But no affairs with married women

Another of the many movies that I recorded the last time they showed up on TCM was The Affairs of Dobie Gillis. It's finally getting another showing on TCM, tomorrow (Feb. 11) at 6:00 AM, so once again now would be the perfect time for me to put up this post I've written on the movie after having watched it.

Dobie Gillis, played by Bobby Van, is a young man about to enroll as a freshman at Grainbelt University somewhere in the Midwest. One wonders how he even got into college, considering his philosophy that some people are workers and others are enjoyers, and, well, he's an enjoyer. At the opening registration, Dobie gets a roommate in the form of Charlie Trask (Bob Fosse) who becomes his new best friend.

Dobie also seems to be a hit with the women. There's Lorna (Barbra Ruick), who winds up with Charlie. The only real reason she isn't with Dobie is because another woman got there first. Pansy Hammer (Debbie Reynolds) is in the same freshman composition class and chemistry class as Dobie, and the two of them immediately hit it off, even though the English professor, Amos Pomfritt (Hans Conried) has it in for Dobie. Pansy lives in town because she's a local and can live with her parents (Hanley Stafford and Lurene Tuttle). Mr. Hammer in particular has a dislike of Dobie, because he sees Dobie wants to get by with a minimum of work and that's not a good trait to have in a husband. But then, we wouldn't have much of a movie if Pansy weren't around or there weren't some sort of conflict.

Things go wrong first when Dobie's car breaks down on a date (although Pansy makes a mistake by not going straight up to her bedroom and changing when she gets home) and then when Dobie decides he and Pansy should just start skipping classes to go on dates, forcing the two of them to do a semester's worth of work in one day and leading to Pansy's blowing up the chemistry lab. For this, Pansy's dad sends her to an aunt in New York so she can go to school there, far away from Dobie. Dobie wants to see Pansy, but he doesn't have the money to get to New York.

Eventually Dobie does get the money, although it's in the sort of dishonest way you'd think would get him strung up on an embezzlement charge: he offers to go to New York to find a band for a fundraiser, and spends a goodly portion of the money dating Pansy instead. Worse, not long after returning to Grainbelt word comes in from New York that Pansy has gone missing! Her dad is understandably pissed, but as you might guess from a movie like this, Dobie is actually innocent and there's a happy ending to be had.

The Affairs of Dobie Gillis is an MGM musical, albeit decidedly not a Freed Unit musical, which in some ways makes the movie a bit of an anomaly. It might also be a bit surprising to some that this came out after Singin' in the Rain, when you'd think MGM wouldn't want to cast Reynolds in such a trifle. There's a lot of opportunity for the four leads to sing and/or dance, to more success than failure although Van's solo of "I'm Thru With Love" goes on too long. The problem that the movie has is the plot, which has too many plot holes and left me wanting to take Dobie and Pansy and literally try to shake some sense into them.

The Affairs of Dobie Gillis is also mildly interesting for those with nostalgia for the studio system; I for one was trying to figure out which of the campus buildings (if any) was the one used as the high school in High School Confidential some years later. There's also a set that has a ton of college pennants on it. Oddly, the design also has a pennant from Carvel High School, which you may recall was the high school from the Andy Hardy movies.

Time Without Pity

TCM ran a morning and afternoon of the films of actress Ann Todd some time back. One that I watched just before it expired from my DVR so that I could write up a review of it here was Time Without Pity.

Todd isn't the star here; that would be Michael Redgrave, although we don't see him in the opening scene. Instead, that pre-credits scene is of an older man killing a young woman named Jennie Cole. Then, after the opening credits, we see a plane landing in the UK after a transatlantic flight. Getting off is David Graham (Michael Redgrave). He's an alcoholic who has been away in Canada in some sort of in-patient treatment, which must have taken quite a long time since David missed not just that murder. David's adult son Alec (Alec Macowan) was accused of the murder of that young girl, found guilty, and sentenced to hang, with the execution being the day after Dad arrived back in Britain. We also learn that Dad's alcoholism has been going on long enough that his son doesn't care about his father, and is perfectly willing to be executed even though we know he's not guilty. Dad is convinced his son couldn't have done such a thing, and plans on proving his son's innocence.

The first person David tries to talk to is Agnes Cole (Joan Plowright), the sister of the murder victim. Agnes is a showgirl, and is convinced that Alec must be guilty. Or, at least, that's what she has David believe with the way she's screaming at him and doesn't want to talk to him at all.

Alec, having been forced to spend a lot of time away from his father, became friends with the Stanford family, specificall with the son Brian. Brian's adoptive father Robert (Leo McKern) is a wealthy automobile manufacturer, and it was in the Stanford house that the murder took place. Alec, you see, spent a lot of time there what with his father being away, and was the boyfriend of the murder victim. David doesn't let on who he is when he visits the Stanfords, (Ann Tood plays Mrs. Stanford), and Dad doesn't seem to recognize David, although the son Brian does and doesn't tell his father that David is using a false identity to visit the Stanfords.

David continues to try to find clues, all with a metaphorical clock constantly ticking down the hours until the scheduled execution. It seems ridiculous that this tyro should be able to solve the mystery when the police haven't been able to, even if we already know who the killer is since we see his face in the opening scene. It also seems ridiculous that the trial went the way it must have gone, but then we wouldn't have had a movie if these things hadn't happened.

Time Without Pity is another of those movies where I can see why somebody like Michael Redgrave would want to take the lead. The idea of having to try to prove somebody's innocence against an extremely tight deadline makes for a potentially really interesting story, as we've seen in great movies like Saboteur. Here, however, it seemed to me like it would be so unlikely for the legal system to screw up this badly, to the extent that it makes the movie not work all that well for me. Still, everybody tries, but can't quite overcome the script flaws.

Paris Interlude

Despite my writing this blog for 18 years now, it always surprises how many 1930s movies are that I still don't know about. The latest example of this came when I watched the programmer Paris Interlude.

The movie opens up in 1927, when Charles Lindbergh was making his transatlantic flight in The Spirit of St. Louis, and everybody in Paris waiting for Lindbergh to land. Especially the reporters, who wanted to be the first to get the story. Among those reporters is Sam Colt (Otto Kruger), who was a flyboy in World War I before he lost his left arm. He's become a reporter since, and at one time was a good reporter before he turned to drink and is the sort of dissolute ex-pat who was a thing back in popular culture in the years just before the Depression, although Paris Interlude was released in 1934. In any case, Colt enlists the help of aspiring writer Pat Wells (Robert Young) to help write the stories in a sort of apprentice relationship. It's not enough for Pat to make a living, and he wants to write fiction any way.

All of these characters spend just as much time at a local watering hole that has next to nothing French about it instead being a place for Americans to recreate their fantasy of what Parisian café life is about. Among these people are aimless Julie (Madge Evans), who moons over Sam because he's just so dashing and handsome, while not having any idea what to do with life. There's also fashion designer Cassie Bond (Una Merkel), and Ham (Edward Brophy), a naïve journalist on his way to the Soviet Union to cover the situation there although he never makes it for whatever reason.

Sam proposes to Julie and plans to take her back to the States, and she even tells her folks back there she's planning to come back a wife. But Sam gets an assignment covering the slow-burning Chinese civil war (at the time the movie was set, this would have been before Japan invaded Manchuria, although the movie was released some years after), forcing him to leave Julie behind. She feels she can't go back to America, so she starts working writing about the haute couture scene in Paris with her articles illustrated by Cassie. Pat falls in love with Julie but can't support her, while another American abroad, golfer Rex Fleming (George Meeker) shows up. And then news comes in that Sam has been shot down in China and is presumably dead.

Except that in a movie like this you have to expect that he's not in fact dead. So 20 minutes later into the movie, on the day that Julie is finally about to marry Sam who has sold a story, Sam arrives back in Paris looking just like he would have looked the day he was shot down in China which makes no sense in terms of plot. Wouldn't he have gotten cleaned up? But Sam's arrival makes Julie wonder just whom she should marry.

For some reason, I went into Paris Interlude thinking this movie was going to be a comedy. It isn't at all, and mostly wasn't intended to be apart from the comic relief character. It's not exactly a bad movie, but it's definitely the sort of thing that would have been what movie exhibitors wanted in 1934: something that could run for a week or two as the second feature and give audiences a movie to come to, only to fade into obscurity as something newer came to the screen. It's with good reason that I had never heard of this one before it showed up on the TCM schedule the last time it did.

Between Two Worlds

Many years ago, I did a post on the early sound film Outward Bound which I found interesting for the way in which I felt it actually tried to use sound as a character in the movie. Outward Bound was remade as a somewhat bigger movie during World War II and given the title Between Two Worlds. I'd been meaning to get around to watching it, so the last time TCM ran it I finally recorded it and eventually watched it, wrote up this post, and saved it in drafts for you to get this post today.

The movie starts off at a travel agency in some British seaside port, presumably Southampton although I don't know that the movie makes this explicit. Various people are trying to get passage to America, something which is difficult considering the war going on. Among them Henry Bergner (Paul Henried), a former concert pianist who joined the anti-Nazi resistance in his home country but had to flee to England. He's not allowed to board, and heads home to commit suicide. As he's going through the streets, we see the car that's carrying the other passengers about to set sail get bombed in a Nazi air raid.

Cut to a shot of Henry'a apartment, where we find him having turned on the gas to off himself. His distraught wife Ann (Eleanor Parker) enters the apartment, and decides that if Henry is going to kill himself, she's going to join him because she'll have nothing to live for. Henry, for his part, tries to keep Ann from joining him, but she's insistent.

And wouldn't you know it, the next thing they know is that they're on the boat that Henry had been trying to get a ticket for, which doesn't seem to make sense at first unless of course you've seen Outward Bound before. And in any case, it's explained much earlier in Between Two Worlds than in Outward Bound what's happened. Henry and Ann are dead, as are all of the other passengers on board, although they're being carried to a sort of purgatory where they'll be judged by the "Examiner" before it's to be determined where and how they spend eternity.

