Roast-Beef and Movies

A short that TCM ran as a TCM Extra in a time slot after something else that I watched recently was Roast-Beef and Movies.

A movie studio that's fallen on hard times is looking for new ideas and offers up to $100K for a movie they use. With that in mind, a would-be producer called Gus Parkyakaruks (George Givot, who is not the same actor who would be billed as "Parkyakaruks" in a string of movies from the late 1930s and 1940s) shows up together with two partners, one of whom is played by Curly Howard of the Three Stooges although none of the other stooges are here. Neiter is Ted Healy, who in this time frame would have been the "manager" of the Stooges, the short having been made in late 1933 and released to theaters in early 1934.

Most of the rest of the short is a sort of revue that shows the sort of "movie" that the producers wanted to make, although there's more to it than that. Eventually, the studio boss likes the idea behind the movie and offers Gus and his two partners a contract, but there's a catch that forms the humorous finale of the movie.

There are two things that are mildly interesting about Roast-Beef and Movies. One is the presence of Curly Howard (billed as Jerry Howard) without anybody else related to the Three Stooges. The other one is that the movie is in two-strip Technicolor. Now, Disney had already made a couple of animated shorts in three-strip. I'm not certain how much later the live-action three-strip shorts came out, although I've mentioned Warner Bros.' Service With a Smile from 1934 as a three-strip short with pretty vibrant color.

In any case, the reason for the two-strip Technicolor is because TCM wanted to reuse some musical dance numbers from a couple of earlier movies that had been filmed partially in two-strip. Something that was done in several movies in the early sound era was to have most of the movie in black and white, with Technicolor mostly for a musical finale; it's those numbers that are reused in Roast-Beef and Movies. Other than the Technicolor and Curly Howard, however, this short isn't particularly good.

Roast-Beef and Movies did, however, get a release to DVD as part of one the Classic Shorts from the Dream Factory box sets.

TCM "Star" of the Month July 2026: Singers in the Movies

Now that we're in the first full week of a new month, it's once again time for a new Star of the Month. This time out, we don't get a traditional one person as star. Instead, TCM has decided to do a spotlight on singers who decided to try their hand in the movies. Every Monday in prime time, leading into the daytime hours of the Tuesday schedule, there will be movies featuring people who, when they first appeared in the movies, were mostly known as singers.

Now, some of them became famous for their acting, such as Bing Crosby, whose early appearance in Going Hollywood is getting an airing at 7:15 AM July 7. Rudy Vallee is another such instance, as is, I would argue, Barbra Streisand. Streisand shows up in the 1976 version of A Star Is Born at 9:45 PM on July 13.

But some of them are certainly people best known as singers who didn't make very many movies in part because some of them aren't exactly good actors. Johnny Cash in Five Minutes to Live (July 14, 6:15 AM) would certainly be an example of that. Willie Nelson is basically playing himself in Honeysuckle Rose (12:15 AM, July 14), so he's not exactly bad, but I'm not certain how much talent he would have had in other roles.

There are also some movies I'm interested to see that I haven't seen before. I think I've only seen a bit of Ruthless People (July 20, 10:30 PM), probably back in the late 1980s when my parents would have been watching it on the VCR. Overnight, at 4:30 AM on July 21, is Paul Simon in One Trick Pony. I only know of that one because of the song from the film that was a commercial success as a single. I would have been much too young to have seen the movie in the theater, and it's not the sort of thing that shows up regularly.

Jazz Heaven

I think it's been a while since I've done a post on a movie from that year when Hollywood finally completed the transition from silent movies to sound: 1929. This time, the picture in question is one that I have to admit was new to me the last time TCM showed it: Jazz Heaven. But since I'm always interested in such early sound movies, I recorded this one and eventually got around to watching it to do this post.

In a rooming house in New York City, Barry Holmes (Johnny Mack Brown) lives with his piano. That's because he's an aspiring songwriter, trying to make it in the then musical capital of America. Unfortunately, he plays his piano all night long trying to figure out the last few themes to the melody of the song he's currently working on, and this pisses off a lot of the other roomers and especially his landlord, Mrs. Langley (Blanche Friderici). She wants to throw him out right now since he's also four weeks behind on his rent, but Mr. Langley (Clyde Cook) intervenes much to his wife's consternation. It doesn't help Mr. Langley that he only works as a night watchman in a piano factory.

Quite stupidly, Barry keeps striking away at his piano even after being told to wait until 10AM. His playing wakes up his neighbor in the next room, Ruth Morgan (Sally O'Neil). She works for a pair of music publishers, Kemple and Klucke, both of whom seem to have the hots for Ruth even though they're much too old for her which provides a bit of ick factor. But more importantly, when Ruth is awakened, she goes about her morning routine by humming along to Barry's music, eventually giving Barry that last theme he needs and causing him to invite her over to help him by continuing to hum that theme.

Mrs. Langley shows up just as Ruth and Barry are talking about what a blankety-blank she is, so she gets angry enough that she decides to evict Barry right then and there and not renewing Ruth's month-to-month lease. She also plans to keep the piano since Barry owns back rent. Mr. Langley knows the rooming house across the stree takes people evicted by the Langleys, which will give Barry a place to stay, but when Langley tries to help out by moving the piano for Barry, he destroys it.

Barry needs a piano to finish up his work on the song, while Ruth is trying to get it sold to her bosses. Mr. Langley takes a risk by offering Barry and Ruth a room on an upper floor which is normally used as a remote broadcast location where the piano company airs a radio show they sponsor. Thanks to a totally coincidental mix-up, Ruth and Barry accidentally send a feed of their practice session to the radio station, with the two board ops at the station (as we'd call them today) deciding to broadcast this since it's more interesting than the lecture on birds that's supposed to go on air. The song becomes a surprise hit, and the owner of the piano factory gets a bunch of letters about it, causing him to want the two unknowns to reprise their song the next time the piano factory's show is scheduled to go out. Getting the two lovers together, however, is going to be a bit difficult because of the sort of complications you can probably predict if you've watched enough movies from this era.

