Beau Brummell (1954)

Stewart Granger was cast in a whole bunch of movies that were period pieces from various eras of British history. When last I posted about Granger, it was for the Victorian-era film Blanche Fury. This time, we go back a couple of decades to the Regency, for the MGM costume drama Beau Brummell. It's airing tomorrow (April 16) at 3:30 PM as part of a morning and afternoon of movies dedicated not to Granger, but to supporting star Peter Ustinov.

You probably know that "Beau Brummell" is, even to this day, a byword for stylish fashion, and the term comes from a real person named George Bryan Brummell, who got the nickname Beau (played here by Stewart Granger). As the movie opens, Brummell is a captain in the British army in the late 1790s, when the real-life Brummell would have been about 20. Brummell's regiment is doing a military parade, and showing up for inspection is the Prince of Wales, the future King George IV (that's Peter Ustinov). Brummell shows himself to be good with a sword on horseback, in exercises involving cutting melons, and putting the sword through rope rings. Brummell gives the rings to another attendee, the socialite Lady Patricia (Elizabeth Taylor). But Brummell gets himself in trouble when he comments to the Prince of Wales that the epaulettes are too big, seemingly designed to make his highness look slimmer and not for ergonomics.

Brummell eventually quits the army, in part because life in the army is expensive since in those days officers had to provision their own uniforms and horses. Brummell runs across a candidate running for Parliament, and makes more comments, partly about fashion, such as the wasteful expense of powdering one's hair and how the flour could be used to feed the poor, as well as some comments about the royals, which again brings Brummell to the attention of the Prince of Wales. This time, however, Brummell is able to ingratiate himself to the prince, in part because of his views on the king, George III (Robert Morley in a small role). If you remember from The Madness of King George, the king's mental capacity had long been a question, along with his testy relationship with the Prince of Wales. The King wants his son to marry a suitable royal from Germany, while the prince is in love with a different woman.

The Prince of Wales, having become friends with Brummell, helps Brummell rise in society, but there are storm clouds on the horizon. One is that Brummell has been spending freely to maintain the appearances of being a member of the aristocracy, and this has led to heavy debts that he's going to be unable to pay off. If he can't pay them off, eventually the debtors are goingto come for him, with the likelihood of debtors' prison looming. The other issue is Lady Patricia. Brummell loves her, and she certainly likes him. But she's long been betrothed to a man who is of her proper social class, Lord Mercer.

Eventually, Brummell and the Prince of Wales have a falling out after he becomes regent and assumes more power. This means he no longer has a protector and is going to have to flee to France post-Napoleon to stay out of debtors' prison. The movie at least gives Brummell the chance at reconciliation with the former Prince of Wales, who by this time has assumed the throne and is George IV.

The problem, if you will, with Beau Brummell, is that it's a fairly fanciful version of history. Lady Patricia is not a real person, but the bigger issue is that in real life, Brummell outlived George IV by a decade. Additionally, from what I've read, he didn't particularly have public political views the way he's presented here. But the total Hollywood lack of historicity aside, Beau Brummell is a good example of how MGM could make a fine color costume drama. Granger is OK, Taylor doesn't have much to do, and Peter Ustinov steals the show. Morley is quite good too, although he only has one or two scenes. If you want to see an example of what MGM could do well, Beau Brummell is definitely a good example.

Lady Be Good

Red Skelton is TCM's Star of the Month for April, and as I mentioned last week, I've got a couple of his movies on my DVR that are showing up as part of the salute to him. First up is a movie that has Skelton in a supporting role: Lady Be Good, early tomorrow (April 15) at 5:00 AM.

Eleanor Powell gets top billing here, although that was a ruse by MGM to get audiences into the theater. In fact, the female lead is Ann Sothern, whom MGM was trying to turn into a musical star. She plays Dixie Donegan, and as the movie opens, she's in divorce court, trying to obtain a divorce from her husband Eddie Crane (Robert Young). This introductory scene is a pretense to go to a flashback, as Donegan tells Judge Murdock (Lionel Barrymore) how the two met and why she wants a divorce. Before the marriage, Crane was a composer, and his girlfriend Dixie sees him and his lyricist have difficulty collaborating. Somehow, Dixie is able to come up with lyrics for Eddie's latest music, and the song they release together becomes a big hit, leading them to get married as well.

