The Secret Bride

Barbara Stanwyck was the TCM Star of the month back in early 2025, and surprisingly there were some of her films that I hadn't seen before. So I recorded a couple, and I think I'm getting to the last of the films from the tribute that I recorded. The movie in question is The Secret Bride.

Now, the marriage isn't a secret to the viewer, as it happens right at the beginning of the movie. Robert Sheldon (Warren William) is the Attorney General of an unnamed state, and he's run off to get eloped to Ruth Vincent (Barbara Stanwyck) right at the beginning of the movie. Part of the reason for the elopement is that Ruth is the adult daughter of the governor. After the wedding in front of a justice of the peace, Robert calls his office to tell them he'll be back soon. Picking up the phone is Robert's secretary/assistant Hazel Normandie (Glenda Farrell). She hands the phone to Dave Breeden (Douglass Dumbrille), who is Robert's chief investigator as well as Hazel's boyfriend. Dave tells Robert he's going to pick up somebody on a tip, but can't go into details over the phone.

Cut to a bank just as it's opening up. Being let in by the security guard is Willis Martin (Grant Mitchell). Willis is making a deposit of $10,000 in cash, but it's to the personal account that's not his, as we soon learn because he's picked up by the authorities -- that tip Dave mentioned obviously is about this deposit and both who it's from, and whose account is getting it. Willis is the executive assistant to one J.F. Holdstock, a businessman who was sent to prison on fiancial fraud crimes but was pardoned by the current governor. The clear implication is that the deposit will be seen as Holdstock having bribed the governor for the pardon. Worse is that not long after this, Holdstock is found dead of a suicide, which is an implicit admission of guilt.

Now, Sheldon is loyal to the governor, and knows that the governor didn't really engage in any wrongdoing. But there's a problem, which is that marriage to the governor's daughter. If that comes out, then nobody will believe the Attorney General is acting independently. Nowadays, a special prosecutor would be appointed and people would act like the special prosecutor is independent and unbiased. But they didn't have things like that back in the day.

It gets worse when Breeden comes to see Sheldon that evening. Sheldon has brought Ruth back to his place, and Hazel is working there as well. So when Breeden comes, Hazel goes out to the courtyard to meet him. In the courtyard, Breeden gets shot and killed! Now, we know that the angle he was shot from should exonerate Hazel, never mind the fact that we've seen it. I'd have thought that Breeden was shot from far enough away that Hazel wouldn't have had time to get into the position from which the shooter took the shot. But a small handgun that Hazel had purchased is found at the scene and is determined to be the murder weapon. So for these obvious reasons she's put on trial. Ruth saw what happened, too. But, if she were to testify, it would reveal that she's married to Robert, which would likely end his and the governor's careers because of that controversy over the apparent cash-for-pardon scheme.

The Secret Bride was released in December 1934, a few months after the Production Code really took effect, so you can guess that the good guys are going to win in the end. And the Ruth Vincent and Robert Sheldon characters are never portrayed as anything less than good. Maybe they're a bit naïve in the way they're acting, but they're clearly not on the take. So that's part of the flaw that The Secret Bride has. The movie has to get to a certain end, and the way it gets there and resolves all the plot issues is a bit too convoluted for its own good.

However, if you don't pay too close attention to the plot, you'll find that The Secret Bride is a fine example of the Warner Bros. programmer as it was in the mid-1930s. It's a brisk 64 minutes, and never stops moving -- and frankly never stops being entertaining either. It moves so fast that I can easily see audiences of the day not particularly caring about the plot holes, and remains worth a watch 90 years on.

His sister-in-law

Barbara Stanywck was TCM's Star of the Month back in March 2025, which gave me the chance to record a couple of her movies that I hadn't done posts on before. Among those was the melodramatic programmer His Brother's Wife.

Robert Taylor plays the he who has a brother and eventually a sister-in-law. The "he" in question is Chris Claybourne, the latest in a family line of medical researchers who, despite having been trained to do medical research, would rather be a playboy. To be fair to him, the research in question is the tick-borne disease spotted fever, which is affecting mining camps in the jungles of South America; since a lot of the basic research has to be done down there away from civilization, it's understandable why Chris might not want to go down there. This disappoints his dad (Samuel S. Hinds) and older brother Tom (John Eldredge), also medical researchers. Tom has an unseen fiancée Mary.

Chris makes an agreement with his family, which is that before he goes off to South America at the beginning of June to work with Prof. Fahrenheim (Jean Hersholt), he gets to spend the month of May doing what he wants. So he goes to the Crescent Club, a gambling establishment run by a guy called "Fish Eye" (Joseph Calleia). Working at the club as a tout who brings in rich guys to be fleeced by the club in exchange for a commission on how much they're fleeced is Rita Wilson (Barbara Stanwyck, who would go on to marry Robert Taylor after making this movie). Not that Chris knows Rita is workin for Fish Eye, or that she has debts of her own to him that she's basically working off. In any case the two of them fall in love, with Chris deciding to elope with Rita instead of going to South America.

Except that Chris runs up $5,000 in gambling debts that he can't pay off, passing off a bad check since it's generally believed he's going to go down to South America away from American law. Fish Eye is no dummy and calls Chris on his bluff. Dad can't mortgage the clinic again to pay off his son's debt, so Tom makes Chris agree that he (Tom) will pay off the debt in exchange for Chris' going off to South America for that two-year research hitch. If Rita really loves Chris, she'll wait the two years before Chris returns and only marry him then.

Rita is no dummy and understands that Tom is trying to get rid of her because she's déclassé and the Claybournes are high-class. So she goes into debt herself to pay off Chris' debt, not telling either Chris or Tom, and letting Chris go off to South America. She then starts working her wiles on Tom, getting him to dump that unseen fiancée and marrying Rita, who really doesn't love him and is certainly never going to grant him a divorce.

If that's not insane enough, Chris returns from South American before the two years are up and finds out about the marriage. He knows Rita is still at the Crescent Club, and discovers that she still loves him, although now it's Tom who won't grant a divorce. So he takes her to South America on the theory that this will make Tom finally grant that divorce. Meanwhile, the research into the spotted fever isn't going well, to the point that the South American authorities will charge Chris or Fahrenheim with manslaughter if they try out a serum on another local and that local doesn't survive. You can guess where this is leading....

His Brother's Wife is the sort of movie that audiences of the 1930s might have liked, but 90 years on seems dated and with a plot that veers in a direction that feels like a hilarious misfire. Stanwyck does the best she can with the material, as do the rest of the cast. This is one of those movies where the studio (MGM) has the ability to cast a fine stable of stars, even if the material more or less sinks the movie.

Another "I can save you, but..." movie

Barbara Stanwyck was TCM's Star of the Month some months back, which gave me the chance to record some of her movies that I hadn't seen before. One that has a fairly pedestrian plot, but is redeemed by good performances from the cast, is Gambling Lady.

