Sadly not a drama

Another of the movies that I recorded and was getting close to expiring from the DVR was the later Gene Kelly musical It's Always Fair Weather. It's on TCM tomorrow, Mar. 3, at 10:00 AM, so I've watched it in order to be able to put up this review.

The movie starts off with an introductory sequence set at the end of World War II. Soldiers are being demobbed, and three of them are spending their first day back on American soil at a bar in New York: Ted Riley (Gene Kelly), would-be artist Doug Hallerton (Dan Dailey), and Angelo Valentine (Michael Kidd). They have way too much to drink and go on a drunken dance sequence, this being a Gene Kelly musical after all. At the end of the day, the three "best friends" who made their way through Europe together vow that they'll meet at the same bar ten years from now, or October 11, 1955.

To remember this vow, each of them takes a third of a one-dollar bill and writes the date one it, so sure enough, when the main action of the film opens up on October 11, 1955 (oddly enough about a month after the film was released), they all see that they have a reminder of the day. Doug wanted to go back to Europe to become the great American artist, but wound up using his art skills to go into the more lucrative field of advertising. He's based out of Chicago, where he's in an unhappy marriage, but created the ad campaign for a New York-based slice-of-life show hosted by Madline Bradville (Dolores Gray), so he was going to be in New York anyway and shows up at the bar.

Angie had been hoping to become a quality chef, but life didn't work out that way for him either. Instead, he got married (and as far as we can tell is happily married) running the sort of hamburger joint up in Schenectady that Thelma Ritter ran in The Mating Season. And as for Ted, he's a native New York who had been hoping to become a lawyer and marry his sweetheart. However, in the opening scene on October 11, 1945, he's learned that that sweetheart couldn't wait for Ted to come home and married another man, leaving Ted embittered. Instead of becoming a lawyer, he got into the fight game, training a second-class boxer who probably had pretentions of greatness at one point but is now being asked to take a dive.

Doug has an expense account, so he offers to take his two old friends to a swanky restaurant where the three find out that they really have nothing in common other than their service in the war. Ted and Doug think Angie is a hick; Ted and Angie find Doug snobbis; and Doug and Angie see Ted's act as kind of scammy, which in many ways it is. Especially when they run into some of the staff from the show who are having a business meeting in the same restaurant. This includes segment producer Jackie Leighton (Cyd Charisse), on whom Ted immediately starts putting the moves, only to discover she's much too smart for that stuff.

Except that there's a bit of a problem, which is that the show goes live, and the subject for the show's "surprise" segment won't be able to do it. So Jackie figures a surprise segment of having the three soldiers appear together on live TV for their 10th anniversary reunion would be a great thing. Except that she doesn't quite realize that the three men, having met each other, don't really want to see each other any more. So they're going to have to engage in some minor deception to make the reunion work. Meanwhile, Jacke and Ted learn about the fixed fight, which gives some extra motivation to what goes on later that evening.

It's Always Fair Weather is another of those movies with a really good premise, that unfortunately doesn't quite work in the execution. For me, I think that's for a different reason than a lot of the other reviewers I've read. Everybody else loves the Gene Kelly dance numbers, but I found myself thinking that this is the sort of plot that shouldn't have been set to the genre constraints of a musical. It's the sort of thing that could be a drama, either serious or somewhat lighter considering the finale is clearly being played for its comic effect.

Deep in My Heart

Tonight is the final night of Merle Oberon's turn as TCM's Star of the Month. One of her movies that I haven't blogged about before, but had on my DVR, is Deep in My Heart, which airs overnight tonight at 12:45 AM (which is technically December 31 in the Eastern time zone but still December 30 in more westerly time zones). So, with that in mind, I held off on watching the movie and putting up a review until I could do it in conjunction with tonight's TCM showing.

Deep in My Heart starts off with the MGM orchestra performing an overture. This is actually a medley of songs composed by Sigmund Romberg, who is the subject of the movie. After the overture and opening credits, we're introduced to the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where a young Sigmund (José Ferrer) works as a waiter at a Viennese-style café owned by Anna Mueller (Helen Traubel), composing Strauss-style music for the band to play. A musical agent shows up and likes Romberg's ability, but notes that this is a type of music that's old fashioned: if Romberg wants to make it as a composer, he's going to have to write music that's more with the times.

