Out west with Gloria Grahame

Gloria Grahame was TCM's Star of the Month some months back, which gave me the chance to record a couple of her movies that I hadn't seen before. Now, Grahame isn't the sort of person you'd think of when you think westerns; she seems a bit too glamorous for the genre. But in the studio era they put their stars in all sorts of stuff, so it's unsurprising that Grahame got cast in at least one western: Roughshod.

We don't see Grahame right away. Instead, even before the opening credits we see a couple of men in the sort of striped shirt that makes it obvious that they're escaped convicts. They're led by a man named Lednov (John Ireland); coming upon a band of cowboys, they murder the cowboys for the cowboys' clothes since those clothes wouldn't identify their wearer as prisoners. It's only in the next scene that we meet Grahame. She plays Mary Wells, who ran one of those houses of ill repute, at least until the people in the town where she was working decided they wanted to be respectable. So they too are headed to California.

At the next town, Clay stops, where he's informed by the sheriff that Lednov has escaped prison. That's important because Clay was instrumental in getting Lednov put behind bars in the first place. Everybody naturally thinks that Lednov is going to be out looking for Clay to gain revenge. Meanwhile, when Clay and Steve get back out on the road, they run into Mary and her companions. The women's wagon has broken a wheel, so they're in need of assistance. Not that Clay is all that interested in taking on a group of women since it's going to be difficult enough as it is to get those horses through the mountain pass. Still, Clay offers to take them to the next ranch, where they can figure out what to do next.

Mary is hoping to get to Sonora, which just so happens to be the same place Clay is headed for. But the ranch where he plans of dropping the women off is owned by the Wyatts, who as it turns out are the parents of one of the women from the house of ill repute. Mary is insistent on not being left behind, and eventually she and another of the women continue on with Clay and Steve. Mary starts teaching Steve how to read and write, since Clay has thought a cowboy doesn't really need it. But as you can also guess, a romantic attracting is going to develop between Clay and Mary.

You can also guess that the other story line, with the escaped convicts, is going to cross paths with Clay and Mary, leading to the climax.

Roughshod is one of those competently produced westerns from a time when Hollywood was making a lot of such movies. There's nothing particularly special about it either in terms of plot or scenery, but there's nothing particularly wrong with it either. If you like westerns, I think you'll like Roughshod. At the same time, if I were looking to introduce people to any of the actors involved with this movie, Roughshod isn't the first thing I'd think to pick.

It's Always Sunny in Small-Town Ohio

One more movie in the FXM rotation that I've never actually done a post on before is On the Sunny Side. So, the last time that it showed up, I made it a point to record it so that the next time it would run, I could do a post on it. That next showing is tomorrow, May 15, at 4:45 AM.

The Andrews family are a well-to-do family in a small town in Ohio in the days where World War II had begun in Europe, but had not yet come to America. There's a father (Don Douglas), Mom (Katharine Alexander) and one child Don (Freddie Mercer), with the family being well-off enough to have a live-in maid Annie (Jane Darwell). Don is the sort of kid who has the clubhouse thing that was more of a thing back in the days of free-range kids, and he's popular enough with the other boys that he could be elected president of the club.

But then the postman comes, and Annie has to sign for a letter because it's a special delivery from the UK. The Andrews parents had been to the UK before the war, and became friends with a British family, the Aylesworths, who have a son who is just about the same age as young Don. With the Nazi air raids going on and the UK evacuating a fair number of its children to places like Canada and Australia, the Aylesworths and Andrewses have agreed that the Aylesworth boy, Hugh (Roddy McDowall) should spend the duration over in America to remain safe. Now the letter has come telling when they can expect Hugh.

Hugh arrives in Ohio, and as you can expect there's a bit of culture shock. The adults are trying to recreate a little bit of Britain for Hugh so he won't feel so homesick, but as it turns out Hugh is just as willing to try all-American foods like hot dogs. The two boys become fast friends at first, and Hugh is even in the same class as Don. But it's not all sweetness and light.

Trying to make British foods is just the first sign that everybody -- and I mean everybody is going to gush all over this foreigner in their midst. The adults seem to want to cater to his every need, while all of the kids seem to want him to be their new best friend. Don begins to feel like he's the fifth wheel, and being ignored. Heck, even his dog wants to sleep in Hugh's bed. Don thinks about running away. But On the Sunny Side isn't going to be a dark movie.

