Warner Bros. B Urban Corruption Drama #23489567826

I've mentioned a lot how I like the Warner Bros. B movies, and this is often the case even when the plots turn out to be implausible. Another good example of this is Strange Alibi. I presume it turns up often enough on TCM, but I don't think I had noticed it until the last time it showed up several months back.

The backdrop is one that's not uncommon for B movies in the pre-World War II era: a big city where there's a crime syndicate, and they've been able to infiltrate various parts of the administration, leaving them free to act with impunity. When somebody does threaten to turn state's witness, that person is immediately shot. The police are quick to find the killer but wouldn't you know it the killer "commits suicide" by hanging.

The police chief, Sprague (Jonathan Hale), brings in a bunch of his detectives to have a long talk about the matter. The chief immediately gets into it with one of the men, Sgt. Joe Geary (a very young Arthur Kennedy), who proceeds to deal with his temporary suspension by getting into a fight with the police chief, which makes the suspension permanent. Wait until Joe's poor fiancée Alice (Joan Perry) finds out.

Except that all of this was a ruse. Sprague knows the syndicate has dirty cops working for it, although he can't figure out who. He wants Geary to figure that out, except that having Geary do it in uniform is going to present a problem for various reasons, hence the nonsense about getting Geary fired. This mission is so super-secret that only Geary and Sprague know about it. Sprague hasn't even bothered to tell anybody like the state Attorney General or governor or anyone in the feds.

So you can probably guess what happens next. Geary goes to an establishment known to be a hangout for syndicate types, run by Katie (Florence Bates), who isn't exactly law-abiding but also has a heart of gold which is going to come into play for the climax. Joe works from there, getting into the good graces of the syndicate by shooting some high-priced liquor bottles from a bar owner who's shorting the syndicate. Geary finds a guy named McKaye who can provide key evidence, only to discover too late that they're being watched. When Geary takes McKaye to Sprague's house (really, they're meeting there despite the code to communicate?), the bad guys follow along and kill Sprague in a way that clearly implicates Geary and only Geary, getting him sent up the river as it were to a nasty prison. The only way Joe is going to be able to clear his name is to find McKaye. After all, nobody else knows that Geary was working with Sprague to weed out corruption.

Geary is eventually able to escape, but has very few places to go. Worse, McKaye is found, but he's found rather dead. Still, Geary has some luck in that the governor is working on weeding out corruption and might just be able to help Geary out....

The whole plot of Strange Alibi feels like a mish-mash of tropes that had all been done before. But this being Warner Bros., they do it well even if the plot as a whole bears little resemblance to reality. They're also helped out by a fine stable of mostly supporting character-type actors. Arthur Kennedy, of course, would go on to much bigger things (and five Oscar nominations), but at this point nobody knew what they had in him. And Strange Alibi is also, like all of the good Warner B movies, breezily fast, clocking in at a sprightly 63 minutes. Definitely another one worth watching the next time it shows up on TCM.

Lawrence of Arabia

It may be a surprise, but one of those movies that I never sat down to watch all in one go, largely because of the length, is Lawrence of Arabia. Partly for that reason and partly because of my reluctance to do posts on extremely well known movies, I've never done a full-length post on it here. But to rectify that, the last time it showed up on TCM, I recorded it in order to be able to watch it in advance of the next showing. That next showing is tomorrow, February 21, at 11:30 AM as part of a day devoted to epics.

Peter O'Toole stars as T.E. Lawrence, and as the movie opens, he's riding his motorcycle to his death in England in the mid-1930s. His was a well known name, so a lot of people gather for the funeral, and a couple, such as reporter Jackson Bentley (Arthur Kennedy), basically intimate that Lawrence was an SOB, but our SOB. Since Lawrence is dead, we're obviously going to get a flashback to when he was alive.

The scene shifts to 1916/1917, which is smack dab in the middle of World War I. Britain is one of the Allies while the Ottoman Empire are one of the opposing Central Powers. The Ottomans are Turks, but a fair amount of the territory they govern is Arab, such as the Hejaz which is now a province on the Red Sea coast of Saudi Arabia. Prince Faisal (Alec Guinness) is one of the potentates who is leading an Arab revolt against the Turks, and the British realize supporting the Arabs is a good way to destabilize the Ottoman Empire. They've already got an advisor there in Col. Brighton (Anthony Quayle), but aren't certain of what the situation is really like, so they want to send a second man in Lawrence, an army lieutenant (ultimately promoted to colonel) who speaks Arabic and has good knowledge of the region, to get more information.

Lawrence is supposed to meet Faisal, but first meets Sherif Ali (Omar Sharif), who will take Lawrence to where Faisal is. However, along the way, Ali and his men run into Auda Abu Tayi (Anthony Quinn), who is from a different tribe from Ali. Sadly, the two tribes have a blood feud that threatens to derail the whole uprising until Lawrence puts it to rest by carrying out an execution himself. Worse, he finds that he doesn't dislike killing people. In any case, the result of this is that many of the Arabs act like they've got a lot of respect for Lawrence.

Lawrence's plan is that the Arabs should attack the port city of Aqaba, now at the southern tip of Jordan. Of course, the port is well defended, but only from the sea, since on the other sides lies a desert that's thought to be impassable. Except that Lawrence figures they can cross it and surprise the Ottomans that way, which works. It brings Lawrence more glory, but to go any further he's going to have to get more help from the British back in Cairo.

