Three more musketeers

I've got a couple of movies from FXM that I hadn't seen before and was planning on blogging about the next time they came up. Now, as it turns, out, one, The Lieutenant Wore Skirts, is a movie I did blog about back in about 2018. But I know that I had not seen the 1939 Fox version of The Three Musketeers before. This one is getting another airing tomorrow, May 10, at 4:45 AM, so once again, now's the time to put up the post about it.

The movie informs us right from the start that this is a musical comedy version of Alexandre Dumas' famous story. Don Ameche plays D'Artagnan, the adult son of a Musketeer in the 1620s France of king Louis XIII (Joseph Schildkraut). D'Artagnan lives in Gascony in southwestern France, but is making his way to Paris in order to become one of the King's Musketeers. Along the way, he meets a couple of the Musketeers who aren't in uniform and pisses them all off to the point that he challenges them to duels in Paris.

So all three of them, who just happen to be Athos, Porthos, and Aramis, show up at the appointed place, at the same time: an inn/tavern where the proprietor seems to be off for the night and three dim-witted workers, played by 1930s comic team the Ritz Brothers, are running the place. The Musketeers challenge these men, whose characters are listed in the closing credits as Three Lackeys, to drink to every King Louis that France has had. Thanks to their incompetence, the lackeys spill most of their wine while the Musketeers get blackout drunk, prompting the lackeys to change into the much nicer Musketeer outfits. This is also how D'Artagnan finds the lackeys when he shows up, and since D'Artagnan wanted to be a Musketeer himself, he joins them, or has them join him.

Meanwhile, there's that palace intrigue going on that you might recall if you've seen a more serious movie version of the story. Cardinal Richelieu (Miles Mander) is the King's prime minister, but is trying to amass more power by having his own private security force that is working on diminishing the power of the Musketeers who, in Richelieu's mind, are too prone to random violence. There's also the matter of relations with England. Her Majesty the Queen Anne (Gloria Stuart) had been carrying on an affair with the Duke of Buckingham, and gave him a brooch to remember her by when he had to go back to England. Richelieu is pretty certain of this thanks to his spies among the court such as the Milday de Winter (Binnie Barnes).

Meanwhile, D'Artagnan and the lackeys meet Lady Constance (Pauline Moore), another of the Queen's ladies-in-waiting, who is the one who gets D'Artagnan involved in retrieving the brooch for the Queen since D'Artagnan is clearly more of a stauch supporter of the royals and not Richeliu. Along the way Don Ameche gets to sing some songs while the Ritz Brothers do their slapstick routines.

This version of The Three Musketeers is less about the Dumas story and more about the songs along with the Ritz Brothers' shtick. Whether you like the movie is going to depend in good part on what you think of the Ritzes, who are a decidedly dated sort of comedy. It also doesn't help that poor Don Ameche is saddled with some subpar songs. I'm reminded of the I Love Lucy episode where Lucy and Ethel write a song for a Camelot number Ricky wants to do, and come up with terribly inane lyrics. However, I think the movie as a whole is just more forgettable than actually bad. It's only a brief 72 minutes, so more programmer-length than ponderous prestige movie. And of course some people may actually enjoy the Ritz Brothers.

Hiram Maxim

Movies from the classic era of Universal Pictures, especially lesser-known films from the studio, don't show up so often on TCM because of TCM's having to pay for the rights to show them. One old Universal movie that did show up some months back that I recently got around to watching is one that's technically a biopic, or at least about a real person: So Goes My Love.

The movie opens up in 1867 in Massachusetts. Myrna Loy plays Jane Budden, a woman who has been raising pigs but doesn't want to do that any longer. So she sells all her pigs and buys a train ticket to Brooklyn (not yet a part of New York City at the time). She's got a cousin there, and her plan is to find herself a rich man to marry so that she can settle down and live a life of comfort. However, the first man she meets is decidedly not rich, but the struggling inventor who lives next door, Hiram Maxim (Don Ameche).

Even if Ameche and Loy weren't top-billed, you know they're going to wind up together, because of the way Hiram keeps comedically approaching Jane and just coming across as so darn charming, even though he's not particuarly successful and tells her not to marry him since he can't give her what she wants. Hiram keeps it up long enough that Jane eventually asks him to marry her, and they live happily ever after.

Well not quite, and even the movie version doesn't have you believe this. Hiram continues to struggle as an inventor, working on among other things improvements to curling irons as well as arc lighting. Jane bears Hiram a son, called Percy here (Bobby Driscoll) but Hiram Percy in real life. The movie is based on a book written by Hiram Percy, which was basically a series of vignettes about growing up with an unconventional father like Hiram.

Percy is an incorrigible child, and it's his antics, and the way he relates to his parents and his parents' relationship with each other that forms the second half of the movie, concluding with the birth of Percy's kid brother. Hiram, in this movie telling of the story, becomes successful enough that a committee wants to commission a portrait to hang in their museum of advancements in engineering. But the movie ends when Percy is maybe 10.