Romberg does do this, coming up with a formulaic song called "Leg of Mutton", which brings him to the attention of J.J. Shubert (Walter Pidgeon), an impresario who together with his brother was about to open what is the Shubert Theater on Broadway that still stands to this day. Shubert is putting on a show with star Gaby Deslys (Tamara Toumanova) and would like Romberg to write a song for her. This leads to part of the dramatic tension of the movie, such as that is, in that Romberg has artistic principles while Shubert and a bunch of other people all know better than Romberg what would be commercially successful. Indeed, there's a scene late in the movie where an adolescent girl says she likes one of the songs, but decries the show as a whole as opera.

Back to the meeting with Shubert, and Romberg's song is enough of a hit that he gets to keep working with Shubert and makes a lot of money. Unfortunately, he spends even more money than he earns, which ultimately results in his declaring bankruptcy and being forced to go back to Shubert to work on the sort of material that Shubert knows will be a commercial hit and make Romberg a tidy sum of money. Along the way, Romberg meets another actress, Dorothy Donnelly (Merle Oberon), who is a bit of a champion of Romberg's and who has some pretentions to higher art of her own. While on a tour of Europe just after the Great War, she comes across a play called Old Heidelberg that she snapped up the rights to, to work on a translation with lyrics that could be set to music. She wants Romberg to write the music, and the result is the successful operetta The Student Prince.

To fill out the plot, there's a romantic angle involving how Romberg meets his wife Lillian (Doe Avedon) in the Adirondack resort town of Saranac Lake while trying to work on songs for a musical where he faces a very tight deadline. (In fact, this was Romberg's second wife; his first wife isn't mentioned and IMDb doesn't even list her.) But a lot of the movie is just an excuse to bring in MGM's stars to do musical numbers of Romberg's songs.

Not that this is a bad thing, of course; people who like the Freed Unit musicals that MGM was putting out in this era are probably going to love Deep in My Heart even if it is a slightly different type of music. For me, the one big problem with the movie is the sense that, the way things play out, Sigmund Romberg comes across as the sort of person whose life wasn't quite interesting enough to be the subject of a Hollywood biopic. The actors all do quite well with the material they're given, and the stars performing the musical numbers -- including Gene Kelly with his brother Frank; Rosemary Clooney; Cyd Charisse and her husband Tony Martin in different numbers; Ann Miller; and more -- are more than competent at what they're asked to do. But the music may not be to everyone's taste, and the dramatic scenes in getting to the musical numbers are slow.

Still, for anyone who wants a bit of musical history or who wants to see an MGM musical that isn't as well remembered, Deep in My Heart is a movie of a high technical standard.

Oh, right, musicals aren't my favorite genre

I've metioned before that musicals aren't my favorite genre, although I don't necessarily mind the backstage musicals or the musical biopics. So it's not a surprise that I didn't particularly care for this week's selection for the TCM Musical Matinee: Brigadoon, tomorrow (March 22) at noon.

Musical star Gene Kelly is the star here, as Tommy Albright, an American who's decided to go on a hunting trip to the Scottish highlands together with his best friend Jeff Douglas (Van Johnson). It's partly to get away from America for a while to try to figure out whether he really wants to marry his girlfriend back home, Jane Ashton (Elaine Stewart, fourth-billed in a surprisingly small role). While hunting, Tommy and Jeff get lost, and come to the crest of a hill overlooking a village that doesn't seem to be on their maps.

So, naturally, curiosity gets the better of them, as well as the idea that perhaps if you go into town the locals might be able to tell you where on the map you are and how to get back to where you were originally going. The town is called Brigadoon, and and it looks like it could pass for one of those places that's deliberately been restored for the historical purpose of showing the way things used to be.

But it's a real village, all right, and more than that, the place is about to celebrate. Young Jean Campbell is about to get married to Charlie Dalrymple, and the whole village is taking part, and willing to have Jeff and Tommy join them in the celebration. Jeff isn't terribly thrilled with the place, but Tommy takes to one of the locals, Jean's older sister Fiona (Cyd Charisse), which is of course a bit of a problem since he's got that girlfriend in America.