The next passenger to figure out what's happened in Thomas Prior (John Garfield). He's the sort of cynical reporter who always seems to have a sharp word for everybody else but has set up such a shield around himself that he claims not to feel anything. And he's more than willing to spill the beans on what's happening even though the ship's purser, Scrubby (Edmund Gwenn), wants everybody to figure it out for themselves that they're already dead.

Among the other passengers are Pete (George Tobias), a sailor reminscent of the William Bendix character in Lifeboat; a wealthy older couple; a local vicar who winds up helping the "Examiner"; gold-digger actress Maxine Russell (Faye Emerson); housemaid Mrs. Midget (Sara Allgood); and war profiteer Lingley (George Coulouris). Eventually the Examiner (Sydney Greenstreet) shows up to deliver judgment on each of the passengers.

I think I personally preferred Outward Bound in part because I have a thing for early talkies and in part because it's a much more compact little picture at almost 30 minutes shorter than Between Two Worlds. However, even I have to admit that Between Two Worlds has much better production values. Ultimately, however, I think a lot of which version are going to prefer is going to come down to their preconceived notions of the stars playing the various characters. The role played by John Garfield is much changed for Garfield's screen persona, the role having been essayed in Outward Bound by Leslie Howard. A little bit of Garfield can go a long way, and here I think he's a bit too cynical. Somewhat like his character in Four Daughters in that regard.

Sydney Greenstreet, on the other hand is excellent in his role, as is Allgood. So it's not without reason that many fans are going to prefer Between Two Worlds. Watch both and judge for yourself.

Olympia

Another of the movies that I had to watch off of my DVR before it expired was Olympia, Leni Riefenstahl's two-part documentary on the 1936 Berlin Summer Olympics. Today being the opening ceremonies of the Winter Olympics, I figured this would be a good time to put up the post on it. Apparently the original plan was to release one movie, but Riefenstahl's edit ran so long that the movie wasn't released until mid-1938, and in two parts as it ran over four hours. Stylistically there's not enough different to justify two full separate posts, so I'm doing a post that covers both Part 1 (Festival of Nations; linked above), and the second part, Festival of Beauty.

The first part starts with a long sequence of Riefenstahl's interpretation of what training for the ancient Greek Olympiad might have been like, with a bunch of nearly naked men wearing nothing more than a codpiece and running or doing throwing events. There are also women who are completely naked, albeit in a form about as artistic as Renaissance art nudes or ancient Greek statuary. We then transition to the Olympic torch relay, starting in Greece and going through southeastern Europe on its way to Germany, leading up to the opening ceremony when the Olympic cauldron is lit after all of the countries (I think 51 of them) march into the Olympic stadium.

The rest of Part 1 deals with most of the track and field events, attempting to document them to show what happened, who won and how, but without running ridiculously long. Berlin is the Olympics where Jesse Owens famously won four gold medals, and these events are shown, with pretty much no more propaganda or racial denigration than one would have gotten from a white American Hollywood production. The recreation of the German radio/public address athletes consistently refers to certain athletes as "the black man [surname]", but that's not much worse than American commentary would have been. But more on the propaganda in the summary later.

Part 2 opens with a shorter sequence of athletes training, which might be a bit controversial in that all the male German athletes retire to the sauna after their run and there's some obvious full frontal nudity. The sports covered here include very brief references to boxing and gymnastics, with more to yachting, and then rowing (showing the American men's win in the eights that became the subject of the book and movie The Boys in the Boat), modern pentathlon, the cycling road race, and the diving, with the diving being the most famous sequence because of Riefenstahl's camera use.

And it's that use of the camera for which Olympia should be rightly remembered. The opening sequences of the two parts are in many ways the most interesting in that Riefenstahl had the most freedom in composing them. When it comes to actual sports, that's a bit harder, since there's only so much you can do to film, say, an actual boxing match. So a lot of the movie has a slightly boring feel to it. To combat this, Riefenstal did as much as she could to put cameras in spots that were unorthodox for 1936, have them moving on rails to track the athletes, or put them under or over the athletes. She also made heavy use of editing, especially in the diving sequence. I think they might have mentioned the winner, but more than any other event that felt beside the point, as she was trying to show the beauty of the human form. Some sequences, however, especially in the cycling and probably in the sailing, look like they have to be recreations.

The beauty of the human body is also where one can start when it comes to discussing the propaganda nature of the movie. Adolf Hitler obviously wanted to show the Germans as a superior people, and all of those nearly-naked bodies are very clearly of a certain narrowly-defined standard of beauty. Riefensthal couldn't show Germans winning events they didn't win -- and she doesn't hide non-Germans winning as with Jesse Owens -- but beauty is clearly a German thing.

There's also the presence of Adolf Hitler. Some of this obviously can't be helped. Berlin had been awarded the right to stage the 1936 Olympics back in 1931, before the Nazis came to power, and it is traditionally the job of the head of state of the host nation to declare the games open. So of course Hitler has to be there. At the same time, one didn't need to show him later on watching the events. There's also a lot of shots of German athletes and spectators giving the Nazi salute to the German flag at various times. During the medal ceremony and anthem playing that's understandable. 90 years on, people are going to be a bit uncomfortable with other shots of it.

All in all, Olympia deserves to be remembered as a movie that introduced a lot of ground-breaking techniques to the coverage of sport, even if it will also always be remembered for director Leni Riefenstahl's involvement with Adolf Hitler.

Who Killed Teddy Bear?

Another of the movies that's showing up on TCM and sitting on my DVR is the 1960s exploitation piece Who Killed Teddy Bear, which will be on TCM tomorrow, February 6, at 6:15 PM. As is always the case, when one of these movies comes up, I make a point of watching it so that I can do the post like this on the film.

The movie starts with a man, face unseen, but with a fairly fit body and wearing just a pair of tighty-whities, making an obscene phone call to poor Norah Dain (Juliet Prowse). Meanwhile, we learn about the titular teddy bear, which comes about when a young girl named Edie Sherman (played as an adult by Margot Bennett) saw her brother Lawrence (Sal Mineo) having sex with someone, which scarred her emotionally and caused her to fall down the stairs, leaving her a brain-damaged adult.

Norah and Lawrence both work at a discotheque run by Marian Freeman (Elaine Stritch) that plays the sort of upbeat pop music that was all the vogue in the 1960s. Norah works as a hostess and playing records, while Lawrence is a busboy. Norah tells Marian about the phone calls, which brings the police into the case, in the form of Lt. Madden (Jan Murray). Madden is a piece of work himself. He's got a young daughter, but no longer has a wife, as the wife was raped and killed some years back. This led Madden to start doing his own independent research on what causes men to become the sort of sex maniac who would make such obscene phone calls or even go further. But, the way he does the research makes you think it's much more than just a professional interest and that he might be about to become one of the criminals he claims to be railing against. Indeed, higher-ups in the police have noticed.

The incident that left little Edie brain-damaged, and forced Lawrence to become her guardian after their parents died, has also saddled poor Lawrence with a lot of guilt in addition to an inability to have a normal relationship with a woman, to the point that he goes to the sort of adult establishments that dotted the streets just off Times Squares in the era before the place was cleaned up and Disneyfied. Meanwhile, the calls to Norah keep coming, so Marian offers to spend the night at Norah's apartment. However, Marian does something Norah considers a sexual advance, and kicks Marian out. But the man pursuing Norah mistakes Marian for Norah since Marian is wearing Norah's coat, and follows Norah and kills her!

Eventually, for the movie's climax, Norah offers to teach Lawrence how to dance. Lawrence reveals his feelings for Norah but, due to his being emotionally stunted, is completely unable to express his feelings in a healthy way.

Who Killed Teddy Bear is an incredibly sleazy movie considering the star power on offer here. That makes it interesting. Unfortunately, as an actual narrative movie it's not quite so good. The story is kind of a mess and it's really not that difficult to figure out who's making those calls to Norah. But the sleaze that makes it interesting also makes it worth a watch.

Un esercito di 5 uomini

Another of the movies that I had on my DVR that I wanted to watch before it expired was one that, unknown to me at the time, is a spaghetti western: The Five Man Army. At the time I recorded it, I only noticed the name of Peter Graves in the screen guide description, but when you watch the opening credits and several of the Italian names show up, it's fairly obviously a spaghetti western.

As I metioned, Peter Graves is the nominal star here, although he's not the first one we see. In a Mexican village in 1914 during the revolution, Luis Dominguez (Nino Castelnuovo) shows up where the authorities are registering men for work permits. Luis has a past, as we later learn, as a bank robber, and so as not to be found out, he takes another man's identity. Luis is then offered a job by a "Dutchman" (Peter Graves).

That job is a heist which is going to require a team of people with various abilities, so in fitting with the formula of a heist movie, we get a series of scenes of the Dutchman finding the right people for the job, all of whom are known to him while they don't know each other. Mesito (Bud Spencer) is a mountain of a man who rustled a rail car of cattle, only to make the mistake of trying to sell them back to their original owner. Mesito also thinks a lot about food, a sort of running joke throughout the movie. There's also the Dutchman's old comrade-in-arms Augustus (James Daly), who is needed because he's the explosives expert. Finally, there's the mysterious "Samurai" (Tetsuro Tamba), who somehow wound up in the US and is good with knives. I don't know if the producers thought Tamba's English wasn't good enough, but there's a conceit written into the script that Samurai is a taciturn man who only speaks when he needs to, and I don't think Samurai has an actual speaking line in the entire movie.

After the five men get together and escape the Mexican authorities again, they learn what the mission is for which Dutchman has assembled them. There's that revolution going on, and the revolutionaries need money. The legitimate Mexican government is shipping a bunch of gold by rail, so as always, why not hijack one of these rail shipments and give the gold to the revolutionaries? Each of them has separately been promised good pay for the work.