It's easy to see why a film like On the Sunny Side got made. Fox had recently cast McDowall in How Green Was My Valley, where he made a big impression. And even though the movie went into production before Pearl Harbor, it was clear war was coming, and much of the US was solidly on the British side. So something that was family-friendly and sympathetic to the plight of the British was just the thing. A morale-booster, if you will, without being too heavy. There's no battle to be shown here.

However, looking 80-plus years back, On the Sunny Side is jarringly, and at times gratingly, simplistic. Hugh comes across as a stereotype of the oh-so-proper Englishman, while the culture differences are played up in a way that makes you want to reach through the screen and tell everybody, no, Hugh is going to adjust lickety-split. Brits use words like "cheque" and prefer cricket to baseball? At times it's almost cringeworthy. Well, more than almost, as in a scene where the radio plays "America"/"God Save the King" (why would the radio even be playing that?).

So at best, On the Sunny Side is a time capsule of what America was thinking about Britain at the time just before entering World War II. Not much more to recommend it, I'm sorry to say.

Decoy

If you want a movie with a different plot twist, you could do a lot worse than to watch the B noir Decoy. Having seen it on the TCM schedule some time back, I decided to record it and recently finally got around to watching it.

After an intriguing opening credits in which somebody shoots at a locked box, the real action starts off in the present, or at least we're going to learn a couple of minutes into the movie that most of the action is told in flashback. A man in what looks like the sort of rural California we'd see in films like Out of the Past, looking very sickly, makes his way to the big city, where he finds the apartment of one particular woman, going to that apartment and shooting her! A policeman, Sgt. Portgual (Sheldon Leonard) shows up to try to get the woman's story before she dies.

That woman is Margot Shelby (Jean Gillie), and she's the girlfriend of a man named Frank Olins (Robert Armstrong). Frank and his gang robbed a bank out of a mid-six-figure amount, which was quite a lot in the middle of the 1940s. He buried the money in a safe place, but he was caught and sentenced to the gas chamber. The problem is that Frank is the only one who knows where the money is hidden, and he's more than willing to let that secret go with him to the grave.

Frank is also worried that Margot is seeing his lawyer, Jim Vincent (Edward Norris), behind his back, and as it turns out, he's right to be worried about it, not that it would matter if Frank is dead. In theory, there's always the possibility of Frank getting out on some sort of technicality. And wouldn't you know it, but Margot has a technicality in mind. The only thing is, it's not a legal technicality, in more than one sense of not being legal.

Margot has learned that the California gas chamber uses hydrogen cyanide gas to off the condemned, and has also learned that a historical treatment for cyanide poisoning is a chemical called "methylene blue". (In fact, there was such an experimental treatment; it just carried a substantial risk of making things worse, so other treatments were developed.) However, the methylene blue would need to be administered fairly quickly, and more importantly, Margo and Jim would need a doctor to administer the drug. In any case, once being revived, Frank would be able to divulge the location of the money.

It seems like an absolutely daft plan, and of course it is, but then this is a movie, so just go with it. Margot finds a doctor whose work includes a couple days a week working at the penitentiary where the executions are carried out, Dr. Lloyd Craig (Herbert Rudley), who also turns out to be the guy who shoots Margot in the scene before the flashback. She works on turning him so that he'll go along with the harebrained scheme. As you might guess from the beginning, as well as the fact that this is a movie, he does eventually go along. At the same time, there being a Production Code, you know that the scheme isn't going to work out in the end....

Thankfully, unlike some other movies, the fact that there's that Production Code doesn't mean that the story is harmed. Decoy is the sort of scheme that you expect to go wrong because there are so many points where it could. So instead, the fun is watching how the scheme doesn't work. And in that regard, the movie works very well, at least for the low standards of Poverty Row. It's not great by any serious measure, but it's entertaining nonsense. Definitely worth a watch.

Not really strange, or fascinating

I was recently looking through the list of "leaving Tubi soon" movies, and found one I hadn't heard of before: Strange Fascination. Not really knowing anything about it, I decided I'd watch it anyhow and then do a post on it here to give you all ample time to watch it before it leaves Tubi. I'm assuming that's at the end of May, since the contracts generally seem to run out at the end of a calendar month, and there was no "XX days remaining" notice that starts around two weeks before a movie leaves.

