Confidential Agent

Lauren Bacall was TCM's Star of the Month last September on the occasion of her centenary, and it gave me the opportunity to record a movie I wasn't certain whether I had seen before. That movie is Confidential Agent, and as it turns out I hadn't seen it. So I've rectified that situation by watching it in order to be able to do a review now.

Opening intertitles inform us that the movie takes place in October, 1937; as you may recall, that's smack dab in the middle of the Spanish Civil War. On a boat heading from somwhere on the Continent to England is Luis Denard (Charles Boyer). He's working for the Republicans, and has a thing against the fascist Loyalists since they killed his wife and daughter. When they reach the port of Southampton, Luis gets delayed by a customs search, and misses his train as a result.

Also missing the train is Rose Cullen (Lauren Bacall), who isn't British at all although she's playing one, the daughter of industrialist Lord Benditch (Holmes Herbert). Rose being a well-to-do daughter, she's able to rent a car to drive back home, and takes Luis with her. The trip doesn't go smoothly, however, as the car breaks down and Spanish Loyalist Licata tries to pressure Denard into selling a letter of credit that he's got and which is essential for his business in England.

That business is to buy a bunch of coal from the mining magnates, which includes Lord Benditch, in part because it's vital for the Republican war effort but also to keep it out of the hands of the Loyalists from whom it's also vital. So you can see why both sides would want the letter of credit. Denard eventually makes it to London and registers at a hotel where he thinks the owner is sympathetic to the Republican cause. That owner, Mrs. Melandez (Katina Paxinou), turns out to be on the side of the Loyalists which, as you might guess, puts Denard in all sorts of danger.

Denard meets his contact, Contreras (Peter Lorre), only to discover later that Contreras is yet another Loyalist sympathizer. Denard doesn't seem to have much support, but he's got a couple of important people his side. One is Rose who, once she learns Denard is there to buy coal, tries to help him get an in with her father, and is also willing to lie to the police to get Denard out of trouble. (I'm guessing that since she's doing it to aid the antifascist cause and the movie being released in 1945, the Production Code office let this one slide.) The other person helping Denard is young Else (Wanda Hendrix), the hotel maid. But Melandez figures out that Else is helping Denard, which also puts Else in severe danger. Eventually, people die from negligent manslaughter, forcing Denard to go on the run. But again thanks to the Production Code, the good guys are going to win in the end.

I think for me Confidential Agent had several flaws. One is in the casting, since Lauren Bacall is not British at all. (In her defense, she knew this and felt miscast while making the movie.) Another issue is that the plot has to do a lot of contortions to get both a happy ending and one that satisfies the Code office. But more than that, the plot is too convoluted for its own good, with sections of it feeling like they're putting in macguffins to drive the movie forward. It also doesn't help that Confidential Agent runs nearly two hours, which is a good 15 minutes longer than Casablanca. Sadly Confidential Agent often feels overlong as well.

It's not that Confidential Agent is a bad movie so much as it's another of those movies where something so much better could have been made considering the cast.

Fanny

Yet another of the movies that I had sitting on my DVR that's coming up again on TCM is Fanny. It's next airing is tomorrow, March 23, at 3:30 PM, which is why you're getting the post on it now.

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Fanny is played by Leslie Caron, and is a young woman of 18 living in Marseilles with her mother Honorine, who sells fish in the seaside equivalent of a farmers' market at some time in the past. (This movie was released in 1961, based on a musical from several years earlier which was in turn based on stories written in the 1920s. And, as you'll see, there's a ten-year gap between acts of the movie. The earlier scenes in this movie, however, don't look like they're set in any sort of past beyond an old car here and there.) Fanny is in love with Marius (Horst Buchholz), who is the son of César (Charles Boyer), a bartender at the sort of bar that served the sailors and where you wonder how the proprietor could earn a living. As such, Marius doesn't care for ths sort of life, and wants to go to sea where he feels he can be free.

Although Fanny loves Marius, he only sees her as a friend. Meanhile, Panisse (Maurice Chevalier) is a man who has saved up a bunch of money. So when he approaches Honorine, she unsurprisingly thinks he's like to live with her and be a father figure to Fanny. She's shocked to learn that he's willing to marry Fanny (who doesn't want an 18-year-old who looks like Leslie Caron). Never mind the fact that Fanny doesn't have any feelings for Panisse and has no desire to marry him. She only pines for Marius. But Marius is looking into getting a job with a scientific research vessel that's going to be at sea for five years. Even though Fanny is willing to wait, Marius says she shouldn't. She lets Marius go off to sea, because she doesn't want Marius to have any regrets.

Of course, the night before Marius goes off to sea would be the one night that Marius and Fanny make sweet sweet love. And of course, that one time they get it on is, in the best Hollywood tradition, enough to get Fanny knocked up. She knows the baby needs a father, so she sucks it up and tells Panisse she's going to marry him. Panisse doesn't much care since he's OK with having Fanny near him, even if she doesn't love him and still holds a torch for Marius.

Marius comes back and sees the child, but Fanny isn't going to punish Panisse. Several years later, the child is given the opportunity to meet the man who is his father without actually being told this is the father. By this time, Panisse has gotten old enough that he's about to die.

Fanny feels like one of those old-fashioned movies that will appeal to a certain sort of viewer. I'm sorry to say that I'm not particularly that sort of viewer. Having said that, everybody involved does a professional job with the material, and a good portion was shot on location, and in color, which are both big plusses. It would just be nice if all of this were in service of a better story.

