Just a Cineast

The Last Voyage

2012-02-14T09:30:00.000-05:00

A full decade before the all-star disaster epics of the 1970s, MGM produced the entertaining The Last Voyage. It's airing tomorrow morning at 7:00 AM on TCM.

The movie starts off in the boiler room of an old luxury liner that's outlived its usefulnes and is going to be retired soon. Sooner than everybody expects, in fact, but we'll get to that in a bit. Down in the boiler room, the crew is having trouble with a fire that's broken out in the engine room. The captain (George Sanders) doesn't want to bother the passenges, for obvious reasons: why panic them until you absolutely need to get them off the ship? Besides, he thinks the fire can be put out. Still, some of the passengers have noticed that there seems to be something up. There's a bigger problem, though, which is that the fire has melted some of the valves, such that too much fuel is flowing into the engines, and the pressure is rising. If they're not careful, there's going to be an explosion!

Well, this is a Hollywood movie, so you know that despite their best efforts, that explosion is going to happen, and it's going to have catastrophic consequences. It cripples the ship, but more importantly, it rips a giant hole through several decks, affecting some of the cabins. Specifically, that's the cabin of the Henderson family. Dad (Robert Stack) was in a different part of the ship from Mom (Dorothy Malone) and their daughter, who were in the cabin. The result is that Dad winds up on the right side of the gaping hole, that being the side from which escaping the ship is going to be relatively easy. The kid is on the wrong side of the hole, but with a little help should be able to make her way to safety. Mom, however, is trapped under a steel beam! Hooray for cheap plot devices that introduce suspense!

What's a father to do? He goes to the crew for help, but unsurprisingly, they have bigger problems. They have to worry about the entire ship and all the passengers, and not just poor little Robert Stack. And among the officers there's still some debate as to whether the ship can be saved. The second officer (Edmond O'Brien) wants to abandon the ship and start getting the passengers off and to safety now; the aging captain still seems to think the ship can be saved. Neither of them has much time for the the problems of a single passenger. Thankfully, there are other crew members working to get all the passengers off. Stack finds one of the stokers, Woody Strode, and he's willing to help Stack.

The Last Voyage is fairly predictable stuff, especially if you've seen the more epic movies of the 1970s. And to be honest, it's only moderately good. Robert Stack shouts his way through his role (although in his defense, what else is a man who's got a wife trapped under a girder to do?); Dorothy Malone is trapped under the aforementioned beam; the kid is annoying; George Sanders isn't given much more to do than Malone; and Woody Strode only seems to be there for the purpose of running around half-naked and tittilating the ladies in the same way that a Mamie Van Doren or Jane Russell would tittilate the men. Still, dammit, The Last Voyage is entertaining. Which means that, despite all its flaws, it's a good movie that does precisely what it set out to do. And there's one big positive, too, which is that the filmmakers got an actual old ship about to be decommissioned on which to film, so that many of the sets are authentic. That ship is the Île de France, which is famous for being the first ship to come to the rescue of the Andrea Doria when it had its collision back in the mid-1950s.

He's alive, he's alive!

2012-02-13T09:11:00.000-05:00

TCM is going to Greece tonight, although the first movie never explicity mentions being set in Greece. That film is Z, airing at 8:00 PM.

Z is based on events that happened in Greece in the early 1960s. A rightist government supported by the military was faced with leftist opposition, and one of the opposition leaders was killed in a traffic incident that was presumably premeditated vehicular homicide, but wsa just plausible enough for the authorities to claim it was an accident. Eventually, it led to the military taking control directly, and a military junta led Greece from 1967 to 1974 before democracy was restored. Z was released in 1969, at a time when the junta obviously wouldn't have cared for a story about this incident.

As for the movie itself, Z refers to the opposition leader, played by Yves Montand, who only goes by that letter. He's coming to the second-largest city in his Mediterranean country to speak to his supporters on the issue of nuclear disarmament. (As I mentioned before, the country is never actually mentioned; although it's obviously a reference to Greece the movie was filmed in Algeria.) Z and his supporters face problems. The first problem for everybody is that although they had booked a meeting hall for his speech, the owners of the hall have backed out. One can guess it's because the government doesn't like the idea of this speech going on and they've pressured the hall's owner into not allowing it. Indeed, it's clear that the military doesn't like the opposition, as we see a long lecture among the military and intelligence community comparing the opposition to a disease.

Anyhow, there's a bigger problem for Z, which is that there are rumors of an attempt on his life. Z feels he can't allow that to prevent him from standing up to the government, so he plans to go ahead with his speech, although he eventually gets hit by a speeding truck and left to die. Or, at least, that's the government's official version. The prosecutor given the task of coming to this conclusion (Jean-Louis Trintignant) starts his whitewash, but finds that perhaps what the government has been telling him might not be the truth. And he's not the only one. There's a photojournalist (Jacques Perrin) who has been covering the case because he's conluded the truth will make for a dynamite story. This becomes much more apparent when people who originally claimed to have known something about the case either clam up or go missing or get found dead.

Z is a movie that clearly has political points to make, but it's also the sort of movie that shows it's possible to have an obvious point of view and still make something that's entertaining and artistic. This is something that the people at Warner Bros. making many of the social commentary movies of the early 1930s (eg. I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang) knew, as did Michael Powell when he made 49th Parallel. It's also something you wish the filmmakers of today could know.

Cimarron (1960)

2012-02-12T21:51:00.000-05:00

I've blogged about Oscar's Best Picture of 1931, Cimarron, before, and mentioned that it was remade in 1960. Since it's one of those films that's been remade with the same title, you have to be careful looking at the listings when it shows up on the schedule. Monday at 11:00 AM, TCM is scheduled to air the 1960 version of Cimarron, in which Glenn Ford plays the part of Yancey Cravat, played by Richard Dix in the original. Thankfully, everybody seems to agree on tomorrow's schedule: TCM's original printable schedule, their online schedule, and the box guide all have the same thing. And with this being 31 Days of Oscar, it's of note that the 1960 version of Cimarron did receive two Oscar nominations (for sound and art direction).

Actually, I should have heeded my own warnings about looking at the schedule last week. I had noticed in the printable schedule that TCM was showing State Fair. I didn't look carefully enough, and figured this was the 1945 musical, starring Jeanne Crain and Dana Andrews, which doesn't particularly interest me; I'm not a huge fan of Fox musicals. I'm certainly not interested interested in the 1962 version starring Pat Boone, either, although that one wasn't worthy enough to be nominated for any Oscars. However, what TCM really aired was the 1933 non-musical pre-Code version, starring Janet Gaynor and Will Rogers, which sounds much more interesting. And it doesn't seem to be on the TCM schedule again any time soon.

Why am I mentioning Whitney Houston

2012-02-12T13:58:00.000-05:00

Well, I suppose it's partly because, thanks to TCM's 31 Days of Oscar, TCM is showing a lot of movies I've already blogged about in the past. But it has to be mentioned as well that she did act (or at least play characters) in some pretty well-known movies. The two most notable would be The Bodyguard, for which she also famously provided the music; and The Preacher's Wife, which is a remake of the classic The Bishop's Wife. Two of the songs from The Bodyguard received Oscar nominations, butnot "I Will Always Love You", as that was not an original song. However, Houston didn't write the lyrics or compose the music to either, so she didn't get the nomination, which is standard operating procedure: the nomination and award go to the composer and lyricist. Anybody could sing the songs; if you saw the documentary TCM ran on Johnny Mercer a few years back in honor of the 100th anniversary of his birth, you'll see some fun footage of Mercer on TV singing his own songs, not particularly well, but looking like he's having a blast performing.

Anyhow, Whitney Houston's death at a relatively young age and her history of drug abuse sounds reminiscent of any number of Hollywood movies. Whenever I think of a female singer abusing drugs and getting into legal trouble as a result, my first thought is of Smash-Up: The Story of a Woman. Heck, I've already used that theme back when Amy Winehouse (remember her?) died last summer. A movie about a drug-using singer in which the singer actually dies might be The Rose starring Bette Midler as the singer. For drug-addled actresses, I mentioned Jeanne Eagles when I wrote about Winehouse, but I could just as easily have mentioned Valley of the Dolls, a movie I really need to write a full-length post about sometime, since it's one of those movies that's an unintentional laugh riot.

There are apparently reports that Houston might have drowned in her bathtub. That, I suppose, would make her like Jim Morrison, about whom there is also speculation as to whether he really overdosed or drowned in a bathtub. They already made a biopic of him, The Doors after the group he fronted, but then, Morrison is one of those 60s counterculture era icons. Houston is firmly of the 1980s, and I wonder whether the 60s hangers-on who still seem to be making movies and influencing our culture care to make a movie about a 1980s singer. (Note that The Rose, despite having been released in 1979, was actually set in 1969 and is supposedly loosely based on the life of Janis Joplin, another counterculture icon.)

A Kiss Before Dying

2012-02-11T13:41:00.000-05:00

Robert Wagner's 82d birthday was yesterday, so I probably should have blogged about it yesterday. But if you want to see an entertaining movie starring Robert Wagner, try the 1956 film A Kiss Before Dying

The opening titles make this look as though it's going to be either light entertainment or, from the title, a bit of a Love Story-style tragedy, but A Kiss Before Dying isn't like that at all. Wagner stars as Bud, a college student who comes from not much money, and so wants to make certain he doesn't wind up that way as an adult. One of his college classmates is Dorothy (Joanne Woodward), who is the daughter of a wealthy mine owner (George Macready). Bud knows that Dorothy is in line for an inheritance in the future, so Bud has started a romantic relationship with Dorothy, with the presumed intention of marrying her and, as the boss' son-in-law, eventually taking over the mining business.

Only, things don't quite work out that way. Bud is apparently stupid enough to have sex with Dorothy before they can ever get married, and this unsurprisingly results in Dorothy's getting knocked up! Oh dear, that sure isn't going to look good with Daddy! There goes the inheritance! But Bud is a determined young man and comes up with a brilliant idea: kill her and make it look like suicide! Bud gets Dorothy to write something that could look like a suicide note, and gets a hold of poison which he presents to Dorothy as medicine but which she doesn't take. So it's up to Bud to lure Dorothy to the top of City Hall and push her off, making it look as though she jumped.

Oh, but that's not the end of the story by any means. Dorothy has a sister Ellen (Virginia Leith), who meets Bud after her sister's "suicide". Perhaps Bud can fall in love with her and inherit Daddy's fortune that way. Only in Hollywood, I suppose. That plan is obviously doomed to failure, since the Production Code was still in effect and it's clear Bud is never going to get away with his crimes. Soon enough, Ellen begins to suspect that Dorothy didn't commit suicide, but was in fact murdered. And then she begins to put two and two together and figure out just who did it.

A Kiss Before Dying is entertaining enough, although it's a movie that has pretensions to a higher station in life than it really deserves. The movie was remade in 1991, although now in 2012, it's the sort of material that would likely go straight to one of the women's channels. Still, the producers brought in a lot of quality people to make the film: in addition to the stars mentioned, there's Mary Astor as Bud's mother and Jeffrey Hunter as Leith's boyfriend; also, the movie is based on a popular book of the time by Ira Levin, who wrote the original books The Stepford Wives and The Boys From Brazil as well as the play No Time For Sergeants, all of which were turned into well-known movies. Finally, the movie is in wide-screen and color, giving it a look in many of the outdoor scenes that is really nice.

The problem, however, is the plot. I haven't read Levin's story, but the movie has some pretty bad plot holes, most notably a second murder committed by Bud: Bud finds somebody overhears him and Ellen in a restaurant, and realizes this man is a threat. So Bud manages to get back to the man's dorm and type up a suicide note, all before the student does. Yet there doesn't seem to be any way for there to be enough time for this. There's also an almost amusing sequence where pregnant Dorothy trips and falls down bleachers -- and yet it doesn't result in the baby being miscarried, they way falling down stairs would in almost any other movie (see Leave Her to Heaven, where Gene Tierney deliberately throws herself down the stairs to abort her unborn child).

A Kiss Before Dying is avaliable on DVD, although as I mentioned earlier, it was also remade -- and the 1991 version is on DVD as well. So if you want to enjoy Robert Wagner, make certain you get the correct version.

And the winner is...

2012-02-10T13:36:00.000-05:00

...what's left of the Fox Movie Channel. As I mentioned yesterday, there was a discrepancy between what the box guide said was going to air this morning (The Man With One Red Shoe), and what FMC's website was going to air (Emperor of the North). In fact, it was Emperor of the North that aired. Not as if it will do you much good now, since the movie is long since over.

That having been said, it certainly can be important to check the listings. I think I've mentioned before that I usually download TCM's monthly schedule the last full week before the next month begins. So for this month, as an example, I would have downloaded the February 2012 schedule around Thursday, January 26 or Friday, January 27. TCM comes up with its schedules some time further in advance, but when they first put it up on their website it's a work in progress. That's one of the reasons why I try to avoid downloading the schedule until close to the time the next month begins. Even then, I can still get caught out. The printable schedule has Cheynne Autumn in the lineup tonight at 10:30 PM. However, TCM must have had a rights problem, because that's been replaced by The Big Sky. In this case, that's pretty much a certainty, since TCM's own online schedule has The Big Sky listed.

Who knows what FMC is showing

2012-02-09T12:47:00.000-05:00

I was looking through my satellite box guide, and noticed that what's left of FMC is supposed to air Born to Be Bad tomorrow morning at 7:30 AM. The only thing is, the box guide is saying it's in a 60-minute time slot, while I was certain the movie clocked in at about 64 or 65 minutes. Maybe not, at least on the last point: IMDb says the movie is 62 minutes. And the remnants of FMC's web site says that Born to Be Bad is airing at 7:30 AM, followed by Caprice at 8:32 AM -- something that would be consistent with the movie running 62 minutes.

Perhaps what's more interesting is a bit later in the day. Both the box guide and the FMC site have Caprice on the schedule, although obviously the box guide says it's starting at 8:30 AM. The next movie comes up at 10:30 AM, and here the box guide and FMC differ quite a bit. The box guide, as well as one of the online listings services I checked, claim the following movie will be The Man With One Red Shoe. FMC's site, on the other hand, says it will be Emperor of the North. I should point out that the various box guides and online listings sites (and by extensions, the ones in your local newspaper or other print sources) get their information from a low number of companies, so both of these could have received the same wrong information from the same source.

Friendly Persuasion

2012-02-08T13:24:00.000-05:00

A quick Blogger search claims that I haven't blogged about the film Friendly Persuasion before. Since I only first saw it last April, and I don't recall it airing that much since the TCM showing last April, the search function is probably not acting up for once. At any rate, Friendly Persuasion is airing again tomorrow morning at 8:15 AM on TCM.

Gary Cooper stars as Jess Birdwell, the patriarch of a Quaker farming family in southern Indiana in 1862. That year should give you a clue as to what's about to happen; 1862 is smack dab in the middle of the US Civil War. This presents a bit of a problem for the Birdwells, as Quakers are supposed to be devout pacifists, which is more or less currently the case. Then again, they're in Indiana, and it's not as if the war was going on in Indiana -- all the battles were in the South. But back to the Civil War later. Jess has a wife, Eliza (Dorothy McGuire), and two kids who are just about all grown up: son Josh (Anthony Perkins), and daughter Mattie (Phyllis Love). (There's a third, much younger kid as well.) Josh needs a girlfriend, while Mattie is in love with young Gard (Mark Richman), a nice young man who just happens not to be a Quaker -- which means he's also going off to war.

The first half or so of the movie deals mostly with the Birdwells' personal lives, and especially with the fact that Eliza is better at adhering to the Quaker tenets than Jess is. It's a bit sentimental, but also gives the story a good chance to develop some humor and some sympathy for all the characters. This is most notable in a scene where Jess takes Josh with him to visit the widow Hudspeth (Marjorie Main) to propose a business deal. Hudspeth has three daughters, who are all clearly looking for the company of a man, something which makes both Jess and Josh uncomfortable. But as I said at the beginning, you know where the film is going, which is that the war is going to come to the Birdwells.

This happens in the form of a Confederate raiding party. The Birdwells' farm is under threat, as is their farmhand Enoch, a runaway slave. But how to defend themselves? You'd think that self-defense ought not be a problem, but apparently pacifists do have a problem with it, at least as presented in Friendly Persuasion. Then again, if it weren't for this moral conflict, there wouldn't be a story. And even though the story is somewhat predictable, it's still very well executed, making for quite a good film.

Oscar goes to Germany

2012-02-07T12:52:00.000-05:00

Oscar Around the World continues tonight on TCM with a bunch of movies set in Germany; the German-set movies continue into tomorrow morning. Now, a lot of Oscars went to Germans in that once Hitler took power, a lot of creative people fled Nazi Germany for Hollywood, and a good number of them won Academy Awards. Amazingly, the AMPAS database claims that Fritz Lang is not among them. Shame, shame shame.

But of course, honoring the birthplaces of people is not what TCM's programming scheme for this month is about; as I mentioned, it's where the movies are set that matters. The night kicks off with Decision Before Dawn was nominated for two Oscars; one for its editing and one for the big prize of Best Picture. It's another Fox film and one that I'm surprised to have blogged about nearly two years ago. Anyhow, you can catch the very good Decision Before Dawn at 8:00 PM.

A movie I've briefly mentioned a number of times, but not for over two years, is Dr. Ehrlich's Magic Bullet, which comes up overnight at 1:30 AM. Edward G. Robinson stars as Ehrlich, the man who comes up with a treatment for syphilis, only for his work to cause controversy that lands him in court in a libel trial. The movie itself would have been controversial back in the day, if only for the use of the word "syphilis", which would shock the people enforcing the Production Code. Yes, people had sex back then, and people got venereal diseases.

As for blogging about some movies I haven't done before, well, that's probably going to come up in the near future. That, and hopefully finally getting around to adding some more tags to posts, if only because the Blogger search function is acting up again.

Ronald Reagan vs. the Oscars

2012-02-06T13:07:00.000-05:00

Today marks the birth anniversary of Ronald Reagan, who was born on this day in 1911. TCM has its regular 31 Days of Oscar on February, so people born in February don't get the normal birthday salute that people born in other months of the year do. And as far as Reagan goes, he started his career playing the male lead in B movies which, while entertaining, were never going to be Oscar material

Still, you can catch Reagan later this week in Desperate Journey, which airs at 9:45 AM Wednesday. Reagan plays second fiddle to Errol Flynn in a movie about a World War II bomber crew who get shot down by the Nazis over eastern Germany, and have to make their way back to freedom by going through Germany and the Netherlands. (You'd think it might be easier to make their way across the Baltic to neutral Sweden, although I don't know what sort of agreement Sweden had with Germany regarding Allied figthers. It received an Oscar nomination for its special effects, and not for the acting, and certainly not for the screenplay. If you want to see a better movie in the same vein, you could watch One of Our Aircraft Is Missing overnight tonight at 1:30 AM. This one, made in Britain by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, has a British bomber crew get shot down over the Netherlands, where the Dutch resistance helps them escape. Or, you could have watched 49th Parallel last week, where the stranded folks trying to escape are the crew of a Nazi U-boat.

What else could TCM show on Reagan's birthday? Perhaps his best performance is in Kings Row. Not that he was nominated, but the movie itself received a Best Picture nomination. Reagan received top billing in The Hasty Heart, and does a fairly good job, although the acting nomination here went to Richard Todd. Reagan also had a supporting role in Dark Victory, but again, the acting honors went to somebody else, namely Bette Davis.

Reagan also appeared in Million Dollar Baby, but not the one that won the Best Picture Oscar.