That's a shame, because as far as it goes, So Goes My Love is an OK nostalgia piece about growing up in the late 1800s. When watching the movie, I thought that the name Hiram Maxim was a real person, and on doing a bit of research, I found out that my suspicion was correct. And that's part of why So Goes My Love is only OK. Hiram Percy's book apparently only goes up to about the time Percy was 12 or so, and Hiram the father had an extremely interesting second act after all this that could make for a much more interesting movie, with inventing advancements to the machine gun, as well as becoming a naturalized British citizen and having a second marriage that may or may not have been legitimate.

Still, Ameche and Loy do a creditable job with the material they're given. It's just that they could have been given so much better material.

Hollywood Cavalcade

Another of the box sets that I picked up ome time back was a five-film set of the movies of Alice Faye. One of the movies in the set that I hadn't blogged about before is Hollywood Cavalcade, so I recently sat down to watch it and do a post on it here.

Faye plays Molly Adair, a stage actress in New York in 1913. She's successful on the stage, while the new medium of moving pictures is moving out west for various reasons. Michael Connors (Don Ameche) is a director who works for a Mack Sennett-like producer (Sennett, in fact, had a cameo in the movie), Sennett being the man who gave us the Keystone Kops and was instrumental in advancing Charlie Chaplin's career. The producer is always on the lookout for new talent, and Connors is sent east to sign Adair to a movie contract with the studio. Instead, Connors signs Adair to a personal contract.

Adair is supposed to star in romantic one- and two-reelers, but during filming of one of these shorts, a blooper happens in which the male lead (Buster Keaton playing himself) accidentally hits Molly in the face with a pie. This of course gets big laughs, and it gives Connors the idea to turn Molly into a comedy star. Now playing comedy, Molly becomes wildly successful, and Connors with her since he's got the rights to her contract.

This gives Connors the idea that perhaps he should start his own studio, bringing Molly with him as the new studio's big star. He needs money for that, but fortunately, a good friend, Dave Spingold (J. Edward Bromberg) has an uncle die and bequeath him the money that could be put to good use starting a new Hollywood studio. Connors has daring new ideas for the direction moving pictures should take, and thanks to having Molly, those ideas mostly work.

Connors wants to make Molly a "serious" actress again, and takes her out of comedy, pairing her with an unknown, Nicky Hayden (Alan Curtis). They form a successful screen team, but this is where things begin to go off the rails. Molly has always like Connors, to the point that she would be happy if he proposed marriage to her. Unfortunately, Connors is more in love with the idea of making movies than he is with Molly. Not that he dislikes Molly; she's more than a good friend. But he's just so busy with his work that he doesn't see the big flashing signs that Molly is in love with him and those two should be together.

Molly and Nicky are definitely good friends too, and since Mike doesn't see what's going on, Molly finally decides she's going to marry Nicky since he asks her. Besides, the fans, seeing the two of them paired on the screen together, think they're romantically involved in real life.

Molly's marriage to Nicky causes Mike to go off the deep end and start acting extremely irrationally. He rips up Molly's contract, and starts making a series of other mistakes that causes his movies to become flops. Eventually, it causes his studio to go bankrupt while Molly continues to be a big star. Eventually, she asks her studio to hire Mike to direct her next picture, even though the studio isn't so sure.

Two nearly simultaneous events cause the movie to face disaster. One is that Molly gets in a car accident that also kills Nicky, while the other is the advent of talking pictures. Will Mike be able to save the picture? Well, this is a light movie, so you can probably guess the answer.

One gets the feeling that Hollywood Cavalcade was originally conceived as a musical, of the sort that Fox liked to make. Not big and bold like MGM did, but more homespun and nostalgic, often looking at the past. It was a style that suited Alice Faye well, but for some reason, Fox wound up making this one not be a musical. Perhaps they didn't want it to be too closely related to Alexander's Ragtime Band, which came out a year earlier and has a lot of plot themes that resemble Hollywood Cavalcade. (There's also The Great American Broadcast, released two years later, and decidedly fitting into the same space. In any case, the material mostly works here, including a simulacrum of the old two-reeler comedies that were big hits two decades before the movie was released. That's because that section uses a lot of people who had been in the silent comedies.

At the same time, however, Hollywood Cavalcade also feels formulaic and a decided step down from Alexander's Ragtime Band. It's a good enough movie, and one that is great to have in a box set, but definitely a lesser Fox musical.

Midnight (1939)

A search of the blog reveals that I've never blogged about the Claudette Colbert film Midnight before. It was on TCM not too long ago, so I recorded it in order that I could do a review of it, not having seen it in ages.

Colbert plays Eve Peabody, who at the start of the movie shows up in Paris on a train from Monte Carlo and Nice. She's asleep in third class when the train stops, and the railyard worker who checks to make certain all the passengers have gotten off has to roust her to get her off the train. She also doesn't have any luggage with her, just the very fine gown on her back. Eve, you see, is a chorus girl who likes to gamble, and lost everything she had in Monte Carlo, to the point that she had to pawn her belongings to get to Paris.

