The Magnificent Seven

We're halfway through August and up to the day honoring actor Charles Bronson. Surprisingly enough, I'd never actually sat down before and watched The Magnificent Seven end-to-end in one sitting, and certainly never done a post on it before, although I have posted about the Japanese movie of which it is a remake, Seven Samurai. So the last time The Magnificent Seven showed up on TCM, I recorded it in order to be able to do a post in conjunction with a future airing. That airing is tomorrow, August 16, at 12:45 PM.

I assume most people know the basic story, and that a lot of readers here have even seen the movie already. The action is moved from medieval Japan to 19th century Mexico, where a village in the middle of nowhere is being predated upon by bandit leader Calvera (Eli Wallach) and his substantial band of bandits. In this most recent raid, one of the villagers gets shot dead, which is the breaking point. They want to fight back, but they don't even have effective weapons. So they head north to the American border since guns are easier to get in the US, trading some of their few possessions for those guns.

When they get to the border town, they find a stalemate where the locals don't want to bury an Indian in their cemetery, so a couple of gunslingers drive the hearse past them, shooting those who actively resist. Those gunmen are Chris (Yul Brynner) and Vin (Steve McQueen). On hearing from the Mexicans, Chris realizes that the villagers would still be ill-equipped to defend themselves even if they had guns. That, combined with a sense of adventure, leads him to tell the villagers that he'll form a band of American gunslingers who will help the villagers defend themselves, even if the pay won't be good.

Over the next half-hour of the movie or so, we get set pieces introducing the rest of them Chris hires. Harry (Brad Dexter) assumes that Chris is only taking the job because there must be a gold or silver mine near the village, so he wants in; O'Reilly (Charles Bronson) needs the money, as does gambler Lee (Robert Vaughn). There's a knife expert, Britt (James Coburn) as well. Finally, there's the young hothead Chico (Horst Buchholz) who wants to be part of the group, only to not reach Chris' standards. But he's so determined, following the other six through Mexico, that eventually Chris does let him join.

When they reach the village they start to teach the villagers how to fight, even without guns, and prepare for Calvera's eventual return. Along the way, some of them start developing emotional bonds to the villagers, notably O'Reilly, who had a Mexican mother and Irish father. It's all leading up to the return of Calvera and his men for the final showdown.

The Magnificent Seven is a highly entertaining film, and it's easy to see why over the years it has gained a reputation as one of the iconic westerns. It's definitely worth watching if you haven't seen it before.

Well, technically not *my* wife

I was looking through the streaming services recently, and noticed that the Roku Channel's Cinevault Classics channel (which is mostly, if not entirely, the Columbia library) had a new-to-me movie called Our Wife coming up, so I sat down to watch it. Unfortunately, the sub-channels on the Roku Channel don't seem to have schedule listings that go out more than a day in advance, so I don't know when it's going to show up again.

The Drakes -- a college-professor father (Charles Coburn), his adult son Tom (John Hubbard) and adult daughter Susan (Ruth Hussey) are on vacation taking a cruise down to Cuba and nearby Caribbean islands in the days before World War II when Americans could still get to Cuba easily. They meet composer/musician Jerome "Jerry" Marvin (Melvyn Douglas) on board, and then meet him again later on the island, drunk and looking like he's about to miss getting back on the boat. So they do the human thing, which is to look after him enough to get him back on the boat.

Except that they find his cabin is now occupied by someone else. Apparently, Jerry had a one-way ticket and the possibility of a job he was only going to take because he needed the money. Susan keeps trying to come up with a way to get Jerry to take one of the rooms in the suite the Drakes booked; as you might guess, along the way she's going to begin to fall in love with him, although that takes a little while longer than expected. Jerry repays the Drakes by letting them stay in his place in Westchester when they get back to the States.

Jerry, it turns, out, is in the middle of getting a divorce from first wife Babe (Ellen Drew), one of those divorces like in The Awful Truth where the judge has more or less signed off on it but it won't become legal until after a cooling-off period. That period still hasn't passed. And wouldn't you know it, but Babe shows up again, thinking that perhaps there's still a spark left.

Jerry comes up with an idea, which is to have Susan pretend that she and Jerry are engaged, since Jerry's divorce is going to happen anyway, what with it just not being finalized yet. This only serves to make Babe more jealous, and more desirous to win Jerry back. And she sees the perfect opportunity to do so when she suffers a fall on the stairs in Jerry's house, winding up with leg paralysis and having to stay in bed for several weeks. Susan, however, is convinced that Babe is just faking it. And Susan is going to start trying to prove it....

Our Wife is one of those movies from just before World War II (it was released in August 1941) that, had it been made a few years earlier, would have been written as a screwball comedy in the vein of something like The Awful Truth that I mentioned earlier in the post. Columbia may have tried to bill it as a comedy, but it's really more of a light drama than a comedy.

Unfortunately, the main flaw of Our Wife is that it develops slowly, with not a whole lot happening and being way too talky. Reading up on it, the movie was based on an early 1930s play, and the second half of it really belies the stage origins of the material. The material might have worked better on the live stage, and the stars here do the best they can with the material, but the whole time it feels like there's something missing. And then, the movie doesn't know how to resolve the conflict, doing so in a wacky way that I didn't think fit the rest of the movie.

Still, Our Wife isn't terrible, and fans of Melvyn Douglas will find it a mild diversion. I just wish I could point out when the next airing would be to give you all a heads-up.

A Royal Scandal

I mentioned last week that A Royal Scandal is one of the movies that recently got added to the FXM rotation and that a search of this blog claims I haven't done a post on before. So I recorded it and recently watched it, since it's going to be on FXM tomorrow (Nov. 25) at 8:05 AM.

The royalty in question is Catherine II, better known as Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia (played by Tallulah Bankhead). Catherine is, or desires to be, an absolute ruler, mostly because of the situation in Russia that got her onto the throne in the first place. Her husband Peter III had been an unpopular emperor, and their marriage was not a happy one, with both partners taking multiple lovers and Catherine keeping up that process after Peter was overthrown and killed in a coup. But the action in the movie takes place some time after that.

Catherine is worried about the people around her plotting possible coups, such as Gen. Ronsky (Sig Ruman); about the only person she trusts is her chancellor, Nicolai Illytch (Charles Coburn). She's also known for her violent temper, and for treating her ex-lovers at least a little bit better than Elizabeth I of England did in that she lets them live, if at least a retirement in internal exile. She's also so dictatorial that she has no problem making people wait interminably to get an audience with her, such as the French ambassador (Vincent Price essaying a ridiculous accent; if you don't recognize him by sight with the wig you'll still recognize the voice even with the accent).