By the standards of 1929, Jazz Heaven is an interesting enough movie if not spectacular by any stretch. Sally O'Neil is quite appealing here, with Johnny Mack Brown adequate. The plot, however, is fairly creaky and definitely the sort of thing that most people watching it nearly a century later would find it hard to get into. I mostly liked Jazz Heaven, but can easily see why it won't be a movie for everyone.

Born Free

Even though it's the Independence Day holiday in the United States, this being a Saturday TCM is continuing with the Two for One programming in prime time. Tonight's guest is songwriter Diane Warren, and the first of her selections is Born Free, at 8:00 PM.

Born Free is one of those movies where you probably know the basic plot synopsis already. And, to be honest, there's not a whole lot more going on in the movie beyond a basic synopsis. In the 1950s in what is now Kenya, George Adamson (Bill Travers) works as a game warden working to keep the national parks safe from poaching and keeping the locals from being harmed by wildlife rampagaing outside the parks. He lives in one of those well-appointed lodge-type houses together with his wife Joy (Travers' real-life wife Virginia McKenna) and a bunch of people working together with the responsible department for wildlife management.

One day out on patrol, George and some of his crew are attacked by a lioness and are forced to shoot in self-defence. Unfortunately, they discover the reason the lioness attacked was because she was a mama lioness defending their three cubs. It would be inhumane to shoot the cubs, so they take the cubs back to the lodge and start caring for them in the expectation that one or more zoos are going to come along to take the cubs when the time comes.

Everybody becomes attached to the cubs, whom Joy has named, with Joy becoming most attached of all. And then a zoo does come, but can only take two of the cubs. So the Adamsons keep the youngest and smallest cub, named Elsa, and continue to raise it. Elsa is relatively tame, but the freedom that the Adamsons give Elsa is the sort of thing that's bound to cause problems of mistaken identity. Worse, Elsa's lack of interest in hunting the other wild animals is going to disrupt the local balance of nature such that the wild animals can predate against the villagers.

After one such incident where Elsa more or less incites an elephant stampede, the government really starts to tighten the screws on the Adamsons giving Elsa over to a zoo. That, and there's policy that George is supposed to take a mandatory sabbatical away from his current posting. The fact that he's already survived a bout of malaria is another indication that the government policy might in fact be the right one. But in any case, it puts a pretty hard deadline on the question of what to do with Elsa.

Joy is horrified at the idea of Elsa in a zoo, so she comes up with the crazy idea that Elsa can be taught to hunt in the wild, and dammit, she and George are going to do just that so that Elsa can be integrated into a tribe. This is pretty much what the entire final third of the movie deals with.

Born Free is, as you probably know, based on a true story, with the book and movie coming out before the end of the Adamsons' story, which doesn't quite have a happy ending. The movie was filmed on location, which is a big plus, as the cinematography is mostly quite lovely apart from a few insert shots of wildlife on stampede. As for the story, a lot of people have called Born Free a family movie, a designation with which I'd largely agree. But at the same time, the story feels like one of those things that's clearly simplified like a young person's guide to history. Some people will find the story in Born Free to be a bit too pat and simple, although those people will probably not be children. Well, that is the children who can handle the fact that there are predator and prey animals and that this is shown about as explicitly as one could do in a mainstream movie of the 1960s.

Judge Hardy and Son

There were 16 movies made in the MGM Hardy family series, if you count the one from the late 1950s after Lewis Stone died. Surprisingly, I haven't done posts on all that many of them. But one of them aired on Father's Day and is getting another showing tomorrow since the plot nominally deals with July 4. That movie is Judge Hardy and Son, on TCM on July 4 at 6:30 AM.

Lewis Stone is once again Judge Hardy, who shows up at court only to find that there are no cases on the docket. That tranquility is interrupted by an immigrant couple, the Volduzzis (Maria Ousepnskaya and Egon Brecher), who have been served with a writ that they're going to have to leave their house for being unable to pay the mortgage, which seems like a surprise since Mr. Volduzzi has only been out of work for three weeks and you'd think he's old enough to receive Social Security which had been in place four four years by the time the movie was released. If they have any surviving children, perhaps she could be imposed on to do something to help them. But Mrs. Volduzzi claims their daughter is dead. Judge Hardy suspects this is a lie.

Andy is at home getting ready for the Independence Day celebrations, except that all of the innertubes in his car's tires keep bursting, leading to a bunch of financial issues yet again. He's already borrowed money from Beezy, and now he's going to borrow some from big sister Marian (Cecilia Parker) before she heads off to a cabin with friends for the holiday. Mom (Fay Holden), meanwhile, and Aunt Millie (Sara Haden) are planning to head off to their parents' house for their parents' 50th wedding anniversary.

Andy needs to do something to get more money before Polly Benedict (Ann Rutherford) returns for Independence Day. One way he hopes to do so is to help his father find that Volduzzi daughter, which involved interviewing everyone in town who has the middle initial V because a grandkid would have the middle name Volduzzi. (It wasn't uncommon in those days for people to get their mother's maiden name as a middle name.) The other idea is to win the public oratory contest by writing a speech on Alexander Hamilton. Unfortunately, he misreads the contest rules and discovers that the $50 first prize is for the best speech by a girl. A boy gets a 20-volume set of biographies of great Americans. So Andy both sees a bunch of girls his age with the middle initial V, while trying to get them to read a speech he'll write in exchange for splitting the prize money. They, not being stupid, try to blackmail Andy by making him take them to the big July 4 shinding. When Polly returns and find this out, she's going to be none too happy.

