Not for love or money

Debbie Reynolds was TCM's Star of the Month back in March, and this gave me the opportunity to record several of her movies that I hadn't seen before. Back in September I mentioned Mary, Mary when TCM aired it, pointing out how it didn't really escape its stage origins. Another Reynolds film based on a stage play was This Happy Feeling.

We actually don't see Reynolds for a while. Instead we see Curt Jurgens. He plays Preston Mitchell, commonly called Mitch. Mitch is one of those stage stars in an era when everybody, at least of a certain demographic and residency, knew the stage stars. But he'd like to retire from the stage to a farm in Connecticut, much to the consternation of friend Nita Holloway (Alexis Smith) and a producer. They want him to play the father of a character to be played by the big new star of the stage, Tony Manza (Troy Donahue). Mitch politely turns them down, and goes home.

Storming into Mitch's house is neighbor Bill Tremayne (John Saxon). He, like everybody else in the area, has been invited to a housewarming party for a couple who recently moved to the area, the Dovers. Bill comes over to tell Mitch about it, and if Mitch doesn't want to come, at least perhaps Mitch can lend Bill his car so Bill doesn't have to walk over in the rain. It's at the party where we finally see the Debbie Reynolds character. She plays one Janet Blake, a secretary who went to the party with her boss. But she'd like to get away from her boss, because he's doing things that today would be considered sexual harassment.

Janet buttonholes Bill, trying to get him to take her home, or at least to to nearest commuter train station. Bill, seeing Janet and already having been revealed to be a ladies' man, starts showing the sort of interest in Janet that her boss had been showing her. Janet, being terribly ticked, gets out of the car and starts running -- anywhere -- to get the heck away from poor Bill. She winds up at Mitch's house, and Mitch is kind enough to offer her a room so she can dry off and have a place to spend the night.

Mitch decides to give her a job as his secretary, mostly out of convenience so that Nita won't think Mitch had any bad intentions having a lovely young thing like Janet in his house overnight. Bill shows up, and also suspects the motives of Janet and Mitch. More complications ensue, leading to the predictable ending.

This Happy Feeling is supposed to be a comedy, but for me, it wasn't all that funny, largely because none of the characters are particularly likeable or nice to each other. There's also a subplot involving Mitch's maid (Estelle Winwood) and a seagull she shot by mistake but did not kill. That subplot is equally grating. Also not helping is the fact that while the opening says the movie was filmed in Cinemascope, we only get a panned-and-scanned release in 4:3.

Fans of stage plays may like This Happy Feeling, but I'm sorry to say I didn't really care for it.

Gentleman Jim

Errol Flynn was Star of the Month last year if memory serves; I recorded several of his movies to watch later. Among them was Gentleman Jim, which is back on TCM tomorrow (Feb. 9) at 6:00 AM.

The Jim in question is James J. Corbett, a name you might recognize as one of the early heavyweight boxing champions of the world. In many ways he was the first modern heavyweight champion, as this was the time the Marquess of Queensbury was codifying new rules to make the sport less unsafe. Also, Corbett was one of the first boxers to train the way modern boxers do. As you can probably surmise, Flynn is playing Corbett, since it's tough to imagine Flynn not being in a starring role at this stage of his career.

The movie opens up in San Francisco circa 1887, which was before Corbett's boxing career. In fact, with no standardized boxing rules and bare-knuckles boxing being the thing, the sport was illegal in a lot of places in much the same way that it took a long time for certain jurisdictions to legalized mixed martial arts. San Francisco was one of the places, at least according to the movie, an Corbett, who works as a bank teller when that was considered a moderately good job for people who want to move up in the world, goes to an illegal fight together with his best friend Walter Lowrie (Jack Carson). The fight gets raided by the police and a bunch of the spectators arrested; this even includes a judge. Corbett's quick thinking when everybody's in custody together gets them off as the judge plans to institute amateur boxing at the Olympic Club.

The judge is also on the board of the bank, so Corbett thinks he's going to get fired, but no. Indeed, the judge and another Olympic Club member help Corbett get a membership too. Buck Ware's daughter Virginia (Alexis Smith) comes to the bank to get some silver currency for Dad's poker game, which Corbett takes over to the bank. There, he sees the gym and gives an impromptu training session to some of the would-be boxers. It's also the start of a love Corbett has for Ware that takes a long time to be requited, but since Flynn and Smith are the two leads, you can expect them to wind up together at the end of a movie like this.

