Pat O'Brien grows a moustache

Ever since moving and getting access to reliable high-speed internet two years ago, I've been able to watch the FAST services. Tubi seems to have access to a whole bunch of stuff that wound up in the public domain. One that I hadn't heard of before seeing it in the "classic" movies section was Slightly Honorable.

The movie starts off with the idea that perhaps there's an island somewhere in the South Pacifc that doesn't have corruption, but we're in America, 8,000 miles away. Cut to a shot of the highway commissioner in some state getting killed in a road accident, which is the height of irony because the commissioner was the one more or less responsible for the shoddy state of the roads, what with all the graft in the highway department. At his funeral are newspaper publisher Vincent Cushing (Edward Arnold), who is in on the graft and getting wealthy from it; and attorney John Webb (Pat O'Brien), who wants to eliminate corruption and graft.

Complicating matters is that one of Webb's clients, Alma Brehmer (Claire Dodd) just happens to be the mistress of one Vincent Cushing. Webb and Cushing are brought together again when Alma invites Webb to a swanky party at a nightclub hosted by Cushing. It's also a place for Webb to meet chorine Ann Seymour (Ruth Terry), who thinks of Webb as someone to look up to as well as woo once he saves her from one of the brutes at Cushing's party trying to slap her around because he's jealous of her dancing briefly with Ann. Ann, however, seems mostly to be comic relief, which is surprising considering that Eve Arden is also in the film playing the part of Webb's secretary.

Up to now the movie has been more comedy than drama, although things are about to take a turn. Alma being one of Webb's clients, she wants him to see her about some jewelry Cushing gave her and that she wants appraised so she can have it added to her insurance policy. Webb goes up to her swanky apartment, and finds that somebody's stabbed her! Needless to say, since he's the one to have found her, he's an obvious suspect. Cushing's wife has good reason to worry that perhaps her husband could be held responsible, what with his having an obvious motive of trying to silence poor Alma. So she tries to keep anything bad about Cushing from being released. Worse for Webb is that Cushing's daughter actively wants to implicate Webb. Helping to save Webb is his legal firm partner Sampson (a young Broderick Crawford).

I mentioned above that the movie starts off on a somewhat humorous tone, and in the years before the US got involved in World War II there was quite a cycle of comic murder mystery-type movies. However, Strictly Honorable takes a slightly different tack of being humorous up to the murder and then tacking a much darker turn. It's an odd strategy, and one that doesn't always work. However, the flaws in the movie are also in part to it being a low-budget independently produced movie.

Not that Strictly Honorable is a bad movie; it's more that it's the sort of thing where it's easy to see why it's fallen through the cracks and become largely forgotten.

Woman Chases Man

Recently, while browsing through the Roku Channel (I really hate that name, since there's a bunch of channels in addition to all the streaming stuff) app, I was alerted to a new-to-me movie that sounded interesting, with a cast including several old stars whose movies I tend to enjoy, so I watched it. That movie was Woman Chases Man.

Kenneth Nolan (Joel McCrea) is a wealthy young man on a transatlantic liner coming home from Europe, about to surprise his fahter B.J. (Charles Winninger) when he gets home with the news that he's about to pop the question to Nina (Leona Maricle, and if you haven't heard that name before that might be a sign as to which character Kenneth will wind up with in the final reel) Tennyson. However, Dad surprises him first, with a collect radio call to the liner (in the days when this sort of thing would have been monstrously expensive) asking for money. However, Kenneth has heard it before.

Meanwhile, waiting outside B.J.'s office are a bunch of process servers. B.J. is no longer rich; his late wife had half of the couple's money, and when she died, she made certain the son got half of it so he'd have something to start on and so that B.J. wouldn't spend it all. B.J. isn't a bad guy; it's just that he has a habit of picking hare-brained inventions that won't work in real life and wind up costing him a bunch of money. The latest scheme, at least, doesn't sound so bad: a property development of planned houses for the lower social classes, to be called Nolan Heights. But he needs $100,000 to keep the creditors at bay.

Not knowing this is Virginia Travis (Miriam Hopkins). She goes to the building here B.J.'s office is along with a letter of introduction telling Nolan that she's an architect who would be good for the Nolan Heights project. Not that she has any clue that Nolan doesn't have the money to hire her, or anybody else, on. However, her moxie is able to drive the process servers away so the elder Nolan is going to see her. She faints, being in as bad a financial state as B.J. is and not having eaten in two days.

All this gives Dad an idea. Virginia should use her feminine wiles on Kenneth to get him to propose to her, or at least to sign a check for that $100,000 that Dad needs. That latter isn't going to be so easy, since as I said earlier Kenneth has seen all of the schemes up close and seen his father fritter away his money. Kenneth isn't about to let him blow the other half of the money that Mom had when she died. The former -- getting Kenneth to fall in love -- isn't going to be easy either, since as we know Kenneth is bring his girlfriend home with him.

Except that we eventually learn Nina isn't wealthy, and the "Uncle" Henri she's traveling with is really her boyfriend. She's just a gold-digger. And, since we know who the two leads are, we know where it's all going to go. As is so often the case with a movie like Woman Chases Man, the movie is more about how the characters get where we all know they're going.

Unfortunately, Woman Chases Man is one of the weaker screwball comedies I've seen. The situations are even phonier than in most screwball comedies, and the characters are almost all people it's hard to have sympathy with, the possible exception being Kenneth. But even he does a 180 just in time for the final reel. Of note, as a friend of Virginia's pressed into service as a butler, is a young Broderick Crawford.

