Mr. Imperium

Another of the movies that I reecorded when Lana Turner got a day in the 2025 edition of Summer Under the Stars was Mr. Imperium. It's a movie that I don't think gets all that much mention when it comes to Turner's filmography. Having seen it, I can understand why.

Turner plays Frederica Brown, an actress who is doing some sort of American-themed stage show at a club in Italy in 1939, which is of course just before World War II kicked off in Europe, and a fact that ought to set off all sorts of alarm bells in terms of anachronisms and the question of how the movie will handle the history of the intervening 12 years. Anyhow, one of the male patrons sees Frederica and falls for her, creating a ruse in which he calls himself Mr. Imperium to get the chance to meet her.

Imperium takes Frederica to the sort of lovely Mediterranean villa that, by the end of the decade, would have been filmed on location in lovely wide-screen in addition to the pretty good color we have here. (IMDb says the California coast around Monterey and Pebble Beach are standing in for Italy, which isn't a bad stand-in.) Imperium played by the much older Ezio Pinza, reveals that his true identity is Alexis, the crown prince of Italy. Alexis is a widower with an unseen 5-year-old son. Alexis knows his duty is to become king, and he's resigned himself to that, although he's not thrilled that this is going to be his son's fate too. And not that Alexis can really marry an actress like Frederica: it would cause a royal scandal.

In any case, Alexis suddenly hears from the prime minister Bernand (Cedric Hardwicke) that the King has taken a sudden turn for the worse and that Alexis is going to have to go to Rome to see the King. Alexis writes a note to Frederica to explain, but Bernand burns the note so that Frederica won't understand why Alexis just up and left her, at least not until she sees the news of the king's death. Frederica has to be smart enough to know what all that means.

Anyhow, a dozen years pass. Frederica, now using the stage name Fredda Barlo, is a successful Hollywood actress with a boyfriend in producer Paul Hunter (Barry Sullivan) who is trying to get her to sign a long-term contract. In Paris, Alexis sees a marquee and lobby card for Fredda's latest movie. He realizes he has to get to America incognito to have another chance to see her again. So he schemes to get in contact with Fredda, who is going to be going to Palm Springs to contemplate her next movie. Fredda is staying at a private resort run by Mrs. Cabot (Marjorie Main) and her shockingly indiscreet niece Gwen (Debbie Reynolds).

Alexis, again registered under the alias Mr. Imperium, tells Fredda about the history of what's been going on in his country since the war. He abdicated following a post-war revolution, and his kid is at a boarding school in England, soon to turn 18. However, the country has been going through revolution for quite some time, with one section of the population tired of the revolution and thinking that the monarchy would be a good way to return stability and a unifying force to the country. There's going to be a plebiscite next week on whether to restore the monarchy, and Alexis plans to lose it so he can stay with Fredda. And then Bernand shows up to reveal a twist....

Mr. Imperium is another of those movies that's decidedly of its time, and is supposed to be inoffensive. If you're not the biggest fan of MGM's musical romances of the era, especially considering that Pinza's music stylings are more operatic, you're probably going to have a problem with this one. For me, the bigger problem was with Debbie Reynolds' scenes. She's just so obnoxious in trying to snoop on her guests. If she hadn't been the proprietress' niece, she would have been fired for cause.

Mr. Imperium is a minor movie, but I can see why some people might like it.

For some values of sweet

I didn't intend to do posts on two of what I refer to as the 1960s "generation gap" movies in fairly close succession, after last week's post on Don't Make Waves. I also didn't intend to do posts on two Debbie Reynolds movies a few weeks apart, after I Love Melvin. But it turns out there's a movie on my DVR that's showing up on TCM tomorrow, April 7, that relates to both of those films. That movie is How Sweet It Is! at 8:00 AM as part of a birthdy salute to actor James Garner.

After wannabe groovy opening titles and one of those awful 1960s MOR songs, the action shifts to a bedroom in an upper-middle-class suburban house in New Rochelle, NY, where a man and a woman are in bed together making mad passionate love -- or least as mad and passionate as you could get on screen in 1968 -- in the middle of the day. The woman, Jenny Henderson (Debbie Reynolds), is worried about Davey (Donald Losby) returning home from work and catching the two in bed together. Davey does show up, but in a twist it turns out that Davey is Jenny's teenaged son, and the man in bed is Grif Henderson (James Garner), who is Jenny's wife and Davey's father.

Grif is a photojournalist, and the magazine he works for sends him on foreign assignments often enough that he doesn't get to see Jenny so often. Worse is that he doesn't get to see Davey, which worries Mom since she knows Davey needs a father figure. So when Grif goes to have a father/son chat, he learns that Davey is dating Bootsie (Hilary Thompson), the daughter of Grif's boss at the magazine. Bootsie is going to be spending the summer on one of those guided student tours of Europe, and Davey wants to use the money from his job to go over to Europe and follow Bootsie around. Dad kind of likes the idea -- it's a good way to learn about girls -- but Mom isn't so certain.

So what Jenny's Mom does is get Bootsie's mom to put pressure on Bootsie's dad. He, as the editor of the magazine, is planning to send a photographer along to document the trip for the magazine -- American student life on the European grand tour or some such. Perhaps it can be arranged so that Grif is the photographer, and Davey his assistant, so Dad can watch to see that Davey doesn't get into too much hijinks. Jenny, for her part, will rent a house on the Riviera for the family to stay in after the tour.

Except that Jenny is a bit naïve and gets taken in by an obvious con artist (Terry-Thomas in a brief role) and the transatlantic voyage offers no prospects of rekindling the romance. When everybody gets to France, Jenny goes south to the house they've rented for the summer, only to find out that the owner, Philippe Maspere (Maurice Ronet), a prominent lawyer, is living there as his summer house. But since there's no place else for Jenny to go and he's obviously attracted to her, he lets her rent the place for the second half of what she was going to pay the agent.

The standard love triangle hijinks ensue, with Philippe kinda-sorta pursuing Jenny, who for her part seems flattered although she really does love Grif. Grif, meanwhile, is being pursued by the guide Nancy, who is thrilled to have an adult male with her after having to spend so much time with teenagers. One coincidence leads to another, and the movie climaxes with Grif and Jenny getting arrested; Jenny getting bailed out by a bordello owner (she's in a holding pen with the owner's stable of prostitutes); and Grif and Davey showing up at the bordello.

From what I've read, James Garner hated How Sweet It Is!, although he enjoyed the people he worked with on the movie. I can't say I disagree with him. The premise, beyond a middle-aged couple still having a sex drive but mostly unable by circumstance to act upon it, is forced, and the budget doesn't even allow for the sort of establishing shots or location shooting other "Hollywood goes to Europe" movies of the era had. Worse, a lot of the movie feels like it's trying to appeal to a younger crowd but failing badly. The movie also has any number of plot holes. The ocean voyage wouldn't give a husband and wife a cabin together? The teenagers' given ages are also much too young.

If you want to watch another example of Hollywood's difficulty in adjusting to changing social values in the 1960s, How Sweet It Is! fits the bill. But it's not a particuarly good movie.

Well, Debbie Reynolds loves him

TCM is running a couple of Debbie Reynolds' movies tomorrow (March 23) morning. There's one that I hadn't blogged about before, but that I have on my DVR, so I watched it as I always do with an intention to writing up this review for the airing. That movie is I Love Melvin, which comes on at 7:45 AM.

