The Journey

Another of those movies that shows up on TCM regularly enough but that for whatever reason I had never actually watched in its entirety, is The Journey. With that in mind, the last time it ran on TCM I recorded it so that I could later watch it and write up a review to post here.

The opening credits play out over scenes at the exterior of an airport. We then are taken to the inside of Budapest Airport early in November 1956. For those who don't know, at the end of October student protests led to a new, somewhat less Communist government in Budapets, something which the Soviets couldn't tolerate, so they sent in tanks. The authorities also closed the airport, with a whole bunch of passengers stranded.

Among them is Hugh Deverill (Robert Morley), a British television representative who represents the worst of the British stereotypes about Brits who think they can just dictate terms to everybody around them and get their way. There's also an American family, the Rhinelanders (E.G. Marshall and Anne Jackson, with a very young Ron Howard as their younger son), and various people from other countries, all wondering how they're going to get out of the country.

Into all of this walks Lady Ashmore (Deborah Kerr), accompanied by a man calling himself Flemyng (Jason Robards) who is feeling rather unwell. It's also obvious that Flemyng isn't who he seems to be. Worse is that Ashmore has met Deverill in the past back in England. And Deverill is an absolute prick about it, constantly not wanting to give Lady Ashmore any privacy. He also knows she's married, so shouldn't be traveling in dangerous Communist Hungary alone, and certainly not with a sick man who isn't her husband.

The stranded passengers get put on a bus traveling to Vienna, since it's the closest airport in a non-Communist country, and get stopped at a couple of roadblocks, with Flemyng fainting at one of them and it being revealed that he's traveling under a false identity. They then get to the last major town before the border with Austria. There, the passengers are forced to stop, and wait at the hotel that has been commandeered for just this purpose.

At the hotel is a Soviet Red Army officer, Major Surov (Yul Brynner). He suspects something is up, and demands everyone surrender their passports so that he can interview them individually before letting them go through. This is going to be a particular problem for Flemyng, since he's not actually Flemyng but a Hungarian freedom fighter named Kedes. Not only that, but his physical situation is getting worse to the point that it's fairly obvious to everyone, even Surov, that something is badly wrong.

Further complicating matters is that Surov finds himself taken with Ashmore, or at least acting like he is. You could get the impression that Surov is going to ask for sexual favors in exchange for letting Kedes go, or something similar. But then, this is a movie from the late 1950s released by MGM, so most likely something like that isn't going to show up in a film subject to the Production Code.

Still, The Journey isn't a bad movie, although it's one that's not without its flaws. It runs a bit over two hours, which is a bit too long. It also feels a bit too pat, with the ending being somewhat unrealistic. Then again, I think it's less about the plot and more about the characters and their dealings with each other, with the various stars giving capable performances. The Journey is not, I think, the best movie for anybody involved with it, but is also something not to be ashamed of.

Another movie that feels like a 1930s exile

A couple of weeks back, I did a post on The Main Event, mentioning how it came across to me as the sort of movie that, with a bit of script doctoring, could have fit right in in the late 1930s. Recently, I watched another movie that has the feel of something that could have been done in the 1930s, although this one came out in the late 1950s. This time, the movie is Count Your Blessings.

The credits are done over a backdrop of the Houses of Parliament in London, with those old air raid searchlights you'd see in films set in either of the World Wars, along with explosions. It's a sign that the movie is set in London and during World War II. Or, at least, it opens up then. After the credits, Grace Allingham (Deborah Kerr) is returning home from her job as the sort of secretary at military headquarters that had her wearing a uniform. Not long after getting home, a visitor comes who is a friend of her kinda-sorta boyfriend Hugh. That man is Charles de Valhubert (Rossano Brazzi), who is working with the Free French.

Charles sees Grace and immediately falls in love with her and says he's going to marry her, which seems like nonsense except that this is a movie so you know that the two are eventually going to get married. The two go on a honeymoon somewhere in the picturesque English countryside, but it's a brief honeymoon in that Charles gets called back to London to be part of some sort of military operation. The honeymoon, however, was enough time for Charles to get Grace pregnant.

Some time later Grace gets news that Charles has been taken POW, which means that he's at least not dead. But somehow the war ends, and Charles never gets demobbed, instead getting sent on one tour of duty after another until it's around early 1954, since Charles is in Indochina at Dien Bien Phu. But finally he makes it out of Indochina and is able to return home, or at least to his wife and the son who's now about nine years old but whom he's never actually seen.

Needless to say, the reunion isn't going to be an easy one, not only for husband and wife but also for the son who now has a father in the flesh. Charles decides he's going to make things so much worse for all of them by packing everybody up -- after all, Grace has been living with her father at his fashionable London house -- and moving the whole family to France just because he says so!

Grace isn't particularly happy with this, especially when she learns that Charles has been seeing other women the entire time he's been in the military! Charles' uncle the Duc de St. Cloud (Maurice Chevalier) explains to Grace that this is the way French men are, except that since they're French, they all clearly care most about their wife and not all those other women. As if all of this should somehow mollify Grace. Grace thinks about taking the boy back with her to England, and eventually the boy gets his own ideas about how to resolve the conflict.

It's the boy's resolution of things at the end that made me think of one of those 1930s movies where the adolescent children figure out some crazy scheme to bring their divorced/widowed parent together with the right person. Most of those are wacky comedies, while Count Your Blessings feels like it's supposed to be more of a light drama, at least until the finale. But up until that finale, it's both extremely slow going and frankly maddening to anybody with common sense that the main characters have any logical motivation to act the way they do. After having watched it I looked it up, and noted both that it was a money loser and that the IMDb reviews are fairly negative. I'd have to agree.

I'd make the joke that you should Count Your Blessings that I watched the movie for you, but as always I have to say that you should watch for yourself and make your own conclusions.

The Chalk Garden

Some months back, TCM ran a night of movies directed by British director Ronald Neame. This gave me the chance to record a couple of movies I hadn't seen before, such as The Chalk Garden.

Deborah Kerr is the star here, playing a woman named Madrigal. As the movie opens, shows up at one of those big old houses that looks like it's on the coast of Devon or Cornwall. The house is owned by the elderly Mrs. St. Maugham (Edith Evans), and she's put a help wanted ad in the papers looking for a governess for her adolescent granddaughter Laurel (Hayley Mills). Laurel, it seems, is quite the handful and has driven off several prior governesses in prior succession. Indeed, Miss Madrigal isn't the only prospect showing up on this day; as the servant Maitland (Hayley Mills' real-life father John Mills, although Maitland is not Laurel's father in this movie) talks about Laurel, the other prospect isn't so sure she wants the job. But Madrigal is badly in need of a job, even though she's never been a governess before and has no references. But she has firm opinions on how to deal with Laurel and even speaks candidly about the state of the garden and how it's a metaphor for Laurel's upbringing, so Mrs. St. Maugham gives Madrigal the job.