The British seem none too pleased that Lawrence looks as though he's going native, as it were, and supporting the Arab desire for total independence which would clash with what the British and French have decided should be done with the Middle East after the defeat of the Ottomans. The Arabs, for their part, are looking to get to Damascus, while General Allenby (Jack Hawkins) of the British will be going to Jerusalem as that area even during the 1910s had a substantial Jewish population. (Not every Jew had left in the various diasporas, while Zionism had begun with some European Jews already moving to the region, which south of Beirut had a fairly sparse population.)

Lawrence keeps attacking, but there's some question of whether he's getting too big. Also, there's the question of whether the Arabs are going to be able to govern anything modern if they do take Damascus. The leaders of the revolt are tribal and suited to desert warfare, but Damascus is a fairly modern city. They could easily use western engineers, but that might keep them from being truly independent.

It's easy to see why Lawrence of Arabia won so many Oscars. The acting is quite good, as is the cinematography and other parts of the production design. Maurice Jarre's musical score is also memorable. However, I'd have to say that Lawrence of Arabia is another of those movies where, while it's very good, I'm not certain I agree with it ending up near the top on lists of all-time great movies. The movie runs over three and a half hours plus the intro/entr'acte/exit music; the print TCM ran is 227 minutes. And frankly, in the last hour or so the movie really loses steam. Some historians take serious issue with some of the ways history is presented here. Certain of the characters are composites (such as the diplomat played by Claude Rains), a movie which is often necessary when trying to distill a story like this down to a reasonable length, but apparently some of the timeline is wrong and the movie glosses over Lawrence's knowledge of the region before the war.

Love Story meets Barefoot in the Park meets the 1920s

Richard Chamberlain died last year and TCM eventually got around to running a night of his movies as a tribute. One that I hadn't seen before was Joy in the Morning, so as always I recorded it in order to be able to watch it later and do the obligatory post on it. Having finally seen it, I can now write up that post.

The movie starts off with a pre-credits sequence, set against a backdrop of the radio broadcast of the Gene Tunney/Jack Dempsey title fight, which places things around 1927. Carl Brown (Richard Chamberlain) is making out with his girlfriend Annie McGairy (Yvette Mimieux) beneath the stairs of one of those old New York tenement buildings. This is the sort of thing that's scandalous if they get caught, and on top of that, Annie has an unseen stepfather who treats her badly, so Annie decides to run off and elope with Carl.

Carl is a law student at one of those smaller schools that certainly populated movies of a previous era. For college students of the 1920s to be married was just as scandalous as making out under the staircase, so Carl takes a job as a caretaker at the school to help defray expenses, with he and Annie living in a caretaker's cottage on campus. But the dean of the school, Dean Darwent (Sidney Blackmer), isn't so sure Carl can make things work. And besides, one of the student loan programs they have set up isn't for married students, which puts a crimp in the Browns' finances. Things get much worse when Dad (Arthur Kennedy) finds out not only about the marriage, but to whom Carl has gotten married. Apparently the Browns and McGairys had a history back in the old country, so when Dad learns what his son is doing, he withdraws his financial support. Carl's mother also writes a nasty letter about what type of woman she thinks Annie is.

To help further defray expenses, Annie gets a job doing babysitting work for single mother Mrs. Karter (Joan Tetzel), who is carrying on with a much older married man Mr. Pulaski (Oscar Homolka), one more thing that's scandalous. But Pulaski's Christmas present to the young married couple is to offer Carl a job as night watchman, although he's going to have to sleep away from Annie, which puts a further strain on the marriage. Annie seeks companionship with the local florist, who fortunately for the marriage is gay and has no designs on Annie. But being gay in the 1920s was also scandalous, and all the busybodies in town learn of a life for the married couple that's not quite conventional in a way that the busybodies think they should be able to gossip about.

Finally, Annie gets pregnant, which ought to be perfectly respectable considering that she's married, and there's no suggestion that anybody other than Carl is the father. It's just that he's got so much financial difficulty, and there's the possibility that he might flunk out of law school, that could push the marriage over the edge.

Joy in the Morning is one of those 1960s melodramas that the producers at the time probably thought was mildly daring as it pushed the limits of the Production Code. In retrospect, however, it's just one of those movies that's funny when it isn't supposed to be. It's turgid, trying to shoehorn a whole bunch of social issues into the plot, while at the same time laughably acted by the two leads. And the music (by Bernard Herrmann, with a bad MOR title song sung by Chamberlain) totally doesn't fit the movie. Joy in the Morning turns out to be a howler, with that badness possibly being the only real reason to watch.

Robert Mitchum in another invasion movie

Back on June 6 I mentioned The Longest Day about the D-Day invasion of Normandy, in which a ton of Hollywood and international stars, including Robert Mitchum, have roles of varying sizes. Several years later, for Italian producer Dino di Laurentiis, he made a movie about a different World War II invasion: Anzio.

After a horrendously awful song sung by Jack Jones over the opening credits that makes it sound like one of those 1960s potboilers instead of a war film, we see a bunch of Allied soldiers somewhere in southern Italy. The Allies had taken Sicily relatively early since it was an island, while getting across to the mainland was somewhat more difficult. They were able to take some of southern Italy before the Nazi commander in Italy, Field Marshal Kesselring (played in Anzio by Wolfgang Preiss), was able to set up a defensive line that more or less stalemated the Allies as winter was setting in.