Stanwyck is the titular gambling lady, a woman named Lady Lee who makes an OK living is the sort of "escort" provided by a gambling syndicate to people who need a dealer or something for a high-stakes poker game or some other form of gambling. Of course, the syndicate wants to boost the odds in its favor even if that's by less than honest means. This is something Lady Lee says she absolutely doesn't care for. As a bit of foreshadowing, one night at the club she meets wealthy Peter Madison (C. Aubrey Smith) who, for whatever reason, doesn't seem to mind being taken by this charming woman.

Not that there's going to be anything romantic between them, since Smith was about 70 at the time the movie was made. And Lady Lee already has someone theoretically more her type pursuing her in the from of horse racing bookie Charlie Lang (Pat O'Brien). For Lady, it's more of a friendship than anything romantic. As she works for the syndicate and makes good money, she keeps coming across young Garry (Joel McCrea), although she keeps rebuffing him even though he's clearly into her. One night he sneaks up to the room where Lady will be playing, only for undercover police to get in the elevator with Garry.

Garry wants to marry Lady, but she claims she won't fit into his society and doesn't want to anger his parents. Except that this is Garry Madison, son of Peter whom we've already met. So they marry and live happily ever after, yeah right since we're only a third of the way into the movie. On their honeymoon they meet Garry's old girlfriend Sheila (Claire), and when Garry and Lady invite society over on their return to America, Sheila has followed them and insists on gambling against Lady. Lady wins a bunch of Sheila's jewels, and takes the betting seriously, not giving Sheila back her jewelry even though Sheila obviously thought this was all a lark.

Things get more complicated when Charlie gets into legal issues requiring a large bail. Garry's money would cause scandal, so Lady pawns those jewels. Except, that also causes difficulties when Lady gives the pawn ticket to Charlie. Garry wants it so he can quietly get the jewels back without Lady knowing. However, Charlie gets killed, and all signs point to Garry since he's got the ticket. In fact, he was with Sheila, who has been trying to break up Garry and Lady's marriage.

Now, is this movie going to have a happy ending? The answer is yes, and that unfortunately is something that requires a bit of a cop-out for the movie to get that ending. The material is stuff that we've seen quite a few times in the early 1930s, and which frankly strains credulity. None of this is the fault of the cast, who all give it their best and mostly succeed. But that script? Oy. Gambling Lady is OK, as long as you can get past the unoriginality of it.

The Moonlighter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Don't call me Byron Barr

Tonight into tomorrow brings the second night of Barbara Stanwyck's turn as TCM's Star of the Month. One of her movies that I hadn't seen before and recorded the last time TCM ran it is The Gay Sisters. It comes on as part of the Star of the Month salute tomorrow (March 13) at 1:00 PM, so I made a point of watching the movie to be able to do a post on it here.

The movie opens with a brief establishing scene set about 25 years before the main action. As the movie was released in 1942 and set more or less at that time (possibly just before Pearl Harbor although World War II doesn't play into the action), that means the opening is set in the mid-1910s, which is the run-up to World War I. The Gaylords are one of the richest families in America, and the current patriarch, Penn Gaylord (Donald Woods), has a wife and three young daughters. Or should I say had a wife. She was somehow traveling alone on the Lusitania, which as we all know was torpedoed and sunk in the Atlantic. Eventually the Americans entered the war, and Daddy Gaylord for some weird reason went off to fight despite having those three young daughters and presumably being the same sort of captain of industry as Jerry Lewis in Which Way to the Front. Dad gets it in France, leaving the thre girls orphans.

Two dozen years pass, and probating the will has been a nightmare. Apparently, somebody over in France claims that Papa Gaylord wrote a codicil before getting killed in action in which he gave ten percent of the family fortune to a French children's charity. The remaining Gaylords back home naturally contested this, and somehow international legal delays have dragged the case out for all these years, while the Gaylord sisters grew up and slowly lost the estate's cash. They have, however, held on to the land, because family tradition has it that land is more important than money.

The three sisters are Fiona (Barbara Stanwyck), the eldest, who is foster mom to an orphan child Austin; Evelyn (Geraldine Fitzgerald), who married an English nobleman and has come back to America in the only sop to the fact that there's now another war going on in Europe; and Susie (Nancy Coleman), who got married except that it's one of those loveless marriages she'd like annulled. Her unseen husband is willing to do it for a price, but since the money has been spent on contesting the will, Susie doesn't have the money. So although she's in a relationship with painter Gig Young (the print TCM ran has the character being played by the Gig Young who became a prominent supporting actor; he was born Byron Barr and took his stage name from this character although I don't know if he did that before the movie was first released or TCM only has a re-release print). Complicating matters is that when Evelyn returns to America, she sees Gig and starts pursuing him.

But since Barbara Stanwyck is the star here, she gets the biggest complication. That comes in the form of Charles Barclay (George Brent), who is contesting the will on behalf of that French charity. Of course, he really wants the land the Gaylord house is built on because he's a land developer who has bought all the surrounding land in order to be able to build a skyscraper. He also seems to know quite a bit about Fiona's past. More, even, than Fiona's first lawyer Gibbon (Gene Lockhart) who gets replaced with Ralph Pedloch (Donald Crisp). Even the poor foster kid gets dragged into all of this.

The Gay Sisters was based on a novel that I'm guessing was popular at the time to the extent that you can see why a studio would want to turn it into a movie. However, something goes wrong in the adaptation, which I think is the screenplay since it seems to go all over the place, with the reveal of Fiona's past being a bit bizarre. And if the Gaylords were supposed to value land over money, couldn't they have just given up that ten percent right at the beginning?

Still, The Gay Sisters isn't a terrible movie. It's just not what you'd want to show as the first movie for any of the main players involved.

The Miracle Woman

Another of TCM's spotlights from some months back was a comparison of pre- and post-Code films, looking at a particular subject and how the studios had to make films about it -- if they could mention the topic at all -- that were rather different after the enforcement of the Code started in July 1934. One such subject is religion; after 1934 the suggestion that there might be a bunch of con artists in religious clothing was given more of a soft-shoe treatment. For the example of how you could be harsher toward organized religion, or the abuse of it, the movie that was selected was 1931's The Miracle Woman.

The woman in the title is played by Barbara Stanwyck. She's Florence Fallon, daughter of a minister in one of those small-city churches of no named Protestant denomination, but of the sort it seems like everyone in town attends. Think David Niven in The Bishop's Wife, although there his character is explicitly Episcopalian. Anyhow, Florence's father is about to give his final sermon, because the congregation has decided to hire his replacement. Dad is unwell and can't deliver the sermon, so Florence does. But she has a shocking message for the congregation: their callousness broke Dad's heart and killed him, and can anybody really believe in God when faced with a congregation of such venal hypocrites? Florence drives the congregation away, with one exception.

That exception is Hornsby (Sam Hardy), a PR guy, who has the idea that somebody like Florence, now clearly bitter, should use the congregation's hypocrisy against them. Rather than true Christianity, just give them what they think they want, which is feel-good Christianity, and they'll bang down the doors to donate to her. So Florence becomes one of those radio evangelists, TV not being a thing yet. It's obviously dishonest, but a lot of people want to believe.