Into all of this walks Lt. Alexei Chernoff (William Eythe, whom Fox was obviously trying to groom for stardom but for reasons that should be obvious on watching this movie didn't quite make it). He's got information about the parlous state of the Russian army and how there are people plotting against Catherine; to that end he has to sneak into the palace to see the Empress which is dangerous since the Chancellor and Catherine are liable to see him as an intruder which he technically is. It turns out that the information Alexei has is the stuff about Ronsky that Catherine already knows. But Catherine finds Alexei handsome, so she lets him stay, even promoting him because she wants him around as her latest lover.

But there are any number of complications. One of the big ones is that Alexei is already engaged to be married. And, the fiancée is one Anna (Anne Baxter), who just happens to be a lady-in-waiting to Catherine. Meanwhile, there's enough palace intrigue that being the new guy in the place, suddenly elevated above one's station, is going to be dangerous for anybody. Alexei doesn't help matters by letting power go to his head and coming up with all sorts of reform plans. The Chancellor doesn't like the proposals and wants to resign, but Catherine doesn't let him. And if Nicolai has made a minor miscalculation in the palace intrigue, Alexei makes major mistakes.

The opening credits list Ernst Lubitsch as a producer, with directing credits going to Otto Preminger. Therein lies what I think is the big problem with the movie. Lubitsch presumably was going to direct, but he fell ill and couldn't do so after rehearsals. It's the same sort of thing that happened with That Lady in Ermine, except that in the latter case Lubitsch actually died. Still, one gets the sense that Lubitsch would have liked this material to be a lighter comedy, and that this is a genre to which Otto Preminger is wholly unsuited. So the final result is a mismatch of styles and an overall mess.

Having said that, I also think that with the movie having been released toward the end of World War II, it was also a victim of changing societal tastes. The "Lubitsch touch" worked well in the 1930s, but I think it was always going to grow old eventually, with World War II hastening that, much as it hastened the retirements of certain stars (Norma Shearer and especially Greta Garbo come to mind). And then there's Eythe, who I think is too lightweight to fit in this role. I'm not certain what actor would have been best for the role; probably the best person I can think of who would have been contemporary was Gregory Peck fresh off of Fox's Keys of the Kingdom.

A Royal Scandal is, however, still an interesting misfire, if in part just to see how it misfires.

How to be very, very unfunny

Another of the movies that recently started showing up in the FXM rotation is How to Be Very, Very, Popular. It's going to be on again tomorrow at 8:10 AM, so I recently sat down to watch it and do a report on it here.

Stormy Tornado (Betty Grable) and Curly Flagg (Sheree North) are burlesque dancers at a club in San Francisco. One night, at the show, another of the dancers in another act is shot dead by a bald guy. Stormy and Curly, having witnessed the murder and knowing that they will be held against their will as material witnesses, decide that the best thing to do is skip town.

Unfortunately, they don't have very much money, so they're forced to get off in the town of "College City" not too far away, and home to Bristol College. Also unfortunate for them is that they've already been spotted, and the police back in San Francisco, as well as the killer, are going to be making their way to College City fairly soon.

The two women are not just broke, but cold and hungry. And unbeknownst to them, they've wound up right outside one of the men's fraternity dorms. So when they go in to try to get food, they wind up in a place that's not supposed to have any women in it other than house mother Miss Sylvester (Alice Pearce).

And a wacky group of students it is. There's Fillmore Wedgewood (Bob Cummings), a forty-something who has learned that he can keep living off of his grandfather's trust fund as long as he's still studying. Also there's Eddie Jones (Tommy Noonan), who attended a lecture on hypnosis and is trying to hypnotize his friend Toby Marshall (Orson Bean), a former student at the college who was expelled for his poor grades. However, Toby's father B.J. (Fred Clark) is one of the college's wealthiest donors, having spend the past few years attending to business in the Middle East, and doesn't know his son has been expelled, instead expecting to see Toby graduate tomorrow.

One thing that's obvious is that Eddie's hypnosis isn't going to work on Toby, but it will work on somebody else; that somebody just happens to be Curly. Stormy has also gotten in touch with Curly's father (Rhys Williams), who is planning to come get his daughter. He, like Toby's father, is bald, which as you'll already have figured out is going to play into the plot since the murderer is bald.

It all goes on like this for 90 minutes, always being tediously unfunny and cringeworthy. I don't know what audiences in the 1950s saw in Tommy Noonan, since he's been the obnoxious half of his comedy team with Peter Marshal in everything I've seen him in. Even though Cummings is supposed to be playing an overage student, he looks way too old even for that. Ditto Betty Grable, who is in her final movie. Apparently, the role Sheree North took was originally conceived for Marilyn Monroe, which is why North looks and sounds the way she does.

The only positive thing about the showing is that FXM left the movie in the original Cinemascope aspect ratio. But simply having widescreen is never going to be enough to overcome a myriad of flaws.

Don't look for Elton John or Kim Jong-Un

A new-to-me movie started showing up in the FXM rotation a month or two back: The Rocket Man. I see that it's going to be on FXM again tomorrow at 11:55 AM, so I watched it to do a post on here.

Timmy (George "Foghorn" Winslow) is a boy living at an orphanage that apparently has a TV that put all the boys in front of, because TV character Captain Talray shows up to do an appearance and everybody wants to see him. Timmy is last in line to receive one of the free gifts, but somehow a space gun that wasn't in the bin of gifts before magically shows up and Timmy is about to get what he's always wanted.

Timmy is about to get something else, which is a chance at a home. Local Justice of the Peace Amelia Brown (Spring Byington) is a widow living with her adult unmarried daughter June (Anne Francis) and is looking for a child to foster, eventually picking Timmy. Brown also tries to rehabilitate non-violent criminals by giving them a home during the beginning of their parole, and is also being pursued romantically by the town's mayor, Ed Johnson (Charles Coburn).

Meanwhile, local political fixer Big Bill Watkins (Emory Parnell) is about to come to town in advance of the upcoming election. He picks up a DWI, but a judge lets him off lightly because of his political clout. One of his underlings, Tom Baxter (John Agar) shows up at the bus station, and June, who is there to pick up the parolee, thinks that this is the parolee. Tom goes along with it because of June's good looks. Mayor Johnson picks up the real guy who is only a plot device to introduce the mix-up involvoing Tom.