Now, the train has a whole bunch of soldiers guarding it, both on open cars and in the one sealed car that actually has the gold. Samurai is good at throwing knives to kill people silently; while Augustus has the explosives knowledge necessary to get into the car with the gold. And Mesito has a key role not on the train. The plan is to unhook that car and shunt it to an abandoned barn; Mesito has to lay a bit of track and operate the switch. And Dominguez, who was in a circus acrobat act before his parents' deaths broke up the act and forced him into a life of crime to make ends meet, is going to rehook the other cars together.

As often happens in heist movies, there are things in the buildup and execution of the heist that threaten to derail it, pun intended. And, of course, even if the heist does go off as planned, it's not unexpected that criminals might wish to get greedy over how much they're going to get paid for it. So with all that, it's not really as though The Five Man Army is breaking any new ground. And yet the road it takes is more than entertaining enough. It's not the world's greatest movie, in part because there's something about the spaghetti western genre's production values that always seems just a bit off. Also, in part because of the cinematography that screams late 1960s with its pans and zooms. But there's more in The Five Man Army that works than doesn't.

The Curse of Frankenstein

Tonight's second night of Bugs Bunny shorts includes a trio of monster/mad scientist-inspired entries in the 1:00 AM half hour. That will be followed by a couple of horror features, including The Curse of Frankenstein at 3:00 AM. Fortunately, I had that one on my DVR from when John Carpenter selected it in last year's Two for One series, so I was able to watch it to do this review.

Frankenstein is, as always, not the monster (called the "Creature" in this movie), but Dr. Victor Frankenstein, who created the Creature. Here, Victor Frankenstein is played by Peter Cushing, and as the movie opens, he's in a Swiss prison awaiting execution. As you might guess, this is going to lead to a flashback in which the main story is told, to a visiting priest.... (I suppose the other plot device could have involved Dr. Frankenstein escaping prison.)

Flash back to when Victor was an adolescent. His father has been dead for some time and now his mother dies, leaving Victor a fairly substantial estate in addition to the Baron title he's already had. His mom's sister shows up together with her daughter, ie. Victor's cousin Elizabeth (the adult Elizabeth being played by Hazel Court). Apparently Mom had given her sister a modest allowance, and she'd like that to continue, although this scene is more a way to introduce the Elizabeth character. Victor being on his own but still a legal minor, needs an adult, and hires a tutor in Paul Krempe (Robert Urquhart).

Krempe proceeds to teach Victor everything he knows about the sciences, and Victor is an adept learner. Victor seems particularly interested in the relatively new field of electricity and what sort of energy animates life-forms. This first bit of experimentation culminates in bringing a dog back to life, which is a pretty neat trick. As you might guess from a Frankenstein movie, however, things aren't going to stop there, and Victor wants to go much farther than Krempe would like, leading Krempe to feel a sense of alarm. Worse, Victor builds his human for the experimentation by obtaining various body parts in highly illicit ways, up to and including murder of an aging professor.

Adult Elizabeth shows up with the intention of marrying her cousin, but Krempe wants her to leave the house right away because he believes she's in danger. Indeed, when Victor kills the professor for the professor's brain, Krempe gets in an argument with him that damages the brain. So when Victor's creature (played by Christopher Lee) comes to life, it's brain-damaged and sociopathic, with a propensity to kill.

The Curse of Frankenstein tells the story of Frankenstein's monster in a very different way from the 1931 Frankenstein with Bela Lugosi. This version focuses on Victor as an openly malevolent person, and that's a take which I think serves the story quite well. This was one of the earliest Hammer horror films, and was extremely successful, which led to all those future Hammer horror movies. Cushing is very good, while Lee doesn't exactly have a whole lot to do here since he doesn't show up in the first half of the movie and doesn't have any lines anyway. If you haven't seen The Curse of Frankenstein before, it's an excellent way to kick off the Hammer horror films.

The Gauntlet

Another of the movies that's been sitting on my DVR for a while that I decided to watch is The Gauntlet.

Clint Eastwood stars as Ben Shockley. During the opening credits, a car is driving through the streets of downtown Phoenix early enough that although the sun is up, there's no traffic on the road. Parking near police headquarters and getting out is police detective Shockley, who drops his bottle of booze getting out of the car, which is a sign that Ben is an alcoholic. Ben runs into his friend and former detective partner Maynard Josephson (Pat Hingle), who warns Ben that Commissioner Blakelock (William Prince), who wants to see Ben, would like to see someone who's polite and polished, things that Ben clearly isn't.

Commissioner Blakelock has a special assignment for Ben. Apparently, there's a trial to be held in Phoenix, Arizona v. Deluca, and one of the witnesses, Gus Mally, is in Vegas. So the Arizona authorities need somebody to go to Vegas and pick up Mally, who is fortunately in the county jail awaiting extradition to Phoenix. Since this isn't much of a job and Shockley is supposedly not much of a cop, he can be spared the day or so it's going to take. Shockley flies to Vegas and asks the duty officer at the jail if they have a man named Gus Mally ready for extradition to Arizona. They don't: the reason is that Gus is actually Augustina Mally (Sondra Locke), making her a woman. She's also one who obviously doesn't want to go to Phoenix.

We fairly quickly learn that it's with good reason she doesn't want to be extradited. Because she's tried to make herself sick, an ambulance takes her to the car that Shockey is going to take her to the airport with. But when they get to the transfer point, the ambluance driver starts the car only to reveal it's been booby-trapped with a car bomb! And somebody from the Mob is following them as they try to get away in the ambulance. They take the ambulance to Gus' house just outside of Vegas, and Shockley calls Blakelock to get the Vegas police to send a car so they can get to the airport. Instead, the Vegas police send an entire divison of man who shoot up the house!

Gus has various reasons for why the Mob would be after her, but it seems the police want her dead too, and Shockley has no idea why, in part because Gus, who doesn't want to testify, still doesn't trust him. But whoever is after Gus seems to be after Shockley too. Gus, not being stupid, has a feeling that perhaps it might have been Blakelock himself who tipped off the Vegas police as to her and Shockley's whereabouts. Shockley doesn't seem to be able to put two and two together, at least not until they reach the Nevada/Arizona border and find the Arizona cops sent by Blakelock seem to have been sent there to kill him. Still, having escaped yet again, Shockley is compelled to get Gus to Phoenix, in part because he wants to show the world Blakelock's corruption, and in part because the Mob is wagering on whether Gus will make it to Phoenix to testify.

The Gauntlet is another entertaining action movie in the 1970s style, although this again means one of those movies where you're kind of going to have to shut your brain off and just enjoy the ride because the movie is as riddled with plot holes as it is with bullets. I'm sure you all know my thoughts about police corruption, but at the same time I find it hard to believe that a commissioner could make a few phone calls and suddenly every policeman would shoot first and ask questions later. And how come none of this stuff seemed to make the news? And why is every sniper such a terrible shot? But as I said, sit back and watch without too critical an eye. I think you'll be entertained.

TCM's Sorta Star of the Month, February 2026

Bugs Bunny in What's Opera, Doc? (Feb. 2, 8:20 PM)

We're into the start of a new month on TCM, which normally means it's time for new programming features including a Star of the Month. However, the Academy Awards are on Sunday, March 15 this year, which means that 31 Days of Oscar is beginning on February 13 so that the final day of it will fall on the same day as the Oscars, so only the first half of February (and then the second half of March, which as far as I know has not had a schedule release yet) have the more traditional themes.

Having said that, there have been years where TCM programmed something like the Star of the Month differently, but doing prime time every night for a whole week. John Wayne and Katharine Hepburn both had their centenaries in the same month (May 2007), and TCM gave each of them a different week in that month. This month, TCM is doing something similar yet different. To celebrate getting the rights to the Looney Tunes (and I think Merrie Melodies and earlier) cartoons back, TCM is honoring Bugs Bunny as their "Star of the Month".

Of course, most of what Bugs Bunny appears in is one-reel shorts, and I don't think there are enough shorts that TCM could run entire nights of prime time with them. So, instead, TCM has picked trios of Bugs Bunny shorts that have something thematic in common, and then paired those shorts with a traditional movie that also fits the theme. Tonight's opening theme has Bugs with Elmer Fudd, and since two of the shorts are the classic opera shorts Rabbit of Seville and What's Opera, Doc?, the movie at 8:30 PM is the Marx Brothers film A Night at the Opera. It goes on like this all week.

NB: Tuesday night opens with three desert shorts, and currently the 1939 version of Beau Geste comes on at 8:30 PM. The TCM schedule lists it as 120 minutes with the next set of Bugs shorts to begin at 10:30 PM, which would obviously clash considering that there should be an intro and outro. Wikipedia and IMDb, however, both list Beau Geste as running 112 minutes. (It's been ages since I've seen it, so I don't recall the running time, or whether that might have changed due to any restoration.)

For some values of "mad" and some values of "youth"

A lot of the Poverty Row B movies can be fun to watch in part because they're so nuts, but also because they're so short: if you don't like them, it's not as if you've wasted too much of your time. Recently I watched another such movie, the exploitation frilm Mad Youth.

The "youth" in question is Marian Morgan, played by Mary Ainslee, who was about 25 when the movie was made but playing about 18. (There's no shots of high school, but Marian is considered old enough to marry without parental consent.) She lives with her divorcée mother Lucy (Betty Compson), both of them surviving on the money they get from the ex-husband, which is presumably substantial, since she can call up the "escort" service and get them to send a date of sorts over to accompany her to her bridge game. Mom wants Marian to go over to her friend Helen's house to spend the night, but Marian is horrified: Helen lives with an incredibly old-fashioned granny.

So as a compromise, Marian is allowed to invite her "good" friends over, although of course her friends are the sort who enjoy entertaining themselves in a way that's scandalous for 1939 but fairly tame today. They dance the jitterbug, while some play strip poker! Eventually Mom comes home with her companion, the "Count" DeHoven. Apparently he's supposed to be a young, dashing sort of count, because Marian immediately falls for him and start dating, which really pisses off Mom who is still trying to pass herself off as 28.

