Criminal Court

Someone whom I haven't given much attention to over the many years that I've done this blog is Tom Conway, brother of more prominent supporting actor George Sanders. But Conway was more than capable of doing a good job and bringing energy to an otherwise pedestrian movie. A good example of this would be the RKO B movie Criminal Court.

Conway plays Steve Barnes, a defense attorney who has a reputation for producing theatrics and gimmicks in the courtroom. He's currently defending a man who is accused of a gangland killing. This defendant isn't so important; what is important is the fact that the defendant has run afoul of underworld king Vic Wright (Robert Armstrong). Barnes is hoping to use this case as a jumping-off point in his campaign to become the new district attorney, running on a clean government campaign since the current DA is using "witnesses" paid for by Wright.

Complicating things is the fact that Barnes has a girlfriend, Georgia (Martha O'Driscoll), who is an aspiring nightclub singer. She's about to get an interview for a job... at a nightclub owned by Vic Wright. Steve isn't particularly thrilled with this, although he also realizes that he can't really get in the way of his girlfriend's career. She makes it past the first test and gets an interview with Wright himself later that evening.

But she's not the only person who's going to be seeing Wright at his club in the evening. Barnes has come across some pictures of Wright's kid brother Frankie (Steve Brodie) that will put a big dent in Vic's career. Not only that, but he plans on showing them at a campaign event. Vic tries to bribe him, and when that doesn't work, claims that he's got some sort of incriminating evidence of his own that Barnes really ought to come over and see.

The meeting doesn't go well, and devolves into a struggle between Vic and Steve, although it's also witnessed by Steve's secretary Joan since she's also on Vic's payroll to feed information from Barnes' office to him. She slips out the back way just as Steve comes in to Vic's office, but stays to listen. She knows that durin the struggle, Vic pulls out a gun, and the two men try to grab it since it's now clearly a matter of life and death. The gun goes off in such a way that Steve isn't really guilty but that could destroy his campaign. Vic gets shot and killed.

Worse, after Steve leaves, who should show up but Georgia? She sees the dead body and rather stupidly panics, picking up the gun. Dumb, dumb, dumb, although I suppose you can't fault her for panicking. But with her having been seen in Vic's office and having been seen by Frankie with the gun, she's an obvious suspect. Steve could get her off for reasons the audience knows why, but of course nobody in the film but Steve knows what those reasons are. Well, almost nobody.

Criminal Court is a B movie that doesn't cover any new ground. It was actually released in 1946, but has the feel of something that would have been right at home in the 1930s. This doesn't mean it's bad; instead, I'd say it feels overly familiar. We've seen all these plot devices before, but thanks to Tom Conway and director Robert Wise early in his career, the material is still entertaining enough.

My Beautiful Laundrette

TCM ran a double feature of films starring Daniel Day-Lewis a while back. I already did a post on My Left Foot, and now it's time to do a post on the other film they ran, My Beautiful Laundrette.

Day-Lewis plays Johnny, who is squatting in a derelict apartment building somewhere in London together with his friend Omar (Gordon Warnecke), at least until some sort of thugs come in and drive all the squatters out, forcing Johnny and Omar to beat a hasty retreat out the back window. Johnny is a sort of street punk who goes back to his all-white gang, while Omar goes back to see his alcoholic father Hussein and take care of him. Hussein and Omar are part of the Pakistani immigrant community, but Hussein is the sort of immigrant who believes in whatever the British equivalent of the American Dream for immigrants is, where you assimilate and the children's generation becomes wealthier, not having to do the terrible physical labor that immigrants generally have to do.

With that in mind, Dad wants Omar to go to university. To help with that, Dad thinks Omar should have a stable job in the off term. Omar's brother Nasser (Saeed Jaffrey) is the sort of immigrant like the brothers in Avalon who worked hard and became a success, now having a finger in multiple pies. Nasser, in fact, also has a white British mistress. Nasser offers Omar a job detailing cars at the car park he runs, London being one of those big cities where people don't have their own dedicated parking spaces outside their houses.