Tom is actually there to put in a bid on the property on which the orphanage sits, because the lease is up and oil has been discovered there. This would send all the kids to the state orphanage, which would be a disaster, and Amelia tries to raise the money to outbid Tom.

As for Timmy, that space gun he got actually has magical powers, which makes those shot with its rays tell the truth, as he learns in a dream in which he sees Talray again. But he's only supposed to use this power for good. Amazingly, he does, and you can probably figure out where here's going to use it.

The Rocket Man is a decided B movie, as you can tell right from the beginning and the "Panoramic Productions" title card. The material is silly and the ending is abrupt, but despite all the problems it has, this one is ultimately watchable thanks to the presence of Coburn and Byington. That, and the fact you know that it's a B movie going in, unlike Never Say Goodbye, so one goes in with lower expectations. Id you want something with a predictably happy ending, you could do worse than The Rocket Man; it's no worse than episodic TV of the era.

Road to Singapore (1940)

Some time back, after buying a box set of the movies of William Powell at Warner Bros., I did a post on an early Powell movie called The Road to Singapore. Of course, there's a much more famous movie with the title Road to Singapore, which is on the Bob Hope box set that I picked up a year or so ago. Recently, I put that DVD in the player and watched the movie.

Bing Crosby and Bob Hope play Josh Mallon and Ace Hannigan respectively. At the start of the movie they're sailors getting back to San Francisco from a voyage. Some strangers come in and approach Ace, asking him about a woman named Cherry. We never meet Cherry, but apparently something happened that caused her to think that confirmed bachelor Ace was going to marry her. So he and Josh start a diversion to escape.

Josh is a confirmed bachelor too, but he's got a bigger problem. He's actually Josh Mallon V, the son of Joshua Mallon IV (Charles Coburn). Joshua IV is the head of the Mallon shipping lines, and it seems (not stated in the movie) that he has the policy of putting his son in the grunt work to learn how the whole business works, before Joshua V takes over. Joshua is also supposed to get married to Gloria Wycott (Judith Barrett), but he has no desire to do this.

After Joshua's engagment party goes bad, he and Ace decide that the best thing to do is to escape the United States. So they hope on a boat and head across the Pacific Ocean, presumably for Singapore as the title says. But they don't make it that far, instead getting off on the island of Kaigun somewhere south of Indonesia.

There, the two meet Mima (Dorothy Lamour), who immediately moves in with them as some sort of housekeeper, in order to get away from her brutal would-be boyfriend Caesar (a young Anthony Quinn); together the two had been doing a nightclub act. Both Ace and Josh pretty quickly fall in love with Mima, although as you can guess there are going to be all sorts of complications along the way.

This is the first of the "Road" movies, and it doesn't seem as though the producers at Paramount had expected this movie to be successful and spawn the entire "Road" series as there's none of the breaking of the fourth wall here that there is in later movies. The movie still works quite well, however, as Hope and Crosby have excellent chemistry together, with Lamour being the very appealing woman for them to have a not-quite rivalry over.

If there was a flaw for me, it was the amount of musical numbers, which seemed quite high. I'm not the biggest fan of Bing Crosby's singing, but I'm sure that other people who like that sort of vocal styling won't mind the musical numbers. There was also a plot hole for me based on Ace's not having a passport. One wonders where he was sailing to be away for months but not be out of the United States.

Still, if you haven't seen any of the "Road" movies, Road to Singapore being the first isn't a bad place to start.

The Years of Color

One of the movies that I hadn't seen before this years 31 Days of Oscar is The Green Years. It's going to be on TCM tomorrow at 1:45 PM, and fortunately, I had it on the DVR to watch and do a review here.

Robert Shannon (played by Dean Stockwell as a child) is a young boy circa 1900 whose mother moved to Ireland to get married, but she and her husband have both died, leaving poor Robert an orphan. His family is mostly living in Loganford, Scotland, so the people who took care of Mom at the end of her life ship Robert off to that family.

The patriarch of the family is Papa Leckie (Hume Cronyn), Robert's maternal grandfather, married to Mama Leckie (Selena Royle), even though there are two great-grandparents around, known as Grandma Leckie (Gladys Cooper) and Grandpa Gow (Charles Coburn). There are also a couple of adult children who are Robert's aunt and uncles, but they mostly move out, having grown up, only to return now and then.

There are all sorts of conflicts right off the bat. Papa Leckie works for Loganford's sewer department, hoping to get a promotion when his boss leaves. Meanwhile, he's a severe penny pincher, to the point that it annoys everybody else in the house. Papa is more or less waiting for his father-in-law to die so he can get his hands on that sweet sweet insurance money. Grandpa Gow is also disliked intensely by Grandma Leckie, since Gow is a bon vivant and inveterate teller of tall tales who also has a taste for the drink.

Robert's entrance into the family also means that there's another mouth to feed. He shows quite a bit of aptitude at school, to the point that Papa will consistently point out later that he made a big sacrifice by not pulling Robert out of the Academy at the legal school-leaving age but letting him go on to graduate. Also complicating things is that he's Catholic, his Mom having converted while the family back in Scotland having remained whichever Protestant denomination they were.

So that's more or less the first half of the movie. The second half opens after several years have passed and Robert is about to graduate from the Academy. He's grown up and Dean Stockwell is obviously too young to play the ~18-year-old Robert, so he's now played by Tom Drake. He's got a best friend who's relatively well-to-do and can go off to university, and a girlfriend who's got a good enough singing voice that she might have a shot at a scholarship to the conservatory. As for Robert, he's in line to take the examination to get a scholarship to go to university with the aim of studying medicine and become a doctor. But there's a catch: Papa Leckie is going to have to sign off on it, and dammit, he only sees Robert as a source of revenue, so it's off to the local boiler factory for Robert, Papa having no qualms about crushing his grandson's dreams.

Thankfully, despite being three generations older than Robert and having had a lifetime of heavy drinking, Gow still hasn't dropped dead. He's the one member of the family who has always been kind to Robert (well, Mama Leckie has generally been on his side too), and even at this advanced age he's going to do all he can to try to fulfill Robert's dream, because, after all, a mind is a terrible thing to waste.