The Count and Marian start double dating on the sly with Helen and one of her boyfriends that she's not serious about, since she's been corresponding with a man she's never actually seen before. Eventually we learn that Helen has been climbing out the window to get away from Grandma, who herself figures out what's going on. So Helen decides that she's going to run off and elope, since the alternative is to go live with her uncle on a farm in Iowa. Yeah, the plot, such as it is, gets nuts. And it's only going to get more nuts.

Marian's mom reads Marian's diary, where she learns about the dates Marian has been going on with the Count, as well as learning of Marian's disappointment that the Count just ghosts her for reasons, not that they used the term "ghosting" back in 1939. Marian decides to go off to visit her friend Helen, only to find that Helen is not in fact married but that the correspondence dating was in fact a front for "white slavery"!

Fortunately, the story ends more or less happily, with the young people learning a valuable moral lesson, which was theoretically the point of a movie like Mad Youth. In fact, the real point was to try to slip in as much luridness as they could get away with while making that point. In the case of Mad Youth, it's actually a pretty tame movie by the standards of 2026. But it's some of the attempts to be shocking that are fun, as Mad Youth is a fairly ridiculous movie. The highlight is probably the nightclub "bull fight", with the matador basically made up like a clown and a dog with bull horns acting as the bull and "goring" the matador in the groin on multiple occasions. It's so off the wall that it's fun.

Also, Mad Youth only runs 63 minutes, so if you don't care for it, well, it's not as if you would have been doing something useful with that hour of your life, is it? I've seen much worse.

Mrs. O'Malley and Mr. Malone

Some time back TCM did a prime-time spotlight on some of the films of Marjorie Main. One that I had seen quite a few years back, but did not blog about at the time -- it might even have been before I started blogging -- was Mrs. O'Malley and Mr. Malone. So with that in mind I recorded it and eventually got around to watching it so that I could do this post on it.

Marjorie Main plays Mrs. Hattie O'Malley, a widow living in Proudfoot, MT and running some sort of boarding house; the Montana setting at the start is basically an excuse for Main to do a version of the rustic Ma Kettle character. She gets a sudden call from a radio program in New York which plays her a mystery song for a chance to win a cash and prize package of $50,000, which is a pretty darn big sum for 1950 when the movie was released. She's able to recognize the song, and she's invited on an all-expenses paid trip to New York to receive her winnings.

Cut to Chicago, where John J. Malone (James Whitmore) lives. He's a struggling lawyer, who owes a bunch of money largely because his big client, Steve Kepplar (Douglas Fowley), owes him. Malone had defended Kepplar on an embezzlement charge where Kepplar stole $100K from the firm run by Myron Brynk (Don Porter). Kepplar was convicted, but is about to be paroled now, and Malone would like the money he's owed for his services defending Kepplar. But Malone needs to get in line: Kepplar has an ex-wife Connie (Ann Dvorak) who wants alimony. And, besides, that $100K was never returned to the Brynk business. Still, Brynk offers Kepplar his old job back and to celebrate, they'll go to the same hotel lounge where Mrs. O'Malley is staying on a stopover in Chicago. This, as you can guess, is how the two title characters meet.

Kepplar is a no-show at the big reunion, and the natural suspicion is that he's fleeing the jurisdiction, and absconding with the $100K. His probation officer, Marino (Fred Clark), has good reason to believe that Kepplar is on the train to New York, so he gets on the same train that Mrs. O'Malley will be taking. Malone also gets on the train because he wants his $10,000, even though he should know that the money Kepplar embezzled can't be touched. The ex-Mrs. Kepplar shows up too.

Sure enough, Kepplar is on the train, disguised as a sailor and hiding in the compartment of his girlfriend Lola (Dorothy Malone). But wouldn't you know it, that night Malone returns to his compartment, which conveniently enough for the plot happens to be right next to Mrs. O'Malley's. In that compartment he finds... the undressed body of Steve Kepplar, who has been stabbed to death! Who would want to stab him, and why would the murderer want to remove his clothes? All Mr. Malone knows is that since the body was found in his compartment he's going to be the prime suspect. Mrs. O'Malley sees Malone and the body, and is willing to help in a murder mystery.

Mrs. O'Malley and Mr. Malone is another of those movies where it's easy to see why the people involved in it would want to make it; the premise of another comic murder mystery is one that has obvious appeal. Unfortunately, this one comes across as a bit too manic. Worse, Mr. Malone is just too dishonest to be a sympathetic character, as opposed to a charming person like Nick Charles. I also think it doesn't help that 1950, when the movie was released, was just about the time when stories like this would have started moving to television. So Mrs. O'Malley and Mr. Malone was underwhelming at best.

Glenn Holland's journey

Every year, TCM's 31 Days of Oscar serves up some "newer", at least in the context of TCM, movies, that I haven't necessarily seen before. One such movie that's 30 years old now and that I hadn't seen is Mr. Holland's Opus. So, as always, I recorded it and eventually got around to watching it and putting up this review here.

Richard Dreyfuss stars as Glenn Holland. As the movie opens, it's the start of the 1964 school year and Glenn is a young musician and would-be composer. However, as any musician or composer would tell you, trying to make a living doing either of those things is difficult, so a lot of college music majors go on to take jobs teaching music. (My sister is an example: some years back she went to a college reunion which included questions about what jobs in music the assembled graduates had; by far the most people stood up for "being a music teacher". She still gives music lessons.) Dreyfus is taking a job at Kennedy High School in Portland, Oregon under principal Helen Jacobs (Olympia Dukakis). Jacobs is understanding, while taking a much more businesslike attitude is her vice-principal, Gene Wolters (William H. Macy).

Mr. Holland teaches his students the basics of music, while trying to compose a symphony at home with his young loving wife Iris (Glenne Headly) and becoming friends with the gym teacher, Bill Meister (Jay Thomas). Mr. Holland teaches a bunch of different types of students, many of whom aren't very good at music, such as clarinetist Gertrude Lang, or a kid who needs a credit to be able to stay on the football and wrestling teams. Mr. Holland resorts to unorthodox methods, such as showing how pop tunes of the day are often taken from classical themes. This causes trouble with Mr. Wolters, which is going to be a recurring theme throughout the movie. Mr. Holland's story focuses on about three or four stints during his career, with montages showing the intervening years for the skipped-over years at school, although all the major historical events show up.

At home, Glenn knocks up Iris, who eventually gives birth to their son Cole. When Cole is about a year old, there's a parade where Glenn is leading the marching band and Iris and Cole are watching. A fire engine sounds its extremely loud horn, causing everybody to cover their ears -- except poor little Cole, who doesn't even cry. Tests at the doctor's office reveal that Cole has lost 90% of his hearing. Having a deaf kid is tough for any parent, but for a man whose whole life is music, it seems even worse, and a large part of the movie also deals with Glenn's consistently estranged relationship with his son, with Dad not even bothering to learn American Sign Language properly. Things finally start to change, however, when John Lennon gets killed and Cole reveals he knows fully well who Lennon was and what his impact on popular culture is.

And then we get to the present day. Schools are facing increasing budget pressures, although the movie doesn't mention how much of this is due to prioritizing the needs of "special needs" students, instead taking a 1990s-standard view that schools are chronically underfunded. Jacobs had retired many years back, so for the last 15-plus years the principal has been Mr. Wolters. He takes this chance to cut the school's arts and music programs, which is going to cost Mr. Holland his job. Is Mr. Holland going to get a chance to live happily ever after?

My title for this blog post references an old Lionel Barrymore movie called One Man's Journey. I can forgive the writers and everyone else involved with Mr. Holland's Opus for not knowing that movie since it was one of the RKO movies that Merian Cooper gained the rights to and was out of circulation for some 40 years by the time Mr. Holland's Opus was made. TCM got the rights to it in about 2005, and it tells the story of a doctor (Barrymore) who spends 30 years ministering to the poor people of a small midwestern town, sacrificing his chance at a prestigious research career. At the end, Barrymore's doctor gets a celebration of his career in a very sentimental finale. Mr. Holland's Opus, however might outdo One Man's Journey with its own mawkish ending. And that is part of why so many of the reviews I read had issues with Mr. Holland's Opus. It's a well-acted movie, but boy is the plot formulaic and the ending incredibly sappy.

Reckless

Another of the movies that TCM ran during Mickey Rooney's turn as TCM's Star of the Month because it had a small juvenile role for Rooney is Reckless.

Rooney is obviously not the star here; he only gets about one scene. The male lead is William Powell. Powell plays Ned Riley, a professional gambler and promoter. As the movie opens, an old lady is coming out of his office. That's Granny (May Robson), who is not Ned's grandmother but the grandmother of Broadway star Mona Leslie (Jean Harlow), who at this point is as well known for the antics she's getting into off-stage as well as what she does on stage. Granny is there to ask for Ned's help in getting Mona bailed out of jail. We also learn that Ned has known Mona since she was a kid, and has done some behind-the-scenes help in making Mona famous.

Ned is able to get Mona out of jail under extenuating circumstances, which is that she leave to go to a theater where she's going to perform a charity function. That's a ruse, but not on Ned's part. Insted, the "charity" in question is the "Society for the Admiration of Mona Leslie", which has one member: Bob Harrison (Franchot Tone). Bob is one of those idle rich playboys whose using his wealth in all the wrong ways, much to the consternation of his father (Henry Stephenson). Even though Ned has secretly always loved Mona, he's not going to try to stop Bob from pursuing Mona. Bob keeps taking Mona out on his yacht, and the two have nice times together. Ned finally works up the courage to tell Mona how he really feels about her, only to find out that she's fallen asleep.

And then Bob and Mona get incredibly drunk and run out of town to get married somewhere where nobody will find them, except that of course the press does find them as well as a bunch of Bob's friends and family who send them telegrams, including one from a Jo. The new couple rushes back to the Harrison home, where Mona meets Jo (Rosalind Russell). Jo has been Bob's nominal fiancée for quite some time, but it feels like another of those upper-crust relationships where the older generation just knows which families should be brought together for the next marriage. Bob likes Jo as a friend, and Jo is a decent person who likes Mona. (Mona, for her part, is trying to be a decent person, although her reputation precedes her.)