Debbie Reynolds plays Judy LeRoy, a chorine who has dreams of making it on Broadway although she currently is only appearing in the chorus of one of those dumb college musicals. (This is not an indictment of the movie; it's that the college musical as a genre is disproportionately insipid in my view as musicals go.) Not having hit it yet, Judy still lives with her parents, real surname Schneider (Una Merkel and Allyn Joslyn) and an obnoxious kid sister Clarabelle (Noreen Corcoran).

However! Good news comes for Judy when she gets a call from the manager of the show that she's got the chance for a more substantial role, that of the football in a highly stylized dance scene that Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen might have come up with except that as far as I know they didn't have their fingerprints anywhere near this movie. So Judy heads off to the theater, walking and singing her way through Central Park.

Also in Central park is Melvin Hoover (Donald O'Connor). Melvin works for Look magazine as someone at the bottome of the ladder, a would-be photographer who is still just an assistant to Mergo (Jim Backus). He too is singing his way through the park in the sort of duet where the two aren't together until they literally bump into each other. Judy isn't pleased at first, although you know she's going to fall in love with Melvin by the end of the movie. Never mind that her parents have been trying to hook her up with a guy who's really got nothing wrong with him beyond being boring, Harry Flack (Richard Anderson).

Melvin, for his part, falls for Judy immediately. Knowing that she's a chorus girl, he comes up with an excuse to do a photo shoot on her. He makes a much bigger mistake, however, when he lies to her by telling her that he's going to get her photo on the cover of Look, something he has no power to do. His bosses don't seem to be particularly interested in his work, either. Melvin compounds the lie by getting Mergo to make a mock-up cover of Look that has one of Melvin's photos of Judy on it, which Melvin presents to Judy even though the editors have no plan to put Judy on the real cover of the magazine.

Judy and the rest of the Schneiders are dumb enough to start gossiping about Judy's being on the cover of Look, and as you might guess, everyone goes to buy copies only to find out that Judy is not in fact on the cover. This leads to the sort of complications you might expect from a light romantic comedy, although you also know they're going to get solved with a happy ending, since MGM wasn't about to put Donald O'Connor and Debbie Reynolds into something dark and twisted.

I Love Melvin is a competent enough vehicle for Donald O'Connor and Debbie Reynolds, but it never rises to anything great. Part of that is that it's only programmer length at 76 minutes, and part of that is that it was conceived more as a musical. The numbers take even more away from the story line, leading to a movie with a wafer-thin plot. It's inoffensive, but incredibly minor stuff.

But no affairs with married women

Another of the many movies that I recorded the last time they showed up on TCM was The Affairs of Dobie Gillis. It's finally getting another showing on TCM, tomorrow (Feb. 11) at 6:00 AM, so once again now would be the perfect time for me to put up this post I've written on the movie after having watched it.

Dobie Gillis, played by Bobby Van, is a young man about to enroll as a freshman at Grainbelt University somewhere in the Midwest. One wonders how he even got into college, considering his philosophy that some people are workers and others are enjoyers, and, well, he's an enjoyer. At the opening registration, Dobie gets a roommate in the form of Charlie Trask (Bob Fosse) who becomes his new best friend.

Dobie also seems to be a hit with the women. There's Lorna (Barbra Ruick), who winds up with Charlie. The only real reason she isn't with Dobie is because another woman got there first. Pansy Hammer (Debbie Reynolds) is in the same freshman composition class and chemistry class as Dobie, and the two of them immediately hit it off, even though the English professor, Amos Pomfritt (Hans Conried) has it in for Dobie. Pansy lives in town because she's a local and can live with her parents (Hanley Stafford and Lurene Tuttle). Mr. Hammer in particular has a dislike of Dobie, because he sees Dobie wants to get by with a minimum of work and that's not a good trait to have in a husband. But then, we wouldn't have much of a movie if Pansy weren't around or there weren't some sort of conflict.

Things go wrong first when Dobie's car breaks down on a date (although Pansy makes a mistake by not going straight up to her bedroom and changing when she gets home) and then when Dobie decides he and Pansy should just start skipping classes to go on dates, forcing the two of them to do a semester's worth of work in one day and leading to Pansy's blowing up the chemistry lab. For this, Pansy's dad sends her to an aunt in New York so she can go to school there, far away from Dobie. Dobie wants to see Pansy, but he doesn't have the money to get to New York.

Eventually Dobie does get the money, although it's in the sort of dishonest way you'd think would get him strung up on an embezzlement charge: he offers to go to New York to find a band for a fundraiser, and spends a goodly portion of the money dating Pansy instead. Worse, not long after returning to Grainbelt word comes in from New York that Pansy has gone missing! Her dad is understandably pissed, but as you might guess from a movie like this, Dobie is actually innocent and there's a happy ending to be had.

The Affairs of Dobie Gillis is an MGM musical, albeit decidedly not a Freed Unit musical, which in some ways makes the movie a bit of an anomaly. It might also be a bit surprising to some that this came out after Singin' in the Rain, when you'd think MGM wouldn't want to cast Reynolds in such a trifle. There's a lot of opportunity for the four leads to sing and/or dance, to more success than failure although Van's solo of "I'm Thru With Love" goes on too long. The problem that the movie has is the plot, which has too many plot holes and left me wanting to take Dobie and Pansy and literally try to shake some sense into them.

The Affairs of Dobie Gillis is also mildly interesting for those with nostalgia for the studio system; I for one was trying to figure out which of the campus buildings (if any) was the one used as the high school in High School Confidential some years later. There's also a set that has a ton of college pennants on it. Oddly, the design also has a pennant from Carvel High School, which you may recall was the high school from the Andy Hardy movies.

The Daughter of Rosie O'Grady

Tomorrow is St. Patrick's Day, and as always, TCM is running a bunch of movies with Irish, or at least Irish-American themes. One that I hadn't seen before is The Daughter of Rosie O'Grady, which shows up at 9:30 AM. But I happened to have it on my DVR, so seeing it on the schedule, I watched it to be able to do a post on it here.

The movie opens in 1898, just as the Spanish-American War has ended and the victorious soldiers are returning home to victory parades for a heroes' welcome. The three O'Grady sisters: Katie (Marcia Mae Jones), Patricia (June Haver), and adolescent Maureen (Debbie Reynolds), are watching the parade. The reason is that just before the soldiers went off to war, Katie had married one soldier, James. The only thing is, she never told her father Dennis (James Barton) about the marriage. Not only that, but Katie and James consummated their marriage before he went down to Cuba, and that one act of sex knocked her up with twins!

Dad is very protective of the daughters, being a widower. In his younger days, he and his wife Rosie worked vaudeville, retiring after she started having kids, with dad taking a job driving horse-drawn trolley cars together with his friend Miklos (S.Z. Sakall, credited here as Cuddles without the initials). Dad thinks having to do all that work in vaudeville drove Rosie to an early grave, and because of that he put away all of the couple's vaudeville stuff, not wanting the kids to look at it or even entertain any thoughts of going on the stage.

After the parade, Patricia and Maureen go to take Dad his lunch at the depot, but take a detour to go by the vaudeville theater run by producer Tony Pastor (Gordon MacRae). Tony is sitting in the alley outside the stage entrance dressed as a tramp since that's one of the outfits he wears in the show. He tricks the two girls into giving him the lunch that's supposed to be for their father. At least the sisters have the plausible lie that they couldn't get past the parade lines.