Obviously, the Allies were going to try to break out somehow, and while the generals were preparing, the grunts are getting all rowdy in one of the palazzos, observed by war correspondent Dick Ennis (Robert Mitchum playing a composite character; most of not all of the Allies are either wholly fictional or composites based on real militry officers). But then some commanders come in, which can only mean one thing: the big invasion is about to being.

Thankfully, although this is winter, it's Italian winter, so it's not bitter cold like the Allies would get the following winter when they pushed eastward from Normandy, meaning that another invasion is doable if not necessarily easy. The big question is, how much resistance are they going to face from the Germans. In command is American general Lesley (Arthur Kennedy), who wants to make certain the Allies can secure the beachhead, that being necessary before further advances can be made.

So the Allies land at Anzio, and as Gen. Lesley sets about securing the location, everybody seems surprised at the lack of resistance that they're facing. Indeed, the lookout points for snipers seem to be completely empty. With that in mind, Ennis procures a driver and sets out for Rome, which isn't all that far away from the landing site. They even get all the way to the outskirts of Rome, basically facing no resistance whatsoever. The Allies, it appears, could just take Rome right away, which would be a major victory.

However, the difficulty lies in getting in touch with the commanding officers and getting them to believe that the Allies could in fact advance. Lesley has some reason to believe that the Germans are in fact setting a trap, trying to get the Allies to overextend themselves after which the Germans can really put a hurting on the Allies. This proves to be wrong, however, and this delay gives the Germans vital time to fortify their position, more or less trapping the Allies on the beach.

It's not hard to see why someone would want to make a movie about Anzio, and with the movie being made in the late 1960s, it's also not hard to see why moviemakers would want to make something that suggests the futility of war. However, there's something about Anzio that makes it come off as not quite right, already starting from that opening song. I think what goes wrong has a lot to do with the script, and a sense of di Laurentiis wanting to make an epic on a tight budget.

The cast is professional although a lot of them are underused. They do the best they can with the material, but ultimately, Anzio comes off as another of those movies that probably could have been so much more than the final product we get.

Another one of our aircraft is missing, somewhere north of the 49th parallel

Errol Flynn was TCM's star of the Month earlier this year, which gave me the chance to record a couple of movies that I hadn't blogged about before. Among those movies is Desperate Journey. Recently I watched it, so now you get a post on it.

A multinational crew is given the task of bombing an important railway junction in what, before the war, was the very eastern part of Germany near the border with Poland. Among them are Brits Lt. Forbes (Errol Flynn) and Sgt. Hollis (Ronald Sinclair), and American Johnny Hammond (Ronald Reagan). Two other members of the crew are presumably American, Sgt. Edwards (Alan Hale Sr.) and Officer Forrest (Arthur Kennedy). (From doing a bit of reading, it sounds like the script was written before the US entered World War II, so the Americans were presumably intended to be the sort of volunteer like the ones who went to Europe in 1916 to fly in World War I.)

The bomber goes on its run, but the weather is bad and the cloud ceiling is low, so to complete the mission, they have to fly low enough that it gives the Germans a good shot at knocking the plane out of the sky, which they summarily do, or else we wouldn't have a movie. All five of the men survive, although Hollis is substantially injured, which isn't surprising since he's the one played by the least-known of the actors, at least by Hollywood standards. The others don't want to leave Hollis behind to die, or worse, to get picked up by the Nazis and tortured for information. In any case, the result is that the Nazis pick them up as a group, and it's up to Maj. Baumeister (Raymond Massey) to interrogate them.

The major is a bit of an idiot in that he doesn't have anybody aruond him for the interrogations. This allows Lt. Forbes to get in a fight with him and win it, allowing the men the time to search the office and then escape. Of course, they now have to figure out how to get the hell out of Nazi Germany, even though they don't really know anybody and have the entire might of the Nazi state gunning for them.

Amazingly, however, they're able to get first on a railcar heading for Berlin with a lot of wounded German soldiers. And once in Berlin, they actually meet Käthe Brahms (Nancy Coleman), who is part of the relatively passive resistance. She works for a doctor who also opposes the Nazis, and that gives the flyboys another chance to escape when the Nazis come calling. Käthe has parents in Münster, which is rather further west, and would allow them to get closer to England. Somehow they make it to Münster, and as part of the Nazis catching up to them in Münster, they steal Maj. Baumeister's car, which allows them to get to the Netherlands. That was of course occupied by the Nazis at the time, but at least theoretically had a lot more people who hated the Nazis than Germany proper did. Not that we meet many of these people. Instead, the plot deals with the Germans having repaired a downed British bomber which they're hoping to fix and then use on a bombing raid since the RAF wo't notice until too late that it's not the Brits flying this plane.

While watching Desperate Journey, it was hard to escape the similarities to a couple of British movies, One of Our Aircraft Is Missing and 49th Parallel. Unfortunately, I think both of those movies are superior because they go for intelligence, while Desperate Journey goes for entertainment and the sort of dehumanizing the enemy propaganda. The coincidences in Desperate Journey also seem more far-fetched than the other movies. Still, it does entertain well enough, and fans of old Hollywood World War II movies will certainly enjoy it.

They Died With Their Boots On

I mentioned at the beginning of the month when I posted about Star of the Month Sydney Greeenstreet that one of his movies I hadn't blogged about before, They Died With Their Boots On, would be running at 6:00 AM on Nov. 25. That's tomorrow morning, and since I have the movie on DVD as part of an Errol Flynn box set, I made a point of watching it to have it fresh in my mind for a post on the movie.