Laurel sets out trying to destroy Madrigal the same way she has all the previous governesses; never mind her other misbehaviors like being a firebug. She's also a chronic liar, saying that her father killed himself and that Mom abandoned her and basically drove Dad to kill himelf. She also claims that Maitland killed his wife and child. As for Laurel's mom, she's gotten remarried and is at the point where she could legally file for custody of Laurel since she is, after all, the kid's biological mother. Mrs. St. Maugham doesn't seem to want that to happen, while Madrigal is more non-committal, even though Laurel is still clearly trying to snoop around into Madrigal's past.

With a custody battle looming, St. Maugham brings in a judge friend of hers, McWhirrey (Felix Aylmer), for advice. McWhirrey may recognize Madrigal; in any case it seems clear that Madrigal recognizes the judge and is thoroughly disconcerted by that. Laurel picks up on this, and because the judge is talking about a murder case involving a female defendant who would have been the right age for that defendant to have been Madrigal herself, gets the idea that Madrigal's past involves murder. And she may just be right. But what good will it do her if she is right and exposes the fact that Madrigal's past is as a murderess?

The Chalk Garden feels like it was based on a stage play, which is because it actually was, one by Enid Bagnold, a name you may recognize from having written National Velvet. Neame and the screenwriters try to open up the action both with scenes in the garden and with an excursion into town. They're not particularly successful in hiding the legacy of a stage play, but that doesn't mean the movie is bad. It has uniformly fine performances, although Hayley Mills' character is so darn nasty that she's tough to like. That can make the movie a bit hard to take at some points.

The Chalk Garden is definitely a movie worth watching thanks to those fine performances.

More Zenda prisoners

About a year and a half ago, I did a post on the 1937 movie version of the 1890s novel The Prisoner of Zenda. I knew that there was another movie version, made in color in the early 1950s, but I hadn't seen that one before. So the last time TCM ran it, I recorded it. The 1952 vesion of The Prisoner of Zenda is coming up on TCM again tomorrow, October 29, at 4:15 PM.

Needless to say, the plot of the two movies is pretty much the same, especially so since to save money, TCM largely reused the 1937 screenplay, never mind both movies are adapting the same source material. Rudolf Rassendyll (Stewart Granger) is an Englishman who's decided to go on a fishing vacation to the tiny Balkan monarchy of Ruritania. As he steps off the train in Ruritania, everybody seems shocked, and frankly as I watched this version of the movie it hit me: nobody bothers to tell him why they react the way they do when they see him. The reason, of course, is that Rudolf bears a striking resemblance, except for his moustache, to the crown prince who is soon to be crowned King Rudolf V (also played by Granger, which explains why they look alike).

Rassendyll is found by Col. Zapt (Louis Calhern) and Capt. von Tarlenheim, who explain the similarity to him (apparently, the two are distant cousins), and invite Rassendyll to meet his doppelgänger. They have dinner together and a bunch of wine, the crown prince known to be a heavy drinker. What they didn't know is that there's one last bottle of wine, which the English Rudolf doesn't drink, that was drugged by the prince's evil brother Michael (Robert Douglas). The idea was that with Rudolf incapacitated, Michael could take over as Regent, with Rupert (James Mason) being the power behind the throne.

But Zapt and company have an English lookalike, and are able to persuade him to take his cousin's place at the coronation. Of course, the English Rudolf doesn't know anything about Ruritanian politics, and one would think he doesn't know the language. But none of that is a barrier since this is a movie. One other problem is that in one of those royal marriages of convenience, the crown prince was supposed to marry a cousin, Princess Flavia (Deborah Kerr). Flavia didn't particularly care for the crown prince, but when she meets the Englishman playing the part of the crown prince, she likes this guy.

Now, the plan was for English Rudolf to go through the coronation and then give the crown and everything else to the crown prince, with nobody knowing the difference. Except that while the ceremony is going on, Michael and Rupert have the actual crown prince kidnapped. English Rudolf has to keep up the charade.

Since the screenplays are largely the same, there's not much to compare between the two movies. And of course, I haven't watched the 1937 version since blogging about it to compare the two movies. I will say, however, that Technicolor is something that works for a movie like this, even more so than modern-day color which is way too often based on a color scheme of teals and oranges for no good reason. There's not much grounding in reality in The Prisoner of Zenda, and the bright three-strip Technicolor is great for that. Stewart Granger is also an actor well-suited to period pieces like this, even if the other actors are better in other genres. Still, they all give it a professional go, and make this version of The Prisoner of Zenda a rousing watch.

The Grass is Greener

Back at the beginning of January when I posted about Robert Mitchum being TCM's Star of the Month for January, I mentioned that one of his movies I hadn't heard of before was The Grass Is Greener. Recently, I finally got around to watching it before it expired from the DVR, and now I can do a post on it.

The opening credits, designed by Maurice Binder, oddly show a bunch of infants, with four names getting roughly equal credit and only one name being listed among co-stars. After the credits, we get a song from Noël Coward about British stately houses and how the aristocrats who lived there can now no longer necessarily afford to do so. Cut to one such manor, where Victor (Cary Grant) and Hilary (Deborah Kerr), the Earl and Countess of Rhyall respectively, live, together with their two children. The couple live in a couple of rooms in one wing of the house that are marked "Private", which is because the rest of the house with all its artwork and other museum-quality furniture is subject to guided tours to help pay for the upkeep of the house. They even have to get rid of the governess, giving those duites to the butler, Sellers (Moray Watson, the one non-star in the credits).

During one of those tours, a man walks into what is essentially Victor and Hilary's living room, claiming that he did not see any "Private" sign because it fell off the door. That man, Charles Delacro (Robert Mitchum) is an American oilman who is in the UK on an extended holiday. Hilary is obviously none too pleased at first about seeing this strange man walk right into her living quarters, but the two strike up a conversation and Charles reveals himself to be extremely charming, as they head out onto the grounds. Eventually, however, Victor comes back into the living room from his office, discovering the two, and figuring out (correctly) that there's some sort of budding romance taking place.

Charles heads back to London where he's staying, and Hilary finds a reason to go to London, namely to get her hair done. But the only appointment is first thing in the morning, before the train would get her there, so she's going to have to stay overnight. She calls her and Victor's frend Hattie (Jean Simmons), a recent divorcée living off the alimony, to ask to stay there. What Hilary apparently doesn't know is that Hattie and Victor were romantically involved. Hilary spends several days in London consistently meeting up with Charles, while Hattie goes to see Victor, with the latter two planning a way to get back at poor Hilary.

That "revenge" is to try to get Charles to agree to a duel, and to use that duel to get Hilary to make up her mind about what to really do. Along the way, however, there's a lot of verbal jousting over who knows what about whom. The duel does eventually take place, albeit with somewhat surprising results.

It's mentioned in the opening credits that The Grass Is Greener is based on a stage play, and despite the attempts by the playwrights (who also wrote the screenplay for the movie adaptation) to open up the play, it's always very obviously based upon a stage play. Now, all five of the players give very good performances, and the movie isn't bad by any means. However, I must admit that it's once again the sort of material that probably would have worked better on the stage with a live audience than in this screen version. Watching it by myself, and with the stars not having any audience energy to play off of, it just feels like something is missing.