Tibor Czerny (Don Ameche) is a Hungarian émigré living in Paris and working as a taxi driver. Eve sees him, and makes him an offer. He'll drive her around to all the nightclubs listed in the want ads as looking for singers, and if she gets a job, she'll pay him double the fare; otherwise, he'll have to eat the fare since she doesn't have any money. We get a montage of nighclub neon signs, as Eve finds herself unable to procure employment. But Tibor is already smitten with her, as he buys her dinner and offers her a place to crash for the night as he works the night shift.

Eve has other plans. She escapes to a hoity-toity classical music recital that's by invitation only. Well, she escapes to the outside of it, as she doesn't have an invitation, of course. So when she gets in line to enter, she presents her ticket from the pawn shop, since the guy handling admittance isn't checking the invitations so quickly. They check after everybody is in, and Stephanie, the woman running the concert (Hedda Hopper in a small role) spots the deception, asking if anybody is Eve Peabody, or knows her. The real Eve, of course, says nothing, but another man spots her trying to leave, and takes her into another room.

These are actually several people who would prefer to play bridge than listen to this classical music, among them Marcel, who brought Eve into the room; Georges Flammarion (John Barrymore); Georges' husband Helene (Mary Astor); and Helene's lover Jacques Picot (Francis Lederer). George knows fully well that Helene and Jacques are lovers, but he's not going to grant his wife a divorce, instead looking for a way to break up the relationship. Meanwhile, Eve loses 4000 francs playing bridge, money she doesn't have. Eve, of course, hasn't told these people she's Eve Peabody; instead she claims to be the Baroness Czerny, taking Tibor's name.

Georges, however, does have many, and slips some into Eve's pocketbook. He even books a suite for her at the Ritz so that Jacques won't discover the deception. Of course, he's got a plan for her, and my synopsis giving a bit too much away, you might have figured it out, which is that Georges wants Eve to get Jacques to fall in love with her so that Georges will be able to get Helene back for himself. Eve accepts the offer, because she doesn't really have much choice.

Complicating things is that Tibor would like to find Eve. And he's got the power of thousands of Parisian taxicab drivers on his side, having put up a pool wherein everybody who antes up can get the whole pool by finding Eve. Eventually, he learns that Eve has gone to the Flammarion place out in the country for one of those weekend-long parties in a movie like Gosford Park. And when he goes out there, and finds that Eve is using his name....

If Midnight suffers from one problem, it's one that's not of its own making, but of having been released in 1939. Old movie buffs tend to consider 1939 Hollywood's greatest year, and there are a lot of movies from that year that are better remembered than Midnight, with probably the most notable one for the purposes of this blog post being another Paris-set movie, Ninotchka. It's a bit of a shame, because Midnight is generally a fine movie, although at times the production values feel just slightly less glittering than Ninotchka.

But, in general, the actors all do quite well for themselves, including Monty Woolley as a judge in a divorce-court finale, and the script is excellent too. This later even though the screenwriters, the pair of Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett, apparently had some problems with Mitchell Leisen's direction -- not that I found anyhing notably wrong with it.

In short, Midnight is one of the underrated films of 1939, and if you haven't seen it, definitely do yourself a favor and watch it.

Trading Places

Among the comedy classics that I've never blogged about before is Trading Places. The Starz/Encore family of channels has had the rights to it, and over Thanksgiving, I had a free preview of those, so I decided to DVR it and watch it to do a post here sometime. It's got another airing tomorrow at 12:14 PM on StarzEncore (or three hours later if you only have the west coast feed), and a few more times later in the week.

Dan Aykroyd plays Louis Winthorpe III, one of those snooty Main Line Philadelphia types who would have been a wedding guest in a movie like The Philadelphia Story or at the parties in a movie like The Young Philadelphians. He works in commodities trading for the firm of Duke & Duke, run by Randolph (Ralph Bellamy) and Mortimer (Don Ameche) Duke, and has a fiancée Penelope who is a member of the Duke famiiy as well as a butler in Coleman (Denholm Elliott). He's never known anything less than the best, and as the managing director of the company, he's responsible for saving the elder Dukes a ton of money trading things like pork belly futures at just the right time.

Definitely not of that social class is Billy Ray Valentine (Eddie Murphy). He's a small-time con artist, pretending to be a blind amputee in order to get people to give him charitable donations, spending his free time at the bar where he's apparently run up quite the tab. And, of course, he's black, although the elder Dukes would call him a Negro if only because that shows how out of touch they are.

But the two Duke brothers have debates about things like nature vs. nurture. So when Billy Ray and Winthorpe accidentally run into each other outside the entrance to the Duke & Duke building, the two hatch an idea. They'll spring Billy Ray out of the municipal jail (Winthorpe having thought Billy Ray was out to steal the payroll when their collision was purely accidental) and give him Winthorpe's life, while using their influence to get Winthorpe strung up on completely bogus charges that he'll have no way of defending himself against. Will Winthorpe turn to criminality? Will Billy Ray become more refined? That's what the bet is about.