And then things take a surprisingly dark turn for a Hardy Family movie. Mom gets off the train and returns home claiming to feel unwell. The doctor diagnoses her with pleurisy, which would certainly cause her a fair deal of pain. But the the pleurisy progresses into pneumonia, which is a much more serious illness with the rest of the family worried she might die. But then, this being a Hardy Family movie, you have to expect a happy ending.

There's surprisingly a lot going on here for a 90-minute movie. Also surprisingly, it mostly meshes well. There's nothing particularly groundbreaking about Judge Hardy and Son, but watching a movie like this you can see why the series was so popular back in the day. With the lingering effects of the Depression and the war going on in Europe, something like this was just what was needed to take audiences' minds off of their daily problems. Definitely worth a watch for MGM's rose-colored view of 1939.

FBI Girl

George Brent was TCM's Star of the Month back in March, and I recorded a bunch of his movies that TCM ran. One that they didn't show was a public domain movie from late in his movie career: FBI Girl.

Now, obviously, Brent is not the title character here. In fact, you could argue that there isn't one title character, as there are multiple "FBI girls" here. In the context of the movie, they're women who work in the fingerprints divison of the FBI, pulling the cards for various law enforcement agencies that need to match prints to identities, as a brief opening narration informs us.

Cut to a generic southern state. Governor Grimsby (Raymond Greenleaf) is the governor, giving a live speech on TV to the people who are interested in the new US Senate crime committee that's coming to the state to investigate corruption. Grimsby says he looks forward to the commission since he's got nothing to hide. Now, for a movie like this, that's an obvious clue that the governor does indeed have a lot to hide, as he informs his chief advisor Blake (Raymond Burr in his bad-guy pre-Perry Mason phase). The thing is that some 20 years ago Grimsby was involved in a murder, when he was going by the name John Williams. If the crime committee suspects anything, he'll be fingerprinted, those prints will be sent to Washington, and Grimsby will be found out as Williams, ending his career. But then he's to the point where he would be relieved to get this off his conscience.

Blake, however, is having none of that, and decides that the best thing to do would be to get one of those FBI girls to remove the Williams fingerprint file. Blake knows just the girl, as Natalie Craig's brother Paul is a small-time crook who has to repay some favors. Natalie does get the file, apparently not wanting to put her brother in danger, but she screws things up just enough that one of the male employees will be able to implicate her in the subsequent investigation. Except that the investigation is into her death, as Blake has her killed in a road accident to prevent her from talking.

Worse for Blake and Grimsby is that Natalie doesn't have the file on her when she's killed. They have to come up with another way to get the file, and FBI agents Stedman (Cesar Romero) and Donley (George Brent) are on the case and begin to suspect things. They talk to Natalie's roommate Shirley Wayne (Audrey Totter), who agrees to help, although things get much more complicated when Stedman and Donley reveal that one of the people who's going to be implicated in the case is the lobbyist Chercourt (Tom Drake). That's because Chercourt is engaged to Shirley. She doesn't realize how much danger even a lowly FBI girl like her can get into in the pursuit of justice.

FBI Girl is one of those low-budget movies that, a few years later, probably would have been the subject for an episode of one of those TV shows that glorified the work of the FBI. It's not a bad movie, although it does strain credulity in a few places -- there are just too many coincidences for the case to be wrapped up so neatly and quickly. And for as ruthless as Blake is, he's also surprisingly incompetent at times.

FBI Girl is perhaps a bit more interesting as a time capsule into the way people looked at the FBI back in the early 1950s, as well as the appearance of a very young Peter Marshall back when he was still paired with Tommy Noonan. Entertaining, but there's a good reason the movie fell through the cracks.

The Match King

Hollywood movies from the Depression era on business are certainly an interesting watch, as the impression given of the way big business was done back then is much different from what we'd think of today. That, and the stock market, although at least back then a very small percentage of the population was invested in the stock market and it wasn't really something one could do for oneself. One such movie, loosely based on a real person, is The Match King, which I recorded the last time it came on TCM.

Warren William stars as Paul Kroll, who as the movie starts is a Swedish immigrant in Chicago who is making a living as a sanitation worker. He's written to his family back home that he's made it in businesses, although that's a lie. The best he's been able to do is start a no-show scam that has a bunch of non-existent people on a payroll which allows Kroll to rake off a bunch of payroll.

However, word comes from his native Sweden that the old business in his home town, a match factory, is in financial difficulty. Since Paul has made it in America, at least according to his letters, the townsfolk would like to know if he could come back and help save the match factory. Of course Paul isn't really in a position to do this. So he engages in another lie. He's been cheating on his best friend by having a relationship with Babe (Glenda Farrell in a brief performance), so he decides now is the time to tell Babe they should run off together. Except that he runs off with Babe's money, which he uses to get over to Sweden.

Paul, of course, doesn't know how to run a match factory or how to save it from its financial difficulties, so he has to continue resorting to confidence schemes. He's able to convince Swedish banks to extend him credit to keep the current match factory open as well as to acquire another in an attempt to corner the market on safety matches. The one person who has any inkling things might not be on the up and up is assistant Erik Borg (Hardie Albright).