Love Affair

There are two movies airing back-to-back on TCM that are currently on my DVR and that I haven't blogged about before, which is why the first one is getting a mention a day and a half or more before it actually airs. That one is the 1939 version of Love Affair, which closes out what TCM considers its September 21 schedule at 4:30 AM September 22.

The movie opens with a bunch of radio broadcasters doing news reports on how a famous French artist, Michel Marnet (Charles Boyer), has gotten on a boat out of Naples heading for the US. There, the artist and playboy is finally going to settle down, as he's set to marry socialite Lois Clark. Also on the boat is an American nightclub singer, Terry McKay (Irene Dunne), although what she was doing in Europe is a bit of a question. She too is engaged to be married back in the US, to Kenneth Bradley (Lee Bowman).

As you can guess even if you haven't seen the famous remake An Affair to Remember, Terry and Michel are going to meet on the boat. This happens when Terry accidentally winds up with a radiogram that was addressed to him. She feigns not knowing him, and since the two are traveling alone, they decide to dine together. They even begin to fall in love, which is of course a big problem since they're both engaged to other people and because of how well-known Michel is; anything that could be seen as not being faithful could present huge problems for him once he gets to the States.

They do have a chance to spend some time alone, however, when the ship stops for an afternoon in Madeira, a Portuguese possession in the mid-Atlantic. There, Michel's grandmother Janou (Maria Ouspenskaya) lives, she having decided to remain there because her French diplomate husband died while serving in the French diplomatic corps. Janou and Terry talk, and the implication from the talk is that Terry and Michael are obviously right for each other, despite being engaged to other people. Grandma knows best, even when she knows nothing of outside pop culture.

But, of course, the two young ones are engaged to other people, so instead of breaking off their engagements forthwith they make an agreement to wait six months, and then meet each other on the observation deck of the Empire State Building to see if they're still in love. They are, but as Michel is on the observation deck, Terry finds herself unable to make the appointment because she gets hit by a car and seriously injured, with no way to contact Michel. She gets noticed singing while in a sanatarium recovering, which gets her work teaching music to children, and a bit of a life of her own. But of course she and Michel are going to run into each other again, aren't they?

The only real problem with Love Affair is the fact that it's one of those movies where pretty much everyone already knows what's going to happen because the movie itself is well-known, and has an even better-known remake, An Affair to Remember. I have a feeling that the movie would have carried a lot more emotional impact in 1939 when it was first released, both because of the relative originality and because the world was in a lot of tension with the run-up to World War II about to break out in Europe.

In any case, Love Affair is anchored by fine performances from both Boyer, who's excellent at romance, and Dunne, who could play either elegant or comedic. The supporting performance from Ousepenskaya is quite good too, and director Leo McCarey handles the material deftly. So despite the fact that Love Affair may suffer a bit from the weight of expectations, it's still an extremely good movie.

Titanic (1937)

A couple of months back, TCM aired another new-to-me movie from the 1930s that sounded interesting, so I recorded it: History Is Made at Night. It's got another airing on TCM coming up, tomorrow (March 24) at 8:00 AM, so as always with upcoming movies, I made a point of watching it in order to be able to do a post on it.

Irene Vail (Jean Arthur) is married to Bruce (Colin Clive), owner of luxury liners and yachts, but it's an unhappy marriage as she's not up on deck with him as the movie begins. In fact, she's just written him a letter telling him that she's going to try to obtain a divorce, and that she wishes she'd never met him. With that in mind, she heads off to Paris for the mandatory separation, while he's left to lick his wounds.

Well, not quite. Bruce is insanely jealous, and convinced that the only reason Irene would leave him is because there's another man in the picture. And if his employees insist that there isn't, well, he's going to create one. With that in mind, he has detectives find out where Irene is, and then sends his chauffeur there to create a situation where it looks like Irene has been having an assignation with the chauffeur, thereby destroying Irene's chance of getting a favorable divorce.

But the surprise meeting doesn't go as planned. Irene unsurprisingly resists, and another man not related to her hears it. That man, Paul Dumond (Charles Boyer) is a maître d' at a fancy restaurant in Paris. He barges in, pretending to be a jewel thief to try to save Irene. He and the chauffeur get in a scuffle before Bruce comes in, Paul pretending to take some jewels to make the lie more convincing to Bruce.

The chauffeur was only knocked out in the scuffle but Bruce kills him, telling the police that it was Irene's new lover who did it. Meanwhile, Paul has taken Irene to his restaurant for a meal, and the two fall in love. So when Irene shows back up at her hotel, she finds the chauffeur dead and that Bruce has made it appear that Paul is the guilty party in a way that nobody will be able to convince the authorities otherwise. Bruce uses this to blackmail Irene into going back to New York with him.

Eventually, Paul discovers Irene's real identity, that she's married to a wealthy man in New York, and heads across the Atlantic with his head chef Cesare (Leo Carrillo) to try to find Irene. He gets a job as maître d' at a fancy New York restaurant after saving it from bad business decisions, and sets out trying to do something to get Irene to discover the restaurant, since he doesn't know where in New York she is.

Unfortunately, Bruce learns that the police have found the man they're looking for, or the man they think murdered the chauffeur, even though we know it's neither Paul nor the actual killer. But Bruce is again able to use this to find Irene and blackmail her. Either she goes to Paris to save her lover, agreeing in the process to stay with Bruce, or her lover gets the guillotine. Bruce celebrates by taking her out to dinner, which just happens to be at Paul's restaurant.