There are bigger problems, however. Not only do Jeff and Tommy wonder why the village wasn't on the map. When Tommy goes off with Fiona to pick heather, she's absolutely terrified when she gets to the bridge leading out of the village. And then Tommy and Jeff find the Campbell family bible, which has Fiona and Jane's dates of birth back in the 1730s, which makes no sense. The town elder, Mr. Lundie, then tells them that Brigadoon is a special place, saved by a miracle 200 years prior. When the villagers go to sleep, they'll wake up the next morning having only aged one night, while the rest of the world has spent 100 years. But the price is that none of them can leave the village. While outsiders can spend a day, if they want to stay it will have to be forever. If one villager leaves, the rest of the village will cease to exist.

This is a big issue because, as if you couldn't tell, Tommy falls in love with Fiona. Worse is that Jean had a suitor other than Charlie Dalrymple, that being one Harry Beaton. and he, having lost Jean, decides that no one else should have her and that he'll leave the village as a result.

One of the problems I have with Brigadoon, not having seen any stage version of the musical, is how it feels even more artificial than other movie musicals. I think that comes down to the fact that while Gene Kelly and director Vincente Minnelli wanted to do a location shoot, preferably in the Scottish higlands, MGM felt they needed to save money and really wanted it done on soundstages. That doesn't work here at all, although a secondary fact that only occured to me after watching is that I don't think the Scottish highlands are as forested as the film version of them. I get the impression that having to do the movie on a soundstage may also have taken Kelly's heart somewhat out of the picture. Van Johnson isn't really the right star for a movie musical, either, unless it were one of those biopic films where everyody else was doing the singing and dancing.

On an Island With You

Tonight's lineup on TCM is a bunch of movies set on tropical islands. This includes one that's been on my DVR for a little while now and that I've never reviewed before: On an Island With You, overnight tonight at 12:45 AM (so technically July 17 in the Eastern time zone but late in the evening of July 16 in the more westerly time zones of the US).

The movie opens in lovely Technicolor with a Pacific-sounding song that sounds like it could be a stand-in for "Aloha Oe". At the end of the opening and credits, a woman dives from one of the trees into the lagoon below, that woman being Rosalind Reynolds (Esther Williams). The scene, however, is one that's part of a movie-within-a-movie, as Reynolds is an actress making a movie in the islands together with her fiancé, Ricardo Montez (Ricardo Montalbán). Montez is playing a character who is a navy officer, which seems like miscasting considering Montez's accent. The character is loved by Reynolds' character, but also by another character played by Yvonne Toro (Cyd Charisse). What nobody knows yet is that Yvonne Toro is also in love with Ricardo Montez.

Since the movie-within-a-movie is about the US Navy, the studio has brought in a technical advisor whose job it is is to make certain that everything is done the way it would be done in the real US Navy. That advisor is Lt. Kingslee (Peter Lawford). But Kingslee has some rather odd ideas about how to be an advisor, which are down in part to the fact that some years back (I'd assume during World War II, as the war had been over for less than three years when On an Island With You was released) Kingslee had seen Reynolds in the flesh when she was doing one of her USO tours. She even invited a serviceman on stage for one of her routines, and that serviceman was Kingslee. This is also why Kingslee seems vaguely familiar to Reynolds, although she can't place him. This is actually logical; the non-famous person would remember the meeting with the famous movie star, while the movie star would likely only remember having invited a ton of servicemen on stage over the course of a slew of USO shows.

Kingslee is still infatuated with Reynolds despite the fact that she's engaged, and he decides to show it first by suggesting that Montez is handling a navy romance all wrong, offering to step in for one scene and how Montez how to do it, if only as an excuse for Kingslee to be able to kiss Reynolds. Later that evening, when Xavier Cugat (obviously playing himself) is the bandleader at the hotel floor show, Kingslee asks Reynolds for a dance, and is a total dick about it when Reynolds politely but firmly declines. So much a dick that he keeps insisting she dance with him, to the point that the assistant director Buckley (Jimmy Durante, mostly there to provide comic relief) offers to dance with Kingslee.