Eleanor Powell plays Marilyn Marsh, who is a friend of Dixie's and to a lesser extent Eddie's. She's also a star on Broadway who dances to the sort of music written by people like Eddie. She's happy to see the two married, but distressed by the fact that after they get married, Eddie lets success go to his head, where Dixie just wants to go on writing music for another Broadway show. This is what leads to the Dixie deciding she needs a divorce, even if we all know the two of them are still friends. They just can't work together as husband and wife, at least not until Eddie learns how to combine the two.

After the divorce, Dixie tries to find other composers, while Eddie seems unable to create new music. Eventually he calls Dixie and she thinks he's looking once again for a lyricist. Except that he wants someone to clean up his apartment, as if he thinks this way she'll come back to him. She's already got a new boyfriend, but once again we know this drip isn't right for her. Mutual friends like Marilyn, or Red Willet (that's Red Skelton) who plugs Eddie's and Dixie's songs, try to bring Dixie and Eddie back together. They're even seemingly successful, except that their second marriage hits a snag for the same exact reasons the first marriage did. Still, we know that Dixie and Eddie are going to wind up together in the final reel, so the question is how are they going to resolve their problems.

The on-again, off-again romance story in Lady Be Good is serviceable, and Young and Sothern are able to handle this light drama material well. Red Skelton was on his way up here, and was I think brought in for comic relief which he is unsurprisingly good at providing with his brand of physical comedy. But Lady Be Good is really to be watched for the music and dancing. Arthur Freed, who was of course a lyricist before he become a producer at MGM and made those big post-war Technicolor musicals, provides the song "Your Words and My Music", while some famous composers have old songs of theirs borrowed, with a couple of songs by the Gershwins (including the title number), and "The Last Time I Saw Paris" having been done by Oscar Hammerstein and Jerome Kern. Eleanor Powell has a very good dance number she does with a dog, but most critics mention a different Powell number as the highlight of the film, one danced to "Fascinating Rhythm".

Despite the story which feels like a retread, fans of MGM musicals and dancing will, I think, love Lady Be Good.

Pat O'Brien grows a moustache

Ever since moving and getting access to reliable high-speed internet two years ago, I've been able to watch the FAST services. Tubi seems to have access to a whole bunch of stuff that wound up in the public domain. One that I hadn't heard of before seeing it in the "classic" movies section was Slightly Honorable.

The movie starts off with the idea that perhaps there's an island somewhere in the South Pacifc that doesn't have corruption, but we're in America, 8,000 miles away. Cut to a shot of the highway commissioner in some state getting killed in a road accident, which is the height of irony because the commissioner was the one more or less responsible for the shoddy state of the roads, what with all the graft in the highway department. At his funeral are newspaper publisher Vincent Cushing (Edward Arnold), who is in on the graft and getting wealthy from it; and attorney John Webb (Pat O'Brien), who wants to eliminate corruption and graft.

Complicating matters is that one of Webb's clients, Alma Brehmer (Claire Dodd) just happens to be the mistress of one Vincent Cushing. Webb and Cushing are brought together again when Alma invites Webb to a swanky party at a nightclub hosted by Cushing. It's also a place for Webb to meet chorine Ann Seymour (Ruth Terry), who thinks of Webb as someone to look up to as well as woo once he saves her from one of the brutes at Cushing's party trying to slap her around because he's jealous of her dancing briefly with Ann. Ann, however, seems mostly to be comic relief, which is surprising considering that Eve Arden is also in the film playing the part of Webb's secretary.

Up to now the movie has been more comedy than drama, although things are about to take a turn. Alma being one of Webb's clients, she wants him to see her about some jewelry Cushing gave her and that she wants appraised so she can have it added to her insurance policy. Webb goes up to her swanky apartment, and finds that somebody's stabbed her! Needless to say, since he's the one to have found her, he's an obvious suspect. Cushing's wife has good reason to worry that perhaps her husband could be held responsible, what with his having an obvious motive of trying to silence poor Alma. So she tries to keep anything bad about Cushing from being released. Worse for Webb is that Cushing's daughter actively wants to implicate Webb. Helping to save Webb is his legal firm partner Sampson (a young Broderick Crawford).

I mentioned above that the movie starts off on a somewhat humorous tone, and in the years before the US got involved in World War II there was quite a cycle of comic murder mystery-type movies. However, Strictly Honorable takes a slightly different tack of being humorous up to the murder and then tacking a much darker turn. It's an odd strategy, and one that doesn't always work. However, the flaws in the movie are also in part to it being a low-budget independently produced movie.