Woman Chases Man isn't a particularly good movie. But at least it's mercifully short. And the print Roku showed had relatively few commercials -- I think 8½ minutes for a 70-minute movie. Traditional cable channels would probably have had 20 minutes.

The Mob

Last week, I talked about the movie Murder by Contract regarding movies that were leaving Tubi at the end of April 2024. I recently watched another movie that's leaving at the end of the month, an early 1950s crime movie called The Mob. (Apparently, both movies did get video releases on Columbia noir box sets, even tough The Mob is to me a straight-up crime movie and not a noir. Just in case you don't get the chance to see either before the end of the month.)

Broderick Crawford is the star of the movie, and considering his pedigree to this point, you'd think he's the mobster. Except that he isn't. He's police detective Johnny Damico, and as the movie opens he's at a pawn shop one night looking for a diamond ring to buy for the girlfriend he's planning to pop the question to! Alas, this conversation is disrupted by a shooting. Damico stops the shooter, who shows Damico his police badge. Apparently, it was much more common in those days for lone policemen to shoot fleeing suspects without a bunch of other people around.

Except, as it turns out, this guy wasn't a police officer. He had shot someone who was a police officer, and then stole that guy's badge to be able to get away with murder, with the victim of the shooting Damico heard being a witness to a grand jury case about waterfront corruption. (Note that The Mob was made three years before On the Waterfront.) Damico's bosses are none too pleased about his letting a murderer get away with it, so they suspend him from the force for 60 days, appparently not caring what the union thinks.

Then again, they aren't really suspending him. They need a way to get him out of town for a bit and into some undercover work. So they get a fake photo of Damico and then send Damico to New Orleans, where he'll be given a union card for a longshoreman. He's to come back from New Orleans with the the fake identity Tim Flynn on the pretense that he's got a criminal record there (the authorities there are creating a fake record in case anyone questions him). When he returns, he's going to get a job on the waterfront and figure out who the "Blackie Clegg" is who is running the corrupt longshoremen's union.

Damico, now posing as Flynn, shows up at the hiring office and the dive bars that service the waterfront, asking way too many questions. The only person who shows anything close to friendship is a fellow longshoreman, Tom Clancy (Richard Kiley). But when Flynn starts asking questions of the guy who hands out the jobs and refers to "Castro", the gangsters are none too pleased. Flynn is taken to meet Castro (Ernest Borgnine in a very early role) to try to find out what the deal is with this mouthy newcomer.

Of course, we know the deal, and we also know that because there's a Production Code, crime is not going to pay. But how we get from where we are to where the movie is going to end is something you're going to have to watch for yourself. There's murder, kidnapping, and the real Clegg being unmaksed.

Apparently The Mob got great reviews when it was released back in 1951. Having watched it, I'd have to say that it's a decidedly competent movie. It's not one I'd give the sort of high praise it got in 1951, but at the same time I'd point out there's nothing terribly wrong with it. Broderick gives a good performance, although I do wonder if the script makes him too curious for his own good. That's not Crawford's fault, of course.

There are any number of familiar faces in the supporting roles, such as Neville Brand as a henchman or an uncredited Charles Bronson whose face and voice are immediately recognizable. It all works, even if it is following a formula. The Mob does what it does more than well enough to entertain.

New York Confidential

Another of the movies that I had somewhat surprisingly never heard of before I noticed that it was available on Tubi was the 1950s crime film New York Confidential. Since it sounded interesting and had a pretty good cast, I decided I'd watch it to be able to do a review on it here.

The movie starts off with a narration (Marvin Miller is the narrator) about a killing that was dirty enough that it was going to point to the New York syndicate, which is the head for the syndicate in the country as a whole. That's not a good thing, and the syndicate is going to have to do something to make certain it doesn't happen again. Charlie Lupo (Broderick Crawford) is the head of the syndicate, and to deal with his problems, he and the rest of the syndicate brings in hired hitman Nick Magellan (Richard Conte) from Chicago.

Charlie knew Nick's father, and wants Nick to work for him, not so much for the syndicate in general. Nick has to this point been working for a subhead of the syndicate, Achilles (Onslow Stevens). Nick doesn't want to switch allegiances, at least not until being told that Achilles is actually OK with it. Nick becomes Lupo's bodyguard, ultimately living for a time in the Lupo house.

Lupo has a devoted mother, as well as a college-aged daughter Kathy (Anne Bancroft). Kathy knows what her father does, and doesn't like it, largely because everybody else knows too, and Kathy wants to be seen as decent and respectable. She's at the point where she's willing to try to run away, even though Charlie would go to the ends of the earth to bring her back. Kathy also starts falling for Nick, apparently not getting that he's a hitman.

Further complicating matters is that we've got another of those "good government" types who wants to go after the syndicate. For the most part, the authorities keep being able to get the small-time folks, while the heads go off unscathed. But this group of crusaders apparently has some witnesses in higher places, and that's going to require the syndicate to do something about it. The bad news for them is that the hitmen -- not Nick -- that they hire to do it botch the job such that they're obviously going to be noticed. It's up to Nick to deal with that. As the violence spirals out of control, it threatens to engulf everybody....

New York Confidential isn't a bad little movie, at least not by the standards of non-prestige movies of the 1950s. Broderick Crawford has the sort of role he could play in his sleep, but he does it well. Ditto Richard Conte. Anne Bancroft is on her way up, but does an OK job. Bigger and better things were to come for her. The ending is a surprising one in a way, in that it somewhat satisfies the Production Code, but in other ways you'd think the Code Office would have had issues with it.