One such person is John Carson (David Manners), although his belief is somewhat different from that of others. He's a songwriter now, but used to be a flyboy until an accident left him blind and just as bitter as Florence, albeit in a different way. He's gotten to the point where he's ready to kill himself, until he hears one of Florence's radio sermons. This changes his life, and he shows up at Florence's revival, willing to be a "witness" when the shill doesn't show up. John also falls in love with Florence, not knowing anything about Florence's hard edge.

John's faith stirs pangs of conscience in Florence, but here's the rub. She's been working with Hornsby, and Hornsby has been far more dishonest than even Florence. Hornsby has been taking all the money the rubes are donating and embezzling it, while cleverly having the books be in Florence's name so that when the financial crash does eventually come, Florence will be the one left on the hook. Hornsby's blackmail becomes more strident when he learns Florence loves John. He announces, without telling Florence, that the two of them are going to go to the Holy Land. This is a lie, of course; Hornsby is just going to take her away from John, but to Europe to live the high life.

As you can guess, things don't end that way, but to see how they do end, you're going to have to watch The Miracle Woman.

The Miracle Woman was directed by Frank Capra, who had some very dark movies in the early part of his career, despite what many people may think considering his optimism for the American spirit. It's the sort of hard edge that Barbara Stanwyck was excellent at portraying, and it comes as no surprise that she's a standout here. David Manners does well, although he's definitely not on the level of Stanwyck. He probably should have had a better career, but never got good enough roles from the studios.

The Miracle Woman is a very good early talkie, and a fascinatingly cynical one.

Forbidden

Another movie that I noticed was on Tubi but I think is leaving at the end of the month is a Barbara Stanwyck pre-Code that a search of the blog says I haven't blogged about before: Forbidden. And, having watched it, I don't think I'd actually seen it before. So now I do a post on it in order that you can see it for yourself before it leaves Tubi.

Stanwyck plays Lulu Smith, which is certainly an odd name for a Stanwyck character. Even odder is that as the movie starts, she's a small-town librarian of the sort that Donna Reed in It's a Wonderful Life would have been if Jimmy Stewart had never been born. Lulu, needless to say, doesn't much care for this kind of life. So she decides to cash in all the money she's saved up, get a makeover, and take a luxury cruise to Havana, this of course being decades before Communism.

However, you can't take the prim and proper out of the librarian, so on the cruise, Lulu keeps dining alone. One day, however, she goes to her cabin after dinner, and finds that somebody else is in there! And that somebody is... a man! A drunk man, no less, up-and-coming lawyer Bob Grover (Adolphe Menjou), who has thoughts about a career in politics. Lulu is surprisingly forgiving about this drunk crashing her cabin, so much so that she decides to have dinner with him. And then, when they get to Havana, she spends the entire vacation with him!

Back home, we see that Grover is a district attorney, put into office with help from the local scandal sheet newspaper. Editor Al Holland (Ralph Bellamy) is none too pleased with this, and decides he's going to work at derailing Grover's career. The only thing is, he doesn't really have any way to do this, at least not honestly. That's only because he doesn't know about Grover and Lulu.

Grover meets Lulu for Halloween, and each of them has a surprise for the other. Lulu got knocked up on that vacation to Havana, and she's about to tell Bob so that he can marry her and the two can live happily ever after and make lots more babies. Well, we're not far enough into the film for that to happen, so instead Bob has to break the terrible news to Lulu that he's got a wife Helen (Dorothy Peterson), except that she was badly injured in a car crash and is now an "invalid" (judging by the way she's able to walk, I'm guessing the only part of her body that got injured was her uterus). Because of the injuries, Bob can't divorce Helen.

Fast forward to the maternity hospital, where Lulu checks in as Jane Doe and has the baby, Robert. She finally comes up with a way to tell Bob about the baby, which is a plan to have the Grovers adopt the baby Roberta, and for Lulu to be the baby's governess. It's a wacky idea, and Helen puts the kibosh on it when she finds out that Lulu doesn't have any references -- frankly, that's not unreasonble on Helen's part, and she's not written as the villainess of this piece.

The villain is Al. Lulu, in need of a job, gets one as the lonelyhearts columnist at Al's newspaper, and then many years later winds up marrying him. Lulu has been scrapbooking Roberta's childhood, since Grover is prominent enough that Roberta gets in the society section of the papers. Grover's political career is coming along nicely, too, as he's in the running for governor. But Al finds out the truth about who Roberta's mom is, and he's got no compunction about using that information to bring Grover down.

Forbidden is one of those early 1930s melodramas that's got some interesting ideas. In fact, possibly too many of them for the movie's own good, since the movie on multiple occasians turns on a dime. It's fun, and thanks to the direction of Frank Capra, there are some nice visuals. The story isn't the best, however. On the bright side, all three of the leads do more than the best they can with the material such that its weakness doesn't seem like such a big deal.

Sure, there are better and more lurid pre-Codes out there. But Forbidden isn't bad, and it's absolutely worth a watch.

As if some men in westerns aren't in fact violent

Barbara Stanwyck was one of the people honored in TCM's Summer Under the Stars last August, and there are quite a few of her movies that I still haven't seen. Among those movies that TCM showed was The Violent Men.

Barbara Stanwyck is the female lead, although first we meet the male lead, played by Glenn Ford. That man is John Parrish, who owns a ranch in one of those western areas that was beginning to develop the range wars between new homesteaders and the old ranchers who wanted an open range. Parrish served with distinction in the Civil War, and is really back in town to sell his ranch so that he can move back east with his fiancée Caroline (May Wynn) and take of work that's less taxing to his health, even though the doctor says he has no real health concerns.

Having arrived back in town, Parrish is shocked by why he sees. Lew Wilkinson (Edward G. Robinson) is the biggest landowner in the area, married to Martha (Barbara Stanwyck) and with an adult daughter Judith (Dianne Foster). Lew owns the Anchor Ranch, and being worried about the encroaching farmers, wants to get them out of the valley. He's willing to buy them out, but, if they don't take his lowball offers, Wilkinson's men will use violence at the behest of Martha as well as his younger brother Cole (Brian Keith).

Parrish is willing, more or less, to sell, since he had been planning on moving back east and has a fiancée who really wants him to do so. The people who work for him, as well as the other farmers and smallhoders, learn that Lew and his Anchor Ranch have put in a bid for the Parrish spread, and they're none too happy about it, so they try to convince him not to give in. Parrish is planning on ignoring them -- until Wilkinson's men create an excuse to try to kill one of Parrish's men.

Lew, meanwhile, wants to preserve what he's got, but since he's getting old and was crippled in the previous range war, would really like to do it without violence. What he doesn't know is that Martha has been scheming behind his back together with Cole to use that violence that we saw earlier. Not only that, but she seems to be romantically interested in Cole, despite the fact that he's got a Mexican girlfriend. Still, Martha eventually realizes that since Lew doesn't want violence, he's getting in the way of her plans and she may have to do something about him too.