So why have I titled this post "Titanic (1937)"? Bruce heads to Paris on the Hindenburg, since one of his ships is going to be trying to break the transatlantic speed record, and he wants to be in Le Havre to meet the ship. Irene takes the boat, with Paul following going with her to testify at the trial. And when Bruce finds out the truth about Irene's lover, he's perfectly willing to have his ship hit an iceberg!

History Is Made at Night is an interesting movie, although I had a problem with the severe plot hole that accompanies the climax of the movie. After the Titanic sank, rules were changed in order to make certain all transatlantic liners would have sufficient lifeboats for everybody on board. So the idea that anybody would be forced to stay on board for lack of space in the lifeboats is totally wrong. But the rest of the movie is pretty darn good, being an interesting mix of romantic drama, disaster movie, and some noirish elements even though noir wasn't really a concept back in 1937.

Boyer and Arthur make an appealing romantic couple, and Clive, who died much too young not long after this movie, is quite good as the nasty jealous husband. It's one that got a DVD release from Criterion and doesn't show up very often on TCM, so now is a good time to watch it.

Conquest

One of those movies that I had noticed on the TCM schedule several times but never got around to watching was Conquest. So with that in mind, the most recent time it was on the TCM schedule, I finally made a point of getting it on the DVR in order to be able to watch it and do a review here.

The movie starts off with an intertitle stating that the action is set in Eastern Poland in 1807. Now, for those who know your history, you may recall that over the previous roughly 40 years, Poland's neighbors: Prussia, Russia, and Austria-Hungary, had cooperated to take bits and pieces of the country until there was no longer a Poland as an independent entity. Count Walewski (Henry Stephenson) has worked for the last king, but now his estate is in Russian territory, and the Russians come in to commandeer the estate, running the horses into the house. This greatly distresses him and his young wife, the Countess Marie Walewska (Greta Garbo).

However, it's a chaotic political situation as Napoleon (Charles Boyer) has been moving from the west. Soon, the Countess' brother Paul (Leif Erickson) arrives to inform the Walewkis about this. And it's not long before Napoleon does make it as far as the Walewski estate and even is the guest of honor at a party there as he sets up what is a vassal buffer state in the Duchy of Warsaw. But at least the Polish people get to have something of their own for a little while. Anyhow, it's at that party that Napoleon first meets Countess Waleska. The two quickly develop an attraction to each other.

But, there's a problem. Both of them are already married, even if it is a marriage of convenience for both of them: Walewska needed the sort of money and a good name that the Count could provide, while Napoleon needed a wife who could produce him an heir and was from a place that could serve as a political ally on the grander European stage, which is why he married Josephine.

Fast forward a couple of years. Both Napoleon and Waleska are still married to their respective spouses, but they've both been unfaithful. Seemingly happily for Marie, her husband is willing to seek an annulment. And Napoleon, not having been given an heir by Josephine, is planning to get an annulment of his own. So it's with this in mind that Marie heads off to Vienna where Napoleon currently is.

They resume their relationship, and Marie even winds up pregnant with what is presumably Napoleon's child. Sadly for Marie however, she can't really offer anything of political advantage for Napoleon, so he decides to get married to an Austrian princess instead. This is only 1810, which means Napoleon still has the disastrous 1812 invasion of Russia ahead of him, as well as the first exile to Elba, the triumphant return to France, and then Waterloo before finally being sent way too far away to St. Helena. Marie pines for her Napoleon through all of this....

Conquest is the sort of material that may be it bit hokey for some, setting a silly romance against the backdrop of Great Events. But it's all based on real people, and how much of a relationship Walewska had with Napoleon is still a matter of debate. (DNA testing suggested that the real-life Marie may in fact have borne Napoleon's son.) And Conquest was made at MGM, which is exactly the right studio to make a costume drama like this, with all the gloss they could bring to the material. Garbo does a good job as Countess Waleska, but the movie is really Boyer's; after all, Napoleon in a proment place in any movie is going to be the natural focus.

Conquest is a fine example of the MGM magic in action, and definitely a movie worth watching.

Not quite as obnoxious as Athena

Many years back, one of the local TV aired a movie that I only got to see the beginning of; for whatever reason, I never got around to watching the whole thing and TCM hasn't run it often enough for me to be able to catch it there (and indeed, hasn't run it since I upgrated to a service with a DVR). That movie is Barefoot in the Park, and having found it on one of the streaming services (I think PlutoTV), I decided to watch it even with the commercial interruptions.

The movie starts off with the honeymoon of Paul (Robert Redford) and Connie (Jane Fonda) Bratter, a young couple who are so madly in love that they can't be bothered to leave their hotel room. But of course the honeymoon is going to have to end, and in this case it's because Paul has to start his new job as the young lawyer at one of those Manhattan law firms. Connie is apparently still from the era when a wife stops working when she gets married even if she doesn't yet have any children to look after. But it's her job to go find an apartment for the couple to live in, something you think they would have done before getting married and moving to the city. Or maybe she did before they got married and the movie doesn't explicitly mention that.

In any case, Connie probably didn't do enough due diligence in picking a place to live, or else the couple just couldn't afford anything better. One of the reasons she's been able to get something so cheap is because it's on the fifth floor of a walk-up apartment building. No wonder it's so cheap; who the heck would want to keep walking up and down that many flights of stairs. There's also the issue of a hole in the skylight and the fact that the apartment seems ridiculously small, with the bedroom being little more than a closet. Connie is so in love that she can live with it until the couple can get settled in. And she's always been a free spirit, so she likes the sense of adventure.