Omar takes to the work, but is also confronted by the presence of his cousin Salim. Salim is one of those children of immigrants who takes a different view of life as an immigrant and ethnic minority from people like Omar. Instead, immigrants should take what they "deserve" from the host country by whatever means, even if those means are scammy, and keep up ties with the old country to the extent of practically being bi-national. (Nowadays, you wonder if a character like Salim would become more of an Islamist, but that theme isn't explored in My Beautiful Laundrette.)

One night while Omar is driving Salim around London, the car is surrounded when it's stopped at a light. Wouldn't you know it, but the gang that surrounds them just happens to be Johnny and his friends. Johnny and Omar are able to resume their relationship, which as it turns out is more than just a friendship as the two have homosexual feelings for each other. Omar realizes that having Johnny around as a bit of "muscle" could be a good thing, and Nasser starts to give Omar bigger duties, such as trying to turn a laundrette (laundromat for American viewers) profitable. Omar is bright and hardworking, but also finds he has to get a bit of money via illicit means to make things work, which could get him in trouble with Salim.

My Beautiful Laundrette is an interesting if uneven movie. It presents a lot of ideas that in the wrong hands wouldn't just be controversial, but used as a laundry list for a morality play; think the movie No Down Payment that I blogged about back in 2013. Here, though, a lot of the stuff (homosexuality being the obvious one) are just presented as this is what the characters are and the viewer has to have the intelligence to figure out how this would play out in real life.

One thing I do wonder about as an American, however, is how much the director and screenwriter might have been trying to make a commentary about the Britain of this time. Being 1985, it was smack dab in the middle of Margaret Thatcher's time as Prime Minister, and as with Donald Trump here in the US, her being in power drove the arts "community", or the people in creative arts fields who saw themselves as a "community", hysterically around the bend. If there is commentary, however, it's certainly not to the level you see from contemporary Hollywood. And in any case, My Beautiful Laundrette is definitely a worthwhile, offbeat movie.

March 2025 end of month briefs

It's been a while since I did a briefs post, since I've been a bit busy trying to keep up with watching stuff before it expires from the DVR as well as putting in some overtime out in the real world. Heck, I don't think I even did a post for the clock change on Daylight Savings Time a few weeks back, although it's really more important to do a post when the clocks go back since that's when there's an extra hour in the schedule to fill.

The first order of business would be to mention the passing of actor Richard Chamberlain, who died yesterday at the age of 90. I think he might be better remembered for his TV work, especially the early 1980s TV miniseries Shogun. But TCM fans may recall that Chamberlain did a Star of the Month piece on Claude Rains, with whom he worked at the end of Rains' career making Twilight of Honor. Unfortunately, I don't think that piece seems to be on YouTube, although Warner Bros. does have a preview for Twilight of Honor.

Tonight's Silent Sunday Nights feature is the Clara Bow film It, starting at midnight. YouTube TV has it as a 72-minute movie in a 2-hour slot, which of course led me to wonder whether there would be a short to fill out the time slot. A two-reel silent would make sense, but as it turns out the short is 24 Hour Alert, supposedly starting at 1:25 AM and leading up to the 2:00 AM start of TCM Imports. TCM's site actually does have shorts listed at least a couple days out, and at least for the daily schedule; as far as I can tell they still only have a monthly "highlights" listing rather than a full monthly schedule.

Monday morning and afternoon on TCM are dedicated to director Lloyd Bacon in honor of his birthday on December 4. Wait a second, that wouldn't be his birthday. But since he worked at Warner Bros. in the 1930s it's easy for TCM to do a programming salute to him, starting at 6:00 AM with the Joel McCrea film Kept Husbands. Also of interest might be Marked Woman at noon. If you've seen the piece on Bette Davis that was done for one of her turns as Star of the Month, they use a clip of her from Marked Woman where she talks about being smart enough to know all the angles. Watch enough TCM, and you'll know exactly the clip I mean.

Tuesday is April 1, which means the start of a new quarter. I can't tell if FXM's Retro block as any new movies in the rotation, mostly because I haven't been paying close enough attention since I've done posts on the vast majority of what that block airs. Not their fault so much as it is that there are only so many films Fox made. Titles that I did posts on ages ago that are showing up in April where I don't believe I've seen them show up recently include Something for the Boys and Satan Never Sleeps.