When Patricia learns that the "tramp" was really Tony Pastor, she goes back to the theater to give him a piece of her mind. He learns that she's Pat O'Gradie, daughter of Rosie, and of course he recognizes the O'Grady surname and the significance that this has for vaudeville. So he'd love to see Dennis and talk shop, not realizing how much Dennis wants to keep his daughters away from vaudeville. As you can guess, things are going to get more complicated when Pat goes on stage with Tony and the two fall in love. And of course, there's still the issue of Katie and James. It's going to cause a lot of heartache before the predictable happy ending.

The problem with The Daughter of Rosie O'Grady is how predictable and formulaic the plot is. I wouldn't be surprised if Warner Bros. knew this, which is why they loaded the film up with what feels like even more musical numbers than normal for a movie like this. It makes the movie one that people who like musicals in general, and the nostalgia musicals from the post-World War II period that were set about a half century earlier than that in particular.

Two weeks with sex

I'm getting close to the end of the movies that I recorded while Debbie Reynolds was TCM's Star of the Month back in March. This time, it's another of her supporting roles from early in her career: Two Weeks With Love.

As this was early in Reynolds' career, she was not yet the star here; that honor goes to Jane Powell. She plays Patti Robinson, eldest daughter in a middle-class family from the turn of the last century. The family goes up to the Catskills for a summer vacation at the same resort every year, and Patti, just having turned 17, is at the point where she wants to be treated like an adult and is none too pleased by having to go to this resort with her family. She's also irritated with other ways she's not treated like an adult, such as not yet being allowed to wear a corset. Dad (Louis Calhern) loves his family, but like a lot of fathers, doesn't quite know about teenage daughters, while Mom (Ann Harding) doesn't see Patti as an adult. Younger daughter Melba (Debbie Reynolds) is definitely not grown up, and there are two even younger brothers here for comic relief.

The Robinsons aren't the only people who go to the resort every summer at the same time, and the proprietor, Mr. Finlay (character actor Clinton Sundberg) knows all of them, while many of the guests, such as budding actress Valerie (Phyllis Kirk), a year or two older than Patti, looks forward to seeing Patti again. Meanwhile, Finlay's son Billy (Carleton Carpenter) is in the same position as Patti in that he's on the cusp of adulthood but his father won't treat him like a man yet. Billy has a thing for Patti, but she's not into him; instead, it's Melba who would like Billy.

There's one new guest at the resort: Cuban Demi Armendez (Ricardo Montalbán). He's apparently got enough name recognition, and is glamorous enough that any young woman would love to be approached by him. So it's no surprise that both Valerie and Patti express an interest in Demi. Patti, however, screws things up by tripping in the dining room and sending the contents of Billy's serving tray onto poor Demi! Demi forgives her though, and is willing to go with Patti for an ice cream soda, if only Mrs. Robinson weren't there to inform Patti that it's her bedtime. Valerie, of course, has no such curfew, and is there to pick up the pieces.

But Jane Powell is the star here, so we can expect that she's going to end up with Ricardo Montalbán in the final reel. However, it's going to take some twists and turns. Also, it's going to require both of the parents to come to their senses and realize their "little" girl is growing up. Likewise, you can expect Debbie Reynolds and Carleton Carpenter to end up together, especially when they sing the big hit "Abba Dabba Honeymoon".

Two Weeks with Love is an enjoyable piece of fluff, showing the sort of movie that the studio system could churn out and imbue with charm back in those days, and the sort of thing that I don't think could possibly be made today. Sure, it's all backlot stuff, and a latter-day version would look more realistic, but a version made today just wouldn't have the charm. So definitely catch Two Weeks with Love.

For some values of pleasure

I've been trying to watch the movies that TCM ran during Debbie Reynolds' turn as TCM's Star of the Month last month before they expire from YouTube TV's cloud DVR. I think I've gotten through all of the ones I've recorded, although I also think by the time I blog about them they'll have expired. I'm also pretty certain the order in which the posts on the movies show up won't be the same as the order in which I watched them, in part because at least one of the movies had similar themes to a non-Reynolds movie I wanted to blog about because it was coming up on the TCM schedule. That's more to say that there may be a few things in this or later posts that refer to posts I've already written but are only in the queue to show up on the blog at some point in the future. In any case, one of Reynolds' movies I hadn't heard about before the TCM showing was The Pleasure of His Company.

The "His" here refers to the male lead, that being the character played by Fred Astaire, although we don't see him at first. Instead, we see Reynolds, playing Jessica Poole. She's in a wedding dress at one of those high-class department stores where she's able to try on a gown with just a few attendants and her parents watching. Or, at least, her mom Katherine Dougherty (Lilli Palmer) and stepfather James Dougherty (Gary Merrill). Those two are talking to each other commenting on Katherine's father Mackenzie (Charle Ruggles) walking Jessica down the aisle and giving her away, while it really ought to be Jessica's biological father doing that. But James spent a ton of money sending telegrams all over the world trying to get in touch with bio-dad about the wedding, seemingly in vain.

Enter Fred Astaire. If you haven't figured it out yet, Astaire plays Biddeford Poole, nicknamed Pogo, and is in fact Jessica's biological father. He had some sort of wanderlust that caused him and Katherine to get divorced years ago when Jessica was still aged in single digits, and has spent the time traveling around the world like a playboy and racking up at least one more failed marriage. But he did in fact hear about his daughter's upcoming wedding, and has decided to show up for it. Not that anybody knows, so when he knocks on the door of the Dougherty house, it's there Asian butler Toy who answers the door.

Pogo immediately sets about taking over the house as though it was his all along, and you can see why he wound up divorced multiple times, and why it's a bit of a surprise that this movie is supposed to be a reasonably light comic drama. In fact, Pogo is so selfish that it's tough to see him as a sympathetic character. Surprisingly, Jessica has held a bit of a torch for Dad, if not a romantic one. She's followed his life as he's made the vintage equivalent of the gossip columns, leading her to keep a scrapbook and now be taken with him.

It's almost enough to put a crimp in the wedding plans. Jessica's fiancé Roger (Tab Hunter) is from a cattle-ranching family, and he's decided to change the honeymoon to Hawaii since there are some prize bulls there he's interested in seeing and the new couple can kill two birds with one stone to mix metaphors. But Jessica's dad shows up, and suddenly she wants to see the world with him. And Roger is pissed that Jessica and her dad can speak good French. Additionally, stepdad thinks he's about to lose his wife to her previous husband just because that previous husband is just so darn charming.

The Pleasure of His Company was based on a Broadway play, and maybe the material works well in front of a live audience on a more intimate stage. For me, the movie doesn't really work, largely because I couldn't help but find Fred Astaire's character to be such a selfish jerk, almost from the minute we see him when he moves himself into stepdad's study as if nobody's going to have a problem with this. I can't fault the acting, which is capable enough, but damn if that script isn't an irritant. The Pleasure of His Company is for me, in short, one of those movies where I couldn't really suspend disbelief.

Yet another musical biopic

Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby are songwriters who aren't as well remembered by name today as some other writers, in part because they didn't write any well-known Broadway musicals, or as much in the way of songs that have stood the test of time. A few have, such as Connie Francis' recording of "Who's Sorry Now", or "I Want to Be Loved By You". But they still had enough of a legacy when MGM started doing a series of biopics of songwriters that they too were the subject of one: Three Little Words.

The movie opens up in 1918. Bert Kalmar (Fred Astaire) is part of a vaudeville double act with his long-suffering girlfriend, Jessie Brown (Vera-Ellen). Bert wants to marry Jessie, and she'd be willing to, but she wants him to settle down, or at least stick to just vaudeville. Bert wants to try all sorts of other things in entertainment, such as music, screenplays, and even magic acts. Jack of all trades, master of none is an idea that makes Jessie nervous.