The Green Years is the sort of movie that MGM was good at making, and the polish that MGM could put on a movie like this really shines through. Now, a lot of it is probably nonsense; Coburn has a truly awful beard and I don't know that any two characters have the same Scottish accent. But, minus a couple of musical numbers since the studio was trying to promote Beverly Tyler, it's amiable enough. It runs a bit long at just over two hours, though, so be warned.

The Green Years did get a DVD release courtesy of the Warner Archive Collection, but the TCM Shop has it on backorder, while Amazon has it listed as avaialble to buy from a bunch of non-Amazon sellers. Make of that what you will.

You still gotta stay happy

Back when Olivia de Havilland died, TCM replaced a day in Summer Under the Stars with a day of her movies, which gave me the chance to DVR a couple that I hadn't seen before. One of those, Princess O'Rourke, is on again tomorrow at 12:15 PM, so I sat down to watch it and do a post on it here.

Olivia, as you can guess, does play the princess, but her name isn't O'Rourke. She's Princess Maria, who at the start of the movie is the princess of some unnamed central European country that's been overrun by the Nazis, the movie having been released in 1943. The royal family has been forced to flee, with Dad in exile in London and Princess Maria, together with a secretary and an uncle, Holman (Charles Coburn), holed up at a hotel in New York (I'm guessing they don't control the embassy in Washington).

Maria is bored in New York, and has a count she doesn't care for pursuing her because the royal family needs a suitable marriage. Holman decides that the best thing to do would be to send Maria out west, since the royal family has some friends in California who have a ranch. It would be a nice change of pace for Maria, as well as a way to get her out of the spotlight for her own safety should the need arise.

The only problem is that she's going to have to fly out to California, something that she's rather afraid of doing. Holman and the secretary come up with the brillian idea of giving her a sleeping pill before the flight, so that she'll sleep through the flight (a redeye with train-like sleepers) and wake up in California refreshed.

But it doesn't work out like that. Maria can't sleep, so first she asks the stewardess for a sleeping pill. She still can't sleep, so now it's the turn of co-pilot Dave Campbell (Jack Carson) to give her a pill. When that still doesn't seem to work, she asks the pilot, Eddie O'Rourke (aha! there's the O'Rourke, played by Robert Cummings), for a pill, and he gives her two.

The pills eventually do the trick, and perhaps Holman should have told her in the first place that it wasn't going to be instantaneous. But taking five of them really knocks Maria out, to the point that when the plane hits fog and has to turn back to New York, she doesn't realize the plane has landed, and can't wake up. And when she finally does, it's left her with a cloudy brain such that she can't remember where she's staying.

So O'Rourke puts her up at his place for the night, since Dave has a wife in Jean (Jane Wyman) and Eddie has the room, although Eddie asks Jean over to change Maria into something more appropriate for sleeping.

You can probably guess more or less what happens next. Maria likes this way of being incognito, so after she leaves Eddie's place, she escapes the hotel to go see him again. He wants to see her, anyway, not realizing she's a princess, and so begins a beautiful love relationship.

Well, that's how it begins, but it's going to take some twists and turns before it gets to the end. The big one, of course, is what's going to happen when Eddie finds out that Maria is in fact a princess. Perhaps thankfully for him, he comes from a long line of sons, leading Holman to believe that he's likely to produce a son for the royal family, which after all is the chief duty of a Prince Consort. But is Eddie going to want the sort of life that a Prince Consort has to live? And is Maria going to want that sort of life for Eddie?

For unsurprising reasons, Princess O'Rourke made me think of You Gotta Stay Happy, which I blogged about not too long ago. Both are about a pilot falling in love with a rich woman, and they have the sisters Olivia de Havilland and Joan Fontaine. But of course there are a lot of differences, with the big one here being that Princess O'Rourke has the heavy hand of World War II hanging over it. Well, maybe not heavy in that it doesn't do anything to harm the movie; just that it gives the movie a completely different tone. It mostly works for Princess O'Rourke, and while it's certainly not the greatest movie in the careers of any of the main stars, there's nothing notably wrong with it.

If you want a change of pace from Olivia de Havilland, you could do a lot worse than to watch Princess O'Rourke.

Charles Coburn makes anything worth a watch

I think I've mentioned on multiple occasions in the past my belief that early sound era actor George Arliss could take any sort of trifling material given him and make it worth watching based pretty much on his performance alone. A later actor who has a similar effect on me is Charles Coburn. Coburn's watchability is very much on display in Unexpected Uncle.

Anne Shirley plays Kathleen Brown, a shop girl at some sort of hoity-toity shop in Palm Beach, FL, where all the rich people go for the winter. One of those wealthy people is Johnny Kerrigan (James Craig), who tried flirting with Kathleen while she was on the job, something which got her fired. Passing by is Seton Mansley (Charles Coburn). He hears Kathleen's sob story and marches her straight back into the store to see the manager, telling the manager that he's a big shareholder in the store and the manager will never hear the end of it if Kathleen, his niece isn't rehired. The gambit works.

Seton then tells Kathleen that if she needs him again, she can find him at the Seminole Trailer Park, these being the days when the trailers were still mobile as in The Long, Long, Trailer and not like the latter-day stereotype of a trailer park. But still, it's a sign that Seton is likely not what he was claiming to be back in the store. He's probably living off his savings, whatever they are, as well as making some extra money betting on horseshoes, at which he is a whiz (and which is some foreshadowing that horseshoes are going to come into play as a plot point later in the movie).

Sure enough, Kathleen comes looking for Seton when Johnny invites her out to dinner. "Uncle" Seton comes along, meeting some of Johnny's rich friends, including his former fiancée Carol (Renee Haal). Although she and Johnny are still friends, Carol broke off the engagement because every time push came to shove, Johnny was more married to his business than he could ever be to any woman. Carol warns Kathleen that the same is going to happen to her if she gets into a relationship with Johnny.

But Kathleen is in love. Johnny has come down to Palm Beach to try to get away from that business up north, even drinking himself into a stupor and getting into a DUI crash. Kathleen tries to extricate him from the situation, but it blows up B-movie style into an alleged kidnapping, with Johnny, Kathleen, "Uncle" Seton, and Carol attempting to resolve matters. Johnny has been called home on business, but Seton's smart enough to get himself and Kathleen on Johnny's plane, where Johnny proposes to Kathleen!

So when they get back to Johnny's palatial home, they're married, which is a big deal. But it also turns out that Carol knew what she was talking about, and Johnny, now home again, shows just how much more he cares about his business than any woman. Can Kathleen make Johnny love her? Can he balance his interests like a normal businessman? With Seton there, I think you can figure out the answer.