Bikur Ha-Tizmoret

I've mentioned several times how I've got quite the backlog of foreign films to get through on my DVR before they expire, and frankly, I don't think I'm going to get through all of them. But with that in mind, I figured it's time I at least try to watch some of them. Up next is a film from a country whose movies I rarely frequent: the Israeli film The Band's Visit.

The movie was released in 2007 although it's supposedly set about a decade earlier; in any case I didn't notice any obvious signs that would point to precisely when it was set. The band in question is the Alexandria Police Orchestra, whom as you might have figured out from the name are actually Egyptian, from the large port city. They've been invited to appear at the opening of a new Arab Israeli cultural center in the city of Petah Tikva (remember, even disregarding the Palestinian areas Israel gained control of in the Six Days' War, Israel has a population of something like 15% non-Jewish Arabs). As the movie opens, the Egyptians have landed at Ben Gurion Airport, only to find that nobody has come to pick them up. With that in mind, they go to the bus terminal to inquire about a bus to where they're going.

Unfortunately, they not speaking Hebrew -- apparently modern Egyptian Arabic has trouble with the voiced P sound -- the destination they ask about gets them sent to a place called Bet Hatikva, which is well into the Negev desert in the south of the country, completely in the opposite direction from Petah Tikva. The band is unceremoniously dropped off in the middle of nowhere and make their way to a small cafe which is one of the only signs of human activity. There, shop owner Dina tells the orchestra's head Tawfiq that they've come to the wrong town. Worse, there are no more buses leaving tonight: when Tawfiq makes a comment about the cultural center, Dina says that Bet Hatikva has no culture.

Eventually, Dina comes up with a plan, which is to find several of her acquaintances and put the musicians up by ones and twos, since the orchestra only has eight members. It's an awkward and sudden imposition, considering that while Dina lives alone, everyone else has a life. One person's family is holding a birthday party; another guy was about to go on a blind date; and the like. But it's only for one night, and thankfully most of the people speak something close enough to English that they can all communicate with one another. Little things happen to everybody until the band is put on the right bus the next morning and are able to play at the cultural center that afternoon.

The Band's Visit is one of those little movies where not much happens. As such, it's a movie that's not going to be for everybody. Even with a modest running time just under 90 minutes, it can still feel slow. But it's the sort of movie you should stick with, because it really does work in the end, as you come to learn about all these characters' lives and how they feel like real people, warts and all, with lives that, like real life, are often boring with little going on.

At least somebody laughed

Some time back TCM had a two-movie salute to actor John Ritter, who is of course better known for his TV work on Three's Company than the movies he made, so both of the movies were new to me. First up will be the bittersweet comedy They All Laughed.

The movie opens up with John Russo (Ben Gazzara) taking a taxi down to the heliport in New York City. John is a divorcé and private detective who is going to the heliport in order to see, or at least watch, Angela Niotes (Audrey Hepburn). Angela is the subject whom John is investigating, as Angela's husband is worried that she might be having an affair. In addition to his work, John is carrying on a romance with country singer Christy (Colleen Camp). But it's a long-suffering romance for her, as John seems to be unable to make a committment. As a sign of this, John almost immediately asks his cab driver, "Sam" (real name Deborah although John keeps calling her Sam) on a date.

Also working at the detective agency is Charles Rutledge (John Ritter). He too is following a woman whose husband is worried that his wife, Dolores (tragic Dorothy Stratten) is having an affair, this one with a man names Jose nicknamed "The Gaucho" (Sean Hepburn Ferrer, Audrey's real-life son). Charles and another colleague at the agency, Arthur, follow Dolores from a Broadway show to a hotel where she meets Jose, and then eventually back to an apartment where Dolores and Jose enter through different doors but have a way of getting into each other's apartment from the inside. So they're clearly having an affair.

But things get complicated. Charles finds himself falling in love with Dolores, which is a fairly obvious ethical problem for him. Arthur makes things even more difficult by arranging for Charles to meet Dolores up close and personal. I guess in some detective work that would make sense, but it does make things a mess for Charles. Meanwhile, John finds himself falling for Angela, and Arthur comes up with a ruse for John and Angela to meet. And, of course, John is also already in multiple other relationships. Christy realizes what's going on, so she decides that she's going to try to get back at John by starting a relationship with Charles. And there's still the issue that Charles and John are supposed to be private investigators following women they're falling in love with.