Not that Strictly Honorable is a bad movie; it's more that it's the sort of thing where it's easy to see why it's fallen through the cracks and become largely forgotten.

The American Film Theatre

Back in the 1970s, producer Ely Landau tried a bold experiment of taking prominent, mostly modern playwrights, and producing more minimalist versions of their plays as movies. Tickets for these movies would then be sold together, like buying a subscription to a stage theater or the ballet or opera. This project, called the American Film Theatre, only lasted two years and produced about a dozen movies in all. Among them is a version of Edward Albee's play A Delicate Balance.

The leads here are Katharine Hepburn and Paul Scofield. They play a married couple, Agnes and Tobias respectively, who have made it in life and are living an upper middle class life in suburban Connecticut of the generation of American prosperity that followed the second World War (the play was first produced in 1966 and the movie was released in late 1973). The sort of older couple who would stay in on a Friday night and enjoy the fruits of their life of hard work. Or, at least it seems they've made it.

Unfortunately, Agnes has a sister Claire (Kate Reid) who drinks too much and has been in and out of Alcoholics Anonymous and has as been rather less of a success at life. As a result, Claire lives with Agnes and Tobias. I imagine it can't be much fun for Tobias, but then they're at an age where life it more about a pleasant enough routine than fun. They can settle down to a nice dinner before enjoying the weekend.

At least, they can until a couple of neighbors and best friends knock on their door. Harry (Joseph Cotten) and Edna (Betsy Blair) are a married couple who seem to have just as good a life as Agnes and Tobias. But somehow, suddenly, they've both decided they're going to have a midlife crisis at exactly the same time. The two have reached the conclusion that they're terrified of... something that they can't quite figure out what it is. Except that whatever it is, they know they can't live in their current house. So they're just going to knock on Agnes and Tobias' door and move right in. And Agnes and Tobias are willing to let them do this because they're such good friends and have enough spare bedrooms to do so. It's a turn of events that makes no sense in any sort of real life, but there you are.

Things go from bad to worse. Agnes and Tobias have an adult daughter, as well as a son who died some time back. The adult daughter, Julia (Lee Remick), has made an even bigger mess of her life than her aunt Claire, and has just announced she's getting a divorce from her fourth husband. So she's coming back to her parents' place since she needs a place to stay. And dammit, Harry and Edna have her room. So there's a lot now for everybody to bicker about and talk in unnatural stage dialogue.

I suppose that the material in A Delicate Balance is the sort of stuff that might work well on the live stage where you've got a live audience to play off of and play to with communal reactions. And I can certainly see why stage actors would read a script like this and jump at the chance to develop characters. But it's material that's decidedly not going to be to everyone's taste, as well as material that doesn't translate to film as well as other plays do. So definitely some people are going to like it. I'm just not one of those people.

Grosse Pointe Blank

It may seem hard to believe, but it's been 28 years to the day since the release of Grosse Point Blank. I have it on my DVR since one of the TCM Guest Programmers some months back selected it. Recently, I finally watched it to do a review on it.

John Cusack stars as Martin Blank, and as the movie opens up he's in Miami, and on the phone with his executive assistant Marcella (Joan Cusack). It's quickly revealed that Martin is in a hotel room on a high floor, working as a sniper to kill some figure. To lighten the mood, Marcella tells Martin that today's mail includes an invitation to his 10-year high school reunion in Grosse Point, MI, a tony suburb of Detroit.

The killing goes wrong and multiple people get killed thanks in part to fellow hired killer Grocer (Dan Aykroyd). Martin also gets a phone call from Grocer, about a plan Grocer has to consolidate the hired assassin business, something Martin doesn't want, even though they're about the only people who can understand each other. Certainly having trouble understanding Martin is Dr. Oatman (Alan Arkin), whom Martin has been seeing in no small part because being a hired killer leaves him with all sorts of mental issues. Well, that and ex-girlfriend Debi, whom Martin jilted on prom night ten years ago.

And then Marcella gives Martin his next assignment, which is to kill a guy who's about to blow the whistle on some sort of corrupt business or other. Obviously there's some bad guy who doesn't want this guy to testify in court, which is why the guy is a target. The thing is, the target is in Detroit. This would be the perfect opportunity for Martin to kill two birds with one stone, so to say. Not only can he do another job, but he can go home and attend his class reunion.