Paul, on the other hand, is more strait-laced. Having said that, neither of them is a bad person; they're just the sort of people with some personality differences but of the sort that in the real world they'd figure out a way to solve the problems maturely. And Paul would probably move up in the firm quickly enough that it wouldn't be too awfully long before he could afford a better place for the couple. But then we wouldn't have a movie

Somewhat on Paul's side is his mother-in-law, Ethel (Mildred Natwick). Now that Connie's gotten married, Ethel is on her own, and Connie does worry about that, sincerely wanting what's best for her, even if Connie has the same conflict with Mom that she does with her husband. But Connie is about to get an ally in the form of Victor (Charles Boyer). He's a professional adventurer, and keeps the garret apartment above the Bratters' place because it's cheap and he's away a lot. Indeed, he needs to go through the Bratter place to get to his apartment, or so he claims. Seems highly illegal to me. Like Connie, however, he's a decided free spirit, and it's obvious that he's going to be interested in Ethel.

Barefoot in the Park is based on a stage play by Neil Simon, and it's one that's filled with contrived situations written solely for laughs. Fans of Neil Simon will enjoy this stuff, although I have to say that for me it's not quite as good as some of his later work, notably The Odd Couple and Plaza Suite. You know you're going to get a happy ending out of all of it, although the climax leading up to that ending is utterly unnatural and didn't work for me. Even with its flaws, however, Barefoot in the Park is definitely worth a watch.

Heartbreak

I've noticed that I've got a rather higher ratio of more recent movies -- at least if you consider recent as being released after I was born -- on my DVR than older movies. Specifically, I haven't blogged much recently about movies from before 1950. With that in mind, I made a specific point of watching Break of Hearts from Katharine Hepburn's day in Summer Under the Stars to do a post on here.

Hepburn is the female lead, although we don't see her until the second reel or so. The other star is the male lead, orchestra conductor Franz Roberti, played by Charles Boyer. Franz is known to be extremely tough on his musicians, and also for socializing with the sort of high-society woman who atends his concerts. While in New York for a series of concerts, he goes to visit an old friend, Professor Thalma (Jean Hersholt), who teaches music in lives in a rather less glamorous apartment.

Living in the same apartment building is Constance Dane (Katharine Hepburn), who has a love of classical music and has even written a composition for piano that the movie tries to pass off as musical but sounded more contemporary to me. When she stops by to see Thalma, she meets Roberti for the first time.

Constance would love to see one of Roberti's concerts, but when she goes to the box office, she finds that the concerts are all sold out because that's just how popular Roberti is. So she does what any self-respecting lover of classical music would do, which is to sneak in to one of the rehearsals. Roberti is unsurprisingly pissed at first when he discovers Constance in the audience (well, actually, an audience of one). But Constance's explanation is one of those movie tropes that wouldn't work in real life but does in the movies, with Roberti starting a relationship with Constance.

It's a whirlwind romance that leads to the two getting married and going on an extended honeymoon in Europe. They return to New York where Franz will be giving another series of concerts, and the two live happily ever after.

Yeah, right. Constance and a violinist friend, Johnny Lawrence (John Beal) go to have dinner together because Franz is way too busy with rehearsals. Except that he really isn't, as he's seeing another woman, which he was wont to do in his pre-marriage days. Doing it once you've gotten married, however, is much worse, certainly by the standards of 1930s movies.

At this point, the movie really veers into melodrama. Constance obtains a divorce and to support herself, gets a job as an accompanist at one of those Tin Pan Alley publishing companies. Here, she learns that unfortunately she doesn't quite have the talent to be a professional musician. Roberti turns to drink and reaches the point that it's going to derail his conducting career. The only thing that can save him is the love of a good woman like Constance.

It's easy to see from the second half why anybody might have a scathing review of Break of Hearts. Oh my does it become sappy. Boyer and Hepburn both do the best they can with the material they're given, although considering some of the lines Hepburn has, you can be forgiven for thinking the suits at RKO looked at her Oscar-winning performance in Morning Glory and tried to recreate it.

Other people, however, may like this sort of melodrama, in which case they'll probably enjoy Break of Hearts. It's certainly not bad; it just very much fits a certain genre that to me also has the problem of appearing dated. It's definitely not going to be for everybody.

Liliom

Back when Charles Boyer was the TCM Star of the Month, one of the rarities TCM ran was a film he made in France in 1934, Liliom. The TCM Shop has a Kino Video DVD of the movie available for purchase, so I'm comfortable doing a full-length post on it.

Boyer plays Liliom Zadowski, who makes a modest living as a carnival barker getting people to ride the carousel at a French carnival; presumably this was one of those carnivals where you bought tickets for each individual ride since Liliom is going up against the strongman to try to get people to try the various attractions. Liliom is a bit of a ladies' man, which eventually gets him fired wih he's accused of trying to romance one of the young lady riders: the cashier who owns the ride is a woman and she wanted Liliom.

Julie (Madeleine Ozeray) is a good woman working as a maid, until she's found out to be going out with an unemployed carnival barker. She too loses her job, and the two eke out a living sharing accommodations with Julie's aunt. Poor Liliom has lost his manhood, at least in a psychological sense; he's still able to knock poor Julie up. And get in fights with her.