So Bert has to try his other work in secret. When he goes to a place out by Coney Island to do his magic show as "Kendall the Great", playing the piano is Harry Ruby (Red Skelton). Harry isn't just a piano player; he'd like to write his own songs and seems to have some talent for it. But the producer doesn't need new songs. He needs a magician's assistant for Kendall, or at least one who can be the man behind that curtain you're not supposed to pay attention to. It's not an auspicious beginning, however, as Harry screws up the act.

Some time later, Bert is back on stage with Jessie in a successful show, at least until he injures his knee in a backstage accident. Jessie thinks this is a perfect time for Bert to take up songwriting, as that's something that could help make ends meet once the two of them are married. But Bert thought of that as a bit of a hobby compared to "serious" playwriting. So they go their separate ways for a while, although they do eventually get married.

Bert writes one moderately successful tune, but only the one. When he's with a music publisher, the two of them hear one of the pluggers in the front office playing a tune over and over. That someone is Harry Ruby, and the two agree it's a catchy enough tune. So the publisher brings Harry in for the two of thm to try to match words and music. Eventually, Bert realizes who Harry Ruby is from his past, and they have a breakup of their own.

Except that the one song they worked on together becomes a big hit. And Harry takes out an ad calling Kalmar and Ruby a hot new songwriting team. So they have to start working together, and obviously the pairing pays off since we wouldn't have a movie if the pairing didn't. Eventually, however, old differences come back up and derail not only the professional partnership, but also their friendship. It's going to take some doing to bring the two men back together.

Three Little Words is a competent and pleasant enough movie, but I think it's going to appeal more to people who are fans of that era of music than a more general public. That's because a lot of the songs don't hold up all that well apart from "Who's Sorry Now" (sung by Gloria De Haven) and "I Want to Be Loved By You" (sung by a young Debbie Reynolds with Carleton Carpenter). Red Skelton is quite good in a role that provides a bit of comedy, but is nowhere near as zany as in most of his movies. Fred Astaire, unsurprisingly does a good job in both the acting and the dancing parts of the movie.

There are a lot of other music-related biopics I'd recommend first, but Three Little Words is certainly worth catching the next time it shows up on TCM.

Not for love or money

Debbie Reynolds was TCM's Star of the Month back in March, and this gave me the opportunity to record several of her movies that I hadn't seen before. Back in September I mentioned Mary, Mary when TCM aired it, pointing out how it didn't really escape its stage origins. Another Reynolds film based on a stage play was This Happy Feeling.

We actually don't see Reynolds for a while. Instead we see Curt Jurgens. He plays Preston Mitchell, commonly called Mitch. Mitch is one of those stage stars in an era when everybody, at least of a certain demographic and residency, knew the stage stars. But he'd like to retire from the stage to a farm in Connecticut, much to the consternation of friend Nita Holloway (Alexis Smith) and a producer. They want him to play the father of a character to be played by the big new star of the stage, Tony Manza (Troy Donahue). Mitch politely turns them down, and goes home.

Storming into Mitch's house is neighbor Bill Tremayne (John Saxon). He, like everybody else in the area, has been invited to a housewarming party for a couple who recently moved to the area, the Dovers. Bill comes over to tell Mitch about it, and if Mitch doesn't want to come, at least perhaps Mitch can lend Bill his car so Bill doesn't have to walk over in the rain. It's at the party where we finally see the Debbie Reynolds character. She plays one Janet Blake, a secretary who went to the party with her boss. But she'd like to get away from her boss, because he's doing things that today would be considered sexual harassment.

Janet buttonholes Bill, trying to get him to take her home, or at least to to nearest commuter train station. Bill, seeing Janet and already having been revealed to be a ladies' man, starts showing the sort of interest in Janet that her boss had been showing her. Janet, being terribly ticked, gets out of the car and starts running -- anywhere -- to get the heck away from poor Bill. She winds up at Mitch's house, and Mitch is kind enough to offer her a room so she can dry off and have a place to spend the night.

Mitch decides to give her a job as his secretary, mostly out of convenience so that Nita won't think Mitch had any bad intentions having a lovely young thing like Janet in his house overnight. Bill shows up, and also suspects the motives of Janet and Mitch. More complications ensue, leading to the predictable ending.

This Happy Feeling is supposed to be a comedy, but for me, it wasn't all that funny, largely because none of the characters are particularly likeable or nice to each other. There's also a subplot involving Mitch's maid (Estelle Winwood) and a seagull she shot by mistake but did not kill. That subplot is equally grating. Also not helping is the fact that while the opening says the movie was filmed in Cinemascope, we only get a panned-and-scanned release in 4:3.

Fans of stage plays may like This Happy Feeling, but I'm sorry to say I didn't really care for it.

The Rat Race (1960)

TCM's Summer Under the Stars for 2024 concludes with a day of the films of Tony Curtis. The day includes a film or two that I haven't seen before and so am intending to record. However, there's a movie of his that's on my DVR but isn't airing today, so that's the movie I'm blogging about for today: The Rat Race.

Curtis plays Pete Hammond Jr. As the movie opens, Pete is in his home town of Milwaukee, getting on a bus to head to New York City. Pete plays the saxohphone and is into jazz, so heads to New York in the hopes of making it big in jazz. You'd think he could do better performing around Wisconsin with a combo of his own, but some people get stars in their eyes. The movie spends several minutes on a montage of Curtis heading east on the Greyhound bus before finally arriving in New York City. And then when he gets off the bus, he's ridiculously naïve. First he walks to Times Square with all his luggage in hand, and then heads to a hotel only to find that there's no way he can afford the daily rates there. So he inquires about rooming houses, which were still a thing in those days.

Cut to the other main character in the story, Peggy Brown (Debbie Reynolds. She's one of the people who lives in the roooming house. And she seems well enough off that she's able to have her own phone, something in the old rooming house movies from before the war wouldn't have had. Except that she's not so well off, as a man from the phone company (Norman Fell) knocks on her door with the intention of disconnecting the phone for non-payment. Peggy convinces him to give her another two weeks to collect the bill, with the implication being that the repairman thinks he's going to get "something" in return. Worse, Peggy hasn't been able to pay her rent, so the owner of the house is about to throw her out.

It's to this house that Pete shows up, and since the owner is evicting Peggy, there's a free room to let, one which Pete is immediately able to take. But as I said a few paragraphs above, he's impossibly credulous for a newcomer to the city, even by the standards of Hollywood movies that have dumb yokels making their way to New York. He hears Peggy's sob story and lets her stay, which I'd have though would be a serious violation of the Production Code. Worse, Peggy doesn't let on about her full story.

Peggy is a taxi dancer working at the dance hall run by Nellie Miller (Don Rickles, really cast against type here), and she's already asked Nellie for quite a few advances on her income. He's to the point where he's about to expect something more in return for all the money he's lent Peggy that she'll never be able to pay back. And she's about to ask Nellie for even more money.

Pete is so stupid that he gets caught out by a scam involving some musicians about to form a combo, only for them to ask him to go out and get beers for everybody. He goes out, and they take the opportunity to run off with his valuable musical instruments. He thinks he can just go to the police and of course they'll solve the case lickety-split, but Peggy, having been in New York for five years, knows much better. She turns to Nellie for the money to buy Pete new instruments, with serious consequences.