Corbett's boxing skill takes him places, as does his drinking. He and Walter wake up one morning in Salt Lake City seemingly not remembering how they got there. Corbett meets boxing manager Delaney (William Frawley), who gets Jim a fight in order for Jim to be able to pay his way back to San Francisco. Corbett wins, and this among other fights turns him from a banker to a professional boxer.

Corbett rises through the ranks, and when the more-or-less recognized champion of the world at the time, John L. Sullivan (Ward Bond) shows up in America, you know that Corbett is going to fight Sullivan. (Of course, this happened in real life.) But negotiations between the camps were difficult then as now, perhaps even more so then since the challenger had to come up with financial banking. It's not as if they could expect a windfall from pay-per view as that simply didn't exist in the early 1890s.

I have no idea how much of Gentleman Jim is based on the truth. Supposedly, it's based on a serialized autobiagrphy Corbett wrote at the height of his fame in the 1890s, although who knows how much of that is true, either. (I haven't read the autobiography.) It's definitely got all of the hallmarks of a studio-era biopic, with as much if not more emphasis on a good dramatic story than on the unvarnished truth.

But Gentleman Jim also has all the character actors Warner Bros. could bring to a movie like this, and that only serves to add to the entertainment value. It also calls for the sort of bravado and charisma that Errol Flynn was quite adept at displaying; I can't imagine anybody else in Hollywood at the time taking on the role.

So despite any issues with accuracy, Gentleman Jim is a fine example of early-1940s Hollywood entertainment.

The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane

Another movie that's been sitting on my DVR for a little while and that I'd always wanted to see is The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane. I think it was run in October as part of the whole Halloween thing, and while the movie opens up on Halloween, it isn't really a horror movie at all, but more of a quiet thriller.

Jodie Foster, who was 13 at the time she made this movie, plays Rynn Jacobs, a 13-year-old girl living in a rented house in a small seaside town in Maine with her father, who coincidentally seems to be absent all the time. It doesn't take much to figure out that Dad is actually dead, and that Rynn is remarkably independent and mature for her age, and a shockingly good liar, even though pretty much everybody around her seems to suspect that something isn't right. After all, she doesn't go to school, and as mentioned, her father is never around.

Among the people who know something is up and want to talk to Dad is Cora Hallett (Alexis Smith), who owns the house and has rented it out to the Jacobses. Now, she rented it out to them before Dad died, as Dad was apparently able to pay three years' rent up front, as well as leaving Rynn a substantial sum of money that she has in the form of travelers' checks in a safe deposit box in the bank. But Cora unsurprisingly still wants to know what Rynn is up to all day.

Also showing up, and curious about Rynn, is Frank Hallet (Martin Sheen). He's Cora's son, and he has a back story that is hinted at and slowly revealed over the course of the movie, although it's pretty clear from the outset that Frank is a fairly malevolent figure. And just wait and see what he does over the course of the movie! But we're getting ahead of ourselves, and this is something I don't want to give away.

On one of Cora's visits to the house, she's looking for some drinking glasses, and decides to look in the basement, which is accessed via a trap door. On her way back up the stairs, Rynn lets the door hit Cora on the head, killing her! Rynn knows she's in danger of being found out, as in Our Mother's House about a decade earlier, and doesn't want to face the consequences of this until she's an adult at least. But now with Cora dead, Rynn has a whole new set of problems.

Fortunately, she meets an obliging young man who's willing to help. Not Frank, of course, but Mario (Scott Jacoby), who came down with polio as an infant before being able to get the then-new vaccine, and walks with a stick and severe limp as a result. Mario makes some money as a magician doing shows, but as a fellow outcast like Rynn, he feels simpatico with Rynn, which is why he's willing to help her. Of course, he's also willing to get her into bed with him even though she's only 13, in one of the film's more controversial scenes. (Jodie's adult sister was used as a body double.)

Frank misses his mother, which is why he comes back to the house. And he must have found his mother's house keys, since he's able to get in and discover enough evidence to know that there's a pretty horrible truth being hidden. It's a game of cat and mouse between Frank and Rynn.

For a film with a low budget, The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane is quite a good one. Jodie Foster's character may be a bit grating at times to some people (me included) thanks to all the lies she has to tell, but that's certainly not her fault. And, in this case, the lies are really more necessary than in some films. This is also not a mystery but a suspense, so figuring out pretty quickly tht Rynn doesn't have any parents around and won't isn't an issue -- think of Alfred Hitchcock's dictum about suspense. The producers also did a very good job creating a small town atmosphere by finding a small town in Quebec to substitute for the village in Maine. (Well, except for some of the seaside shots.)