Except that, as Tom Wolfe wrote, you can't go home again. Well, you can go back to the place you used to live, but it will have changed, and not always for the better. Martin finds out that his old childhood home was sold and redeveloped into a convenience store, with his mom being forced into a nursing home with one or another form of dementia. Debi is still in Grosse Pointe, working at the local independent radio station, and not pleased at seeing Martin considering how he jilted her all those years ago.

Worse is the fact that there seem to be quite a few people who want Martin dead. There are two Feds following him around, while another hitman tries to blow up the convenience store while Martin is in it. He's convinced Grocer is responsible for at least some of the people on his tail. And there's still that reunion to attend. Perhaps Martin might be safe there, since you have to be a graduate, or guest of a graduate to be there. There's also that contract killing Martin is supposed to carry out, which has also not been resolved.

Grosse Pointe Blank is a quirky little movie where you never quite know where it's going to go next, and that's decidedly to the film's benefit. I think it also helped me that I was in high school in the late 1980s, so a lot of the nostalgia vibe was definitely in play. The performances are also all enjoyable, with a bit of a surprise turn from Dan Aykroyd since the movie is a dark comedy and not the sort of comedy he'd normally be more associated with. Alan Arkin is good in his small role too.

If you haven't seen Grosse Pointe Blank before, it's definitely worth a watch.

Sidewalks of New York

About twenty years ago, TCM produced a relatively brief documentary titled So Funny It Hurt: Buster Keaton & MGM, which discusses how Keaton's signing a contract with MGM at the end of the silent era more or less derailed his career as MGM terribly stifled Keaton's creativity. If you want to see a sad example of what MGM did to Keaton, try watching Sidewalks of New York.

Keaton plays Homer Van Dine Harmon, and as you might guess from a name like that, he's an idle rich guy. Specifically, one who owns several tenement apartment buildings. So, as the movie opens his assistant Poggle (Cliff Edwards) is down at the tenements to collect the rent, only to get beat up for his trouble by the sort of young hoodlums who a decade later would be played by the Dead End Kids, or maybe the East Side Kids or the Bowery Boys. Homer is going to have to collect the rent himself.

However, Homer's attempt also leads to the same sort of scuffle that Poggle got into previously. It also results in Homer's meeting Margie (Anita Page), who is the adult sister of Clipper, one of the delinquent boys. She's also his guardian, since 100 years ago it wasn't all that uncommon for there to be large age differences between siblings and the parents to die relatively young. In a trope that MGM probably liked but doesn't work for this version of Buster Keaton, Homer immediately falls head over heels for Margie, so Homer wants to do something for Clipper and the rest of the neighborhood boys.

Homer's plan is to take one of the buildings he owns and convert the ground floor into a YMCA-like gymnasium, where the local boys can blow off their steam and possibly get fit in the process too. But Clipper doesn't like Homer from the previous incident of trying to collect rent, and vows not to go to the gym at all, and convince he friends not to go either. Clipper prefers the company of Butch, who is much more of Clipper's social class. The only problem is that Butch is an actual criminal. Worse, Butch decides to bring Clipper into his schemes.

The final scheme is a plot to kill Homer. Homer, as part of his trying to do good deeds for the deprived neighborhood boys, is going to put on a play with the kids playing most of the parts. The plot of the play will have Clipper's character shoot one played by Homer with a prop gun and blanks. When Butch learns about this, he plots to have real bullets put in the gun so it will kill Homer!

Sidewalks of New York is, I'm sorry to say, fairly dire. That I think, is largely down to MGM, as well as to the fact that the movie was released in 1931, well into the sound era. MGM, instead of letting Buster come up with his trademark physical humor, wants a bunch of dialogue-based stuff, which doesn't work at all, as in a terrible courtroom scene. The movie also feels like a bunch of disjointed scenes. It's a shame that Buster Keaton wound up in stuff like this.

The Paleface

Another of the type of movie that I've said I wound up with a bunch of on my DVR that I need to watch and do posts on before they expire is westerns. One that aired during Summer Under the Stars was The Paleface, so recently I finally got around to watching it.

The star being honored in conjunction with the showing I've got on my DVR is Jane Russell, who plays Calamity Jane. As the movie opens, she's in prison, but is being busted out by people not known to her, and who force her to go with them. (Coincidentally, another western on my DVR that I'm going to be writing a post on before the recording expires has the same theme, Gunfight at Comanche Creek, although the breakouts in that movie are done for a different reason.) The men who break Jane out take her to the territorial governor Johnson, who offers her a bargain. Somebody is smuggling weapons to the Indians, who are obviously using them to attack settlers. If Jane can figure out who, the governor will give her a full pardon. Jane being a woman would be less likely to be suspected of being an agent of the government.