Another pair of repeats

2012-02-05T14:04:00.000-05:00

I think I mentioned a few days back that TCM is spending its 31 Days of Oscar this year looking at "Oscar Around the World"; that is, the movies are grouped more or less by the locations where they're set. TCM has been spending most of this weekend in Merrye Olde Englande, or, at least, England in various time periods. Contemporary England finally arrives this afternoon. It stars off with the Ealing comedies The Lavender Hill Mob at 4:45 PM and The Ladykillers at 6:15 PM. But the lesser-seen movie that I've blogged about in the past and would like to mention again is The VIPs, which ends the visit to England in the wee hours of the morning, at 5:15 AM tomorrow.

Tomorrow morning, TCM switches its focus from England to the Continent, starting off with a bunch of movies set in Central Europe, by which I mean the countries in the former Communist bloc west of the defunct Soviet Union. Note that this doesn't mean the movies are all set during the Communist era; there historical movies such as Conquest at 10:30 AM tomorrow and the Chopin biopic A Song To Remember at 7:15 AM. (Interestingly, Madame Curie, which received seven Oscar nominations, is not among the films, although it is disproportionately set in France.) The only one of the films set during the Communist era is a movie I blogged about previously, though -- and by coincidence, only five days after The VIPs: The Firemen's Ball tomorrow morning at 9:15 AM. I'm really pleased to see this one finally show up on TCM, which has much broader coverage than IFC and which doesn't interrupt the films with commercials the way IFC now does.

Ben Gazzara, 1930-2012

2012-02-04T09:30:00.001-05:00

Ben Gazzara, on the right in the military uniform in Anatomy of a Murder (1959)

You might have come across the news that veteran character actor Ben Gazzara died yesterday at the age of 81. I found it a bit more difficult to find good photos of him from his movies than I would have thought, apparently because the Google Image searching is bringing up more recent photos of him that are being used in all the online obituaries. Gazzara's breakout movie role was as the soldier accused of murdering the man who raped his wife in Otto Preminger's Anatomy of a Murder in 1959.

A movie os his for which I have a soft spot is The Young Doctors, where Gazzara plays a young pathologist arguing with veteran Fredric March over whether a patient has cancer and therefore needs a leg amputation, or not. The movie also stars a young Dick Clark, which is why I enjoy the film. Clark isn't that good, but Gazzara is. I was looking for a picture of Gazzara and March from that film, and the best I could find is somebody selling a production still on Ebay. (I don't know how long that link is going to be active.)

Nowadays, anybody can be a critic

2012-02-03T14:28:00.001-05:00

This morning, I came across an interesting article at the reason magazine blog [the lack of capitalization is the way the magazine calls itself] more or less on the auteur theory that film critics seem to love, and how today's technology has allowed those of us who don't agree with that theory to have our own say. The first point that the author, Tim Cavanaugh, brings up is an article written elsewhere on the firing of the film critic for The Village Voice. From that article's author, Tom Carson:

Whether or not he'd care for the title, Hoberman, along with The Nation's Stuart Klawans, is the most honorably anti-yahoo movie critic in the country.

Carson's "anti-yahoo" comment encapsulates a lot of what I think about movie criticism. That is, I don't pay all that much attention to what the "critics" for whom it's a day job for which they get paid by the old-style media have to say about movies. I think I've mentioned someplace that every time I see an old comment by Pauline Kael on a movie, I find that she had quite a different opinion than I did on the movie she's discussing. But above and beyond that, the "anti-yahoo" line says something about how the critics think they're superior, and how dare those regular people not have the tastes they do.

Another of my favorite non-movie bloggers is David Thompson, who blogs about things that interest him aesthetically (have fun with his "Friday Ephemera" link posts) among other posts. However, Thompson also posts his own commentary about the state of the arts today, which is usually to say about the people who would call themselves the "arts community", and how what they consider art tends not to be that which the rest of us consider art. That, and how the "arts community" wants us to pay for their "art". Here's Thompson's most recent post on that theme.

The two have something in common, which is that you have people who want to impose their own tastes on everybody else, and that they're often stridently political about it. I think I've commented more than once on the auteur theory (note that my understanding of it isn't quite the same as Tim Cavanugh's) and how it seems to imply that the non-corporate -- or more accurately the anti-corporate -- is somehow automatically virtuous and better. It's a point I made fairly when I blogged on Greed back in September, 2010. Also, the genesis for the auteur theory seems to come from French critics, and since they're not Hollywood, they're not of the horrid Hollywood, American "suits" culture -- another automatic plus for them. That's partly where notable child rapist Roman Polanski comes in.

One of the commenters to the reason post I mentioned at the beginning (I apologize for any obscenity you'll encounter from the reason readers; we're a rather saucy bunch) says something to the effect that we shouldn't refer to critics as failed movie makers, but instead understand that almost anybody can be a critic. All it really takes is a passion for the subject you're writing about, and an ability to communicate well. That might be the best comment of them all. With the advent of blogs, any idiot such as I can write about the things which make us passionate. Granted, some people may be better writers than others (and I'm probably in that latter group!), but if you're looking for opinions, you can find them all over the place, and don't need to go to your newspaper's film critic for them. Worse, many of us may not share the opinions of the newspaper film critic.

That having been said, I have to admit that I sometimes feel a sense of, "How could the average person like this stuff?" I know that I much prefer a good story to loads of CGI and explosions, and don't particularly get the current trend towards 3D as though it makes the pictures better. If it didn't do that in the 1950s, why should it have that effect today? But that's also why I try to limit my posting to older movies, and even when I don't like a film a lot of other people do, I understand that there are going to be people who do like that genre (women's pictures) or actor (Judy Garland).

Interesting anachronism

2012-02-02T13:37:00.000-05:00

So I watched Reap the Wild Wind yesterday; a movie which probably deserves a full-length post of its own sometime down the road. It's a movie set in Key West, Flordia, in the 1840s among the world of salvage boats. But that's not really what I'm posting about, other than to make the point that the film was set in the 1840s. One of the characters -- I think it was the John Wayne character, but since I wasn't expecting this, I wasn't paying close enough attention -- makes a reference to "Mother Carey's Chickens".

This is something I found odd. I already knew about the movie Mother Carey's Chickens, which was released in 1938. Obviously, a reference to a movie would be an anachronism for a film set in the 1840s, when they barely had photography. One would presume that the movie was based on a prior work of fiction, which in fact turns out to be the case. Kate Douglas Wiggin wrote the novel Mother Carey's Chickens... in 1911. Still a pretty obvious anachronism. (The book is in the public domain and free ebook versions are available if you wish to read it.)

What I find more interesting, however, is referring to "Mother Carey's Chickens" at all. Reap the Wild Wind was released a good four years after the movie Mother Carey's Chickens, which makes one wonder whether the movie would still have been in the public consciousness. I thought perhaps there might have been a series based on the movie, but not as far as I can tell. It was remade in the early 1960s, but that's obviously a bit too late for Reap the Wild Wind If not, I wonder whether the moviegoers of the early 1940s would remember a book written three decades earlier. Further, the movie Mother Carey's Chickens was made at RKO, while Reap the Wild Wind is a Paramount production. I always find it a bit hard to believe that one studio would openly mention another studio's movies back in those days. In fact, every time there's a scene in a movie where people go to a movie theater or pass by a theater with movie posters in the lobby, I try to figure out whether the movie in the poster is a real one and contemporaneous to the action in the movie. It's something I briefly mentioned in August, 2008, regarding the movie Should Ladies Behave.

Oscar death match: Rocky vs. Network

2012-02-01T08:21:00.000-05:00

TCM kicks off its annual 31 Days of Oscar this morning, with the theme for this year being an "around the world" theme of TCM grouping the movies more or less by where they were set. The prime time lineup for tonight has quite a few movies set in Philadelphia, starting at 8:00 PM with Rocky, which won the Best Picture Oscar for 1976. I know a lot of people who think it's almost a travesty that Rocky won the Oscar that year and not Network. After all Network has biting social commentary, and Rocky is supposedly just a feel-good movie. To be honest, though, I'm of two minds as to what should have won Best Picture that year.

For me, the thing is that I find both pictures are worthy of the award. Network certainly does have biting social commentary, and is prescient in the things it was saying about the state of television. I find, however, that a lot of people who talk about these points seem to want to use them to bash one particular broadcaster or another, depending on their particular political point of view. (I think you can guess which channel comes up most often in this regard.) When it comes to politics, or in my case ideology, I'd argue that all of television news i pretty lousy, what with its moral panic of the day and the emotional appeals of "won't somebody think of the children". As for the actual on-screen product in Network, not only is there the biting satire, there are some pretty damn good performances by much of the cast. And it has its iconic moment, with Peter Finch as Howard Beale telling everybody to shout, "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this any more!"

Rocky, as I said earlier, often gets dismisses for being a "feel-good" movie, which implies that either it doesn't have any political views, or worse, it has the wrong political views. I think, however, that this does the movie a gross disservice. Rocky certainly has commentary to make, but it does so in a rather more subtle way than many pictures that are trying to make their points in a serious way. (Let's leave satire aside here; my previous comment is to compare Rocky to dreadfully blunt films like Philadelphia.) When Rich Eisen was Guest Programmer back in June 2010, he selected Rocky and commented that it wasn't so much a movie about boxing as it was a love story set against the world of boxing. It's also a social commentary about the state of the lower classes which just happens to be set against the world of boxing. Look at the conditions Rocky is living in, and it's not all wine and roses about the Americn dream. Rocky also has a decidedly ambiguous ending. Also, like Network, there is an iconic image, that of Sylvester Stallone running up the steps of Philadelphia's City Hall, set to the music of Bill Conti, which has also stood the test of time more than most Hollywood music. Play "Gonna Fly Now" and everybody gets the reference.

Is Rocky better than Network? I'm not certain which one is better, but both are transcendent movies.

End of the month briefs

2012-01-31T13:28:00.000-05:00

I sat down to watch the beginning of The Man Who Understood Women on what's left of the Fox Movie Channel this morning. Mostly, it was to see if they were finally going to air a letterboxed print. I think the last time it showed up was on TCM several years ago as part of a night dedicated to Nunnally Johnson. Johnson was mostly a screenwriter, but in the 1950s he directed a couple of films, of which this was one. Surprisingly enough, FMC did show a letterboxed film. But I was reminded quickly enough why this is one of those films I find so hard to sit through. Henry Fonda is badly miscast as a difficult to work with Hollywood director married to Leslie Caron. In fact, I find it difficult to care about any of the characters.

TCM's prime time lineup tonight is dedicated to the people who were honored some months back in AMPAS' Governors Awards. It's the one part of the Academy Awards I ought to care about, but to be honest, I don't even sit down to watch these. Now that they've been separated from the regular Oscar broadcast -- presumably, it's the wrong demographic of people who would care about the recipients of these awards -- I wouldn't even know when or what channel these were on. Or if they were even on at all.

Speaking of the Oscars, tomorrow starts TCM's annual 31 Days of Oscar programming block, with the first film being 1953's Beneath the 12-Mile Reef at 6:00 AM. This is another Fox film that was shown in an ugly pan-and-scan print the last time it showed up on the Fox Movie Channel. TCM is claiming they're showing it letterboxed, but I wouldn't know.

Not-so-gratuitous Gene Hackman photos

2012-01-30T12:53:00.001-05:00

Gene Hackman thankfully not in a basketball uniform in Hoosiers (1986)

Today is the 82nd birthday of Oscar-winning actor Gene Hackman, so posting a bunch of pictures of him really isn't so gratuitous. (That, and I haven't used any new-to-the-blog photos in quite some time.) Hackman started in television, but really made a name for himself with the 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde, in which he played Clyde's brother Buck. In the photo here, that's Hackman on the left, other than that little old lady who seems a bit calm for a bank robbery. I suppose that's one of the problems with using still images to illustrate a moving picture; in fact, I find the same problem with a lot of sports photographs.

Hackman won the first of two Oscars for playing Popeye Doyle in 1971's The French Connection, a role that he later reprised in 1975 in the unoriginally named French Connection II. As for sequels, Hackman also appeared in both the 1978 Superman and the sequel Superman II, playing Lex Luthor on both occasions.

A rather more fun role is that of Reverend Scott, the unorthodox ship's chaplain, not so much ministering but instead following Benjamin Franklin's dictum that "God helps those who help themselves", in The Poseidon Adventure. As for more unorthodox religion, Hackman also provided the voice of a bored God who would be perfectly happy destroying mankind in Two of a Kind.

Ooh, another MGM B picture

2012-01-29T14:05:00.000-05:00

TCM is spending tomorrow showing a bunch of movies from 1952. These include one of those MGM B movies with a message that I've been mentioned a bit lately: Talk About a Stranger, airing at 7:30 AM tomorrow.

The scene is one of those orange-growing towns in southern California in the prosperous years after World War II. We have our typical all-American family: father George Murphy, mother Nancy Davis, and son Billy Gray -- and a kid on the way: mother is supposedly quite pregnant, although supposedly-pregnant women never looked very pregnant in the Hollywood movies of those days. Into this town comes a new resident, Dr. Mahler (Kurt Kasznar), who takes one of the old houses and mostly keeps to himself. This arouses a bit of suspicion, as the movie is set the sort of small town where everybody knows everybody else. The children, as children are wont to do, are particularly terrible in their gossip-mongering. Some of them try to visit his house and befriend him, but he just wants to be left alone.

Matters take a turn for the worse when the son's adopted stray mutt dies one day. It seems as though the dog may have been poisoned, and it's obvious to the kid that Dr. Mahler must have done it. I mean, how could anybody else have possibly been responsible for what there's not even a chance of having been an accident? If things are bad for the kids, it's about to get bad for the adults as well. A cold snap is on the way, and that means the possibility of frost, which would be devastating to the orange crop. It's off to set up the jerry-rigged heating system. But will Dr. Mahler hinder the orange growers?

Talk About a Stranger is like a lot of those MGM B movies in that it has a good premise, but it doesn't work as well as it should. It just seems so obvious that the movie is trying to tell us not to judge a book by its cover, and won't shut up about that message. Still, there are interesting scenes in the attempt, and Nancy Davis, who would of course go on to marry Ronald Reagan, is always worth a watch. I think both of the Reagans get an undeserved bum rap as "B-movie stars" because of Ronald's future political career. The thing is, Hollywood needed a lot of actors back in the days when they were making all those B pictures. Ronald and Nancy were both competent if not stellar, but given the right material, they could shine. If they had been 50 years younger, they probably both would have started their acting careers in episodic TV playing varoius supporting roles. Not necessarily big names, but steady careers.

I don't think Talk About a Stranger has gotten a DVD release, so you're going to have to catch the TCM showing if you want to see it.

Four years

2012-01-29T10:04:00.000-05:00

It's hard to believe sometimes, but today marks the fourth anniversary of my blogging here. My first real post was about Jack Carson, so I suppose I should mention another of his films. However, I'd much rather recommend the 1925 MGM Studio Tour, which is supposed to air a little after 1:20 AM. This is a "documentary" short in the sense that MGM is documenting the studio as it was in 1925, visiting every department and having the folks who worked in each department pose for photos. There's a good deal that's interesting, in that you can finally put faces to names of some of the old silent stars. But what's more interesting is the mention of their new discovery, 17-year-old Lucille LaSueur. That's a name that wouldn't work in Hollywood, so MGM changed her name -- to Joan Crawford.

This is the end

2012-01-28T10:00:00.000-05:00

Well, it's not the end for me; it's the end of another season of TCM's Essentials. Next Saturday is the first Saturday in February, which means 31 Days of Oscar. After that we have a new season of the Essentials in March. It's also the end of Alec Baldwin's three-year stint as Robert Osborne's co-host. Come March, Drew Barrymore will be sitting alongside Osborne discussing the movies.

TCM has decided to something interesting with this last week of the Essentials, which is to program a night of movies that were the last film for a prominent Hollywood star. That starts off with The Misfits at 8:00 PM, which of course was the last film made by Clark Gable.

Following that is Saratoga at 10:15 PM; Jean Harlow died of septicemia during the filming of the movie, and her fans clamored so much for the footage to be released that MGM brought in a body double to play Jean Harlow's back during the hitherto unfilmed scenes. (I'd rather see Harlow's back at the end of Dinner at Eight.)

Edward G. Robinson died after filming his scenes in Soylent Green but before the movie was released; you can see the movie at midnight.

James Dean made only three features. I'm not certain if they were released in the same order he filmed them; but TCM is showing Rebel Without a Cause at 2:00 PM. (IMDb says that Giant was the last one released.)

Finally, at 4:00 AM, you can see Spencer Tracy's final film, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner.

James Whale night

2012-01-27T13:27:00.001-05:00

TCM is spending this evening (before TCM Underground, at least), showing four pictures directed by James Whale. Whale is best remembered for directing the 1931 Boris Karloff version of Frankenstein, which is on at 11:15 PM. What might be more interesting, however, is that three of the four movies showing (other than the first, The Great Garrick, at 8:00 PM) were made at Universal.

As far as I can tell, for quite a long time, TCM hasn't been showing very many films from Universal, and certainly not from the days before Universal became Universal-International in the late 1940s. (In fact, I already mentioned this back in February, 2008.) Part of it might be down to the quality of Universal's movies from that era. Universal also controls the rights to the Paramount talkies made before 1950, and the Paramount films from the 1930s and 1940s have begun to spring up on TCM in the past few years. Paramount, for the most part, had a reputation for making more prestigious films, with Universal being further down the pecking order of the studio system, much like Columbia in the days before It Happened One Night.

It will be nice if TCM can continue to get the rights to show more films made at Universal Studios, although I have a feeling it's going to start with Universal's best known product from the 1930s. In addition of Frankenstein, TCM is also showing The Invisible Man from Universal at 12:30 AM. The more interesting selection is One More River at 9:45 PM, a movie I've never heard of. For the time being, I'd expect more of the Universal horror product, such as The Black Cat which aired earlier this month.

Millionaires in Prison

2012-01-26T22:32:00.000-05:00

I briefly mentioned the movie Millionaires in Prison twice, back in April and July of 2011. The first mention was for the birthday of Lee Tracy, who plays the prison warden in the film. Anyhow, the movie is airing at 10:30 AM tomorrow (January 27) as part of a day of prison movies.

It's not a particularly good movie, although it's a bit of fun. The premise is as the title mentions: several rich people get sent to prison: two (Raymond Walbourn and Thurston Hall) for embezzlement; and a third is a doctor who drove drunk and committed vehicular manslaughter. The plot is fairly risible. The two rich guys act incredibly naïve as to what prison is like, thinking they can get gourmet food in the clink and trying to bilk the regular prisoners out of their money. In real life if they tried this the prisoners in for violent crime would probably kill them. The doctor, meanwhile, gets a chance to redeem himself by being the doctor in a medical experiment. Really.

As I said, it's not very good, but if you want to have a laugh at a howler of a movie, or see what happened to Lee Tracy after Viva Villa!, this is your chance.

The Liquidator

2012-01-26T10:59:00.000-05:00

A couple of weeks ago when I was mentioning TCM's tribute to Jack Cardiff, I said that there was going to be a night of movies directed by Cardiff. These include The Liquidator, which is coming on overnight at 1:30 AM.

Rod Taylor stars as "Boysie" Oakes, who at the start of the film is a British tank commander in World War II, leading his tank into the Paris which is just being liberated from the Nazis. While trying to get his bearings, Boysie sees a man getting chased by Nazis, who are trying to kill the man for presumably being a spy. Boysie kills the two assailants, and earns the enduring gratitude of this man (Trevor Howard).

Fast forward many years, and Howard's character, Mostyn, is now in charge of British intelligence. They've got a problem of various British citizens being traitors and selling secrets to foreigners. They could put these double agents on trial, but the problem with that is that it would be a public relations disaster and would also reveal state secrets. So British intelligence gets the brilliant idea of starting a dirty ops campaign of bumping off these agents. And Mostyn knows just the man to recruit to do the killings: Boysie.