One of the reasons I had never heard of Strange Fascination before is because it stars and was directed by Hugo Haas. He was one of the many filmmakers who made their way to Hollywood to escape the Nazis, first acting as a character actor, and then directing a string of independent B movies. Most of the rest of the cast of Strange Fascination is even less distinguished, although female lead Cleo Moore starred in several of Haas' movies.

Here, Haas plays Paul Marvan, and as the movie opens he's listening plaintively to a piano concert. He leaves and walks through the sort of city you'd see in a noir, darkened and mildly seedy, also looking like he could fit into a noir what with his three-day beard and correspondingly disheveled look. He walks into a Salvation Army mission, finds the church hall part of it empty, with a piano up on stage. He gets up on stage and sits down at the piano, which is a cue for the flashback....

The flashback takes us to Salzburg, Austria, just after the war. Paul is a concert pianist who somehow survived World War II, although the war is really only mentioned as difficulties of the past few years. Salzburg holds a Mozart festival and has a storied relationship with classical music, so Paul is here in Salzburg to perform a concert. In attendance at the concert is wealthy American widow Diana Fowler (Mona Barrie), who likes Paul's playing. At dinner after the concert, she offers to sponsor Paul's immigration to the US, with a bit of an implication that he should consider some sort of mutually beneficial relationship for the two of them.

Paul lives with Fowler, practicing until he can get an agent and some bookings so he can strike out on his own. After a concert one night, he irritates a showgirl at the nightclub where he goes for drinks. That woman, Margo (Cleo Moore) decides she's going to go to one of his concerts to give him a piece of her mind. But she loves the music and falls for him, almost like a groupie. Some time later, after he's back in New York, she shows up, claiming that her boyfriend Carlo is treating her badly and she needs someplace to hide from Carlo.

This being the early 1950s, the Production Code is still there, so a man and a woman couldn't really shack up without at the very least some serious moral opprobrium. Indeed, a couple of people find out about the two of them living together and issues arise. It gets to the point that when Paul goes out on his next tour, he takes Margo with him so that he can have a quickie wedding away from the prying eyes of the New York set!

But it's not to be a happy marriage. The second half of Paul's tour gets cancelled due to flooding, and the contract states he won't get paid for it. He's already taken advances on his tour fee, so this leaves him heavily in debt. He starts drinking again, which really threatens his career. He's also got too much pride, resulting in his not wanting Margo to be the breadwinner in the family. She understandably chafes at this.

Strange Fascination is a decided B movie, playing on themes apparently common in Haas' work (I've read some on Haas but not seen that many of his movies), of the basically good man who marries a woman not right for him, and for this to bring him ruin. Apparently, later movies would have the woman be much more of the gold-digger/villainous type than what Margo is here. In the case of Strange Fascination, it feels more like a tragedy of two people jumping into something they might not be ready for and not able to deal with the consequences or the difficulty in backing out.

Hugo Haas doesn't have much of a reputation as a director, which I think is partially due to being stuck with B movies. Strange Fascination is certainly not great, but it comes across as Haas having sincere feelings about the material he was putting on the screen. He also comes across as somebody who knew how to stick to a budget and deliver stuff quickly. I have a feeling that had he been a few years younger, or American-born, he might have been able to make it as a director in episodic TV. Perhaps other of his movies really make Haas look like a terrible director, but Strance Fascination doesn't.

The Pilgrim

It's been a month or so since the last time I did a post on a silent movie, and I've got several sitting on my DVR, so I figure I should start watching more of them. Next up is a Charlie Chaplin film that's a bit too short to be called a real feature, but too long to be a real short, at four reels: The Pilgrim.

The title card has a 1923 copyright date on it, which theoretically means the movie is in the public domain, but the print TCM ran was a 1959 re-release, which has a new score written by Chaplin, as we can tell from a song with vocals, "I'm Bound for Texas". And indeed, Chaplin's Tramp is about to be headed to Texas. He's just gotten out of prison, but not legally, as we see him behind a bush wearing long underwear and holding up a striped convict's uniform, wondering what to do next. We also see a shot of a wanted poster with his image, complete with mustache that for some reason he doesn't shave off.