The plan is to have Jane go to a town called Port Deerfield, where she'll meet up with her contact from the feds. She'll pose as the guy's husband and the two will join a wagon train to their ultimate destination, Buffalo Flats. But Jane gets to Port Deerfield and finds that the federal agent she's supposed to work with has been discovered and killed. Worse, she realizes that the men who killed the agent are hot on her trail and coming after her, so she needs to get away, but how?

Also in Port Deerfield, and decidedly not part of the gang of men running guns to the Indians or trying to kill Jane is Painless Pete Potter (Bob Hope). Potter is an itinerant dentist who goes from one town to the next to provide dental work. Except that this being a character played by Bob Hope, Potter isn't the most competent denitst, which I suppose is part of why he has to go from one town to the next. His makeshift office is on the ground floor of a building that houses baths for women on the upper floor, which is how Potter and Jane wind up in the same building together, and then wind up in the same wagon when Jane has to jump from the balcony to escape the gunmen coming after her at the same time Potter is escaping irate patients.

They have a pretend marriage, and join the wagon train, but since Potter isn't good at that either they lead a bunch of wagons off course to spend a night at a cabin in an isolated part of the countryside where a group of Indians can attack. Unbeknownst to Potter, who doesn't know that he's with Calamity Jane or that she's working with the feds to stop gun-running, Jane helps repel an Indian attack while making it look like Potter is responsible for stopping them and thus a hero. It serves Jane's plans, as if the gunmen think Potter is the fed they won't suspect her, although of course this puts Potter into danger which is a bit of a problem from a Production Code point of view.

So eventually Jane has to kinda, sorta let Potter in on what's going on, which is also in part because she needs his help. The two both get captured by the Indians, but you know that this is the sort of movie that's going to have a happy ending.

If you've seen any of Hope's comedies from the 1940s, and I've reviewed several of them here, you'll know what your in for with The Paleface. The surprise here is Jane Russell, early in her career since Howard Hughes didn't use her much in the 1940s. She shows herself to be extremely adept at doing comedy with Bob Hope, and the screenplay, while not particularly realist, is simply a lot of escapist fun. The movie also won an Oscar for introducing the song "Buttons and Bows".

Spoiler: There's really not that much crying

Another of the foreign-language films that I needed to watch off my DVR before it expired was one from German arthouse director Rainer Werner Fassbinder: The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant.

Petra von Kant (Margit Carstensen) is a fashion designer living in apartment in Bremen, in the northern part of what was the old West Germany, together with her assistant/secretary Marlene (Irm Hermann). Petra treats Marlene like dirt, seemingly making her work day and night, even when people like Petra's sister Sidonie (Katrin Schaake) comes over to visit. Complicating this sort of ill treatment is the fact that Petra and Marlene may be having some sort of sexual relationship, something that might have been controversial when this movie was released back in 1972, but is fairly passé today.

But Petra is more likely bisexual, as she's been in two marriages, the first of which left her a pregnant widow, with daughter Gaby away at boarding school. Gaby, along with Petra's mother Valerie, show up for the final act since that's set some months later on Petra's birthday. But, once again, we're getting ahead of ourselves. There's one more main character we haven't met. That's Karin (Hanna Schygulla), a young woman Sidonie and her husband met when they were in Australia. Karin and her husband are German but were living in Australia; she's decided to return because she couldn't take it in Australia.

Karin needs a legitimate job, and Petra offers her one as a model for her designs, although the presumption is that there are also going to be sexual favors involved. But with Karin modeling the clothes, Petra gets a chance as a major German department store is interested in the new designs. Those designs are in fact what the department store wants, and the major commission is good financial news for Petra.

However, it also gets Karin a job modeling, and one that means she's going to be away from Bremen a lot. Worse is when Karin gets a phone call from her husband saying that he's coming back to Germany, and could she come to Frankfurt to meet him. That's all too much for Petra.