At this point, the movie really starts taking a turn. Jo gets married, Bob gets drunk enough to start thinking that perhaps he should have married Jo all along, and Mona finds out that Bob's been letting this on to Jo. She's also gotten pregnant with Bob's kid. Eventually, a drunk Bob winds up in Ned's hotel apartment, finds Ned's gun, and shoots himself in a way that everybody in the public thinks Mona is responsible, to the point that she should be forced to give custody of the kid to the Harrisons.

Reckless is an odd little movie because of the way it changes tone in the middle of the movie from what seems like a light romantic triangle comedy into a fairly ridiculous melodrama. A lot of people have criticized the casting of Jean Harlow as not being right for the role, and Harlow herself wasn't sure. Harlow does her best, as do everybody else. And the problems with Reckless aren't really because of the casting of Harlow. Instead, I think the problems it has are down to the script, which really is a mess as it veers from one act of the plot to the next. The comic parts are better than the melodrama, with May Robson shining.

Still, Reckless is interesting to watch to see as the sort of misfire a studio could have when it used its contract players in the wrong way.

MGM's Historical Mysteries

After my recent post on God's Little Acre, I watched a short from the late 1930s titled Captain Kidd's Treasure. This is billed in the opening credits as "An MGM Historical Mystery" which, for some reason, I thought was another series headed up by Carey Wilson who did MGM's Nostradamus shorts that I've mentioned in the past. In fact this was a completely different series, and Wilson was mostly a writer and sometime producer.

This being a 10-minute short, there's not much here. William Kidd was a privateer, working to keep pirates away from the American colonies, especially New York. But in the late 1690s he fell afoul of the British authorities, most likely for political reasons. He was eventually hanged for this, but before his hanging he wrote a letter claiming to have buried some of the loot he had stolen and would hand over the loot to the Crown in exchange for his freedom. He was hanged anyway. But the legend of the buried treasure remained.

Fast forward to the 1930s, and the framing story for this short has an adventurer who has what he says is a map highlighting the location of Kidd's buried treasure. But, this adventuree doesn't have the money or ship he needs to mount a voyage to the specific location on the map. That's why he's asking a couple of wealthy men if they'd fund the expedition in exchange for a share of the proceeds, since this was before the days where governments arrogated such finds to themselves.

Now, you'd think that with Kidd having been dead for well over 200 years by this point, somebody would have found any treasure buried on land, especially if there were a record in the form of a map. And, unsurprisingly, one of the two rich guys is extremely skeptical. The other one, however, seems more open to listening. The short, apart from the framing story, is a vehicle for each of these three men expounding a theory of what might actually have happened to any theoretical treasure that Kidd might have had, as well as to exactly how Kidd fell afoul of the authorities. These are accompanied by original (as far as I can discern) film with Stanley Andrews playing Capt. Kidd.

There's really not much here, and what there is isn't particularly good. A longer film version of the Kidd story might have been more interesting, and indeed several years later we'd get a film called Captain Kidd with Charles Laughton as the privateer. I'm not certain whether I've seen that one. For some reason I think I have but a search of the blog says I haven't done a post on it.

There were about 10 of these MGM Historical Mysteries made in the late 1930s; I don't think the Warner Archive has compiled them together and put them on a box set. Frankly, other film series are much more interesting.

TCM's Rob Reiner tribute

Actor-turned director Rob Reiner was killed back in December at the age of 78, and it's time for TCM to do their programming tribute to Reiner. That tribute is in prime time tonight, and includes four of the movies Reiner directed:

8:00 PM The Princess Bride
10:00 PM When Harry Met Sally...
Midnight Stand By Me
1:45 AM This Is Spinal Tap

When I downloaded the monthly schedule, there was still a blank space between This Is Spinal Tap and the "following" movie, The Lost Patrol at 4:45 AM. That blank spot was subsequently filled by The Song Remains the Same at 3:15 AM which is not a Rob Reiner movie. The Song Remains the Same is 137 minutes, which means that The Lost Patrol was removed from the schedule.

I also have to admt that I have yet to see The Princess Bride, so I'm recording that one and will eventually get around to watching it and writing up a review here. I will probably also record Stand By Me; that's one of those movies that I saw ages ago, long before this blog, and haven't seen since, so I've never actually considered blogging about it before.

God's Little Acre

One of those movies that I had seen part of some time back on TCM but never actually watched in full was God's Little Acre. With that in mind, the last time TCM ran it I made it a point to record it so that I could finally watch it in full and do the requisite post on it here. Well, having gotten around to watching it before it expired from the DVR, it's time to write up the review.

Ty Ty Walden (Robert Ryan) is a farmer living in one of those dirt-poor parts of the South in the era that led Variety to write the famous headline "Stix Nix Hick Pix". Or, I suppose you could say he was a farmer since he hasn't been growing anything for quite some time. Instead, he's convinced that his grandfather buried a treasure in gold somewhere on the land and, dammit, Ty Ty is going to find that gold so the family can live on easy street. With that in mind, Ty Ty has been enlisting the aid of two of his sons who still live with him: Buck (Jack Lord), who is married to Griselda (Tina Louise); and Shaw (Vic Morrow). Also living with Ty Ty is a daughter, Darlin' Jill (Fay Spain).

Jill, at least, has a bit of hope to get off the farm and slightly escape this bizarre family dynamic. Visiting the house is sheriff's candidate Pluto Swint (Buddy Hackett, interestingly cast as a sweaty southerner), who has some romantic interest in Jill, although who knows how he's going to make a living if he's not elected sheriff. Having done a slightly better job escaping is daughter Rosamunda (Helen Westcott). She married Will Thompson (Aldo Ray), who worked at the local cotton mill. Unfortunately, that mill has been closed for several months now, putting everybody out of a job. Will, having little hope of a better life, has taken to drink. Not only that, but he's attracted to Griselda, which is a problem since both of them are married to other people.

You wonder how Ty Ty is able to survive financially, and the answer is that he can't really survive financially. And there's only one person he can turn to for help, who is the last of the sons, Jim Leslie (Lance Fuller). Jim got out of this dysfunctional family by marrying a wealthy woman and getting into the side of the cotton business that makes people rich since he seems to have a better head on his shoulders for that sort of thing. Not that he has a good head on his shoulders for dealing with his family, however. Once they all show up he gets sucked into the family dynamic that's threatening to spill over into violence.

Meanwhile, Will gets drunk enough that he decides he's going to reopen the cotton mill. This is, of course, not his decision to make, as he doesn't own the mill. It's going to highly illegal to break into the mill and turn the equipment on, and there are security people out to stop him. This is likely to lead to tragic consequences, although it's an epiphany for the rest of the family....

God's Little Acre was famously steamy upon its first release in 1958. By the standards of 2026, however, it's somewhat tame. It's based on a novel by Erskine Caldwell that's even more nuts because Caldwell had political statements he wanted to make and used the story as an allegory for those. The characters here are way over the top, and how much you like the movie is probably going to depend on how much you can accept these characters as a parody instead of a serious movie. Unfortunately, for me, the second half of the movie devolves into a bad attempt to be too serious, much like a Tennessee Williams play in that regard. On the other hand, it's interesting to see a bunch of people who would go on to bigger fame for their TV work in the near future. In addition to Tina Louise, Jack Lord, and Buddy Hackett, there's also Michael Landon as an albino who is brought to the Walden farm because of a folk belief that albinism gives one the power to find things underground.

I'm glad I finally checked God's Little Acre off my list, but it's a movie I don't know that I'll be revisiting any time soon.

Stealing Home

It feels a bit like TCM has been airing more 1980s movies in recent years. To be fair, all of these movies are over 35 years old now. In any case, one that I hadn't heard of before it showed up on TCM was Stealing Home. Having seen it now, I can see why I hadn't heard of it.

Mark Harmon plays Billy Wyatt, and as the movie opens he's doing groundskeeping work for one of those independent minor league baseball teams. He mentions that just six months earlier, his life was a mess as he was living in a motel with a waitress. He's informed that his mother is calling him on the pay phone just outside, and she has a message for him: a name from the past, Katie Chandler, has blown her brains out. Rather strangely, Katie left a last will and testament stipulating that she wished to be cremated and that her ashes be given to Billy, who would know what to do with them.

Flash back to when Billy was about 10 years old. His parents go the same place every year for their anniversary, and have hired the neighbors' teenage daughter Katie (Jodie Foster) to baby-sit Billy, who is a big baseball fan. Katie is a bit of a free spirit and takes Billy from his home in one of the Main Line suburbs of Philadelphia to the Jersey shore where her family has a vacation house. Katie also gives Billy baseball pendant, reminding him he's always a baseball player.

Fast-forward to about 16 years of age. It's the spring, and the big baseball game of the season. Teenaged Billy (played by William McNamara) and his best friend Alan Appleby (Jonathan Silverman) are on their private school baseball team together, and Billy wins the game by stealing home plate, a relatively rare feat in the sport. Billy is also approached by a scout for the Philadelphia Phillies. This enables them to get home, where Billy is supposed to do a favor for Alan by telling young Robin Parks, who lives closer to Billy, that Alan would like to take her to the prom. Unfortunately, Robin says that she's been in love with Billy for years, and the two wind up having sex togeether. Even more unfortunate is that Billy's father gets in a fatal car crash that night. Billy thinks about giving up baseball forever.

The Wyatts go over to the summer house that the Chandlers have, together with Katie (but seemingly not her parents) and Alan in tow. Alan has the stirrings of a sexual experience by engaging in voyeurism with an older woman who is renting another beach house and is actually teasing Alan because she knows he's watching. Billy has a falling out with Katie, who has also informed him that she's about to elope to Paris with some guy she barely knows. It turns out to be the last time Billy saw Katie.

We then return to the present day, where Billy isn't certain what to do with Katie's ashes, at least not until he goes to see Alan (Harold Ramis), who now owns a sporting goods store. The two relive their past in ways that are thoroughly illegal, in part because Katie's free spirit led her to take young Billy on some illegal adventures. It gives Billy ideas on what to do with Katie's ashes, although not all of the ideas are going to work out.