Unfortunately, Paul's scheme turn out to have some of the qualities of a pyramid scheme in the sense that he has to keep going because, once the merry-go-round stops, the whole thing is going to come crashing down. So he turns to foreign countries, like Germany, where he finds a girlfriend Ilse (Claire Dodd) and then the one love of his life, actress Marta Molnar (Lili Damita). He keeps pursuing her, to the point that he puts off all sorts of important match-factory business. It's not that the feeling isn't mutual, although what Marta really likes is a violinist named Trino. So Marta decides to run off from Berlin to Salzburg, with Paul eventually figuring out where she's gone and following her.

But there's still that pesky match factory, and all sorts of notes are going to come due. There's also a man who's invented a match you can strike over and over, which would seem to violate the laws of physics. In any case, Paul has to resort to increasing ruthless things to keep his schemes going and the creditors at bay. As you might guess, there's only so far all of this is going to be able to go before the walls come crashing down.

The Match King is an interesting if not great movie. One problem for me is that Warren William's character is rutless to the point that it's fairly unsympathetic. He has one man committed to an insane asylum and lets another man die. That's certainly shocking enough to make the movie worth watching, but damn if you don't want to beat the crap out of William. One other issue is that, despite the number of interesting character actors and actresses in the movie, most of them only get a few scenes because of the way the movie is plotted. Still, the plusses of The Match King outweigh the minuses.

Notes on the early July schedule

TCM got the rights to the Looney Tunes (or maybe the Warner Bros. cartoons more generally; I'm not certain) shorts some months back, which is why they did a "Star of the Month" simulation for Bugs Bunny in the short month before 31 Days of Oscar began. Tonight sees a lineup of shorts where they recycle songs from earlier Warner Bros. movies, a practice that was not uncommon as other studios did it often enough too. The night also features the movies from which the songs are apparently taken, although I can't confirm the accuracy of this as I haven't seen the shorts in question. It was only about four months back that I posted on Going Places, which is on tonight's lineup at 10:00 PM for the song "Jeepers Creepers".

Charles Laughton gets a birthday salute a day late tomorrow, which includes a couple of excellent lesser-seen movies. Payment Deferred kicks off the day at 6:00 AM, while the afternoon ends with This Land Is Mine at 4:00 PM and Hobson's Choice at 6:00 PM.

The "Summer of Darkness" noir series continues on Friday evening with some very good 1940s noir where I thought I'd already blogged about all of them. A search of the blog claims I haven't done a post on Thieves' Highway (Jul. 4, 12:45 AM; still the evening of July 3 in more westerly time zones) before, although I've definitely seen it on the old iteration of the Fox Movie Channel. So I suppose it's time to record that one. I was thinking of the "Summer of Darkness", however, more for some of the neo-noir that shows up, such as this week's TCM premiere of Against All Odds (July 4, 2:30 AM). People of my age will remember not the movie -- we would have been too young once again to see the original theatrical release -- but the Phil Collins title song.

Sophie's Place

TCM ran a double feature of films with Telly Savalas some months back; not having seen either of the movies I decided to record both of them. The first of them was Crooks and Coronets.

The opening credits and plot synopsis made this one sound like it was made in England with Savalas one of those Hollywood stars sojourning in the UK. As the movie opens, there's a "state penitentiary" that seems just far enough off. Herbie Haseler (Telly Savalas) is a convict being released from prison, picked up by his friend Marty Miller (Warren Oates) who got out of prison himself a few months back and is supposedly going straight. However, it's quickly revealed that Marty stole the car he used to pick up Herbie from prison.

While confined in prison, Herbie has been reading up on the great manor houses of England, and he's become convinced that he's got a great idea for a heist that would solve all his financial problems. The Fitzmore mansion is owned by some people on hardish times, and they've got a lot of artwork that could easily be stolen and sold off in the States. But Herbie is going to need some money to fund the scheme, and the only person he knows is his old crime boss Nick Marco (Cesar Romero). The thing is, Nick already laid out money for the last scheme, the one that got Herbie and Marty in prison, and Nick has been calculating interest on that money for the entire time the two were in prison. So Nick is reluctant at first to fund Herbie, and certainly not going to accept any failure.

But Herbie and Marty make it over to merrye olde England, and eventually get to the gates of the Fitzmore place, although getting in to case the joint is not without some comic difficulties. The Fitzmores, Lady Sophie (Edith Evans) and her son Lord Freddie (Nicky Henson) are in bad enough straits that they're giving tours of the house for a price. The two crooks take one of the tours, and find somebody trying to fish one of the statues off a table, stopping the heist. That would-be robber is in fact Lady Sophie, under the ruse of trying to test the security arrangements. Herbie and Marty stop it, which gets them in good with Sophie, who being an eccentric old lady also decides to offer the two of them a place to stay, which is just the stroke of luck they needed.

Lady Sophie is so charming that, as Herbie and Marty plan the heist, they start to wonder whether they should go through with it at all, although that's a big problem too since Nick back in the States is beginning to wonder why it's taking Herbie and Marty so long to carry out the robbery. And eventually he's had enough, coming over to the UK himself to take over the heist so that he can make sure it goes according to plan. But by the time Nick comes over Herbie and Marty are thinking up ways to foil Nick in the comedic climax to the movie.

Crooks and Coronets was released in 1969. It's in a genre that had been successful over the years, although by 1969 this sort of view of British society was getting dated. Crooks and Coronets isn't exactly a bad movie, although it's one of those that feels like it doesn't have all that much that's original to it. Had it come out in 1959 it might have worked better, but by now the whole premis is beginning to feel tired. Still, it's also another of those movies where you can understand why the people involved, espcially Savalas and Oates going over the Britain, would have read the screenplay and decided they wanted to make the movie. Crooks and Coronets is modestly entertaining, but nothing spectacular.