There's not much going on in The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, as the whole movie is set in that apartment. It's not nearly as obnoxious as some of the other arthouse films I've mentioned here relatively recently, but I think it's also not likely to appeal to the more casual movie fan. Fassbinder is very deliberate both with the camera movement as well as focus (often to focus on a frustrated Marlene in the background), which to me heightened the feeling of the movie being slow. One other thing that doesn't help is that Petra has a bunch of wigs that she wears over the course of the film. That can make things harder to follow, especially if you don't speak German and have to rely on the subtitles.

No relation to Kevin McCarthy

TCM is doing a morning and part of the afternoon of Val Lewton's films tomorrow, April 8. I happen to have one of those on my DVR, so I'll put up a post on it now: The Body Snatcher, at 1:30 PM.

The scene is Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1831. Donald Fettes (Russell Wade) is a medical student who had been studying with Dr. MacFarlane (Henry Daniell), this being an era when dedicated medical schools weren't a thing. But he's going to have to give up those studies for monetary reasons. He's stopped by a cemetery for no other reason than to come up with an expository scene mentioning body snatching, which is digging up the grave for the body therein, not for any valuables that might have been buried. Body snatchers were a thing back in those days because the anatomist-doctors teaching the next generation of doctors needed bodies to do that teaching, and they couldn't get enough legally, say from people who would othewise be buried in potters' field.

Fettes goes to see Dr. MacFarlane at the same time a difficult paralysis case shows up: Mrs. Marsh is bringing her daughter Georgina, hoping that MacFarlane can operate on her. MacFarlane has no bedside manner to get Georgina to explain exactly what the pain is like which would help diagnose exactly where and what the injury is. Fettes, however, does have a bedside manner, so MacFarlane makes him his assistant.

Meanwhile, the Marshes were brought to MacFarlane in a cab driven by John Gray (Boris Karloff). What Fettes doesn't (yet) know is that John is in fact a body snatcher, bringing the bodies to MacFarlane. Fettes is disturbed by this, but MacFarlane explains that the bodies are absolutely necessary for the advancement of science.

This, however, is also where that opening scene at the cemetery comes back into play. While at the cemetery, Fettes met a woman whose son died and whose dog is mourning at the grave 24/7. Gray knows about the boy having died, but when he goes to the cemetery and gets confronted by the poor dog, Gray hits the dog over the head with a shovel, killing it. Good like getting bodies from the cemetery, now that all of them will be given police protection.

So what does Gray do? Why, turn to murder! Unfortunately, he decides to murder a woman who was trying to eke out a living by singing on the street in exchange for coins. He brings this body to MacFarlane but Fettes recognizes it and realizes that Gray is now murdering people and MacFarlane is complicit in it. (Granted, Fettes has his own problems by not going straight to the police.) This sets the denouement of the film into motion.

The Body Snatcher is based on a story by Robert Louis Stevenson, which explains why Val Lewton wound up making a movie set in 19th century Scotland. It's not quite in the same vein as the straight-up horror movies Lewton produced like Cat People or The Seventh Victim. Since we know who's doing the killing, it's more of a horror-tinged melodrama. That's not to say that The Body Snatcher is bad, although once again the fact that the ending is going to have to satisfy the Production Code office does raise some issues with the film.

Still, Karloff and the rest of the cast are effective enough for what was only ever meant to be a programmer and not some sort of prestige film. In that light, The Body Snatcher works quite well and is definitely worth a watch.

Star of the Month April 2025: Red Skelton

Red Skelton and Lucille Ball in Du Barry Was a Lady (midnight between April 14/15)

As we're in a new month, it's time for a new Star of the Month on TCM. This time around, that star is Red Skelton, who's known for his physical comedy. His movies are going to be showing up every Monday in prime time.

I didn't quite realize it when I was scheduling posts ahead of time -- and I'm getting to the point where I'm close to a month ahead -- but I've actually got two posts on movies that are going to be showing as part of TCM's Skelton salute. Given a choice, I try not to have multiple movies starring the same person show up in fairly close proximity, in part because I also prefer to watch a variety of movies rather than a block of one star or one genre like westerns. This post is a day early because for some reason I thought the first of the Skelton posts was going to appear tomorrow; in fact, it actually shows up in the second week of the salute.

By the same token, I've actually got two movies on my DVR that are part of the final night of the salute, but am only going to be doing a post on one of them, which is actually already scheduled. Also of interest is Du Barry Was a Lady, featured in the photo above, although I blogged about that ages ago, and it's a bit more of a vehicle for Lucille Ball, I think. Indeed, I had to go out and search for a good color photo of Skelton in the movie. There are a lot of black-and-white publicity stills out there.