But Kingslee isn't done being a jerk. One scene involves flying over the set. Since Kingslee is a Navy pilot (which one would guess is how he got the dual job to be technical advisor), he flies Reynolds over the set, but then flies off with her to an island several hundred miles away so that he can have some alone time with her. This to me seems like kidnapping and going AWOL, both of which would be offenses deserving of a court-martial. And indeed, when Kingslee and Reynolds are finally rescued, his commanding officer is extremely displeased.

But the worst of all things is that Peter Lawford is billed above Ricardo Montalbán, which implies that Lawford's character is the one that's supposed to end up with Williams in the final reel. Cyd Charisse's character having the hots for Montalbán is, then, obviously in the script so that Montalbán can end up with her as the "right" match. But Lawford's character is just such a total jerk, and he's so violating the Hollywood Production Code, never mind military law, that you wonder how he's going to get away with it in the final reel.

As you might guess, the huge problem for me with On an Island With You is the plot that just doesn't work. None of this is Williams' fault. Once again, she gets to do aquacade numbers that are well choreographed and look lovely on screen. Jimmy Durante is the same sort of character he usually is, while Xavier Cugat as himself is as much of an acquired taste as is Durante's humor. Some people will like them, some won't.

So, if I were to recommend Esther Williams to people, I'd start with something else before On an Island With You. But there's enough here that people are going to like the visuals.

Words and Music

Yet another movie that's been sitting on my DVR just waiting for another TCM airing so that I could watch it and do a post on it is the musical "biopic" Words and Music. That next showing on TCM is tomorrow, May 23, at 5:45 PM, so with that in mind I sat down to watch it in order to be able to do a post on it in time for you to watch the next showing.

After an opening credits sequence set over a chorus singing one of the songs of the writing team of Richard Rodgers and Lorenz "Larry" Hart, we're introduced to Rodgers. Well, not Rodgers himself, but Rodgers as a character, played by Tom Drake. The fact that a decidedly second-tier star like Drake is playing Rodgers is a good hint that this is much more a story about Lorenz Hart.

Back in 1919, Lorenz Hart was a struggling songwriter who came up with all sorts of lyrics that the smart set might have thought were witty, but didn't have any music to go with them. His friend Herb Fields (Marshall Thompson), realizing that Larry needed a composer to put those words to music, decided to introduce Larry to one of his friends, that of course being Richard Rodgers. Rodgers is mildly confused considering that Larry doesn't really seem to be listening to his music, but some time later Larry tells him he does like one of his melodies and they should put the two together.

However, actually trying to sell any of their songs is much more difficult. Eventually Richard gets to the point that he thinks seriously about giving up trying to become a composer, telling his father that he's going to quit music to go into selling children's apparel. But Larry ropes him back in asking him to give it one last chance, and wouldn't you know it, but the Garrick Gaieties comes along introducing a bunch of new faces to Broadway, with Rodgers and Hart being asked to be among those new faces, even if not on the onstage side.

One person who might make a nice new face is struggling actress Peggy Lorgan (Betty Garrett). Larry does try to get her a starring role in the gaieties, but he's not a producer or casting agent, with the result being that another actress, Joyce Harmon (Ann Sothern) gets the part. Still, the two develop a nice friendship together. It goes far enough that Larry decides he's going to ask Peggy to marry him, but she turns him down. This is where the "biopic" really starts getting sanitized, as if it weren't already being sanitized to this point.

In real life, Lorenz Hart was gay at a time when one couldn't really be gay in public life. Apparently, he did have an actress with whom he was good enough friends that he'd ask her to marry him in what would have been an obvious sham relationship in the Tab Hunter/Natalie Wood vein, but that actress turned him down. Again in real life, being gay and not being able to be so publicly led Larry to engage in heavy drinking and other self destructive behavior that led to his death just before the age of 50, as well as to Richard Rodgers' decision to team up with Oscar Hammerstein when Broadway came calling with what would be the musical Oklahoma. Hart did live long enough to see that become a success, dying not long after.