Desert Hearts

Another of the movies that I recorded from the September 2025 TCM salute to the UCLA Film and Television Archive was Desert Hearts. It's got a showing tonight (June 29) at 11:15 PM as part of TCM's "Pride" movie day, so I figured now would be a good time to schedule this post that had been lying in my drafts in conjunction with the TCM showing.

It's 1959, and getting off a train in Reno, NV, is Vivian Bell (Helen Shaver). Reno in those days of course meant the place the people go to when they're looking to get a divorce since the divorce laws in other states still hadn't been liberalized. Vivian is an English professor at a college in New York, in a marriage with a man who was more or less just a friend at the time they got married, with no real plans to have children or anything. The two have basically just drifted apart, so a divorce is apparently the best thing. (We never see Vivian's husband.) She has come out to Reno for the requisite several weeks of residency and will be spending them at a ranch-type place that's been converted to tourism and partly to accommodate the sort of woman who is looking to fulfill the residency requirement for that divorce.

The place is run by Frances Parker (Audra Lindley), who is a widow with an adult son Walter and stepdaughter Cay (Patricia Charbonneau). Walter works solely for Mom, while Cay has a job on the outside, making change for the sort of pathetic people who go to one of the lesser casinos to play the slot machines, a job she shares with her best friend Silver (Andra Akers). Silver is planning on geting married to Art, while Cay is being pursued romantically by her boss Darrell (Dean Butler). They're advances that Cay has decided she really doesn't want.

That's because Cay is a lesbian, and is relatively open about it for 1959 and a place like Reno. This is going to cause some serious issues with her stepmom later in the film. Cay is also in some ways very much a product of the west at a time when there were much greater cultural differences between the various regions of the United States. So the sudden presence of an urbane New Yorker like Vivian is bound to shake things up.

Cay is one of those way too extroverted people who immediately starts to befriend Vivian who, for various reasons, is a bit repressed. After all, she is there for a divorce, and starting a relationshp with anybody could theoretically be seen as giving her husband grounds to make the divorce settlement less in her favor. Never mind that this being 1959, she probably hasn't had any openly lesbian friends before.

But Cay makes Vivian realize that she might in fact be lesbian or at least bi, which would also explain the fairly loveless marriage, even though she's also rather reluctant to consummate the relationship. Cay's pursuit of Vivian also makes Frances extremely uncomfortable. And there's also the fact that Vivian is going to have to return to New York eventually since she does have that job waiting for her next semester.

Desert Hearts isn't a bad movie by any stretch of the imaginaton. But I can't help but think that, had the story been about some sort of heterosexual relationship -- say, the woman going out to Reno and finding a nice man who falls in love with her on the rebound -- it would be the sort of movie that would have gone in an out of theaters, largely forgotten because it doesn't do anything anyone could consider groundbreaking. Part of that, though is down to the low budget; I have a feeling that it the director had wanted to do a more mainstream heterosexual relationship film funding would have been easier to come by. Still, as long as you're OK with the fact that it has a fairly explicit sex scene, Desert Hearts is one that's worth one watch at least.

Secrets with nice socks

In September 2025, TCM ran a night of films dedicated to the UCLA Film and Television Archive, which gave me the opportunity to record several lesser known films, a fact I mentioned with Wanda not too long ago. Another movie that aired as part of the salute was The Argyle Secrets. As is my wont, not having heard of it, I recorded it to watch and write up this review.

William Gargan stars as Harry Mitchell, a journalist who, as the movie opens, tells us he's still surprised that everything he's about to tell us about happened in the space of just 24 hours. That's an obvious sign that we're about to get Yet Another Flashback, although in this case it's not that much of a flashback, as it's basically just the previous 24 hours.

Mitchell has a colleague named Allen Pierce, a columnist who covers the Washington scene and has been writing a lot about something called the Argyle Album that will, if published, create a giant scandal. However, Pierce is known to have heart issues and is in hospital as a result, with Mitchell and a photographer visiting to cover the story. Pierce tells Mitchell to finish his work on the Argyle Album if anything should happen to him, at which point Pierce develops an acute issue and dies in his hospital bed. Mitchell is no dummy and figures out a way to keep the other reporters out of the room while he phones in his story. Except that by the time Mitchell gets back, Pierce's body is revealed to have a scalpel in it, while the photographer is missing at first before also being found very much dead.

Mitchell is an obvious suspect even though we know from what's shown that he's not guilty, never mind the opening narration. So he has to figure out a way to get out of the hospital so that he can find the rest of the Argyle Album, since Pierce only gave him a photostat of the cover. The first place to go is Pierce's secretary, Elizabeth Court (Barbara Billingsley), who doesn't have the album and doesn't want to help. It's also quickly revealed that Mitchell isn't the only person looking for the album, which should be obvious considering how we've been told that the publication of the album could lead to major scandals. One such person shows up, a man in a panama hat who gets the obvious nickname of Panama, who's rather violent in his desire to get that album.

So Mitchell has to escape again, going to the apartment of a friend who's out of town. Of course, he's been followed, only not by the police. Instead, a woman calling herself Marla (Marjorie Lord) shows up, offering Mitchell a substantial sum of money if only he'll give her the album, which she doesn't know that he doesn't yet have the album. Marla, for her part, has a bunch of nasty friends who also want the album, which is eventually revealed to have the names of people who were profiteers or collaborators during the recently-concluded World War II, which would explain why so many people so badly want this album.

Mitchell's search takes him all over the city, although at least at some point the police are able to figure out that he in fact did not commit the murder. Granted, he's still a material witness so shouldn't be trying to evade the police either. But then we wouldn't have much of a movie, would we?