New York Confidential isn't the greatest movie, either, but it's one that's definitely worth a watch for anybody who likes movies of that era.

Stanley Kramer makes a medical drama

Whether producing or directing, Stanley Kramer was known for making "message pictures" dealing with important social issues. Sometimes, his style was blunt enough that the message came across as more important than the picture. One good example of this is Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. This was something I kept thinking about as I was watching his debut directorial effort (although he had already produced several movies), Not As a Stranger.

Lucas Marsh (Robert Mitchum) is a medical student at Big City Medical School, studing under Dr. Aarons (Broderick Crawford) and lightening the mood with his best friend, Alfred Boone (Frank Sinatra, and yes, everybody is pushing 40 and much too old for the parts they're playing). Watch also for a young Lee Marvin as another medical student, although he's not part of the second half of the movie. Marsh is highly driven and pretty darn intelligent, but this causes him to clash with the established doctors. To be fair, part of this is that they may not be up to date on the latest medical techniques.

Also causing problems for Marsh is his father (Lon Chaney in a small role). Marsh's mom died some time back and left him a fair amount of money which should help pay for medical school. But Dad is an alcoholic, and drank away the money, leaving Lucas with no money to pay his upcoming tuition. Thankfully for him, however, he does meet somebody who has a little bit of money saved up. That's nurse Kirstina (Olivia de Havilland), who has been saving up money, and who for some reason is part of the Swedish immigrant community along with Oley (Harry Morgan), forcing her to essay a ridiculous Swedish accent for no discernible plot reason. Lucas marries Kristina for her money.

Eventually everybody graduates from medical school and does their internship before going into practice. Alfred decided to go the route that Robert Donat did for a while in The Citadel, of becoming a wealthy doctor in private practice, although he's going to remain Lucas and Kristina's friend and show up when necessary to advance the plot. Lucas, on the other hand, decides to go to a small town that looks partly like a studio backlot and partly like a smaller city than a small town. There are some farmers around, and Lucas will certainly be serving them, but there's also a surprisingly well-equipped hospital and some ritzy areas.

The ritzy areas and farm life come together one evening when Marsh goes out to attend to a farmer who got kicked by his horse. The farmer's wife says that Miss Lang (Gloria Grahame) wants to see him, even though it's 1:00 AM. Now when you see the name Gloria Grahame in the credits, you can guess that the character is a bit of a vamp, or a femme fatale. Well, more than a little bit. Lang lives in a big house with a sort of hobby horse-raising concern attached to it, and she leads a lonely life drinking more than she should. You can guess that Lucas is going to find himself falling in love with her, and that this is going to cause a problem with his marriage to Kristina.

I mentioned at the beginning that Stanley Kramer made a bunch of message pictures, and boy does he try to insert as many of the medical drama tropes as he can to get The Message across. At times this makes the movie become unintentionally funny. There are montages of the doctors treating patients which look like they could have come from a medical issue of the week TV drama. Worse, or more hilarious depending on your point of view, is Kramer's use of horses when Marsh finally falls and becomes unfaithful with Lang. There's also the blatant foreshadowing. Kristina talks so much about having a family that you know that she's going to get pregnant, and it's obvious way before we see the scene of Dr. Boone telling her that it's already happened.

The casting is also interesting. Robert Mitchum is clearly miscast, much like epileptic research scientist Ronald Reagan in Night Unto Night. And as I mentioned, why Kramer made de Havilland and Harry Morgan take on Swedish accents was beyond me. On the other hand, Broderick Crawford shows he could play more than tough guys. Charles Bickford plays the elderly small-town doctor who takes Marsh into his practice, and he does well too.

Overall, Not As a Stranger is a movie that's more interesting for how it lets The Message dominate the movie than it is for being any sort of truly great movie. But it's still worth a watch.

The Decks Ran Red

Dorothy Dandridge was TCM's Star of the Month back in September. She didn't make all that many movies so TCM didn't run many, but there was one that I hadn't seen before and recorded: The Decks Ran Red. It's available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive, so I recently sat down to watch it and do a post on it here.

The SS Berwind is a ship docked in a small port in New Zealand, owned by an American shipping company based out of Los Angeles. The ship's captain has recently died suddenly, which causes some dissension in the crew's ranks, with the cook and chief steward jumping ship, and other crew members thinking the captain didn't just die of a heart attack. Henry Scott (Broderick Crawford), in particular, seems to have it in for the management and already seems to be planning a mutiny with his friend and crewmate Leory Martin (Stuart Whitman).

Meanwhile, back in Los Angeles, Edwin Rummell (James Mason) is the first mate aboard a cruise ship whose home port is Los Angeles and which is owned by the same company that owns the Berwind. The shipping line decides to promote Rummell to take over the Berwind even though this means flying him all the way across the Pacific, and also overlooking Moody, the Berwind's own first mate, because he's too old and probably should have been pushed into retirement anyway.

So Rummell arrives on board the Berwind to find a tense situation. This is exacerbated by the fact that the ship had to find a cook at very short notice, since getting crappy food is one of the things that will make a crew even more likely to become malcontents and mutiny. The cook that the get is a Māori named Vic, who has agreed to be the ship's cook only on the condition that he's allowed to bring his wife Mahia (Dorothy Dandridge) aboard with him; she effectively gets to be the ship's steward.