Errol Flynn plays George Armstrong Custer, who at the start of the movie is entering West Point as a plebe in the summer of 1857. Custer, as presented here, doesn't seem to care much for rules, naïvely thinking that he'll be able to bring his hunting dogs with him and get the biggest suite in the barracks, egged on by upperclassman cadet Ned Sharp (Arthur Kennedy). This is just the first of many, many incidents in which Custer will pick up demerits, he being constantly wary of authority.

One of those incidents results in his having to march guard, basically marching back and forth and having to keep his mouth shut. Elizabeth Bacon (Olivia de Havilland) is a young woman from the same town as George, Monroe, MI. But she comes from the well-to-do part of town while George was a blacksmith's son, so there's a class difference that her father may not approve of. Of course, it's going to take a while for George and Elizabeth to meet each other again.

1861 comes, and this of course means the start of the Civil War. All of the cadets from the South leave West Point, while those in Custer's class are still a year away from graduating (at the time, West Point was a five-year school). The Union was badly in need of junior officers, so they took the West Point cadets and graduated them a year early. Custer fights in his own iconoclastic way, eventually rising to the rank of brevet general, although that's not a full general but only a temporary rank. So when the Civil War ended, he was returned to his regular rank of Captain and sent back to Michigan with the thanks of a kind nation.

Having married Elizabeth, who father died soon after the war, Custer is in need of a good job, even though the military is all he really knows. Ned Sharp shows up looking to trade on Custer's name to have it behind a development company looking to develop the Dakota Territory. Custer rightly doesn't trust Sharp one bit, and refuses, instead looking to get put back into regular service.

Custer does, in fact, get promoted to Lieutenant Colonel and sent as a cavalry commander west... to Fort Lincoln, which is in the Dakota Territory and where Ned Sharp just happens to be. Custer finds all sorts of chicanery going on, including with the Indian agent for the region, which causes him to try to take his case to Washington. Ned and the agent are trying to get the treaty with the Sioux and other tribes abrogated so they can bring more white settlers onto the land, from which they hope to make a hefty profit. Custer's patrols eventually take him to the Little Big Horn in eastern Montana, and his unorthodox command style finally does him in.

Pretty much anybody who has a good knolwedge of history and who has seen They Died With Their Boots On will tell you that the movie is more or less a whitewashing of history, along with a hefty dollop of Hollywood tropes deemed necessary to entertain the viewers. I can certainly say that the tropes are laid on in grand style, from the romance between Flynn and de Havilland to Hattie McDaniel as the Bacons' servant, to the whole military gallantry.

From what I've read, the real life Custer was indeed a discipline problem and unorthodox. There might actually be room for an interesting movie about the question of unorthodox command when the battle is actually raging and the communication lines break down. It's generally presented in World War II movies that Nazi generals were fairly rigid, with American initiative and ingenuity winning the day. But when is it right to take that initiative, and when not?

Also, in later years there were a lot more westerns about how the Bureau of Indian Affairs was cheating the Indians blind, something we wouldn't get in pre World War II days. The real-life story of Custer seems interesting in that the corruption apparently ran all the way up to the Secretary of War (nowadays Secretary of Defense) and President Grant's brother; Custer was a witness in the impeachment proceedings of the Secretary of War and arrested when he wanted to return back to his post out west instead of staying around to testify when he thought his written testimony was enough. There's material for a Tennessee Johnson type movie there, but nobody in Hollywood ever thought to make it.

What we do get, however, is more than worth watching as examples of what Flynn and de Havilland could do, and on the whole an example of what the studio system could put out. Just don't expect real history from They Died With Their Boots On.

You'll note that I haven't brought up Star of the Month Sydney Greenstreet once. That's because he's got a smaller role as General Winfield Scott, fighting the war from central command in Washington. He has a few scenes during the portion of the movie covering the Civil War, but once the war ends, he's pretty much out of the picture.

Claudelle Inglish

I've come to realize that one of the genres of movies that I really enjoy is the overheated potboiler, if only because there's often so much to laugh at that the producers didn't intend to have be laughed at. An excellent example of this is the movie Claudelle Inglish.

Diane McBain plays Claudelle, a high school senior in some small town in the rural south, this being based on a book by Erskine Caldwell of Tobacco Road fame. Claudell lives with her parents, tenant farmers Clyde (Arthur Kennedy) and Jessie (Constance Ford), who, having been jilted by their respective spouses in A Summer Place, apparently decided to head south and impose their presence on this movie. Clyde, despite his best intentions, isn't able to provide much of a good life for his wife and daughter, and this has left the wife perpetually resentful.

One of Claudelle's classmates is Linn Varner (Chad Everett), whose parents are also tenant farmers like Claudelle's, both families renting land from the county's biggest and wealthiest land owner, S.T. Crawford (Claude Akins). Linn falls in love with Claudelle, and asks for her hand in marriage, with the caveat that she's going to wait until after Linn serves his hitch in the Army, this being the days of the peacetime draft. You'd think an 18-year-old who gets off the farm for his Army hitch and sees a bit of life would like something better, but Linn thinks he's going to become a father just like his father, and needless to say Claudelle's mom doesn't like this.

Claudelle writes to Linn pretty much every day, but eventually, replies stop coming, until one day she gets a letter from Linn saying that he's found another girl and is going to marry her instead. So Linn would like something better, just not with Claudelle. Claudelle, having been jilted, decides that like Miss Havisham, she's going to spend her life hurting men, which here means letting every man in the county date her just for the presents they can give her, but with no plans on the relationships going anywhere. And not telling anybody Linn has jilted her.