After Winthorpe spends a night in jail, he's bailed out, but a mysterious Clarence Beeks (Paul Gleason) pays the hooker Ophelia (Jamie Lee Curtis) to screw up Winthorpe's relationship with Penelope. Ophelia at least learns that in Winthorpe's past, he had a large bank account and credit cards that have been frozen because of his legal issues. So she, being the stereotypical "prostitute with a heart of gold" that was already parodied back in Paris When It Sizzles, puts Winthorpe up.

Billy Ray, meanwhile, does start becoming more refined, showing some regret when he invites all the people from the lower-class bar to a party at his new digs only for them to treat the place like a dump. He also has some decidedly different advice about why the market might act the way it does, although his advice turns out to be just as right as Winthorpe's was, only for different reasons. However, Billy Ray overhears the Duke brothers talking about the wager, and figures out that half of what's going on, leading him to take Winthorpe in as an ally.

There's another half to what the Dukes are doing, however. The aforementioned Clarence has been cut some extremely large checks that both Winthorpe and Billy Ray noticed in payroll and red-flagged, although the two elder Dukes have excuses for those checks. In fact, Beeks is supposed to steal a top-secret Department of Agriculture report about orange juice futures; having said information early will enable them to corner the market and make a killing. Winthorpe and Billy Ray figure out that plot as well, and work to foil it.

Trading Places is funny and mostly works, although it's going to require you to suspend a lot of disbelief. I find it impossible to believe that any random schlub picked off the street would be able to understand the nuances of the futures market, for example. And I can't think of any way that somebody like Coleman would immediately turn on Winthorpe, whom he clearly likes, just because the Dukes have a wager.

The screenplay, as well as director John Landis, also avoid social commentary in all but a superficial way, which could be either a positive or a negative depending on your expectations. There's certainly a lot of ground for trenchant commentary that is pretty much ignored. But at the same time, it's the sort of commentary where it would be very easy to fall into the trap of making it preachy and drowning any of the comedy. The one interesting thing I did notice was the contrast between black Billy Ray being a petty criminal and white Ophelia who, although she's a prostitute, is shown as saving money for retirement and having a substantial sum to invest for the climactic scene.

Make of all that what you will, Trading Places is still mostly a pretty darn funny movie with a chance for everybody to shine.

Picture Mommy Dead

There was a lot of schlocky horror and sci-fi in the 1950s and 1960s. Recently, I had the chance to watch one such film, Picture Mommy Dead.

The movie starts off with a prologue scene of Jessica Shelley (Zsa Zsa Gabor) burning to death, and her daughter Susan (Susan Gordon) singing that song about "the worms go in, the worms go out". Cut to a convent school that apparently doubles as a sanatorium for troubled youth. Susan wound up there due to the trauma of seeing her mother die the way she did. But after several years, she's apparently ready to go back to the outside world, and her father Edward (Don Ameche) is picking her up from Sister René (Signe Hasso in a one-scene part).

In a bizarre move, Dad takes Susan back to the home she grew up in, which just happens to be the home where Mom died, something you'd think would be a traumatic experience. But that's not the only bizarre thing. While Susan was in the sanatorium, Dad remarried, to Francene (Martha Hyer), who just happened to be Susan's governess while Jessica was still alive. The family lawyer Clayborn (Wendell Corey in another one-scene part) discusses the will with the family, since Susan would have been too young to comprehend everything. Mom left most of the fortune to Susan in a trust that she'd only get control of once she turns 25. Mom had the wealth and Dad only had a high-society name, so Mom left Dad control of a much more modest sum of money, which Francene has already blown through.

So you can guess part of what happens next. Although Jessica's death was declared accidental by the coroner, Francene intimates that Susan was actually responsible for it, which is part of why Susan had to go into that institution. Susan starts to have nightmares as everything seems to remind her of her dead Mom and Francene seeems to be doing nothing whatsoever to discourage this, sort of like a bizarro world Z-movie version of Rebecca. It's an obvious ploy on Francene's part to get Susan committed which would give Susan and Edward control over Susan's money.

But Francene is a much bigger piece of work than that. Jessica had a cousin Anthony (Maxwell Reed) who was burned in the fire, and Francene is conspiring with him to wrest control of Susan's money not only from Susan, but from Edward as well!

While the plot of Picture Mommy Dead is lurid, the movie as a whole doesn't work, which is a bit of a shame. The problem is that the first two-thirds of the movie are too slow and tedious. The final third veers into camp, at which point the movie picks up and becomes a lot of fun. The acting goes way downhill and the nonsense goes way up, with echoes (not necessarily intentional) of such classics as Detour and Night of the Hunter. It's a mess, but laughably fun, and it's a shame that it takes the movie so long to get there.

Cocoon

I can't recall the last time Cocoon showed up on FXM. It's been on TCM a couple of times, and I recorded it the last time it showed up. But it's finally on the FXM schedule, having gotten an airing today and on again tomorrow morning at 11:10 AM. So I sat down to watch it and do a review on it here.

Wilford Brimley plays Ben Luckett, who lives at a senior citizens' community together with his wife Mary (Maureen Stapleton) and several of his more recent friends. Ben being a bit younger (in real life Brimley was 20-25 years younger than most of the other retiree co-stars), he can still drive at least for the time being, and is somewhat more independent, as opposed, say, to the Lefkowitzes, Bernie (Jack Gilford) and Rosie (Herta Ware), the latter of whom has some form of dementia.