The Argyle Secrets is another of those B movies that's surprisingly effective even if the album is more of a macguffin than anything else. It's somewhat reminiscent of a low-budget version of The Maltese Falcon, with Gargan as a journalistic Sam Spade. Gargan is more than good enough here, and the rest of the cast is entertaining although this isn't a movie that's going to be remembered as anything truly classic.

Mel Brooks Centenary!

Mel Brooks (l.) in The Twelve Chairs (2:30 PM)

Today is the 100th birthday of director/screenwriter/comedian Mel Brooks, known for his parodies and often absurd comedies. TCM is celebrating with five of his movies this afternoon and evening:

2:30 PM The Twelve Chairs, in which Brooks looks for a missing chair that may be concealing a treasure;
4:15 PM The Producers, starring Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder as Broadway producers who get involved in a scam regarding their latest show;
6:00 PM Spaceballs, a parody of science-fiction movies in general and Star Wars in particular;
8:00 PM Blazing Saddles; a boundary-pushing absurd comedy western; and
10:00 PM Young Frankenstein; a comic retelling of a descendant of the original Dr. Frankenstein.

Normal programming returns with Silent Sunday Nights at midnight.

A million tanks

James Gleason was an always reliable character actor, and it was nice to see him get a day in the 2025 Summer Under the Stars on TCM. One of his movies that I hadn't seen before was the Hal Roach Streamliner Tanks a Million, so I recorded it in order to be able to do the post on it here.

A search of the blog says I haven't mentioned the Streamliners before. These were a series of movies Hal Roach produced that were longer than the shorts he had mostly been producing, but still shorter than even a lot of the B movies, clocking in mostly at a shade under an hour (this one is 50 minutes). Granted, this was still the era before TV so in later years material like this would probably have been storyboarded for episodic TV. The "star", if you will, here is William Tracy, playing Dorian "Dodo" Doubleday. As the movie opens, he's on a radio show where he's showing off his photographic memory. Dodo works at a train station information booth, but that work is coming to an end as he's just been drafted into the army. (The movie was released in September 1941, so no mention of any possible upcoming war.)

Sgt. Ames (Joe Sawyer) is the drill instructor assigned to the new recruits, but Pvt. Doubleday already knows the entire army manual and not only that, but seems to know how to actually do the stuff the manual asks of new recruits. And he's frankly obnoxious about showing off all this knowledge. Needless to say, it ticks Sgt. Ames off, but when Ames goes to his superior officers, they get the brilliant idea to promote Doubleday to sergeant, albeit with a bit of a devious catch. Doubleday is assigned to a unit that has the most inept recruits, who also have a bit of a mischievous streak in that they figure out ways to do stuff very close to sergeant's orders. If Sgt. Doubleday fails to mention every article of clothing they're supposed to wear, they'll only wear the ones he mentioned. The trick's on them, however, when they have to march barefoot.

Col. Barkley (James Gleason) is coming to the base, where he's supposed to deliver a speech that's going out on a national radio hookup. Not that he likes giving radio speeches. Sgt. Doubleday gets assigned to be Barkley's orderly. But when he gets some sort of powder on Barkley's uniform, he puts the jacket on himself to be able to clean the powder off. Unfortunately, this leads to his being mistaken for Barkley, leading to all sorts of complications. But since this is a comedy, and a short one at that, you know things are going to work out well, and quickly.

Tanks a Million is a film that's rather more episode than something that has a fully-fledged plot, although that's probably to be expected coming from Hal Roach since he'd been doing a lot more with shorts. The material is adequate for what it is, which is a throaway B movie. Nobody will consider Tanks a Million any great shakes, but back in 1941 I'd bet it entertained while it came and went, to be promptly forgotten as it was replaced by the next movie.

Ann Blyth, 1927-2026

Ann Blyth and Joan Crawford in Mildred Pierce (1945)

The death has been announced of actress Ann Blyth. Blyth, who was probably most famous for playing spoiled brat daughter Veda Pierce in the movie Mildred Pierce, was 98. I should point out that some sources listed her date of birth as 1928, but I believe Blyth talked about being 17 when she did the screen test for Mildred Pierce with Crawford, which would put her date of birth as 1927.

Blyth didn't have the longest of careers, at least not in the movies, as like a lot of actresses of her era, she aged out of roles and got married. The obituary I linked to says that her final feature film was The Helen Morgan Story, which I blogged about only a year ago.

Paul Newman and Ann Blyth in The Helen Morgan Story

As I write this, there hasn't been any tribute programmed on TCM for Blyth. She was the subject of a Summer Under the Stars day back in 2013, so TCM probably can get the rights to enough movies to do a reasonable tribute on her. I'm not certain if they'll pre-empt a night of programming in July, give her a day in Summer Under the Stars, or wait until September for a tribute.

Mr. Skitch

My internet went out for a couple of hours a few nights ago, forcing me to fire up the DVD player which in some ways isn't a bad thing considering the number of DVDs I've got sitting unwatched. This time, it was another film from my Will Rogers box set: Mr. Skitch.

In the town of Flat River, MO, Ira Skitch (Will Rogers) lives together with his wife Maddie (ZaSu Pitts), adult daughter Emily (Rochelle Hudson), and three young kids. Ira has been working as some sort of repairman, but there's a depression on, don't you know, and work has dried up. Also, the bank that Ira put the family's money in has failed, so Ira hasn't been able to pay off the mortgage and the home is about to be foreclosed on. Hardest hit by this is Emily, who had hoped to land a man above her station as husband but who rejects her as soon as he discovers the Skitch family's financial hardship. Some love.

So Ira, several years before The Grapes of Wrath was published, decides that the best thing to do is to pack up the family and head west to California since at the time it was seen as a land of economic opportunity. However, the family takes a rather circuitous route, as they go first to Yellowstone, then the Grand Canyon, and finally an auto-camp in what is supposedly the Lake Tahoe area of Nevada. (I don't remember how much gambling there was going on in Las Vegas in the early 1930s, and in any case it would have been much too hot for an auto-camp.)