It turns out that Boysie is running a pub in the English countryside, and keeping up relations with quite a few women to boot. Mostyn woos Boysie with the promise of high pay and a wonderful flat in London in exchange for becoming a secret agent, although he doesn't first tell Boysie that his work is going to involve killing people. Boysie goes to London with Mostyn, only to find out too late that the job involves murder, which Boysie really doesn't like.

At this point, The Liquidator starts to take a more darkly comic turn. Boysie, not wanting to kill anybody but being duty bound to do so, hires a contract killer to do all the killings for him. Meanwhile, Boysie still continues his womanizing ways, trying to bed Mostyn's secretary Iris (Jill St. John) despite the fact that this is highly illegal. To get around being spotted having a relationship with Iris, Boysie arranges for the two to meet in the south of France and have a weekend fling there. Unfortunately, Mostyn finds out. And then to make matters worse, Boysie gets captured as part of a real spy drama.

The Liquidator is a movie that has in interesting premise, but ultimately falls flat. Rather like The Big Street, it's a movie that tries to straddle two genres -- in this case comedy and a spy thriller -- and never really knows which side it wants to plant both feet in. The thriller parts aren't thrilling enough, and the comic parts aren't comic enough. The casting is quite right, I think: Rod Taylor is just the right person to cast as a dashing ladies' man who can also do masculine spy work. Trevor Howard seems to be reprising his role in Faher Goose, but doing a good job of it. And Jill St. John is easy on the eyes in a role that's really not very demanding. The spy scenes in France have quite a few character actors who are entertaining enough. But in the end, I think they're all let down by a flawed script.

The Liquidator doesn't seem to have gotten a DVD release, so you're going to have to catch the TCM showing.

The last night of Angela Lansbury

2012-01-25T13:29:00.000-05:00

Tonight being the final Wednesday in January, it's the final night of Angela Lansbury's turn as TCM's Star of the Month. TCM is kicking the night off with the Private Screenings interview she did with Robert Osborne several years ago. Toward the end of the night, at 3:45 AM, is Dear Heart, which I recommended last April.

Angela Lansbury is a bit odd a choice as Star of the Month, as she was not the star of a lot of the movies which TCM showed. (Although, to be fair, they seem no longer to have the rights to the Disney live-action movies such as Bedknobs and Broomsticks, where she was the star.) I think you can safely call her the female lead in The Manchurian Candidate, but in movies like Gaslight she's clearly a supporting player. And in Dear Heart, she only shows up for the last 15 minutes or so. On the other hand, Lansbury, thanks to her work on the TV series Murder, She Wrote, is pretty recognizable. And since she also had a long career making movies in Hollywood, it's kind of understandable why TCM might choose to put the spotlight on her. It's a good way to use many of the same old movies to try to attract new people who might not know so much about those old films.

And speaking of Private Screenings, I was remiss in not mentioning yesterday's airing of Robert Osborne's Private Screenings interview with Ernest Borgnine from a few years ago, re-aired in honor of Borgnine's 95th birthday. Sadly, it doesn't seem to be available in the TCM media room, and I don't think it's been posted to Youtube either.

Sharon Tate vs. Redd Foxx

2012-01-24T13:05:00.000-05:00

I've mentioned both of these shorts briefly in the past, but TCM is airing two fun little shorts between movies in the prime time/overnight lineup. First, around 1:45 AM, just after Agent 8 3/4, TCM is showing All Eyes on Sharon Tate, which is a promo of sorts for her then-upcoming film Eye of the Devil. I finally got to see Eye of the Devil last summer, and I have to say that it wasn't all that good.

The night ends a little after 5:40 AM with Redd Foxx Becomes a Movie Star. When I mentioned this one back in May 2011, I commented that I hadn't seen it, but from the date and title it seemed it would be about his film Norman... Is That You?. Sure enough, it was. It's fun to see Foxx and Pearl Bailey doing their thing to promote the flim.

I've probably briefly mentioned this as well, but I always get a kick out of this particular type of short to promote a film, much more than I do out of the traditional trailers. These have a nostalgia value that the trailers just don't.

Max Ophüls night

2012-01-23T13:45:00.000-05:00

TCM is spending tonight showing several films directed by German-born filmmaker Max Ophüls. One that I saw the last time it showed up on TCM, but don't have quite a good enough recollection of to do a full-length blog post on, is Letter from an Unkown Woman, airing at 11:15 PM.

Louis Jourdan plays a pianist/composer in turn of the last century Vienna who comes home one one night looking to make a quick getaway: it turns out he's been challenged to a duel, and unbeknownst to him, the duellist is waiting for him at the entrance to his apartment building. But before he can leave to try to make his escape, his servant hands him a letter. Cue the flashback, as if we haven't seen that before....

The letter, it turns out, was written by Joan Fontaine, who knew Jourdan years ago when she was a teenager living in the same apartment building as Jourdan. She and her family move away, but years later she meets Jourdan and has a brief affair with him. Parts of it remind me of Brief Encounter, one of those women's pictures that is well made, even if I find it a bit hard to stomach. From memory, however, Letter from an Unknown Woman isn't quite as much a "women's picture" as Brief Encounter.

To be honest, though, I'm looking forward to The Reckless Moment, kicking off the night at 8:00 PM. It sounds like an interesting thriller about a mother trying to hide the murder committed by her daughter. Supposedly both movies have been released to DVD, as Amazon lists them as available for purchase, but the TCM web-site doesn't: the DVDs are listed as imports from Korea.

Boris Karloff, meet Bela Lugosi

2012-01-22T09:56:00.000-05:00

TCM is showing a couple of early 1930s horror films tonight. Perhaps the most interesting of them is The Black Cat, airing at 9:15 PM.

The movie starts off with Bela Lugosi on a train in Hungary, which is where he meets American couple David Manners and Julie Bishop (the latter credited under the name Jacqueline Wells). They're on their honeymoon, touring central Europe. However, their honeymoon takes a turn for the worse when the car they're in crashes, injuring the young wife. The husband and Lugosi take her to the mansion of an old acquaintance of Lugosi's (that acquaintance played by Boris Karloff), which is where the action of the film really begins.

We quickly learn that Karloff and Lugosi are more than just acquaintances. When Lugosi had last met Karloff 15 years earlier, he had had a wife and daughter. They were both left behind at Karloff's estate, and Karloff claims they both died of illness. Lugosi, on the other hand, believes that they were murdered, that Karloff is a Satan worshipper who believes in human sacrifice, and that the young wife is the next person who is going to be sacrificed!

To be honest, The Black Cat doesn't particularly cover much more ground than a lot of the other horror films of the early 1930s. They're all interesting in their own rights as time machines, and the plots, being horror-based and not really having to deal with reality, don't date too badly. The thing that makes The Black Cat so interesting is the set design. Karloff's mansion is a masterpiece of art deco design, even though there probably wouldn't have been art deco at the time Lugosi's character was first at the mansion with his wife and kid 15 years earlier. Karloff must have had Martha Stewart in to remodel.

About that Columbia noir

2012-01-21T12:59:00.000-05:00

A few days ago, I asked about a TCM Shop promo I saw hawking some noir (more or less) films from Columbia that the TCM database lists as not being available on DVD. It turns out that they're not available yet. In fact, the DVD set is called Film Noir Classics III, and is avaliable for purchase (or more accurately ships) on January 25. Tight Spot, the movie that started my wondering, is one of those five films, as is My Name is Julia Ross, which I blogged about last October.

The other three films are: Broderick Crawford in The Mob (1951); Mickey Rooney in Drive a Crooked Road (1954); and Dan Duryea as The Burglar (1957). There's also an abbreviated version of the promo airing which doesn't actually name any of the films, although if you look carefully you can see My Name is Julia Ross as one of the titles.

I guess what this shows is that I should do more research before I post.

Experiment in Terror

2012-01-20T13:57:00.001-05:00

There are a lot worse ways to spend two hours than by watching the movie Experiment in Terror. It's airing overnight tonight at 3:45 AM on TCM, so you'll probably have to record it: the DVD seems to be out of print.

Lee Remick plays Kelly Sherwood. She's a bank teller in San Francisco taking care of her high school-aged sister Toby (Stefanie Powers), since both of their parents are dead. One night, Kelly gets home from work, only to be accosted in her garage by a stranger. The stranger apparently knows Kelly quite well, as he knows Kelly's occupation, and that she and Toby live alone. The man also knows what he wants, which is money. He tells Kelly that she's going to embezzle a substantial sum of money from the bank for him, and that if she doesn't, there are going to be severe consequences -- after all, there's that kid sister he can threaten. And if she tells anybody, well then, there are those consequences again.

Naturally, you know that Kelly is going to tell somebody. She gets in touch with the authorities and, in the person of FBI agent John Ripley (Glenn Ford), they get in touch with her. Kelly never actually saw her assailant, at least, not well enough to see his face. All she did was hear his voice, which she could spot immediately because it was raspy and the man seemed to have asthma or something.

At this point, the movie becomes fairly standard: the investigator tries to find the culprit before anything untoward happens; the victim lives in fear that something bad is going to happen to her; the situation gets escalated; and there's a frantic chase at the end. That doesn't mean that Experiment in Terror isn't a good movie. It's just that there's only so much that the genre can do. Indeed, to be fair to Experiment in Terror, the movie actually does it quite well. Glenn Ford is the right sort of actor, dependable and sturdy, to play the role of the FBI agent. Lee Remick is more than suitable as the working woman, and Stefanie Powers is young and vulnerable enough to play the kid sister. And the climactic chase scene is set at San Francisco's Candlestick Park where Ford had to negotiate a large crowd without there being any violence. Sure, the movie covers ground we've all walked on before, but it does it in a very entertaining way.

As I implied at the beginning, you may have a difficult time finding a DVD. Amazon has copies available for purchase at a ridiculous price, while TCM says you can't buy it from them. These both suggest that there was a DVD release in the past, but that the print run ended. That's a shame, since the movie delivers well on what it does.

A couple of questions

2012-01-19T13:37:00.000-05:00

I watched In Name Only yesterday. I could swear that just before the movie started, TCM ran one of its TCM Shop ads, promoting DVDs and box sets that they're newly selling. This time, I thought I saw a promotion for a "Columbia Noir" collection. One of the movies in the set was Tight Spot, something I blogged about all the way back in August 2008, but which I mentioned at the time was not available on DVD. A look at TCM, however, still claims that Tight Spot is not available for purchase from the TCM Shop. Did I actually see something different than I thought I saw? Or is Tight Spot getting a DVD release, but just that it's not yet available?

This morning, I tuned in to watch the 11:30 AM showing This Land Is Mine. I turned on the TV a few minutes before the movie began, and it certainly looked as though TCM was showing a short, something involving old footage from the 1920s, repackaged for a later release. The short ended, I think, with Al Smith leading people in singing "The Bowery". TCM's schedule page doesn't list a short following Uncertain Glory, the feature which was on immediately before This Land is Mine. However, Uncertain Glory came on at 9:30 AM, and is listed with a running time of 102 minutes, which would mean that there was not only enough time for a short; indeed, TCM probably would have scheduled a short in between the two movies.

The Runaway Bus

2012-01-18T08:33:00.001-05:00

I could swear that I've already blogged about the film The Runaway Bus, airing at 6:30 PM this evening on TCM, before. Blogspot's search function, which definitely still has problems, doesn't show any results; nor does Google (which of course owns Blogspot). But then Bing also claims I've never blogged about it, so maybe I haven't.

The Runaway Bus is one of those interesting little British movies being made in the early 1950s in that it's got a running time of only about 75 minutes, but it packs in a lot of fun. The movie starts at one of London's airports, which is currently socked in thanks to those terrible stereotypical London fogs for which the city is famous. That means nobody gets in and nobody gets out. Except, of course, that some people need to. So a bus is rounded up to take a group of passengers to another airport where there isn't any fog, and incompetent Percy (Frankie Howerd) is put in charge as the bus driver. With Percy being incompetent, it isn't too difficult to figure out that he's going to get lost. And that provides a lot of the comedy in the movie.

But The Runaway Bus isn't just a comedy; it's a comic mystery. Back at the airport, it's been determined that somebody has made off with a shipment of gold bullion, and that whoever has it is extremely dangerous. It seems sensible to conclude that whoever took it is also on the bus. But where is the bus? And which of the passengers is the robber? Well, both questions are a bit difficult to answer. The bus has ended up somewhere where there is an abandoned town, and a series of explosions going on. And the passengers are all a bit odd, notably George Coulouris and little old lady Margaret Rutherford. Petula Clark, who is probably best known in the US today for her 1960s singing career, but had been acting since the late 1940s, plays a stewardess sent along to help oversee everything.

The Runaway Bus is quite entertaining, mixing the comedy with the suspense in the right amounts. It will leave you guessing until the end as to who stole the gold; for all we know it could even be Howerd himself! The movie has been released to DVD, but it's a relatively expensive release.

Intruder in the Dust

2012-01-17T13:28:00.000-05:00

One of the movies I finally got around to watching yesterday is Intruder in the Dust. It's available on DVD, so I can still recommend it after the fact.

Based on a novel by William Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust is set in a small Mississippi town (presumably in Faulkner's mythical Yoknapatawpha County; the film was actually film in Faulkner's hometown of Oxford) as it was in the 1940s. There's been a murder, and the police are bringing in farmer Lucas Beauchamp (Juano Hernandez) as the obvious murderer. It's evident from first sight that Beauchamp is black and, since the dead man was white, this case is going to have racial overtones. In fact, the deceased was a brother in one of those small-town clans (of the sort that I talked about when I recommended The Firemen's Ball back in November 2009). So there are a lot of family members baying for blood, and this being the South of the 1940s, there's the palpable fear that theere's going to be a lynching. Well, some of the people (the blacks) fear it, while others (the whites) have gone to the county lockup to crowd around and see what's going to happen.

A member of that latter group is young Chick (Claude Jarman, Jr.), who is spotted by Lucas because of an incident that happened some time earlier when Chick fell into an icy creek on Lucas' property. Town legend now has it that Chick is friends with Lucas, and Lucas asks Chick to get his uncle John (David Brian), who is a lawyer: Lucas needs somebody to defend him. All the (white) adults, unsurprisingly, think Lucas is guilty as sin, and Lucas is reluctant to defend himself because he knows that none of the adults will believe him. Chick, on the other hand....

Chick's willingness to believe Lucas leads to an illegal night-time exhumation with a surprise, and the realization that perhaps Lucas is innocent after all -- except that he won't have much of an alibi until after any autopsy. Meanwhile, the patriarch of the murder victim's family has his own desires for wanting to see justice done, and the crowd in front of the county jail is growing. Time is short to uncover the identity of the killer.

Intruder in the Dust works fairly well as a straight-up mystery/suspense movie. As commentary on race relations, however, I'm not so sure. There's something about Juano Hernandez, who was born in Puerto Rico, that screams, "Not a southern black!" Not that he could pass as white; but in all of his films that I've seen, he just seems different from the other blacks. True, he's supposed to be somewhat different here, but in other movies like Trial he also comes across as being slightly miscast. I say all this despite his being a good actor. Secondly, characters such as the sheriff (Will Geer), and especially the victim's father (Porter Hall), seem to turn on a dime. One little shred of evidence that Lucas might not be guilty, and they suddenly become crusaders for justice. I can't help but think that in real life, they'd be more like Linda Darnell's character in No Way Out: she could certainly be persuaded to do the right thing, but she's clearly more concered about what's in it for herself. Finally, there seem to be a few convenient coincidences in the plot. As we saw in Fury, a lynch mob doesn't seem to concerend about whether any "innocent" people trying to protect the target of their ire get killed in the crossfire. And what's the old lady doing seeking legal advice on a Sunday night?

Back to Crime School

2012-01-16T22:19:00.001-05:00

I mentioned the movie Crime School back in December 2009 when its star, Humphrey Bogart, was TCM's Star of the Month. It's airing again tomorrow morning (January 17) at 8:00 AM (and is available on DVD if you miss the Tuesday showing), but there are a few more things I don't think I said about the film back in 2009. First is that in addition to Bogart, it's got the Dead End Kids early in their careers, before they morphed into the Bowery Boys and a series of low-budget films over at Monogram. More interestingly, while I mentioned in 2009 that Crime School was a remake of The Mayor of Hell, I hadn't spotted that the story was done a third time in 1939 as Hell's Kitchen. Astonishingly, Hell's Kitchen also stars the Dead End Kids.

On a somewhat unrelated note, in doing searches, I've been tending to mix up Crime School with another 1938 picture, Girls' School. Not only that, but I was thinking Girls' School was the title of a completely different picture (albeit one slightly closer to Crime School in plot), Girls on Probation, which stars Ronald Reagan and has the screen debut of Susan Hayward.

Revisiting Crime School also made me think of the Rodney Dangerfield comedy Back to School, which came out all the way back in the summer of 1986. There's another one for the "Boy does that make me feel old" file.

Martin Luther King Day

2012-01-16T08:05:00.000-05:00

This being the Martin Luther King Day holiday, TCM is once again showing a bunch of movies either with prominent black cast members, or casts that are almost entirely black. Robert Osborne sat down with director Charles Burnett several years back on MLK Day for a night of Burnett's films. That's when I first came across My Brother's Wedding, airing at 8:00 PM. If memory serves, it was one of the later films that evening so I didn't stay up to watch the whole thing; I suppose then that it's good this film is back on the TCM lineup, as the little I saw looked at least interesting, and more accessible than his better-known Killer of Sheep (not on today's lineup).

The other surprise is The Defiant Ones, airing at 6:15 PM. No, it's not a surprise that it's on the lineup. What surprised me is that TCM lists it in its schedule as not available for purchase on DVD. Apparently it had a DVD release many years back, but is now out of print. You can get it at Amazon, but it's not cheap.

There are a couple of other good movies airing in the morning lineup, but they're also available on DVD so I don't have to mention them right now.

Making me feel old again

2012-01-15T20:13:00.000-05:00

I was watching the football on TV today, and there was an advertisment for a film coming out in March or April called 21 Jump Street. The ad certainly brought back memories: I remember the original TV show 21 Jump Street, which was one of the first "hits" for the then-fledgling Fox network, or as close to a hit as they had back in those days.

It's also a bit odd to see 80s shows being made into movies, as the 80s seem to be a bit of an overlooked decade in my opinion. I've posted a lot about how the older Baby Boomers (roughly the ones born in the first half of the boom) still sit in a lot of executive positions and seem to have a lot of cultural power, and that one of the results of this is how we get so many references to stuff from the 1960s. To be sure, we've seen Hollywood make movies out of The Dukes of Hazzard and The A-Team, and now 21 Jump Street, but they've also decided to keep remaking Mission Impossible movies. And when somebody does make a movie about a conservative icon from the 80s, such as The Iron Lady, the shrieking from those who fought on the 80s left is amazing. For all her faults, she was far less bad than murderous 60s revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara, but making movies about him is radical chic.

But I'm getting too much into politics. When I saw the 21 Jump Street ad, I began to wonder what was the first TV show to be turned into a movie. There was a Dragnet movie in the 1950s, and it had already been a TV show, but it was also a radio show which got its genesis with the movie He Walked By Night. Episodes of TV shows such as The Man From UNCLE were cobbled together into movies in the late 1960s, but I don't know how much nostalgia there was until the Baby Boomers started getting nostalgic.

On the other hand, turning movies into TV shows seems to have been going on for a long time, and may or may not have much to do with nostalgia. Gidget and Peyton Place (which of course was originally a book) were turned into TV shows in the mid-1960s, and The Naked City came even a few years before that. I think it's not uncommon for Hollywood to try to cash in on a successful property by selling it through multiple media; after all, look at how many comic strips have been turned into movies going back to the early 1940s if not earlier (the entire Blondie and Dick Tracy series).