So while Words and Music really plays fast and loose with the facts, in some ways that's not the reason one would watch a movie like this. In a film about a composer, it's always going to be just as much if not more about the music as about the music. And as we all know, Rodgers and Hart wrote quite a few of the great pre-war songs from the Great American Songbook. Not only is there the music, but MGM took a whole bunch of its musical stars under contract and had them do cameos singing various of the Rodgers and Hart songs. These include Judy Garland, Gene Kelly, Lena Horne, Perry Como, and others.

Words and Music may be utter nonsense as far as the historical facts go. But if you like vintage Broadway music, you'll get that in spades. That, combined with MGM's superb Freed Unit production values. Maybe someday somebody will put the real story of Lorenz Hart on film. But I don't think it would be as vivacious a movie as Words and Music.

The Band Wagon

Fred Astaire was another of the stars honored back in August in Summer Under the Stars. I recorded a couple of his movies that I haven't seen before, and one of them is coming up again on the TCM schedule: The Band Wagon, tomorrow (Dec. 6) at noon. With that in mind, I recently watched the movie in order to be able to do a review on it for the upcoming showing.

The movie starts off with an auction, with the auctioneer informing us that they're selling off props used in the films of movie musical star Tony Hunter (that's Fred Astaire, although we don't see him in the opening scene). Nobody really wants to buy the props, however, which is an indication that Tony's time in Hollywood is past. Tony had gotten his start on Broadway, so he heads back to New York, only to find that the place has changed almost beyond recognition in the time since he's left.

Tony has also changed, to the point that nobody much cares that he's coming back to New York, at least not the sort of people who would have been his fans when he left for New York. The only people who care about him, it seems, are a couple of old friends, Lester (Oscar Levant) and Lily Marton (Nanette Fabray). They're good enough friends, and have enough pity, that they've decided the new stage show they've written would be just perfect for Tony to make his return to Broadway. And they've gotten the best director in town, Jeffrey Cordova (Jack Buchanan), except that that's a name Tony doesn't recognize, having been away from New York for so long.

Jeffrey is currently doing an adaptation of Oedipus Rex, and when he finds out that the play the Martons have written is based on the Faust story, he's thrilled with the idea of acting in it, along with Tony. The first problem, however, is that Tony isn't so certain an adaptation of Faust can really work on Broadway. The problems get bigger, however, when Jeffrey does some script doctoring to turn things into a dramatic musical.

Even worse is that turning it into a musical more or less needs bringing in a leading lady, although at least he's able to get the best, in Gabrielle Gerard (Cyd Charisse). Her presence brings more problems, though. She's got a demanding boyfriend/managel, and Gabrielle and Tony are both uncertain whether they'll be able to jell together and whether the other one is better than them. It gets so bad that Tony comes to the conclusion that the show isn't going to work and that perhaps he should withdraw from the troubled production.

Things get even more complicated and nuttier when Tony and Gaby start falling in love with each other despite the age difference and the fact that Gaby already has a boyfriend. But everybody decides that the way to save the show is to turn it into some sort of revue and have a bunch of disconnected musical numbers that sure look nice on the big screen, but make no sense together in terms of plot.

And that's the big problem with The Band Wagon for me. There winds up being too little story, and way too many musical and dance numbers that, like Gene Kelly's cadenza in Singin' in the Rain, don't fit together. Now, to be fair, everybody working on the movie is extremely talented, and in isolation, the muscial numbers are mostly very well done. Fred Astaire even in his mid fifties is a darn talented dancer, helped by the fact that he aged well not having been quite as much a looker when he was making those movies with Ginger Rogers as some other musical stars (Gene Kelly) did in their youth.

The Band Wagon also introduces the song "That's Entertainment", written by Howard Dietz and Arthur Schwartz, while also using a bunch of old songs from the pair. The musical number may not be the most memorable thing, but the song certainly is, and it's unsurprising the song became a standard.

Fans of the Freed Unit musicals from MGM will love The Band Wagon; for those who aren't the biggest fan of musicals, I'd certainly start with Singin' in the Rain instead.

The Secret of the Red Dress

When I was looking for The Assassination Bureau on Tubi, one of the movies that showed up in the search terms and that I had never heard of before was Assassination in Rome. I was mildly surprised not to have heard of it considering Cyd Charisse leads the cast, but having seen the movie, I understand why.