While a lot of people are doing the standard old-fart group activities that the retirement home puts on, Ben breaks in to the unoccupied home next door, which has a nice pool house that nobody is going to notice him and his friends using. These friends are unmarried Art (Don Ameche), and Joe Finley (Hume Cronyn), married to Alma (Cronyn's real-life wife Jessica Tandy).

Meanwhile, at the marina nearby, Jack Bonner (Steve Guttenberg) is running a struggling charter boat business. He's lucky to be able to pay off his dockage fees, but other than that, he's had a terrible string of bad luck. So how does all of this come together?

One day, Walter (Brian Dennehy) shows up along with friends including Kitty (Raquel Welch's daughter Tahnee) and Pillsbury (Tyrone Power Jr., although he's really the third or fourth member of the acting family with that name, since "Tyrone Power Sr." was a silent film star and there was one before that). They offer Jack a substantial sum of money in exchange for exclusive use of the boat for the next month. They also show up over at the unoccupied home, looking to rent that for a month, too.

This puts a crimp in the plans of Ben and his friends, who might not be able to use the pool any longer. They decide that they'll still go in when they see Walter and his friends go out on the boat; that way they know they'll have the pool for a while. As for Walter's group, they go scuba diving and bring up what look like large shells that have been lying on the sea floor for who knows how long, bring them on the boat, and then store them in the pool.

This last bit, unsurprisingly, gives the three old men a bit of pause, but they still go into the pool even with these rocks or whatever they are in the pool. They find out after getting out of the pool that they feel much younger -- and hornier -- with all sorts of similar anti-aging effects. Ben had failed the eyesight portion of his license renewal but now passes with flying colors, while Joe finds that his terminal cancer is suddenly in remission.

This should be good news, but there are consequences that aren't entirely positive, such as when Joe starts flirting with other women and it threatens to break up his marriage to Alma, whom he loves dearly.

As for that pool, it turns out that Walter and his friends are aliens, which we first learn when Jack is watching Kitty undress through a small hole in the boat. She doesn't just undress; she takes off her skin, revealing a bright light/pure energy being that obviously throws Jack for a loop. The big surprise is that the aliens don't seem to be afraid of Jack when he finds this out. Nor do they seem afraid of all the old people when Walter finds Ben and his friends in it.

As for those rocks or shells, they're actually the titular cocoons. Walter and his friends had led an expeditionary force from another star system millennia ago, but were forced to leave, putting their friends in these cocoons and depositing them at the bottom of the sea until they could return. (You'd think 10,000 years of geological processes might have done something to the cocoons, but apparently not.) Walter is back to retrieve his friends, and filled the pool with some sort of life force energy that would keep the cocoons and the beings in them alive until they can get back to the spaceship, where they'll live out their immortal days until the heat death of the universe.

But there's a limited amount of life force in that pool, and the energy revitalizing Ben and friends and making them young again ultimately saps all of that energy, making it no longer a fountain of youth and even resulting in the deaths of one of the beings, this being the first death Walter has experienced personally. It's that bit of emotion that leads Walter to accept Ben's sincere apology as well as Ben's offer to help put the remaining cocoons back on the sea floor until Walter can come one more time to retrieve them. In exchange, Walter offers to take Ben and his friends on the spaceship where they can be eternally young and a useful part of some alien society. But will they be willing to leave everything they know behind, and can they even escape?

Cocoon for much of the first half seems like a light silly science fiction fantasy, but with the draining of the life force in the pool it really turns into something thought-provoking and interesting. Of course the idea of not having to grow old and decrepit like Rose is appealing, but most of the time we don't really think about the consequences of an action like that. The material is handled well, and the performances of all these older actors getting another chance at a third act in life are reasonably good, even if Don Ameche's Oscar really seems more like a career award.

Cocoon is absolutely worth a watch, and I was surprised to see that it seems to be out of print on DVD. It does, however, seem to be available on Amazon streaming if you don't have FXM.

Down Argentine Way

For some reason, I thought Down Argentine Way was available on DVD courtesy of Fox's MOD scheme. It's not as far as I can tell, but it turns out there is a standalone DVD that's probably out of print because you can get it at Amazon but not the TCM Shop. Amazon also does the streaming video thing, and there's also a four-film Betty Grable set that is apparently in print, as it's available from both Amazon and the TCM Shop.

Although the movie is in a Betty Grable box set, it's actually Don Ameche who gets top billing and shows up first. He's Ricardo Quintana, an Argentine and son of Don Diego, a wealthy horse breeder. Don Diego is looking to sell some of his horses in the US, and sends Ricardo there to handle the sales. Get the highest price, but with one caveat: don't sell to Willis Crawford (Edward Fielding), who apparently screwed Don Diego over while the two were at boarding school in Paris ages ago, or any member of his family.