Needless to say, the presence of Mahia really gets the crew's hormones flowing, resulting in more dissension. And we also learn what Henry's real intention is. He doesn't want to mutiny; instead, he's found an obscure bit of maritime law that someone who finds a derelict ship and rescues it is entitled to half the value of the ship and its cargo. So his plan is to waterlog the ship but not enough to sink it, and then claim to find the derelict ship. I'd think this wouldn't work since he was one of the crew members and certainly the shipping line would know this, but run with the story anyway. Henry and Leroy plan to pull off the nefarious scheme at some point. The bring in a third party, Mace, becaue he's got a gun. But he talks in his sleep, and that forces Henry and Leroy to kill him!

The disappearance of Mace raises one more alarm among the crew, together with the death of Moody and Henry's trying to incite a mutiny which is of course not really what he wants, but is an excuse to get rid of the officers before he can get rid of the unsuspecting crew. Eventually, Henry and Leroy kill the four men on watch in the engine room, and that sets off the "mutiny" and the climactic struggle for Rummill to regain control of the Berwind.

In terms of storytelling and visual style, The Decks Ran Red made me think of another Mason movie I blogged about recently, Cry Terror! This shouldn't be surprising, since both movies were directed by Andrew Stone and made by him and his wife Virginia. It's a no-nonsense style that plays out more like a programmer than a big-budget movie, and frankly, it's something that works well for both movies. Mason and Dandridge are both quite competent if unspectacular. Whitman does OK with an early role, while Crawford has fallen into his bombastic style that isn't necessarily bad here, but makes you wonder why anybody would follow him as a leader.

I somewhat wish the movie had been made in color (there's a brief splash of red on the word "RED" in the title card), but that's a minor quibble. While nobody will think of The Decks Ran Red as the highlight in the career of anybody who made it, it's a definitely effective little film, and not a bad way to spend 84 minutes.

The Time of Your Life

Another of the movies that I recently watched was The Time of Your Life.

Based on a play by William Saroyan, the movie tells the story of Nick's, a dive bar on the San Francisco waterfront run by bartender Nick (William Bendix). More than that, it looks at the stories of several habitues of the bar, as observed by Joe (James Cagney). Joe spends all day at the bar, and there's no indication of how Joe earns a living to be able to do this. Nick, for his part, wants to play the ponies, and considering how little people buy, it's a good question how he makes his money, too.

Tom (Wayne Morris) is Joe's "stooge", looking up to Joe for reasons I don't get and running all sorts of bizarre errands for Joe. Then Kitty (Jeanne Cagney) walks into the bar. She claims to be an actress, although she has a past, as will be revealed at the end. Tom falls in love with Kitty, and he's eventually going to get a real job to be able to support himself and Kitty.

There's also Harry (Paul Draper), a man who can dance and offers to be entertainment if Nick were ever to have a floor show, although again there are the questions of how Nick could pay for any of this. He's joined by Wesley (Reginald Beane) the pianist. Other denizens of the bar are the pinball player Willie (Richard Erdman) and Dudley (Jimmy Lydon), who is in love with Elsie (Nanette Parks), who is not a denizen of the bar.

There are a few more patrons, including a slumming couple (Natalie Schaefer, best known as Lovey Howell on Gilligan's Island, is the wife), an obnoxious cowboy, and a couple of cops who pass through.

There's not much of a plot here, although most of the characters other than Joe and Nick have their own subplots. And to be honest, that's one of the big problems with the movie. A second problem is that it felt very stagey to me, since it's based on a stage play by William Saroyan and is mostly set in the bar. Then there's the fact that there are a couple of overlong dance sequences and other musical numbers. But most of all is that I found all the characters irritating.

Perhaps this is material that would work better on the stage, and perhaps other people are going to like it more than I did. But I have to admit I didn't care for it at all. Still, it's available on DVD so you can watch and judge for yourself.

Two years before The Spoilers

One of my recent DVD purchases at amazon was this two-disc Marlene Dietrich set. This past weekend, I decided to watch a new-to-me movie off it, Seven Sinners.

Dietrich stars as Bijou, a nightclub singer who's been plying her trade in the islands of Southeast Asia. Based on the language used being American English, one might guess it's pre-war Philippines (which was an American territory at the time), although a shot of a map early on suggests she might have done some work in Dutch Indonesia or British Malaya. (Most other synopses claim it's the South Seas, which would make more sense if it weren't for that map.) Anyhow, her beauty cosistently causes the sailors to go riotously mad, something that the the authorities don't like for understandable reasons. So she's about to be deported from yet another island. She leaves with her two friends, dishonorably discharged US sailor Ned (a young Broderick Crawford), and magician/pickpocket Sasha (Mischa Auer). They're going to an island that Bijou has been to before, but the island is getting a new governor in Henderson (Samuel S. Hinds), so she figures she can go back there and fly under the radar as they say nowadays but didn't then since radar wasn't a thing.

Henderson has a lovely daughter Dorothy (Anna Lee) who is the romantic interest for a young navy lieutenant, Dan Brent (John Wayne). When Bijou gets off the boat, she runs into Brent, who understandably find his interest piqued because who wouldn't. All the other navy guys are even more interested. As for Bijou, she goes to the Seven Sinners club, where she worked in her previous stint. The club owner Tony (Billy Gilbert) is none too pleased because he's seen Bijou's reputation first hand. That, and he's got a new patron in Antro (Oskar Homolka) who has a predilection for throwing knives and who thinks he can keep Bijou for himself.