Of course, it's also not as if The Grass Is Greener is going to be widely revived on the stage for people to be able to see, so this movie version is going to have to suffice. It's a thoroughly professional outing from everyone involved.

From Air to Eternity

Some time back, when I was in my previous house, TCM ran The Gypsy Moths and, for whatever reason, I didn't record it. Either it was before I had the DVR, or I just didn't have the space on my DVR. In any case, several months back it showed up on the TCM schedule again, so this time since the DVR is technically unlimited, I decided to record it to be able finally to watch it.

Three guys jump out of an airplane together, although it must be pointed out they have parachutes on. Those guys are Mike Rettig (Burt Lancaster), Joe Browdy (Gene Hackman) and Malcom Webson (Scott Wilson). On their way down, they unfurl a banner, and it's clear that these are actually stunt jumpers, putting on a show for the people watching from the ground below who have paid for the privilege.

Now, at this point, I was expecting a period piece, but after putting on the show the guys go to the next town to put on another show, and judging from the automobiles, it's contemprorary, meaning the late 1960s. The next town is Bridgeville, KS, which is an interesting place if only because Malcolm used to live there. He left many years ago, not having looked back, largely because his parents no longer live there. In fact, his parents no longer live at all. They died when Malcolm was young, and his aunt and uncle lived in Bridgeville. Now that he's back, perhaps he ought to look them up and see if they're still in Bridgeville.

Of course, they are in Bridgeville, and it's eventually going to become clear why Malcolm wanted to get the hell out of Bridgeville. Aunt Elizabeth (Deborah Kerr) and Uncle John Brandon (William Windom) never had kids of their own, and that has long been a bone of contention between them. But the couple is nice enough that they're willing to put the three skydivers up for the one or two nights they're going to be in town.

Although the Brandons never had kids of their own, they've got a big enough house not only to put the three men up, but to have boarders. Generally, that's students at the local college, although one, Annie Burke (Bonnie Bedelia), is staying there over the summer. She eventually becomes a bit of a love interest for Malcolm.

As you might guess, there's going to be love interests for the other two men. It also doesn't take much to figure out that one of the women involved is going to be frustrated Elizabeth, although at least she doesn't get into a relationship with Malcolm, because that would be really creepy. Instead, she and Rettig connect while the creep factor is from Joe trying to bed a dancer from the local strip club. They still have to perform the aerial stunts for the crowd, however....

The Gypsy Moths is the sort of movie that's too serious for its own good. The Production Code had recently gone out the window, and you can understand Hollywood wanting to deal with grown-up themes in a more grown-up way. But The Gypsy Moths has too much conversation between the various people involved, rather than aerial action. You'd think that in a movie dealing with parachute jumpers people would want to see the effects photography, instead of a romantic drama.

Everybody involved tries their best, and the movie's flaws are definitely not the fault of the actors. But it's still a movie that doesn't add up to all that much 50 years on.

I'm not the only person who thought of From Here to Eternity

Last year on Veteran's Day, TCM ran a lineup of war movies, with prime time being a special look at the role of the American Red Cross during various wars, with Ben co-presenting together with a bigwig from the American Red Cross. One of the movies presented was new to me, The Proud and Profane. Not having heard of it and with the movie having an interesting-sounding plot, I decided to record it and eventually watch it.

The movie opens in 1943, in Nouméa, which is the capital of French New Caledonia. This is the height of World War II in the Pacific, and since France itself had been occupied by the Nazis, overseas territories the Nazis couldn't get to might be used by the allies for their own war-staging efforts, at least when such islands weren't taken by the Japanese. Coming to New Caledonia on the latest transport is new Red Cross worker Lee Ashley (Deborah Kerr).

Lee is met at the airport by the head of the Red Cross mission, sympathetic but no-nonsense Kate Connors (Thelma Ritter), who also knows a thing or two about operating with the limited supplies that the various military and adjunct groups have to deal with. The Red Cross' role here is partly like the USO on the home front, to entertain the men who get rotated out of theater here, as well as to do what they can to minister to those who are brought here injured. It's tough work, and Kate isn't so certain Lee is up to it in part because her husband died some time back on Guadalcanal.

Coming into all of this is a platoon of marines commanded by Lt. Col. Black (William Holden, with a ridiculous mustache that I'd have thought wouldn't conform to USMC regulations). He demands perfection out of his men, in part because there's a war on out there and he has to keep his man alive; at the same time, it's also the Marine way and that's the only like Black knows. Lee is a bit put off by this at first, as is Kate, and the platoon's chaplain Holmes.

Also in the platoon is Pvt. Eddie Wlodcik (Dewey Martin). He and Kate have a relationship together, but it's not a romantic one. Kate was Eddie's foster mother stateside and before the war, and they still have the sort of relationship that a mother and son have, at least among families that aren't dysfunctional.

As for romantic relationships, there's about to be one between Lt. Col. Black and Lee. He starts taking her around the island, and it begins to grow into something as Lee begins to realize that there's more to him than just the taskmaster. It also grows into more, once Lee realizes she's gotten knocked up by the lieutenant colonel. She's thinking of marrying him, the Code really requiring that, but that would also mean her getting sent back to the States.

In the opening that Ben and the Red Cross executive recorded, it was mentioned that the movie is a lot soap opera. And to be honest, once we learn of Lee's pregnancy, the movie really does veer into soap opera territory. We learn more about Black, as well as Lee's journey to find her husband's grave on Guadalcanal, which also leads to more revelations. The movie becomes faintly ridiculous.

As I said in the title, I couldn't help but think of From Here to Eternity as I was watching The Proud and Profane. Part of that is the presence of Deborah Kerr. That, and a scene she and Holden have on the beach were I almost expected them to do the Kerr/Lancaster thing. And of course, there's Kerr in the earlier movie mentioning her now infertility. This is also a movie that, although it's theoretically a war movie, is a lot less about the war itself much like From Here to Eternity isn't really a war movie.

All that said, The Proud and Profane is an inferior movie in every way, although that's not terribly surprising considering how good From Here to Eternity is. The Proud and Profane isn't terribly by any standard, however. It's just that it's the sort of movie that really could have been a good deal better.

King Solomon's Mines

Another of the movies that I had on my DVR and that is coming up again soon on TCM is MGM's 1950 version of King Solomon's Mines. As usual, in order to be able to do a post on the upcoming airing, I sat down to watch the copy already on my DVR. That airing is coming up tonight at 8:00 PM, so now you get the review.

After some nice opening credits in Technicolor with backdrops of Africa as well as informing us what parts of Africa the movie was actually filmed in (what are now Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, and eastern DRC), we're informed that the action is set in 1897 Africa, so when Britain was in control of a lot of east Africa, and when Europeans felt they had a moral duty to "civilize" the so-called Dark Continent. One such person is Allan Quatermain (Stuart Grainger), a safari guide working in British East Africa for the past 15 years, which is much longer than the average life span for a (white) guide in that part of the world.