While in America, Ricardo meets the beautiful Glenda (Betty Grable). He falls in love with her, and she with him, as well as with one of the horses he's selling. However, there's one catch. Glenda's last name is Crawford: she's Willis' daughter. No sale.

Glenda is determined to get that horse, and frankly determined to get Ricardo as well, so she follows Ricardo back to Argentina, accompanied by her aunt Binnie (Charlotte Greenwood). The usual complications ensue. One further complication is that Don Diego's horses only do show-jumping, ever since one of his beloved horses died in a flat track race 15 years earlier. Ricardo and Glenda decide to train Don Diego's current favorite for the big flat track race.

The plot of Down Argentine Way is silly and predictable, and you know where it's going. But there are still good reasons to watch it. Charlotte Greenwood provided support in several Fox musicals of the 1940s, notably this one and The Gang's All Here, and she's got a great high kick for musical numbers and pretty good comic timing. More noteworthy would be the Hollywood debut of Carmen Miranda. She was still under contract at a New York nightclub at the time of production, so Fox had to film her scenes in New York and then splice them into the movie. That's probably why she only shows up as a musical performer, with just two or three songs. The one you'll most recognize is "South American Way", which is sung by the two daughters in Mildred Pierce as well.

Also appearing for the musical numbers are the Nicholas brothers, doing one of their dance routines including cringe-inducing splits for those of us who aren't quite as flexible as the brothers. Since they were black, the numbers have fairly obvious cutting points where exhibitors in the South could snip to remove the scene so that white audiences wouldn't have to see it.

To be honest, there's nothing in Down Argentine Way that movie buffs haven't seen in any number of other movies. But it's still solid entertainment, and anybody who likes the early 1940s musicals or romance movies will certainly enjoy it.

Don Ameche night

TCM in the past couple of years seems to have had a little more luck in getting movies out of the Fox vault that they can run. Tonight's lineup is a good example of that. TCM is putting the spotlight on actor Don Ameche, who was a contract player at Fox in the late 1930s and early 1940s. I think at least two of the movies running tonight are TCM premieres, although I will admit that I don't have access to the entire 21 years of TCM scheduling.

The night kicks off at 8:00 PM with 1943's Heaven Can Wait, which is not one of the premieres. Ameche plays a man who has just died, and thinks that because of the dissolute way in which he's lived his life, he's not going to go to heaven. He meets the Devil (Laird Cregar), who quizzes him on just why his life isn't worthy of going to heaven for, and the life story is told in flashbacks. There's wonderful Technicolor, with good performances from Gene Tierney as Ameche's wife and Charles Coburn as Ameche's grandfather.

The Story of Alexander Graham Bell, at 10:00 PM, is, I think, a premiere for TCM. I know it didn't show up in the look at the films of "Hollywood's Greatest Year" 1939 that TCM did back in 2009. It's a 1939 biopic of Bell (played by Ameche), who invented the telephone with help from his assistant Watson (Henry Fonda, also under contract to Fox at the time), but gets into a patent dispute. Charles Coburn shows up again, while the love interest is played by Loretta Young.

That Night in Rio, which follows at 11:45 PM, might also be a TCM premiere. It was in the FXM or maybe Fox Movie Channel rotation at one point, but again I can't remember exactly when everything shows up everywhere. This is one of those energetic Fox musicals which might remind you a bit of the recently blogged about You Were Never Lovelier, as Ameche plays an actor who gets the job of playing a baron in order to help a business deal go through. The Baroness (Alice Faye) is OK with this arrangement, at least until the real baron comes back. Ameche's girlfriend (Carmen Miranda; there's a pairing) isn't quite so OK with it. With a cast like that there's ample opportunity for Fox musical merrymaking.

Wacky heiress comedy #75424527584328578432760

Heiresses were a staple o screwball comedies in the 1930s. Heiresses getting chased by reporters happened almost as often, it seems: It Happened One Night and Libeled Ladu are two of the great comedies of all time. Fox's entry into the heiress vs. reporter genre is Love Is News, which is airing tomorrow morning at 10:15 AM on the Fox Movie Channel, with half a dozen further airings in August.

Loretta Young, who was already a fairly big star by the time the movie was made in 1937, plays the heiress, Toni Gateson. She's just broken off an engagement with Count de Guyon (George Sanders, in a small role billed well down the credits), and that engagement -- as well of the rest of Toni's private life -- has become fodder for the tabloids of the day, something that Toni doesn't like. She really values her privacy. So, when reporter Steve Layton (Tyrone Power) is sent out by editor Martin Canavan (Don Ameche) to get Toni's story, he has to engage in a ruse to get it. He poses as a police detective escorting her from her plane to the city, asking her questions along the way. However, she learns that he's really a reporter, and he's not about to let her have some privacy by not publishing the story.

What's a scorned heiress to do? Why, turn the tables on the reporter by making him part of the story! Toni gets Steve in a hotel restaurant, where she can make certain all the other reporters hear about how the two of them are engaged to be married. It's a bogus story, of course, but it's tabloid fodder that all of the other reporters can get. She's tricked Steve out of a scoop, she's given all the other reporters something phony to try to ruin their credibility, and she's let Steve know what it's like to have reporters hounding your every move. Steve tries to set the record straight, and Toni tries to make his life more of a nightmare. Along the way, you can probably figure out that the two are going to begin to fall in love as well.