I can understand why the stars of The Rat Race would have wanted to be involved, as everyone was known more for fairly light movies. (Admittedly, Curtis had done more serious drama up to this point like The Defiant Ones.) The material here seems like a good opportunity for all involved to show off serious acting chops. Don Rickles takes that chance, and is surprisingly good playing a part that's totally unexpected for him. Tony Curtis, however, isn't so good. I think, however, that's more down to the script, which gives him the thankless task of playing a person you just want to shake some sense into. The movie also feels stagy at times, which is in no small part because it is indeed based on a stage play.

Still, I think The Rat Race deserves a watch, in no small part because of that performance from Don Rickles.

How the West Was Won

I mentioned at the start of the week in conjunction with Debbie Reynolds being TCM's Star of the Month for March that there was was at least one of her movies that I've got on my DVR and haven't done a post on before. That movie is the epic How the West Was Won. It's coming up early tomorrow morning (March 30) at 4:30 AM, so now we get the post on it.

Spencer Tracy narrates this movie that at times feels like an anthology, but is really more of an episodic movie since some of the characters appear in multiple segments, and many of the characters who are only in one segment are all part of the same family. Anyhow, Tracy informs us that it hasn't been all that long since the American frontier was conquered, and that in the early days of trying to move west it was particularly difficult, at least until the construction of the Erie Canal (completed in 1825) really made it a good deal easier to get to at least western Missouri. We then cut to 1839 for the first segment....

The first segment, called "The River" deals with one family trying to migrate west in search of more fertile land, although west here more or less means the Ohio Valley, which I'd have though was fairly comprehensively settled by 1839; Wikipedia suggests Cincinnati had already been incorprated for a generation and had a population in the mid-five-figure range. In any case, the family, the Prescotts, consists of father Zebulan (Karl Malden), mom Rebecca (Agnes Moorehead) and daughters Eve (Carroll Baker) and Lilith (Debbie Reynolds). They meet trapper Linus (James Stewart) before all of them get waylaid by some dubious pirates of the river (their leader is played by Walter Brennan). An accident in river rapids kills Mom and Dad; Eve marries Linus and Lilith heads for greener pastures.

Those pastures take her to Saint Louis in 1850, where she's workin as an enterainer who finds out that she's somehow inherited a gold mine out in California. So as with Westward the Women mentioned recently, she has to go west to California to take possession of the mine. She's followed by some suitors, notably professional gambler Cleve Van Valen (Gregory Peck).

Back to Eve's side of the story, when the Civil War comes she's got an adult son Zeb (George Peppard). Linus and Zeb both go off to fight, but when Zeb sees the hell that war truly is, a confederate he meets (Russ Tamblyn) suggests the two of them desert and go off somewhere together. But there's a lot more tragedy to come.

After the Civil War, the Transcontinental Railroad gets built. Zeb is still in the Army, now in the cavalry, trying to keep the peace with the various Indian tribes despite the fact that Mr. King (Richard Widmark), the man from the railroad, wants to get the track laid and who cares what the Indians think.

Finally, after leaving the Army, there's one last segment that reunites the two branches of the Prescott family. Lilith is forced to sell her home in San Francisco, deciding to retire to a ranch in the Arizona territory. But she's old, so she invites her nephew Zeb, by now married (Carolyn Jones playing his wife) to come along and run the place. When they get to Arizona, Zeb runs into Gant (Eli Wallach), an outlaw who's there to try to steal one of the shipments of gold.

It's easy on watching How the West Was Won to see why it was such a massive commercial success when it was released. The story is actually fairly pedestrian, but the movie was made in Cinerama, so I can only imagine how spectacular it must have been to see the movie as it was intended to be seen in the original Cinerama.

Unfortunately, however, most people don't have the sort of curved screen necessary to see Cinerama in its original aspect ratio and presentation format. In days past, this meant that TV presentations would be cut down, and there would be severe crease-like lines where the various segments of the print were supposed to meet up. Nowadays, restorers have tried to solve that problem through the use of the "smilebox" format that attempts to replicate the experience one would have had in the theater where the left and right edges of the screen are closer to the viewer than the middle.

I'm sorry to say that this doesn't quite work. First, I get the impression that the smilebox format is really more curved than it needs to be. Some of the photos I've seen of Cinerama screens do show a clearly evident curve, but not as much as the smilebox format has. The bigger problem, however, is how translating Cinerama to the smilebox distorts motion. I've always felt like there was something off in Cinemascope backgrounds when there are scenes with long panning in that the motion in parts of the background don't look quite right. In the smilebox format, this is much more severe, almost like what you'd see if you were moving around a sphere with stuff being reflected off of it.

But if you're the sort of person who doesn't tend to notice such distortion, or if you ever get the chance to see it in the original Cinerama (I don't know how many Cinerama screens still exist; would it be possible to translate Cinerama to an IMAX screen?), give How the West Was Won a chance. It's certainly a spectacle.

It Started With a Kiss

Debbie Reynolds is today's featured star in TCM's Summer Under the Stars, which in theory would have given you a chance to catch Athena again, although by the time most of you see this post it will have already aired. And since I've blogged about Athena already, I decided to mention another movie: It Started With a Kiss, airing tonight at midnight (so technically the very start of Monday, August 7 in the Eastern Time Zone, but still the evening of August 6 in more westerly time zones).

Reynolds plays Maggie, who's selling raffle tickets to help raise money for the Fresh Air Fund, a real charity that sends poor kids from New York City out to more rural summer camp-type places for a week or two in the summer. We actually had a similar camp near where I grew up, but it was run by the Boys' and Girls' Club instead, and is now owned by one of Brooklyn's Orthodox Jewish communities as a summer camp for boys. But that's beside the point. The raffle tickets are for a designer car, and one of the people buying a ticket as a charitable deduction is an Air Force officer, Sgt. Joe Fitzpatrick (Glenn Ford).

Joe and Maggie get away from the fundraiser for a bit, and as they start talking, they suddenly start feeling the spark of romance, leading to a quickie marriage even though Maggie was saying she wouldn't get married at all. Unfortunately, just as the two get married, Joe learns that he's being transferred to one of the US air bases in Spain, since the Franco regime was a fairly substantial ally of the Americans during the Cold War.

However, Franco was a dictator, which meant that there was a substantial portion of the population that didn't care for him, not that this bit is mentioned in the movie. More importantly in terms of plot is that people consequently are ambivalent at best about the US military presence in the country, something that's been an issue pretty much everywhere the Americans have had bases abroad. The base commanders, on orders from well above in terms of Maj. Gen. O'Connell (Fred Clark), want the Americans to be seen as good neighbors, so there are all sorts of rules the American military has to follow, with a big one being no ostentatious displays of wealth.

You know this is going to be a problem from the way a big point is made of. Sure enough, if you remember that raffle at the beginning of the movie, it was for a Lincoln concept car (the car used in the movie would in real life be repurposed as the Batmobile of all things) that's worth quite a sum of money. And wouldn't you know, but Joe wins the car! Maggie is coming over to Spain to live with her new husband, and she's having the car shipped over as well, so you can see where the problems are going to come from.

Meanwhile, Joe is getting some less than stellar advice from his meddling friends, including Charles (Harry Morgan), so when Maggie shows up she finds more problems, leading her to declare marriage a trial marriage, with no physical contact. If that's not bad enough for Joe, the presence of that car -- and the taxes Joe is going to have to pay on it -- is a big deal. Further complicating issues is a bullfighter who falls for Maggie.