Having come to the region from the UK is Elizabeth Curtis (Deborah Kerr). She's the wife of Henry, an adventurer who apparently had the crazy idea that King Solomon got his gold and gems from mines somewhere to the west of the British colony, in a part of Africa that's unexplored by the white man, and that supposedly many of the local tribes don't want to venture towards. Henry sent Elizabeth a "map" of the quality suitable for Hollywood movies of the era, where you wonder how anybody can find anything. Elizabeth would like Henry to guide her to where she thinks her husband would be if he's still alive, and to help she's brought along her brother John (Richard Carlson).

Allan isn't certain whether he wants to take on the job, but Elizabeth is offering a lot of money. Allan is a widower with a son back in England, and taking this job would help secure his son's future, so Allan reluctantly decides to take the job. It doesn't take long for Allan to think that perhaps he was right not to want to take on this job, as Elizabeth is one of those Victorian women who seems decidedly unsuited to going out on this type of adventure, being scared of every little thing and not properly provisioned.

Along the way, however, Elizabeth starts to become a bit more self-sufficient. She and Allan also go through that movie trope of developing feelings for each other even though there's still the question of whether Elizabeth's husband is alive or dead. The expedition also faces any number of westen tropes about Africa from the period: an animal stampede; local tribes that the guides aren't certain whether they're friendly; and a lot of wildlife. Much of this serves as a hook for a lot of lovely scenery.

There are a few set-pieces, if you will, in and among all the travelogue. One involves finding a white man out in the middle of nowhere (Hugo Haas), although Quatermain eventually determines who that white man is. There's also a lone African from a tribe Quatermain doesn't recognize at all; that guy joins them and his back story is revealed at the end of the movie. And then everyone gets to a cave that may just be what Henry thought was the titular mine. But is there anything there, and will they find Henry?

To be honest, I found large parts of King Solomon's Mines to be slow, largely because the characters have to trek quite a ways to get to the putative mines. There's only so much they can do along the way. With that in mind, the scenery might just be the best part of the movie. For 2024, that's a bit of a sad statement, only because getting color footage of exotic places is so commonplace. For 1950, when the movie was released, it would have been a big deal to audiences, and it's no surprise that this was one of the biggest box office hits of the year.

My comments about the scenery are not to imply that King Solomon's Mines is a bad movie, however. It's more that looking at it from almost 75 years on, it's the sort of stuff we've seen so many times since. But this would have been one the earliest, most previous Africa movies using studio backlots to stand in badly for Africa. So definitely give the 1950 King Solomon's Mines a watch.

I prefer coffee

Another of the movies that shows up reasonably often on TCM but that I had never seen before is Tea and Sympathy. So, the most recent time it showed up on TCM, I made a point to record it in order to be able to finally watch it and do a review on it here.

The movie starts off with Tom Lee (John Kerr) returning to the boarding school where he had studied several years earlier. For some people, such years were a happy time, but right from the beginning we get the sense that this wasn't the case for Tom. As he goes into his old room, we get the inevitable flashback....

Tom is a young man whose mother died some years back and whose father is one of those people seemingly more married to his work than to his now deceased wife, so Tom winds up getting raised by his maid, which has made him somewhat different from the rest of his classmates. Unsurprisingly, his classmates pick up on this, although he's not really helped in this regard by his father Herb (Edward Andrews), who consistently thinks the point of boarding school is to turn his son into a real man, whatever that means.

In the house where Tom lives, there's a housemaster and housemistress, the husband and wife pair of Bill Reynolds (Leif Erickson) and his wife Laura (Deborah Kerr, no relation to John). Bill is the sort of athletic, on the go man who seems just like the stereotype of someone you would expect to make a man out of a boy. Laura, however, is the only one who seems to have any real understanding of Tom. She sees him as bright and kind and sensitive, and thinks he's just as much of a man as the rest of the people at the school, thinking as well that it's absolutely cruel the way everybody else treats him.

Eventually, Tom decides that there's only one way to prove to everybody that yes, he is a real man, and that's to find a woman and bed her. To that end he sees the local prostitute, Ellie Martin (Norma Crane), but she treats him cruelly as well since he's clearly so naïve about sex. Tom's reaction to this sets the film's climax in motion before the flashback ends and we go back to the present day....

Tea and Sympathy was released in 1956, having been based on a play from a few years earlier, with all three of the film's leads reprising their roles. I haven't seen the stage play, but from what I've read -- it's obvious that where the movie version is dancing around the idea of Tom "being a man", that's really just dealing with the strictures of a Production Code that wouldn't allow the movie to deal with the question of homosexuality. The movie version doesn't dance around things so well, instead hitting the viewer over the head with the central conflict. The stereotypes are so crude that the movie becomes more tedious than sensitive or intelligent.

Some of the reviews I've read suggest that because of the handling of the topic to get around the Production Code, the movie has become dated, while others suggest that homosexuality and gender stereotyping is a timely topic even today. One thing that's decidedly not explored is the stereotypical expectations that gay men have for other gay men. I happen to know a handful of small-l libertarian gays who are extremely uncomfortable with the latter day movement focusing on Ts and Qs to the near exclusion of the LGB portion of the "community" (heck, I wouldn't be surprised if they don't like the idea of an LGBTQ "community" in the first place) or the idea that everything needs to be "queered", because to them "queer" in practice means fitting into a tediously restrictive political worldview.

So in that regard Tea and Sympathy probably is still relevant today, just not in the way a lot of people think. It's just too bad that the movie is too blunt in handling the issues.

Beware the Ides of March

I didn't intend to blog about multiple movies with Julius Caesar as a character in close succession, but the movies all showed up on one or another movie channel a few weeks apart, so we get a third film featuring Caesar: the 1953 MGM adaptation of William Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, tomorrow at 11:45 AM. (Yes, tomorrow is March 16, and the Ides of March are traditionally on the 15th. But because the 31 Days of Oscar grouping of movies by decade, as a 50s movie it had to air on a Wednesday.)

According to the Wikipedia article, this is a fairly close adaptation of the Shakespeare play, but I was in the academic track in high school that did a different selection of Shakespeare plays, so I got Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, and Macbeth instead. The movie opens not long (history suggests a year, but time is telescoped to make it seem like a couple of days) before the Ides of March on which Caesar (Louis Calhern) would be killed. He's just killed some of his biggest rivals for power in battle, and the braying mob in Rome wants him made king/dictator; as we saw in Cleopatra the idea of anybody being a king was supposed to be horrifying to republican Rome. But Marc Antony (Marlon Brando) seems to be encouraging Caesar to take the crown.

This obviously terrifies any number of Caesar's other rivals. Some of them just want power for themselves, probably recognizing that the Republic had been fatally wounded for several decades already. This notably includes Cassius (John Gielgud) and Casca (Edmond O'Brien), although not so much Brutus (James Mason) at first. Brutus is less after power than concerned about the Republic being preserved, leading to a reluctance to join a conspiracy against Caesar. But Cassius and Casca aren't stupid. They know how to manipulate people, and so make it look as though there are quite a few Romans who want Caesar to be stopped before he gets too much power. Ultimately, after a lot of soul-searching, Brutus agrees to take part in the conspiracy.