Unexpected Uncle runs about 67 minutes, so there's not a whole lot here in terms of plot. It's pretty easy to figure out where things are going to go, and when those horseshoes are going to come back into play. But it turns out to be an appealing little B movie, mostly because Coburn brings so much energy to the proceedings that you just can't help but like the characters, even Johnny, who like James Stewart's stuffy family in You Can't Take It With You, just needs to learn how to relax. The movie's theme that it's either work or pleasure and that ultimately you can't balance both, doesn't quite ring true, but the movie as a whole works for what it is, which is a B movie that never had any pretentions of being remembered 80 years later.

Unexpected Uncle was released by RKO; as such it wound up in the library of films to which Ted Turner acquired the rights and which form the backbone of the Warner Archive collection. Unexpected Uncle is one of the many movies that has gotten a DVD release this way.

B.F.'s Daughter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not-so-delightful idiots

In July's TCM spotlight of movies from the year 1939, one of the movies they ran that I hadn't blogged about before is Idiot's Delight. So I decided to DVR it and sat down to watch it so I could do a post on it here.

The movie starts off with the end of World War I and soldiers returning home. Among those soldiers is Harry Van (Clark Gable), who had been working in vaudeville before the war. The war has changed things, and he's constantly bouncing from gig to gig, eventually winding up as the straight guy to phony psychic Madame Zuleika (Laura Hope Crews). One night in Omaha she gets drunk and the show goes south. Irene Fellara (Norma Shearer), an acrobat with a different act, figures out what's going on and after the show tells Harry that she wants to learn the secret of the act and be the psychic. Harry says no, and the two eventually go their separate ways.

Fast forward to 1939. Harry has continued to work a series of gigs, with his current one being the front man for a group of chorus girls called Les Blondes. They've been performing all over the place, and are now in the Balkans, returning back to western Europe. But the political situation in Europe is unstable; as we know World War II in Europe would begin in September of 1939. (The movie was actually released in 1939 and is based on a play that hit Broadway back in 1936.) So when the train gets to what would be roughly Slovenia in modern geography if it had been an independent country at the time, they're forced to stop because the borders are temporarily closed.

Harry, Les Blondes, and a bunch of other passengers are forced to wait in an Alpine resort hotel while the uncertain situation resolves itself. Among the passengers are the scientist Dr. Waldersee (Charles Coburn), who is doing cancer research on his rats; the newlyweds Mr. and Mrs. Cherry; pacifist Quillery (Burgess Meredith) who used to work in the arms industry; and Achille Weber (Edward Arnold), a titan of the armaments industry who has as his companion Russian exile Princess Irene [sic -- in Russian it would be spelled Irina]. Harry sees Irene, a platinum blonde, and realizes she's a dead ringer for the Irene he knew back in Omaha.

Harry tries to figure out whether Princess Irene is the same woman he had met all those years ago, while some of the other people have their own dramas of greater or lesser importance played out. Weber tries to send a bunch of telegrams, while Quillery eventually goes nuts and breaks up a performance of Les Blondes screaming about the upcoming war, not caring what the authorities are going to do to him.

Eventually, the border is reopened -- but Irene's passport is not in order. She had what was probably a Nansen passport, since her real birth location wasn't known and even if she were Russian she would likely not have been able to bring her passport with her when she escaped and it would have expired anyway. The problem with being forced to remain is that at the bottom of the hill where the hotel is, there's an air base where some of this country's air force has its planes. And they might well have started the war by carrying out an air raid.

I have to admit that I found Idiot's Delight to be a curious misfire. There's a whole lot of nothing going on for much of the movie, and frankly there's not much reason to care about any of the characters besides Harry and Irene. Irene in particular is irritating in the second half of the movie.

But there's also quite a bit interesting. One thing is that the fictional country where everybody is stranded uses Esperanto. (Apparently the original play used Italian and Italy objected when the movie was being made. And since they were still a market for Hollywood movies....) Another interesting thing was that Les Blondes (and Harry) perform Irving Berlin's "Puttin' on the Ritz", which still has the original lyrics about the hired help going back to Harlem on their night off and voguing. I was surprised to see an Irving Berlin song used like this, since I thought by this point he wanted complete control over how his music was being used, hence the whole creation of the movie Alexander's Ragtime Band.

The final thing of note is that MGM created two endings, one for Europe and one for the US. When TCM ran it, they showed the European ending. But after the closing titles, the print has a card pointing out there were two endings, and proceeds to show the American ending.

Idiot's Delight is available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive, if you want to watch it and judge for yourself.

Impact

Another movie I recently watched to try to make some space on the DVR is Impact.

The movie starts off a bit less than promisingly, with some dopey narration defining the title of the movie for us: "Impact, the force with which two lives come together. Sometimes for good, sometimes for evil." We then meet Walter Williams (Brian Donlevy). He's a businessman in San Francisco who's been doing well for his company buying up factories. He's got a wife Irene (Helen Walker) with whom he's planning on going away for a bit. But we soon learn that things aren't quite as good as they seem. Irene is feigning illness, because she'd really rather be spending more time with the man with whom she's having an affair, Jim Torrence!

Anyhow, Walter drives off on one of his business trips that's supposed to end with him picking up Irene. But at the appointed spot, who meets him but Jim, who claims to be one of Irene's cousins that Walter has never met, and since Jim is heading the same way as Walter, perhaps he could drive Jim part of the way. This, as you can probably guess, is a ruse, especially when we see Jim releasing some of the air from one of the tires. Jim's plan, which Irene is in on, is to kill Walter when he stops the car to change the tire!

The two men get out to change the tire, and Jim hits Walter with a crowbar, pushing him down a hill, and then getting in the car and driving off. But Jim isn't careful enough, and crashes into an oil tanker, causing a fiery crash that kills him. Everybody naturally believes when the crash is found that Walter has died, because why would anybody suspect anything else?

Walter, however, hasn't died, but just got concussed. When he comes to, he hops on the back of a moving van, eventually ending up in the small town of Larkspur, ID. When he finds out about the car crash that everybody believes killed him, he feigns amnesia while trying to figure out what to do next. (Amazingly, nobody recognizes him despite his face having been in the newspaper.) He becomes a mechanic for service station owner Marsha (Ella Raines), and the two fall in love despite the fact that Walter can't follow through since he's still married.