In the next scene, Chaplin is now at a train depot, dressed in a preacher's vestments. He gets a train tickets to parts unknown to him, but we see that it's one of those towns in old westerns that has one church of the Generic Protestant denomination, and has just hired a new preacher. Before that, however, there's enough time to have a comic sequence of a couple that wants to elope and thinks Chaplin is just the right man of the cloth to perform the service, before the bride's father can show up to stop the wedding.

Chaplin shows up in Devil's Gulch, TX, to a town that's awaiting a preacher who is supposed to arrive on the same day Chaplin shows up. So, it's unsurprising that they think he's the preacher they've hired. You'd think it would be awkward when the second preacher shows up, but fortunately for Chaplin he telegrams to inform them that he's going to be a week late, and Chaplin is able to intercept the telegram.

But there's still the little matter of the townsfolk expecting Chaplin to be a preacher, and Chaplin's escaped prisoner not being particularly Christian. Fake it until you make it, I suppose. After the service, Chaplin gets invited to a parishioner's house for Sunday dinner. Also showing up is another prisoner who knows Chaplin. When that guy finds out there's a large sum of cash in the house, he plans to steal it while pinning the blame on Chaplin, who is, after all, a wanted prisoner.

The Pilgrim is a well-enough made movie, and yet for some reason as I was watching it I couldn't help but think about how I personally prefer Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd to Charlie Chaplin. There's not really anything wrong with The Pilgrim, and yet somehow everything seems just slightly less funny than it really could be. Perhaps it's because the movie is 40-some minutes when it would probably be better off as a two-reeler. But fans of Charlie Chaplin will like The Pilgrim if they haven't seen it before.

Nobody expects Mildred Pierce

Tomorrow is the second Sunday in May, which in the US means that it's Mother's Day; I know that some other countries celebrate it on other days during the year. Unsurprisingly, TCM is marking the day with several movies with classic movie mothers. As you might guess, the lineup has a number of familiar movies that show up year after year in TCM's Mother's Day lineup:

The day kicks off at 6:00 AM with Three Daring Daughters, a Jane Powell musical about her trying to bring her parents back together. Not to be confused with the Deanna Durbin movie Three Smart Girls.
Doris Day moves out to the suburbs with her husband David Niven and kids in Please Don't Eat the Daisies at 8:00 AM.
Eddie Muller is not celebrating motherhood with his Noir Alley selection, Follow Me Quietly at 10:00 AM.
The 1935 version of Edna Ferber's So Big can be seen at 11:15 AM.
Another remake, Pocketful of Miracles, which is an early 1960s version of Lady for a Day, is on at 1:15 PM.
You just knew Mildred Pierce would be scheduled, and sure enough it gets its airing at 3:45 PM.
If you didn't have enough remakes, it's time for another, as the Lana Turner version of Imitation of Life is on at 5:45 PM.
Prime time sees the final two movies of the salute, with I Remember Mama at 8:00 PM and Yours, Mine, and Ours at 10:00 PM.

Looking at the Silent Sunday Nights and TCM Imports lineups, it doesn't look like those are Mother's Day related at all. It also doesn't look as though FXM is doing anything to mark Mother's Day.

Not Disney treacle

I've mentioned the past few days how there are several movies on my DVR that are being reaired on TCM in fairly quick succession. The third of them to get a blog post of its own is the 1942 version of The Jungle Book, which you can see tomorrow, May 11, at 6:00 AM.

This version of the Jungle Book was made by the Korda brothers, who were born in Hungary but left for the UK where they started making a series of highly-regard movies. Then World War II came to Europe, so the brothers left for Hollywood where they set up another version of their independent production company, which would explain the presence of Hollywood character actors in the cast along with the lack of the spelling "colour" in the credits. Anyhow, the movie starts off with an establish shot of a British woman, presumably the wife of either a British colonial governor or Army officer, traveling through India with an Anglified Indian. The two happen upon an elderly storyteller, who will tell you some interesting stories if you just support him by putting coins in his cup....

Flash back some decades, to a village in a jungle part of India. Buldeo (Joseph Calleia) is a prominent local in the village, talking about a big future for the village, together tiwh the town barber (John Qualen, not hiding his usual accent), and a pandit (Frank Puglia). Since the village is in the jungle, they're not far from all sorts of wild animals, and sure enough when a baby wanders off and the baby'd father goes looking for him, a tiger comes and attacks the father. The baby, Mowgli, wanders into a cave where he is protected by a pack of wolves who presumably have a similar fear of the tiger, called Shere Khan.