Caesar, depsite having heard the warning to beware the Ides of March, and much to the chagrin of his wife Calpurnia (Greer Garson, in a one-scene role), goes to the Senate, where he gets killed, stabbed first by Casca and then the other conspirators, before Brutus has to deliver the coup de grace that leads Caesar to utter "Et tu, Brute".

All of this occurs inside the Senate, but waiting outside is another braying mob. Brutus, the intellectual, gives an eminently logical speech about Caesar, while Marc Antony, the one person not a part of the conspiracy, knows how to whip up that mob to the point they'll turn on the people who killed Caesar. The conspirators are going to have to flee rome, but even then they're not going to be safe, as Marc Antony and the other members of the triumvirate hunt them down.

This version of Julius Caesar is probably best-known for the fact that Marlon Brando was cast as Antony. Brando is one actor who was decidedly not known for being a Shakespearean actor, unlike those British members of the cast, notably Gielgud. (James Mason had also done a fair amount of Shakespeare before becoming a movie star.) Brando was also known at the time for his less-than-stellar diction. To be honest, Brando's diction is not particularly a problem, although there are times where his delivery devolves into something like his character from The Wild One.

Unsurprisingly, Mason and especially Gielgud handle the dialog well; somewhat more surprising is Edmond O'Brien, whom I wouldn't have thought of as being adept at Shakespeare. Louis Calhern dies halfway through and gets a relatively small number of scenes, and the female roles are small and an excuse cast big names. In addition to the aforementioned Garson there's Deborah Kerr as Brutus' wife.

Overall, Julius Caesar is the sort of movie MGM was very good at producing, and the quality shines through in pretty much every scene, other than possibly the battle scenes looking more like southern California than Italy. But there wasn't much that could be done about it without busting the budget. This version of Julius Caesar is definitely worth a watch.

More Mongkut

About a year ago, I blogged about Anna and the King of Siam when it was running in the FXM rotation. Some years later, of course, Rodgers and Hammerstein wrote a musical version, called The King and I. That one's been in the FXM rotation recently, and it's going to be on TCM this evening at 10:15 PM as part of 31 Days of Oscar.

Since the plots of the two movies aren't that different, this post is going to be a bit brief on plot and focus more on other things, like what's different in the musical from the older movie. Deborah Kerr plays Anna Leonowens, an English widow with a son who has been hired by Mongkut (Yul Brynner), King of Siam, to tutor his many children. Mongkut wants to modernize the country, but that brings all sorts of political challenges with it, as well as the repeated clashes between His Majesty and the headstrong Anna on how to achieve Mongkut's desires.

There's also a subplot involving Tuptim (Rita Moreno), who has been given by a Burmese prince to Mongkut, presumably as a concubine or a slave. Tuptim, however, already has a boyfriend in Lun Tha (Carlos Rivas), and has no desire to be pawned off to the King to be one of his zillion lovers. Interestingly, the movie handles the resolution of this subplot in a rather more muted way than in the earlier movie, in what is basically an aside saying both of the lovers have been found dead.

Part of that is because The King and I has to make room for the various musical numbers. Quite a few of the songs have become well known, including "I Whistle a Happy Tune" and "Shall We Dance", but probably the most famous of the songs is "Getting to Know You". Rodgers (the composer of the two) was quite adept at writing catchy tunes.

However, Tuptim does get a big production number of her own. As you may recall from Anna and the King of Siam, one of the big parts of the movie involves King Mongkut's holding a giant state dinner for all the Brits in Bangkok, where he can show everybody how modern and western the palace is. In The King and I, that involves Tuptim having written a play for the entertainment of the westerners, a one-act version of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. Even if Tuptim didn't break the fourth wall (at least the one in the palace theater, not the one in the actual movie), the symbolism of her not wanting to be a slave to Mongkut would have been obvious, and Mongkut would have understood it.

The strength of The King and I is in the production numbers, as well as the performances of Kerr (Oscar nominated), and Brynner (Oscar winner). There are the same issues I mentioned in my review of Anna and the King of Siam, namely that Hollywood didn't have anywhere near enough people of Southeast Asian descent to look like the Siamese. Some people might also have an issue with the Uncle Tom's Cabin scene, although the play is clearly stylized like kabuki, and to be fair, the royal palace wouldn't have had anybody of African descent in it to play black American slaves, or any whites to play Simon Legree for that matter. The movie also has a fairly abrupt ending.

But then, people don't watch The King and I for the subtleties of the plot; instead it's for the songs, and of course those shine if you're a fan of musicals. People who do like musicals are going to love The King and I if they haven't already seen it.

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp

I implied last week when I did a post on the three-hour movie The Sand Pebbles that for me there's a running time beyond which most movies could probably stand some editing down; for me that point is usually about two and a half hours. It's something I was thinking of again as I finally got around to watching The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp.

The movie starts off at the height of World War II in the UK. The Home Guards are doing training exercises, with the "war" they're going to fight set to start at midnight. However, the young commander suggests that since this is supposed to be as realistic as feasible, and the enemy doesn't hold to a set of gentlemanly rules of war, why should they? Therefore, the war will start early and they'll have the element of surprise in capturing the enemy commander.

That commander is General Wynne-Candy (Roger Livesey), who lives in one of those gentlemen's clubs that populated movies of the 1930s where men could go to spend the night if they've ticked off their wife or if they've gotten too drunk to make it home without creating a scene or somesuch. He's in the Turkish baths, unaware that he's about to be captured. But when he does get captured, it makes him think back on the last 40 years of his life....

In 1902, the much lower-ranking Candy, having recently returned from the Boer War where he earned a Victoria Cross, hears from an Englishwoman living in Berlin that the Germans are using him as propaganda to put out a bunch of lies about the way the British are treating the Boers in South Africa. So he proposes that he should go to Berlin and tell the Germans the truth. Not that they'll listen, of course. And not that his commanders think this is a good idea for his career.

So he goes off to Berlin to meet that woman, Edith Hunter (Deborah Kerr). He falls in love with her, but also falling in love with her is a German officer, Theo Kretschmar Schuldorff (Anton Walbrook). Candy's comments cause all sorts of controversy which eventually leads to Candy being challenged by a duel, where he fights Theo. The duel is inconclusive as they both wind up with scars from which they need to convalesce, although they also wind up about as good friends as possible for people who don't really speak each other's language.

Fast forward to 1914, and the start of the Great War, said fast-forward being done with a montage of hunting trophies. Candy goes back into service and winds up in France in 1918, where the troops under his command have taken some Germans prisoner. Candy has reason to believe Theo is among them, and sure enough Theo does wind up a POW in England, only heading back to Germany in 1919. But more importantly, Candy is trying to get back to England on leave. His attempts to get a train bring him into contact with one of the English nurses, Barbara Wynne, who looks amazingly like Edith Hunter from Berlin all those years ago, which is unsurprising considering Barbara is played by Deborah Kerr as well. As you can guess from Livesey's character being named Wynne-Candy in the opening scene, Candy and Barbara get married.