Eventually, Marsha convinces Walter to deal with the secrets he's hiding, so he goes to San Francisco and reveals he's still alive. But Irene has a trick up her sleeve, suggesting that Walter had gotten in an argument with her, leading authorities to believe that perhaps Walter had planned to kill Irene and Jim. Amazingly, it's Walter who's going to have to stand trial.

Impact is a pretty good movie, despite the fact that I couldn't help but think there were a lot of plot holes. In addition to nobody recognizing Walter, parts of the trial seemed rather unrealistic. But suspend your disbelief and there's a farily entertaining movie. Donlevy in particular does well, as this is mostly his story. The two women are also good, Walker as the villainess and Raines as the good girl. The movie runs a bit longer than it probably should at 111 minutes; if the script could have been tighter we'd probably have an even better picture.

Impact is available on DVD should you want to watch.

Made for Each Other (1939)

A few weeks back I mentioned the 1971 movie Made for Each Other, and how it shares a title with, but is unrelated to, the 1939 movie Made for Each Other. TCM ran the 1939 movie not long after, and it's available on DVD and Blu-ray, so I DVRed it and watched it.

James Stewart plays John Mason, a lawyer for a big New York firm. He had to go to Boston to get a deposition, and while there, he met Jane (Carole Lombard). It was love at first sight, as they got married during his business trip and John returns to the office to everybody's surprised well wishes. Not everybody is so certain the marriage is going to work however, among them John's boss Judge Doolittle (Charles Coburn) and John's mother (Lucile Watson).

Still, the newlyweds try to make a go of it despite the obstacles and hardships they're going to face. A lot of them center on money, as John is only earning enough for the couple to scrape by rather than to live in the upper-middle class lifestyle Jane thinks a New York lawyer should be living. They have a dinner party that goes wrong; John loses out on a promotion to partner at the firm; and Jane keeps pestering John to put the marriage ahead of work by getting a continuance so that they can take a honeymoon.

And then the two have a kid, which puts even more of a financial strain on the marriage. If that's not bad enough, the movie veers way off into melodrama when the kid gets sick....

By the time the infant child got sick, I found myself thinking of two other movies, Penny Serenade and Mildred Pierce, the latter because the kid has pneumonia and is in an oxygen tent. When they showed that, I was actually hoping the kid would die (as in Mildred Pierce) so that we'd get the same obstacles for the married couple as in Penny Serenade. Instead, we get a climax of trying to get serum across the country through a snowstorm, which frankly left my eyes rolling.

Carole Lombard is best known for all those screwball comedies she made, but in Made for Each Other she shows that she really was a talented actress who could do more than just comedy, as there is very little comedy here. The supporting cast also does a good job, including Louise Beavers in yet another maid role. The problem is that they're all saddled with a sappy script.

Overall, I think I'd marginally recommend Made for Each Other for people to see Lombard's against-type performance. But in that case, I'd also recommend Penny Serenade more heartily for Cary Grant's against-type performance.

In This Our Life

I mentioned last week that I apparently haven't done a full-length post on In This Our Life before. It's coming on tonight at 8:00 PM as part of the salute to Star of the Month Olivia de Haviland, and it's worth a watch.

Bette Davis stars as Stanley Timblerlake, sister of Roy (that's de Havilland); both are nieces of Uncle William (Charles Coburn). Stanley is engaged to Craig (George Brent), while Roy is already married to Peter (Dennis Morgan). But Stanley decides she'd rather have Peter, so she schemes to get him, and then runs off to the big city with him! Once Peter's divorce from Roy is finalized, he and Stanley get married, but Stanley continues to be a controlling blankety-blank. In fact, she's so controlling that poor Peter decides the only way out of this marriage is to kil himself! Meow.

So Stanley comes back to her old home town. By now, Roy is doing well for herself by having fallen in love with Craig; after all they were both screwed over by Stanley. Craig is a prosperous lawyer, helping out young black clerk Parry (Ernest Anderson), who has dreams of going on to law school to become an attorney. (Pretty daring stuff for a 1940s film, to be honest.) Not that Stanley is any more racist than the rest of American society; she's just a selfish controlling you-know-what. So one night Stanley has a little too much to drink, and gets into an accident. What's the easiest thing to do? Why, blame it on the young black kid!

All along the way Stanley has been enabled by her uncle William, as the family was wealthy and Stanley was more like her mother (William's sister). But this time when she tries to get help from William, there's a plot twist, that allows Bette Davis to have one of her better screen rants.

Supposedly Bette Davis didn't think much of In This Our Life, but I think that's quite unfair. Sure, it's a melodrama, but it's a really fun melodrama, and one that gives Davis a chance to strut her stuff in spades. It's only natural that she takes the chance and runs with it. Everybody else does well, although George Brent and especially Dennis Morgan don't have much to do. This one is Davis' picture all the way.

In This Our Life doesn't seem to be in print on DVD.

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is airing on TCM tonight at 8:00 PM as part of a night of movies starring Jane Russell. According to a search of the blog, I've never done a full-length post on it before, so now might be a good time to do it. I've said before that I'm not the biggest fan of musicals, but this is one where the plot is good enough to make the movie worth watchign. That, and it's actually got one or two interesting musical numbers.

Marilyn Monroe stars as Lorelei Lee, a nightclub singer who's engaged to Gus Esmond Jr. (Tommy Noonan). Lorelei is the sort of person who wants the finer things in life, and so has wanted to marry a rich guy like Gus. Gus' father, however, isn't so sure that it would be a good thing for his son to marry a chorus girl. So when Gus Jr. sends Lorelei and her best friend Dorothy Shaw (that's Jane Russell) to Paris on a transatlantic liner with a letter of credit, Dad hires the private detective Ernie Malone (Elliott Reed) to get the dirt on Lorelei. Dorothy, for her part, is there to try to prevent any dirt from happening.

The results are somewhat predictable. Needless to say there are a whole bunch of people on board interested in Lorelei and Dorothy. They're really more interested in Lorelei because Dorothy is more open about her desire for a millionaire: she wants one she can love first. Lorelei doesn't necessarily want to hurt men; she just wants those diamonds. So a whole bunch of people wind up portrayed as potentially upsetting Lorelei's relationship with Gus, chief among them being "Piggy", real name Sir Francis Beekman (Charles Coburn). He's got diamonds, but they're on a wife. The other predictable part is that Ernie the detective falls in love with Dorothy along the way to Paris, which is definitely going to complicate matters.