They All Laughed is the sort of movie where you can see why director Peter Bogdanovich wanted to make material like this. However, the production was tragic as Bogdanovich fell in love with Stratten and her estranged husband killed her and himself before the original schedule release of the movie, which as a result was dedicated to her. (Dorothy Stratten's tragic end is, of course, the subject of the Bob Fosse movie Star 80, which is definitely worth watching.) As a result, the release was held back, and limited, with nobody really wanting to see it.

It also doesn't help that Bogdanovich, being the director and having co-written the screenplay (with the actor who played Arthur, a man I didn't recognize and didn't go on to big things), made it way too complex for the film's own good, as though he was making a film to please himself without paying heed to the idea that it would need to pay back its costs at the box office. There are a lot of good ideas here, but they don't jell as well as they probably should or might have had Bogdanovich had stronger studio heads overseeing the project.

Those who love New York City, as well as those who like Peter Bogdanovich and/or Audrey Hepburn, will definitely like They All Laughed. But it's not quite going to be to everybody's taste.

The Chalk Garden

Some months back, TCM ran a night of movies directed by British director Ronald Neame. This gave me the chance to record a couple of movies I hadn't seen before, such as The Chalk Garden.

Deborah Kerr is the star here, playing a woman named Madrigal. As the movie opens, shows up at one of those big old houses that looks like it's on the coast of Devon or Cornwall. The house is owned by the elderly Mrs. St. Maugham (Edith Evans), and she's put a help wanted ad in the papers looking for a governess for her adolescent granddaughter Laurel (Hayley Mills). Laurel, it seems, is quite the handful and has driven off several prior governesses in prior succession. Indeed, Miss Madrigal isn't the only prospect showing up on this day; as the servant Maitland (Hayley Mills' real-life father John Mills, although Maitland is not Laurel's father in this movie) talks about Laurel, the other prospect isn't so sure she wants the job. But Madrigal is badly in need of a job, even though she's never been a governess before and has no references. But she has firm opinions on how to deal with Laurel and even speaks candidly about the state of the garden and how it's a metaphor for Laurel's upbringing, so Mrs. St. Maugham gives Madrigal the job.

Laurel sets out trying to destroy Madrigal the same way she has all the previous governesses; never mind her other misbehaviors like being a firebug. She's also a chronic liar, saying that her father killed himself and that Mom abandoned her and basically drove Dad to kill himelf. She also claims that Maitland killed his wife and child. As for Laurel's mom, she's gotten remarried and is at the point where she could legally file for custody of Laurel since she is, after all, the kid's biological mother. Mrs. St. Maugham doesn't seem to want that to happen, while Madrigal is more non-committal, even though Laurel is still clearly trying to snoop around into Madrigal's past.

With a custody battle looming, St. Maugham brings in a judge friend of hers, McWhirrey (Felix Aylmer), for advice. McWhirrey may recognize Madrigal; in any case it seems clear that Madrigal recognizes the judge and is thoroughly disconcerted by that. Laurel picks up on this, and because the judge is talking about a murder case involving a female defendant who would have been the right age for that defendant to have been Madrigal herself, gets the idea that Madrigal's past involves murder. And she may just be right. But what good will it do her if she is right and exposes the fact that Madrigal's past is as a murderess?

The Chalk Garden feels like it was based on a stage play, which is because it actually was, one by Enid Bagnold, a name you may recognize from having written National Velvet. Neame and the screenwriters try to open up the action both with scenes in the garden and with an excursion into town. They're not particularly successful in hiding the legacy of a stage play, but that doesn't mean the movie is bad. It has uniformly fine performances, although Hayley Mills' character is so darn nasty that she's tough to like. That can make the movie a bit hard to take at some points.

The Chalk Garden is definitely a movie worth watching thanks to those fine performances.

Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid

William Powell was selected as part of TCM's Summer Under the Stars last August, and there aren't quite as many of his movies that I haven't seen before, in large part because he did a lot of work at Warner Bros. before moving to MGM in 1934, and the movies from both of those studios show up on TCM a lot. (However, I don't think I've done posts on the last four Thin Man movies.) A movie Powell made at Universal after World War II was one of the movies TCM ran, so I recorded that: Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid.