HBO's schedule

2012-01-15T09:25:00.000-05:00

So I was looking through the online TV listings services, and noticed that HBO Signature is airing Doctor Dolittle next Sunday morning (January 22). The listings say it's the Rex Harrison film from 1967, but I remembered that the movie was remade some years back, specifically in 1998 with Eddie Murphy playing the good doctor. Curious to see whether the listings sites were right, I decided to look for HBO's own online schedule.

I probably shouldn't have. HBO's website is a Flash-based abomination. It took a long time for anything to show up on screen at all other than a black background. And then when I clicked on the schedule link, there was another long wait... followed by the browser window going completely black. No schedule whatsoever. As much as I've complained about TCM's schedule, at least you can actually access their schedule. Is this just a problem with using Opera? I'm loathe to download the latest version of other browsers just to keep up with sites that may be excluding the one I use on a regular basis, especially if the problem pages don't work well in other browsers.

And why do websites insist on making everything Flash-based in the first place? It's really obnoxious. I know there are a lot of times when I'm visiting a site and I'd like to open one link in a background tab while suring the main page. TV listings sites are a natural for this; I can right-click the link to one program and open it in a background tab to see what other times the movie is showing, while looking through the main listings for other movies I might be interested in. But Flash, as usually implemented, brings up the Flash dialog with a right-click, not the standard browser dialog.

Riding the High Country

2012-01-14T13:28:00.000-05:00

Yesterday when I was looking for a good still of Fortunio Bonanova in Five Graves to Cairo, one of the hits led me to a blog on FilmJournal.net. It turned out that the blog was no longer being updated. More or less -- in fact, the blogger had decided to stop using the filmjournal.net platform and switch to WordPress, where you can find his blog Riding the High Country.

To be honest, I don't read other film blogs all that often, mostly out of laziness and having other things I'd like to do with my time. (I'm an avid Go player, for example, and if I want to play a game at something other than breakneck speed, it's best to budget an hour at minimum.) It's also part of the reason why a lot of other people have a better-written blog than mine. I try to put up one post a day, and when there isn't anything I can think about, the post usually winds up being just a sort of placeholder mentioning something coming up on TCM that I blogged about some years in the past. That, and when I blog, I almost always just sit down and write in a sort of stream-of-consciousness style in that what I put down are the first things I think of. I don't normally write up posts some time in advance. Last Thursday, I mentioned Jack Cardiff and a movie he directed called The Liquidator which will be coming up later in the month on TCM on a night of movies that he directed. I probably should be starting that post now, but the reality is that I most likely won't get around to it until the day it airs.

Anyhow, I enjoyed Riding the High Country enough that I decided to include it in my minimal blogroll -- again a blogroll that's small mostly out of laziness. Then I looked at his blogroll, and noticed that I'm already on there. I hate to think how many people have decided to blogroll me, and I'm blithely unaware of it, looking selfish for not mentioning any of their blogs. So to any new readers, welcome! I hope you find something new about film that you don't already know.

Fortunio Bonanova, 1895-1969

2012-01-13T13:24:00.000-05:00

Today marks the birth anniversary of Fortunio Bonanova, another of those names you might have seen in the credits but whose face you may not remember. In fact, as is often the case with character actors, internet image searches don't necessarily find too many pictures, which is why I haven't included a picture with this post.

Fortunio Bonanova sounds like either a Spanish or Italian name, and in fact he was born in Spain's Balearic Islands. As is the case with somebody like Gilbert Roland, his Spanish accent made him a natural for playing various Latin character roles (or roles from other Romance language-speaking countries, notably Italy). For example, IMDb lists him as "Hotel Manager" in Down Argentine Way, one of those Fox musicals from the early 1940s which, as you can guess, is set in Argentina. That Night in Rio? There's another obvious choice for casting Bonanova.

That having been said, I find it difficult to remember Bonanova in most of these films. IMDb also lists him in Citizen Kane. Really? He's also one of the men at the Spanish colony in The Black Swan. Then there was his small part in Double Indemnity. It's a bit of a shame that somebody good enough to keep working consistently in dozens of movies is also so difficult to remember.

In fact, the one role in which I best remember him is as the Italian general in Five Graves to Cairo.

Jack Cardiff

2012-01-12T08:44:00.000-05:00

TCM is spending Thursday nights in January honoring cinematographer Jack Cardiff. Cardiff's career started in the 1930s, but it really took off in the 1940s thanks to director Michael Powell, who spotted Cardiff's work on The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (airing tonight at 8:00 PM) and then asked Cardiff to be the chief cinematographer on Powell's next color film, A Matter of Life and Death (airing overnight at 12:30 AM). Infact, this evening's entire lineup is dedicated to the movies Cardiff made when he was working for Powell.

There is one exception, and that's a documentary on the life and work of Cardiff, airing at 11:00. It aired twice last week, and I hadn't seen it then. It's actually quite a good documentary if you have any interest in the people who worked behind the scenes. Cardiff's work was quite broad. Not only did he work with Michael Powell; he was the cinematographer for such classics as The African Queen and Alfred Hitchcock's Under Capricorn, the latter of which is finally coming to TCM next Thursday.

In the 1960s Cardiff became a director, first with Sons and Lovers (interestingly enough for one of the great color cinematographers, Sons and Lovers is in black and white) and then with several lesser films. TCM actually showed the Cardiff-directed The Liquidator yesterday afternoon, but I'll mention that one in more detail when it comes up on the last Thursday of January. (It's not on DVD so I can't really mention it now.) Cardiff's directorial career is mentioned in the documentary, but not given as much attention as his work at a cinematographer, largely because it wasn't as successful.

So they had a Guest Programmer last night

2012-01-11T14:10:00.000-05:00

I'll admit that I haven't been watching quite as much TCM over the past few weeks. TCM probably ran their Guest Programmer promo more than enough times, but I didn't see it until the last one, which always seems to air just before 8:00 PM on the night that their Guest Programmer shows up. If I had been paying attention, I would have known that James L. Brooks was going to be on last night, and I would have been able to do the research to find out about the short This Is Your Story, which was actually originally a sketch on Sid Caesar's Your Show of Shows. This was one of the sketches repacked in 1973 for the film 10 From Your Show of Shows.

To be fair, one should normally be able to spot these things from TCM's online schedule. If you look at tonight's schedule, for example, just before the 8:00 PM movie, there's a header reading, "TCM PRIMETIME - WHAT'S ON TONIGHT: STAR OF THE MONTH: ANGELA LANSBURY" Yesterday's schedule only read "TCM PRIMETIME - WHAT'S ON TONIGHT:". That, I think, would go a good ways toward explaining why I had less of an idea about the schedule.

I apologize. I also didn't think the This Is Your Story sketch was quite as funny as I've read some people make it out to be. In fact, I thought it got exceedingly tedious after the first "guest" was introduced. So I apologize a well if I led you astray.

I wish I had seen it before

2012-01-10T14:40:00.000-05:00

TCM just showed Just You and Me, Kid. George Burns stars as a retired vaudevillean who takes his vintage car to the grocery store one morning, and when he comes out of the store to put his groceries in the trunk, finds a naked Brooke Shields in his trunk! It turns out she was a drug mule who shafted the dealers out of $20,000, so naturally they're looking for her.

It's not a bad movie; to be fair, though, it's the sort that would have worked well as a B movie 40 years earlier, something I've mentioned with a few other films I've recommended such as For Pete's Sake and 9 to 5. That B-movie nature also means it hasn't been released to DVD. I don't like to recommend movies that haven't gotten a DVD release unless they're going to be showing up on TV in the near future, and that's obviously not the case with Just You and Me, Kid.

As for what to recommend, if you read this quickly enough, you can see the short Teenagers on Trial at about 6:00 PM tonight. I could swear I've mentioned this one before; it's a pretty funny (in an unintentional way) short looking at the problems of juvenile delinquency in the 1950s, and how it's really society's fault.

I'm also looking forward to the short This is Your Story at 8:00 PM, but it's one that I haven't seen before, so I can't say whether it's any good. In fact, there doesn't seem to be any information on it at all.

The original legend

2012-01-09T13:02:00.000-05:00

TCM is showing a night of movies about pandemic diseases this evening, including a truly underrated movie that's been remade a couple of times since: The Last Man on Earth, at 10:15 PM.

Vincent Price stars as a man living in what looks like a sort of postapocalytpic world, of the sort that you might see in Night of the Living Dead. There's no trace of living humans, but there's certainly evidence that people were around, and have been around recently. Only they're not real people any longer; they're vampires. It turns out that a new virus escaped some years back, and killed most of mankind, turning them into some sort of half-zombie/half-vampire people: they need to feast on real humans, but can only do their feeding at night. So Price goes out during the day to gather food and try to kill any of these creatures he can find, while hunkering down at night, trying to keep them at bay for one more night while he can work on trying to find a cure for the disease. (Price himself is immune, having been bitten by a vampire bat before the virus entered the body public.) And then he meets a woman who seems to be as immune to the disease as he is....

If the story above sounds familiar, well, it should. The movie is based on an earlier science fiction story by Richard Matheson called "I Am Legend". The Last Man on Earth, or more accurately the original story, was later remade into the movie I Am Legend, starring Will Smith in the Price role. In between, Charlton Heston also played the role in the 1971 film The Omega Man.

Although Vincent Price has long been known as the king of low-budget horror from the 1960s on, this is not quite the sort of movie that compares to the work he was doing with either William Castle or Roger Corman. There's something much more serious and disturbing about it. Price had been acting since the late 1930s and had serious acting chops, as you can see in movies like Laura, which he uses to good effect here, bring much more depth to the character than we see in his films with William Castle.

I don't know how exactly The Last Man on Earth compares with the original story "I Am Legend", but on its own it stands as quite a good film.

José Ferrer, 1912-1992

2012-01-08T09:52:00.000-05:00

Today marks the centenary of actor José Ferrer, who won the Best Actor Oscar in 1950 for his starring role in Cyrano de Bergerac. That movie is airing at 8:00 PM, although the last time I saw it on TCM, the print didn't look so good.

Actually, quite a few of Ferrer's films are airing today, which is a bit odd since TCM doesn't often do birthday salutes on the weekend. I've recommended The Caine Mutiny before (October 2009 to be specific), which kicks off the salute at noon. That's followed by another underrated film, Crisis, an August 2009 selection which airs at 2:15 PM.

I don't know if I've recommended I Accuse! (4:00 PM) before. Ferrer plays Alfred Dreyfus in this telling of the Dreyfus Affair, in which Émile Zola wrote the famous open letter J'accuse!. I'm pretty certain I've recommeded The Life of Émile Zola before, which covers much of this same material, albeit in black-and-white and without any location shooting.

Ferrer plays composer Sigmund Romberg in Deep in My Heart (6:00 PM). I very briefly mentioned Sigmund Romberg once, back in May 2008, as part of a post about the short An Intimate Dinner in Celebration of Warner Brothers' Silver Jubilee, in which Romberg has a cameo as one of the men responsible for the songs in musicals.

The last of the Ferrer movies showing today is in fact the first film Ferrer made, the Ingrid Bergman version of Joan of Arc, at 10:00 PM.

Frederica Sagor Maas, 1900-2012

2012-01-07T07:55:00.001-05:00

One of the last links -- and almost certainly the last adult link -- to silent cinema, has died. Frederica Sagor Maas, who started as a story editor at the New York branch of Universal back in 1920, was 111 years old.

Maas fairly quickly made her way to Hollywood, where she wound up at MGM, probably most notably writing the screenplay for Greta Garbo's Flesh and the Devil. Hollywood, however, turned out not so well for her and her eventual husband, as they found Hollywood doing all sorts of things to their scripts that the two of them didn't write. This eventually forced the couple back to New York in the 1930s. Maas wrote one more screenplay about the tribulations of pioneering working women, but that turned out just as bad for her when Fox took it and turned it into a light musical comedy, The Shocking Miss Pilgrim. (That movie, to be fair, isn't particularly bad; it's just nothing at all like how Maas would have wanted her screenplay to turn out.)

Maas got the last laugh, however, as she outlived everybody she worked with and wrote her memoirs, which were published when she was 99 years old.

Perfect Strangers again

2012-01-06T13:23:00.001-05:00

I last mentioned the movie Perfect Strangers back in July 2010, with the post implying that I hadn't seen the film before I first posted about it. For some reason, I thought I might have seen it when Ginger Rogers was Star of the Month, but then, I'm not even certain any more whether it even aired back when Rogers was Star of the Month. Looking through the schedule, Rogers was Star of the Month in March 2010, and the movie aired at 11:30 AM on a Thursday at the end of one of Rogers' "nights". I'm pretty certain the first time I saw Perfect Strangers was in prime time, so I guess I didn't watch it back in March 2010.

At any rate, I bring it up again because the movie is airing again tomorrow morning at 9:00 AM on TCM. It's probably worth one viewing, if only to have fun watching Hollywood's warped perception of the legal system.

More than a moment

2012-01-05T13:07:00.001-05:00

Esther Williams starred in The Unguarded Moment, which aired last May when she was TCM's Star of the Month. Tomorrow at 11:15 AM, as part of a birthday salute to Loretta Young, TCM is airing The Unguarded Hour.

The Unguarded Hour is a movie that might remind you of Evelyn Prentice. Young plays Lady Helen, a British woman who is the wife of Sir Alan (Franchot Tone). Sir Alan is a prominent prosecuting attorney, and is in line to become the British equivalent of the Attorney General. There's a small problem, however. It seems as though Alan had a relationship with a married woman many years earlier, and there are some letters from that relationship. Blackmailer Hugh (Henry Daniell) has obtained these letters, and is looking for a substantial sum of money for them, or else he'll make them public. Doing that would scuttle Sir Alan's chances at a promotion, so Lady Helen decides to pay the blackmailer.

Paying the blackmailer involves going to an out-of-the-way location near some of the cliffs that overlook the English Channel. While making her way around the paths, Lady Helen runs across a couple who are arguing, but in which the husband is trying to make his wife watch her step lest she falls over the cliff. Sure enough, the dumb broad falls over the cliff to her death, and the husband gets prosecuted. Unsurprisingly, that prosecution is handled by Sir Alan to make the story more interesting. The defendant claims there was this mysterious female witness, and dammit there certainly was! But for that witness to come out, she would have to reveal she is the wife of the prosecutor, and that she witnessed the accident because she was on her way to pay off a blackmailer.

The Unguarded Hour is a melodramatic movie of the sort that seemed to be popular in the 1930s, as there are a lot of them. Nowadays, I think such stuff would be straight-to-TV on a channel such as Lifetime. To be fair, the movie is reasonably well made, with Young, Tone, and the rest of the cast of MGM regulars doing a creditable job. The only problem is that the story is so frustratingly obnoxious. It's not quite as bad as Madame X or any of its variants, but it's got an ending that will probably be making you scream at your TV.

The Unguarded Hour hasn't been released to DVD, so if you want to see it, you'll have to watch it on TCM.

The Red Danube

2012-01-04T21:03:00.000-05:00

Angela Lansbury's movies started tonight at 8:00 PM, but they continue into tomorrow morning. The last of them for this week is The Red Danube, airing at 9:00 AM tomorrow.

Lansbury plays Audrey Quail, an adjutant to British colonel Hooky Nicobar (Walter Pidgeon). Hooky is stationed in the British sector of Vienna back in those days not long after World War II when Austria and Vienna were occupied by the four victorious powers from World War II (you'll probably remember this from The Third Man). As with Berlin, people were trying to make their way from one sector to another in Vienna, in that they wanted to get away from one country or another. Part of the job of the various militaries was to repatriate people back to countries they originally came from, as there were a lot of refugees in the early postwar years.

However, there weren't only refugees, there were people who didn't want to go back to their original countries, especially not the Soviet Union. It's Hooky's job to return them, which in this case means ballerina Olga Alexandrova (Janet Leigh). She's got some people on her side, however, in the form of Mother Auxilia (Ethel Barrymore), a nun who leads a convent and tries to hide escapees when she can; and British major Twingo McPhinister (Peter Lawford). He doesn't see why Soviets should be forcibly repatriated assuming they don't want to go -- and while trying to convince Hooky of this, he falls in love with Olga.

The political situation is in some ways the main part of the story, at least in how it drives the story line of Leigh's character. But there's also the subplot of Lawford's relationship with her, and a second subplot of Pidgeon's loss of faith (he lost his son in the war) and his journey to find it again, helped enormously by Barrymore's Mother Auxilia, who is one of those characters who just won't take "no" for an answer. The movie is quite good at times, showing for example the horrible fate awaiting people who would be repatriated to the Soviet Union. It doesn't do this as well as movies like The Third Man or The Big Lift show the bad life faced by people living in postwar Vienna and Berlin respectively, although it looks like The Red Danube doesn't have nearly as extensive the location shooting that either of the other two movies did. On the other hand, The Red Danube also effectively shows the difficult situation that Western military officials were in when having to deal with the Soviets. By the time of this movie, Berlin had already been blockaded, so the consequences of non-cooperatoin with the Soviets were fairly obvious. (As an aside, the occupation of Austria didn't end until 1955.) On the bad side, the movie has an ending that seems a little too pat.

The Red Danube hasn't gotten a DVD release, which is a bit of a surprise.

Angela Lansbury in Gaslight

2012-01-04T08:17:00.000-05:00

Tonight sees the first of several nights of the films of Angela Lansbury as TCM's Star of the Month. I've mentioned Gaslight a number of times in the past, and it's Lansbury's feature film debut. As such it's a good choice to kick off the look at her, and it's airing at 8:00 PM tonight. What I hadn't noticed before is that I've apparently never included a photo of Lansbury to accompany any of the posts I've done; certainly not one of Lansubry in Gaslight. So, I rather shamelessly found a photo from the blog Sage Slowdive and am reusing it here. She doesn't seem to like Lansbury's performance as much as I do, but not everybody can have the same opinion.

I'd rather forgotten that Lansbury shows up in National Velvet, which follows at 10:00 PM. But yes, she's in there.

At least they changed the names

2012-01-03T13:50:00.000-05:00

If you watched much of William Powell's turn as TCM's Star of the Month back in December, you will probably have seen The Last of Mrs. Cheyney. It's a 1937 film in which Powell plays an elegant jewel thief who teams up with Joan Crawford, only to see her be pursued by Robert Montgomery. Hollywood has never been original, so it may not surprise you to know that the William Powell film is a remake of one from 1929, starring Norma Shearer in the Crawford role, and Basil Rathbone in the Montgomery role. In fact, both are versions of an earlier stage play, something that was relatively common in the early days of sound films -- they needed a lot of material back then, and this was stuff that already had pre-written dialogue.

What you might not know is that MGM made the movie a third time, in 1951, as The Law and the Lady, which you can see tomorrow morning at 11:15 AM on TCM. This time, the lady is played by Greer Garson, who really isn't right for the role. Michael Wilding is suitably dashing, but nothing spectacular, redoing the Powell role; and Fernando Lamas plays the Montgomery role. The location has also been moved from England to San Francisco in the days before the earthquake of 1906. (I doubt MGM still had any sets left over from San Francisco.) Perhaps the one highlight is Marjorie Main (Ma Kettle) as the woman Garson and friends are trying bilk.

Marion Davies Day

2012-01-02T13:48:00.000-05:00

TCM is honoring actress Marion Davies (1897-1961) tomorrow on the anniversary of her birth. The salute goes from 6:00 AM until the start of prime time with nine of Davies' films. Davies is an actress who doesn't get the credit nowadays she deserves. In part it's because her career ended in the late 1930s, but I think it has a lot more to do with Orson Welles and the movie Citizen Kane. Marion Davies was the mistress of William Randolph Hearst, who was married to another woman, one who wouldn't grant him a divorce. Citizen Kane, of course, was a fairly thinly-veiled look at a media magnate based on the life of Hearst. In Citizen Kane, Orson Welles' Charles Foster Kane takes a chorus girl (Dorothy Comingore) and tries to make a serious opera star out of her, with disastrous results. As Marion Davies' career had already ended and there were no outlets for re-watching old films, critics looked at the Comingore storyline and unsurprisingly compared her character to Marion Davies, giving the impression that Davies was a lousy actress who only got where she did thanks to Hearst.