Critics at the time savaged Stealing Home, and I can see why. It's a pastiche of nostalgia tropes, combined with a whole lot of characters doing things that they would never do in real life. Frankly, one thing that shocked me considering this is Boomer porn (Billy would have been born about 1950, although the teenaged music references are all from the early 1960s) is that there's no reference to John F. Kennedy being shot. None of it works well, and the ending is mawkish. That would probably explain why this movie isn't well known today.

The Heat's On

Back in the spring of 2025, Mae West was honored as TCM's Star of the Month, even though she didn't make all that many movies. I didn't have much to record, in part because of a box set of hers that I have that has a lot of her stuff from Paramount and TCM's not showing her two 1970s movies. However, before decamping from Hollywood, West made one film at Columbia that was part of the salute: The Heat's On.

Mae West plays Fay Lawrence, the sort of Broadway star loosely based on West herself: for the grown-up audience, but doing the sort of show that some of the more prudish types would consider controversial. With changing times and it being World War II, however, the new show for producer Tony Ferris (William Gaxton) has been a box office flop, and Fay is thinkng of using a clause in the contract to get out of the show so she can do something with rival producer Forrest Stanton (Alan Dinehart) instead. Fay, frankly, is sick of Ferris and his bend-the-rules ways.

Wanting to see Ferris after the show is Hubert Bainbridge (Victor Moore). He works in the supply department of the Bainbridge Foundation, one of those famously prudish moral uplift societies reminiscent of the one Ezra Ounce in Dames a decade earlier was a part of. But Hubert doesn't actually run it; that job falls to his sister Hannah. The two of them have a niece Janey who has some musical and dance talent, and Hubert would like Ferris to give Janey an audition.

Ferris isn't pleased with this intrusion at first, until he realizes Hubert is from the Bainbridge Foundation and what they have a reputation for. The Bainbridge Foundation can get the show raided and shut down without Ferris having to pay off Fay's contract. And then, when Fay starts working with Stanton, Ferris sets about manipulating Hubert to get back at Stanton. Fortunately for Ferris, Hannah has gone off to Seattle for two months to preside over a conference of the foundation's western branch or something. Ferris sees how weak-willed Hubert is, and uses that to get Hubert to do all sorts of things that are dishonest at best and highly illegal at worst, which of course brings up the question of how Hubert is going to get out of this movie both satisfying the Production Code, and staying out of prison.

For most of this section of the movie, Fay is not really a part of the movie, at least not on screen. But then she learns that Ferris has used Hubert to get control of Stanton's musical that she's in, and she takes pity on Hubert and cooks up a scheme of her own to get back at Ferris and have a happy ending.

Having watched The Heat's On, I can see why Mae West got out of movies after this and why this one isn't very well remembered. If it hadn't starred Mae West, it's the sort of movie that would probably have a reputation for a second-tier movie designed to entertain the home front during World War II by not actually making much reference to the war. (Lloyd Bridges has an early role as a solder boyfriend to Janey, and Hannah is asked whether her trip to Seattle is really necessary, but that's about it.) Mae West is terribly underused and doesn't have the best one-liners her. Also, most of the music is forgettable, with the exception of Hazel Scott, the black pianist who is quite good.

The Heat's On is for Mae West completists only, I think. Well, maybe for Lloyd Bridges completists too.

TCM's Diane Keaton tribute

Diane Keaton (l.) and Woody Allen in Annie Hall (1977), 8:00 PM

Actress Diane Keaton died back in October at the age of 79. It's time for TCM to do its programming tribute to her. This one is a bit different in that a lot of the tributes are an entire night of prime time, or for people with enough movies, an entire 24 hours. Keaton, on the other hand, is getting a tribute starting tomorrow, January 25 at 12:30 PM after Noir Alley and continuing through the first two movies of prime time, concluding in time for TCM to run its normal Silent Sunday Nights and TCM Imports programming blocks. This is still enough time for TCM to run five of Keaton's movies:

12:30 PM Father of the Bride, the remake of the classic Spencer Tracy movie;
2:30 PM Reds, about journalist John Reed who went to the nascent Soviet Union to document the revolution;
6:00 PM Manhattan Murder Mystery, a Woody Allen comedy about, well, murder mystery;
8:00 PM Annie Hall, another of Keaton's collaborations with Allen, this time winning her an Oscar; and
10:00 PM Baby Boom, with Keaton becoming an unexpected adoptive mother and moving to Vermont.

Chelovek s kinoapparatom

I've got a couple of days coming up where TCM is running a programming salute worth mentioning. Usually, I want to supplement the post simply mentioning TCM's programming with another shortish post on a short film. With two such days in close succession, I decided to do a post on an experimental film instead: Man With a Movie Camera.

There's no plot here, in part because the movie's director, Dziga Vertov, believed that cinema was a medium for something completely new, meaning among other things eschewing movies with traditional narrative plots. The narrative here, if you want to try to call it that, is documenting "a day in the life" of a modern Soviet city as it was in the late 1920s. Except of course that this is not one day, nor is it even one city. Vertov decamped from Moscow to Ukraine which wasn't under quite as tight reins as Moscow was, and filmed in part in Kiev, Odessa, and Kharkov.

Also in terms of "narrative", the movie is divided into six chapters, which look sort of at different times of day as well as different parts of life. The first part, for example, is dedicated mostly to the morning. There's another section that juxtaposes a woman giving birth, another woman mourning her husband at a cemetery, and a man being taken by ambulance to a hospital. A third chapter looks mostly at sport.

But it's the juxtaposition if you will that's worth mentioning, because that's part of the main thrust of Vertov's work. Believing that cinema was a new art that should stand on its own, Vertov used all sorts of film techniques: slow motion, double exposures, time-lapse, running film in reverse, and on and on, to get the style he wanted. There's also a fair bit of breaking of the fourth wall as one of the two recurring characters in the movie is the man with the camera whom we see trying to get the shots while filmed by a second camera. This can include filming from a convertible, filming from the water, being suspended over a watercourse, and so on. This cameraman was in fact played by Vertov's younger brother Mikhail Kaufman, who was a noted cinematographer in his own right.

There are also several shots of the movie's editor, Vertov's real-life wife Elizaveta Svilova, as she engages in the editing process. The other self-referential part includes showing shots of what are various parts of a movie theater, presumably as the film that we are about to see is being premiered.

But do the avant-garde techniques in Man With a Movie Camera work? I can see people not liking it, and certainly critics of the day had issues with it. To be fair, however, Vertov's work was so new that contemporary critics had probably never seen anything like this before and wouldn't know what to make of it. Modern-day critics, on the other hand, go too far in praising Man With a Movie Camera solely (in my opinion) on the grounds that it is so different. Overall, it's mostly interesting although I can't blame anybody who finds Man With a Movie Camera a bit pretentious at times.

Twice in a Lifetime

A movie that TCM could easily have used for the "working class" spotlight this month is, instead, showing up on a Saturday evening. That movie is Twice in a Lifetime, which will be on tomorrow (Jan. 24) at 8:00 PM.

Gene Hackman stars as Harry Mackenzie, who works in a steel mill in a small town between Seattle and Tacoma, going home to a cramped house where he lives with his wife Kate (Ellen Burstyn) and two daughters. Helen (Ally Sheedy) is about to graduate high school and has a boyfriend Tim, while Sunny (Amy Madigan) is married to Keith (Stephen Lang) and has two children of her own. Keith is currently out of a job, which seems premised on the idea of the steel mill having something like the corrupt union in On the Waterfront based on a scene in which we see a foreman calling out who gets work that day, with Keith not being mentioned.

Harry is about to turn 50, which seems quite young to have two grandkids of the age he does, but don't bother yourself with that plot point. The whole family celebrates at the Mackenzie house. Kate doesn't really want to go out that night, but Harry's friends do, so Kate encourages Harry to go out to the local bar with his friends for a second birthday celebration. There's a new woman behind the bar, Audrey (Ann-Margret), and Harry's friends suggest that the two of them kiss since Harry's wife isn't there.

Something happens, and Harry and Audrey decide to meet up for a lunch. Harry then helps Audrey do some electrical work back at her apartment, and before you know it, the two of them are having an affair just because Harry wants a bit of excitement in his life. Kate isn't a bad person, but she just can't bring herself to put any sort of spark back into the marriage considering all the other stuff that's going on trying to keep a family going.

Anyhow, one day, one of Kate's gossipy friends happens to be driving through town and pulls up to a stop sign next to Harry and Audrey. She immediately suspects something is going on, and blabs it to Kate. Harry admits it to Kate, who isn't exactly happy but is relatively determined to go on with life. Sunny, for her part, is hysterically pissed, taking it out on anybody and everybody. Indeed, when Dad finally moves out of the house and into a Seattle apartment with Audrey, Sunny is the only one who doesn't want to give Dad a hug or shake his hand.

Kate, meanwhile, is left to rebuild her life, and with a bit of help from Sunny she starts breaking out of her shell, first by getting a job as a hairdresser and then by going to a Chippendales-type club. Helen, for her part, realizes that she's not going to be able to afford college with the family situation the way it is, so she's going to marry Tim and maybe try night school to get credits here and there. (Nowadays, of course, she could just try one of the online universities, but this was the mid-1980s.) It's the impending marriage that finally forces Dad to meet up with Mom again, but what sort of relationship if any are they going to be able to have going forward?

I think I'd agree with most of the other reviews that I read: Twice in a Lifetime is a well-acted movie. But it's one with a mess of a script in that there's not a whole lot going on and nobody's charcters get to be as fleshed out as they should be. Ann-Margret is also much too glamorous for her role, or maybe she should just have been glammed down the way Burstyn is (to very good effect). Also note that the print TCM ran last time was panned-and-scanned down from 1.85:1 to 4:3. Indeed, I wondered at first whether this was a TV movie. As it turns out, Amy Madigan received an Oscar nomination, so no, it's a genuine movie.