This bunch of detours is really an excuse to make Mr. Skitch a bit more of a sketch comedy movie with the various characters Skitch meets while he tries to make enough money to actually get to California. There's a British actress, Flo (Florence Desmond) who at one point does her best Greta Garbo impersonation. Eugene Pallette plays an inebriated gambler in the Nevada segment, and there's also a wealthy retiree traveling across country in a mobile home whom Skitch encounters at Yellowstone. Oh, and Yellowstone is also an excuse for Mrs. Skitch to have an encounter with a couple of bears that is of course played for comic event.

Emily's lack of job prospects back in Missouri that led her to go along for the ride is also a bit of an excuse for her to be in the romantic subplot that dominates a good portion of the movie along with supplying the requisite happy ending. At a pond in Yellowstone that thankfully isn't one of those hot mineral springs that would have killed her instantly, she falls in, and is rescued by Harvey Denby (Charles Starrett before playing the Durango Kid) who is dressed as a West Point cadet because he's going to be heading back to West Point after the summer. Denby has a wealthy uncle, not that he's letting on, and is willing to love Emily even if she is poor. But she doesn't get this until the final reel.

To be honest, Mr. Skitch isn't as good as some of the other Will Rogers movies I've seen, largely because of the series of vignettes structuring. That, and this time even more than other Rogers movies, the Depression forces him to be uncomfortably dishonest in trying to earn that money to get the family to get to California. We understand why he's doing it, but it all still seems scammy.

Mr. Imperium

Another of the movies that I reecorded when Lana Turner got a day in the 2025 edition of Summer Under the Stars was Mr. Imperium. It's a movie that I don't think gets all that much mention when it comes to Turner's filmography. Having seen it, I can understand why.

Turner plays Frederica Brown, an actress who is doing some sort of American-themed stage show at a club in Italy in 1939, which is of course just before World War II kicked off in Europe, and a fact that ought to set off all sorts of alarm bells in terms of anachronisms and the question of how the movie will handle the history of the intervening 12 years. Anyhow, one of the male patrons sees Frederica and falls for her, creating a ruse in which he calls himself Mr. Imperium to get the chance to meet her.

Imperium takes Frederica to the sort of lovely Mediterranean villa that, by the end of the decade, would have been filmed on location in lovely wide-screen in addition to the pretty good color we have here. (IMDb says the California coast around Monterey and Pebble Beach are standing in for Italy, which isn't a bad stand-in.) Imperium played by the much older Ezio Pinza, reveals that his true identity is Alexis, the crown prince of Italy. Alexis is a widower with an unseen 5-year-old son. Alexis knows his duty is to become king, and he's resigned himself to that, although he's not thrilled that this is going to be his son's fate too. And not that Alexis can really marry an actress like Frederica: it would cause a royal scandal.

In any case, Alexis suddenly hears from the prime minister Bernand (Cedric Hardwicke) that the King has taken a sudden turn for the worse and that Alexis is going to have to go to Rome to see the King. Alexis writes a note to Frederica to explain, but Bernand burns the note so that Frederica won't understand why Alexis just up and left her, at least not until she sees the news of the king's death. Frederica has to be smart enough to know what all that means.

Anyhow, a dozen years pass. Frederica, now using the stage name Fredda Barlo, is a successful Hollywood actress with a boyfriend in producer Paul Hunter (Barry Sullivan) who is trying to get her to sign a long-term contract. In Paris, Alexis sees a marquee and lobby card for Fredda's latest movie. He realizes he has to get to America incognito to have another chance to see her again. So he schemes to get in contact with Fredda, who is going to be going to Palm Springs to contemplate her next movie. Fredda is staying at a private resort run by Mrs. Cabot (Marjorie Main) and her shockingly indiscreet niece Gwen (Debbie Reynolds).

Alexis, again registered under the alias Mr. Imperium, tells Fredda about the history of what's been going on in his country since the war. He abdicated following a post-war revolution, and his kid is at a boarding school in England, soon to turn 18. However, the country has been going through revolution for quite some time, with one section of the population tired of the revolution and thinking that the monarchy would be a good way to return stability and a unifying force to the country. There's going to be a plebiscite next week on whether to restore the monarchy, and Alexis plans to lose it so he can stay with Fredda. And then Bernand shows up to reveal a twist....

Mr. Imperium is another of those movies that's decidedly of its time, and is supposed to be inoffensive. If you're not the biggest fan of MGM's musical romances of the era, especially considering that Pinza's music stylings are more operatic, you're probably going to have a problem with this one. For me, the bigger problem was with Debbie Reynolds' scenes. She's just so obnoxious in trying to snoop on her guests. If she hadn't been the proprietress' niece, she would have been fired for cause.

Mr. Imperium is a minor movie, but I can see why some people might like it.

Never Steal Anything Wet

It's time for another of those movies that I recorded from the previous TCM showing, and is now getting another airing on TCM. This time, the movie is Catalina Caper, and the next airing is tomorrow, June 25, at 9:30 AM.

After some cheesy animated opening credits, we get a scene of a guy snooping around a museum late one night, stopping at one of the paintings. Well, technically, it's not a painting; it's a scroll from one or another of the Chinese dynasties, so several hundred years old. The man removes it from its frame, this being the era and the sort of lower-tier museum that doesn't have an alarm on each painting, and is able to get the scroll out of the building without being discovered, more or less.