With a child on the way and no money coming in, what's a man to do? One of Liliom's "friends" suggests the perfect crime, which you know means it's something that's going to go wrong. The proposed crime is to rob the guy who's going to be bringing the payroll cash to a local factory; Liliom also gets the unwelcome job of having to stab the guy to death.

Of course, the job goes wrong and Liliom and his partner in crime are caught by the police. Well, not quite so much Liliom. He knows he's going to be caught with no escape, so he decides to take another way out and stab himself to death, leaving Julie even worse off than when he was around.

Liliom is taken up to heaven, where he's shown just what a jerk he was down on earth, so he's going to have to spend a lot of time in purgatory, until he's given a chance to go back to Earth for one day to try to make amends for the things he did wrong while he was alive.

If the story of Liliom sounds familiar, it probably should. It's based on a play by Ferenc Molnár (credited here as Franz which is just the German equivalent of Ferenc), who wrote the play behind The Guardsman, The Swan, and One, Two, Three. Further, Liliom was turned into a musical by Rogers and Hammerstein, Carousel. Fritz Lang directed, having recently fled Nazi Germany and on his way to Hollywood. The result is some beautiful cinematography, especially in the heavenly sequences.

I had a big problem, however, with the fact that it took so darn long for the story to get to the heaven part. The movie is a shade under two hours, and it's not until about 1:20 in that Liliom finally dies. The resolution is much too quick. And in the first half, he's not the sort of person I cared for, but a sort of snotty Jack Carson-type whom I'd just want to smack.

Still, it's easy to see why a lot of people would like Liliom. I just wish the Kino DVD weren't so expensive for them.

Mrs. Of

Another recent watch was The Earrings of Madame de..., which TCM ran during the Star of the Month Salute to Charles Boyer and which is available on DVD courtesy of the Criterion Collection.

Madame Louise de... (played by Danielle Darrieux; the last name is never revealed), is an upper-class housewife in 19th century Paris (the exact time frame is never given) who has an affinity for spending vast sums of money that her general husband André (Charles Boyer) earns. I didn't think generals earned that much, but there you are. Anyhow, Louise has run up a bunch of debts, and doesn't want her husband to know about them. So she makes a deal with the jeweler Rémy that she'll sell a pair of diamond earrings to him to make the money to pay the debt. She then makes of big show of the earrings getting "lost".

Rémy doesn't want to bring any embarrassment to her or her husband, so he discreetly, and unbeknownst to Louise, approaches André to tell him his wife sold him back the earrings, and giving André an opportunity to buy them back. André does, and gives them to his mistress Lola, who only has a brief appearance in the movie. Lola is just as spendthrift as Louise, and promptely loses enough money gambling in Constantinople that she has to sell the earrings. The Italian diplomat Baron Donati (Vittorio De Sica) buys them to use at a later date.

Donati being a diplomat, eventually gets sent to Paris, where he meets Louise, and falls in love with her. The feeling is mutual, because André spends so much time away thanks to his military career. Donati eventually gives the earrings to Louise as a gift, having no idea that Louise already had these earrings in the past. Of course, she doesn't know what happened with the earrings in between.

Louise is at first reluctant to wear the earrings, but then she realizes that she can come up with a lie about finding the earrings after all this time. She, remember, has no clue that André knows she had sold them, and certainly doesn't have any idea that André would be able to figure out that with the earrings having made their way to Constantinople, it would have been Donati who gave them to her. Complications and tragedy ensue.

The Earrings of Madame de... is one of those movies that is often praised as one of the best of all time but that, I have to admit, left me mildly underwhelmed. I think the thing for me was that the movie really started falling flat in the third act, once André realizes that Donati bought the earrings and gave them to Louise. The story up to then is quite good, however.

There are other things I noticed on a cursory first viewing that I hadn't realized the critics mentioned. One would be director Max Ophüls' very fluid camera movement, which is fairly obvious from some of the tracking shots. There was also a dance montage of Louise and Donati at the beginning of their relationship when I couldn't help but think of Alfred Hitchcock and Rope based on the way the cutting has the scene shift from one night out to the next.

The Earrings of Madame de... is a movie that everybody probably ought to watch at least once. I don't know that I'd be interested in getting the DVD to watch again, but I can see why many people would be.

Charles Boyer night

Summer Under the Stars is winding down, but we've still got three more stars. First up is Charles Boyer, that suave bilingual actor who could work in both English and French. Prime time contains a couple of movies I haven't seen in years.

First up, at 8:00 PM, is Algiers. Come with Boyer to the Casbah as he does the English-language version of Pepe Le Moko, about a criminal (Boyer) who hides out in the Casbah district of Algiers; at the time, Algeria was still a French province. Hedy Lamarr goes to the casbah, finds Pepe, and falls in love with him; the police realize they have the opportunity to use her to get Pepe out of the Casbah so they can arrest him. I've long thought that it was movies like this that gave Chuck Jones and the rest of the animation department at Warner Bros. the idea for Pepe le Pew.

Algiers is followed at 9:45 PM by Hold Back the Dawn. Boyer plays a Romanian who would like to enter the US what with the war going on over in Europe. But there's a severe quota system, and that forces Boyer to stay in Mexico with his dance partner (Paulette Goddard) in limbo. That is, until he meets an American schoolteacher (Olivia de Havilland) who has never known love. She falls in love with him, and he sees his chance to marry her, thereby becoming a US citizen. After a suitable time, he can divorce her and marry his dance partner. Except that he actually falls in love with the American. This was a Paramount movie, now controlled by Universal, which is why it doesn't show up very often on TCM.