That's somewhat unfair. Hearst certainly did try to do as much as he could for Davies' career, to the point that he had his own production company (Cosmopolitan Productions) to put Davies in its films. But Davies was actually a fairly competent actress, and she had started making movies before meeting Hearst. Davies was best at more comedic films; her silent Show People is a spoof on Hollywood which is excellent. It's unfortunate that TCM is only looking at the talkies tomorrow. Still, Davies was able to do creditable jobs in films like The Florodora Girl, which kicks off the salute at 6:00 AM. Here, Davies plays a chorus girl who is unable to attract a rich man the way all the other chorus girls do. Then, wealthy Lawrence Gray (who had made a number of silents with Davies) comes along, although he may not have the best of intentions -- until he hits a financial reversal and he and Davies have to decide whether love will conquer all.

The Florodora Girl ends with a two-strip Technicolor sequence which would be better if the print were better, but it's a nice look at turn-of-the-last-century fashion. And this was one of Davies' problems. Although The Florodora Girl is a romantic comedy, it's also a period piece, and that's the sort of movie Hearst preferred she be in. Still, The Florodora Girl, along with the rest of tomorrow's Davies movies, are worth watching.

The end of the Fox Movie Channel

2012-01-01T09:45:00.000-05:00

Well, not quite, but I don't think it's unsafe to say the end is near. Three months ago, the folks at Fox who run the Fox Movie Channel decided they were going to "rebrand" the channel effective January 1, 2012. According to the press release,

The new FXM block will air contemporary movies with limited commercials from 3 p.m.-3 a.m. daily, while maintaining its current commercial-free format of classic films from 3 a.m.-3 p.m.

Pardon me if I roll my eyes at that use of the term "limited". I'm reminded of one of the Simpsons episodes, where Marge makes a comment to the effect that "they turned Fox into a soft core porn channel so gradually I hardly even noticed". As with IFC a year ago, these things start off slowly, but within six months, the identity of the channel is totally changed, and we'll have a Fox version of AMC, which has mostly recent movies -- when they have movies. The rest of the time it's commercials and crap like Mad Men. (Yes, I'm aware I'm one of the few who doesn't like Mad Men, but I think I've mentioned quite a few times how I don't care for the constant revisionist rehashing of the 1960s.)

Besides, from what I can tell (it took a long time before FMC's website updated the schedule for January 1 and beyond), the movies airing in the "classic" block are rather less classic than before. I'd presume the FXM block films are going to be edited for content as well.

So enjoy the rest of the Fox Movie Channel while you can; it's probably not going to be around much longer.

Starting the new year with shorts

2011-12-31T23:16:00.001-05:00

I'm sorry to see that I didn't post this before. But TCM has actually done a fairly conscientious job of remembering to include the shorts it will be showing, at least for the first couple of days of the new year.

Pete Smith, whom I've mentioned a couple of times in the past, shows up with a pair of shorts early in the morning on January 1. First, just after King Kong (ie. just after 8:00 AM), is Donkey Baseball. When I was a kid, I remmeber that one of the fundraisers the local school would put on every few years was "donkey basketball", in which a team of middle school kids would play against the teachers. The name, as you can probably guess, implies that the two teams were playing basketball, except that the players were riding donkeys. The short Donkey Baseball implies that this is baseball instead of basketball, but with the players riding donkeys.

After the following feature Swing Time (around 10:00 AM), there's another Pete Smith specialty, Swing High. This one looks a bit more interesting, being about a family of trapeze artists.

Last but not least, after Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (or around 12:25 PM), TCM is airing the Traveltalks short on Washington DC, filmed in 1940. One of the interesting things about this ones is the relatively positive things it says about Japan having given Washington the cherry trees -- the short was filmed the year before the attack on Pearl Harbor.

I don't think any of these are on DVD, which is a bit of a shame; the Traveltalks shorts at least would be good additions to features set in the same locations that Traveltalks visits.

The TCM Programmer's vicious sense of humor again

2011-12-31T08:18:00.000-05:00

Death and doomsday on New Year's Eve? Why not! I've briefly mentioned Fail-Safe a couple of times before; that interesting movie about a rogue nuclear bomber crew is tonight's TCM Essential at 8:00 PM.
A movie that I have blogged about before is Panic in the Streets in which Richard Widmark has to race to stop a plague outbreak; that follows at 10:15 PM.
Armageddon comes, but only for one man, in D.O.A. at midnight.
Perhaps the least menacing of the movies is Ice Station Zebra, about espionage on a nuclear submarine, at 1:30 AM.
Finally, one of my favorites, even if it's not all that great, is Juggernaut, ending the night at 4:15 AM

Happy new year 2012 to all of you!

One Week

2011-12-30T13:45:00.000-05:00

I wrote up three posts back in October when Buster Keaton was TCM Star of the Month, and didn't mention the fun short One Week. It's airing again tonight at 7:00 PM, and if this isn't enough warning for you, you should be able to find it on DVD.

The plot, as with most of Keaton's two-reelers, is simple. Keaton plays a new groom who, with his bride, finds he's been given a nice wedding present by his uncle: a pre-fabricated house, and a lot to put it on. Well, it's a 1920 version of a pre-fabricated house, meaning that it's a house-in-a-box (the boxes look decidedly too small, but that's beside the point) with a series of numbered boxes that show the order in which the house goes together. Sounds easy, doesn't it?

Of course, this being a Buster Keaton comedy, you know that things aren't going to go the way they're supposed to. First of all, the house winds up looking not at all like it's supposed to. You wonder whether they had a level among the tools they used to build the house. That, and the house could have used a foundation, a problem that everybody notices the first time there's a stiff breeze. And to make matters worse, they find they've built on the wrong lot.

One Week is a quite entertaining little two-reeler. It's followed on the schedule by another two-reeler I'd never heard of, called The Flame Song (start time approximately 7:28 PM). This one is apparently a 1934 short remake of a 1930 operetta called Song of the Flame, the film elements of which have been lost. I'm not into operetta, and haven't particularly enjoyed the Jeanette MacDonald films that get shown on TCM from time to time, but for those of you who like this sort of film it's probably worth a watch. And I don't think it's on DVD either.

The Birds in the news

2011-12-29T13:10:00.001-05:00

You might have known that The Birds is based in part on a real incident in 1961 when a bunch of seagulls committed suicide off the coast of the Central California coast. What I didn't realize is that scientists have apparently been debating for the past 50 years what led to the birds' strange behavior.

A new study claims to answer that question. Apparently the birds' food supply had become contaminated, such that the birds were getting subjected to a high concentration of a neurotoxin. I don't know enough about neurochemistry to know how accurate any of this is, but it at least makes for interesting reading.

That having been said, none of this has anything to do with whether the movie itself is enjoyable, which it certainly is.

A night of TCM Remembers

2011-12-28T12:30:00.000-05:00

Back in June, I mentioned how I did a "TCM Remembers"-themed schedule for the TCM Programming Challenge, and remarked just how many famous people died during the first half of the year. When I did my schedule, I programmed one film from a different person who died in 2011 at the 6:00 AM time slot to start each day. Obviously, TCM wouldn't program a tribute in quite that way. I personally don't think it would be a bad idea if TCM took its December schedule and instead of a regular Star of the Month, honored all the people who left us over the course of the year, since there are always quite a few as you can see in the TCM Remembers montage every year.

Instead, TCM has decided to have a one-night salute to half a dozen of the more famous obituaries from 2011:

Jane Russell died at the very end of February. She starts the night of tributes appearing opposite Bob Hope in The Paleface, at 8:00 PM.
Peter Falk died in June, and starred in The In-Laws, which you can see at 10:00 PM
Sidney Lumet passed away in April. Although he was a very talented director, TCM has decided to honor him by showing the Private Screenings interview Robert Osborne did with him at midnight.
Elizabeth Taylor is probably this year's most famous obituary, having died in March. TCM is showing Cat on a Hot Tin Roof at 1:00 AM.
Anne Francis died at the very beginning of the year. TCM's selection for her is Bad Day at Black Rock, at 3:00 AM.
Finally, Jackie Cooper left us in May. He, having been a child star, gets the earliest movie of the films selected: The Champ, at 4:30 AM.

Dr. Kildare

2011-12-27T12:11:00.000-05:00

TCM is showing all nine movies in the Dr. Kildare series tomorrow. Lew Ayres (whose birthday is tomorrow, hence the tribute) played the young Dr. Kildare who was the assistant to Dr. Leonard Gillespie (Lionel Barrymore). Now, I've mentioned Dr. Gillespie before, specifically in regards to the 1942 film Dr. Gillespie's New Assistant. And there's a bit of a tale in that.

Dr. Kildare was played by Lew Ayres from 1938's Young Dr. Kildare (airing at 6:15 AM tomorrow) through to the end of 1941. And then the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. World War II changed a lot of careers, mostly because people got called off to fight in the war, at least if they were men. Women like Greta Garbo found they were really no longer popular and the European market had dried up; and of course Carole Lombard died in a plane crash while raising money for war bonds. But back to Lew Ayres. He had the misfortune of being a conscientious objector of one of the few wars which was quite obviously morally acceptable. So it killed off his career for quite a few years, until the war was over. (To be fair, Ayres did serve as a medic/chaplain during the war.) Ayres didn't really achieve prominence again until Johnny Belinda in 1948, for which he earned an Oscar nomination, although like almost everybody else involved with that film, he lost. In the end, Ayres went on to a career in television, making dozens and dozens of appearances in episodic TV.

More on those Christmas noirs

2011-12-26T11:54:00.000-05:00

One movie that TCM aired in the run-up to Christmas which sometimes gets called a noir but is really just more of a mystery is Cover Up. It's a movie that has made its way to a cheap DVD release, so don't worry if you missed the TCM showing.

Dennis O'Keefe plays Sam Donovan, an insurance claims agent for a big-city life insurance company who is on his way to the small town of Cleberg one Christmas to pay off on an insurance policy. It seems that one of the town's prominent citizens committed suicide, but there are a few loose ends that need tying up before the company will pay off. So Donovan immediately goes to the local sheriff's department, and finds Sheriff Best (William Bendix) is shockingly hostile to him. The dead guy was a suicide by gunshot, but the coroner never bothered to get the bullet out of the body. And the gun wound up not at the scene of the act. Those are just a few of the inconsistencies, and when Donovan asks Best about them, Best does everything he can to keep Donovan from finding out the answers.

So Donovan starts going to other people in town to try to gather evidence from them, and finds them equally hostile, with the hostility mounting the more Donovan finds evidence that this "suicide" might actually have been a murder! Even the insurance policy's beneficiary, the dead man's niece, doesn't want to hear any talk of murder, which is the biggest surprise, since there was a double indemnity clause stating that the policy would pay double if the deceased had been murdered. (Why it would pay off at all for a suicide is one of the mysteries that this film doesn't answer.) And when Donovan leaves the niece's house, we get some dialogue from the niece and her husband which implies that they could be suspects.

In fact, it seems as though everybody in town could be suspects: everybody hated him! This dislike rises to the point that for a time during the movie I was beginning to wonder if the mystery was going to be resolved by having everybody in town take a shot or stab at him. The closest to an exception is the Anita Weatherby, the young lady Donovan meets at the beginning of the movie (Barbara Britton), who is the daughter of the town's banker. Another of Cover Up's odd plot twists is that Donovan spends quite a bit of time trying to put the moves on her, despite having only recently met her on the bus into town. But when she discovers that the murder weapon is a Luger and that her father has one from his days in World War I, she conspires to hide evidence herself. As I said, perhaps everybody is guilty.

This "everybody is guilty" attitude not only permeates the movie; it leads to some really nutty plot points, like the kid who would rather watch Anita and Donovan make out in a movie theater. Or Anita's hilariously obnoxious kid sister. And even more strange is the Weatherbys' maid. She has to be implicated in all of this somehow. All in all, there's a muddled plot, which isn't helped by some incredibly corny dialogue, which we see right away at the beginning of the movie when Donovan and the sheriff are talking. It's the sort of movie you'd think is terrible, from reading everything I've written.

And yet, Cover Up is a lot of fun as it makes its way to its denouement, which involves Donovan setting a trap that he hopes will lure the murderer back to the scene of the crime to destroy evidence. Unfortunately, at this point, the murderer is revealed to be... a bit of a deus ex machina. It's a maddening twist, the last of the film's many twists. But you can't help but wonder whether the screenwriters had to come up with an ending like this to get around the folks enforcing the Production Code. The "everybody in town did it" resolution wouldn't have made it past Joe Breen. And as I said, it's a shame. Cover Up is most definitely a B movie, but up until the end, it's a really fun one.

Scrooge at TCM

2011-12-25T12:00:00.000-05:00

Well, not yet another version of Dickens' A Christmas Carol, although as I mentioned earlier this month, there are lots of movie versions of that story. It seems as though somebody involved with programming the schedule at TCM has a vicious sense of humor. Tonight's Christmas lineup includes the decidedly un-Christmassy Make Way For Tomorrow, at 10:15 PM. To be fair, it's part of a lineup of movies directed by Leo McCarey, which includes the hideously treacly (but suitable for Christmas) Going My Way at 8:00 PM. If they had really wanted to stray from the Christmas spirit, they would have gotten the rights to My Son John again.

That having been said, I was looking for the post that I did previously on Make Way For Tomorrow, and was a bit surprised to see that the movie had been aired last year on December 24, which means somebody at TCM deliberately has this movie in mind for Christmas.

What other movies would be good for a dysfunctional family Christmas? For starters, I might pick Night of the Hunter. Stepfather Robert Mitchum's relationship with his stepchildren clearly fits the definition of dysfunctional, and the film does have a Christmas scene.

The Apartment would be another excellent choice, as Shirley MacLaine's character attempts to commit suicide in Jack Lemmon's apartment over the Christmas season, having been jilted by boss Fred MacMurray, whose thought in buying a gift amounts to giving her a $100 bill. That would have been a nice amount of money back in 1960, but somebody was looking for love, not money.

Sandra Dee has a rather bad Christmas with her mother in A Summer Place, a scene which if I remember correctly comes complete with one of those cold aluminum trees that were the rage in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Merry Christmas, and I hope you have a better Christmas than some of the people in the movies.

Let's keep insulting FMC!

2011-12-24T14:37:00.001-05:00

The folks running the Fox Movie Channel have more or less decided that they don't much care about the classics any more, something that I'll get into sometime next week in more detail. Now is a good time as any to comment on how badly they've run the channel all these years.

Tomorrow of course is Christmas, a time at which almost every channel runs Christmas-themed programming. FMC is too, and it's not as though I have any problem with that. But they're running Home Alone tomorrow. Twelve times: every two hours starting at 6:00 AM. Now, there's nothing wrong with programming gimmicks. I remember several years ago when some local radio station was changing formats to a classic R&B format (the station has changed formats twice more since, and seem to be adding newer songs to their newer "classic" rock format), they played Vicki Sue Robinson's "Turn the Beat Around" on a continuous loop for an entire weekend or some shockingly long period of time. And I don't have any problems with channels that repeat programs so that one airing is in prime time on the east coast while the next is on the west coast. I can't help but think, however, that what FMC is doing really won't bring much in the way of eyeballs to the channel, either now or for the coming new format.

Dear Brigitte

2011-12-23T20:40:00.001-05:00

I don't know how many more times it's going to air on the Fox Movie Channel, so I ought to mention the movie Dear Brigitte, which is airing at 8:00 AM on December 24.

James Stewart, in that portion of his career where he was getting cast in family comedies like Mr. Hobbs Takes a Vacation, plays Professor Leaf, a literature professor on the west coast who lives with his wife Vina (Glynis Johns) and his two children, daughter Pandora (Cindy Carol) and son Erasmus (Billy Mumy). At first this sounds like the typical all-American family -- except that the Leafs live on a steamboat-turned-houseboat complete with captain (Ed Wynn). In addition, Prof. Leaf only seems to care for the arts, and has quite a bit of disdain for the sciences, which is a problem since his university wants more science. There's also the much bigger problem that Erasmus has no artistic capabilities whatsoever. Can't sing, can't draw, can't paint, can't play a musical instrument. So imagine the good professor's horror when he discovers that Erasmus is a math whiz!

Oh, that's the least of his problems. Pandora's boyfriend Kenny (Fabian) needs help with his math homework; the bank is horrified to learn that this little kid can tell them there balance is wrong; and the military and head shrinkers would like to know more about what's going on in little Erasmus' mind. And if those aren't enough problems, Erasmus is able to use that brilliant mathematical mind to determine which of the ponies is most likely to win, which has obvious use -- and there are more than enough people out there willing to use this talent for their own purposes. Erasmus, on the other hand, thinks about other things, namely lovely French actress Brigitte Bardot.

From the above synopsis, you might be able to figure that there's quite a bit going on here. That, I think, is one of the things that helps drag the movie down. The other is that it's trying to be be hip when that's something James Stewart probably shouldn't have been doing. As for Erasmus' obsession with Bardot, that's why she's mentioned in the title. Erasmus writes to Brigitte and eventually receives a reply from her, which leads to him and Dad getting to meet her at the end of the film. Bardot herself didn't want the studio using her in their advertising since she was really only doing a cameo and wasn't the main part of the story. (Look carefully; she's not in the credits.) But since she's obviously good-looking enough that a studio would want to use her to try to draw at least a certain segment of the population in, the suits had a bit of a problem. They solved it by putting Bardot in the title!

Dear Brigitte is passable family entertainment if you have kids who won't mind a nearly 50-year-old picture. But it's nothing great.

Christmas noir

2011-12-23T07:19:00.000-05:00

TCM is listing tonight's prime time lineup as "Christmas Noir". It's been a while since I've seen any of the movies, so I'm having a bit of trouble remembering just how much Christmas is in any of them. The movies are:

Backfire at 8:00 PM;
Lady in the Lake at 10:00 PM; and
Murder, My Sweet at midnight.

Lady in the Lake has the conceit of being told from the main character's point of view (played by Robert Montgomery, who also directed), but other than that I don't remember it being particularly special. Dark Passage spent the first 45 minutes telling the movie from Humphrey Bogart's point of view, but that's only because his character was getting plastic surgery halfway through the movie and they didn't want to do a make-up job showing him before and after the surgery.

As for Christmas noir, one I can think of is Gang War, which is really more of a "post-noir" in that it comes from the end of the 1950s and is a bit too bright for your traditional noir. Charles Bronson early in his career plays a teacher who inadvertently witnesses a mob murder, finds his wife murdered for it, and finds that the police won't do anything much to help him. The only thing Christmas about it is the presence of some Christmas decorations. It's not on DVD, which is a shame, because it's a fun (if not exactly great) little movie, mostly for watching Bronson. That, and Los Angeles as it was in the late 1950s -- one of the scenes has an establishing shot of the Capitol Records Building.

The Thin Man movies

2011-12-22T10:01:00.000-05:00

I've mentoined the Thin Man series a number of times in passing, although I'm not certain whether I've done a full post on any of them. (You can blame Blogger's lousy search function in part.) This being the fourth week of William Powell's turn as TCM Star of the Month, TCM is showing all six Thin Man movies back to back, in the order in which they were made.

The first of them, the original 1934 The Thin Man, which kicks off the night at 8:00 PM, is the best of the movies. I also have a soft spot in my heart for the second of them, After the Thin Man, which comes on at 9:45 PM. As I've mentioned before, the movie has Elissa Landi in the cast as the Charles' cousin, and she's got a local connection. In that July 2010 post, I also mentioned the presence of James Stewart in the cast, and he does quite a good job.