The rest of the plot is predictable. Brent falls fully in love with Bijou and intends to put his navy career in jeopardy in order to marry her, while she winds up in danger from Bijou, as does Brent, leading to the climactic fight scene. (You'd think the Navy would just declaer the Seven Sinners Club off-limits, as they did to various places in Sayonara, which would solve much of the navy's problems.)

Dietrich and Wayne have good chemistry in what was their first film together, and the film is moderately entertaining. But as I watched, I couldn't help but think of The Spoilers which they would make two years later. The characters and plot of Seven Sinners don't feel as fully fleshed out as in The Spoilers. Antro seems like he must have had more of a past with Bijou that isn't fully explained. That, and why he didn't get deported from the island for his criminal activities, since he seems to have an entire gang.

Still, I'd definitely recommend Seven Sinners. Especially on a moderately-priced box set. As for that set, it's got two movies on each disc, with no extras, but you get what you pay for. The image quality seemed OK, but I don't have a TV with high-enough resolution to notice mildly bad images. (It's nowhere near The Walls of Malapaga in terms of image quality, looking like it could air on TCM and not seem out of place.)

Eternally Yours

1939 is commonly referred to as Hollywood's greatest year. A movie from that year that is generally overlooked is Eternally Yours.

Anita (Loretta Young) is the granddaughter of Episcopalian bishop Peabody (C. Aubrey Smith), and is having a luncheon with some of her girlfriends when her boyfriend Don Burns (Broderick Crawford in a very early role) shows up to pick her up for an afternoon out. They go to see a show from master magician Arturo the Great (David Niven). He's so magical that he's able to steal Anita's heart right out from under Don.

Fast forward a year and a half, and Anita is working as her husband's partner in those illusions that need a lovely woman as the magician's assistant. They're currently performing in London, which one assumes is home for Arturo, although it certainly isn't for Anita. She's decided that she'd like to settle down, and to that end has had plans drawn up for a small country house in the middle of nowhere in Connecticut, or at least as middle of nowhere as you can get there. She's especially unhappy that Arturo talked himself into an escape act involving being handcuffed and thrown out of a plane!

Not that Arturo wants to do that. Arturo feels he needs to keep making money to make Anita happy, and to that end he's signed the two up for a two-year tour. (The movie was released in October 1939, after World War II had already begun, so presumably this world tour wouldn't take them to Europe.)

At any rate, they set out on the tour, but when they get to South America, Anita decides that she's had enough, and that she's going to go home to get a divorce. (Well, actually, she has to go to Reno and serve Arturo the divorce papers, but Arturo could only get the slow boat back to the States.) Anita gets the divorce and marries Don, while Arturo is stuck doing vaudeville-type shows. Until a charity function winds up with his meeting Anita again, giving him a chance to win her back.

Eternally Yours is one of those competently-made movies that unfortunately winds up adding up to less than the sum of its parts. I think that's in part because so much of the material feels formulaic, in that we've sen this type of story before. A big entertainer falls in love, and then has to decide whether the love can survive a life on the road. I think the most recent post I did on such a movie was for There's No Business Like Show Business a few months back, but I can think of a bunch of movies in the genre. Eternally Yours feels like everyobdy is going through the motions, which is a bit of a shame because it actually has quite a bit of star power in the supporting roles: C. Aubrey Smith is criminally underused, and when you see names like Billie Burke, ZaSu Pitts, and Eve Arden on the second card, you might expect a lot.

Not that Eternally Yours is bad; it just feels like it could have been better. The movie is available on DVD, though, so you can watch and judge for yourself.

Between Heaven and Hell

Even though today was Veterans' Day, TCM decided to spend the day showing other stuff, which doesn't particularly bother me although it's agitated a bunch of people who sounded off on the Internet, apparently. FXM Retro did run some war movies, although I think I had already blogged about all of them. One Fox war movie I finally got a chance to see recently that didn't air today is Between Heaven and Hell. It does seem to be available at Amazon, so you can get a copy there if you do the streaming video thing.

The movie opens with army private Sam Gifford (Robert Wagner) just having been busted in rank and lucky not to face a court-martial for apparently having struck a senior officer, Since it's World War II and they're all in a combat zone on some God-forsaken island in the Pacific, it's apparently the least bad thing that he simply be demoted and sent to serve in a different company, which is how he gets sent to Company G. This company is headed by Captain "Waco" Grimes (Broderick Crawford), who has some peculiar rules of command. Specifically, he wants to be called "Waco" instead of "Sir", being afraid that the Japanese snipers will learn that he's the commanding officer and try to kill him. And Waco is a bit of a martinet, thinking Gifford's middle name Francis is a bit effeminate.

And then we begin to learn a bit about how Gifford got here. Some other soldiers in the company mention the former commander, Col. Cousins, and how sad it was that he got killed in battle. It was especially difficult for Gifford because he married Cousins' daughter (Terry Moore). Cue the first of the flashbacks.... In the flashbacks, which start off before the war, we learn that Gifford was a rich landowner down south, and had a bunch of white sharecroppers working his land. Gifford pushes them hard to get the most out of them, something that bothers his wife Jenny.

Back in the present, Gifford winds up serving with a guy from Chicago and another man, Pvt. Crawford (Buddy Ebsen) who just happens to be from a sharecropper family himself, close enough that he knows all the places Gifford talks about, but not close enough to have worked for Gifford. Gifford takes a liking to Crawford, and this combined with his war experiences begins to temper Gifford's outlook to the point that perhaps things will be different back on the farm if he survives the war.