Mowgli learns how to communicate with the animals, as well as learning all the ways of the jungle and what's safe and what isn't, to an extent that no normal human ever could. But on reaching adolescence, Mowgli (now played by Sabu) goes exploring for himself, and winds up in the village where he had been born and where many of the old locals still live, not that he'd recognize him. In any case, they take him in, and Buldeo's daughter becomes friendly with Mowgli more than anybody else. Indeed, you could call it love, although the movie doesn't really wind up going down that road.

Mowgli takes the girl, Mahala, out into the jungle, where he's safe because he knows the jungle ways, although Mahala obviously doesn't feel safe and who could blame her. But Mowgli knows a place in the jungle that's an overrun ghost town where some wealthy people lived generations ago. They left behind a bunch of gold coins and various jewels, although the snakes tell Mowgli that trying to claim that wealth is going to come with a curse. And not that Mowgli has ever had need of such wealth. The villagers, of course, would want it if they knew of its existence. Mahala isn't going to reveal it, but she does make the mistake of taking one gold coin by which to remember the ruins.

As you might guess, Buldeo finds out, and he, the barber, and the pundit set out to find the village, following Mowgli with the intent of killing him. Mowgli, for his part, is also on a quest to kill Shere Khan to get revenge for the tiger having killed his father. As for the three villagers, well, if you've seen Treasure of the Sierra Madre, you can probably think of the sort of thing that's going to happen to them. Except that those guys were in a relatively deserted area. Buldeo could do a lot more damage by setting the forest on fire.

As I mentioned at the beginning, this version of The Jungle Book came out in 1942, with all the implications that carries. One is that there weren't very many people of Indian descent in Hollywood at the time, which is why you get actors like John Qualen made up to look like they're from the Subcontinet. At the same time, India would have been a far more exotic place in 1942 -- especially in America since the place wasn't our colony -- in the eyes of westerners. So it's a lot easier to imagine audiences overlooking the use of backlots and being able to suspend disblief.

It helps that the story is a pretty good one, and somewhat surprisingly filled with themes of man's greed against Mother Nature, something that transcends race and time. The vivid Technicolor photography also helps, even if there's no location shooting. Granted, there are times when the process photography is apparent. But for the most part the story holds up, without any distracting Disney songs.

This version of The Jungle Book is definitely worth a watch.

Rumble Fish

I mentioned yesterday that I've got two unrelated movies on my DVR that TCM happens to be showing fairly early on May 11, so I'd be blogging about one of them on May 9 and the other on May 10. The first one up is Rumble Fish, which you can see at the midnight between May 10 and May 11 (technically the intro will start just after midnight on May 11 ET, which means that in other time zones it's still late in the evening of May 10).

After some stark black-and-white cityscapes in Tulsa, OK, we go inside a pool hall where a gang of high school friends hang out. The nominal leader of the gang is Rusty James (Matt Dillon), although he's only the leader if you will because he inherited it from his older brother, who had the nickname Motorcycle Boy. Motorcycle Boy left Oklahome some time back to go out to California. Among the friends are Smokey (a young Nicolas Cage), looking like he belongs in one of those 50s juvenile delinquent movies, and the rather nerdy Steve, who looks decidedly out of place although he seems closer to Rusty James than does Smokey.

Rusty James gets word at the pool hall that a member of another band of delinquents wishes to pick a fight with him; the two gangs are to meet at a designated location at 10 PM if Rusty James isn't a coward. Rusty thinks he isn't a coward, but first he has to go see his girlfriend Patty (Diane Lane) and have some nookie with her before he can go off for that fight. At first it seems like the fight is going to be your standard issue fistfight, but more like Fight Club than with Marquess of Queensbury rules, unti Rusty James' opponent pulls out a knife. Rusty James gets a board and is more or less able to subdue his opponent until a surprise -- the return of Motorcycle Boy (Mickey Rourke). This distracts Rusty James, leading to his getting slashed in the abdomen.

