Maybe they should have tried actually being merry

TCM ran a hodgepodge of 30s movies about odd relatives and living situations some months back, and one of the new-to-me movies I recorded that day was The Merry Frinks, selecting it, because the interesting cast is headlined by Aline MacMahon and Guy Kibbee.

MacMahon plays Hattie Frink, the mother in the family. She's married to Joe (Hugh Herbert), a chronic drunk who is a sportswriter at one of the city's newspapers; which one doesn't matter because he's lost jobs from one after the other. They live with his mother (Helen Lowell), a bitter hypochondriac who wants to boss everybody around.

Worse than that, however, is the Frinks' three adult children. Emmett (Allen Jenkins) is a communist lawyer (complete with portrait of Stalin; imagine Hollywood trying to portray a Nazi lawyer complete with portrait of Hitler with such a gentle touch) who loudly spouts slogans and lost his office for non-payment of rent. Then there's daughter Lucille (Joan Wheeler), who fancies herself a singer and has a sleazy boyfriend she insists is going to get her an audition at the radio station. Finally, there's Norman (Frankie Darro), who technically isn't an adult since he still has to go to school but skips every day.

Into all of this comes Uncle Newt (Guy Kibbee), who is presumably Grandma's brother-in-law. Nobody's seen Newt in decades, and here he is on their doorstep with all of his trunks claiming to have been in New Zealand after a lifetime spent in other places that would have seemed incredibly adventurous back in the early 1930s. Newt likes Hattie as the only relatively normal and nice member of the family.

So it shouldn't be much of a surprise that when New dies suddenly, it's revealed that he rewrote his will. In fact, he had spent all that time in New Zealand and the other places, and has a good half million (in 1930s dollars) in stock, which he leaves entirely to Hattie. But there's a condition that would never have stood up in probate court, I think. She has to abandon the rest of the family, never to see them again.

She's happy to do so, living a life she could never have dreamed of before. And unsurprisingly, the rest of the family falls to pieces without Hattie around, and wants her back.

There's a good premise behind The Merry Frinks, but a serious problem. All of the Frinks other than Hattie are beyond obnoxious, to the point that you want them to suffer and Hattie never to see them again. Their obnoxiousness goes on far too long before Guy Kibbee shows up, and he's not in the movie nearly long enough.

The Merry Frinks is on a double feature DVD with Big-Hearted Herbert, another movie starring MacMahon and Kibbee. That one is far better.

Tish

Another movie I didn't realize is available on DVD is Tish, which you can find at the TCM Shop courtesy of the Warner Archive. To be honest, however, Tish is really a movie that's only worth buying if it were part of one of those four-film sets TCM/Warner Home Video put out, likely focusing on one of the character actors who populate this film.

The star is Marjorie Main, playing Letitia "Tish" Carberry, a spinster aunt in one of those New England towns who's raised her nephew Charlie (Lee Bowman) from a young age. He's gone on to become the editor at the town newspaper, and if he could work up the courage, would finally propose to Kit (Virginia Grey), who is the daughter of the town's Judge Bowser (Guy Kibbee).

The judge, for his part, doesn't really like Tish, mostly because Tish insists on trying to run everybody's life in that small town. Tish, for her part, is slightly helped by her two widow friends, Aggie (ZaSu Pitts) and Lizzie (Aline MacMahon), who live at the local boarding house now that they're on limited incomes. Also living there is young orphan Cora (Susan Peters), who thinks she's in love with Charlie and who Tish thinks would be much better for Charlie than Kit would. However, the one who really loves Cora is the judge's son Ted (Richard Quine, who would later quit acting and become a director).

Tish tries to set up Charlie and Cora, but it turns out all she's really able to do is make life difficult for everybody. And it's at this point that the movie takes a surprisingly dark turn. Ted wants to make a man of himself, and since the opening part of the movie is presumably set before Pearl Harbor (the movie was released in September 1942 and the action covers well over a year), Ted signs up to train to be a pilot and fly Lend-Lease planes from Canada to the UK. And once he gets that job, Cora realizes she loves Ted, so elopes with him, to follow Ted to Toronto once he gets settled and the good salary starts rolling in. Cora runs off to Canada stealing some money Tish had in her purse that actually belonged to the church's organ fund, and Ted's boat gets torpedoed on the way back across the Atlantic. And Tish winds up with temporary custody of Cora's baby....