Love Is News is one of those many movies that I would rate as being in the range of successfully entertaining without being anything particularly special. But with a running time of just under 80 minutes, this solid professionalism is enough as the movie doesn't wear out its welcome. You don't normally think of Loretta Young and Tyrone Power doing comedy, and certainly not screwball comedy. Loretta Young is pretty good; Tyrone Power is the sort of actor who I think was better-suited to being the foil; letting everybody else around him being funny. Watch the scene where he has to deal with small-town judge Slim Summerville, for example. He doesn't bring down the proceedings here, but if you had tried to put him into something else from around the same time like My Man Godfrey or Bringing Up Baby, he would have failed spectacularly, I think. Ameche was adept at comedy, or at least Fox kept giving him comic material that worked to his strengths. He plays his role effortlessly, especially in a running joke about him firing and re-hiring Power.

Love Is News has received multiple DVD releases: one by the Fox Cinema Archive, one on a Tyrone Power box set, and one as part of a double bill with the remake, 1948's That Wonderful Urge (in which Power reprises his role, this time opposite Gene Tierney).

Moon Over Miami

TCM is showing several bright color musicals from the 40s tonight. Among them, they got the rights to broadcast one from Fox: Moon Over Miami, at 9:45 PM ET.

Betty Grable and Carole Landis play a pair of sisters working at a drive-in diner in Texas when they learn of the passing of a wealthy relative, who has left them $55,000, a fairly substantial sum for the early 1940s. Unfortunately, they quickly discover that's the amount he left them before tax. Estate tax, probate fees, and the lawyers' cut take the vast majority of that money, leaving the two sisters and their aunt with just over $4,000. It's not really enough to live on, so Grable gets an idea: the three of them should go to Miami, where she'll pretend to be wealthy, all the while playing golddigger to look for a wealthy man. So, off the three women head, Grable playing the rich one, Landis her secretary, and Aunt Charlotte Greenwood her maid.

Once in Miami, they quickly get a bottle of champagne from wealthy Bob Cummings, who invites Grable over to his bungalow for what looks like the remnants of a wild party. Cummings proceeds to pursue Grable, but isn't alone in this, as fellow wealthy businessman Don Ameche is also in town looking for a woman, and has his eyes on Grable. The result is a fairly standard story, with the two men each trying to outdo the other, secondary romances for Landis and Greenwood, everybody trying to cover up their lies, the requisite amount of music, and the obligatory happy ending.

Moon Over Miami is nothing groundbreaking. What it does have is Betty Grable in spades; she was quite popular back in the 1940s and Fox made musical after musical with her in an attempt to cash in on that popularity. The music may not be up to the standard of a Johnny Mercer, but is passable enough. Perhaps best, though, is the location shooting. There's quite a lot of outdoor scenes, and many of these were filmed at various places in Florida. That opportunity to see at least a bit of Florida as it was in 1941 is by itself worth watching the movie at least once. (There is a Traveltalks short made around the same time on Florida, but TCM doesn't have that listed on the schedule, despite having a 90-minute movie start at 8:00 PM, and a good 10 minutes after Moon Over Miami before the next movie.

Moon Over Miami has been released to DVD, both on its own and as part of a box set of Betty Grable movies.

Fox's version of Jack Carson

I've mentioned how Jack Carson often played a charming schemer in movies such as The Strawberry Blonde and Mildred Pierce. The closest Fox got to this was in quite a few pictures starring Don Ameche. One such movie was Confirm or Deny, which the Fox Movie Channel is showing at 6:00 AM ET tomorrow morning.

Ameche plays Mitch Mitchell, who's in charge of an American news bureau in London during the days of the Blitz. Mitchell wants to get his reports on the bombings out, and he wants to get a scoop, which means getting a dedicated transatlantic telegraph wire of his own, something that's in very short supply. That's not the only problem he's got. There's a war on, and the British authorities are insistent on controlling what information gets out to the public, since they don't want to give the Nazis too much information on how much success they're having. This means that Mitchell also has to deal with the censors, in the form of Jennifer Carson (played by Joan Bennett). Along the way, Mitchell finds himself falling in love with his censor, and trying to charm her, as well as the owner of one of London's finest hotels, when he wants to use their basement for his news bureau after the old office gets bombed by the Nazis.

Confirm or Deny is a movie that tries to do a lot in a running time of about 75 minutes, and, to be honest, that's to the movie's detriment. There's not enough time to make Ameche's character truly sympathetic, or to give the audience a plausible reason for why the two should fall in love. It also leaves subplots either hanging a bit, or, in the case of the one involving Roddy McDowall as a boy who handles Ameche's newsgathering carrier pigeons, ends them abruptly (and with too much obviousness about where the story is going). Don Ameche and Joan Bennett deserved better than this. The thing that makes Confirm or Deny interesting, though, is its being a time capsule of how Hollywood looked at England in the months just before Pearl Harbor. The movie was made when the US was still neutral, although it didn't get released until just after Pearl Harbor. That is the one thing that makes Ameche's disdain for the censorship much more logical: he's officially neutral; why should he care about what the Brits are doing? Ameche and Bennett also give the best they can in a movie that's given short shrift. The whole thing left me wishing that Fox could have given everybody involved a little more time to flesh out the story.