It's not exactly a happy marriage, at least in the sense that they don't live happily ever after as Barbara dies tragically young. This leads Candy to do a lot more hunting, until the start of World War II. He's old by this point, and the Army would like to pension him off, although as a VC winner he's got enough clout to make that a problem for the younger command, which is why they put him in charge of the Home Guards instead. He gets an army driver in the form of Angela, nicknamed "Johnny", who reminds him of Barbara and Edith, which is again unsurprising since Angela too is played by Deborah Kerr.

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp is one of those movies that's well-acted and competently made, and looks lovely in Technicolor, but man does it seem slow. That's not much of a surprise since the movie runs 163 minutes. Director Michael Powell was trying to make a statement about a certain type of Briton -- at least in the eyes of Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who wanted to ban the movie. Blimp, to me at least, represents the sort of old-fashioned colonial soldier we saw from C. Aubrey Smith in The Four Feathers, or the older generation getting pushed aside 15 years later in I'm Alright Jack, people who thought they'd win the war by being gentlemanly, as Candy himself says about the first World War.

I happen to know any number of Brits who take the relatively tedious to me attitude that if Johnny Foreigner does it one way, that way must be automatically wrong. But the people who take the diametrically opposed view that if John Bull does it one way, that way must be old-fashioned and wrong always come across as equally tedious to me. And that second sort of tedium really does bubble to the surface at times.

Still, the acting performances in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp are definitely to be recommended. It's just that if I were going to recommend Michael Powell movies to people who don't know much (if anything) about him, there are other movies I'd pick first.

For those who like Tennessee Williams

Another of my recent watches off the DVR was The Night of the Iguana.

Richard Burton plays Rev. Lawrence Shannon, who at the start of the movie is an Episcopalian minister in some middle-class parish of the sort that David Niven had in The Bishop's Wife where everybody seems to attend services. Shannon, however, has some sort of breakdown when he's about to deliver one of his sermons, which results in going on a rant and getting dismissed from this particular congregation.

Cut to Mexico, at some point in the future. Shannon has apparently been down here for quite some time, never having been able to get a minister's post with another congregation. He's leading a tour of little old (well, middle-aged) ladies from Texas, a tour that includes one student, Charlotte (Sue Lyon). She's constantly leading him on, and he seems to be OK with it.

The woman who organized the tour, Miss Fellowes (Grayson Hall), understandably thinks Shannon is the one responsible for the way the relationship between him and Charlotte is going, and to be fair, in some ways he is. But she's also a prudish little biddy who's going to be complaining about the smallest thing. What she's doing on a tour like this, I'll never know.

Then again, I don't really know what everybody's doing in a movie like this. The tour is scheduled to go to Puerto Vallarta, which was apparently a backwater at the time. Shannon commandeers the bus and takes it from the hotel in downtown Puerto Vallarta to a ramshackle resort run by a woman with whom Shannon had a previous relationship, Maxine Faulk (Ava Gardner). He then steals the bus' distributor so that the tour can't leave.

Fellowes and Charlotte and Shannon and Faulk go through a lot of overheated Tennessee Williams dialogue, but if that's not enough for you, they're joined by sketch artist Hannah Jelkes (Deborah Kerr) and her elderly grandfather poet who should have been in a rest home decades earlier, Nonno. Hannah obnoxiously touts her and her grandfather's talents, while tending to Shannon, since she's the one who realizes how broken he is.

The tour group is able to get the distributor back and escape, while Shannon and the other two women do things for another half hour, as if the movie hasn't gone on long enough, until it reaches a conclusion of some sort.

As you can probably tell, I didn't particularly care for The Night of the Iguana. It's partly down to the dialogue from Tennessee Williams, which possibly works better on a stage, although I haven't seen the play either. It's not helped by direction from John Huston, who turned this into another of his indulgent movies. I couldn't help but think of Under the Volcano, which had an excellent performance from Albert Finney, but a Hustonesque ending that nearly sinks the film. The performances here are adequate but not quite as good as Finney's, and Huston thankfully has to hew at least somewhat to Williams' script.

Still, The Night of the Iguana definitely isn't going to be for everybody. If you're a fan of John Huston or Tennessee Williams, you'll probably like it; otherwise, I'd suggest starting with something like The African Queen for Huston and Suddenly Last Summer for Williams.

Narcissus of Color

I had Black Narcissus on my DVR for a while, it being one of those movies that the critics all think everybody should watch. So finally I watched it to do a review here.

The movie is set in India, presumably in the late 1930s since that's when the book on which it's based was published. In Calcutta, there's an order of Anglican nuns known as the Order of the Servants of Mary. They run a school as their missionary work, and the Reverend Mother has a mission for Sister Clodagh (Deborah Kerr). Apparently there's an old palace up in the Himalayas that the order thinks would be perfect for starting a remote mission, and Clodagh is the perfect one to run it as the Sister Superior.

Sister Clodagh takes four nuns with her, and they go to meet Mr. Dean (David Farrar), the agent for the palace's owner, an old general (Esmond Knight). It's difficult to get to the palace, it being high on a cliff above the village in the valley below, and it's going to be a hard life for the nuns. A group of monks tried to make a go of the place some time back, and they left after a whopping five months. As in the old Lillian Gish movie, the wind is supposedly going to drive everyone crazy.

Still, Clodagh goes up to the palace with confidence, leading the other four nuns: Sister Briony (Judith Furst) is going to run the infirmary; Sister Honey (Judith Furse) for morale and teaching the making of lace to the local girls); Sister Philippa for gardening; and Sister Ruth (Kathleen Byron), partly as a teacher and partly because the Reverend Mother thinks getting the already unstable Ruth away from Calcutta will be a good thing for Ruth.

Along the way, the nuns deal with the old caretaker Angu Ayah, and take custody of a young woman Kanchi (Jean Simmons). As Mr. Dean predicted, the location has a somewhat adverse effect on all of the nuns. Clodagh seems the most stable, but she starts remembering an old relationship back in her native Ireland that led her to join the order, one she hadn't thought about in ages. Ruth goes further nuts. Briony tries to help a sick baby, but the baby is beyond saving. So when she gives the baby medicine that's really harmless castor oil, the baby still dies and the locals in the valley below think the nuns caused the death.

Ruth decides she's going to leave the order and marry Mr. Dean, although he has no desire to marry her, and this finally pushes Ruth over the edge, literally and figuratively.

Black Narcissus is a beautiful movie to look at, which is a good thing because it's not exactly beautiful to think about. This is partly because of the dark story line, and partly because as with Camille, it feels as though there's a whole lot of nothing going on. The stunning visuals, however, make up for this to an extent, helped by the cinematography of Jack Cardiff and some extremely impressive matte paintings.

So, I can recommend Black Narcissus if you know going in that it's psychological and less on plot. It's available on a pricey Criterion Collection DVD and Blu-ray.