When I said every man, that's not quite correct. If the movie hasn't gone around the bend enough, it's about to get a whole lot crazier. S.T. Crawford decides that, like the men in Baby Doll, what he'd really like to replace his late wife is a girl who's barely of legal age, and he's picked out Claudelle, because she's making him really horny, not that he put it that way since the Production Code would never have allowed it. He comes to the Inglish house looking to take Claudelle out on a date, and Jessie thinks this is a good idea because it will allow Claudelle to escape the life of a tenant farmer's life. Never mind what Claudelle might like.

Claudelle Inglish continues on like this until the the unsurprising and logical plot development of some of the men in town beginning to fight over which one of them is going to get Claudelle. But there are some other twists as well involving Jessie and Clyde.

Watching Claudelle Inglish, it's easy to see why this one was a box-office failure back in the day and the critics savaged it. And to be fair, simply taken on an objective level it's not very good. But it's also easy to see why people consider it so much fun despite the bad critical repuation. Just when you think it's gone all the way over the top, it suddenly goes further, like the plot twist of sleazy Crawford deciding he wants Claudelle.

If there are flaws that could make the movie even more of a guilty pleasure, I can think of two. One is that the movie is in black-and-white, when it could really benefit from garish color. The other is that Claudelle doesn't get pregnant; the movie could have used a pregnancy like Susan Slade and The Best of Everything to be that much more ridiculous.

So get together with a bunch of friends and have a blast watching Claudelle Inglish.

The perfect movie for Bastille Day

Tomorrow is July 14, which means that the French will be commemorating Bastille Day and the start of the French Revolution. TCM has run French Revolution-themed films before in a block on July 14, but not this year. Instead, we get a morning and afternoon of the films of Robert Mitchum, including The Lusty Men at 10:45 AM.

Mitchum plays Jeff McCloud, who is returning to the old homestead after years away that he spent on the rodeo circuit. Having recently been injured, however, he's looking to settle down, hence the return "home". It's not home any more, of course, since the family moved away and a man named Watrus (Burt Mustin) owns the place, although Watrus does remember Jeff's parents.

Also interested in the house is cowhand Wes Merritt (Arthur Kennedy) and his wife Louise (Susan Hayward). They're not making much, but the big thing for them is that this would finally be a place of their own. Wes recognizes Jeff and helps Jeff get a job at the same ranch where Wes is working.

But Wes wants more. Knowing that Jeff was a relatively big-time rodeo guy, at least in the smallish world of rodeo, Wes wants the taste of that himself. Louise is fairly pragmatic and worries about the physical danger Wes would be getting himself into. After all, Jeff had to quite the rodeo business due to injury. Still, Wes decides that he's going to get the money together and enter a rodeo without telling Louise. Perhaps Jeff can help train him and teach him the behind-the-scenes part of the business, but Jeff wants a substantial cut, and frankly, who can blame him.

Unsurprisingly, Wes does well at his first rodeo, because if he failed badly we wouldn't have much of a movie. Wes, having succeeded, finds that he likes both the rodeo itself, and the money, along with the modicum of fame. As I said, Louise is at least pragmatic enough to decide that perhaps Wes can win enough money to buy the old McCloud place from Watrus, and then retire from rodeo having gotten it out of his system.

Yeah, right. Once again, The Lusty Men would be a fairly boring movie if Wes were that pragmatic too. He's beginning to get pursued by the ladies, and some of the people around the rodeo are putting it into his head that Jeff was a big hit with the ladies back when he was doing rodeo. Wes earns the $4100 that will let Louise make the escrow payment on the house, and Wes responds by saying sorry, but he loves rodeo too much to quit now.

So while there's a lot about The Lusty Men that's formulaic, one thing that's relatively new is that it's set against the world of (semi-)professional rodeo. The one other movie that came to mind was J.W. Coop, which I apparently never blogged about after watching it some years back. Here, Arthur Kennedy is miscast but does his best. Hayward is professional and Mitchum seems cast best of the leads. Probably the most interesting thing, however, is some of the establishing scenes of the rodeos without the leads. The movie probably should have been in color, however, to make those scenes more worthwhile.

The Lusty Men is an interesting change of pace, even if it isn't the first thing I'd think of to recommend to people who want to learn about any of the three leads. It's definitely worth a watch.

Hemingway's Adventures of a Young Man

Another of the movies that's been back in the FXM rotation over the past couple of months is Hemingway's Adventures of a Young Man. It's going to be on FXM again, tomorrow (June 21) at 6:00 AM, so I'm mentioning it now.

As you can probably guess from the title, the movie is based on works by writer Ernest Hemingway. Specifically, it's the Nick Adams stories, which I don't think I've actually read although as I understand it they're loosely based on some of Hemingway's own experiences. After all, they always tell starting writers to write what you know about. Nick Adams (Richard Beymer) is a young man of about 20 circa 1916 living with his parents, Dr. Henry (Arthur Kennedy) and Helen (Jessica Tandy) in a small town in northern Michigan. Mom runs the family and is frankly dominating, trying to force Nick into a marriage to nice local girl Carolyn (Diane Baker) and henpecking Dad. Nick has had enough of it, so after a bender one night with his friend George (Michael J. Pollard), he decides he's going to run off and grow up.