Motorcycle Boy (I don't think his real name is ever given) doesn't really want it known that he's back in town. Meanwhile, Rusty James looks up to him much like the relationship between two brothers in American History X. This time, however, there's a father in the picture (Dennis Hopper) but no mother, although Dad is also an alcoholic, which is why he hasn't been able to keep his kids in check. Rusty James' behavior gets progressively worse, leading to a fight where the gets hit in the head and really ought to have suffered at least a severe concussion if not a fractured skull, although he goes on as if it's only a one-night headache, much like he's gone on from the stabbing.

Motorcycle Boy also returns to petty crime and, being known to the police already, this is bound to have a deleterious effect. Ultimately, he and his brother wind up at a pet store where Motorcycle Boy admires the Siamese fighting fish. He ultimately returns to the pet store to steal a tank of the fish, while at the same time liberating the other animals in a move that horrifies Rusty James since he doesn't want to run that afoul of the law.

There are two big problems that I had with Rumble Fish. One is that the protagonist, Rusty James, is in many ways not a particularly likable character. Once again this is the sort of thing that's a problem in a movie where we're probably supposed to be identifying with him. The even bigger problem for me, however, is how the story felt terribly aimless, as though there's no real plot. And what plot there is felt like it had terrible holes. Notably, how did Rusty James not end up in hospital considering how badly he got hurt? And how did someone like Steve both wind up with a badly wrong crowd and maintain his nerdiness at the same time.

Francis Ford Coppola directed, and the technical aspects of the film, especially the cinematography, are worth noting. I think the fact that it has a "name" director is part of why in the years since it was released it's gained a higher reputation than I would give it. But that's also the reason why you should probably watch and judge for yourself.

Flirtation Walk

There are several movies coming up on TCM in the next two or three days that are on my DVR and that I haven't blogged about before. Two of them are part of a double bill of Dick Powell/Ruby Keeler musicals that I think were on the same double bill when I recorded them some months back. The first of those movies is Flirtation Walk, which shows up overnight between May 9 and 10 at 1:45 AM (so that's technically early May 10 in the Eastern time zone, but still May 9 in the Pacific). The second one is Shipmates Forever, but that's not getting a post of its own just yet because I've never been the biggest fan of doing multiple posts on movies from the same person or in a closely similar genre in close succession if I can avoid it. That, and there are two movies overnight between May 10/11 which aren't really related, so one of them gets a post tomorrow, May 9, with the other getting a post on May 10.

Dick Powell plays Dick Dorcy, an enlisted man in the Army who is stationed in Hawaii (this being a dozen years or so before World War II) serving under Sgt. Thornhill (Pat O'Brien). Ruby Keeler plays Kit Fitts, who is the daughter of a general who is only passing through Hawaii on his way to a posting in the Philippines, since that was a US colony at the time. Gen. Fitts is traveling with his daughter, as well as an adjutant, Lt. Biddle (John Eldredge) who also happens to be Kit's boyfriend, something you'd think might be a problem considering Biddle might be serving under his future father-in-law.

Now, since Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler are top billed, you might guess that they're going to get romantically involved, and might just even wind up together in the final reel, although it's going to take several reels for them to get together for that requisite happy ending. The two characters are brought together courtesy of Sgt. Thornhill, who assignes Dorcy to be Miss Fitts' driver while she's on Oahu. Kit wants to see the island, so she orders Dorcy to take her off base to some of the more scenic spots, with the two of them winding up at a luau where it seems Dorcy already knows some of the ethnic Hawaiian locals, even singing "Aloha Oe".

But Dorcy is an enlisted man, and Fitts is not only the daughter of an officer, but a young woman who already has an officer pursuing her. So he doesn't quite understand it when he gets accused of wrongdoing and Kit says she didn't really love Dorcy. Dorcy first thinks about desertion, but ultimately decides that the way to get the respect of people like Kit and Biddle is to become an officer himself. I don't know if they had an Officer Candidates' School back in those days, but in any case Dorcy eschews this, applying to West Point instead!

Dorcy somehow gets accepted, and is good at the military stuff, to the point that by the time senior year comes along, he's considered a leader among men in his class. He's even given the job of writing the class revue for senior spring. But a monkey wrench gets thrown into the works when West Point gets a new commandant: Gen. Fitts! He brings back his daughter, who is still involved with Biddle although they're still not engaged. Nobody else at West Point knows about Dorcy's previous involvment with Miss Pitts, so when the cadets all meet her, everyone else is taken with her while Dorcy feigns complete indifference.