The ocean liner eventually makes it to Paris, and Gus Jr. has heard about what's gone on on the boat, so he's cancelled the letter of credit, leaving our two singers stranded without cash or a job. The job is easy to get, and as for the cash, there are still a bunch of millionaires around. But Gus shows up to try to reconcile with Lorelei, and Lady Beekman's jewels go missing with Lorelei and Dorothy being among the subjects....

As I said, the plot of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is predictable and nothing groundbreaking. But Jane Russell and Marilyn Monroe are both quite entertaining in their portrayals of the two singers, making the movie entertaining if it were just a romantic comedy. It's a musical, though, and there are a couple of numbers of note. Everybody connects Gentlemen Prefer Blondes with Monroe's performance of the song "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend", which she does in a very pink scene. But there's another song to look out for, which Russell gets early on in the film. In "Anyone Here For Love?", Russell performs among the men of the US Olympic Team, who are on the ship on their way to the games. It's only the men, and I don't think any of them is wearing more than a pair of those skimpy shorts that people wore to do sports back in those days. No wonder there's a stereotype of musical theater being a haven for gay men.

The TCM Shop only seems to list one pricy, but big (15 films) box set available for purchase, while Amazon lists several DVD releases that all seem to be out of print.

Pair it with Under 18

I don't think I've ever mentioned the movie Over 21 before. It's airing tomorrow afternoon at 1:00 PM and is worth a viewing.

First, about the title. There's nothing risqué or even particularly adult about it; it's just a reference to a line one of the characters has about the humban brain not being able to absorb new knowledge when you're "over 21". That new knowledge comes in the form of the US Army's Officer Training School. Over 21, you see, is a World War II movie. The officer-in-training is Max Wharton, played by Alexander Knox. His day job is as a newspaper editor, but he realizes that his editorials about the war will be meaningless unless he can actually experience some of the real thing, he is why he enrolls in OTS. This presents problems for a couple of people. One is his wife Polly (Irene Dunne). She's got a day job as a novelist-turned-screenwriter, but she loves her husband and plans to follow him to the base if at all possible. The other person with a big problem is Max's boss, publisher Robert Gow (Charles Coburn). Max is the one person who can edit the paper well, and if Max is going to leave, well, he'd better sell the paper.

Polly gets a brilliant idea. She wants her husband to be able to dedicate all his time and energy to passing the officer's exams, but also wants him to be able to keep his job. So she decides to write his editorials for him, using his name as the byline and not telling either Max or Mr. Gow. They say honesty is the best policy, so you know that Polly's keeping this a secret is going to cause a problem eventually. But she's got other problems of her own. As a famous novelist in the big city, she was used to a much more glamorous life than that of an army officer's wife. To make matters worse, her accommodations are a crappy bungalow where the appliances doesn't work. And, like Barbara Stanwyck's character in Christmas in Connecticut, Polly isn't much use around the house.

Over 21 is based on a play written by Ruth Gordon, who is responsible for several screenplays to classic films, including Adam's Rib. She based the play on her own experience from when her husband Garson Kanin entered the military during World War II. I don't know quite how accurate the movie is, since I wasn't around for World War II. That having been said, it's intelligent at times, as well as entertaining. Like Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious, I would think of it as the sort of movie that doesn't exactly contain material objectionable for children, but one which isn't suitable for children just because I think they'd find it boring. The movie is also available on DVD.

Vivacious Lady

TCM is showing the movie Vivacious Lady this evening at 10:00 PM, and I don't believe that I have ever blogged about it before. Despite the fact that it has two fairly substantial stars in James Stewart and Ginger Rogers, it's one that's relatively little-seen. To be fair, Stewart wasn't quite yet the big star he was to become; Vivacious Lady was released in 1938 and it was movies like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington a year later that made him a much bigger star. But Rogers was already quite big.

But enough of that, and on to the plot. Stewart plays Peter Morgan, Jr., a professor at a college in some unnamed middle American city where his father (Charles Coburn) is the president. The good professor starts off the film in the big city on a trip with his cousin Keith (James Ellison), who is rather the playboy, and obviously not the family member of which the rest of the family would be proud. In fact, we first meet Keith in a nightclub, where he's enjoying the singer (Ginger Rogers) despite the fact that staying at the club is going to make him miss his train home. It's Peter Jr.'s job to fetch Keith and bring him home, but Peter himself gets waylaid... by that singer. That singer, of course, is Ginger Rogers, playing a character named Francey. When Peter sees Francey, it's love at first sight, and the two get a quickie marriage before taking the train home.

This, unsurprisingly, causes serious problems. First, Dad is bound not to approve of the marriage. Could you imagine a college professor getting married to a nightclub singer? (Sure, in a Hollywood movie.) The trustees are certain not to like the idea either. So at first Peter Jr. keeps the marriage a secret, putting Francey up in a women-only apartment house while he works up the courage to tell Dad the truth. Dad isn't the only person who needs to learn the uncomfortable truth: Peter Jr. was engaged to Helen (Frances Mercer) before going off to pick up his cousin. Mom (Beulah Bondi) would be more accepting, but unfortunately she, like her son, has been too cowed by Dad to stand up to him.

Now, Vivacious Lady is a comedy, so all of this is handled very lightly. And it's quite an enjoyable little comedy, too. It doesn't seem to be trying to anything too big; we just have a bunch of professional actors going about their jobs and doing a darn good job of it.

Trouble Along the Way

I briefly mentioned Trouble Along the Way when Donna Reed was Star of the Month last May. It's airing again on TCM, tonight at around 11:15 PM ET. (Note: TCM's schedule lists Rififi as starting at 9:15 PM, or at least after the employee Guest Programmer introduction; Rififi has a running time of 122 minutes. So the times are off somewhere.)

Charles Coburn plays Fr. Burke, the head of a Catholic school that's always done things in the old way, but as a result is struggling financially, to the point where the diocese has decided it's going to shut the college down unless a way can be found to raise revenues. He sees that Notre Dame is successful and has a money-making football program, so he figures that maybe he can start a football program of his own. Bring in coach Steve Williams (John Wayne). Williams has problems of his own. He's been out of college football for years due to his scandalous behavior, and that behavior has also led to his getting divorced by his ex-wife (Marie Windsor), who is trying to get custody of their daughter Carol by having a social worker Alice (Donna Reed) investigate the family situation.

