provides. Eighty years on, however, the characters are a bit too unrealistic for any of this to work well. Besides, everything could have been handled with a Zoom chat and Carol would have been able to prevent Henry find finding out the author's real identity.

Nazi Heist Plot Movie #59486748578267

I mentioned some time back that TCM ran a double feature of movies starring Telly Savalas. The first one, which I already did a post on, was Crooks and Coronets. The second was Inside Out, and now is the time for the post on that movie.

The movie starts off with a prologue set in 1945, the dying days of the Nazi German regime, if you didn't figure that out from the title of the post. A bunch of Nazis are transporting cargo, when they're stopped at a checkpoint. Except that the checkpoint is a ruse for SS agents to shoot the people driving the truck, and take it to a train depot. There, they commandeer one of the trains for, well....

Cut to London in the present day, or, well, 1975 when the movie is set. Harry Morgan (Telly Savalas), is a former US Army officer who served in World War II but has fallen on a bit of hard times, making a living doing scammy things but not enough of a living to keep himself out of debt. He gets a letter from a German he knew, Ernst Furben (James Mason), who meets him to propose a business deal. Apparently, Ernst knows that that train we saw in the opening was supposed to transport looted Nazi gold to the Balkans but never made it there (didn't we see something like this in Charade?) -- the gold just disappeared as far as everyone knows.

Ah, but Ernst knows a way to find out where that gold is. Apparently, the man in charge of the shipment is notorious Nazi prisoner Reinhardt Holtz (Wolfgang Lukschy), who is an obvious stand-in for Rudolf Hess. Holtz is being kept as the only prisoner in a prison co-run by the British, Americans, and Soviets on a rotation basis, which is part of where Morgan comes in. Morgan served in the war with MSgt. Prior (Aldo Ray), who never rose far in the military but is a career officer, is the American who is in charge of day-to-day operations when it's the Americans' turn to oversee the prison. Since Prior and Harry knew each other, perhaps Harry can corrupt Prior to get people into the prison who can get the information out of Holtz as to where that gold really ended up. As if the gold is still where it was 30 years earlier.

Now, at this point, we get the standard second act of a heist movie which involves the protagonist organizing all the other people who are going to be in on the heist. This involves master thief Sly Wells (Robert Culp), currently based in Amsterdam, as well as several Germans. They're able to blackmail the doctor who is the one person who gets to see Holtz on a daily basis, with the plot ultimately being that they're going to drug Holtz, kidnap him, and replace him for a day with the doctor. While under the influence of those drugs, 36 Hours-style, they'll get Holtz to reveal the location of the gold.

Amazingly, this part of the plot goes off without much of a hitch. But when Holtz tells them where the gold is (they're dressed like Nazis and he doesn't realize they're not real Nazis), they discover that the location is in what is now East Berlin. Oops. Good luck getting behind Communist lines. And better luck getting the gold back to West Berlin and then out of West Germany.

Frankly, the heist plot in Inside Out is ridiculous and something that would never work in real life. But this is a movie, and thanks to a cast of professionals who look like they're enjoying themselves, they turn Inside Out into something that's at least 90 minutes of passable entertainment. That is, at least as long as you can suspend disbelief.

Youngblood Hawke

I've always enjoyed the potboilers of the 1950s and 1960s. Even if they weren't particularly good, they're interesting, and some of them can be fun. One that's a fairly minor entry in the cycle is Youngblood Hawke.

James Franciscus stars as Arthur Youngblood Hawke, who as the movie opens is driving a coal truck in his home town in Kentucky and convinced that somebody is trespassing on the family land. He gets home and tells his mother Sarah (Mildred Dunnock) about this, and she's even more ticked about it. It seems that some years earlier, before Dad died, Dad's brothers dishonestly got the mineral rights on Dad's land, which is why they're rich and she and Youngblood isn't. She could use a good lawyer, and Youngblood could have been one, except that he decided to go to college to study creative writing in hopes of starting a writing career.

And then Youngblood gets a letter in the mail telling him that a publishing house in New York liked his manuscript and is thinking about publishing it, even though he submitted it unsolicited without an agent, which seems like a very bad idea. But in any case Youngblood goes to New York and gets treated like royalty by the publisher Jason Prince (Lee Bowman), who read the book along with his wife Fannie (Eva Gabor). If Youngblood signs the contract, he'll be working with editor Jeanne Green (Suzanne Pleshette). Youngblood wants more than the "standard" advance for a first-time writer, since he's been busy working on his second novel. A compromise is reached where that extra money is to be paid out in several monthly installments. Jeanne gets Youngblood a place one floor above her in her apartment building, and she proceeds to fall in love with him.

It's the first love in an exceedingly complicated life for Youngblood. At a Christmas party, he's introduecd to wealthy Frieda Winter (Geneviève Page), who loves studly young Youngblood albeit with the catch that she got her wealth by marrying a wealthy man (Kent Smith). She does things like secure Youngblood the use of a clients swanky Manhattan apartment while the client goes out to Hollywood to make a movie, something that ticks off Jeanne. Jeanne, for her part, has been thinking about going to another publishing company.

Where Youngblood's first book was at most a modest success, his second book is a big hit, and starts to give him a swollen head. Youngblood is approached by aging actress Irene Perry (Mary Astor) who wants him to adapt the first novel into a stage play with her as the lead actress. He also gets the idea of "investing" his money in various ways, including building out on Long Island along with starting his own publishing company. But this gets him into debt, and those debts are eventually going to be called in.