Sherlock Jr.

I've briefly mentioned the movie Sherlock Jr. in a number of blog posts about the work of Buster Keaton. It's airing on TCM overnight tonight at 1:30 AM as the second film in tnoight's Silent Sunday Nights lineup, so now is a good time for a fuller-length post about the movie.

Buster Keaton stars as the main character, a film projectionist who would really rather be a detective. He's in love with The Girl (Kathryn McGuire), but he's not the only one in love with her, and as a lowly projectionist, there's no way he can compete financially with the wealthier guy (Ward Crane) who wants her affections. Unfortunately, Buster's character is inept at everything: films, love, and detective work. Crane frames Keaton over the theft of McGuire's father's watch, and the chase is on. Keaton eventually winds up on a train, getting off by holding on to the waterspout along the side of the tracks that provided water to trains back in those days. (Unfortunately, in real life, Keaton fractured a vertebra in his neck doing this stunt.)

If Keaton can't be successful in real life, at least he can be successful in his dreams. Back at the movie theater, Keaton sets up the next film to be shown to the audience, and falls asleep while its running. (This ought to be a problem, since projection reels only ran about 20 minutes before they had to be changed.) In his dream, Keaton enters the movie that's being shown, and here he's finally able to be Sherlock, Jr., elegant and solving mysteries while he's at it, avoiding danger along the way.

Sherlock Jr. is a relatively short film, running about 45 minutes. But as with a lot of Keaton's work, it's filled with inventive sight gags and stunts that Keaton himself did, as with the ones on the train I mentioned earlier. TCM ran it a few summers back as part of its Essentials Jr. summer series, and I think they were quite right to do so. Not only is it an excellent film; it's the sort of film that can appeal to younger people with the sight gags, and doesn't run too long. I'd think it's a great way to introduce kids to silent film.

All This and Heaven Too

I mentioned once quite a long time ago that All This, and Heaven Too is one of those films that shows up surprisingly infrequently on TCM. It's got a top-notch cast, stellar production values, and was made at Warner Bros., so TCM should have an easier time with the broadcast rights. But for whatever reason, it doesn't seem to show up quite as often as some of the other prestige films from Warner Bros. That having been said, it's on again tomorrow morning at 9:30 AM, and even though it's got a fairly long running time at 141 minutes, it's worth a watch.

All This, and Heaven Too is actually based on a true story, that of French nobleman Charles de Choiseul-Praslin. Choiseul-Praslin was a duke, played here by Charles Boyer, during the reign of Louis Phillipe in the 1840s. More on the Duke in a bit. The movie actually opens up with Henriette (Bette Davis), playing a teacher at an all girls' school in the US several years after the 1848 revolution that overthrew Louis Phillipe. Her students know that Henriette has a past, and when they ask her about it, she decides to set the record straight....

Flash back to 1840s France. Henriette is the governess to the aforementioned Duc de Choiseul-Praslin. He's married to the Duchesse (Barbara O'Neil) and has four children (obviously, or else there wouldn't be a need for a governess). Although they've got four children, they no longer have a happy marriage. It's a difficult situation for Henriette, but she makes the best of it, treating the children as best she can, and they adore her in return. Unfortunately, this only serves to make the Duchesse angrier and more jealous. Not only does she fear they're loving the governess more than they love her; she fears the same could be said about the Duc. As a result, the Duchesse decides the best course of action would be to fire Henriette, and not give her any letter of recommnedation. The Duc is none too happy about this, and the result is that the Duchesse is killed by his hand. Henriette and the Duc are both accused of complicity in the murder even though Henriette is quite innocent. The real-life Duc poisoned himself, while Henriette made her way to America with the help of Rev. Henry Field (played here by Jeffrey Lynn), whom she wound up marrying. In fact, the original novel All This, and Heaven Too was written by Henriette and Rev. Henry's grandniece.

The movie version is unsurprisingly top-notch, as you would expect from a Warner Bros. period piece made in 1940. The only caveat might be that studio-era period pieces don't have quite the realistic look that more recent period pieces do, but Hollywood couldn't do much about that. Bette Davis is good as usual, and who better to play French than Charles Boyer? I don't know quite how closely the movie follows the actual events, and how much is embellishment just to have a good story. Even with that caveat, any fan of movies form the studio era should love this one. It's gotten a number of DVD releases, too, so you shouldn't have much trouble finding it if you miss it on TCM.

The curtain is a macguffin

After you're finished watching Seven Cities of Gold, switch over to TCM and wait for a little bit. At 12:30 PM you can watch the fun disaster The Cobweb. The movie can be summed up in one sentence: Doctors and patients at a mental hospital spend two hours arguing over new curtains for the library. But there's so much more to this movie.

The thing is, the draperies themselves are really secondary to the plot, or more accurately the intermeshing sub-plots. The fight over the curtains is really just a convenient rod on which to hang all of the characters' other problems. And God knows that the doctors here have just as many problems as the patients. First up is Dr. McIver (Richard Widmark), the new managing director of the institute. He's one of those "modern" 1950s doctors who has ideas that doctors of the past would consider unorthodox. One of those is that the patients should engage in a little art therapy by designing the aforementioned new curtains for the library. This is natuarlly opposed by the previous director, Dr. Devanal (Charles Boyer). Devenal reminds us of Leo G. Carroll's character in Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound, who doesn't like that his job is about to be taken by the man Gregory Peck is impersonating.