As for another future star, I mentioned Donna Reed in Shadow of the Thin Man, airing overnight at 1:45 AM

I personally think the series went downhill a bit once Nick and Nora had a kid, but what are you going to do?

The shortest day of the year

2011-12-21T13:08:00.000-05:00

We're at the winter solstice here in the northern hemisphere, which means we've got the shortest day of the year. To celebrate, let's show one of the shortest movies you'll ever see. Thankfully, it's reached Youtube, although it's also in the public domain.

Now, if you don't like that sort of short film, perhaps you might like a different sort of short movie:

(Technically, the solstice is early tomorrow morning in Europe, at 0530 UTC on December 22. This corresponds to half an hour past midnight in the US Eastern Time Zone, and late this evening in the other time zones.)

TCM Guest Programmer: Winona Ryder

2011-12-21T12:57:00.000-05:00

Tonight sees the Guest Programmer for December, Winona Ryder come to TCM. Presumably, she did a good job, and that would be why she was asked to fill in for Robert Osborne during part of his vacation over the last several months. Her choices are interesting in that two are comedies and two are not only rather different from comedies, but rather different from each other:

The Front at 8:00 PM, an anti-anti-communist movie from 1976 about how horrible the 1950s blacklist was;
Ball of Fire at 10:00 PM, in which Barbara Stanwyck hides out with Gary Cooper and his band of stuffy professors;
Born Yesterday at midnight, in which William Holden teaches Judy Holliday a lesson in civics; and
A Face in the Crowd at 2:00 AM, in which Andy Griffith plays a populist yokel who becomes a TV celebrity drunk on power.

One thing I find interesting is that A Face in the Crowd was written by Budd Schulberg, who testified against the communists before Congress, so it's certainly odd to have this paired with The Front. To be fair, Schulberg softened his stance later in life, although he also pointed out that the communists really only seemed to care about freedom of speech when it was speech with which they agreed: they didn't seem to want him to say the things he did. I'm not a particularly big fan of A Face in the Crowd, mostly because I find Griffith's character so unappealing -- even though the fact that his character winds up unappealing is part of the point of the movie. Still, I find the character less than appealing at the start of the movie.

On the other hand, the big problem I have with The Front is that I find it so "easy". That is, by the 1970s, it became de rigueur to bash the McCarthy era of the early 1950s, and it no longer took any courage to speak out about it. In fact, you could argue we got to the point where it took more courage to point out the evils of the communists. Even today, with the recent death of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il, there are people who say he wasn't as bad as the anti-communists make him out to be.

I should probably also include a link to my October 2011 post about anti-communist movies.

A Christmas present for myself

2011-12-20T14:13:00.000-05:00

I mentioned not long ago how depressing it was looking for classic films at the local DVD shop. There was one thing that I splurged on for myself though, which was a Mill Creek cheap set of DVDs of Alfred Hitchcock's early movies. I've seen most of Alfred Hitchcock's sound films, with one or two exceptions from his days in Britain, as well as Under Capricorn (which I think I saw on a TCM schedule for early next year). However, it also has a bunch of Hitchock's silent films, many of which I haven't seen. The early talkies showed up on TCM about six years ago when they did a week-long salute to the movies of Alfred Hitchcock; this even included otherwise obscure titles like Juno and the Paycock (not a very good film to be honest).

I'm normally a bit of a cheapskate, or to put it more kindly, I've always been reluctant to spend money I don't need to spend. But at $10 for 18 films and two Alfred Hitchcock Presents episodes, I figured the worst that could happen is that I'd get defective DVDs. I'm looking forward to watching a bunch of Hitchcock's silents and getting close to seeing all of his surviving films (and maybe someday they'll find the remaining reels of The White Shadow).

The other upshot is that at some point in the future you'll probably start seeing posts on Alfred Hitchcock's silent films.

What the Dickens?

2011-12-19T13:30:00.001-05:00

TCM is showing Scrooge tonight at 10:15 PM. You can probably guess that it's a movie version of Charles Dickens' classic story A Christmas Carol. The difference about this one is that it's a musical version, starring Albert Finney as Scrooge; Edith Evans (whom you saw in Fitzwilly) as the Ghost of Christmas Past; Kenneth More (Sink the Bismarck) as the Ghost of Christmas Present; and Alec Guinness as the ghost of Jacob Marley. It's also the third version of the Dickens story to air this month on TCM, after the 1938 Reginald Owen and 1951 Alistair Sim (no S on the end) version. These are by a good ways not the only three versions of the film. IMDb lists the very first as having been made all the way back in 1901. I've also mentioned the film The Passions of Carol, which I've never seen before. Apparently it's an adult film retelling the story. More interesting is that it's apparently gotten a restoration. (If you do an Internet search, you'll be able to find where you can find it on DVD.)

Charles Dickens is one of the more adapted writers out there. However, it's a bit difficult to figure out exactly who has been most adapted for the big screen, largely because IMDb lists movies and TV shows together. Dickes has 323 works listed, although many of these are TV adaptations by organizations like the BBC. The obvious choice for most adapted writer would be William Shakespeare, with an astonishing 857 adaptations. An interesting question would be what other writers come near the top of the list. My first thought in that regard was Edgar Rice Burroughs, since he created the character Tarzan. But then it's only his character being adapted, not so much actual books (although Burroughs wrote some 20 or more Tarzan books). I knew there were a lot of Tarzan movies, although I'm a bit surprised to see the number of Burroughs adaptations is under 100. Burroughs wrote a lot of other stuff besides Tarzan, and apparently a work based on his works about Mars explorer John Carter is scheduled for release next year.

I wonder what other authors would be near the top of the most-adapted list.

A few more briefs

2011-12-18T13:37:00.000-05:00

I recommended the 1925 version of Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ all the way back in March 2008. It's tonight's TCM Silent Sunday Night movie, airing at midnight ET. It's not the first version, of course; back in June 2010 I posted including a Youtube link to a 1907 version that runs all of 11 minutes. (I also posted it in December 2009, but the Blogger search function is still screwed up, and my first site search on Ben Hur didn't bring up that post.)

Tomorrow morning and afternoon on TCM brings a bunch of Cary Grant movies, even though his birthday isn't until January. Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, on the other hand, do bring birthday tributes: in order, TCM will be honoring Irene Dunne, Jane Fonda, and Ruth Roman.

As for what's on the Fox Movie Channel, you can see The Ghost and Mrs. Muir at noon tomorrow. This was actually the movie I bought for one of my young nieces last Christmas, figuring that even if was a bit too grown up for her, she'd grow in to it. She wanted to watch it that night when I gave it to her, and I have to admit she had trouble comprhending the idea of Rex Harrison as a ghost. She also didn't seem quite ready for a black-and-white film that runs that long.

Christmas shopping

2011-12-17T20:14:00.001-05:00

I hate Christmas shopping. Unfortunately, I've got several nieces and nephews for whom I really should make an attempt to get something worthwhile, with cash being the gift of last resort. (I had an otherwise nice uncle who got all of us siblings new pajamas every Christmas. I vow never to buy that for any of my nieces or nephews.) Since I'm a classic movie fan, I went to the cookie-cutter DVD shop at the local mall to see if I could find anything old for them -- I'm loath to buy anything recent for fear that they'll already have a copy of it.

On the bright side, one of my sister's kids are getting to the age where grown-up movies are fine for them, as long as the movies aren't overly violent or filled with bad language. One good thing about the Production Code is that you won't have the bad language, and a lot less sex, which eliminates two of the things parents might find objectionable. So I just had to look through enough movies to find something in genres I thought they'd like. Last year was a romance and a western; this year a musical and a western.

My other sister has two much younger children, and that presented a problem. The DVD store had much less of a selection than even last year. I remember last year wondering whether I should have picked up the DVD with the two Shirley Temple movies for my eight-year-old niece. I don't know whether my sister would have appreciated it, though, if my niece started singing all those Shirley Temple songs. This year, I couldn't find anything Shirley Temple. I considered something truly classic like The Wizard of Oz, but that's the sort of movie I'd fear my nieces already have a copy of. And for the six-year-old? Don't get me started. That having been said, they moved half a country away over the past year so I'm not even certain if I'll be seeing them at Christmas, which at least gives me time to think up something to buy where there's a better selection and send it to them. Or I could always do it online, except that the online stuff often winds up being more expensive especially when you add in the shipping.

Shopping online would at least do away with the problem of bad service. The store was supposed to open at 10:00 AM. The anchor stores in the mall opened earlier, and I walked into one of the anchor stores about 9:55, walked through it, and then looked for the DVD store. Even though the mall was nearly dead, I was amazed at how many stores didn't seem to have any employees in them at 10:00 AM. There were about half a dozen of us waiting outside the DVD place at 10:00, and I don't think it opened until about ten minutes late. And they still didn't have enough cash in the registers when I finally found the DVDs I wanted to buy.

There's not much point to all of this, I guess. One thing, though, is that I think it illustrates just how small the market is when it comes to classic cinema. And this is for the "popular" classic titles; I can't imagine how lousy it must be for the obscure movies I prefer to watch on TCM.

By request

2011-12-16T14:14:00.000-05:00

I was just looking through my site stats to have a little fun with the searches. This time, somewhat surprisingly, Gus Visser didn't show up. The Dionne quintuplets still do, on the other hand. That having been said, there were a few that surprised me.

First up is the person who was looking for "Lucille Ball pin ups". Now, Lucille Ball is underrated in the looks department, or at least underrated in what the studios' makeup departments could do for her. (That, and the fact that more people probably remember her from her TV shows, by which time she was a good deal older.) I wrote much of the above when I recommended Ball in Du Barry Was a Lady back in July 2008; that is also the movie from which the photo at left is taken. Anyhow, I decided to do a bit of research, and it turns out that Lucille Ball did do some posing that could be considered a pin-up, as evidenced by this 1945 shot from the Army's Yank magazine.

Another search was rather more bizarre: somebody thought they could find "Busty old lady pics" on my blog. After a bit of thought, however, I immediately realized what movie I could mention to satisfy this reader's search: 85-year-old Mae West in Sextette, her final movie. To be honest, I've never seen Sextette, but I've read some about it. West was going senile by the time she made this movie, but still thought she could make movies with lots of hot young men. And so she made one that is apparently a cult classic. Here's a scene with her and a future James Bond, if you want to see just how frightening the movie looks:

There are only so many Christmas movies

2011-12-16T08:56:00.001-05:00

TCM is continuing to show Christmas movies tonight, with three that I've at least mentioned in passing, if not blogged fully about.

Three years ago I blogged about The Bishop's Wife, which kicks off tonight's lineup at 8:00 PM. It's one of the greats, and a movie I could recommend over and over.
The next Christmas, I blogged about Christmas in Connecticut, which you can see at 10:00 PM. It aired back on Sunday; as I said, there are only so many movies out there for TCM to show during the Christmas season. (As another example, Fitzwilly, which I mentioned at the beginning of this month, got a second airing last Tuesday.)
This past March, on the birth anniversary of actor Felix Bressart, I posted a photo of him and James Stewart from the film The Shop Around the Corner, about two people (Stewart and Margaret Sullavan) who work together but don't like each other, but unwittingly fall in love when they answer anonymous personal ads. (I wonder if they like piña coladas and getting caught in the rain.) You can see that at midnight.

Finally, I briefly made mention of the 1936 version of Three Godfathers as part of a birthday mention to director Richard Boleslawski. (I could swear I did a full post about the film one Christmas, but either I didn't, or Blogger's search function, which has definitely been acting up, couldn't find it. I mentioned the movie by title on Christmas 2008, and search isn't finding that.) It's airing tomorrow morning at 9:00 AM on TCM.

William Powell, night #3

2011-12-15T13:28:00.000-05:00

Tonight is the third Thursday in December, and the third night of TCM's salute to William Powell as the channel's Star of the Month. This weeks sees several of the movies from closer to the end of Powell's career. In fact, Powell's last movie was 1955's Mister Roberts, which you can see at 11:30 PM. That's followed by It's a Big Country, airing overnight at 1:45 AM. Powell only has a bit part here, as I mentioned when I blogged about the movie back in May, 2010.

For a starring role from Powell, you'd have to watch him in Life With Father, which kicks the night off at 8:00 PM. It's a story about a family in New York City in the 1880s, with Powell playing the patriarch. Come to think of it, it would be interesting in a double bill with I Remember Mama (although that of course doesn't star William Powell).

The last of the four later Powell movies is The Girl Who Had Everything, airing at 10:15 PM. I'm not certain if I've seen it before, but I know the story well, since it's a remake of A Free Soul. Powell plays the alcoholic father (played by Lionel Barrymore in the original), with Norma Shearer's part being taken by Elizabeth Taylor. The interesting thing here is that this is one of those "little" MGM films from the early 1950s (running only 69 minutes), yet it has a surprisingly big cast what with Powell -- admittedly near the end of his career -- and Elizabeth Taylor who was quite clearly a big star already by this point: not only had she done all those juvenile roles at MGM; this was two years after A Place in the Sun.

After It's a Big Country, it's back to early 1930s stuff starring William Powell, starting at 3:30 AM with One Way Passage.

More on TCM Remembers

2011-12-14T07:57:00.000-05:00

It only took a half day or so for somebody to post it to Youtube. Thankfully the rights holders don't seem to get too worked up about the various TCM Remembers spots showing up on Youtube.

I got to see it on TCM last night after The Lemon Drop Kid. They included Harry Morgan, including him in what looked like a scene from The Ox-Bow Incident, which means they edited it very late. Part of the fun is trying to figure out what movies each of the clips is taken from, which can be tough, considering how fast the montage goes by.

There were one or two names that I was particularly looking for. I posted at the end of June that I was a bit surprised over how many obituaries I missed. So I was definitely on the lookout for Gunnar Fischer, and sure enough, TCM remembered to include him. They also included Swedish actress Lena Nyman, who was the female lead in I Am Curious (Yellow/Blue). I mentioned in October nearly missing the death of Diane Cilento, and sure enough, TCM had a clip of her. There were also quite a few actresses with French names whom I didn't recognize.

So, as always, it's a good job from TCM, although one has to presume they've got a person in the production department keeping track of all the obituaries over the course of the year so they remember to include as many of the people as possible over the roughly five minutes they have.

Parade of the Dead 2011

2011-12-13T07:24:00.001-05:00

Apparently, the TCM Remembers piece for 2011, the retrospective that shows many of the more prominent people in the world of film who died in the last 12 months, finally aired just before the start of the prime time lineup last night. I had been watching after several films ofer the past few days to see if it would show up, but I had the great bad luck not to be watching TCM yesterday evening. But go on the TCM forums, and there are already people asking what the music is.

I looked on Youtube and the TCM Media Room last night, but nobody had posted the 2011 TCM Remembers piece yet. Quite a few of the other TCM Remembers spots for individual actors are available from the TCM Media Room, as are one or two of those from past years. (That last surprises me a bit considering I would have thought there would be rights issues with the music used.)

At any rate, I'm sure the TCM Remembers piece will air repeatedly throughout the rest of December, so look for times where there's a goodly amount of space between two films, and you might find the TCM Remembers piece. (I don't think it ever gets put on the schedule.)

Grand Central Murder

2011-12-12T14:43:00.000-05:00

For some reason, I thought I recommended the movie Grand Central Murder, which is airing tomorrow morning at 6:00 AM on TCM, before. A Google search claims I haven't. It's one of those many, many B mysteries from the early 1940s, this one starring Van Heflin as a detective who investigates a murder that takes place in a private rail car that's currently in the bowels of Grand Central Station.

Heflin plays one of those wisecracking, slightly arrogant detectives, much like the Michael Shayne character I mentioned last month in Dressed to Kill. Not only is there that sort of detective; there's also a bumbling police investigator (played here by Sam Levene), and a story where anybody could have done it. That having been said, Grand Central Murder is interesting in part for Heflin's role, just before his career really took off with Johnny Eager. Another reason is that MGM's production values make this look better than just a B movie, especially the bowels of the station and the room where all the trains are routed.

Perhaps the reason I thought I might have blogged about it before is that Van Heflin made a related movie the same year, Kid Glove Killer, which I did blog about back when Ava Gardner was Star of the Month on TCM. In fact, I think I saw the two Heflin films back-to-back the first time I saw them before, which would be a good way to see them. (In fact, putting the two of them together in a DVD set wouldn't be such a bad idea.)

Luis Antonio Dámaso de Alonso, 1905-1994

2011-12-11T14:00:00.000-05:00

Today marks the birth anniversary of Luis Antonio Dámaso de Alonso, who was born in Mexico on this date in 1905. Now, you've probably never heard of that particular actor; at least, not as Luis Antonio. His family moved ot the US when he was young, and by his early 20s he was in Hollywood playing supporting roles in silent movies. It's here that he took his screen name from two of the actors he worked with: Gilbert Roland (from John Gilbert and Ruth Roland).

Gilbert Roland transitioned to talkies just fine, which is mildly interesting considering that he wasn't a native English speaker. Granted, some of those roles included immigrants or foreigners, as in the brief role in Life Begins, or the Russian in She Done Him Wrong.

In the 1940s, Roland played the Cisco Kid, before really making his mark as a "Latin lover" type, probably most notably in The Bad and the Beautiful, from which the photo above is taken. At the end of his long career, he made frequent appearances in episodic TV and TV movies, as did a lot of actors from the earlier generation.

Peyton Place goes calypso

2011-12-10T13:30:00.000-05:00

I don't quite know what to say about the sprawling drama Island in the Sun, which airing tomorrow morning at 10:00 AM on the Fox Movie Channel. It's not the greatest movie by a long shot, but it certainly bears one viewing.

The movie is set on the fictional island of Santa Maria in the Caribbean in the mid-1950s. Santa Maria is a British colony, but the mid-1950s was the beginning of the period when Britain was giving is colonies home rule. As such, there's a large black underclass on the island itching to take power, and a smaller wealthy class of whites running the place with a colonial governor still heading things. Indeed, one of the story lines in the movie is going to involve a black and a white character running against each other for the legislative assembly, but that's actually a relatively small storyline compared to what the box guides might say. We first see the whites, as the wife Sylvia (Patricia Owens) and sister Jocelyn (Joan Collins) of wealthy planter Max Fleury (James Mason) return home with a friend Hilary (Michael Rennie), a man who's rather drifted through life in the British Foreign Office. Hilary smokes Egyptian cigarettes, and when Max returns home, he notices one of those in the ash tray, which makes him think his wife is having an affair.

Meanwhile, the Governor is hosting a party where the Fleurys have been invited, as well as labor leader David Boyeur (Harry Belafonte). Boyeur brings a lovely cashier with him (Dorothy Dandridge), but she falls for the governor's white aide. The governor's son (Stephen Boyd), meanwhile, falls for Jocelyn. Along the way, David falls for Sylvia's sister Mavis (Joan Fontaine) -- or more accurately, she falls for him, not realizing what life is really like for the black people on Santa Maria.

If things sound less than exciting so far, keep watching; things happen that should theoretically make the action level pick up. The first of those big things is when Max finds Hilary and realizes he's the one who's left his cigarette in Max's ash tray. He confronts Hilary, who suggests that Max may have some black ancestors in his family tree, which causes Max to strangle Hilary to death. This causes us to get two more plot lines: a murder mystery that's much like Dostoevsky's novel Crime and Punishment (and indeed, the police chief gives Max a copy of that novel to read); and, a discussion of racial heritage as both Max and Jocelyn discover the truth about their ancestry, which may or may not involve black ancestors.