Of course, to survive the war, he has to deal with Waco, which is a problem. Waco has Gifford command a sortie that is risky enough that you wonder whether Waco is deliberately trying to get Gifford killed. Gifford does a good job, but Waco doesn't want to believe him. Meanwhile, Waco is becoming more and more a difficult person to be around, to the point that you hope he's the one to get relieved. But not before Gifford has to go out on one last difficult mission, this time doing scout patrol up in the mountains.

Between Heaven and Hell is well-enough done, although there are a lot of the tropes of war movies that, I suppose, it's difficult to avoid falling into simply because there's only so much you can do and still be a realistic war movie. Robert Wagner does reasonably well in what is a somewhat atypical role for him; I think he was generally the sort of actor better suited to lighter material. Broderick Crawford shouts and gesticulates much the same way he did in Born Yesterday and All the King's Men, but these are things that befit his character. Unfortunately, the print that FXM Retro showed was panned-and-scanned from Cinemascope down to 16:9.

If you like war movies, I think you'll like Between Heaven and Hell.

A Little Romance

TCM is today marking the anniversary of Laurence Olivier's birth in 1907 with a bunch of his films. They're concluding at 6:00 PM with the charming A Little Romance.

Laurence Olivier doesn't show up for a while, and even though he gets top billing, he's not really the star of the film. That goes to the two juvenile leads. First is Diane Lane, playing a 13-year-old girl named Lauren King. She's living in Paris with her mother Kay (Sally Kellerman) and stepfather Richard (Arthur Hill), who is working for some multinational doing big business stuff. While Stepdad is away, the mice, or in this case Mom, will play. There's an American film production doing filming on location at some Paris area palace, and Mom is carrying on an affair with the director, George (David Dukes). Not that Lauren cares; she'd rather read abstruse philosophy since she's so much more sophisticated than all of her classmates.

Somebody who does care, at least a bit, is French schoolboy Daniel (Thelonious Bernard). He's a movie buff, especially of the old Hollywood films, and he would love nothing more than to get behind the scenes of a production and see how everything is done. In this case, that's especially so because the film has a small role for veteran Hollywood actor Broderick Crawford (playing himself in a cameo). Daniel isn't supposed to be there of course, and as he's trying to get away from everybody, he runs into Lauren, who has been shunted into a corner that's out of the way since she doesn't want to be there.

You can probably guess that the two adolescents are eventually going to fall in love, and sure enough, that's what happens. This, even though they kind of have to keep their relationship a bit of a secret from the adults. The only people who do know about it are each of the two teens' best friends, who are consistently asked for assistance in getting the two to meet without getting caught out by the adults. The only adult they can trust is a stranger they meet at the park one day. Julius (Laurence Olivier) is an old man who has a fascinating life story, having lived in Robert Browning's old house in Venice, having done all sorts of interesting things with the diplomatic corps, and telling the kids about a legend that if they can kiss under Venice's Bridge of Sighs at sunset, they'll have eternal love.

Eventually, the parents find out about Lauren and Daniel's relationship, and they're none too happy about it. Stepdad decides that the best thing to do is to go back to the States, putting an ocean between the two young lovers and presuming that time will dull their love. Lauren and Daniel decide that the only thing they can do is to run off and head toward Venice, so they can have that kiss. So together with Julius, they head off for Italy. There's just one catch: the backstory that Julius told the two kids is an utter lie. In fact, he's a petty pickpocket, so when the kids go missing he's going to be suspected of kidnapping and all sorts of other horrible things.

I mentioned in the opening paragraph that A Little Romance is charming, and it is in oh so many ways. The two young leads are both excellent, coming off as much more natural than the wanna-be worldliness of, say, Julie Harris' character in Member of the Wedding. Olivier is excellent as Julius, showing what a good actor and broad range he had. Even though he's a criminal, you want him to get away with what he's doing. There's a lot of location shooting, and that is to the movie's benefit, because really, you can't go wrong with Paris and the Italian Alps. The little things in the movie are also good. Crawford only gets a couple of scenes, but they work. The first one has him showing he's really in it for the money and fringe benefits, while the second has Daniel peppering him about movies he has no memory of. (Probably because they're movies he never made; Daniel asks him about a couple of costars I think Crawford never had.) And then there are the two best friends, who provide some comic relief. Her French is lousy, his English equally bad; but you know they too could fall in love if the main story had been about them. There's also a lot for fans of old movies to like.

All in all, A Little Romance is a little film that hasn't gotten the attention it deserves, which is a shame, since it's so enjoyable. It's another of those movies that received a DVD release years ago, but has fallen out of print, since there are only a limited number of copies available at Amazon and it's not available from the TCM Shop. So catch it now while you have the chance.

All the King's Men

TCM is running All the King's Men tonight at 10:00 PM. Apparently I haven't blogged about it before, and apparently the DVD is out of print. So now would probably be a good time to blog about it.

All the King's Men is one of those movies whose stories is probably already reasonably well-known, in part becasue of the movie's critical acclaim having won all those Oscars, and in part because it's loosely based on real events. Willie Stark (Broderick Crawford) is a small-town man running a quixotic campaign for Country Treasurer in one of his state's more out of the way regions. His campaign theme is that everybody else is corrupt, and that if only you'll elect a man like him who's never held power before, he can help fight that corruption. It's such a novel idea that the state's big-city newspaper sends out reporter Jack Burden (John Ireland) to do a story on the campaign. Needless to say, the campaign is ultimately unsuccessful, but it gives Stark a taste for civic-mindedness.