So we get a violent, almost military-like campaign by Martha and her brother-in-law Cole to go after Parrish and his men. Parrish, however, has an ace up his sleeve in that he served in the war and served with the cavalry, which gives him some valuable military experience that he's going to be able to bring to use to try to defeat the Wilkinsons.

Sometime in the early 1950s, probably with the advent of television, Hollywood started giving us more "adult" westren movies with themes and vistas that the small screen couldn't give us. The Violent Men is squarely in that tradition. Robinson did make a couple of westerns, and does well here in a role where he's not quite to the decrepit level of a Spencer Tracy in Broken Lance, but getting there, with others in the family taking over. Glenn Ford made several westerns, and is good here as the reluctant hero. Stanwyck, once again, is excellent as a woman who's become tough as nails out of necessity.

The Violent Men is also a visually satisfying movie, with various locations in Arizona serving as the backdrop. Despite the themes not being particularly original, it's still a movie worth watching thanks to all those find acting performances.

Ex-rich guy meets never-rich girl, vol. the umpteenth

Barbara Stanwyck was another of the people given a day in Summer Under the Stars this past August, and among the movies of hers that I hadn't seen before was a 1935 movie called The Woman in Red, not to be confused with other movies of the same title. Now that I've watched it, I can give you the review on it here.

This is one of those mid-1930s Warner Bros. programmers where the studio would routinely conclude the opening credits with brief head shots of each of the main charactes with the star's name and character wich is always a good way to put actors' names to faces. Stanwyck plays Shelby Barret, and and the beginning of the movie she's at the San Hernando Horse Show. But it's in a working capacity as she rides show horses for her boss, the wealthy widow Mrs. Nicholas (Genevieve Tobin), nicknamed Nicko. Nicko comes from old money, and showing horses from new money is Gene Fairchild (John Eldredge), who you get the feeling has a sort of thing for Shelby, except that he really wants to get into high society.

Accompanying Nicko, but riding her polo ponies instead of the show horses is Johnny Wyatt (Gene Raymond). He comes from old money; in fact, his extended family, the Wyatts, live back east on Long Island in a town named after them, Wyattville, this being the days before World War II whan Long Island was not yet suburbs halfway into Suffolk County. But they're living on past glory, and Nicko has Johnny riding her horses more because she sees him as a kept man.

Johnny, meanwhile, finds himself falling for Shelby almost from the moment he meets her, although the feeling isn't quite mutual at first. But he desides to ask her to marry him and take her back to meet his family on Long Island. They, thinking they're from old money and want to stay that way, are highly displeased with the idea of Johnny having married someone like Shelby. They go off to another of the family's residences, although it's one that needs a lot of repairs. The two also get the idea to start a business of a stable for other rich people's horses, but they need the seed capital to start the business.

And who should show up with the possibility of that capital but Fairchild and his yacht. Shelby wants it to be business and borrow the money from Fairchild as a real loan, but Fairchild still has feelings for her. So he invites her aboard his yacht, in part to help him secure another business deal while Johnny is away on business of his own. The only thing is, Fairchild's client brings a chorus girl along, making things look a lot more suspect than they would have been Johnny had accompanied Shelby. Worse is that the chorus girl gets drunk and falls overboard to her death a la Natalie Wood. And then Nicko, who is also a gossipy blankety-blank, was also at the dock seeing Shelby get on the tender to Fairchild's yacht. Fairchild is accused of killing Olga, but only Shelby can save him, and for her to do that might destroy her marriage to Johnny. His family are also worried about the family name.

The Woman in Red is the sort of Depression-era nonsense that you can't really believe could have happened in real life, but the sort of look at the wealthy that you can imagine audiences of the day loving. It's also material that feels like it's been done in a whole lot of othe movies of the era. In later years, there would be a slew of screwball comedies to do it, but in the first half of the 1930s it was a lot of dramas.

Still, Barbara Stanwyck is ever the professional and makes the material work, and even if she wound up in something lousy the movie would still be worth watching just for her. So definitely give The Woman in Red a chance.

To Please a Lady

Another of the movies that I've had sitting on my DVR for a couple of months is To Please a Lady. Recently, I finally got around to watching it in order to be able to do a review on it here.

After the opening credits, the camera focuses on a poster advertising "Regina Forbes, America's Leading Woman Columnist". Forbes is played by Barbara Stanwyck, and she's in the office with her editor, Gregg (Adolphe Menjou). They're watching a TV promo about Mike Brannan (Clark Gable), a racecar driver who drives all sorts of cars to make a living. The promo points out that he's become successful, but he's also now the villain because he'll do anything to win, not that they had the word kayfabe in those days. In any case, Gregg thinks Brannon would be a perfect person for Regina to do her next column on.

Regina and Gregg go out to Newark to the midget car track where Brannan is racing this week. Brannan is good and knows it, and as a result treats Regina with all the respect he deserves, which is not much but also about as much as he'd give to any writer not already in the racing world. It's an attitude that turns Regina off to Brannan. She and Gregg stay in the stands to watch the race, which is rather an eventful one. Brannon and another driver are in a fight for the lead, having lapped other cars that are much slower. In an attempt to lap another car, there's enough of an accident that Brannan's rival crashes off the track, eventually dying from his injuries. Regina is ruthless in her column, and Brannan finds that he's unable to race anywhere.

Some time later, Gregg reads a newspaper article mentioning how Brannan has been blackballed from racing, and is now a trick driver at the sort of traveling carnival that, a generation earlier, would have featured stunt pilots who would have been lionized in early talkies. Regina feigns disinterest, but you get the feeling she was so turned on by Brannan's bad boy act back in Newark that she just has to go to the carnival when it shows up in the New York area. Not only that, but she goes over to see Brannan after the show even though he seems to be pursuing one of the women working in the carnival.

Regina is clearly falling for Brannan, although he certainly doesn't return the favor at first. And he's got good reason to be pissed at her. But he thinks he's finally earned enough money to try to get back into racing, and this time big time racing as in the Indianapolis 500, which was the Great American Race back in thos days. But you know that eventually Brannan is going to thaw and start having feelings of his own for Regina.

It takes some time as Brannan goes back up the ranks, and Regina is also forced to re-examine herself when another person she wrote a nasty column about decides to commit suicide rather than face a prison sentence resulting from one of Regina's poison-pen columns. Brannan and Regina may finally be able to accept each other for who they are, but the relationship is going to have to survive Brannan's attempt to win the Indy 500.

I've mentioned in the past how I think MGM was quite good at doing literary adaptions and costume dramas. However, there were certain genres they weren't as good at, and To Please a Lady falls squarely into that latter half. It doesn't help that the movie was made in 1950. Gable and Stanwyck were both much too old for their roles, Gable in particular. Plus, tastes were changing after World War II and To Please a Lady feels a lot like the sort of auto racing movie that would have been done in the pre-war years. The script also doesn't do any of the stars any favors.

To Please a Lady may be of interest to fans of either Clark Gable or Barbara Stanwyck, but it's not a terribly good film.