Perfect Strangers

Another recent movie watch was the British film Vacation from Marriage (original title Perfect Strangers), which, due to its interesting provenance, is actually available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive.

Robert Donat plays Robert Wilson, a bookkeeper married to Cathy (Deborah Kerr) in London in April, 1940. This is of course during World War II and the time of the Nazi blitz on London. Robert has decided he's going to do his part for the war by joining the Royal Navy, but he's a bit meek, having the same routine day after day and being a bit afraid to ask his boss to make up the pay difference since he's a few weeks short of the five-year tenure to get that. However, Robert feels that he has to be the protector of Cathy, who is even more fragile than he is.

Robert goes off and shows he's go no experience with naval life, although he does slowly begin to take to it. Cathy has been left in their London flat, a place that she really didn't like even though she never told Robert this because she thought Robert needed the stability thanks to his meekness. So now that he's gone, she decides that she too is going to do her part by joining up with the WRENs (the Women's Royal Naval Service), the UK equivalent of the WAVEs.

Cathy quickly makes a friend in Dizzy (Glynis Johns), but like Robert she too is not ready for the women's equivalent of naval life. However, also like Robert, she does slowly being to open up in the WRENs, especially when she gets the chance to do something slightly heroic by taking a message to headquarters by boat, the road and telephone both being out. She even gets over her constant colds.

Time goes on, and both halves of the couple become more changed persons, even meeting a person who might be falling in love with them. Neither one is certain about having anything more than a friendly relationship with the new person who loves them, but both of them are uncertain that they want to go back to their old relationship after the war, having seen what life can really be like.

So after three years apart, the two each get ten days' leave at the same time, and each decides that they're going to bring up the idea of divorce. They don't realize, of course, that the other partner has changed, and that divorce might not actually be necessary.

Director Alexander Korda and his London Films signed a contract with MGM that was supposed to lead to three pictures, although this turned out to be the only one. The movie works out well, mostly thanks to a really strong supporting performance by Glynis Johns. I'm not the biggest fan of Donat, and at times his character seems off to the point of dislikeability. Kerr is much more sympathetic here.

If you like little pictures that work, then Vacation from Marriage is certainly one worth watching.

The Sundowners

Another of my recent movie watches was The Sundowners.

Robert Mitchum plays Paddy Carmody, an Irish-Australian sheep drover (a driver of sheep the same way cowboys drove cattle on cattle drives), going around the various sheep ranches of rural Australia in the 1920s together with his wife Ida (Deborah Kerr) and son Sean (Michael Anderson Jr.). It's a lifestyle that Paddy loves, although his wife wouldn't mind settlin down, especially because with an adolescent son they probably should have settled down some time back. So when the next sheep drive starts in Bulinga and Ida sees a farm for sale there, she suggests buying it.

Paddy says no and in any case they have a job lined up and currently not enough money to put a down payment on the farm, so they head out on the next job. The only thing they need is one more assistant drover, which they find in the form of British-born adventurer and raconteur Rupert Venneker (Peter Ustinov). They set out for their destination, Cawndilla, with a good 1200 sheep. They all make it to Cawndilla without that much incident besides a dingo, and Ida gets the brilliant idea of getting jobs for all of them, forcing them to stay a while and hopefully save enough money for that down payment.

The Carmodys and Venneker have various incidents relating to work on a sheep ranch, and often involving money, something which Paddy is singularly irresponsible with. Local innkeeper Mrs. Firth (Glynis Johns) meets Rupert and falls in love with him, while, surprisingly, there's no love interest for Sean. Money remains an issue until Paddy wins a racing horse which could be the family's meal ticket to earning the money for the down payment on that farm back in Bulinga.

The Sundowners is an extremely well-made movie, if you're interested in the subject material. It doesn't help that I'm not a particular fan of Peter Ustinov, even though he's relatively muted here. Mitchum and Kerr are both excellent as the married couple who clearly still love each other despite having a big disagreement on what they want out of life. The cinematography is quite good, since they used a fair amount of location shooting in Australia. The movie is a bit long at 133 minutes and could probaby have been edited down to under two hours.

The Sundowners is available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive.

As the screw turns

For those of you who have FXM, they will be showing The Innocents tomorrow, at 3:00 AM and again at 10:15 AM.

Deborah Kerr plays Miss Giddens, who at the beginning of the movie is meeting with her new boss, the uncle (Michael Redgrave, whose character is only referred to as "The Uncle") of two siblings to whom she is going to be governess. Uncle is a bachelor who prefers an active life and doesn't want kids impinging on it. Their parents died, and they're living off the inheritance in an estate out in the country. Or, at least, Flora (Pamela Franklin) is; her older brother Miles (Martin Stephens) is currently off at boarding school.

Miss Giddens gets to the estate where she thinks she hears a voice that must be Flora, but Flora insists it isn't her. Giddens also meets the cook, Miss Grose (Megs Jenkins), who seems to know that this place had a bit of a dark history, although she doesn't want to let on what that dark history is. Eventually we learn that a former governess, Miss Jessel, and another servant, Quint, were in love with each other and died, and it might just be the case that their ghosts haunt the place, if you really believe in ghosts.

Flora, like all children, can be a bit mischievous and willful at times, and she too seems to have a bit of the dark history as she just knows Miles is going to be coming home soon even though he's off at boarding school. Sure enough, word arrives that Miles is being expelled from the school because he's a bad influence on the other boys. And boy does he seem to be bad when he gets back, in a Bad Seed male equivalent sort of way. Miles lies through his teeth but also acts at times like a perfectly innocent gentleman.

Giddens continues to investigate, and eventually reaches a disturbing conclusion: Quint and Jessel are still around in spirit form, showing up to possess the bodies of Miles and Flora respectively! This would certainly explain their naughty, overly grown-up behavior. But such behavior also seems to be a threat to the people around them, and Giddens decides that she's goin gto have to expel the trespassing souls from her young charges, in a manner of speaking. Of course, to do so may just drive the little brats insane, especially if they're not actually possessed by anything....

The Innocents is based on the novella The Turn of the Screw by Henry James. I haven't read the original but do recall seeing one other TV adaptation of it back when I was in high school. (I think it was this 1974 version which is technically American although I always thought it was British thanks to the cast featuring Lynn Redgrave.) The story is a good one if you like that sort of story, which I have to admit isn't necessarily my first choice. Kerr does well in her role, and the photography is excellent, as should be expected considering the movie was directed by former cinematographer Jack Clayton. To me, the movie seems a bit ambiguous on whether the kids were really possessed or whether Giddens was just going insane, but that works for the movie.

The Innocents got a Criterion Collection DVD release some years back, but that seems to be out of print, so you're either going to have to pay through the nose or watch on FXM.

Edward, My Son

Another movie that I watched over the weekend was Edward, My Son.