It Started With a Kiss is another one of those movies that has a good idea as the basis of it, but which doesn't quite live up to that idea in the execution. That's a shame, since the stars here are generally enjoyable to watch in a lot of their other movies. But everything feels contrived and predictable. Not that predictability is necessarily a bad thing on its own. There was some location shooting, at least for establishing shots, which is nice, but I couldn't help but feel walking away from this movie that it's the sort of thing that could have been a lot better.

The Freed Unit wasn't always right

I'll admit that I'm not the greatest fan of musicals, but I think sometimes my not particularly caring for a certain musical is because the movie isn't all that good. I'm sorry to say that's the case with the musical Athena.

The movie starts off with a performance from an alleged TV star, Johnny Nyle (Vic Damone). Nyle sings in the sort of way that the part of Hollywood that still had one foot stuck in the past would like, and has a legion of adoring female fans who wear conservative long skirts. He's also got some sort of legal issue that has a process server going after him. With that in mind, Johnny goes to see his old war buddy Adam Shaw (Edmund Purdom) to see if Adam can fix his legal problems.

Adam, for his part, is trying to run for Congress, being the third generation of his family to go into politics and having the old solons from the party on his side. Regardless of the political considerations of helping someone like Nyle, Adam may simply not have the time to do it. He's also got his own personal problems, as he had bought some fruit trees from a tree nursery that didn't turn out the way he had hoped.

Adam is about to have much bigger problems when he goes to the nursery and runs into Athena Mulvain (Jane Powell). She's the sort of person who, when she's in public like this, would get the reputation for being "free-spirited", although that's putting it mildly. And Athena has decided that she loves Adam and is going to get him to marry her just by constantly being in his life. Never mind that he's got a fiancée already.

So Adam tries to find out who this Athena Mulvain is and where she lives so that he can go visit he and ask her if she would kindly break off the relationship. Instead, he finds that not only is she not going to take no for an answer, but she's got a really kooky family. She and all of her sisters are named after mythological figures, altough not all Greek as Athena's sister Minerva (Debbie Reynolds) is named after Athena's Roman equivalent. Minerva is also going to become a romantic interest for Johnny. This is determined by Athena's grandmather Salome (Evelyn Varden), who is into numerology.

Obviously, getting involved with Athena would cause all sorts of political problems for Adam, but he can't help himself. A further subplot involves Grandpa Mulvain's (Louis Calhern) views on diet and fitness, leading him to emcee a Mr. Universe-like contest which also serves as the dramatic climax of the movie.

For me, the movie Athena had a whole bunch of problems. One is that although it's a musical, it's one of those where the songs aren't particularly memorable and bring the proceedings to a screeching halt. Fans of musicals, however, probably won't have that problem. The bigger problem is that on multiple occasions, the main characters' motivations suddenly turn on a dime in ways that aren't realistic at all. And Athena isn't a charming free spirit, but an obnoxious blankety-blank since she can't take no for an answer.

Still, there are probably going to be some people who like a musical like this, so as always, watch and judge for yourself.

The Second Time Around

Not quite, but it's a damn good song

One of the few movies currently in the FXM rotation that I haven't blogged about before is The Second Time Around. With that in mind, I made a point of recording one of the recent showings so that when it came up again I could watch it and do a post on it here. Well, that next showing is finally here, as FXM will be showing it tomorrow (July 5) at 7:55 AM.

Debbie Reynolds plays Lu Rogers, a widowed mother of two living with her mother-in-law in New York circa 1911. An establishing scene at the opening shows her going into a shop, and that evening she tells her mother-in-law that she pawned her ring in order to get the money to... go west, young girl, and grow up with the country. Or, more specifially, her husband had a friend who went west to Arizona and opened up a store in one of those little towns that pop up in western movies like this. Said friend is offering Lu a job at the store, and one can guess that the friend might be willing to marry Lu and help take care of the children. But Lu only got the money for one ticket, so the children will have to stay behind until she can get enough money to wire back train fare.

Lu goes west, and arrives at a pretty bad time. It turns out that her husband's friend has literally just been killed in a hold-up, which means that that job Lu was hoping to get has just evaporated. The least the sheriff (Ken Scott) can do is figure out who killed the guy and bring the killer to justice.

It's not as if the sheriff has a job for Lu. The only person who has one is a rancher who happens to be a widow herself, Aggie Gates (Thelma Ritter). And that job is only on a trial basis since Aggie doesn't know if she can make a going concern of her ranch, let alone pay the salary of a mother with two children. And never mind that Lu at first doesn't know the first thing about ranching. But she's a fairly quick learner, and Aggie is willing to keep her on after the month is up.

The real reason, however, is that Aggie wants to find Lu a husband, and she knows just the man, neighboring rancher Pat Collins (Andy Griffith). Meanwhile, the man who really wants Lu's hand is Dan Jones (Steve Forrest), a gambler back in town. Unfortunately for him, he's done enough to keep ticking Lu off and generally making life difficult for her.

Not only that, but he may be in cahoots with the sheriff, who seems curiously unable to solve that shopkeeper's murder. It gets bad enough that Lu decides to start a recall campaign against the sheriff. That gets the real bad guys in a tizzy, since the sheriff has more or less been protecting them.

The Second Time Around isn't the world's greatest movie, but it's amiable enough thanks to Debbie Reynolds still being appealing and some nice supporting work from most of the rest of the cast. The plot, however, is a bit of a mess because much of the story has Pat unwilling to marry Lu for no good reason. And the finale is a bit too slapstick and strains credulity. Despite its flaws, however, The Second Time Around is definitely worth a watch.

What's the Matter With Helen?

If Tod Slaughter, one of the stars of yesterday's selection Sexton Blake and the Hooded Terror, got to go over the top and make the movies he was in fun as a result, another person who did the same later in her career was Shelley Winters. One of those performances can be found in What's the Matter With Helen?

The movie starts off with newsreels from early in the days of the Franklin Roosevelt administration. After stories about Franklin and Eleanor, we get a fictitious one about the notorious trial of two young men in Braddock, IA, who committed a particularly grisly murder. The two men were found guilty, and their mothers walk out of the courthouse and into a car waiting to whisk them away to the collective jeers of the people assembled outside.

The action then shifts to "real life", or at least real by the movie's universe, and out of the newsreel. The mothers are Adelle Bruckner (Debbie Reynolds), and Helen Hill (Shelley Winters), who seems a little more high strung. Adelle ran a school of dance for children in Braddock, with Helen a business partner providing accompaniment on the piano among other things. But they won't be able to keep a business running in a small town as the mothers of two notorious criminals. Worse, Helen reveals in the car that somebody stabbed her in the palm of her hand. Worse, she starts getting threatening phone calls from some guy who breathes like the obscene phone callers of 1970s jokes.

So Adelle gets the idea that she's going to change her name to Adelle Stuart and decamp to Hollywood, teaching there the children of stage parents who think their daughters might actually have some artistic talent. Helen, who generally puts more faith in the Lord, listening to radio evangelist Sister Alma (Agnes Moorehead) and not doing worldly things like going to the movies, has nothing else to do so she takes the name Helen Martin and goes out to Hollywood with Adelle.

Despite the fact that there's supposed to be a depression on, Adelle's school does moderately well. Well enough for Helen to keep rabbits in the yard out back, as well as for people to take an interest in the school. One is Hamilton Starr (Micheal Mac Lammoir), who just walks in to the house one day because Adelle keeps leaving the front door unlocked. This should be unnerving to anyone, but is especially so for Helen. You see, in addition to the phone call back in Iowa, she has this feeling someone is out there watching her. Worse, she starts having hallucinations in which she sees the dead body of the woman her and Adelle's sons killed. But Hamilton, it turns out, is a bit of a chancer who claims he can teach the dancing daughters elocution, something they'll need if they want to act.