Nick tries to ride the rails, but gets knocked off by another man, ending up in the countryside where he makes the acquaintance of a man nicknamed the Battler (Paul Newman). The Battler was a boxer back in the day, but as with Anthony Quinn's character in Requiem for a Heavyweight, he's obviously taken a few punches too many and isn't good for anything. The Battler has a trainer in the form of Bugs (Juano Hernandez). Unfortunately, while Bugs doesn't dislike Nick, he realizes that the Battler needs to be kept away from everybody, so Bugs ultimately sends Nick on his way.

Nick ends up in another small town where he meets the chronically drunk Billy Campbell (Dan Dailey). Billy's job is to put up posters advertising the burlesque show run by Mr. Turner (Fred Clark), only to leave for the next town before Turner shows up to find Billy drunk and try to get Billy into rehab (or "taking the cure", as they called it back in the day). Ultimately neither Billy nor Turner is ultimately a bad person, but they're just incompatible and Billy really doesn't want to deal with his boss' hectoring him about his drinking. Billy and Nick sleep in late one day, not getting out of town before Turner shows up.

Since Nick hasn't been able to do much in life so far, he thinks about giving up, wiring Dad for the money for a ticket home (James Dunn plays the telegrapher). But just before the telegraph gets sent, Nick decides that no, he doesn't want to go home, and goes to New York City, where he thinks he can get a job writing for a newspaper even though he's never done this before. The editor tells him to come back when he gets experience. He then does some odd jobs, ultimately working as a busboy/waiter who is serving an Italian-American effort to raise money for the war effort in Italy, the Great War going on and the US not yet being involved in the war.

Nick signs up to become an ambulance driver in Italy, even though again he's got no experience and can't speak a word of Italian, qualities which understandably vex his commanding officer, Maj. Padula (Ricardo Montalban). Nick gets paired with another American, John (Eli Wallach), and actually does a fairly good job as an ambulance driver. But a bombing campaign leaves him badly injured and sent to a hospital in Verona, where he meets Rossana (Susan Strasberg), a nurse who takes care of him and with whom he falls in love.

Some people are going to like Hemingway's Adventures of a Young Man, but I had three substantial problems with it. First off was the episodic nature of the story, although that's the smallest of the problems. There are a lot of people in the movie, but for the most part they come and go and you can't really get that invested in them. Secondly, the movie runs at a very leisurely pace, ultimately lasting 145 minutes. Boy does it feel slow at times.

But the biggest problem was with the casting of Richard Beymer as Nick Adams. To me he just didn't have the charisma to pull off the role. Most of the supporting players do well with their roles, drawing an even sharper contrast with the bland Beymer just walking through his part.

I'm not certain whether fans of Hemingway will enjoy seeing the Nick Adams stories put on film, or feel that Hemingway has been butchered and dislike the movie as a result. In either case, watch and draw your own conclusions.

Devotion (1946)

I had two movies on my DVR titled Devotion, with different stories. The early talkie version doesn't seem to be on DVD, but the 1946-released movie titled Devotion is, so I watched that recently to do a review on here.

The Brontës are a family living in Yorkshire near the moors in the 1830s, where their father (Montagu Love) is a reverend in the Anglican chuch. There are four surviving children, daughters Charlotte (Olivia de Havilland), Emily (Ida Lupino), and Anne (Nancy Coleman), along with son Branwell (Arthur Kennedy). (In real life there were two older daughters but they, like all of the siblings, died young.)

As you probably know, all three of the surviving daughters liked to write, while Branwell liked to paint, as well as drink. Charlotte and Anne are set to go off to become governesses, while Emily stays to look after Branwell. He gets drunk one night at the local inn just as a new curate, Rev. Arthur Nicholls (Paul Henried) shows up to work alongside the overworked Rev. Brontë in the parish. Rev. Nicholls brings Branwell home, but Emily thinks Nicholls is one of Branwell's drunkard friends.

Emily has on again-off again feelings toward Arthur, until Charlotte shows up back home. The three sisters finally think about publishing some of their poetry, although they do it under male pseudonyms since apparently the thought of women writers, at least from outside the gentry, was somewhat scandalous. Not as scandalous as Branwell's behavior, mind you, but scandalous nonetheless.

Emily and Charlotte go off to Brussels to teach in a school there, where they meet married headmaster Constantin Heger (Victor Francen). Charlotte is portrayed as having a crush on Heger while Emily has more muted feelings for him, although this is probably just Hollywood hogwash from what I've read. Branwell has another bout of illness that forces the sisters to return home, just in time for him to die.

As you know from real life, Emily became famous for writing Wuthering Heights and Charlotte for Jane Eyre. Charlotte goes to London after Jane Eyre has been published under the pseudonym Currer Bell. There she meets William Thackeray (Sydney Greenstreet), author of successful books like Vanity Fair. He learns the secret of the Bells which is that they're actually women, and thinks that Emily's writing is more powerful than Charlotte's, not that he dislikes Charlotte. And then Emily gets sick too....

As with most Hollywood biopics, from what I read, there's a lot in Devotion that's exaggeration at best and made up out of whole cloth at worst. As a movie, however, Devotion is an interesting jumping-off point if you want to learn more about the Brontës. Arthur Kennedy looks like he's channeling MGM contract player Van Heflin here, although since the movie was made at Warner Bros. they probably couldn't get Heflin. In fact, although the movie was released in 1946, it was actually made early in 1943 and shelved for a couple of years, possibly because of de Havilland's lawsuit against Warner Bros. (Indeed, Montagu Love died in 1943, long before the movie was released.)