The movie opens at the office of psychiatrist Dr. Harvey. Mrs. Peabody (Irene Hervey) is in the office, but she's not the one in need of psychiatric help. That would be her husband, Mr. Peabody (William Powell), who's sitting out in the waiting room. Mrs. Peabody tells the good doctor that her husband fell in love with a mermaid. Unsurprisingly, the doctor thinks that sort of delusion is a reason in and of itself for a man to see a psychiatrist: there is no such thing as a mermaid, and if a man thinks he's fallen in love with one, well that's a sign something's wrong with him. So bring Mr. Peabody into the office and let him tell the story, which of course is also the cue for one more highly original flashback....

Mr. Peabody has just turned 50 and is going through a mid-life crisis, although I don't know if they used that term back in the day. Not only that, but being a New Englander and winter coming on, Mr. Peabody got sick and was laid up in bed for quite some time with a bad case of influenza. Since the Peabodys are wealthy enough that they can just go to down to the Caribbean for the entire winter at the drop of a hat, they do precisely this, on an island called St. Hilda that isn't yet the site of much tourism, even though there's a resort there (character actor Clinton Sundberg plays the PR man for the resort).

On one of Peabody's first days in the place they've rented, he looks out over the sea where there's a little cay just across the way where nobody lives. However, Mr. Peabody is surprised to hear music. A subplot includes a singer Cathy (Andrea King) who is also vacationing on the island, and Mrs. Peabody thinking her husband may be having an affair with her. But it's not Cathy doing the singing, so Mr. Peabody rents a boat and heads over to the island, which is where he finds the music coming from a mermaid, whom he names Lenore (Ann Blyth). Mr. Peabody brings Lenore back to the place he's renting.

But as with most mermaid movies, you have to keep the fish part of the mermaid wet or else the mermaid is going to wind up in a very bad way. Mr. Peabody first puts Lenore in the bathtub, but of course Mrs. Peabody sees the mermaid's tail (although not the human half of Lenore). This causes all sorts of complications to ensue, although as we know the Peabodys wind up back home in New England to meet with the psychiatrist.

Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid isn't exactly a bad movie, but it doesn't feel as good as other mermaid movies, notably Miranda. Something is missing, but I can't exactly put my finger on what that something is. Still, it's the sort of movie that's definitely worth one watch at least.

The Moonlighter

With Barbara Stanwyck being TCM's Star of the Month and my having multiple of her films on my DVR that I hadn't gotten around to watching yet, it should come as no surprise that I'm highlighting a couple of them over the course of the month as they show up on TCM. This time, it will be The Moonlighter, which TCM has tomorrow (March 27) at 8:30 AM.

The Moonlighter in the title of the movie refers to a man who works at night, specifically rustling cattle so that nobody can get a good enough look at his face while he's doing it. That man is Wes Anderson (Fred MacMurray), a man who's stealing cattle around the turn of the century, just at the time when the horseless carriage started to show up (which as you can guess is a plot point later in the movie). But as the movie opens, he's been caught by a sheriff in some town and is being brought in to jail. This is done under cover of anonymity, as the sheriff knows that the locals will try to break in to the jail and lynch Wes for his crimes.

In another bit of foreshadowing, the sheriff and #1 deputy make a big deal about putting Wes in cell #3, the first time in a western I've seen the cells numbered like this. Then another prisoner is brought in and makes comments about the dirty state of the cells. So the sheriff lets this new prisoner use a broom to sweep out the cells, putting Wes in a different cell until that job is done. Having done all that, the sheriff and deputy go out for a quick bite to eat, leaving behind an older deputy who's clearly not up to the task of stopping the braying mob from breaking in.

Sure enough, said mob does so, and then goes to the restaurant when the deputy takes the keys there. The sheriff only tells the mob after they beat him that Wes is in cell #3, which we of course know is no longer the truth. But the guy in #3 looks vaguely like Wes, down to the beard that MacMurray is surprisingly sporting for plot reasons (he can disguise himself by shaving it off). The mob leaves the keys close enough to where Wes can get them from his cell, so he takes the opportunity to escape. Seeing the lynching, he decides to gain revenge on the people who did this to him, even if it wasn't him.