The opening credits on the print that Tubi ran were both letterboxed and pillarboxed, which wasn't a good sign, since I had a premontion that the rest of the movie would be panned and scanned, which was in fact the case. Two seemingly unrelated things open the movie. One is Shelley North (that's Cyd Charisse), in a well-appointed apartment in Rome, calling the police to tell them that her husband has gone missing. At the same time, we see two petty thieves robbing and unfortunately killing a man at one of the fountains of Rome that may or may not be the Trevi.

In robbing the man, they take his shoes and discover that the shoes have a heel that opens up. In the fashion of Pickup on South Street they determine that this is some sort of microfilm which must mean something big, but something that they don't know about although they're going to try to figure out who the microfilm was intended for and blackmail that person. But they're the sub-plot to the main story, which is Shelley's attempt to find out what happened to her husband.

The police don't seem to be much help, so she approaches the international newspapers in Rome, which brings her in contact with Dick Sherman (Hugh O'Brian), with whom she apparently shared a past. He does some research, and discovers that Shelly's husband Bill had gotten deeply in debt, to the point that he had to engage in some sort of criminal activity to try to pay off that debt. Of course, we know that the guy killed in the beginning isn't Shelley's husband, since she'd be able to identify him if it had been and the murder victim hadn't had any ID on him. Further investigation takes Shelley to Rome, which seems convenient in that it gives the filmmakers a chance to film a second exotic location for the benefit of the American audience.

Some of the synopses of Assassination in Rome call it a giallo film, and I have to admit that giallo is one of the genres with which I'm not terribly well acquainted. Apparently, the earliest giallo novels which gave birth to the film genre were closer to pulp murder mysteries, but as the film genre became more prominent in the late 1960s and early 1970s the murders became grislier. What killing there is here isn't particularly grisly, and the resolution of the mystery seems perfunctory. It's hard to tell at times how much this was intended for domestic consumption, and how much it was intended for the US audience having secured the participation of Cyd Charisse.

I suppose I'd be able to praise the movie's cinematography if I hadn't seen a panned and scanned print, but as things stand, everything here seems pedestrian and decidedly sub par. Perhaps it's worth watching if you're a Cyd Charisse completist or into giallo, but otherwise, there's a lot of other stuff I'd recommend first.

The Wild North

Another of those movies available from the Warner Archive collection that I recorded off of TCM some time back is The Wild North. As always, I recently sat down to watch it in order to be able to do a post on it here.

Stewart Granger stars as Jules Vincent, a French-Canadian trapper who has wound up much farther west in Canada instead of northern Quebec. (Granger, unsurprisingly, is about as convincing a Québecois as Laurence Olivier was in 49th Parallel a decade earlier.) Vincent lives in a cabin that's really in the wilderness, but he's in one of those trading post villages that's just accessible enough that one of MGM's Old West towns on the backlot could be repurposed for it.

While in town, Jules meets an unnamed native girl (Cyd Charisse; don't ask about the ethnic casting) who is being accosted by another trapper, Max Brody (Howard Petrie). Jules rescues the young woman and heads out for her home village, which is on the way to Jules' cabin, taking her in tow. However, Brody is also on the trip because there's not much way to get around the wilderness and leaving Brody to walk would probably kill Brody. It's not an optimal solution, and when Brody creates a dangerous situation, Jules acts in such a way that accidentally leads to the death of Brody.

Enter Constable Pedley (virile, sexy action hero Wendell Corey), serving for one of the forerunners of the Mounties. He gets wind of the death of Brody, and he obviously believes that it's murder. Or at least, it's a situation that's going to require a summary trial to prove that Jules was acting in self-defense. So he heads farther into the wilderness, to get to Jules' cabin. Once he gets there, he plans to arrest Jules and bring him back to civilization for the trial.