The File on Thelma Jordon

Many years back -- I think it was just before I started blogging, because I remember making a post briefly mentioning the Burt Lancaster movie Atlantic City in conjunction with it -- TCM and Paramount signed an agreement on TCM getting the broadcast rights to a handful of the post-1949 Paramount films. One that aired as part of it and then didn't show up for a long time was The File on Thelma Jordon. Recently, the movie showed up again as part of Eddie Muller's Noir Alley series, so this gave me another chance to watch it and do a post on it.

We don't see Thelma Jordon at first even though she's the title character and in many ways the main character. Instead, we meet Cleve Marshall (Wendell Corey), walking into the office of his boss, Miles Scott (Paul Kelly), late one evening. Cleve is an assistant DA and part of the investigative unit of the DA's office. Anyhow, Cleve goes to the office because he doesn't want to be at home. It's his anniversary, but his wife (Joan Tetzel) has invited her side of the family to a party and they make Cleve feel inadequate and smothered as though he has no say in anything that goes on in his life. Additionally, all that has led him to drink heavily, with his wife calling up all the drinking locations Cleve frequents.

Miles leaves the office and Cleve stays to keep drinking, which is when Thelma Jordon (Barbara Stanwyck) comes in. Apparently she's recently moved in with her elderly Aunt Vera, who is also fairly wealthy but doesn't have any family apart from Thelma. Vera has been getting harassed and is a bit eccentric, so Thelma wants plainclothes investigators not from the police to check up on Aunt Vera and make certain everything is OK.

The two walk out of the building, whereupon Thelma finds she's been ticketed for parking right in front of the building. But Cleve works for the DA's office, so he can get the traffic ticket "fixed", for which Thelma will be eternally grateful. She drives him around to his favorite joints, since he's clearly drunk and needs a designated driver, not that they used the term back in the day. But it leads Cleve to think fall in love with Thelma, since his own marriage is loveless. Thelma seems willing to have Cleve in her life.

But there are some big problems, one of them being that Thelma has to lie to everyone around her about what's going on and only see Cleve in clandestine situations. She's also being less than honest about her own life, as Cleve learns that she was married to a man named "Tony" -- and may still be, as it seems Tony has come out west from Florida looking for Thelma. Perhaps it's Tony who has been harassing Aunt Vera, as he could be looking for some of Vera's money in exchange for getting a divorce from Thelma.

Eventually Aunt Vera has enough of all this, and when she thinks she's heard another intruder, she picks up a gun and goes looking for the intruder herself, at which point we hear a gunshot that kills poor old Aunt Vera. Thelma finds Aunt Vera dead, and calls up Cleve. But Thelma wants Cleve to help her cover up any evidence that might lead police to question whether Thelma was the one to kill Aunt Vera! That, and there might also be evidence that Cleve was having an affair with her!

Things get worse when the DA recuses himself from the case, leading to Cleve having to be the one to prosecute it! Not that he can reveal anything of the affair, because that would also reveal he was in on the cover-up, and that would be a serious ethical no-no.

Unfortunately, there's still the Hollywood Production Code, so we know that Cleve is going to have to pay for what he did wrong. Thelma doing so is one thing; it's not that difficult to compare her to a less blatantly sexual version of Lana Turner's character from The Postman Always Rings Twice. But there would be more suspense if there were the possibility of Cleve being able to get away with the things he did in covering up Aunt Vera's shooting death.

The result is that we get a movie that's competently made, and features reasonably good performances, even if Wendell Corey isn't really anybody's idea of a hot romantic lead. But the Production Code really hamstrings the movie, right down to the ending that makes everybody pay, but only in a way that Hollywood and not real life could provide.

So The File on Thelma Jordon is definitely worth a watch, but be aware that it's a frustrating watch at times.

Breakfast for Two

Herbert Marshall isn't particularly remembered for comedy. I think a good portion of the reason for that is that when he did get to do comedies, they were programmers at best. A good example of this is Breakfast for Two, which is going to be on TCM at 2:00 PM tomorrow.

Herbert Marshall plays Jonathan Blair, a wealthy businessman who has a butler named Butch (Eric Blore). One morning, Butch finds a woman named Valentine Ransome (Barbara Stanwyck) in Blair's house. It turns out that Blair went out for a night on the town, met Valentine, and got incredibly drunk; when Valentine brought him home, the dog wouldn't let her back out. So here we are.

Blair, although owning a shipping company, is the latest in what is a line Blairs in a family-owned business. And Jonathan has always seemed to be more interested in being a playboy than actually running the company, much to the consternation of the board. Valentine learns about this, so she maneuvers to take control of the company, not because she wants to be mean to Blair and take over the company through underhanded means a la Wallace Beery in Dinner at Eight; instead, she's concerned for Jonathan and doesn't want to see the company go under.

The thing is, Valentine kind of likes Jonathan. However, he already has a girlfriend in the form of actress Carol (Glenda Farrell), and indeed is even planning to marry her. Valentine thinks that too would be bad for the family business, so she has to maneuver to stop the wedding as well as keep the company afloat.

Now, we know that since Stanwyck is top-billed here, she's liable to end up with Herbert Marshall's character at the end, and the bigger reason for watching (or not watching) a movie like this is to see how the characters get to the inevitable wedding. In this case, it involves Valentine and Butch working together, much to the consternation of the Justice of the Peace (Donald Meek) who has been hired to preside over the wedding, and has to do so on multiple occasions because it keeps getting interrupted.

But for the most part, Breakfast for Two turns out to be rather lesser comedy, even in the œuvre of Herbert Marshall. In his case, I think I'd recommend Trouble in Paradise or maybe If You Could Only Cook first. Stanwyck, of course, made glittering comedies like Ball of Fire and The Lady Eve. Blore, and to a lesser extent Meek, are the best things in this one.

Breakfast for Two is one of those movies that probably should have wound up in a box set of either Marshall's or Stanwyck's movies, but instead has wound up on a standalone DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive collection.

Not that there's much moonlight....

I watch a lot of movies that are available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive in part because most of what I record is off of TCM, and in part because I make it a point to look up the movies I haven't blogged about that have been released by the Warner Archive in order that I can blog about them. With that in mind, the latest Warner Archive selection is The Moonlighter.

Bruce Willis and Cybill Shepherd are nowhere to be found, as this is an early 1950s western. Fred MacMurray plays Wes Anderson, a man who has just been put in jail for "moonlighting", or rustling cattle under cover of darkness. Of course, this is a serious offense in those old westerns, and he's probably going to get a substantial punishment. But the townsfolk, led by Alex Prince (Morris Ankrum), don't want to wait for legal justice to take its course, so they plan to bust Wes out of jail in order to lynch him.

There's one problem however, which is that they don't know what Wes looks like, since there's no photograph on a wanted poster for them to consult. All they know is which jail cell he's in. And this is where the big problem comes. When the jail cells were being cleaned, Wes got moved into a different cell, and another man was put in the one he had been in. So when they lynch mob comes, they get the wrong guy! But everybody just natuarlly assumes Wes was killed.