Cut to the ferry that goes between Southern California and Catalina Island. Bob and Sid are a couple of Harbor Patrol workers seeing that people get on board the ferry safely, before making the trip over to Catalina Island themselves. Among the people on the ferry is the thief from the opening scene, as well as a couple of college guys. Don Pringle (Tommy Kirk) is from Arizona and has apparently never seen the ocean, so he's being brought over to Catlaina by his friend Charlie, who's quite the ladies' man. Another reason Charlie is bringing Don to Catalina is to introduce him to the hot bikini-clad girls who show up on the beaches of Catalina. One last person is an unnamed (until the finale) man played by Robert Donner who provides comic relief but is clearly going to be integral to the plot in some way that is revealed in the finale.

The ferry ride is an excuse to bring in Little Richard to perform a number, on the theory that presumably the teens who were the target audience for a movie like this were still interested in Little Richard even though his heyday had passed several years earlier. And why does he never show up again even though he was on the ferry?

Anyhow, after the ferry makes it to Catalina, the thief makes his way to a yacht owned by Arthur Duval (Del Moore). Arthur commissioned the heist, with the idea that his wife was going to forge a copy of the scroll and sell the forged copy to wealthy Greek collector Lakopoulos. Arthur has a son Tad who is about the same age as Charlie and Don and all the bikini-clad women. He suspects his father is up to no good, but for understandable reasons doesn't want his parents to wind up in prison.

Lakopoulos doesn't plan to pay for the scroll, but steal it. In his attempt to have his henchmen steal it, however, the container in which Duval put it gets thrown overboard, leading to a Lakopoulos' scuba divers trying to find it. The younger set, meanwhile, also scuba dives for pleasure, not knowing that danger lurks beneath the surface. There's also a lot of scenes of those young people doing beach things along with music by a group called the Cascades who had had a hit several years earlier with a song called "Rhythm of the Rain".

Catalina Caper came near the end of the cycle of beach movies, and as far as I can tell was more or less independently produced on the cheap. That shows, as the movie is fairly lousy, with a paper-thin plot that's an excuse to show shots of nubile young women in bikinis. The music is typical for movies of the era: I've seen a whole bunch of movies from the 60s where a character turns on the radio and this instrumental guitar music plays as though this was the popular music of the era. Most of the score is that sort of bland and not very good music. Worst, however, is the acting, which is wooden at best.

I'd guess that the people behind the movie thought they could make a quick buck by cashing in on a trend. They clearly weren't thinking about creating a good movie.

An American Romance

Tomorrow's daytime programming on TCM is a bunch of movies directed by King Vidor. One that I hadn't seen before, but that was on my DVR was An American Romance, which TCM is showing at 8:15 AM. By now, you know the drill, which is that I watched it off the DVR in order to be able to do this write-up in time for tomorrow's showing.

Brian Donlevy plays Stefan Dangosbiblicek, a Czech man in the early 1890s who is emigrating to the US in part because he's got a cousin in the iron-mining part of Minnesota, the Mesabi range on the north shore of Lake Superior. He barely speaks English, and doesn't have enough money per the law on how much an immigrant should have so as not to be a burden for at least some period of time. But one of the men manning the immigration booth has pity on Stefan, who claims to be a hard worker, and sends him on his way to work -- and walk -- his way west to Minnesota.

Amazingly, Stefan makes it all the way out to Minnesota, where he finds cousin Anton (John Qualen), who does indeed still work in the open-pit iron mine, with the real thing being shown on screen here. He is indeed a hard worker, which is going to stand him in good stead later in the movie, but also wants to learn. Thankfully there's a schoolteacher, Anna O'Rourke (Ann Richards), who is willing to help him learn English, and the two fall in love along the way and get married. Anna eventually has five children: a duaghter and four sons named after US presidents.

Stefan, who along the way had his name Americanized to Steve Dangos, keeps working hard and becomes foreman at a steel mill in one of those mid-sized midwest cities. It's enough for him to be able to buy a car, but this being a car from the crank era of starting, it's still not particularly reliable. This causes him to take the car completely apart to figure out how it runs, although even that stands Steve in good stead as he comes up with an idea to start a factory of his own for new ideas in automotive engineering. This even though other companies aren't so certain of the innovations like a steel roof to keep people safer in roll-over accidents. The fact that there's about to be a Depression on doesn't help either.

And, along the way, various other parts of US history are going to intrude on Steve's story. There's World War I, which costs Steve one of his sons. At the end, there's also World War II, which is handled in a rather propagandistic manner. An American Romance was released in 1944, while World War II was still raging. It seems fairly clear that An American Romance included a fair bit into the story designed to further the war effort explicitly, or through fostering social cohesion. Just before World War II is a long sequence about the labor union struggles of the 1930s, with Steve's own son Theodore Roosevelt Dangos (Stephen McNally, still early enough in his career to be credited under his birth name Horace) on the side of the labor union.

Watching An American Romance, I couldn't help but think about some of the other epic movies about the American experience, such as Avalon. An American Romance is certainly well-made, although the story feels like a romanticized (no pun intended) version of the immigrant experience. That, and it also comes across as having to check off a bunch of boxes about what the American Dream of social and economic advancement was about for early 20th century immigrants. An American Romance isn't a bad movie by any stretch of the imagination, but it does feel a bit formulaic.

Love Begins at 20

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Story of Esther Costello

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your annual Father's Day reminder

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kissing Time

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

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

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

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

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

The Amazing Quest of Ernest Bliss

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fun if not macabre

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dated "edgy" 1960s comedy #95258672804678437580276

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hawaii

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stolen Holiday

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

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

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

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

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

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

Briefs for June 14

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

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

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

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

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

It Happened in Brooklyn

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I suppose I could save this for June 13, 2027

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

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

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

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

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

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