Williams is reluctant to take the job, but dammit, he needs a job -- any job -- to try to keep custody of his daughter. He doesn't particularly care for the living conditions (a garret apartment in the belfry) or the fact that the college's facilities are woeful to put it mildly. And so Williams sets about improving things in the best way he knows how, which just happens to be the rules-bending way that got him kicked out of college football in the first place. That, of course, causes problems with Fr. Burke, who still has principles. Carol, meanwhile, wants Dad to succeed because she'd much rather stay with him than go and live with stuffy Mother (shades of Jackie Cooper in The Champ). Alice might be just the woman to pair Dad up with, too.

Trouble Along the Way is a charming picture that's only tangentially about college football; so, if you don't normally care about football, don't let that stop you from watching this one. John Wayne often comes in for criticism for his political views and for making robust military and western films that fit those views, but he was a better actor than that. Trouble Along the Way is a movie that shows Wayne's better side. He also gets to show that he could act with kids. Coburn is great, but he was good in almost everything he did. Reed is OK, but she doesn't have all that much to do here. In short, Trouble Along the Way is a warm, family-friendly movie that's well worth watching. It's available on DVD, too, so you won't have to stay up past 1:00 AM to see it.

The rest of you is over there someplace

As part of TCM's day of Ann Sheridan movies in Summer Under the Stars, TCM is showing a prestige movie that gets aired surprisingly infrequently: King's Row, at 9:45 PM ET.

Nominally Ann Sheridan is the star, as she gets top billing, but King's Row is a movie with more of an ensemble cast. Bob Cummings plays Paris, who is being raised by his grandmother (Maria Ouspenskaya) in a wealthy home on the outskirts of the Anywhere, USA town of King's Row at the turn of the previous century. His best friend is Drake (Ronald Reagan), a young man who has an inheritance waiting for him at the local bank and has nice girl Louise Gordon (Nancy Coleman) pining for him. Meanwhile, Paris is studying medicine from local doctor Tower (Claude Rains), and loves the doctor's daughter (Betty Field), although the doctor thinks this is a bad idea: apparently, the doctor realizes that insanity runs in the family on the mother's side, and that his daughter is bound to go insane. Eventually, the Towers wind up dead in a murder-suicide, and Drake loses his inheritance when the bank manager is found to have embezzled it.

Fast forward a few years. Paris is now studying psychology under Dr. Freud in Vienna, while Drake is working on the "wrong" side of the tracks, literally: this is one of those towns where the railroad line divides the good side of town from the bad, and Reagan is working at the railway stockyard and living with one of his older coworkers and his daughter (that's Ann Sheridan who, despite top billing, doesn't show up in the first part of the movie). Meanwhile, Louise still loves him, even though her father, the local surgeon (Charles Coburn) has definite class ideas that a relationship between his daughter and Drake would be a horrible thing. So, when Drake gets in an accident at the railyard, Dr. Gordon is presented the perfect opportunity to do something about the relationship.

Drake loses his legs as a result of the accident, sending him into a profound depression from which only his old friend Paris, by now a Freudian head shrinker, can save him. Well, that, and the love of Ann Sheridan. Meanwhile, Paris' grandmother has died, but Paris is sure to find love with the new occupants of her house....

King's Row is a sprawling movie, and one that is not without its faults. But, it's still a lot of fun. Bob Cummings was excellent in a movie like Saboteur where he played the everyman, but he's rather miscast in King's Row. Reagan is often criticized because of his later political career, but to be fair, when given the right material, he was certainly better than Cummings. Reagan does quite a good job as the happy-go-lucky heir and, when he's lost the inheritance, does fine as the spunky optimist who will still make a good life for himself despite having to work at the railyard. It's a bit more problematic though, once his character becomes an amputee: Reagan's on screen characters exuded eternal optimism, and the amputee Drake is supposed to be decidedly not an optimist. (I've argued elsewhere that this is the same problem that dooms his performance in Night Unto Night.) Rains and Coburn are both fine as the doctors, and Maria Ouspenskaya is ever the grande dame, for good and bad.

Ultimately, I think that King's Row has obtained is less-than-stellar reputation in part because of the lack of real star power in its cast, and the fact that a lot of people want to criticize Reagan. King's Row, however, is much better than Night Unto Night, effectively combining melodrama and interesting characters into an absorbing story. The movie has also been released to DVD, so you don't have to stay up late tonight to watch the ending.

TCM's Mothers' Day schedule

Tomorrow is the second Sunday in May, which as always means Mothers' Day. TCM is showing an entire day of movies about mothers, and some of the movies are ones I've recommended in the past, such as Mildred Pierce at 1:15 PM ET, and To Each His Own at 3:15 PM. The first movie of the day, however, is one I haven't recommended before: Bachelor Mother, at 6:30 AM ET.

Ginger Rogers stars as Polly Parrish, a temporary sales assistant at a department store hired as extra help for the Christmas rush. Management doesn't keep her on after Christmas, so, having been fired, she starts walking the streets of town. As she's passing an orphanage, she meets a mother who's leaving her child there. But, the infant is in danger of falling down the front steps, so Polly props it up -- just as the orphanage's employees are opening the front door. They obviously believe Polly is the mother, and do everything they can to convince her not to give up the child. Eventually, Polly winds up taking the child, and giving the department store as her last known place of work.

The administrators of the orphanage naturally send word back to the department store that one of their employees had tried to deposit a baby there, and the son of the president, David Merlin (played by David Niven) is given the task of dealing with Polly. Naturally, he doesn't believe Polly's story about how she got the child. Worse, thanks to a series of misunderstandings, other people start to believe Merlin is the father of the baby. This includes Merlin's own father (Charles Coburn), who's been tipped off by Polly's fellow worker and would-be suitor Freddie (Frank Albertson), who is angling for a promotion. Dad's wanted a grandson all along, so he encourages David to take a more active role in the baby's upbringing....

You have to expect in a romantic comedy like this that Polly and David are going to wind up together, with the baby as well. What makes a movie like Bachelor Mother worth watching, however, is the way they get there. Ginger Rogers was adept at almost anything, and handles the material easily. Niven is charming, which is just the right note his character needs to hit. Charles Coburn does a fine job as well; he was closer to the beginning of his career in playing ultimately kind-hearted rich old men.

It's very surprising, but Bachelor Mother has yet to receive a DVD release.