Tish really isn't a bad movie, a good example of the sort of B movies that MGM was producing back in the day. I generally prefer Warner Bros. B movies, but this one is one of the better-made and more interesting ones to come from MGM, with a bit less of the treacly moralizing that I often find in MGM's B movies. Marjorie Main dominates, of course, and not just because she's the leading character. Aline MacMahon and ZaSu Pitts are both quite good in support as Tish's two best friends. Lee Bowman is OK but his character is supposed to be a bit mousy so he comes across as bland. Not Bowman's fault, but more the way the character is written. Poor Susan Peters wound up with a tragic life; she sparkles. Guy Kibbee doesn't have all that much to do.

Tish, as I said, is pretty good, so it's a bit of a shame that it's only available in a standalone format from the Warner Archive. Those discs can be pretty pricey, and for a B movie, there should probably be something in a budget option available.

What a character!

Back in the day, TCM used to run pieces to fill the time between movies called "What a Character!" These were five- or six-minute pieces, each on a different character actor. I haven't seen any of them in quite some time, but then, I haven't been watching TCM as religiously as I used to. At any rate, I bring them up because this month, instead of having a traditional Star of the Month, TCM is having a month of character actors.

Every Tuesday and Thursday this month, TCM is going to bring up a bunch of character actors, with each one getting one movie. So, there are going to be 32 of them in all, starting at 8:00 PM tonight with Guy Kibbee who gets a mention in Gold Diggers of 1933. Character actors are going to be spotlighted on each of the four Tuesdays this month, and actresses on Thursdays; four a night.

In addition to Kibbee tonight, there's Edward Everett Horton in Holiday at 10:00 PM; Walter Connolly in Fifth Avenue Girl at midnight; and Franklin Pangborn in Turnabout at 1:45 AM.

As far as I know there aren't any special pieces being made like the old "What a Character!" bits, or even what were done for traditional Stars of the Month back in the day.

Angels Over Broadway

Over the weekend, I had the opportunity to watch Angels Over Broadway, which is one one of those low-priced box sets from Mill Creek. Since it's available on DVD, I have no qualms doing a full-length post on the movie even though I don't know that it's coming up on TV any time soon.

The movie starts off on a rainy night in New York. Bill O'Brien (Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.), looking like he belongs in a Damon Runyan story (the movie was actually written and co-directed by Ben Hecht, not Runyan), is a small-time con artist talking about how he's going to roll a 7 tonight, he just knows it. More on him later, though, as his story is going to cross with that of the other main characters. The movie quickly jumps to the person who should be the real main character, but is only fourth-billed. Charles Engle (John Qualen, with much less of an accent than he normally has, and in a much bigger role than he normally gets), is in his office writing a suicide note. It turns out that his boss Hopper (George Watts) has discovered that Engle embezzled $3,000 from the business to help his estranged wife start a business. Hopper wants the money back by 6:00 AM tomorrow or else it's criminal proceedings for the Engles. Engle, of course, has no way of getting the money back, hence the suicide note.

Engle is seen by a cop just before he can jump into the river, reminiscent of the opening of Mildred Pierce just after Monty Beragon gets it. So Engle wanders around town, eventually joining a group of people entering one of the city's swankier night clubs. He's giving his money away in preparation for his suicide attempt, so his big tips get him a good table and the perception that he's a rich man. This is where Bill comes into contact with him. Bill has been working as a tout for Dutch, a man running a high-stakes poker game that brings marks to the game to clean them out. Bill spots Engle as a wealthy man, and tells Dutch he can get Engle to come to the game, which will bring a tidy profit to Bill, too. At the club, Bill meets would-be actress and dancer Nina (Rita Hayworth), and cruelly ropes her into the plot to bilk Engle.