Island in the Sun sprawls and meanders, but never quite goes anywhere. None of the romances is that intense, possibly in part due to two of them being interracial and the problems of depicting interracial relationships when you still had a Production Code that didn't like such stuff. Another big problem is Harry Belafonte. He was a more than capable singer, but not the best actor out there. The one big song he does get to sing is also problematic, in that it depicts the blacks as happy with their lot in life despite living a life of grinding poverty and no political power. (Compare this to the opening scenes of Hallelujah! from 1929, which has sharecroppers singing.) The revelations about characters' pasts seem contrived, only to make the plot work out neatly; in fact they also make you question the motivations of some of the characters earlier in the film. On the bright side, the movie was filmed on location in Barbados, and has a lot of lovely wide-screen color cinematography.

Larceny, Inc.

2011-12-09T07:44:00.000-05:00

If I told you that TCM is showing an Edward G. Robinson comedy tonight, you might be surprised. But that would be because you haven't read this blog carefully enough. In the past, I've recommended Robinson in the somewhat comedic The Whole Town's Talking, and also in the straight-up comedy A Slight Case of Murder. So it shouldn't be a surprise that Robinson did a movie like Larceny, Inc., which is airing tonight at 8:00 PM on TCM.

Robinson plays "Pressure", a career criminal who, along with his partner "Jug" (Broderick Crawford), is just about to get paroled. He needs to have something honest to do in life so that he doesn't wind up back behind bars again, and he's a bit lucky in that he's got a niece Denny (Jane Wyman) looking out for his best interests. She and her boyfriend Jeff (Jack Carson) help Pressure and Jug buy a luggage store when they show an interest in it, and use their business acumen to try to help the business become a success.

Of course, the real reason Pressure and Jug took an interest in the luggage store isn't because they wanted to go straight; it's because the store is located right next to a bank. They figure this gives them the perfect opportunity for another heist: tunnel from the basement storeroom of the luggage shop to the bank next door, and rob the vault from below which, in theory, wouldn't set off the alarm. (The massive evidence of tunneling might be a problem, and I'm not talking about the dirt that they could presumably get rid of in the luggage.) Not that Denny and Jeff quite realize this -- and that causes the first of Pressure and Jug's problems, as they constantly have to deal with honest business that takes time away from their real business.

And then there's a second problem, when fellow criminal Leo (Anthony Quinn) gets out of jail. He's heard of what Pressure and Jug are doing, and wants a piece of the action. Will Pressure and Jug be able to turn good guys and foil Leo, while remaining on the right side of the law?

I've suggested a few times before that I think Edward G. Robinson is a very underrated actor, and Larceny, Inc. is another example of that. True, the movie isn't quite as good as A Slight Case of Murder, and doesn't have any of the biting commentary that The Whole Town's Talking did. I don't think any of that is Robinson's fault; instead, the production feels a bit rushed. Broderick Crawford is fairly good in his typical role of a man with more bluster than brains; Jack Carson once again plays a bit of a schemer, something which he always did well; and Anthony Quinn is enjoyable in one of his earlier roles. Sure, there are better movies out there, but Larceny, Inc. does a fine job of entertaining the viewer -- and that, after all, is one of the main jobs a movie should do.

Meanwhile, back in Sweden

2011-12-08T03:45:00.000-05:00

This is the week that the Nobel Prizes are being awarded, as happens every year on the anniversary of the death of Alfred Nobel. So why am I mentioning this in a blog about classic movies? Well, it's because TCM is using this as an opportunity to show The Prize this afternoon (December 8) at 3:15 PM.

Paul Newman stars as Andrew Craig, the reclusive American writer who is being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. However, Craig has a problem: he's got a bad case of writers' block, and hasn't been able to come up with any of the sort of literature that the Nobel committee would award for the past five years. During that time, he's been making his living by writing detective stories under an assumed name. But, he's not the only Nobelist to have problems. All of them do. The winners in chemistry are a husband and wife who are at each other's throats, to the point that the husband has brought his mistress to the prize ceremony in the guise of his "secretary". And then there are the medicine winners, Sergio Fantoni and Kevin McCarthy. These two play an Italian and American doctor respectively, each of whom thinks the other pilfered his work in coming up with the discovery that joint won them the Nobel.

The biggest problem of them all is had by the physics prize winner, Dr. Stratman (Edward G. Robinson). He doesn't know it, but he's about to be kidnapped, abducted to East Germany, and replaced by a lookalike (who is unsurprisingly also played by Edward G. Robinson) who is going to announce his defection to East Germany. Dr. Stratman does have one good thing going for him, however, which is that he bumped into Craig before getting kidnapped. The reason this is a good thing is that Craig sees Stratman again at a mixer held after the kidnapping, and when "Stratman" doesn't recognize him, suspects that there's something up. Craig, having written a bunch of detective stories, immediately begins to investigate.

At the point the plot begins to break down a bit, if only because it's a bit unrealistic. It is, however, rather entertaining. Craig's investigation causes problems not only for the people trying to spirit Stratman away, but also for the Swedish authorities, who have this crazy American going nuts in the streets of Stockholm. (One of the more interesting escapades has Craig winding up in a meeting of nudists. Women will be disappointed that we only see Paul Newman from the waist up.) This is especially bothersome to the young Elke Sommer, who has been assigned the task of being Craig's minder, and winds up falling for him along the way. Eventually the other prize winners get involved as well, and help solve the disappearance in a satisfying way.

As I said, it's unrealistic, but fun. A lot of that fun comes from screenwriter Ernest Lehman, who had previously done the screenplay to North by Northwest. So, as you can probably figure, The Prize has a lot that looks as though it would be right at home in a Hitchcock movie. In fact, it was directed by Mark Robson, whose work ranges from Val Lewton's The Seventh Victim to fun dreck like Valley of the Dolls. (Along the Hitchcock lines, Stratman's niece is played by Diane Baker, who would appear a year later in Marnie as Sean Connery's sister-in-law.) There's both humor and suspense, and Swedish scenery that's lovely to look at. Edward G. Robinson doesn't have a particularly challenging role here, but he was always professional. The same is true for Paul Newman.

If you want great groundbreaking cinema, The Prize is not the movie for you. But if you just want to sit back, relax, and watch something that's not too taxing, The Prize is more than perfect for that. It's gotten a release to DVD as part of the Warner Archive.

Harry Morgan, 1915-2011

2011-12-07T14:14:00.001-05:00

Harry Morgan in a supporting role in Somehwere in the Night

The death has been announced of actor Harry Morgan at the age of 96. Morgan is probably best remembered to younger people for having played Col. Sherman Potter on the TV series M*A*S*H, although it's been almost 30 years since the show went off the air. Morgan also played Jack Webb's sidekick on the TV police show Dragnet. But before all this, he had quite a substantial career in movies starting in the early 1940s, when he was usually credited as Henry Morgan instead of Harry. He worked at Fox at the start of his career, so a lot of his movies don't show off all that often on TCM, but they either show up from time to time on the Fox Movie Channel, or are available on DVD. One example of the latter is Somewhere in the Night, where Morgan plays a smaller role as an attendant at a bath house, and from which the photo above is taken.

Morgan actually had a broad range in his movie roles. The most recent time I recommended one of his movies, he played a killer, in the film Red Light. Or, I suppose I could mention that he worked the other side of the law in Strange Bargain, in which he plays a police detective. And for something completely different, you could watch him in a western like Yellow Sky.

I don't know that TCM will be pre-empting any of their programming to do a tribute for him, but he is the sort of actor who would merit a night of films sometime in the future, and would of even if he hadn't just died.

filmarkivet.se

2011-12-07T08:52:00.001-05:00

I mentioned the other day that I like to listen to international broadcasters. Yesterday, Radio Sweden had an interesting piece on the Swedish Film Institute's on-line archive. Now, there aren't any classic Swedish films there, at least not in the sense that we'd think of when we think "classic" cinema. All the feature films have the obvious problems with copyright issues. Instead, what we get is about 500 mostly short films that look a lot like the sort of American industrial films of the 1950s, plus a bunch of documentaries. The other thing, of course, is that almost everything is in Swedish, so it's difficult to figure out quite what's going on unless you speak Swedish, which I don't.

Still, there are some interesting things in the archive. One is a document of the 1897 visit of the King of Siam to Sweden, which shouldn't be too difficult to follow since they didn't have talking movies back then so you don't have to deal with Swedish dialogue.

Then, there was the American cruise line that tried to get people to visit Stockholm. They did so by making the advertising film Stockholm, Queen of the Baltic back in 1932. Looks a lot like one of James A. FitzPatrick's Traveltalks movies. (Fitzpatrick himself actually did visit Sweden, making Stockholm, Pride of Sweden in 1937 and Rural Sweden in 1938.)

Another TCM original documentary

2011-12-06T08:27:00.000-05:00

TCM is bringing us another installment in its Night at the Movies series, this time looking at Christmas movies. The documentary is getting its first airing at 8:00 PM tongiht and, like most TCM documentaries, will be getting a bunch of airings throught the month.

The documentary is obviously also a starting point for a night of Christmas movies. Some of them are movies I don't particularly care for, such as Tenth Avenue Angel at 4:00 AM. Then again, that's probably because I have a tendency to get irritated by the films of Margaret O'Brien. It's particularly bad when she's paired with Judy Garland in Meet Me In St. Louis, which precedes Tenth Avenue Angel at 2:00 AM.

On the other hand, TCM is also airing the short Star in the Night, which comes on around 10:35 PM after A Christmas Story. I can't believe it's been two years since I blogged on Star of the Night, but then, there are only so many Christmas movies for TCM to air.

Dev Anand, 1923-2011

2011-12-05T07:49:00.000-05:00

If you're reading this in the United States, you might well have missed the news of the passing of actor Dev Anand on Saturday, at the age of 88. I only heard it because I like to listen to international broadcasters and heard the report on All-India Radio's English service. The obvious reason that Anand would be almost completely unknown to American audiences is because he was a prominent actor in Bollywood.

Bollywood is a subject I don't know that much about other than the stereotypes of Indian cinemagoers loving lavish musical numbers in places of their movies where American audiences wouldn't expect one. I think my first exposure to a Bollywood movie came many years ago back when the local PBS channel was airing classic films from around the world in the late slot on Saturday nights. (I think that would be the same place where I saw The Cranes Are Flying and Ikiru.) I didn't stay up for the end of the particular Indian movie they were showing, largely because it didn't seem to make much sense to me. Granted, I was too young to get what was going on, and certainly too young to appreciate the musical numbers -- although, as I think I've said elsewhere, I'm still not the biggest fan of musicals.

The other aspect of foreign film I'd like to learn a bit more about is "Nollywood", which is the nickname given to the collect movie production of Nigeria. As I understand it, the most common means of distribution is direct-to-video, with movies having a shelf life of only a few weeks before pirated copies start to take over the market. This means that the movies have to be produced on a shoestring budget to recoup the production costs, and a large number of movies are produced. (I think the established production capabilities of Bollywood and Nollywood both produce more normal films than Hollywood does these days, although Hollywood's total likely doesn't include adult films, which are probably the biggest genre of movies produced.)

Fragments

2011-12-04T09:02:00.000-05:00

TCM is doing something a bit different with its Silent Sunday Nights slot this week. Instead of one silent film, or a couple of shorts, they're airing a documentary called Fragments that first ran on TCM earlier this year. It's coming up at midnight tonight.

It's sad how many silent films have been lost as there's no known surviving footage. There are other movies, however, for which some portion of the movie survives, but much of it is missing. I mentioned Alfred Hitchcock's The White Shadow back in August and September as an example of this. In the case of The White Shadow, the movie was found in New Zealand in part because that was apparently the last stop on the distibution tour for a movie print, which makes sense if you consider how far out of the way New Zealand would have been back in the 1920s when there were no transoceanic flights. The documentary was obviously made before the re-showing of The White Shadow, but there are still a lot of other interesting things in this documentary.

Apparently, back in the day, you could get copyright on a movie by leaving part of it with the Library of Congress. One of the results is that filmmakers would take a minute or two of footage, have the individual frams reproduced as more substantially-sized phootgraphs, and have those photographs copied as a series. In theory, the rest of the movie wasn't copyrighted, but you couldn't show a movie without showing the copyrighted footage. Today, such footage can be turned back into film by treating the photographs as a sort of flip-book along the lines of the way animation was done.

Other movies have surviving footage as a result of the promotional trailers made to advertise upcoming films. These trailers would have been distributed differently from the films themselves, so they wouldn't necessarily have been destroyed at the same time the films were.

But perhaps the best footage here is the surviving footage from The Way of All Flesh. Emil Jannings won the first Best Actor Oscar for this movie, but only about five minutes of the movie survives. It's one of the only lost films left that won an Oscar, since the rediscovery a few years back of Two Arabian Knights.

Christmas movies are here again

2011-12-03T13:20:00.000-05:00

Now that we're in December, we begin to get a lot of Christmas movies. Some of them I've recommended in Decembers past, but one that I only saw for the first time last December is Fitzwilly. It's airing tomorrow morning at 8:00 AM on TCM.

Dick Van Dyke plays Claude Fitzwilliam, who with a name like that unsurprisingly gets the nickname Fitzwilly. Fitzwilly is the head butler to the wealthy old spinster Victoria Woodworth (Edith Evans). Or, Miss Woodworth used to be wealthy. She's burned through all her inheritance, to the point that Fitzwilly has to watch her financial situation very carefully. This is a big problem, since the grand old lady likes to donate money to every charity case under the sun. So to keep Woodworth solvent, Fitzwilly and the rest of the staff do two things. First is to try to prevent checks from going out in the first place; if a check doesn't go out you don't need the funds to make it good. Second is to get Mis Victoria's staff to engage in con artist schemes to bilk people of money when she does sign a check and get it past Fitzwilly.

So far so good, with the exception of Fitzwilly technically being a criminal. His situation is about to get a little more complicated. Miss Victoria wants to write the story of her life, and to that end, she's hired young journalism student Juliet (Barbara Feldon) to interview her and cobble those interviews together into an autobiography. Juliet suspects that there's something odd going on in the Woodworth household, and those suspicions are confirmed when she catches Fitzwilly trying to keep a five-figure check from leaving the house. Needless to say, this causes multiple problems for Fitzwilly, who not only is about to get caught, but is about to see his boss be humiliated when her insolvency comes to light.

Eventually, Juliet finds herself beginning to sympathize with Fitzwilly's plight and falls in love with him, although she'd rather that his next scheme be his last one: in order to pay for that big check that Juliet let go out of the house, Fitzwilly has to concoct an elaborate plot to rob one of the department stores of all its cash on Christmas Eve....

Fitzwilly is a comedy and, despite the themes of robbery, it's actually a fairly light comedy. It's certainly the sort of light comedy that Dick Van Dyke could do well. Edith Evans is reminiscent of Margaret Rutherford in The VIPs, and is a delight to watch as the dotty old lady. Feldon is lovely and capable, and there's a supporting cast of a lot of familiar names. All in all, I think you'll find it quite enjoyable. Sadly, Fitzwilly doesn't seem to be available for purchase on DVD.

The title implies it's a kids' film

2011-12-02T07:30:00.000-05:00

TCM is airing a bunch of pre-Codes after the William Powell movies finish up, several of which I haven't seen. One that I have seen and is available to purchase from the Warner Archive in case you miss today's showing is Under 18, at 3:15 PM.

Released at the beginning of 1932, Under 18 is naturally set during the Depression when jobs were at a premium and everybody wanted to get rich quick to escape the financial situation they were in. Marian Marsh is Margie, one such woman. She's got a job as a seamstress in one of the fashion houses in New York's fashion district, and a boyfriend named Jimmie (Regis Toomey) who's trying to get her to marry him. Jimmie is a delivery boy, but has dreams of getting a truck of his own and starting an independent delivery operation. Margie would like more than that, but this being the Depression, it's not as though there's much opportunity out there. A good example of this lack of opportunity can be seen in Margie's sister Sophie (Anita Page). Sophie is already married to Alf (Norman Foster) with one kid, and a second on the way. That in itself doesn't look so appealing to Margie at this point in her life. But to make matters worse, Alf has lost his job, and is constantly spending money on his version of get-rich-quick schemes, which for him means entering pool contests, where he thinks he can win the top prize. Needless to say he doesn't, and it's to the point where Sophie and Alf have had to move back in with the rest of the family and Sophie would like a divorce. If only there were the money for a lawyer.

Margie, to her credit, thinks she sees a way out of this. Although she's only a seamstress at the fashion house, she gets to see the models on a regular basis as they're showing off the designs to buyers, socialites, and playboys who would buy the dresses for their girlfriends. One of the trips out into the showroom brings Margie into contact with one of those playboys, Raymond (Warren William). There's an obvious choice for Margie: abandon the dreary future of being a deliveryman's wife, and spend time being a sugar baby! This would also allow her not only to live on Easy Street, but also to get the money for Sophie's divorce. All it really requires is going up to Raymond's fabulous penthouse and, well, being his....

For me it's that penthouse that's the highlight of Under 18. A lot of the penthouses you'll see in movies from this era are almost impossibly luxurious, which makes for fun set design. The one inhabited here by Warren William is no different in terms of set design, but a bit different in terms of what's going on. When Margie gets there, she arrives at what looks for all the world like the early 1930s version of a swingers' party. (Or at least what I think a swingers' party would have looked like 80 years ago; I don't go to swingers' parties.) It's suitably decadent for the viewer, but for poor Margie, it's enough to give her second thoughts. And to be honest, those second thoughts are one of the things that makes the rest of the movie not so interesting, as Margie resolves the situation in a way that's not quite satisfying for a pre-Code. (Compare this to, say, the end of Jean Harlow's Red-Headed Woman.) Still, Under 18 is a bit of a treat. (But unlike the title implies, not really a treat for kids.)

The return of Robert Osborne!

2011-12-01T08:18:00.000-05:00

Today is the day when TCM host Robert Osborne finally returns from his long break due to surgery and a well-deserved vacation. Osborne returns just in time to present the films of a new Star of the Month, William Powell. Powell made enough films during his two-decade career that TCM is showing the films on all five Thursday nights this month, a good ways into Friday morning. This week sees quite a few movies that I've blogged about in the past:

Jewel Robbery kicks things off at 8:00 PM;
Powell switches from being a criminal to investigating crime as Philo Vance in The Kennel Murder Case at 9:30 PM
The Ex-Mrs. Bradford follows at 11:00 PM;
Powell gets cast with Angela Lansbury and Esther Williams in The Hoodlum Saint at 12:30 AM; and
Crossroads, at 8:30 AM tomorrow morning.

One Powell film that I haven't recommended before is Lawyer Man overnight at 4:00 AM; in this one, Powell plays a lawyer from the lower-class part of Manhattan who has the chance to move on to bigger and better things when he learns that being a sleazy lawyer can pay off big. Moving up in class brings him the attentions of the lovely Helen Vinson and Claire Dodd, much to the consternation of his long-suffering secretary Joan Blondell. Lawyer Man is a movie that has an interesting premise, but doesn't quite go anywhere, which is a bit of a shame.

George White, 1892-1968

2011-11-30T14:12:00.001-05:00

This isn't really a birthday post, since George White was born in March, but tomorrow sees what looks to be the only airing of a movie that the Fox Movie Channel last pulled out of the vault several years ago: George White's 1935 Scandals, tomorrow morning at 7:30 AM on FMC.

White wasn't very involved in the movies; in fact, White was a fairly prominent Broadway producer starting back in the late 1910s. He produced a popular revue show unsurprisingly called George White's Scandals, which the year in question also part of the title. The movie which is airing tomorrow morning is a movie version of the revue, with a fairly thin framing story about White (who actually appears as himself in the movie as well as directing it) travelling down south and finding some novelty acts for his revue. They go back north with him to New York, where they become stars. But they let fame go to their heads. Everything ends happily, however, with a bunch of musical numbers thrown in for good measure.