Youngblood is told, much like Fyodor Dostoevsky when he wrote The Gambler, that he has to deliver his next book by a certain time or else contractual clauses are going to leave him in a very bad state. Youngblood works himself into a very parlous state, while all his romantic relationships resolve themselves to varying degrees of satisfaction.

I called Youngblood Hawke a minor entry in the potboiler cycle largely because it's both not particularly good and not memorably bad. It's just there, as it were, and lingers on for over 130 minutes. Everybody does well enough with the material they're given; it's more that it's not very good material. Poor Suzanne Pleshette is used, and the whole mining rights subplot is never really examined as much as it should be.

Sweet Rosie O'Grady

Last year at Thanksgiving, Dave Karger sat down with comedy legend Carol Burnett to present some of her favorite movies, paired with the parodies that Burnett and her friends did on her weekly variety show in the late 1960s and early 1970s. One parody was The Doily Sisters, which if you know your old movies parodies The Dolly Sisters, a movie I wrote about back in 2017. Unfortunately, TCM couldn't work out the rights to that movie for some reason, so they obtained a different Betty Grable musical for Dave and Carol to talk about: Sweet Rosie O'Grady.

Grable plays Madeleine Marlowe, an American who's the hit of the London stage in the 1880s. She's about to head back to America to appear in her next musical. She's also had men pursuing her, especially Charles, the Duke of Trippingham (Reginald Gardiner). For various reasons, they're not getting married in England, and they're also not traveling back to America together. Madeleine will be going to America with her dresser Edna (Virginia Grey), while the Duke is going to be following in about a month. They'll get married and live happily ever after....

Yeah, right, since all of this is happening in the opening reel. Over in America, there's a scandal sheet called the Police Gazette, edited by Tom Moran (Adolphe Menjou). His best writer, Sam McGee (Robert Young), has heard rumors of Marlowe's past here in New York before she went off to London and became big star Madeleine Marlowe. It seems that Marlowe is a stage name for a "Rosie O'Grady" who worked in the sort of theater that wasn't considered so respectable to the London audiences that flocked to Marlowe shows, making Marlowe the sort of woman a duke might not want to marry. Worse, when Marlowe gets off the boat in New York, she's tricked into getting in a carriage with McGee, who uses this ruse as a way of getting an even more scandalous interview.

Rosie, as I'll call her for the rest of the post, is unhappy. But she's also not stupid. So she decides she's going to turn the tables on McGee by starting a publicity campaign to get everybody to believe that she and McGee are actually carrying on a romance together, which is something that McGee doesn't really want. And even though the intention is that this be a fake romance, the Duke gets all the news when he gets to America, so he's not quite so happy himself and decides that he'll get together with McGee to try to turn the tables back on Rosie again.

Complications ensue, but considering who's got the top two billing spots, you can figure out where things are going to go. (Hint: Rosie does not end up with Moran.) Then again, you also might have been able to figure it out if you've seen other classic movies. Sweet Rosie O'Grady is a remake of a Loretta Young movie called Love Is News. There's also a third version of the story, That Wonderful Urge, which I have apparently not done a post on yet.

The obvious difference with Sweet Rosie O'Grady is that, as a vehicle for Betty Grable, it's got extra musical numbers, most of which are presented as numbers for her stage actress character to perform in her various stage shows. The plot works well enough again, and Grable does fine with her musical numbers even if those aren't quite so necessary to the plot. Sweet Rosie O'Grady is also in Technicolor, and the print Fox ran was quite good. Somewhat surprising for a Grable movie is that the running time isn't padded out by the presence of those musical numbers. IMDb lists the running time as shorter than Love Is News, which wasn't a long movie to begin with.

Two interesting FXM schedule notes

I was looking at the FXM schedule, for Friday, August 14, and saw two things worth mentioning. First is that FXM decided to run an entire block of Gene Tierney movies:

8:00 AM Laura
9:30 AM Leave Her to Heaven
11:25 AM Black Widow

I have to admit that I don't think I've seen Black Widow on the FXM schedule in a while. It's the least of the three movies, although that's partly because of how good Laura and Leave Her to Heaven are.

The other interesting thing is the double-bill that follows Black Widow:

1:05 PM Nightmare Alley (1947)
3:00 PM Nightmare Alley (2021)

I'll admit right up front to not having seen the 2021 version, since I don't go to the movie theater often becuase my local sixtyplex is in a dead mall and a terribly depressing place to go to. Besides, that version would have come out at the height of the covid masking idiocy. I didn't want to get panic attacks from not being able to have the mask under my nose. I was out in the woods with my since-deceased dog who, being on a retractable leash, served as my social distancing. Still I has some assholes who pointedly moved away because I was outside, without a mask, when the nonsense guidance even said no mask was needed since I wasn't going to be close enough to these other people.

No, I'm not sorry for the rant. I'll just go back and keep watching old movies.

No pizza in this one

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Invisible Ray

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kirk Douglas, Mafioso

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The attic around toys

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But, as always, watch and judge for yourself.

Die Mörder sind unter uns

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Murderers Are Among Us is absolutely worth a watch.

Good Morning, Eve!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Briefs for August 7-8, 2026

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

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

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

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