That's not the only problem, of course. Dr. McIver is in a loveless marriage to Mrs. McIver (Gloria Grahame) who thinks that the good doctor is neglecting her in favor of his job. On top of that, she's good-looking to the point that when she goes by the hospital, the male patients notice her. In order to try to get her husband to notice her, she, on hearing about the need for new curtains, arranges to purchase expensive curtain material from back east, not realizing how much having the patients design the curtains means to her husband. That's not the only problem between husband and wife. There's also the new lady doctor, Meg Rinehart (Lauren Bacall). She's a widow, having lost her husband and child in a car accident. But she's ready to start loving again. And she sees Dr. McIver having marital problems, and thinks that trying to form an emotional bond with him might be a good thing.

Add to all that one other person wanting a say in the new curtains: Victoria Inch, a parsimonious accountant played by Lillian Gish. She doesn't care much about the new drapes, as long as they're cheap. A mental institution isn't a cheap place to run, and this one needs every penny it can get. So why spend extra on curtains? Who cares about the patients' feelings on the curtains, anyway? On top of this, Victoria has ears, and figures out all that's going on among the various staff members.

There's a good movie somewhere in The Cobweb, but the movie that actually got made isn't quite it. There's so much focus on the curtains that everybody seems over the top, to the point that you wonder whether the patients are the ones who are in need of psychiatric help. But the movie is saved from being terrible by being so over the top. It's the sort of movie you can laugh at how much of a mess it is.

Ernst Lubitsch's dud

I've commented before that I think even the best people in classic Hollywood had at least one dud movie in them. Ernst Lubitsch made some glittering comedies, but then came one that falls rather short: Cluny Brown, which is airing tomorrow afternoon at 1:00 PM ET on the Fox Movie Channel.

Jennifer Jones stars as Cluny Brown. She's the niece of a plumber, and has dreams of being a plumber herself. One day somebody calls needing help, but uncle is away, so she goes over to the house to fix the man's backed up pipes. It turns out that he's well to do with an estate in the country, and takes a liking to her. So he plies her with drinks while hosting his society party. When the uncle finds discovers where Cluny is, he's none too pleased. He figures she needs a real job for a woman, such as a maid, and gets her one at the estate of Peter Lawford.

Peter Lawford is looking after Charles Boyer. That's because Boyer is a Czechoslovak refugee, having been forced out when the Nazis took over. At least, that's what Lawford thinks, and even if it weren't true, Boyer would be happy to let Lawford continue to believe it. Cluny's presence, however, has an effect on everybody around her, even though she's not much as a maid. Cluny has two guys going after her; both Boyer, and the local pharmacist (played by Richard Haydn), who has the mother from hell (Una O'Connor). Lawford, meanwhile, has a woman he's got an eye on, and Cluny gets involved in that relationship. And so it goes for an hour and a half.

I mentioned at the beginning of the post that Ernst Lubitsch made some wonderful comedies, such as Ninotchka and To Be or Not To Be. For whatever reason, Cluny Brown doesn't really compare to those. I'm not quite certain why. A large part of it, though, probably has to do with the "drawing room" comedy nature of the movie. Back at the beginning of the sound era, there were quite a few movies made that were little more than filmed stage plays about higher-class people getting involved in a comedy of errors and romantic involvements behind everybody else's backs. In part because of the production values and in part because of the subject material, I've always found such movies to be a bit of a slog to get through; they wouldn't be the movies I'd recommend if I were trying to recommend an early talkie. Cluny Brown reminds me of those early "drawing room" comedies. It also doesn't help that the plot is all over the place, jumping from point A to point B much like Sylvia Scarlett, with no real logic in how the plot gets there. That's especially true of the ending. One of the few movies I can think of that has such an ending but works is The Palm Beach Story, which is also a bit of a "drawing room" comedy. But that works (in both regards) because the plot as a whole is coherent and well-presented. (Even the ending is hinted at.) Finally, I'm not a huge fan of either Jennifer Jones or Peter Lawford.

Still, Cluny Brown really tries, and Charles Boyer is reasonably well-used. Fans of Ernst Lubitsch will probably enjoy watching the movie. However, they'll have to watch it on the Fox Movie Channel. It's been released to DVD in Europe, but not in the US.

Manhattan Transfer

A remarkable movie that I had never even heard of, until it aired about a month ago on the Fox Movie Channel, is being repeated, as is Fox's wont, at 6:00 AM ET on May 27: Tales of Manhattan. Directed in 1942 by French exile Julien Duvivier, Tales of Manhattan is an anthology movie, telling several stories framed by a formal topcoat, and the several people into whose hands it falls, both figuratively and literally.

As is the case with anthologies, the stories are uneven, with some only good, and others outstanding. The happy side of this, however, is that if you don't like the current story, wait ten minutes, and you'll get another story. A brief synopsis of the seven stories:

1. Charles Boyer is having an affair with Rita Hayworth behind the back of her husband Thomas Mitchell;
2. Henry Fonda helps his friend Cesar Romero by claiming a love letter to Romero is actually for him; Ginger Rogers falls for the ruse and falls for Fonda;
3. Charles Laughton gets the chance to conduct the concerto he wrote;
4. Edward G. Robinson, a disbarred lawyer living at James Gleason's mission, goes to his 25th reunion, where he's discovered by George Sanders;
5. W.C. Fields plays a teetotaler pushing the benefits of coconut milk -- not knowing that Margaret Dumont's husband has spiked it;
6. J. Carroll Naish plays a casino robber;
7. Paul Robeson and Ethel Waters are sharecroppers who share the $41,000 Naish robs with their preacher, Eddie "Rochester" Anderson.