The other cadets, thinking Kit is so charming, decide that they want to break with tradition and include a female part in the revue, with Kit being just the woman for the part. Dorcy, of course, is mortified, and this leads to the complications that eventually get resolved in the standard-issue happy way in the final reel.

Flirtation Walk somehow got an Oscar nomination for Best Picture, although that was the first era of having 10 Best Picture nominees before it got cut to five in the early 1940s. Looking through the list of nominees (this was the year It Happened One Night won), it also looks like a fairly weak list of nominees. It's not that Flirtation Walk is bad; it's more that it pales in comparison to Warner Bros.' musicals of the previous year, and feels a lot more like a programmer than a prestige movie. I'm not the biggest fan of Ruby Keeler, but the movie doesn't give her enough to do. Ditto Pat O'Brien, since the movie in many ways seems like two movies grafted together, the Hawaii half and the West Point half.

Still, everybody is more than professional with the material they're given, and nobody really hits a wrong note. So Flirtation Walk winds up being something more than pleasant enough, and certainly entertaining for fans of musicals or romantic dramedies. But there's a reason why Flirtation Walk is less well-known than a lot of other musicals out there.

High Flyers

TCM ran a couple of the Wheeler and Woolsey movies a couple of months back that I hadn't seen, so I recorded them in order to be able to do posts on them. First up is what actually turned out to be the team's final film, High Flyers.

We don't actually see Wheeler and Woolsey for the first several minutes, as there's an establishing scene at one of those rich estates. After a musical number, we're introduced to the Arlingtons, wealthy Horace (Paul Harvey) and his ditzy wife Martha (Margaret Dumont), who is into crystal balls and other occult stuff. Mr. Arlington is having a bunch of jewels being brought over from Europe, and doesn't want anyone to know that the jewels are arriving on a certain ship the next day. Having said that, he's dumb enough to tell a newspaper editor, Mr. Hanlon (Jack Carson in an early role), about it, as a way of saying how he doesn't want the press to publicize this information.

Never mind that Hanlon is actually a crook who has an idea for how to steal those jewels. He's going to commandeer a seaplane, and get one of his henchmen already on board to steal the jewels and throw them overboard in a hollowed-out life preserver. (As if nobody would see this happening.) The seaplane will pick up the jewels, and then drop them off in a cove where Hanlon is waiting. And he's got two pilots. Cut to a carnival, where we see Pierre (Robert Woolsey) as a carnival barker getting people to see the airplane-like contraption in which his partner Jerry (Bert Wheeler) is riding. They've been passing themselves off as expert pilots, but the truth is that neither of them has flown a plane before. Worse, Pierre has committed enough fraud that he's wanted by the authorities in Philadelphia because of probation issues!

Not that the boys know that they're going to be getting stolen jewels; Hanlon tells them he's got press photos from some event in Europe that he wants to get before anybody else, hence the ruse to throw them overboard. Despite not having piloted any plane, let alone a seaplane before, and not realizing that Hanlon had actually stolen a Coast Guard seaplane, the two set off to get the life preserver. They are unsurprisingly spotted by the Coast Guard, who pursue after them, with bit of difficulty because the life preserver also has boxes of some sort of drug that causes the two of them to get quite high.

Since they're high and have never piloted a plane before, it can only end up in disaster, and eventually the two crash land. Wouldn't you know it, however, but they crash land right on the Arlington estate. Not that they know that the jewels they've found belong to the Arlingtons and they could save the day by delivering the jewels to Mr. Arlington. Instead, chaos ensues as Pierre and Jerry try to pass themselves off as undercover detectives, while dealing with the Arlingtons, their maid Juanita (Lupe Velez) and their daughter Arlene (Marjorie Lord).

Wheeler and Woolsey were decidedly second best, in part because they were working at RKO which never had the budget that other studios could command. I think the formula was also beginning to get stale; the two had been working together for almost 10 years, starting on Broadway and then making some 20 features. Woolsey was also beginning to get sick to the point of no longer being able to work; he died about a year after High Flyers.

Still, a lot of what made Wheeler and Woolsey work is here, and if you like their material it's not as bad as some reviewers suggest.