Bachelor Bait

I'm always up for Hollywood's B movies of the 1930s, even if they often turn out to be no great shakes. One that's interesting if uneven that I recorded off of TCM and recently watched off my DVR is Bachelor Bait.

The movie starts off with a prologue of sorts: Stuart Eriwn stars as William Watts, heading to his job as a clerk in the marriage license bureau of a typical-for-Hollywood big city of the early 1930s. A young couple who will have no further importance to the plot (the bride is played by Anne Shirley) are there before hours to elope, while William is right on time, because the boss is supposedly going to fire anyone who shows up to work late. Wouldn't you know it, but William's image-conscious colleague shows up an hour late, and when William tries on his co-worker's hat and cane, William is the one who gets fired for tardiness, which also makes no logical sense other than we need a way for William to be out of a job for the main plot.

Having been fired, William goes back to his apartment where his unemployed neighbor Cynthia (Rochelle Hudson) is mending his shirts. William decides he's going to go into business for himself as a sort of dating service, which is eventually going to be called "Romance Inc." With a little help from Cynthia, William takes out an ad in the paper: men, send me $5, and I'll find you a wife. When William goes to his post office box to get the mail, he finds he's been deluged with enough mail and $5 bills that he can open a swanky office. His taxi driver Van Dusen (Skeets Gallagher) is an out-of-work lawyer who goes to work for William, with Cynthia taking on the job of front-office secretary.

The business somehow immediately becomes a massive hit, which again makes no sense from a logical point of view but this is a depression-era fantasy of sorts so just roll with it. Showing up to Romance Inc. among others is the local political boss, Barney Nolan (Berton Churchill), who wants a piece of the action and is also certain this is a racket. So when William says no, he's not letting a political fixer in on the business, Barney sets about getting his hand-picked DA to trump up a crime. Also showing up is Allie (Pert Kelton), who is the former Mrs. Van Dusen from a brief marriage and now looking for five years' worth of alimony. But since she's an unmarried woman, she'd be a good candidate for Romance Inc. to marry off.

This point becomes important when an Oklahoma oil millionaire, Don Belden (Grady Sutton), writes in looking for a wife. Allie would be perfect for this, while the description of an ideal woman that William describes just happens to fit Cynthia. Apparently William is too stupid to realize how much Cynthia has the hots for him, so it's going to take the rest of the movie for the right people to wind up romantically paired with each other, as well as wrapping up the other plot points in a way that satisfies the Production Code.

Bachelor Bait has all the makings of a fun, zippy little B movie, but as I said at the beginning it's rather uneven. I think that's because the movie really should be a straight-up comedy, while large portions of it feel too much like a drama. The cast is workmanlike if not terribly memorable here. I suppose back in 1934 the audiences would have enjoyed this as a second feature for the few weeks it was in the feature, before going on to the next set of movies to come to their local picture palace. But there's a reason why Bachelor Bait is another of the largely forgotten movies.

Better than a Ben Mankiewicz podcast

TCM's schedule for tomorrow, January 22, is all six of the Hildegarde Withers mysteries followed by all four of the Margaret Rutherford Miss Marple movies, before prime time brings us another night of the films of Jean Arthur. I've actually got one film each from the two mystery series sitting on my DVR. But since I don't really feel like doing two mysteries in a row, today's post is going to be on The Plot Thickens, tomorrow at 11:00 AM.

We don't actually meet Hildegarde Withers for a good ten minutes or more. Instead, we get a starting scene in a park, with a woman calling up wealthy John Carter to say she want to meet him there. Carter, meanwhile, has a guest at home and some servants who would prefer the night off. There's the butler, Joe the chauffeur (a young Paul Fix two dozen years before The Rifleman), and Marie the maid who seems to be in romantic entanglements with both Joe and the butler. Everybody's out of the house when a mysterious figure comes out of the bushes in the park and shoots Carter dead during his assignation. But the body is only found the next day, with the investigation also finding a young couple, Bob (Owen Davis, Jr.) and Alice (Louise Latimer) having been at the park so they could be suspects.

It's up to police detective Piper (James Gleason) to solve this. Well, not quite of course. He's the boyfriend of teacher Hildegarde Withers, here played by ZaSu Pitts. Piper calls her up, and as usual she's excited to take part in another murder investigation, although not so excited to deal with incompetence beyond being able to sling acerbic quips at anybody she sees as not up to the task. This of course includes Piper, who is just as good at slinging those barbs back at Hildegarde. The Withers movies are as much about the interaction between Piper and Withers as they are about the mysteries.

In any case, during the investigation at Carter's house, Hildegarde finds a precious gem and learns that it had been stolen some years back in France. The New York police learn from their French counterparts that the man who had stolen it was recently freed from prison, so the assumption is that it might be the same man involved. This also shifts the action to an art museum, specificlly to the exhibit of the "Cellini Cup", an allegedly valuable Renaissance-era piece of fine silver work which also has a pearl hanging from it in one strategic spot. The two things are clearly related, but how is something that we're only going to learn in the final reel when the guilty parties are caught.

As I said, the Hildegarde Withers movies are as much about the relationship between her and Piper as they are about the actual plots. ZaSu Pitts does a good job here, although she doesn't come across quite as well as Edna May Oliver when it comes to striving for a classier attitude. Oliver could seemingly pull that off in her sleep, while Pitts feels a bit more like the Staten Islander types who would be the wives of New York cops. She's still funny, mind you, and the repartee and "mystery", such as the mystery is, do work, making The Plot Thickens an enjoyable entry in the series.

Catch-22

Many years ago when I was in high school, one of the books we read in English class one year was Joseph Heller's Catch-22. I had learned at that time that the novel had been adapted into a movie, although I hadn't seen it in part because in those days it wasn't quite as east to watch whatever classic movie you might want to. With that in mind, when TCM ran the film adaptation of Catch-22, I decided to record it so that I could finally watch the film and do a post on it.

The story revolves around Capt. Yossarian (Alan Arkan), a bombardier at one of the Americans' southern European air bases in the latter days of World War II after the invasion of Italy had already begun. Despite the romanticization of the flyboys, bombing runs were thoroughly unromantic and suffered from a high rate of mishaps. If you could get through 25 bombing runs you were lucky and could be rotated out, at least for the most part. Unfortunately for Yossarian and the fellow crews at his base, their commander, Col. Cathcart (Martain Balsam), keeps pushing the men further and further in attempt to win fame for himself. Every time it looks like crews are going to reach Cathcart's target, he ups the number of bombing raids they have to run.

Yossarian understandably wants to get out of going on these raids and get himself declared unfit to fly. There is, however, a catch. In theory, if you're insane, you would be declared unfit to fly. However, if you say you're crazy and that flying the missions is crazy, that's a sign that you are in fact quite sane, which means that you're pretty much never going to be declared unfit for service. This despite all the things Yossarian tries to do, such as showing up to inspection stark naked. None of it is going to get him out of service.

Meanwhile, other of the people around Yossarian have come up with their own ways of trying to get out of service. Capt. Orr (Bob Balaban) keeps crashing planes before he disspears over the Baltic. The base chaplain, Tappman (Anthony Perkins) pretty much no longer believes in any sort of God. And then there's Lt. Milo Minderbender (Jon Voight), who has a rather more extreme way of dealing with things. He's gone into the black market and become a sort of king of the black market, with all sorts of enterprises throughout the part of Italy the allies control. One wonders how he has any time to do his military service, and how nobody anywhere in the military hierarchy is willing to stop him.

Eventually, Col. Cathcart and his adjutant Lt. Col. Korn (Buck Henry) offer Yossarian a deal. We'll let you get out of flight service, and even recommend you for a promotion, but you have to do something for us, which is to give us all the credit and get us the publicity we crave. Will Yossarian knuckle under, or will he find some other way to cope?

I have to admit that I wasn't the biggest fan of the book version of Catch-22 when I was in high school. As a result, I'm also not the biggest fan of the movie version. There are going to be other people who like the book and not particuarly care for the fact that a lot of changes had to be made for the movie since the book is the sort of narrative it's difficult to make a movie out of. Many people, however, recognize this and think that the changes that Buck Henry (who wrote the screenplay in addition to taking on the role of Lt. Col. Korn) made mostly work. Indeed, author Joseph Heller himself did ultimately think Henry's working the novel worked for the film. There's also a whole of other stars that I haven't mentioned yet, notbaly Orson Welles as a general who shows up at the base.

Ultimately, I think that Catch-22 is the sort of movie you're going to want to watch for yourself and draw your own conclusions.

The Woman Racket

Quite some time back, TCM did a night mentioning the Moore brothers of silent film; all three of them appeared together in the 1929 movie Side Street. Another movie that aired, starring Tom Moore, was The Woman Racket. Since it sounded interesting and I'm always up for early talkies, I of course recorded it and eventually got around to watching it and writing up this post that I saved to post at a suitable distance from Side Street.

The Woman Racket was released at the beginning of 1930, which of course was right in the middle of the Prohibition era. And if you know your Hollywood movies of the time, the speakeasies that served alcohol also had gambling and or a floor show. Singing at one of these floor shows is Julia (Blanche Sweet). But wouldn't you know it, this just happens to be the night that the place gets raided by the authorities, forcing everybody to try to flee to keep the cops from nabbing them. Julia does the same, but she is in fact nabbed by one of the cops, Tom (Tom Moore).

Despite Tom's seeming to be an honest cop, he immediately falls for Julia and basically offers to keep her from being arrested if only she'll date him. And she's so willing not to be arrested that she's OK with becoming his girlfriend. It goes farther, and the two get married with Julia quitting her job at the speakeasy. It's only then that she learns that trying to be the wife of a cop, or more importantly on a cop's salary, isn't exactly a bed of roses.

Julia was used to having the better things in life considering how well she was paid at the club. Tom wants her to be happy, and scrimps and saves to buy Julia a stylish dress from the vintage clothing store. Julia, being bored out of her mind having to stay home while her husband pulls the night shift, decides she's going to put on that dress and pay a visit to her old stomping grounds. There, she finds that her old boss has gone into business with Chris (John Miljan), who is a fairly slimy dude. Tom discovers that Julia has gone out, and it's basically going to be splitsville as Julia wants to go back to work at the club.