A week or so later, an emissary from Wes' family shows up to claim the body. That woman is Rela (Barbara Stanwyck), who had been Wes' girlfriend until he left five years back to try to make enough money to be able to support her so she'd marry him, only to find he had to resort to illicit means that for Rela are a deal-breaker. The undertaker tells Rela that another family member already paid for the burial and, in a flashback, we learn that it was Wes using just his initials as if that would fool the townsfolk.

Wes, during his revenge tour, eventually gets himself shot in the shoulder and, having nowhere else to go, decides to go home to his mother and kid brother Tom (William Ching). Tom is working at a bank but, more importantly, decided to start putting the moves on Rela himself since Wes is no longer in Rela's plans. And if Tom can earn enough money.... But he panics one day when a man comes in to the bank looking like a sheriff's deputy and asking about Tom and Wes. For the mistakes he makes handling money, Tom gets himself furloughed. Worse, it turns out the man was only an old friend of Wes' named Cole Gardner (Ward Bond). Cole has plans for "one last heist" that will leave everybody financially set. Tom overhears it, and thinks this is how he can get enough money to marry Rela.

But the plan goes wrong, Tom gets shot, and a posse is sent out to look for Wes and Cole. Meanwhile, as with lots of heist movies, the survivors start arguing with one another about the split. Rela is the only one who knows where Wes' old hideout might be, so she approaches the sheriff in asks to be deputized, going solo to find Wes.

The Moonlighter is a modest little western, and one that doesn't really do much special, with one exception. That exception is that somebody came up with the idea to film this in 3-D, this being early 1953 when 3-D was one of the gimmicks to get people to leave the small screens at home and come back in to the movie theaters. There's not much the 3-D is used for, apart from the opening credits and then some waterfall shots near the end. MacMurray and Stanwyck are professional here, although you get the feeling that they're just taking a paycheck since they're not doing anything that stretches their talents.

I don't think anybody involved with The Moonlighter had anything to be embarrassed about in having this be part of their filmography. But I also don't think anybody will think of it near the top of the lists of great movies they made.

Not to be confused with Sonja Henie in Idaho

I've mentioned before that when Carol Burnett did a piece for TCM on Lucille Ball for Ball's turn as Star of the Month many years ago, Burnett suggested that the studio (RKO) just didn't know what to do with her. Like a lot of other people who weren't necessarily suited to the genre, she even got cast in a western, Valley of the Sun.

Ball is the female lead here, although we don't see her for several minutes. Instead, we see action at a US Army fort in what is now Tucson, AZ, in 1868. Male lead James Craig plays Jonathan Ware, a scout for the Army who has gotten himself in trouble with the army because he's been soft on some of the Indians who have long been causing a problem for the settlers moving west into the Arizona Territory as well as the Army. Ware, however, knows that the people the Bureau of Indian Affairs have been sending from Washington are corrupt and robbing the Indians blind, which is a big part of why they're attacking. Still, Ware gets court-martialed and sentenced to five years, although one of the soldiers informs him of how to get a horse and escape.

Escape Jonathan does, winding up for a while on the underside of a coach heading to the town of Desert Center. Two men are on the coach: James Sawyer (Dean Jagger), and a justice of the peace. James is heading out to Desert Center to meet up with Christine Larson (Lucille Ball). Christine runs the local watering hole, at least for now, with some help from dimwitted Willie (Peter Whitney). But she's planning on getting married to Sawyer, which is why he's on his way to Desert Center. Sawyer is none too happy to see this stowaway on the coach, and the two men become fast enemies.

Willie may not be smart in the traditional sense, but he knows people well enough to know that Sawyer isn't right for Christine. And, of course, we can guess that Jonathan is right since James Craig and Lucille Ball are the two leads. Granted, meeting up with Christine while he's taking a barrel bath isn't exactly the most auspicious start for Jonathan. Willie, of course, being a good judge of character, figures out that Jonathan might be better for Christine, and that the two of them need to do something to stop the wedding from going forward. Or, repeated somethings.

And then there's the fact that Jonathan is still a fugitive from justice, having escaped from military court. There's more comedy and action to come until the movie reaches the inevitable conclusion of justice being meted out to the people who are actually breaking the law, and the good guy getting the girl.