Spencer Tracy plays Lord Arnold Boult, a Canadian-born Brit who tells us at the beginning that he badly screwed up his family's lives and that now his son Edward is dead. You can probably guess from this that we're about to have a flashback to how Arnold did all this. Flash back to Edward's first birthday, which Arnold and his wife Evelyn (Deborah Kerr) are celebrating along with Dr. Larry Woodhope (Ian Hunter), the family doctor who helped deliver Edward. The Boults aren't particularly well-to-do, but Arnold is ambitious, about to go into the banking industry with his friend Harry (Mervyn Johns) lending small amounts to people looking to buy things on the installment plan.

Fast forward to when Edward is five. He's in need of an operation that's going to cost a lot of money, and frankly he doesn't have that money since the business isn't going all that well. However, he has inventory that's insured, and he realizes if something happens to that inventory he'd have the money for Edward's operation. So naturally, Arnold decides to commit arson to get that insurance money.

It's just the first of many nasty things Arnold is going to go do "help" out his son, who ultimately grows up into a spoiled brat. Arnold blackmails the headmaster (Felix Aylmer) of Edward's boarding school, drives Harry to suicide, has an affair with his secretary, drives his wife to drink and threatens to claim she and Larry had an affair if she tries to file for divorce, and tries to get a woman Edward knocked up to have an abortion! Talk about nasty!

The one interesting thing about My Son, Edward is that we never actually see Edward. It's Spencer Tracy's movie all the way, and even though Kerr was nominated for a Best Actress Oscar, she's really a supporting character here.

As for the movie, I can't help think it could have been better than it turned out to be. Lord Boult was made Canadian-born for the movie so that MGM could give the role to Tracy without his having to essay a British accent. The movie was based on a play co-written by actor Robert Morley who also played the Arnold role in the original stage version. Tracy had too many good-guy roles behind him to be truly convincing as the piece of work Arnold is. Deborah Kerr is also a surprising problem in that she goes way over the top once Evelyn starts drinking. I'd guess she was directed this way, since she's normally much better than this.

Edward, My Son is an interesting but flawed movie that's probably worth one viewing. But it's not one I'm going to rush out and buy the Warner Archive DVD of.

Rocks Under the Marriage

My last batch of DVDs purchased at Amazon included this Frank Sinatra box set, which is apparently not available over at the TCM Shop. I picked it up for The Man With the Golden Arm and Some Came Running and was willing to try the other three movies, one of which is Marriage on the Rocks. The movie is also available as a standalone DVD (but again, not at the TCM Shop for some reason) and via Amazon streaming.

Sinatra plays Dan Edwards, a Los Angeles ad executive with a wife Valerie (Deborah Kerr) and two kids (Nancy Sinatra and Michel Petit) and a nice 60s house. He's devoted to his work though, as the movie opens up on his 19th wedding anniversary which he's more or less forgotten about. Dan's business partner Ernie (Dean Martin) is a very good friend of the Edwardses, to the point that he can pick out gifts for Valerie because he knows her tastes as well as, if not better than, Dan does. In fact, there's been a running joke that perhaps Valerie married the wrong man.

At home, Dan has a lot of problems. His daughter is 18 and wants to move in with one of her friends (female, platonic), but Dad is firmly in the old camp that a girl that age shouldn't move away from home unless she's getting married. But she's got a nearly fiancé in Jim (Tony Bill). The son is hearing from all his friends, whose parents are getting divorced, and is trying to guilt his parents into giving him things. And then there's the mother-in-law from hell (Hermione Baddeley).

Anyhow, Dan has been neglecting his marriage to the point that Valerie winds up making him sleep on the couch on their anniversary night! Dan and Ernie were planning to go on a guys' fishing trip together to Mexico, but Ernie insists that Dan take Valerie instead and treat it as a second honeymoon.

Dan and Valerie get to Mexico and find out that the village they're staying in is one that caters to Americans looking for either a quickie wedding, or a quickie divorce. Local poobah Miguel (Cesar Romero) is willing to provide either for them, and after a comedy of errors, Dan and Valerie wind up getting divorced! This, even though that's not really their intention. However, it gives them a good reason to have a real marriage all over again and fix the problems in their marriage. Business delays Dan and when Ernie goes down to Mexico to tell Valerie that the wedding will have to be delayed a day or two, another comedy of errors leads to Ernie and Valerie getting married -- the ceremony planned for Valerie and Dan goes ahead, only with Valerie and Ernie. Dan realizes that he can finally teach everybody a lesson.

The plot of Marriage on the Rocks is the sort of stuff that could have made for a fun little B movie at Warners in the 1930s. Unfortunately, the movie was made in 1965. With stars like Sinatra, Kerr, and Martin, we get a sort of generation gap comedy where they're trying to be hip to the changing times, only to fall flat on their faces doing it. Kerr dancing at a nightclub where Trini Lopez is performing and Nancy Sinatra's friend dances on an elevated platform is particularly cringeworthy.

On the other hand, the movie has some spectacular set design. I've stated quite a few times that I enjoy looking at 60s houses as they were actually conceived back in the day (and not so much today's look back at the era). Sinatra's house is nice, but Dean's swinging bachelor pad on the beach is spectacular:



It's just too bad it's in service of a dud of a movie. Having said that, there's always the "judge for yourself" caveat that I like to give. And the box set isn't that expensive, so for the price you're paying for Some Came Running and The Man With the Golden Arm, you're getting three other movies as a bonus.

Kirk Douglas wears a porn 'stache!

So I watched The Arrangement off my DVR, since it's available on DVD. Kirk Douglas plays Eddie Anderson, an ad exec in Los Angeles who has it all: a wife Florence (Deborah Kerr), a big house with a three-car garage, and a fantastic porn 'stache. But apparently something is wrong in his life. As he's driving into work one day, he gets stuck between two semis and suddenly swerves to drive under one of them, an obvious attempt to kill himself.

But he ducked at the last moment, so he only wound up in the hospital, not too badly off, all things considered. However, he's decided he's not going to talk, just going over everything in his life that led up to this mid-life crisis.

The big thing is that he had a mistress Gwen (Faye Dunaway), and that complicated relationship went wrong as she decided to go back to the east coast. Eddie is going to have a chance to renew that relationship when he has to go back to New York after his Greek immigrant father (Richard Boone) falls ill. Meanwhile, the Andersons' lawyer Arthur (Hume Cronyn) is trying to get power of attorney to keep the erratic Eddie from spending all the money, and Florence is trying to get her analyst to analyze Eddie. It goes on like this.

Frankly, I think the movie is terrible. The narrative with all its flashbacks isn't easy, but is the least of the movie's problems. Eddie is just such a blankety-blank for nothing other than capricious reasons; Florence isn't so nice either; and the movie gives everybody terrible dialogue.

As I was watching it, I got the desire to look at the IMDb reviews to see how many of them thought the movie was making some sort of brilliant statement about suburbia and if any of them would mention Douglas Sirk. I didn't see Sirk's name pop up, but sure enough, there were a distressing number of comments that basically said that because this movie was criticizing suburbia, therefore it was good. Nonsense.

Of course, you should always judge for yourself, but The Arrangement is an overrated mess.