And then a rich Texan also comes into the picture. That mank is Linc Palmer (Dennis Weaver), and he begins to fall in love with Adelle, which drives a bit more of a wedge between her and Helen, whose behavior is growing increasingly paranoid. Is one of these men out to get Helen and Adelle? Do they know about the women's past? Well, you'll have to watch the rest of the movie to find out.

By the time What's the Matter With Helen? was released, it had been almost a decade since What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? took two grand old stars of Hollywood and put them together in grand Gothic style. So in some ways you would think the genre had mostly been played out. And in some ways, that's true, because there's not much new going on here. However, the success of a movie like What's the Matter With Helen? depends as much on the performances of the stars. Winters does reasonably well, although not as well as some of the other actresses in the genre, or as well as she'd do the following year in The Poseiden Adventure. Reynolds also seems a bit too flat for the role.

Still, What's the Matter With Helen? is pretty darn entertaining in spite of its flaws, and is definitely worth watching.

She can't sink because she's a witch?

Every now and then, TCM runs a movie only a month or two apart. TCM ran The Unsinkable Molly Brown not too far back, and it's on the schedule for tomorrow at 4:00 PM, so I watched it a bit earlier than I might otherwise have done.

The movie starts off with a brief sequence of a baby being caught up in a flood in Colorado, shot both in distance with a doll in an actual river, and in close-up against obvious rear-projection photography. That baby survives the flood and winds up getting taken in by a widowed settler, Shamus Tobin (Ed Begley). She, now named Molly (Debbie Reynolds), has a couple of brothers who torment her constantly, as she wants to make something of herself in life even though she can't read or write.

Eventually she goes off on her own, inadvertently trespassing on land that's part of a mining claim of one John J. Brown (Harve Presnell), who takes her in at least to give her a meal. She doesn't like what she sees as his advances, since she intends to marry one of the rich Denver people, so at the first occasion she leaves for Leadville where she plans to get a job and take that first step to finding the rich guy.

Of course, Brown's mining claim is going to pay off at some point, so he's going to have the money to marry Molly and give her what she wants, at least to a point. When John first comes to get Molly and then gets the money for selling the claim, she's such an idiot that she hides the cash in the stove, where it's obviously going to get burned. Thankfully John has a second claim that strikes and they do get rich.




This leads them to move to Denver, but as nouveaux riches none of the hoity-toity people like them. So Molly gets the idea that they should go to Europe where they can learn a little class. They go to Europe and come back, but it still doesn't seem to help, so Molly wants to go back to Europe again, even though John doesn't. So they separate for a bit. Molly eventually decides to go back to John, and books transportation on the RMS Titanic to do so....

The Unsinkable Molly Brown is another of those movies that may not be your cup of tea if you're not a fan of the genre. Debbie Reynolds give a mostly fine performance, although there are a few parts where Reynolds-as-Reynolds comes through and the character becomes irritating. (The opening where she's being tormented by her foster brothers is one glaring example.) It also may be difficult for some that the movie is a musical, with the songs going on and on -- too long for me in some cases, but then, I'm not the biggest fan of musicals. I always thought the movie was about her surviving the Titanic sinking, but in fact this doesn't come up until the final 10 minutes of the movie.

Still, I'd have to recommend The Unsinkable Molly Brown, because there's enough in it that a certain type of movie buff is definitely going to like. But it's also definitely the sort of movie that wouldn't be first on my list of things to show to people who aren't already movie buffs.

Goodbye Charlie

One of the movies in the current FXM rotation that I haven't blogged about before is Goodbye Charlie. It's going to be on again tomorrow at 11:15 AM and again at 7:45 AM Friday.

The movie starts off with Charlie, who isn't really seen as he's partying with a bunch of other people on the yacht of wealthy movie producer Sir Leopold Sartori (Walter Matthau). Eventually, Charles goes into Mrs. Sartori's cabin and starts putting the moves on her, leading Sir Leopold to go below decks and shoot Charlie, who falls out the porthole into the ocean, obviously dying in the process although since he's lost at sea his body isn't found.

George Tracy (Tony Curtis) was one of Charlie's best friends, and is now living in France as a writer. However, Charlie had named George as the executor of his will, and Charlie's manager Morton (Martin Gabel) wants George to speak at the memorial service, so George comes from nine time zones away to fulfill his solemn duty. Unfortunately, George was also one of Charlie's only friends, as there's only him and two women at the memorial service. Charlie, you see, was a real smooth operator who used and dumped women like tissue paper.

George is going to be in the Los Angeles area for some time settling the estate, which is a mess since Charlie was effectively broke, but George is able to live in Charlie's beach house. That night, after the memorial service, a man comes knocking with an obvious emergency. Bruce Minton (Pat Boone) is a wealthy heir living in another beach house up the coast, and as he was driving to see his mother he ran across a naked and incoherent woman. The most Bruce could make out is that the woman wanted to be dropped off at Charlie's house; presumably she was one of Charlie's many ex-girlfriends.

Except that she regains her identity overnight, and realizes she's not in fact one of Charlie's ex-girlfriends, but Charlie himself, reincarnated as a woman (played by Debbie Reynolds). Charlie is none too pleased at first, knowing how he treated women, and George doesn't believe it anyway until Charlie tells George too many personal things that only Charlie could have known. And eventually, Charlie, if he's not exactly comfortable being a woman, at least figures he can put his womanly body to good use, what with those breasts and sex appeal.

Although Charlie has been reincarnated as a woman, he obviously hasn't learned anything from the whole experience of getting shot, as his plans are to use the womanly form to get close to men and blackmail them, having Charlie's knowledge of everything he did to women. Charlie does need money, after all, even if this isn't a particularly honest way of going about getting it.

Complications arise, however, when Bruce shows up again, having been captivated by this woman that he doesn't realize is actually a former man. Bruce could even marry the new Charlie, and while Charlie might like Bruce's money, he still doesn't want to be a wife till death does them part. There's also Sartori and the question of what will happen to Charlie if Sartori ever learns the truth or the new Charlie releases any information about Sartori.

Goodbye Charlie is a movie with a very funny premise, but one with doesn't quite live up to the potential of its premise. I think the problem is that both of the leads are miscast. In a movie without a gender-bender premise, it would be Tony Curtis who's the unctuous manipulator, not the Reynolds character. Curtis doesn't work so well as the straight man to such an operator. Reynolds, for her part, is entirely the wrong actress to be playing manipulative; I'm not certain who had both the comic chops and the reputation to pull it off at that point in the 1960s. Goodbye Charlie also goes on too long at just a shade under two hours.

As always, however, it's the sort of movie where you may want to watch and judge for yourself. In addition to the upcoming FXM showings, it's available on DVD if you want to watch it that way.

The Tender Trap

In trying to figure out what to watch, I realized I have to Frank Sinatra box sets, so I took out the DVD of The Tender Trap and watched it.

Sinatra plays theatrical agent Charlie Reader who, after we see him singing the title song before the opening credits, is shown on the couch in the middle of his New York apartment in the middle of a hot date (well, hot for the 50s) with Poppy (Lola Albright). It turns out that she's not his only girl, as popping into the room at various times are Jessica (Jarma Lewis), representative from a southern company; Helen (Carolyn Jones), who walks Charlie's dog; and Charlie's old friend Joe (David Wayne).