Some time after the lynching, a woman named Rela (Barbara Stanwyck) shows up in town asking about Wes. Upon learning that he was killed, she pays for his funeral and breathes a sigh of relief. She had been in love with Wes in the past, but things grew problematic what with Wes' life of crime. She fell in love with another man, and is now free to marry him.

Of course, we know that Wes is still alive. He, having seen the lynch mob kill an innocent man, decides that he's going to exact his own form of vengeance on the mob, trying to kill them one by one. This isn't easy, and in one of the attempts to kill people in the mob he gets shot himself. So he beats a hasty escape and decides that he'll go back to his old home.

There, Wes will meet his kid brother Tom (William Ching), and Tom's girlfriend... who just happens to be Rela. Oh dear. As with Love Me Tender, the reappearance of a man who was thought dead but isn't causes all sorts of problems.

Tom has been working at the bank in town, but gets fired. Around the same time, one of Wes' old friends, Cole Gardner (Ward Bond) shows up. Cole wasn't part of the lynch mob, and has a new job in mind for himself and Wes: rob the bank in this town. Wes understandably doesn't want Tom in on this at all, but Tom, having been fired, wants his own revenge, so he's anxious to be let in on the bank robbery.

The Moonlighter, like Love Me Tender, has an interesting premise. And with two headliners like Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray, you'd think you'd get a really good little movie out of it. Yet somewhere, The Moonlighter loses its way. Nothing really works as well as it should, and at just under 80 minutes it all feels quite rushed, with an ending that doesn't make a whole lot of sense but seems to satisfy the Production Code.

I certainly wouldn't use The Moonlighter to introduce people to either Fred MacMurray or Barbara Stanwyck. But for people who are already movie buffs and looking for something new to them, why not give The Moonlighter a try and judge for yourself.

B.F.'s Daughter

Another of the movies from 31 Days of Oscar that I recently watched was B.F.'s Daughter.

B.F. is played by Charles Coburn. This is B.F. Fulton, an industrialist living in a posh New York mansion during the height of the Depression. His daughter, Polly, is played by Barbara Stanwyck. She's got a boyfriend who's not quite a fiancé in Robert Tasmin (Richard Hart), who works as a stockbroker. He wants to be successful on his own before marrying Polly, instead of relying on her father's wealth.

One day, Polly and her friend Apples (Margaret Lindsay) go to a speakeasy, where they meet Thomas Brett (Van Heflin, being cast with Stanwyck again after The Strange Love of Martha Ivers). He's an assistant professor of economics who also writes essays and gives public lectures. He's to the left of Franklin Roosevelt (the movie starts about a month before Roosevelt's first election), so he certainly wouldn't like B.F. But Tom and Polly hit it off, and Polly devises a scheme to meet Tom as a theater showing of Hamlet.

The relationship continues to the point that they're going to get married, a sort of elopement so that Tom can go off to a little cabin to write his next book. He also wants to go on a lecture tour, but the bookers aren't about to give prominence to an unknown like him. What he doesn't consider is that Polly has money, and to make her husband happy by helping him to succeed, she convinces the agent to let her back the lecture tour's profitability (without telling Tom, of course).

The lecture tour winds up being a success, Tom becomes famous, and by the time World War II is about to roll around, Tom gets an important position in the Roosevelt administration, something he relishes because it gives him the opportunity to fuck over the sort of person he doesn't like, much like politicians have always done and do even today. The job also comes with a lot of duties that keep him away from Polly.

So she tries to make him happy again by getting him a nice place in Connecticut, but it's here that Tom learns about Polly's having backed the original lecture tour, which pisses him off because he, like Tasmin (who married Apples), wanted to succeed on his own. It threatens to destroy their marriage.

However, this being an MGM movie, you know it's likely to have a happy ending. If there's one thing wrong with the movie, it's that MGM shine, as I mentioned regarding another Stanwyck/Heflin pairing, East Side, West Side. Both leads are good with the material they're given, but the material is infuriating at times. (It doesn't involve either Stanwyck or Heflin, but there was a scene regarding a World War II mission where I found myself saying out loud to the TV that military secrecy is being horrendously violated.) I also found the love at first sight between these two a little hard to believe here.

Still, I think there are a lot of good performances, not just from the two leads, but from Coburn, and Keenan Wynn as a lefty radio commentator friend of Tom's. (It's his radio commentary that violates military secrecy.) That all makes the movie worth a watch, even if it probably could have been better. The movie is available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive Collection, so you can watch at your leisure.

The Major and the Widow

A movie that ran duing Summer Under the Stars that I hadn't seen before is My Reputation. It's available from the Warner Archive scheme, so I DVRed it and watched it.

Barbara Stanwyck plays Jessica Drummond, a woman in World War II Chicagoland living with two sons who has recently become a widow. Thankfully her husband was exceedingly wealthy before the illness that killed him, because he was able to leave her and the kids financially secure. The kids can still go to boarding school, and Jessica can do Red Cross work for the war effort. But there are other issues.

One is that the boys are growing up (after all, they're old enough to go to boarding school in New England) and developing interests of their own that are leaving Mom increasingly alone, despite the fact that she had a large social circle. More distressing for Jessica is her frankly nasty mother Mary (Lucile Watson). Jessica's mother insists that, like all upper-class people in proper society, Jessica needs to mourn in the right way, which means wearing black and a veil in perpetuity and apparently liking it. Mary's been wearing the veil for 25 years.

Jessica has a couple of nice friends in the Abbotts (John Ridgely and Eve Arden). They have to go to California for business and then plan to rent a cabin near Lake Tahoe for a time, so they invite Jessica alone. She thinks the change in scenery would do her good, although her mom insists Jessica go south with her. (I told you she was a piece of work.)

Jessica is supposed to enjoy the early winter weather in Lake Tahoe, but she's a lousy skier who breaks one of her skis so she has to trudge back to the cabin. Thankfully, she meets a nice man who is willing to help her back to the cabin. Scott Landis (George Brent) is a Major in the US Army, doing some sort of service stateside for the time being. He takes Jessica back to the cabin, and they spend an evening together with the Abbotts. As you can guess, they develop a friendship.

But for Jessica, it seems a bit more than a friendship. When she learns that Maj. Landis has been transferred to Chicago, she jumps at the chance to see him. He warns her that he's not the marrying kind, and that he's liable to be transferred overseas any minute now, but she continues to carry on. Her mom is of course pissed off by it, and even all of her friends other than the Abbotts start a vicious gossiping campaign. Can Jessica and the Major live happily ever after?

My Reputation is the sort of movie I had all sorts of problems with, mostly because I don't think I was the target audience for it. The movie was made in 1943 at the height of the war, but held back for release until 1946, so I'd presume the original intended audience was women whose husbands were away. But the bigger problem I had with the movie is that Jessica could have solved her problems with a little honesty. She could have just had a friendship with Landis and told everybody she was shoing him a bit of Chicago while he was stationed here alone. And with the patriotic war fervor, why would anybody have a problem with a widow being kind to a soldier?