De Havilland and Lupino both do reasonably well, although some people might find the material a little beneath them what with Hollywood's changing biographies around for dramatic effect. It all winds up feeling like material that should have been handled by MGM since they still had the gloss necessary to put this kind of movie over. Devotion isn't bad by any means, but it feels like it could have been so much more.

Bright Victory

TCM is running a night of Arthur Kennedy movies tonight, starting at 8:00 PM with Bright Victory.

Kennedy plays Sgt. Larry Nevins, who at the opening of the film is seriving in the US Army's communications corps in North Africa in 1943. His current mission is to re-connect a forward outpost to the base well behind the lines. It's a dangerous mission, as shown by the fact that he and his two colleagues are stopped at a checkpoint and told there's no vehicles allowed forward of this point due to the road not being de-mined, which is a foreshadowing that the jeep is going to get mined. Still, Nevins bluffs his way through the checkpoint.

Amazingly, the jeep doesn't hit a mine. Instead, there are German snipers on the hills above, and they attack the three men in the jeep, wounding all of them and beating a hasty retreat. Sgt. Nevins has been hit in the head and his eyes have been covered, in preparation for transport back to the States where a better Army doctor can see what can be done to improve Nevins' condition.

As it turns out, when Nevins gets to the Army's Valley Forge Hospital in Pennsylvania, the doctors diagnose a severed optic nerve, which means permanent blindness. Nevins doesn't want to face this future at first, and certainly doesn't want to tell his parents (Will Geer and Nana Bryant). He's also worried about the woman who's going to become his fiancée, Chris (Julie Adams), whose father is the wealthy owner of a barrel factory in Nevins' small Florida home town.

But since there's nothing else to be done, Nevins sets about on his rehabilitation, which means learning to cope with his blindness. There are enough blind people at the army hospital that the locals are used to dealing with blind people, and one of the people Larry meets at the bar is Judy (Peggy Dow). He's gruff with her at first since the first time he meets her he's still not ready to deal with his blindness, but eventually he warms up, and Judy begins to feel that this one might really be the man for her, even though he's blind. Another person Larry meets is fellow blinded soldier Joe Morgan (James Edwards), who we can all see is black. Now that Larry is blind, he can't see that. But he grew up in a southern town where it was just accepted that blacks were second-class humans and casual racism was the norm, so Larry unsurprisingly screws up his friendship with Joe through his use of a racial slur.

Eventually, Nevins has to go home on a furlough as part of his rehabilitation, and he finds that things have changed. Everybody looks at him differently, and he himself has changed thanks in part to his interactions with Morgan. Will Nevins be able to become a productive member of society, and will he be able to find true love and happiness?

Bright Victory is a really good movie with wonderful performances from both Kennedy (who got his one Best Actor Oscar nomination to go with several Supporting Actor nominations; he never won) and Peggy Dow. The resolution of the story seemed to me to be a little too Hollywood happy, as I'd think Nevins would still have a very difficult road ahead of him, but it doesn't detract from the movie overall.

Bright Victory is a movie that deserves better recognition than it has, and as far as I know it's not on DVD at all, which is a huge shame. Tonight's TCM showing, and another one scheduled in November, are your few chances to catch this worthy movie.

Where the River Bends

Another of my recent DVD purchases was a six-DVD James Stewart western collection. First up out of that set is Bend of the River.

James Stewart plays Glyn McLyntock, who is leading a group of settlers west to new farmland in the Oregon side of the Columbia River. While looking for the trail ahead, Glyn comes across a group of vigilantes hanging a man for stealing a horse, and is able to prevent them from carrying out the hanging. The man whose life was saved, Emerson Cole (Arthur Kennedy), is grateful, and as the two head back to the settlers, it's revealed that both of them had pasts as border raiders somwhere along the Missouri/Kansas border. (The movie implies that the action was taking place before statehood, which would place it before 1859. I would have thought the border raiders were from the "Bloody Kansas" slavery dispute in the mid-to-late 1850s, but the plot implies both McLyntock and Cole were both real criminals escaping west.)

After some more difficulties with the Shoshone Indians, the settlers make it to Portland, from where they're going to go upriver to get to the land they're homesteading. While in Portland, McLyntock and the leader of the settlers, Jeremy Baile (Jay C. Flippen), contract to have a bunch of supplies delivered to the settlement in early September. This is important because winter comes early, and while they're building the houses and clearing the land, they're going to need foor for the first winter. The settlers head on up the Columbia, while Cole stays behind along with Jeremy's daughter Laura (Julie Adams), who had to stay in Portland to recuperate from getting an arrow near the collarbone in that Indian attack.

Time passes at the settlement, and no supplies come. Eventually it's October, and the womenfolk point out that they're almost out of the stuff they brought west with them, so they damn well better get those supplies soon. McLyntock and Jeremy head out to Portland to see what happened. What happened is that there's been a gold rush, and with all the miners wanting supplies, the man who was provisioning them, Hendricks (Howard Petrie), was able to bump up the price. This even though the settlers had a contract. The law has obviously broken down, what with no statehood. The settlers' supplies are on the dock in Portland, unshipped because Hendricks won't let anybody ship them anywhere. Also in Portland, they run into Laura, who's working as a gold assayer and engaged to Cole.