All in all, if you haven't seen The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane, it's definitely one you should make it a point to see.

One More Tomorrow

I mentioned the other day that I had a movie on my DVR called One More Tomorrow. It's going to be on TCM tomorrow at 6:00 AM as part of a morning and afternoon of the movies of Ann Sheridan, since she was born on Feb. 21, 1915.

Sheridan nominally gets top billing, but the real star here is Dennis Morgan. He plays Tom Collier III, a playboy who lives in Connecticut in a house that's probably been in the family, and not just his outright, since his father (Thurston Hall) is the one who's the wealthy businessman. Tom is hosting a party for the swell society people, where his seeming best friend Pat Regan (Jack Carson) is serving as butler; said party is right around September 1939 when World War II kicked off in Europe. Odd for a movie released in 1946, but more on that later.

One of the guests at the party is Cecelia Henry (Alexis Smith), a gold-digger who seems intent on getting Tom for a husband; at least, she seems like she might be the right social class for him. Also showing up at the party, but not as a guest, is a crew from the "liberal" magazine Bantam, headed by photographer Christie Sage (that's Ann Sheridan). "Liberal" here means not just being openly anti-Nazi when that wasn't quite so prominent (since the movie is set before the US entry into World War II), but also papering over the evils of Soviet Communism. Tom follows Christie back to New York and the Bantam offices, and sparks fly.

Tom is eventually able to buy out Bantam, but not to neuter it. Instead, he lets the editor, Jim Fisk (Reginald Gardiner), keep the magazine's editorial line. But although Tom loves Christie and the feeling is clearly mutual, there's no way they can get married since Tom has his father and all those "polite society" people. So he marries Cecelia, and nobody lives happily ever after.

Some time passes, and Christie has dealt with the pain of being dumped by Tom by going to Mexico where she does some sort of avant-garde photo shoot (we never actually see the photos), before returning to New York to display the photos at a hoity-toity gallery. Tom gets an invite, and is planning on going, at least until Ceceli shows herself to be a controlling jerk. It's not only that, however; she impresses upon Tom the need to get rid of Pat as a butler.

Tom feels bad about having stood Christine up again, so he goes into New York to see her, although she doesn't want to see him since she can't deal with the emotional pain of his being unavailable to her. Meanwhile, back at Bantam, Jim has gotten a story about corruption in the defense procurement industry. It's a juicy one, but running it means that there's a pretty darn good possibility some of the people in Tom's social circle will be caught up in the scandal and go to prison for it. Cecelia resorts to underhanded means to spike the story.

One More Tomorrow came across as a movie that was really odd in tone, and looked like a lesser print. Indeed, it felt like something that shouldn't have come out after the end of World War II, having been released in mid-1946. A search on IMDb shows that the movie was actually filmed in mid-1943 and held back for three years for whatever reasons Warner Bros. had in mind. That 1943 filming date would explain a lot of the film's politics. (If Warner Bros. had really wanted to be daring, they could have tried making Bantam a magazine that opposed the rampant corruption of the New Deal.) As it was the height of World War II, there was a sense that the Soviets, as our nominal allies in the war, needed to be made more palatable, something seen in movies like The North Star and the thoroughly revolting Mission to Moscow which completely whitewashes Stalin's crimes against humanity.

The resulting tone makes One More Tomorrow a movie that's a little tough to take. A lot of the dialog feels forced, as though everybody needs to go through the motions of making wartime propaganda. But even then, there were movies made during the war that clearly promote the war effort and do a good job of it. One More Tomorrow is heavy-handed even in that way. As a result, it's a movie that'll probably be of interest mostly to completists of one or another of the stars.

The Horn Blows at Midnight

Another of the movies that I finally got around to watching in order to do a post on here is The Horn Blows at Midnight, another of those movies that's on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive collection.

Jack Benny plays the third trumpet in an orchestra that plays for the Paradise Coffee radio show. The shtick of this show is that it's bedtime music, with an announcer hypnotically droning that Paradise is the coffee that puts you to sleep. As you can probably guess, this idiotic announcer puts everybody in the orchestra to sleep, and our third trumpeter starts having a dream sequence.