Now, I don't think James Stewart had made The Naked Spur yet, so perhaps Constable Pedley didn't realize just how dangerous it was going to be to be alone on a long journey with a man who might well want to kill Pedley to maintain his freedom. After all, there was no form of communication so it could have been made to appear that Pedley died before getting to Jules' cabin. Worse, by the time Pedley starts out to bring Jules back from the cabin, it's already the dead of winter, but surprisingly bright outside for someplace that far north. The pair sets off by dogsled to get to town, but who knows whether they'll make it there, and how the writers are going to be able to stay within the Production Code to produce a satisfying ending.

The premise of The Wild North is a reasonably good one, although it does have the problems of having to deal with the Production Code. However, the bigger problem is that the movie is never anything more than a by-the-numbers adventure film seemingly best suited for a Saturday matinee demographic that's made with the production values of a movie with greater pretensions. It also doesn't help that some of the shots are obviously backlot shots and don't fit in with the location shooting. There's also a relatively slow pace since there are a lot of tracking shots of people crossing snowy landscapes filmed in medium-to-long shots.

Younger viewers of the early 1950s might have been thrilled by The Wild North. I have a feeling grown-ups would have been more likely to see through the film's flaws, and also wonder whether the movie holds up for younger viewers of today.

Party Girl

Cyd Charisse was TCM's Star of the Month back in June. She is of course known more for her dancing, although she did essay a couple of serious roles. One of those that I hadn't blogged about before is Party Girl. As an MGM movie, it's on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive, so I recently sat down to watch it.

Charisse is the title character, although I don't think she's really the main character. That would be the character played by Robert Taylor: Tommy Farrell, a lawyer in Chicago in the early 1930s. He's working for gangster Rico Angelo (Lee J. Cobb), basically working to make certain that Rico and his associates stay out of prison. One of those associates is Louis Canetto (John Ireland), who stands trial but whom Tommy defends with some theatrics in the court, so you get an idea of precisely the sort of lawyer Tommy is.

Charisse plays Vicki Gaye, a showgirl in the show at a nightclub owned by Rico. Rico is giving a party, so he hires some of the showgirls to be guests at the party, and Vicki is one of those paid attendees. That's how she meets Tommy. When Tommy points out that being paid to be an escort isn't exactly work to be proud of, Vicki responds that what Tommy does isn't really any different, it's just that he's got high-class degrees behind his work. It's the start of a friendship between the two, although Tommy can never marry Vicki because he's got a wife who won't grant him a divorce.

At any rate, all of this gives Tommy the idea of going straight. One thing he can do is finally get his hip fixed. He's suffered from a limp since childhood thanks to a childhood injury, and getting that hip fixed will take him all the way to Stockholm, which also means getting out of Chicago for a while.

But even on his sojourn to Europe, Tommy can't get away from Rico. Another young hoodlum, Cookie La Motte (Corey Allen) is arrested and faces execution, and Rico wants Tommy to be the defense attorney again. Tommy reluctantly accepts mostly because of the power Rico also has over Vicki. But Cookie, being too aggressive for his own good, escapes to Indiana after one of the jurors is bribed.

Tommy goes to Indiana to talk to Cookie and try to get Cookie to do the right thing, but somebody else responds by pointing a machine gun through the curtains and knocking off Cookie and some of his associates; Tommy survives. It's just the start of a gang war in which a whole bunch of people get killed. This gets the state led by ambitious prosecuting attorney Jeff Stewart (Kent Smith) involved, and holding both Tommy and Vicki on charges.

Rico is still behind the scenes using veiled threats against Vicki to keep Tommy from talking, while Stewart tries whatever he can to get either Tommy or Vicki to talk It all leads to the climactic shootout and the Production Code-approved ending.

I didn't realize going in that Party Girl was directed by Nicholas Ray. I didn't notice his style to the extent that a lot of other reviewers have. Instead, I saw something that was fairly typical for MGM, which was trying to take tough material only to see it softened because MGM just somehow couldn't keep its gloss from rubbing off on everything. It works for some types of movies, but it's not what Party Girl needs.

That's not to say that Party Girl is a bad movie, however. It's eminently watchable despite the two male leads both having somewhat limited ranges. Cobb is given a mobster role that's perfect for him, however, so he does just fine. Taylor tries his best and isn't bad, but you wonder what an actor who had the chops to play such a conflicted character -- somebody like a Gregory Peck -- could do here. The Metrocolor helps the dance sequences although it's not necessary for the rest of the movie.