Jeremy and McLyntock decide that they're going to take the supplies that they already paid for and load them on the boat. In the ensuing scuffle, Cole and Laura also have to flee, along with professional gambler Trey (Rock Hudson). They're on the steamboat, pursued by Hendricks and his men, which means that McLyntock is going to have to disembark everybody well before the normal point and then go overland the rest of the way. McLyntock also has a couple of town drunks on board whom he hired to load the goods, and they given a choice would be just as happy to see the stuff go to the gold camp since they'd rather be miners themselves. And whose side is Cole on, anyway. As Cole reminds McLyntock, once Jeremy finds out about their pasts, he and the settlers are going to reject both of them.

Bend of the River is a very well-made western, one of a bunch that Stewart made with director Anthony Mann. These were from the more "adult" era of westerns when there wasn't just the preternaturally good guy and the over-the-top villain, but men who had rather murkier psychological motivations doing what they did. Stewart is excellent as a man trying to go straight; that time he spent in World War II gave him a much darker edge in his post-war movies. Kennedy was an antagonist in a whole bunch of movies, pulling it off well enough to get multiple Supporting Actor Oscar nominations. Bend of the River isn't one of the nominated roles, but he still does a great job. Rock Hudson has little to do, and Flippen gets a much bigger role than anything else I've seen him in. The cinematography is lovely.

Curiously, the DVD says that the movie has been formatted to fit the TV screen. I was pretty certain before watching that this was made before the advent of Cinemascope in 1953, and sure enough, the copyright says 1951 (although the actual release was in January 1952). At any rate, the movie was pillarboxed on my aging HDTV, which is as it should be. Each movie is on its own DVD in a slim case; the slim cases don't bother me but may bother some others. The only extra on this DVD was the theatrical trailer, but for the low price what can one expect? Overall, I can highly recommend both Bend of the River. Sadly the box set I got it on is out of stuck, but the TCM Shop has the same six movies available on a box set that has two movies per disc.

Too Late For Tears

Last weekend, I finally got around to watching the DVR of Too Late For Tears that I made at the end of December when TCM honored some of the people who died in 2015. In the case of this movie, that honoree was Lizabeth Scott. The movie has been released to DVD on several inexpensive editions, although there was a more recent restoration so I think those DVDs don't have the best print. In any case, however, since there are DVDs available I feel comfortable doing a review of a movie that I don't think is coming up on TV any time soon.

The movie opens with Jane Palmer riding in a convertible in the Hollywood hills with her husband Alan (Arthur Kennedy) one evening on the way to a party she doesn't want to attend, because the hostess is better off than the Palmers. Jane, in fact is particularly money-obsessed; she married her first husband for money but he committed suicide after he lost his wealth. But back to the present, where things are about to get a lot more interesting for the Palmers regarding money.

There's another car stopped on the side of the road, going in the opposite direction. The driver of that car is involved in some shady business, as we can presume from what happens when the Palmers drive past him: he throws a satchel onto the back seat of the convertible. Good thing they didn't have the top up. Of course, when something that out of the ordinary happens, you have to stop , if not to find the person who did it, then to find out what they threw. The Palmers open up the satchel, and discover that it's loaded to the gills with cash! In small, non-sequentially demoninated banknotes, one presumes. In fact it's something like $60,000 in cash, which is a pretty tidy sum by late 1940s standards. Alan quite rightly assumes that they should just turn the satchel over to the police, but Jane wants that money! Eventually, the two compromise, and check the satchel at Union Station, where they plan to leave it for a couple days to see how it will affect them.

That money has certainly affected somebody else, however. That somebody is Danny Fuller (Dan Duryea), the man for whom the cash was intended. He drove up to make the transfer not long after the Palmers, and was obviously able to get their license plate number, which is how he's able to find Jane at home in her apartment the next day. He wants that money, and if Jane doesn't give it back to him, he's going to be mighty ticked! In her greed, she comes up with an even more audacious plan: double-cross Alan, pick up the money from the baggage claim, and run off with Alan. Or that's her story; one can guess that she's probably trying to come up with a way to double-cross Danny, too.

Two other people complicate this tale of greed. One is Kathy (Kristine Miller), Alan's sister, who just happens to across the hall from her brother and sister-in-law. She has the distinct impression that something isn't quite right -- to the point that she has a pass-key and is able to spy on her relatives. And then there's Don Blake (Don DeFore). He shows up as Alan's old Army buddy from World War II, but both Kathy and Jane get the impression that he's not telling the truth. Is he a detective? Is he Danny's partner in crime? Or is he really telling the truth?

Too Late For Tears starts off interesting, and then gets even more interesting with a lot of twists and turns. At times you may think that some of these plot twists are wholly unrealistic, and to be honest, they are. But they make for a story that's never less than entertaining as you try to figure out what's going to happen to whom. If the movie has one problem, it's that it was made during the Production Code. You have to assume that Jane is going to have to be punished if she really is as greedy as she's portraying herself to be. Either that, or some sort of deus ex machina twist that wouldn't fit with the rest of the movie. Still, the story is good, and the actors do a pretty good job too. Scott is poisonous as the bad woman; Arthur Kennedy is solid but doesn't get enough screen time; Dan Duryea is as good as ever playing the nasty guy; and Kristine Miller does fine although it's a shame her career didn't go anywhere.

As I said at the beginning, the movie has gotten a bunch of DVD releases although they're supposedly of poor prints. TCM showed a copy of the restoration, and it looked quite good.