He's now in heaven, where his real-life girlfriend down on Earth, Elizabeth (Alexis Smith) is a harp-playing angel. One of the functionaries in heaven, the "Chief" (Guy Kibbee) has been looking at earth with a jaundiced eye. The planet hasn't been doing so well, what with all the war and destruction going on (the movie was released in 1945, a week after Franklin Roosevelt died). So heaven has decided that earth is going to be destroyed, by way of a horn being blown at exactly midnight.

However, the two guys who were sent down to destroy it decided they'd rather be human. Elizabeth just knows that her boyfriend (named Athanael up in heaven) is up to the job and it would give him a boost in status in heaven. So he gets sent down to earth to do it.

Naturally, problems ensue. He gets involved in an attempted robbery which, through a series of circumstances, results in a woman named Fran (Dolores Moran) trying to commit suicide. Our angel tries to prevent this and is successful, but in doing so, midnight passes.

Worse, the two guys who were sent down the previous night, the first trumpeter Doremus (John Alexander) and second trumpeter Osidro (Allyn Joslyn) decided that they wanted to stay on earth instead of destroying the planet. They've learned of Athanael's presence, and are determined to stop it by getting a hold of that trumpet.

Up in heaven, they know everything that's going on, and that earth has not been destroyed. Elizabeth offers to go down and help Athanael, and further complications ensue. Of course, as we already know, this is an obvious dream sequence running almost the entire length of the movie, so we know that the earth isn't really going to be destroyed.

Apparently the movie bombed at the box office, leading Jack Benny to joke about it on his radio and TV shows, much the way Johnny Carson would make fun of Bedtime for Bonzo because his Tonight Show director, Fred de Cordova, directed the movie. Benny joked that it was a terrible movie. But in reality, it's not as bad as he made it out to be. Sure, it's a bit of an acquired taste, and I think Benny really needs to be more of a supporting star with stronger leads around him. But it's no worse than a lot of silly plots for 1940s movies.

For people not so familiar with Benny, I'd start off with To Be or Not to Be, and then maybe go on to George Washington Slept Here. But for fans of 1940s movies, certainly give The Horn Blows at Midnight a shot

Uxoricide

TCM is running a day of films tomorrow about uxoricide, real and suspected. One entertaining film that I haven't recommended before is The Two Mrs. Carrolls, which comes on at 9:00 AM tomorrow.

Humphrey Bogart stars as Geoffrey Carroll, an artist living in London, who's doing some painting up in Scotland, which is where he meets Sally Morton (Barbara Stanwyck) and falls for her. The only thing is, he's got a sickly wife back in London, a fact he fails to tell Sally about. Oh, and a daughter, too. When she finds out about that, there goes the relationship. So Mr. Carroll paints a portrait of Mrs. Carroll called "The Angel of Death", and during the same time, she dies! Woo-hoo; Mr. Carroll is free to marry Miss Morton.

Fast forward a couple of years. Carroll and Morton did obviously make up, because they got married and moved into Sally's lovely country house outside London. It's time for Sally to let out a secret that Geoffrey didn't know about. While Geoffrey had had a first wife, Sally had had a former fiancé. It all seems like a plot device contrived by the screenwriters to increase the tension between our two main characters. Add to that that Geoffrey takes on the job of painting the portrait of the wealthy socialite Cecily (Alexis Smith) for the money.

At which point we learn why he needs that money. It seems that the first Mrs. Carroll may not have been so sickly after all. She was in fact poisoned, and by her husband no less! Howevewr, they pharmacist who sold him the poison has decided to start blackmailing him! Oh, and if you think things can't get worse for Geoffrey, you'd be wrong. Stanwyck falls ill, and then starts to suspect that there might be something wrong, as does the daughter. What was the deal with the first Mrs. Carroll, and what is that painting Geoffrey keeps locked up in his studio. OF course, we viewers know the answer, but the characters don't, which is what you need for a good suspense film.

The Two Mrs. Carrolls fills the necessary conditions for a good suspense film. But is that sufficient? There's something in this movie that seems a bit flat, especially the questoin of why Sally would marry Geoffrey. She seems like an independent enough woman, and one who has already been lied to by the guy. There should be some serious red flags. The presence and absence of the daughter also seems all too convenient, as does the sudden presence of a burglar in the community when Geoffrey might be getting ready to kill Sally. That having been said, Bogart gives a good performance as a bad guy who isn't a gangster, while Stanwyck is fun as always playing a woman in danger. The two leads take mediocre material and make it worth the while to watch.

The Two Mrs. Carrolls has received a DVD release courtesy of the Warner Archive Collection.