Worse, Chris almost immediately starts trying to put the moves on Julia himself, even though she doesn't really want it. So she basically threatens Chris with the idea that she could go back to Tom and tell Tom that she's got the goods on Chris, who is much more intertwined with the underworld than her old boss was. Chris decides that he's got to do something about Julia, so he engineers a way to get her framed for murder. But will Julia fall for it?

The Woman Racket is an interesting enough little early talkie, although people who aren't the biggest fans of movies of this vintage may find the plot a little unbelievable. That, and the movie certainly does have technical weaknesses that aren't really the film's fault. Sweet does a good job and probably should have had more of a career in talkies. The Moore brothers were already beginning to get up there in years by the time sound came in, so it's not a surprise that they didn't become big talking picture stars. Miljan would go on for the next several year to play a bunch of elegant-looking but sleazy types and had a fairly long career as a character actor.

Briefs for January 18-20, 2026

Tomorrow is Martin Luther King Day here in the States, which as always means special, if not overly exciting, programming on TCM. This year isn't quite the parade of Sidney Poitier movies we've gotten in some years, and I don't think I see even one Harry Belafonte or Dorothy Dandridge appearance. There's also at least one totally new to me film, Uptight (1:30 AM Jan. 20) which, according to TCM's page on tomorrow's programming, is a reworking of the old John Ford film The Informer set against the civil rights movement instead of the Irish independence movement. Sounds interesting enough.

A warning as always that because of how far ahead I am in putting up posts here, I sometimes have to move stuff around when the new month's TCM schedule comes out and I see movies on my DVR that are on the new schedule. The February schedule is coming out in dribs and drabs, in part because of the way 31 Days of Oscar is being programmed this year. The Oscars will be handed out on Sunday, March 15, which means that to get to 31 days and have the final day coincide with the ceremony itself, the programming would begin on February 13 and we'd have half a month each for February and March fall in 31 Days of Oscar. In any case, I keep seeing movies come up that I'm going to need to watch and schedule posts for, which means re-scheduling stuff I've already put up. And since I generally try to avoid movies with the same star or in very close genres being scheduled too close together, I may be screwing that up.

It looks like the FXM Retro block is continuing to bring some new movies out of the vault, although for the most part I've seen them and done posts on them. The Shirley Temple vehicle Curly Top was the subject of a post back in July 2019, for example, while the Laird Cregar version of The Lodger can be seen again at 7:50 AM on January 20. A search of the blog claims I haven't actually done a full-length post on this one, despite the number of times I've mentioned it in passing, so I think I'll record it and then at some point do that full-length post. I'm also pleasantly surprised that the Retro block is still going, since it's been something like 13 years and I also would have thought it might go by the wayside when Disney obtained the Fox cable channels.

There's a couple of days of tribute programming coming up at the end of January, one for Diane Keaton and another for Rob Reiner; I'll be mentioning them again when the day actually comes. With 31 Days of Oscar not showing up until the middle of February there might actually be time for TCM to schedule a tribute to Brigitte Bardot as well, although from what I've currently seen there doesn't seem to be one yet. Then again, with all those foreign films, it might take longer for TCM to nail down the rights to what they can and cannot show.

The Secret Bride

Barbara Stanwyck was the TCM Star of the month back in early 2025, and surprisingly there were some of her films that I hadn't seen before. So I recorded a couple, and I think I'm getting to the last of the films from the tribute that I recorded. The movie in question is The Secret Bride.

Now, the marriage isn't a secret to the viewer, as it happens right at the beginning of the movie. Robert Sheldon (Warren William) is the Attorney General of an unnamed state, and he's run off to get eloped to Ruth Vincent (Barbara Stanwyck) right at the beginning of the movie. Part of the reason for the elopement is that Ruth is the adult daughter of the governor. After the wedding in front of a justice of the peace, Robert calls his office to tell them he'll be back soon. Picking up the phone is Robert's secretary/assistant Hazel Normandie (Glenda Farrell). She hands the phone to Dave Breeden (Douglass Dumbrille), who is Robert's chief investigator as well as Hazel's boyfriend. Dave tells Robert he's going to pick up somebody on a tip, but can't go into details over the phone.

Cut to a bank just as it's opening up. Being let in by the security guard is Willis Martin (Grant Mitchell). Willis is making a deposit of $10,000 in cash, but it's to the personal account that's not his, as we soon learn because he's picked up by the authorities -- that tip Dave mentioned obviously is about this deposit and both who it's from, and whose account is getting it. Willis is the executive assistant to one J.F. Holdstock, a businessman who was sent to prison on fiancial fraud crimes but was pardoned by the current governor. The clear implication is that the deposit will be seen as Holdstock having bribed the governor for the pardon. Worse is that not long after this, Holdstock is found dead of a suicide, which is an implicit admission of guilt.

Now, Sheldon is loyal to the governor, and knows that the governor didn't really engage in any wrongdoing. But there's a problem, which is that marriage to the governor's daughter. If that comes out, then nobody will believe the Attorney General is acting independently. Nowadays, a special prosecutor would be appointed and people would act like the special prosecutor is independent and unbiased. But they didn't have things like that back in the day.

It gets worse when Breeden comes to see Sheldon that evening. Sheldon has brought Ruth back to his place, and Hazel is working there as well. So when Breeden comes, Hazel goes out to the courtyard to meet him. In the courtyard, Breeden gets shot and killed! Now, we know that the angle he was shot from should exonerate Hazel, never mind the fact that we've seen it. I'd have thought that Breeden was shot from far enough away that Hazel wouldn't have had time to get into the position from which the shooter took the shot. But a small handgun that Hazel had purchased is found at the scene and is determined to be the murder weapon. So for these obvious reasons she's put on trial. Ruth saw what happened, too. But, if she were to testify, it would reveal that she's married to Robert, which would likely end his and the governor's careers because of that controversy over the apparent cash-for-pardon scheme.

The Secret Bride was released in December 1934, a few months after the Production Code really took effect, so you can guess that the good guys are going to win in the end. And the Ruth Vincent and Robert Sheldon characters are never portrayed as anything less than good. Maybe they're a bit naïve in the way they're acting, but they're clearly not on the take. So that's part of the flaw that The Secret Bride has. The movie has to get to a certain end, and the way it gets there and resolves all the plot issues is a bit too convoluted for its own good.

However, if you don't pay too close attention to the plot, you'll find that The Secret Bride is a fine example of the Warner Bros. programmer as it was in the mid-1930s. It's a brisk 64 minutes, and never stops moving -- and frankly never stops being entertaining either. It moves so fast that I can easily see audiences of the day not particularly caring about the plot holes, and remains worth a watch 90 years on.

Another spiral staircase

Christopher Plummer was honored back in August as part of TCM's Summer Under the Stars, which gave me the chance to record quite a few of his movies that I hadn't seen before. Among them was a 1975 version of The Spiral Staircase. According to the TCM schedule, it's appearing on TCM again in the early hours of the morning tomorrow (Jan. 18) at 4:30 AM. (It's theoretically possible the TCM schedule has an error and this could be the more famous 1946 version, but considering the following film stars Jacqueline Bisset as does the 1975 The Spiral Staircase, I'm presuming this is no mistake.)

The movie starts with neither Bisset nor Plummer; instead we get a blind woman walking someplace with her guide dog. It's the sort of urban landscape that involves going on a pedestrian walkway that goes under a roadway. This is as always the perfect sort of place for something untoward to happen, since the place is perpetually in shadow. And, sure enough, something does happen, which is the the poor woman gets shot to death with her poor guide dog standing watch over her until the police and coroners can come.

Cut to a shot of our heroine, Helen Mallory (Jacqueline Bisset). She's seeing a doctor whom you could be forgiven for thinking is also her husband. But she's really seeing him because she's lost her ability to speak for psychological reasons that are continually hinted at later in the film through vision-like flashbacks: she survived a house fire in which a little girl, presumably her daughter, died, with Mom unable to help her. But the big reason this and the opening scene murder fit together is that the murder is the latest in a series of murders that all have one thing in common. The murder victims all suffered from one disability or another. Being a mute (although not a deaf-mute; Helen can still hear just fine) is a disability too, so perhaps Helen should get out of the city for a while.

Thankfully, Helen's grandmother, Mrs. Sherman (Mildred Dunnock), lives out in a suitable big house in the middle of nowhere that's theoretically a wonderfully safe place to be but in a movie like this is bound to be a bigger danger to Helen than staying in the city would have been. Grandma Sherman uses a wheelchair as she's got diabetes, and lives in the house with some servants as well as her son, the respected psychologist Dr. Joseph Sherman (Christopher Sherman). Also in the house is another son, Steven (John Phillip Law), who seemingly just got out of the military and, now back with his family, is carrying on an affair with his brother's secretary Blanche.

Helen gets to the house just before a big rainstorm is about to hit, which is a big plot point because the house is isolated enough that power outages are not infrequent. Indeed, they happen often enough that the house has a generator, but just rarely enough that the generator doesn't get used enough to be checked as frequently as it should be. The manor also has a couple of outbuildings, and a strange man who may or may not be the unseen murderer from the opening scene is found in one of them. However, we learn quickly enough that he wasn't the murderer, as he himself gets bumped off. And, as you might guess, this spells danger for Helen as it's not going to be the last killing in the story.

It's been quite a few years since I've seen the 1940s version of The Spiral Staircase, so I can't quite come up with a good list of the ways in which the plots of the two movies differ. This 1970s version feels a bit convoluted, which I'm guessing is based on the fact that it had a fairly small budget without being part of the studio era where lower budgets could be covered by regular studio overhead. As a result, this remake is always a bit of a mess. It tries hard, but at times comes across as though it's trying too hard. You can see why the cast would want to make a newer version of The Spiral Staircase, but ultimately it feels like less than the sum of its parts.