That taste is stoked when there's an accident at the local school. A fire escape collapses, killing several children, and it's discovered that the escape was built shoddily, on a contract given out through nepotism. Now perhaps the people are going to stand up and take notice about a guy going on about corruption, even though the folks in power have a strong, well-oiled machine to keep them in power. In fact, they want Stark to run for Governor: there's another reform candidate besides Stark on the ballot, and having two reform-minded candidates will dilute their strength in a first-past-the-post system and allow the machine to maintain its stranglehold. But the political machine is only as strong as its weakest link, which here is Sadie (Mercedes McCambridge), a political operative the machine sent to keep an eye on Stark. She tells him the truth, and that enrages Stark.

Stark may have lost this round, but he decides that he's going to do whatever it takes to get elected the next time around. He's succesful, at least in the sense that he wins election. But he's got people who backed him and now has to repay, which ultimately means that he too is going to succumb to the lust for power. Stark's is just a different form of corruption than what the machine was inflicting upon the people of the state. Worse, Stark has become a prick in his personal life too. Although Stark is married, he takes up with Sadie, and then with Jack's wife Anne (Joanne Dru). Anne's father, meanwhile, is a prominent judge, and when the judge won't do Stark's bidding, Willie is perfectly willing to have dirt dug up on him. Obviously, the Production Code can't let Willie Stark get away with all this....

All the King's Men is inspired by, if not quite based on, the career of Louisiana politician Huey Long, who ran a populist campaign, won election to the governor's mansion, and then became too corrupt for his own good. Broderick Crawford is a good choice to play Willie Stark. As in a lot of his movies, he's blustery, but the sort of person you feel you could prick with a pin and deflate. It's the sort of bravado that I think a neophyte would have to have to take on a poliitcal machine: if you look weak, nobody's going to vote for you, sad to say. Crawford is ably assisted by the cast of supporting actors; McCambridge won a Supporting Actress Oscar for her role.

The atmosphere portrayed here is also excellent. When I blogged about The Firemen's Ball, I commented that even though it's set in Communist Czechoslovakia, the stuff being shown on screen could be pretty much any small town. The same holds in All the King's Men, I think. The scenes, and the fact that the story was inspired by Huey Long, suggest that the movie is set somewhere in the south, but it could just as easily have been the northeast (The Last Hurrah) or out west (Mr. Smith Goes to Washington).

If the movie has any weakness it's that this is another one of those movies where the story is a bit obvious. Willie Stark goes almost from one extreme to the other; there's no middle ground here. But this is a minor weakness, as it's one I didn't really think about the first time I watched the movie, but only afterwards.

The Fastest Gun Alive

One of the Jeanne Crain movies that TCM ran in Summer Under the Stars today that wasn't a premiere is The Fastest Gun Alive. This one she made at MGM, so if you missed it this morning, it's still avilable to purchase on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive. I would have blogged about it earlier, but there were other movies to blog about yesterday, as well as the passing of Julie Harris. (Heck, I kind of wanted to comment about It Happened One Night being included in Essentials Jr. too.)

The movie starts off with a gunfight involving Arizona gang leader Vinnie Harold (Broderick Crawford). He thinks he's the fastest gun alive, and he's not going to take any nonsense from anybody else who claims that they are faster. Well, in this particular town there's somebody else who gets involved in a gunfight with Vinnie, and loses. Cut to the town of Cross Creek. News travels fast, and word of this particular gunfight has reached Cross Creek, with everybody talking about the gunfight. For whatever reason, this really bothers George (Glenn Ford). He's the owner of the town's dry-goods store, and he refuses to carry a gun or drink, which of course brings other people in town to question his manhood.

It turns out there's a good reason George doesn't pack heat. In a past life, he was the fastest gun alive. It made him famous, but also made him an object for other people who wanted to challenge him, reminiscent of Gregory Peck in The Gunsfighter. In fact, George is in Cross Creek with a different name because he's trying to put his past behind him, at the behest of his wife Dora (Jeanne Crain). But with everybody needling George, and with people making up nonsense about fastest guns alive, George finally snaps. He walks into the bar, orders a drink, and shows off how he is, in fact, the real fastest gun out there.

This presents a problem. As I said earlier, news travels fast, so word of George's latest exploits are bound to get out to other towns. In fact, at least one of the town's citizens wrote a letter to somebody back east talking about the exploits. However, it's a Sunday morning, and the mail hasn't gone out, what with Cross Creek being in the middle of nowhere. Although it's George's intent to leave Cross Creek and try to set up a new life with another new identity, the townsfolk like him and are willing to "forget" anything ever happened, and, like a sitcom with no continuity, never again make mention that anything happened.

But, there's a complication. Vinnie has robbed a bank, and he and his gang have made it to Cross Creek on their escape. Although most of the town's citizens are in church, the bartender is being waylaid by Vinnie, and one young boy walks into the bar, which is not the start of a bad joke. Well, maybe it is; the kid accidentally lets slip about George's exploits, and Vinnie wants to know who this guy is who claims to be faster on the draw than he is. And if the townsfolk won't reveal who among them that is, Vinnie is willing to burn the whole town down.