I can't really fault the acting, although it was odd to see a script leave Eve Arden strangely subdued. But the plot and the character motivations it gave its characters just drove me bonkers. Still, you may be the sort of person this movie was designed for, and especially if you like Barbara Stanwyck you might like it.

An MGM melodrama

I mentioned many years back when I blogged about Johnny Eager that there's something about the gloss that MGM pictures had that comes with a side effect of making certain pictures look not quite right. Another good example of this is East Side, West Side.

Barbara Stanwyck plays Jessie Bourne, who has lived in New York all her life and tells us in a prologue that the city isn't quite as glamorous as outsiders might think; after all, the people in New York have day-to-day lives, too. In Jessie's case, that means marriage to investment advisor Brandon (James Mason), and weekly trips to her parents' place every Thursday night for dinner. At one of those dinners, Brandon gets a call that his business colleague needs to see him before a board meeting the next day, so he's going to have to leave early while Jessie goes home to wait up for him.

Brandon doesn't get in until 4:00 AM. He's spent some time at a swanky nightclub after the meeting, which involved talking to a woman Rosa (Cyd Charisse). Rosa has other guys pursuing her, and one of them eventually took a slug at Brandon. Since Brandon is well-known in his field, and a playboy, and the fight happened outside, it made it into the paper, which ought to be much to Jessie's consternation. Except that she's seen this sort of thing before. She knows that Brandon has had difficulty staying faithful, especially in the case of a former flame Isabel (Ava Gardner).

Well, formerly former. Isabel has come back to town with the intention of taking Brandon away from Jessie! As for Jessie, she meets Rosa, whose boyfriend Mark (Van Heflin) is about to get back from Italy having done government business in the post-war transition. Except that for Mark, this is really only a relationship of friends; he likes Rosa as a friend but not as a girlfriend. But when he meets Jessie, he could fall in love with her if only she weren't already married to Brandon.

This love quadrangle results in Isabel getting murdered, Jessie and Brandon being considered suspects, and Mark (a policeman before going off to World War II and Italy) solving the crime, all in the space of one reel. Now that Isabel is out of the way, what will happen to Jessie and Brandon's relationship?

The problem I had with East Side, West Side is that it all seems too pat and sterile. There's a long lead-up to the murder which occurs less than a half hour before the end of the movie. And as I said, it's amazing that Mark is able to solve it so quickly. Brandon seems to be almost a cardboard cutout and not a real character, with James Mason practically sleepwalking his way through the role.

And yet, through all this the movie is very pretty to watch. It's photographed in nice black-and-white, with attention paid to the details of the Bournes' luxurious duplex apartment, as well as the nightclub and Brandon's office. Even the poor side of New York, where Mark and Jessie's characters grew up, looks too nice. Compare it to the place on the wrong side of the tracks when Dana Andrews' character returns home to his parents in The Best Years of Our Lives, which seems much more real. All of this sheen is hiding a by-the-numbers, pedestrian film.

East Side, West Side is available from the Warner Archive. But it's really one of those movies that would be better off in a box set.

Crime of Passion

I mentioned a while back that I had DVRed Crime of Passion when it showed up on Noir Alley back in the spring, but didn't do a full-length blog post because it was out of print on DVD. Except that it was scheduled for a DVD release on September 5, which is of course yesterday. For some reason, both the TCM Shop and Amazon are listing the DVD as scheduled for a release yesterday, but either on backorder (TCM Shop) or temporarily out of stock (Amazon). Having said that, Amazon is currently offering it via streaming video.

Stanwyck plays Kathy Ferguson, who at the start of the movie is a women's advice columnist at a San Francisco newspaper, single and proud of her career. This even though she writes sappy crap. San Francisco is in the news because a female murder suspect from Los Angeles has fled there, and the LA police send a pair of cops up to find the suspect and bring her back to justice in Los Angeles. It's because of this that Kathy meets Bill (Sterling Hayden) and his partner Charlie (Royal Dano).

Both of the cops are dismissive of Kathy, Charlie more so, but Kathy apparently begins to feel some sort of lust for Bill. She was going to take a better job in New York, but she suddenly decides to drop everything and go down to Los Angeles to marry Bill! Not only this, but she's going to become a housewife and give up the columnist gig! It's never really made clear why Kathy does something so out of character. Maybe her biological clock was ticking, although Stanwyck in real life was pushing 50 by the time she made the movie.

Back to Kathy's idiot motivation, she soon realizes she's done something incredibly stupid, since she doesn't care for the gossipy wives, and the men don't respect her intellect. Eventually Kathy gets so fed up with it that she decides she's going to help her husband's career by getting to know the Popes. Tony (Raymond Burr) is Bill's boss, married to Alice (Fay Wray). If she can do this, she can possibly put a good word in for Bill and get him a promotion. So she starts stalking Mrs. Pope and eventually causes an accident.

Mr. Pope sees right through this, asking Kathy what she was doing over there since it was way out of the way for her. But in a movie where several of the main characters have screwed up motivations, he's willing to succumb to her attempts to seduce him! To be fair, Mrs. Pope has been on the verge of a nervous breakdown, hoping that hubby would retire so she doesn't have to worry about him. And if he does retire, well there's a great career opportunity for Bill. And if Mr. Pope passes Bill by? Well hell hath no fury like a woman scorned!

Crime of Passion is a movie that I have decidedly mixed feelings about. The movie is really only partly a noir, being at the end of the noir cycle; the other part is more of a soap opera as you could easily see a Joan Crawford character doing many of the things Barbara Stanwyck's character does. The characters act in ways that are almost ludicrous at times, leading me to laugh at times when that most likely wasn't the intent of the movie.

Stanwyck does the best she can with the material. Burr does fairly well; he was still a heavy at the time as it was still another few months before Perry Mason would premiere on TV. But his character suddenly finds his conscience again, making for a rapid volte-face in yet another plot veer. Sterling Hayden doesn't have to do much other than be sturdy, something which was easy for him to do.

All in all, Crime of Passion is not without interest, but is another of those movies that would probably be better in a box set.

These Wilder Years

I recently watched These Wilder Years off my DVR since it's available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive Collection.

James Cagney, about 55 at the time and really much too old for the role, plays Steve Bradford, a wealthy businessman. He comes into a board meeting one day and tells everybody he's taking a leave of absence for a personal matter. He goes to some Hollywood version of a midwestern small city, making his way to the Haven, a school for a certain type of girl.

It turns out that the Haven is a place where young women who have gotten knocked up out of wedlock can go to have their babies and put them up for adoption. Twenty years ago, Steve knocked up a girl and the two of them decided to put the baby up for adoption. Steve never got married, and feels an emptiness in his life, so he's going to Haven to find his child.

Of course, back in those days, the adoption records were strictly sealed, so Ann (Barbara Stanwyck), the woman who runs Haven, isn't about to let Steve have them. Steve, for his part, is a rich SOB who's used to geting his way, so he hires high-priced lawyer Rayburn (Walter Pidgeon) to sue and get the records released.