Confirm or Deny hasn't been released to DVD, so you're going to have to catch the Fox Movie Channel showing.

Making gossip easier

One of tomorrow's better movies is The Story of Alexander Graham Bell, airing at 6:00 AM ET October 2 on the Fox Movie Channel.

Now, you should recognize Bell's name as that of the inventor of the telephone, which is more or less what the movie covers -- well, that, and all the ancillary events that led up to it and the effects; just the famous discovery with Dr. Watson wouldn't make for a particularly exciting movie. Bell is played by Don Ameche, one of the Fox studio's top male actors of the late 1930s. The real life Bell was a Scottish-born Canadian who worked with deaf children, trying to figure out a way to get them to be able to hear again. This led to a natural interest in sound-transmission devices, which led to the ultimate invention of the telephone. Along the way, Bell met the young deaf woman who would become his wife (played here by Loretta Young).

Eventually, Bell spilled acid on himself, yelling for Watson (played in the movie by Henry Fonda) to come and help him. When Watson came, claiming he heard the call for help over the apparatus, they had an invention. But, of course, it wasn't all clear sailing for Bell. On the same day Bell filed his American patent application, a rival inventor, Elisha Gray, also filed an application to patent a device for the elctric transmision of sound. This resulted in a protracted court case to determine who should really hold the patent, a case which would have bankrupted Bell and his backers had it gone against them.

As best as I can tell, not being an expert on the history of inventions, The Story of Alexander Graham Bell seems surprisingly accurate. All of the main events in the telephone invention timeline seem to be there: notably, the work with the deaf; the difficulty in inventing the telephone; the scene with Watson; Bell's demonstrations of the phone; and the trial. A lot of the scenes with Ameche and Fonda seem to turn him into a bit too much of a "starving artist" who altough starving is happy; I can't believe Bell was really like that. That having been said, the movie is one that's filled with enjoyable performances, and tells a good story that, for the most part, is quite true. In addition to Ameche, Fonda, and Young, the cast also includes Charles Coburn as Bell's father-in-law and one financial backer; Gene Lockhart as another financial backer; and Spring Byington as Coburn's wife.

I find it very surprising that The Story of Alexander Graham Bell has not made its way to DVD. It was also omitted in TCM's look at the great films of 1939 back in July, which was another sad omission.

Don Ameche

I'm mildly irritated with myself for not having blogged on The Magnificent Dope, a pleasant enough comedy starring Don Ameche as the head of a failing "school for success" who runs a contest to find the ideal candidate for that school, only to find that the candidate (Henry Fonda) has other ideas, teaching everybody else about stopping to smell the roses. Unfortunately, it's not available on DVD, so I can't recommend it now. However, it got me to thinking of some of the other movies of the underrated Ameche; specifically, some that are available on DVD. So today, I'll recommend Heaven Can Wait.

In this 1943 comedy, Ameche plays Henry Van Cleve, a wealthy man who's recently died. He gets sent to "the other place", where he meets Satan, wonderfully played by Laird Cregar. Satan is of the impression that Mr. Van Cleve isn't really up to the caliber of misdeeds for people to earn entry into his domain, and it's left to Henry to try to prove why he does indeed belong "down there".

It turns out that Henry is in many ways not much different than any other male lead who populated the screwball comedies of the 1930s and early 1940s (although I wouldn't use the word "screwball" to describe "Heaven Can Wait"; it's more of a romantic comedy). He's mischievous, and somewhat less than faithful, but ultimately a good guy. The movie tells more or less the story of his life, and that of the people closest to him. Ameche is fine as the protagonist, but to be honest, the movie is really worth watching for the supporting cast.

That cast includes the gorgeous Gene Tierney as Mrs. Van Cleve, who loves Henry through thick and thin, having broken off an engagement with her original fiancé (Allyn Joslyn) to marry the impish Henry. Even better is that the movie is in glorious Technicolor, which especially helps in the turn-of-the-century scenes with the young Tierney. True, she's not quite as beautiful as she would be in Leave Her to Heaven Tierney's parents are played by two veteran character actors, Marjorie Main and Eugene Pallette. Ameche's parents are similary well-played by Louis Calhern and Spring Byington, although it's clear that Henry gets his free-spirited nature from his grandfather, the always wonderful Charles Coburn. Even child star Dickie Moore shows up, playing Henry as a teenager. The direction is superbly handled by Ernst Lubitsch, who makes the movie charming but not cloying; and also touching, without becoming maudlin.

One last caveat: Heaven Can Wait is also the title of a well-known 1978 movie starring Warren Beatty, but the two have nothing to do with each other. The later Heaven Can Wait is a remake, but of the 1941 movie Here Comes Mr. Jordan.