Valley of the Sun mixes a good dose of comedy in with the western themes, although interestingly enough it's mostly not Lucille Ball who gets to be zany here the way she would be on I Love Lucy a decade later. In RKO's defense, Lucy hadn't developed that zany persona yet. Ball does OK, although the movie is really more interesting for being offbeat than it is for actually being a notably good western. I think viewers will like it even if it's certainly not great.

New York, New York

A movie that I had on my old DVR back at the old place before I moved was New York, New York. I was disappointed in not getting around to watching it before having to switch DVRs, so the next time TCM showed it, I made a special point to record it to be able to do a post on it. It's getting another airing on TCM, tonight at 8:00 PM, so now I've watched it to be able to do that review.

The movie opens up on V-J Day in New York City, or at least a stylized rendition of New York as conceived on a studio backlot since the whole movie is very stylized. Someone is throwing a military uniform out of a window, and later we see a man walk out of that building in an outfit reminiscent of a Hawaiian shirt, although they didn't call it that back in the day, I don't think (and the pattern isn't expressly Hawaiian). That man is Jimmy Doyle (Robert DeNiro), and he goes to the USO club where he's set to meet one of his friends. At the club, he sees Francine Evans (Liza Minnelli), who entertains the soldiers going through the club and also wants to be a singer. Jimmy, thinking he's a smooth operator, keeps trying to chat up Francine, although she keeps turning him down, at least until Jimmy's friend, who's found a date here, tries to set Jimmy up his date's friend, who turns out to be Francine, of course.

At Jimmy's hotel, the manager is pissed, because Jimmy turns out to be a smooth operator in dealing with hotel management, not only in trying to pick up women. Jimmy has run up a large tab that he has no intention of paying, and no ability to pay either. Surprisingly, this plot strand doesn't really get explored over the course of the movie. Instead, Jimmy and Francine wind up together the following morning again. Jimmy is a saxophonist who has an audition at a club out in Brooklyn. Unfortunately, he's been doing arrangements that are decidedly not what the club owners of the day want. Francine, hoping to get work as a singer, decides to have Jimmy play a standard to which she can sing along. The club manager is impressed and offers her a job -- but only as part of a double act with Frankie.

This is a problem, since Francine still doesn't really like Jimmy. But, as is the nature of a movie like this, you might guess that they fall in love. That does in fact happen. Not only that, but Jimmy gets his own band with Francine as a singer, and they go out on the road together. However, things hit a snag when, at some point after their marriage, Francine gets pregnant. A pregnant Francine could probably still sing in a studio and cut a record, but traveling with a band is a problem. And Jimmy is none too happy with his wife's pregnancy, even though he should have known this was a consequence of having sex with her. When the baby comes, Jimmy doesn't want to see the kid, and Francine eventually leaves him.

Jimmy stays behind in New York, opens a club of his own, and eventually records the standard "New York, New York", which was actually written for this movie and not a song of the early 1950s. Francine, for her part, has gone out to Hollywood and made it big there, doing the sort of movie musical that was soon to go out of style. When she returns to New York, she and Jimmy eventually meet again. But will they be able to reconcile?

New York, New York was not a success on its original release back in 1977, and frankly it's easy to see why. One big reason is that Robert De Niro is playing a character for whom the audience is supposed to have sympathy, but he's such a jerk to everybody around him that it's difficult to find that sympathy. Secondly, there's the production design of the movie. While watching New York, New York, I found myself thinking of the movie Pennies from Heaven, which was also set several decades in the past but has a look of being a way too antiseptic version of that past. Liza Minnelli looks way too like a product of the 1970s, and everything looks rather off. Maybe that look of artificiality was deliberate, but I don't think it works.

Perhaps the biggest issue is with the movie's running time. Supposedly, the original cut of the movie ran to over four hours, forcing a lot of edits. The version that got released to theaters ran a bit over two and a half hours, which is still too long. On a re-release, a scene depicting Francine's big number in her Hollywood hit was added back in, bringing the movie to a bit over 160 minutes. Frankly, New York, New York is the sort of thing that should have come in under two hours.

The one thing the movie will always be remembered for, however, is that title song, which Frank Sinatra would also sing and turn into a standard. That is not enough, though, to make New York, New York a good movie.