Set against this is young Suzie (Betty Lou Keim), a girl who has gotten herself knocked up and ran away from home to have the baby at Haven and put it up for adoption. Steve takes a liking to Suzie in a fatherly way.

These Wilder Years is exactly the sort of pabulum you'd expect from an MGM movie of the 40s, although this one was released in 1956. The script is didactic and close to moralizing at times, with a whole bunch of plot holes and timeline problems. And then it's revealed at the end that Steve's kid got the adoption information, which seems like a violation of policy that's totally overlooked. The characters are uniformly one-dimensional and although everybody tries hard, they're doomed by the story and script.

It's a shame that great actors like Cagney and Stanwyck wound up in movies like this later in their career. But as I've mentioned on other occasions, every actor if their career goes long enough winds up in a couple of serious misfires. These Wilder Years is one of those misfires for Cagney and Stanwyck.

Ever in My Heart

IMDb says that Barbara Stanwyck was born on July 16, 1907. However, TCM is marrking the anniversary of her birth tomorrow, July 15, with a morning and afternoon of her movies. One that's relatively infrequently seen is the interesting Ever in My Heart, at 11:45 AM.

Stanwyck plays Mary Archer, a nice young woman living circa 1909 in one of those idyllic small college towns, this one founded by her own ancestors a few centuries earlier. She's of a fairly high social stratum, and the feeling among her family is that she's going to marry her good friend and longtime friend of the family Jeff (Ralph Bellamy). Of course, you know that since Jeff was played by Ralph Bellamy, there's no way he's going to end up with the woman. In fact, Jeff introduces Mary to her future husband. While studying in Germany, Jeff met Hugo Wilbrant (Otto Kruger), who comes over to America with his friend. He sees Mary, and it's love at first sight.

Hugo and Mary get married, to the shock of the rest of her family, who think that nothing good can come of not marrying the right kind. And it's old American stock that is the right kind, they think. But no matter. Mary and Hugo love each other, and Hugo gets a job teaching chemistry at the local college. Hugo likes his life, and has good friends in the rest of the community. Indeed, Hugo likes it so much that he decides to become an American citizen, and all his friends celebrate right along with him by giving him a cup to commemorate the occasion.

But of course you know that it's not all going to be a bed of roses, or else they wouldn't have been able to make a movie. The conflict comes in 1914, with the onset of World War I. The US remained neutral for several years, of course, but in mid-1915, with the sinking of the Lusitania, there was a bit more agitation to try to get the US into the war on the side of the British. Indeed, the British themselves started up a propaganda campaign to get the Americans to believe that the Germans were just terrible Huns. And quite a few Americans believed the propaganda.

It's not much mentioned nowadays, but even though something like a quarter of the American population at the time was at least partly of German descent, there was quite a lot of hatred not just of the Germans in Germany, but of the German-Americans in the US. It was so extreme that sauerkraut was renamed "liberty cabbage". And unsurprisingly, the anti-German sentiment hits Hugo and his family. Everybody turns on him on a dime, excepting Mary and their child.

So Hugo decides that the only thing he can do is abandon America and go back to Germany without his wife and child. Yeah, this plot twist is a bit nuts, but it's only leading up to the really nutty stuff at the end. Let's just say that the movie gets pretty harsh on the one hand, and pretty silly on the other.

Despite my feeling that Ever in My Heart has a thoroughly ludicrous ending, I still found the movie well worth watching. The idea of turning on one's former friends in a time of war is one that always bears repeating. Stanwyck, for her part, does a good job in roles like this. She was never less than professional, and this is by no means one of the worse pictures she was in. It's no Double Indemnity, of course, but then most pictures aren't. Still, if you haven't seen it before, take this opportunity to watch it.

I'm not certain whether Ever in My Heart is available on DVD, so you'll have to catch it on TCM if you want to see it.

There's Always Tomorrow

Another of the Barbara Stanwyck movies in today's lineup that I haven't recommended before is There's Always Tomorrow. It's on tonight at 11:30 PM.

Barbara Stanwyck doesn't show up right at the beginning of the movie; that honor goes to the male lead, Fred MacMurray. He plays Clifford Groves, who runs a toy company out in the Los Angeles area and has done a good job for himself. At the end of the day, he goes home to a lovely wife Marion (Joan Bennett) and three wonderful kids. But of course, all of that is about to change, or else we wouldn't have a movie. That change, in fact, starts on the Mrs. Groves' birthday. Clifford comes home all ready to surprise Marion, taking her out to dinner and a show. It is quite the surprise, as Marion had all sorts of other plans doing things with the children since she's been busy raising them while Clifford has been out earning the money to keep them in that lovely house. Dad offers to take each of the kids, but they've got things to do, too, especially eldest son Vinnie, who's got a date with his girlfriend Ann.

Into all of this walks Barbara Stanwyck. She plays Norma Miller Vale, a woman who used to work for the Groves business before Clifford became a husband and father, and who went off to New York in the intervening years and became successful in fashion design. She's in town on business, and on a lark decided to see what happened to the man she worked with and had a good friendship with. Clifford, having theater tickets and reservations to dinner, decides to ask her to spend the evening with him. Purely innocently, of course.

Fast forward a few days, when Dad has planned to make up for Mom not being able to do anything on her birthday, by taking Mom out to one of the desert resorts for the weekend. However, youngest daughter Frankie sprains her ankle, and Mom thinks it would be better to stay at home with Frankie. But why not go off to the resort yourself, Cliff, Marion suggests. Schedule one of your business meetings there. So he does, and Norma just happens to be there, again purely coincidentally. Except that this time, Vinnie and some of his high school friends show up at the same resort where Dad has met Norma. Vinnie, of course, suspects the worst.

At this point, Vinnie has a complete change, much like Ann Blyth's character in Our Very Own, and the film descends into unintentional hilarity. Vinnie, being the oldest of the kids, gets his two younger sisters to take his side and they're utter jerks, too, especially when Dad invites Norma over to dinner with the whole family. Dad, beginning to feel unloved, decides that perhaps he should go off with Norma.

Douglas Sirk directed There's Always Tomorrow, and while it's not as over the top as some of his lush Technicolor movies, his fingers are all over the movie, partly in the sene that there's not really a happily ever after, but more in the laying it on thick once the kids see what Dad's up to. A lot of reviewers will give you some mumob-jumbo about this being a blistering indictment of the staid 1950s view of family happiness and the suburbs and all that, but I've always tended to think that's a bit more revisionist history than Sirk thinking how he can put agitprop into all of his movies. To be fair, much of the material he got was already on the border of overcooked.

As for There's Always Tomorrow, it's not terrible, but the way the kids turn on a dime makes the movie never rise to anythying close to greatness. And it's doesn't go as far around the bend as Imitation of Life or Written on the Wind, so it's not quite as fun to sit and laugh at. MacMurray and Stanwyck both do about as well as can be expected with their roles, making the movie ultimately worth one watch, although you may want to reach through the screen and smack those kids.