Oh wait; Joe's not a woman. It turns out that Joe telegraphed Charlie a few days earlier from Indianapolis that he'd be coming to visit for a few weeks to "take a vacation from his wife", which of course is a euphemism for the couple's marriage may be on the rocks. When David takes phone calls the next day while Charlie is working, it seems as though Charlie has dozens of women after him. There's one more we haven't mentioned; Sylvia (Celeste Holm), the lone lady violinist in the NBC orchestra. Sylvia is probably Charlie's closest girlfriend, except that she may not be so interested in marriage.

And then we meet a young woman who definitely is interested in marriage: Julie (Debbie Reynolds), who auditions for a play and winds up being Charlie's client. She gets the part, but has decided views that she's going to get married on a certain date, live in a certain town up in Westchester, and have three children. Oh, and the marriage date preculdes a standard run of the play contract. She's also flighty, in that she spends so much time at a furniture show the she misses one of the rehearsals. Who would want to marry a woman like that?

You can probably guess what happens next, which is that Charlie falls in love with Julie, and that eventually Julie is going to fall in love with Charlie, although that's going to take a little longer. And since Charlie is constantly stiffing Sylvia to deal with Julie, Joe starts standing in for Charlie and he falls in love with Sylvia, despite that marriage back in Indiana. And there are more complications ahead. Joe has been taking those phone messages from the dozens if not hundreds of women, and you just know Julie is going to find them, which clearly contradicts her conception of relationships.

In the end, though, The Tender Trap is light comedy, so once again you can probably figure out just how the Charlie/Julie relationship is going to be resolved, as well as the Joe/Sylvia relationship. The Tender Trap is moderately pleasant stuff, although not without its flaws, thanks to the way Charlie and Julie are depicted. The probably deserve each other, if only because nobody else deserves either of them.



One of the good things about the movie is the art direction, specifially in Charlie's apartment where much of the movie is set. It's a wonder of Mid-Century Modern, as it probably really was back in 1955. The above is only half of Charlie's palatial living room; I couldn't find a shot that has the whole thing as it's too big for wide screen. (I also wonder how a theatrical agent could afford an apartment like this.) To the left there's a fabulous minimalist gray couch as was the modern style. Julie's family's apartment, on the other hand, is much more old-fashioned:



All in all, The Tender Trap wasn't quite my favorite, but it's worth a watch.

Thursday Movie Picks #132: Featuring Actors/Actresses Who Passed Away in 2016

This being Thursday, it's time for another Thursday Movie Picks, run by the Wandering Through the Shelves blog. This week's theme is actors and actresses who died in 2016, and of course as a lover of old movies, I'm picking some slightly older movies.

First up is Strait-Jacket, from 1964. This one is in honor of George Kennedy, although he only has a small role. The star here is Joan Crawford, playing a woman who axe-murdered her husband decades ago and spent a long time in a mental institution as a result. She's out now and living with her adult daughter (Diane Baker), but odd things start happening that bring Crawford's sanity back into question, especially when somebody gets axed to death. Kennedy's small part includes a memorable scene of him having to axe a chicken to death:



This was made by William Castle, known for his gimmicks; I guess the gimmick here is starring Joan Crawford.

Next we get the 1962 two-reeler Happy Anniversary. This was made by and stars Pierre Étaix, a French clown who made several movies in the 1960s, all known for their inventive visual humor. This short has Étaix playing a husband who is trying to buy a gift for his wife on her anniversary, only to have anything that can go wrong actually go wrong: there's traffic, he has trouble fitting a gift in his tiny car, and so on. Meanwhile, the wife is back at their apartment having made a nice dinner for her husband; they being French, she's also opened a nice bottle of wine. And she waits... and waits... and waits....

Finally, I'll mention another movie where the actor had a small role: Running on Empty. Judd Hirsch and Christine Lahti play a couple of 60s radicals who accidentally killed an innocent janitor when they bombed a napalm factory; they've been on the run ever since with their two children. The elder of the two children, played by River Phoenix, is a piano prodigy, and good enough to go to Juilliard. Except of course that there's a problem, which is that if he were to go off it might reveal his parents' identities, and will also probably mean he's never see his parents again. I'm mentioning this film in honor of actor Steven Hill, perhaps best known from the TV series Law and Order. He plays Christine Lahti's father, and has one memorable scene when he meets his daughter at a restaurant for the first time in ages as she asks him to consider taking custody of her son so he can go to Juilliard.

I thought about using Debbie Reynolds so that I could mention What's the Matter With Helen, which has her and Shelley Winters playing two mothers who have to leave Iowa after their sons commit a notorious Leopold and Loeb-style murder. The mothers' friendship eventually goes downhill....

Because everybody knows the tax code is oh-so-funny

TCM is running a night of Tony Randall movies this evening, including The Mating Game at 11:45 PM.

Although TCM is putting the spotlight on Randall, in this movie Paul Douglas starts off the action. He's "Pop" Larkin, a farmer in rural Maryland, who appears to be fairly successful, although he's done it in an unorthodox way" he barters for everything he needs. This, combined with his family's generally unorthodox nature, ticks off neighboring farmer Wendell Burnshaw (Philip Ober). What's an irritated neighbor to do? Why, use the government to bully people you dislike into doing things you want! It's the American way! Burnshaw and his lawyer go to the local IRS office, where the manager promises to put an agent on the case: after all, the IRS, in the cupidity, see anything that might possibly be a pile of money, and think some of it should be theirs. They discover that Larkin hasn't filed a tax return in 20 years. Shades of Lionel Barrymore in You Can't Take It With You.

With that, the IRS sends top agent Lorenzo Charlton (finally we get to Tony Randall) out on the case. He gets to the farm, where he finds that it's not only Pop who's a bit "different"; it's the entire family: Ma (Una Merkel), adult daughter Mariette (Debbie Reynolds), and the younger kids all seem to like the lifestyle the practice on this family farm. Lorenzo asks to see the books, but of course there aren't any books, wince Pop barters for everything. He doesn't need to keep track of money, because if he's got a couple hundred bucks cash, that's a lot. Lorenzo continues the audit, figuring that the farmers must have made profits on their trades: remember that he's from the government and they think everybody owes them. But, as all this is going on, Lorenzo and Mariette are beginning to find that they like each other.

This, needless to say, complicates matters. The Larkins are trying to figure out a way to waylay Lorenzo and keep him from finishing the audit; he, for his part, has bosses who are more than happy to do the audit themselves if Lorenzo is for any reason unable or unwilling to do it. And they're going to be even nastier about it than Lorenzo could ever be. You don't get to a high position in the IRS by being nice to the people from whom you're extracting money! Still, when the boss comes, he winds up discovering something that at least enables the movie to have a happy ending. (Thankfully, it's foreshadowed enough that the ending isn't a deus ex machina ending.)

The Mating Game is intended as good, clean, fun; a fairly light romantic comedy between Randall and Reynolds. There's so much that could be used to make the ideological points I've mentioned earlier in the movie, but of course the movie doesn't have any real intention of going there. The movie doesn't even have as much to say as You Can't Take It With You on such matters. Not that this is a bad thing; even if you have unorthodox views like I do about the state as bully, trying to shoehorn them into a movie like The Mating Game would only make the film heavy-handed.

All of the main players here give nice performances. Nothing special, nothing earth-shattering; just a nice, entertaining, above-average picture. And that's a good thing. The Mating Game has also received a DVD release courtesy of the Warner Archive.