As you can see, Tales of Manhattan has an all-star cast (and I haven't mentioned a few character actors who show up in the framing stories). Perhaps the best of the stories are two in the middle. Charles Laughton's composer is a struggling one; at the opening of his story he's working as a pianist in a jive joint, playing popular music instead of the serious music he'd like to compose. Indeed, every time the boss turns his back, Laughton tries to play the songs with a more classical-styled arrangement. Watching this, along with the extremely expressive faces that Laughton makes in the bar and later, as his big chance seems to go sour, is a joy.

Edward G. Robinson's story is also excellent; he's a disbarred lawyer who needs the topcoat to be able to go to his reunion, and when he gets there, you can see it's clear that he doesn't want to disappoint his classmates by their finding out the truth about him -- despite the machinations of Sanders, who is wonderfully slimy, eight years before Sanders played the similar schemer Addison DeWitt in All About Eve.

The Naish segment might be the weakest of the bunch, in part because it's too short to have much of a story line, and in part due to the lack of star power. Other reviewers suggest that the Henry Fonda/Ginger Rogers love story is a bit weak, too. It's a straight up comedy, something which Fonda didn't do much of during his career. Usually, when he was in a comedy, he tended to play the foil and let others around him be funny, as in Yours, Mine, and Ours. (Yes, I know he was in Preston Sturges' The Lady Eve, but that's an exception.) Fonda isn't that bad, but the humor is often forced, and it's a "comedy of lies" (in that a little white lie leads to bigger and bigger cover-ups that are supposed to be the basis of the humor) that generally rubs me the wrong way.

Some may find the final segment uncomfortable, since it does come close to verging on racial stereotyping, much more so than when Anderson and Waters were together in Cabin in the Sky.

One final note: if you look carefully, you'll see that W.C. Fields isn't in the credits. That's because his sequence had been cut from the movie at one point, only to be added back in in the restored version.

Three-strip Technicolor

Turner Classic movies is airing the love story The Garden of Allah this Tuesday (February 19) at 3:15 AM ET. The story itself is pretty treacly, and worthy of the Lifetime Channel; it might be even more of a "chick flick" than The Great Lie. But there are technical reasons for recommending this movie.

Charles Boyer plays the male lead, a monk in a Catholic monastery in North Africa who happens to be the only person who knows the secret of making a liqueur that his monastery produces. One day, however, the gorgeous Marlene Dietrich visits the monastery, and he, so smitten by her, leaves the monastery so that he can live out in the regular world and marry her. Although the two fall in love, she's a devout Catholic, and eventually discovers that he's the monk who knows how to make that liqueur which is no longer being made, so she feels it's her duty to make him go back to the monastery and take up his vows again....

I told you that this is a retch-inducing storyline. But the movie has a saving grace: it's one of the earliest features to be produced in the more advanced "three-strip" Technicolor process. I'm not an expert on the technical aspects of filmmaking, but if you want a good history of the Technicolor process, you can't do better than to visit the Wide-screen Museum web-site. Basically, however, in the 1920s, the Technicolor company, in its attempt to create color movies, used a process generally called "two-strip" (although this is technically inaccurate). The film stock was run through two filters to produce a color positive, a red filter, and a blue-green filter. The upshot is that most of the reds turned out rather pinkish, while dark greens were relatively accurate, with other shades turning into a somewhat pastel bluish green. Yellow was the one other color that was reproduced with relative accuracy, as yellow is the result of "mixing" equal amounts of red and green light. (Remember that the primary colors of light are red, green, and blue, different from the primary colors of pigment, where yellow replaces green as one of the primary colors; if you look at an old cathode-ray tube TV you'll note that it has narrow red, green, and blue vertical lines that produced the colors.) Two-strip Technicolor wasn't that successful, partly because it wasn't that accurate, and partly because it was expensive, and once talking pictures were introduced, the studios didn't want to spend large sums of money making pictures in color.

In the early 1930s, the Technicolor company started to perfect the process that would become known as "three-strip", with three strands of film being used to create the ultimate positive. This process was first used in Walt Disney animated shorts, and a few one- and two- reelers by the studios, until 1935, when the movie Becky Sharp was released. The color in Becky Sharp wasn't the greatest, with blues, purples, and oranges still not being displayed all that well.

But The Garden of Allah, released one year later, is different. The color is absolutely brilliant, as you can see in this photo of Dietrich. Dietrich was somewhat worried about how Technicolor would make her look, but when she did some screen tests and discovered that it didn't make her look bad, she went ahead with the movie. And it's not just Dietrich who looks lovely on screen; everything does. Boyer looks handsome too, and watch for the shots of the night sky in the desert. The midnight blue is an unbelievably deep blue.

"Three-strip" Technicolor was used until the mid-1950s, when other processes became available which were cheaper and more convenient. See the Reel Classics site for a synopsis. Sadly, however, the newer processes weren't as vibrant as the three-strip Technicolor. Today, of course, it seems standard practice for big-budget blockbusters to use sets that are decked out in a hundred shades of black, and that have denatured faces. Thankfully, though, the dazzling brilliance of three-strip Technicolor can still be seen by watching the great old movies.