Party Girl is a movie with imperfections, but one of those movies where it's the imperfections that make the movie more interesting.

TCM Star of the Month June 2021: Cyd Charisse

Cyd Charisse with Gene Kelly in Singin' in the Rain (June 16, 4:30 AM)

We're into a new month, which of course on TCM means a new Star of the Month. This time around, that star is Cyd Charisse, who appeared in a lot of musicals at MGM as she was quite the striking dancer, what with those legs that you can see as she mesmerizes Gene Kelly in Singin' in the Rain. Charisse's movies will be airing the first four Tuesdays in prime time into Wednesday morning, starting tonight at 8:00 PM with The Band Wagon. Since I already had that photo of Charisse from Singin' in the Rain, I decided to use that, although TCM somewhat oddly programmed it for the middle of the night. (To be fair, there's another programming feature this month that has Singin' in the Rain in prime time.)

There's a night of non-musicals on June 22, which includes Tension at 3:45 AM June 23, along with a bunch of movies I haven't seen before. Among that latter group is Five Golden Hours, with a plot synopsis that at first made me think of Cast a Dark Shadow, although this one is apparently a comedy with Ernie Kovacs.

Note that the final Tuesday this month, June 29, has a night of movies directed by Brian De Palma, not Cyd Charisse movies.

The Kissing Bandit

Another of the movies I watched recently is the lively Technicolor musical/romantic comedy The Kissing Bandit.

Frank Sinatra plays Ricardo, a young man originally from Mexican California who went east to study in Boston. However, his father has died, so now Ricardo is returning to run the family inn, with help from Dad's assistant Chico (J. Carrol Naish). However, what Ricardo doesn't realize is that the inn was actually a front. You see, Dad was the notorious "Kissing Bandit", who robbed passing coached and was romantic with all the women he robbed. And the Bandit has a large bounty on his head, courtesy of the governor, Don José (Mikhai Rasumny).

Meanwhile, the Governor's daughter Teresa (Kathryn Grayson) is returning home from convent school. The old members of the Kissing Bandit gang set out on another mission with Ricardo in tow, even though Ricardo can barely ride a horse -- he's clearly no bandit. Worse, when it comes time to rob a coach, the one they pick just happens to have Teresa in it. Ricardo meets her, and the two immediately fall in love despite the fact that Ricardo is going to be in danger if he's caught out as the Kissing Bandit. Not that he realizes this is the governor's daughter

That just may happen, because the Governor has other problems. Apparently, he hasn't been doing a good enough job collecting taxes, as a general, Felipe Toro (Billy Gilbert) is sent to collect those taxes by any means necessary. Fortunately, though, the general and his adjutant stop at Ricardo's inn, allowing the gang to waylay him and send Ricardo in the general's stead. This is where he's going to learn that he's fallen in love with the governor's daughter....

Frank Sinatra hated this movie, and it was a financial disaster for MGM, and in some ways it's easy to see why. Sinatra and Grayson are a big clash in musical styles, so the music doesn't always work. Indeed, the producers shelved the movie for a while before adding a specialty dance with Ricardo Montalbán, Cyd Charisse, and Ann Miller, which is really the highlight of the movie. Yowza what a combination. That having been said, I don't think the movie was quite as bad as a lot of people think. The color is nice, and Sinatra, Naish, and Mildred Natwick as Teresa's aunt Isabella are all appealing. Still, having seen it, I can understand better why Sinatra was so desperate to get the role of Maggio in From Here to Eternity and revive his flagging acting career.

The Kissing Bandit is available on DVD should you wish to watch for yourself.

An MGM melodrama

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cyd Charisse, 1922-2008

The death has been announced of actress and dancer Cyd Charisse. She was 86. Charisse's Hollywood dancing career started in the early 1940s playing smaller roles, but it must have been clear to the executives at MGM just how much talent she had, as she got bigger parts, eventually dancing what to me is her most memorable role, that of the woman in the fantasy sequence "Gotta Dance" who seduces Gene Kelly in Singin' in the Rain.

TCM have not yet announced any schedule changes to honor Charisse, as far as I am aware.