But there's one other person who could do something about the plot. Playwright Gene Gibbons (Thomas Mitchell) is down on his luck, too. He won a Pulitzer several years earlier, but his latest play was a monumental flop, in part because Gene has become a hard drinker seemingly spending more of his time drunk than working on his craft, which is why he's at the nightclub. As he's about to leave, he's given Engle's coat by mistake, which is where he finds the suicide note. Gene realizes he has to come up with some plot to get Engle the $3,000 and allow Engle to go on with life. Gene reclaims a piece of jewelery from a former mistress, but she later informs him that piece is just a cheap copy; no way you're getting $3,000 out of that. But then Gene learns about the poker game, and comes up with the audacious idea of having Engle scam the scammers!

There are a lot of interesting ideas in Angels Over Broadway, but I found the presentation to be a bit muddled, with the two main stories being developed too slowly and not meshing for a while. Bill's motivations, too, don't quite add up. Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. was well-suited for light romantic roles, but in this one I think he's a bit miscast. Rita Hayworth isn't given much to do here, but she does what she does well. The honors go to the two "supporting" characters, Thomas Mitchell and John Qualen. Mitchell plays another lovable drunk and delivers Ben Hecht's dialogue with gusto, although he disappears 15 minutes before the end in another implausible plot twist. John Qualen made this one the same year he did The Grapes of Wrath and His Girl Friday, and really sinks his teeth into the part. I've always enjoyed Qualen, but he's a revelation here. It's too bad the material isn't quite good enough.

Overall, based on the price of the Mill Creek DVD set, I wouldn't have any qualms suggesting you seek that out. You'll get some other really good movies, and can think of this one thrown in as an interesting extra.

So the blogathon was actually this week

So I posted last Saturday about character actor John Qualen for the What a Character! blogathon. Well, since the blogathon had been scheduled for the weekend of November 14-16, I wrote the post a bit early and scheduled it to post on the 14th.

It turns out that the blogathon was pushed back a week, so that I should have published my post today instead of last Saturday. One of the nice things about the Internet, however, is that the stuff is always archived and it's always easy to put up a hyperlink. The first link above is to my blogathon post, but if you're not certain which link it is, here it is again: What a Character: John Qualen

Naunton Wayne, 1901-1970

Today marks the birth anniversary of British actor Naunton Wayne. He's probably best known in America for playing Caldicott opposite Basil Radford's Chalmers. They were first paired together in The Lady Vanishes to provide some of Alfred Hitchcock's black humor: they were trying to get back to England to get the result of the cricket Test match, which is far more important to them than any disappearing woman who might be in danger. (The punchline of the story is that the match gets rained out.) The two characters proved to be so popular that they were brought back together to play Caldicott and Chalmers again in Night Train to Munich, as I mentioned back in July 2009. They were paired together as Caldicott and Chalmers in two more movies, and then worked together again in the British horror classic Dead of Night, although the two actors play differently-named characters there.

The photo above is taken from the defunct In Character blog about character actors, which doesn't seem to have been updated in two years.

Hildegarde Withers

A genre popular in the pre-Code era was the zippy mystery; I think I've mentioned Philo Vance in the past. Vance wasn't the only detective popping up in the movies in those days; there were lady crime solvers too like Hildegarde Withers, a spinster teacher with an acerbic wit who was able to cut to the chase much more quickly than the police. She was first played by Edna May Oliver (pictured at left), and two of Oliver's appearances as Withers are airing tomorrow morning on TCM: The Penguin Pool Murder at 6:00 AM ET, followed at 7:30 AM by Murder on the Blackboard.

Oliver left the series when she signed a contract at MGM in 1935, and continued to make movies until illness cut her career and life short. But she got to play supporting roles in some of the great period pieces being made in those days. She's Juliet's nurse (and gets lines with Andy Devine, of all people) in the 1936 version of Romeo and Juliet; she played Dickensian characters in a version of David Copperfield and a version of A Tale of Two Cities; and she might be best remembered as Lady Catherine in Pride and Prejudice. Or, that honor might go to the period piece that got her her one Oscar nomination: being lent out to Fox for Drums Along the Mohawk, where she played a tough, independent frontier widow. Thankfully, we have TCM to show us the works of fun character actors such as Oliver.

And speaking of character actors, watch The Penguin Pool Murder carefully. Quite a few of them show up, notably James Gleason as the police detective; but also Edgar Kennedy (you saw him recently in It's a Wonderful World) as a policeman, and Mae Clarke.