I've stated several times that westerns aren't my favorite genre, but The Fastest Gun Alive isn't a bad movie. Glenn Ford is good enough as the morally conflicted man, while Broderick Crawford brings the same bluster he had in All the King's Men and Born Yesterday to the Old West. The story is good, although it feels a bit slow at times. One scene pads the running time by having Russ Tamblyn, at a town party, do a dance involving shovels among other props. Tamblyn is a good dancer, but the whole dance scene seems incongruous with the rest of the movie. There's also some exposition involving George having daddy issues that I didn't think it was particularly necessary to drive the plot along. The story actually has a logical ending, except that it doesn't seem like something that would have happened in real life. All in all, The Fastest Gun Alive provides a solid 90 minutes of entertainment.

The Stupid Human

I don't know how many cable or satellite providers other than DirecTV ofer Cinémoi as one of the channels in their lineup. But for those who do have it, there are two chances coming up to see Fritz Lang's Human Desire: today at 5:30 PM and tomorrow at 2:30 PM. For those who don't have the channel, it has received a DVD release, as part of a Columbia box set of noirs.

Human Desire strts off with some interesting shots of a train going along the tracks, taken from the perspective of the front of the train moving forward. That train is taking Jeff Warren (Glenn Ford) home. Jeff is an engineer on the line, who stepped away from his job to serve in the Korean War, and is coming home from the war, not just from a run driving one of the trains. When Jeff gets back to his home base, he goes "home" to Alec Simmons (Edgar Buchanan), who is both Jeff's co-engineer on the run they make together, as well as the man whose family has been renting out one of the rooms in their house to Jeff. Alec's daughter Ellen (Kathleen Case) has grown up in the years since Jef left for Korea, and boy does she have the hots for him.

But Jeff isn't really in love with Ellen, and besides, it probably wouldn't be right considering the age differnece. In fact, Jeff doesn't seem to be in love with anybody, although that's about to change. Cut to assistant station master Carl Buckley (Broderick Crawford). Due to some accidents at the station, he's called in by the station master and summarily fired. Losing your job is a problem for anybody; it's particularly a problem when you've got a young high-maintenance trophy life like Carl does in Vicki (Gloria Grahame). But at least Carl has a backup plan. Vicki used to work for Mr. Owens (Grandon Rhodes), who's a big investor with the rail line living in the big city. Carl thinks Vicki might have some influence with Owens to be able to get Carl his job back, so it's off to the city for them.

Vicki is able to get Carl his job back, but there's a problem: Vicki's meeting with Owens goes on, and on, the whole day long, and Carl is a very jealous man. When he finds out that Vicki wasn't honest with him about her and Owens going out for drinks, he gets really angry, and plans to confront Owens. That eventually happens on one of the rail line's overnight trains, climaxing with Carl pulling out a knife and killing Owens! Of course killings don't go off without a hitch, and this one involves Carl, with Vicki in tow, trying to get back from Owens' compartment to theirs: Jeff has bummed a ride on the train and is standing in between two of the cars having a smoke. Carl sends Vicki to seduce the man (not realizing his identity) so that Carl can get back to his compartment. Vicki does so, without Jeff knowing that she's actually Mrs. Buckley.

Oh, but he learns it quickly enough at the murder inquest. When called to testify about what he saw, he claims he doesn't know the person who crossed paths with him coming back from Owens' compartment. Why he does this makes no sense, and frankly I'd think that it would have implicated him, but without such a lie we wouldn't have the rest of the movie. And come to think of it, it does make sense why Jeff would do such a thing: he's thinking with his libido and not his brain. He's fallen in love with Vicki, especially when she starts telling him about how mean Carl is to her, and how Carl has an important piece of evidence that would incriminate her when of course it's Carl who killed Owens. (There's no mystery about Carl's having killed Owens; we're shown that he did it.) Jeff doesn't realize that Vicki is a femme fatale, as he tries to help her deal with her beast of a husband. She was able to lie to him on the train the night Owens was killed, and she's still more than able to lie to him. In fact, by the end of the movie one wonders whether she's telling the truth to anybody....

Human Desire is a remake of Le bête humaine, originally a story by Émile Zola and made into a 1939 film by Jean Renoir. I haven't seen the French version, so I can't judge how the two compare. The title translates to "The Human Beast"; in French most adjectives go after the noun they modify. I kind of like using the other meanings of the French words, though, which would give us "The Stupid Human". Glenn Ford's Jeff is pretty stupid for lying at the inquest; surely he would have realized this would get him in some serious legal hot water, and possibly cost him his job. But love makes people do stupid things. As for Human Desire, it's a good movie, but everybody in the cast has done better. Ford, Grahame, and director Lang were all together a year earlier on The Big Heat, a movie that's outstanding where The Human Desire is merely good. Broderick Crawford is more than good enough here, although he was even better in Born Yesterday and All the King's Men. As for the story, reviewers who have also seen La bête humaine suggest that the ending had to be changed somewhat for Human Desire due to the Production Code. I do have to say that only having seen the latter, the ending did seem a bit abrupt and forced. I'm also not quite certain how I feel about Vicki's never being honest about her relationships with Carl and Owens. Or maybe one of those stories was the actual truth. To be fair, this is probably deliberate; it's supposed to be jarring and unsettling, as with any well-portrayed bad woman in a noir film.

I don't know if Human Desire is available individually on DVD, but as I said at the beginning, it's part of a box set along with Pushover, Nightfall (which I wouldn't quite call a noir, but more of a post noir), and City of Fear, a really underrated post-noir that I still haven't blogged about.