Although it's a film that's not nearly as good as some of the Warner Bros musicals from the early Busby Berkeley era, and doesn't have the polish of the MGM musicals from the late 1930s, George White's 1935 Scandals is still interesting for having one of the earliest screen appearances of Eleanor Powell, who does a "novelty" dancing act. In fact, this is the film which got her her contract over at MGM, where she wen't on to become fairly famous. The female star of the film isn't Powell, but Alice Faye, a Fox contract player whom White had discovered several years earlier when he cast her in the Broadway version Scandals of 1931. As for Faye's film career, it took off when White took his Scandals to Hollywood, but not in 1935; instead, Faye's first movie was the Scandals of 1934, which also starred Rudy Vallee (who was also in the 1931 Scandals with Faye).

When good TV characters go bad

2011-11-29T14:16:00.000-05:00

There are some actors out there who are generally best remembered for characters they played on the small screen. Two such actors show up together to conspire to commit murder in the 1949 film Red Light, airing tomorrow morning at 6:00 AM on TCM

George Raft is not one of those actors; he's the star of the movie, however. He plays Johnny Torno, who runs a successful trucking company in San Francisco. He's got a brother Jess (Arthur Franz) who is a Catholic priest who spent the last several years serving as an army chaplain in World War II, and winning a medal for his heroic work in a POW camp. The kid brother is finally coming home to a happy reunion with his brother and an assignment to a parish of his own in northern California.

Meanwhile, back at the prison ranch, you've got Perry Mason. Er, not Perry Mason, but Raymond Burr playing Nick Cherney. Nick was a bookkeeper at the Torno trucking company, until he rather foolishly decided to embezzle a substantial amount of money from Torno. Torno sent Nick to prison, and Nick wants revenge. Fortunately he's got a way of exacting revenge while keeping the perfect alibi: his prison comrade, Col. Sherman Potter from the M*A*S*H unit. Er, actually it's Harry Morgan, back in the days when he was going by "Henry" in screen credits, playing fellow prisoner Rocky. Rocky is gonig to get out on parole a few days before Nick, so Nick has Rocky kill Jess while Nick is still in prison.

Rocky shoots the brother to death in his hotel room, but the brother survives long enough for Johnny to get there. Johnny hears his brother's dying words, which is that the answer he seeks can be found in the Bible. Johnny looks through his brother's bible, but can't find the name of the killer written in it anywhere. Johnny figures that Jess must have written it in the hotel room's Gideon Bible -- but that's been taken from the room! Johnny tries to find that bible, and even enlists the help of one of the people who had the room after his brother was killed (Virginia Mayo) in his attempt to find it. Mayo, meanwhile, becomes a bit frightened of the lengths Johnny is willing to go to to gain revenge....

Red Light is one of those lower-budget noirish movies which is actually quite entertaining. Raymond Burr, to be honest, had played several heavies before becoming Perry Mason (most notably the killer in Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window), and is good here as Nick. Harry Morgan, I think, didn't play quite so many heavies, but he's just as good as Burr. George Raft never had much range, but his man looking for revenge character fits into that limited range. The one problem with the movie is that it has any number of plot holes. First off is the question of why Jess is being billeted in a hotel room. He's an army chaplain who has a brother who's thrilled to see him. You'd think that either the military would have room at a army base for him; he'd stay at the rectory of the bishop's cathedral; or he'd stay at his brother's apartment. More importantly, you'd wonder why Jess didn't write anything in his own Bible. It would have been just as easy for him to get his personal bible from his suitcase after being shot as it would have been for him to get the Gideon Bible from the desk drawer. (And how big were Gideon Bibles back then? The last time I was in a hotel room that had a Gideon Bible, the thing was surprisingly small and wouldn't have had enough room to write much of anything.)

Despite its plot flaws, Red Light is a fun movie. Sadly, it doesn't seem to have gotten a DVD release, so you're going to have to watch the TCM showing.

Fox mystery series

2011-11-28T14:18:00.002-05:00

I briefly mentioned the Lone Wolf mystery series a few weeks back; the movies are airing on Saturday mornings on TCM for the next several weeks. Mystery series -- that is, B-movies in which an actor played the same detective over the course of several pictures -- were quite popular in the late 1930s and early 1940s. 20th Century-Fox had their own series, the seven Michael Shayne movies. Two of them are airing tomorrow on FMC: Just off Broadway at 7:30 AM, followed by Dressed to Kill at 9:00 AM.

I haven't seen Just Off Broadway, so I can't really comment on it. But Dressed to Kill showed up a few weeks back, and it's a pretty entertaining little mystery. Fox contract player Lloyd Nolan plays detective Michael Shayne, who at the start of this movie is supposed to get married to his long suffereing girlfriend Joanne (Mary Beth Hughes). Suddenly he hears a scream in the apartment hotel where he's staying, and discovers that another of the tenants, a wealthy Broadway producer, has been shot along with a female companion. Just as interestingly, they're both in costume, and the shootings seem to have been particularly ingenious. Michael, of course, begins to investigate and finds a particularly baffling mystery. The producer had gathered together several of the surviving cast members from a show he had done 25 years earlier, and it seems as if everybody at the dinner had a motive to kill him.

To be honest, this is fairly standard stuff for a mystery series. There are the red herrings, the hidden identities, and perhaps most fun in Dressed to Kill, the bumbling police detective, who is played by William Demarest. Demarest was one of the great comedic character actors and is in fine form here as the policeman who is trying to stay one step ahead of Shayne but always seems to be one step behind. The resolution of the mystery isn't perfect, although to be fair, that's the case in a lot of mystery movies. Still, Dressed to Kill provides good entertainment value for its B-movie level.

Reminders

2011-11-28T07:33:00.001-05:00

About three weeks ago I made brief mention of the film The Next Voice You Hear..., and mentioned that it would be airing on Novmeber 28. Today is that day, and it's airing at 2:30 PM on TCM. The Next Voice You Hear... is airing on TCM as part of a day of lesser-known movies from 1950, and is one of those Dory Schary films I would lump in with the "trying to put out a message" films. Even though it's clearly got Christian morals, I'd agree with other commenters who say that it's gentler in putting its message across then the similarly-themed The Day the Earth Stood Still (the early 1950s version; not the recent remake).

Another of the films in this morning's TCM lineup is one that I first mentioned two years ago, and has already gotten a release as part of the Warner Archive Collection: Crisis, starring Cary Grant, which comes on at 11:00 AM. Now if only The Next Voice You Hear... could get the DVD treatment, perhaps with some of the other stuff Nancy Davis (Reagan) did in the early 1950s. One of these days perhaps TCM will get around to showing Talk About a Stranger or Night Into Morning again. I thought I'd blogged about one or the other, but apparently not.

TV movies

2011-11-27T08:15:00.000-05:00

The Fox Movie Channel from time to time shows some TV movies. One of them is coming up this evening: Karl Malden in Word of Honor at 6:00 PM. Malden plays a small-town reporter who gets an anonymous tip about the location of a woman who's disappeared, and it leads to the prosecution of one of the town's more prominent citizens on murder charges. The problem is, the prosecutor needs Malden's tip, and he refuses to reveal his source, who swore him to secrecy. This causes the typical legal problems for Malden, but Word of Honor goes a bit over the top in having it cause all sorts of other problems in Malden's personal life. Specifically, one of Malden's daughters is about to ger married, and the prosecution means that suddenly everybody in town wants not to go to the wedding.

I don't normally recommend TV movies. Partly it's because they don't show up very often, and partly it's because they're on the commercial cable channels nowadays. Back in the late 1970s and 1980s, however, when we were pretty much in a three-network world, it was a lot more common for the networks to produce original TV movies and show them with a lot of fanfare. It also wasn't uncommon for past stars to show up in these TV movies, such as Karl Malden in Word of Honor. (To be fair, he had become a TV star by the early 1980s as well after his long stint on Streets of San Francisco.) Word of Honor has some other interesting casting: Rue McClanahan, later of The Golden Girls, plays Malden's wife; Ron Silver (later of Reversal of Fortune) plays a big-city journalist covering the press freedom angle of the case; and a young John Malkovich shows up as the fiancé.

And to be honest, I wouldn't mind seeing some of the other old TV movies from back in the day wind up somewhere on TV. I distinctly recall one from my childhood called White Mama with an elderly Bette Davis supporting a black kid who wants to grow up to become a boxer. (I see it's directed by Jackie Cooper.) Davis would go on to make another TV movie about the right to die called Right of Way, which co-starred James Stewart.

I don't know that TV movies like this necessarily need to be on TCM, however. There are a number of nostalgia channels that you can probably get on the digits subchannels of your local broadcasters. I can get ThisTV and RTV for example; there are others out there too. Since these TV movies were originally conceived as having commercial breaks, these nostalgia channels would be a perfect place for the old TV movies. It's just a question of who has the broadcast rights to all these things.

The name's the same

2011-11-26T14:05:00.001-05:00

Back in May, 2008, I mentioned the 1937 comedy Easy Living. There's a movie coming up on TCM overnight tonight at 1:00 AM called Easy Living, but it's a rather different movie.

In tonight's Easy Living, Victor Mature plays a professional football player who's diagnosed with a heart ailment and so should retire, but his greedy wife (Lizabeth Scott) wants him to keep playing so he can remain in the spotlight for her sake. Lucille Ball also appears as the team's secretary. This is one I don't think I've seen before, so I can't go into too much more detail.

The box guides should have it right that tonight's movie is the football-themed Easy Living: TCM's online schedule lists tonight's theme as "Ready to Retire", kicking off at 8:00 PM with this week's Essential, Dodsworth. As such, the Mature Easy Living certainly fits in with the theme, whereas the 1930s version doesn't. Sadly, this 1940s version doesn't seem to be available on DVD, so you're going to have to catch the TCM showing tonight.

Kick 'em when they're down

2011-11-25T09:21:00.000-05:00

I've mentioned a couple of times before that I'm a football fan, so I was looking forward to watching the Packers beat the crap out of the Detroit Lions. And then Ndamokung Suh, dirty player that he is, kicked one of the Packer linemen while he was on the ground. That sort of football violence wouldn't get into a classic movie, I don't think. But it's kind of surprising how violent people could be to each other in old movies.

Gangsters roughed each other up quite a bit, as you can see in the ending of the classic gangster film The Public Enemy when rival gangsters deliver James Cagney back to his family. On the other hand, in some movies such as The Big Combo, the gang boss was careful to make certain there wouldn't be any bruises on the cops they roughed up -- you wouldn't want to leave evidence.

I was just watching The Window on TCM the other morning as part of the salute to Ruth Roman. (Sadly, it's not yet on DVD.) The kid at the center of the story escapes from Roman and her husband (Paul Stewart) and when they catch up with him again they put him in a taxi and smack him around quite a bit. You'd think the taxi driver would have a problem with this.

As for actual kicking of people, I'd guess that most of the time it's bratty little kids kicking adults. Kurt Russell, in his piece that he did for TCM on Elvis Presley, mentions that his acting career started as an extra in It Happened At the World's Fair, in a scene where he gets to kick Presley in the ankle. I know I've seen other scenes of kids kicking adults -- there's one of one of the female child stars kicking a butler, but I can't remember either actor or the movie. When it comes to adults kicking adults, all I can think of is Rosa Klebb in From Russia With Love, and Bette Davis kicking the crap out of Joan Crawford in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?

Any other good kicking movies?

Let's Talk Turkey

2011-11-24T12:57:00.001-05:00

A mentioned at the beginning of November that I had been asked about the short Let's Talk Turkey. At the time I didn't know when it was going to be on. A week or so later, I noticed that TCM wasn't announcing shorts in its online schedule. That fortunately seems to have changed. And unsurprisingly, Let's Talk Turkey is one of the shorts showing up on Thanksgiving. Specifically, it's showing up at 7:42 PM, just after Miracle on 34th Street.

Roman Bohnen, 1894-1949

2011-11-24T12:39:00.000-05:00

Today marks the birth anniversary of character actor Roman Bohnen, a name you might have seen pop up in the credits a number of times, even if you don't necessarily recognize which character he's playing. Bohnen had a fairly brief career, having come from the stage to Hollywood in his early 40s, and then dying of a heart attack while doing more stage work. But his ten years in film were productive, much in the same way that Sydney Greenstreet had a brief but productive career. While Greenstreet made about two dozen films, Bohnen appeared in over 30.

I've recommended a couple of those films before, although obviously not for Bohnen's small roles. Bohnen appears as the warden of the brutal prison in Brute Force, for example. He also shows up at the beginning of The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, as the father of the boy who grows up to be the character portrayed (as an adult) by Kirk Douglas.

Perhaps Bohnen's best role, however, comes in the film The Best Years of Our Lives. Bohnen plays the father of Fred Derry (Dana Andrews), and gets a particularly poignant scene when he reads the commendation report that his son got for one of his medals. I'm sorry to say that I don't have any good video capture software, and couldn't find a good picture of this scene on the web.

Not much on

2011-11-23T13:55:00.000-05:00

Thanksgiving is tomorrow here in the States, which means that I'm in a bit of a holiday mood and not really excited about writing much. On the bright side, there doesn't seem to be much to write about today. TCM is continuing its Battle of the Blondes tonight, starting off with a pair of Betty Grable movies from the early 1940s: Sweet Rosie O'Grady at 8:00 PM, followed by Down Argentine Way at 9:30 PM. Both of these were made at Fox in Technicolor; one of the things Fox did well was putting Grable in its Technicolor musicals.

That's followed by a pair of Doris Day movies. Day may have been blonde, but I don't know that I'd select her as one of the actresses in a "Battle of the Blondes". First up is Tea For Two at 11:15 PM, followed by That Touch of Mink at 1:00 AM.

I briefly mentioned the film The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer when I talked about movies with basketball scenes. It's airing at 4:30 AM tomorrow morning.

Finally, there's a Private Screenings interview with a bunch of child stars that Robert Osborne did back in 2006. It's being shown in honor of Margaret O'Brien, one of my least favorite child stars; she's getting the rest of the morning to herself with several of her films, including Meet Me In St. Louis, one of those movies that really makes me retch.

Guest Programmer programming note

2011-11-22T10:10:00.001-05:00

Tonight sees November's TCM Guest Programmer, Ron Pearlman of the series Sons of Anarchy (among other roles) sit down and discuss some of his favorite movies in segments that were taped with Robert Osborne some months ago. If you've seen the spot on TCM, you'll have noted the odd fact that the segments start at 9:45 PM, rather than 8:00 PM. Also, Pearlman is only shown as presenting three films. On the other hand, on the TCM website, Pearlman is listed as having picked four movies.

The reason is presumably that Pearlman selected and taped a segment on something that TCM later discovered it couldn't get the broadcast rights to. Indeed, if you have an older copy of the printable schedule for November, you would see that the 8:00 PM movie for tonight is the Preston Sturges comedy Sullivan's Travels. They apparently don't have the broadcast rights to Sullivan's Travels at the present time, so Pearlman then selected Sweet Smell of Success. But by this time, Robert Osborne was on his vacation (or perhaps Pearlman himself wasn't available), so TCM would have been unable to film a new segment on Sweet Smell of Success. The odd thing is that TCM decided simply to substitute in Sweet Smell of Success at 8:00; I would have thought it would make more sense to move up the three movies with Osborne and Pearlman and then stick Sweet Smell of Success at the end of the evening.

Anyhow, tonight's four-film lineup is:
Sweet Smell of Success at 8:00 PM;
Red River at 9:45 PM;
Gunga Din at 12:15 AM; and
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington at 2:30 AM.

Another of those little early 1950s MGM flicks

2011-11-21T14:10:00.000-05:00

I don't think I've mentioned Terror on a Train before. It's airing tomorrow morning at 6:00 AM on TCM, and unlike Jeopardy, it doesn't seem to be available on DVD, so you're going to have to watch the TCM showing.

Glenn Ford stars as Major Lyncourt, a Canadian army bomb disposal expert who just happens to be in Birmingham, England. That's good for the authorities, because they get a call telling them that there's been a bomb placed aboard a shipment of sea mines going by train from Birmingham to the naval base in Portsmouth. The authorities know about Maj. Lyncourt's expertise, and know he's available, so it's only natural that they call him in to find the bomb aboard the cargo train and defuse it before it goes off at 7:00 AM the next morning. Lyncourt then spends most of the rest of the movie trying to find that bomb.

In some ways, that's all there is to the movie. But to be fair, there is rather a bit more going on on the side. The train started off in Birmingham, and was going to have to go through some rather populated areas on its journey to Portsmouth. Obviously, it would do no good to have the bomb go off in the middle of a populated area, so the authorities do the best they can and have the train shunted to a suburban siding. But even this suburban location has quite a bit of people, so the police are going to have to do a mass evacuation. There's also a problem for the good major with his wife (Anne Vernon), who's really grown tired of his defusing bombs, and wants him to spend more time with her. Finally, the evacuation goes fairly well, except for one slightly dotty old man who loves trains and wants to be around them whenever he can. The problem, of course, being that this is one train he shouldn't get near.

On the bright side, the authorities catch the would-be bomber. That's good because it soon becomes clear that there's no way short of clear dumb luck that the major is going to find the bomb before the next morning. Perhaps they can impress upon the bomber that he should let the authorities defuse the bomb, and show them exactly where on the train it is so that they can defuse it. And what if he doesn't?

As I sais at the beginning, Terror on the Train is one of those small movies that MGM was making a lot of in the early 1950s. It's got a fairly big star in Ford, and a fairly sparse story, with a brief running time (about 73 minutes) to fit that spare story. That having been said, this is a sort of role that Glenn Ford was well-suited to play: essentially of good character but not too challenging. Ford by himself makes the movie worth watching, even if it's never going to get to the level of his more prestigious work like Gilda or 3:10 to Yuma.

Remember to phrase your cry for help in the form of a question

2011-11-21T08:11:00.000-05:00

I should have blogged about this yesterday afternoon or evening, because by the time you read this post, you'll probably have missed the TCM airing of the movie Jeopardy, which is at 10:00 AM today. Fortunately, the movie has gotten a DVD release, so you can still watch it even if you miss the TCM showing.

The scene is your typical post-World War II family: father (Barry Sullivan), mother (Barbara Stanwyck) and a young son. Thanks to the new prosperity America had by the early 1950s, they're able to get in their car and go on a nice little vacation to a relatively deserted beach house on the Baja California coast. There's an old abandoned pier near the house which, having been abandoned, is in a parlous and dilapidated state, which worries Mom when her son wants to go near it. She's right to worry: eventually part of the pier collapses, and Dad gets caught underneath one of the moorings. As if that weren't bad enough, the tide is coming in, so they have to do something quick before Dad gets drowned by the ocean!

There's nobody right by and no phone, so Mom has to get in the car and go looking for help. Eventually, she finds a hitchhiker (Ralph Meeker), who seems willing to offer help, at least at a price. It turns out that Meeker is an escaped convict on the run, and sees this woman in a car as an opportunity to make his escape. So he offers the mother a bargain, but at a fairly high price: he seems to want more than just a chance to escape....

Jeopardy was made at MGM in the early 1950s at a time when they seemed to be making two types of movies. One was the big musical or other spectacle movie: Jeopardy came out only a year after things like Singin' in the Rain and The Bad and the Beautiful. The other sort of film was a small picture that tried to have some sort of message; Dory Schary wanted to make movies that were more socially relevant. While Jeopardy isn't quite "relevant", it certainly fits into this second category. It only runs about 75 minutes, but has a substantial star in Stanwyck, and a couple of people Hollywood was trying to grrom into bigger stars. There's also the high production values that MGM always had. And yet, a lot of these message movies from MGM seem more preachy than any of the social commentary films Warner Bros. had made back in the 1930s, or even the Fox docudramas.

Still, Jeopardy is worth watching if only for Barbara Stanwyck, who is as professional as ever even when having to deal with a plot that doesn't do much.