The Arnelo Affair

I mentioned a few months back that I somehow wound up with a whole bunch of movies starring George Murphy on my DVR, not from a programming theme of his movies. Another of the movies was The Arnelo Affair, which I watched and wrote of this post that I could schedule at a suitable time after other posts on Murphy's movies.

Murphy is technically the second male lead here, and we don't see him at first. Instead, we see the female lead, Frances Gifford, who plays Ann Parkson. Ann is in a car with Tony Arnelo (John Hodiak), and in a voiceover talking about how much she regrets this. And how she wishes her husband had never brought this guy home. So, as you might be able to guess, we're about to get Yet Another Flashback, to the time when Ann's husband Ted (that's George Murphy) brought Tony Arnelo home.

Ted is a Chicago lawyer who's trying to advance his career, and one of his clients is nightclub owner Arnelo, whom Ted is representing in a bunch of tax-related stuff. Ann and Tony have a kid, Ricky (a young Dean Stockwell), and a seemingly wonderful life, except that Ted is spending a lot of time on his work, to the point that he can't take Ann out for a night out on the town with friends like upstairs neighbor and couturier Vivian Delwyn (Eve Arden). But Tony shows up, and he immediately starts telling Ann how striking she looks. When he learns that Ann has a hobby of interior decoration, Tony offers her the chance to make a bit of money by decorating some of his places.

Ann being a bored housewife, she decides to take Tony up on the offer. However, she quickly learns that Tony is really interested in her for other reasons, and that she's not the only woman he's interested in. He's also seeing a local actress named Claire Lorrison who shows up one afternoon when Ann thinks she's going to be alone with Tony. Worse, Tony starts smacking Claire around, leading Ann to want to break off the relationship with Tony. Tony, for his part, is rather persistent, constantly calling Ann up.

Things take an even worse turn when Claire winds up dead, clearly quite murdered. Ann is innocent of the murder, although not necessarily of adultery, which is still an issue under the Production Code. But Tony being a nasty piece of work, he's able to blackmail Ann by making certain that the dead Claire is found with a compact that has a big letter A that can likely be traced back to Ann. But of course, since there's that Production Code, we know that the real murderer has to be caught and get his just desserts.

I can see why all the people involved in The Arnelo Affair might want to be involved with it, but the final result is something that's rather a misfire. If I had to guess why, I think that it feels like it's devoid of emotion. George Murphy isn't a very charismatic actor at the best of times, and he's certainly very much a second banana here. Tony Arnelo may be a piece of work, but Hodiak doesn't give off that vibe. And Gifford is a bit of a cipher too. The Dean Stockwell character is somewhat superfluous. And, not that it has anything to do with the movie itself, the print TCM ran looked like one of those older 16mm prints that TV stations would run of old public-domain movies.

No, No, Nanette

Gordon MacRae was honored back in August 2024 in Summer Under the Stars, and that gave me the opportunity to record a couple of his films that I hadn't blogged about before. One was By the Light of the Silvery Moon which I blogged about when it aired back in July 2025. Another was Tea for Two, which you can see at 4:30 PM tomorrow (October 5) on TCM.

Doris Day is again the female lead here, although it's a couple of minutes before we see her. Instead, we get another of those establishing stories like the one in Margie. A couple of teens are hosting a party for some of their friends, and have pulled out some of Mom and Dad's old things, which specifically means 1920s flapper outfits and male fashions, along with Charleston records that you'd play on a victrola. Great-uncle Max (S.Z. Sakall) shows up and asks the kids what they know about 1929. As you might guess, this is the cue to go back in time to 1929....

Uncle Max is an investment banker who has made the mistake of not making the best investments. Well, to be fair, the investments didn't seem bad at the time, but then October 1929 came along with the stock market crash. Max is the uncle and legal guardian to the investments of niece Nanette (Doris Day), who can't be bothered to worry her little head about the investments, or the fact that they're about to lose a lot of their value. She's the former fiancée of Broadway producer Larry Blair (Billy De Wolfe), and has dreams of staring in a show herself. She's got the money, and Larry knows it. So with that in mind, Larry brings over the two writers of a show he's hoping to put on, Jimmy (Gordon MacRae) and Tommy (Gene Nelson) to try to convince her to back the show financially.

Uncle Max has to sign off on spending the money however, and what he's never told Nanette is that he's sold a bunch of Nanette's investments thanks to that crash. She doesn't really have the money to back that show any more. So Max comes up with an idea that he just knows Nanette will ever be able to agree to. He bets her that she can't answer "No" to every question for the next two days. If, somehow, she does, Max will sign the check that would fund the show. Now, as you can guess, this is going to lead to all sorts of complications. But as you can also guess, Nanette and Jimmy are going to wind up together. They have to, after all, since it's their children in the opening scene.

I have to admit that Tea for Two isn't quite my favorite musical. A lot of that has to do with the plot, since Nanette's having to say "No" to everything leads to the sort of "comedy of lies" that I've never really cared for. That's somewhat unfair to the cast, since they do well with the material they're given. The songs are also good, both the ones that were in the original musical as well as some that Warner Bros. dusted off from old movie musicals of its own. Notable in this second group is "I Only Have Eyes for You".

People who like musicals and are looking for something undemanding that will entertain them will probably love Tea for Two.

Pat O'Brien grows a moustache

Ever since moving and getting access to reliable high-speed internet two years ago, I've been able to watch the FAST services. Tubi seems to have access to a whole bunch of stuff that wound up in the public domain. One that I hadn't heard of before seeing it in the "classic" movies section was Slightly Honorable.

The movie starts off with the idea that perhaps there's an island somewhere in the South Pacifc that doesn't have corruption, but we're in America, 8,000 miles away. Cut to a shot of the highway commissioner in some state getting killed in a road accident, which is the height of irony because the commissioner was the one more or less responsible for the shoddy state of the roads, what with all the graft in the highway department. At his funeral are newspaper publisher Vincent Cushing (Edward Arnold), who is in on the graft and getting wealthy from it; and attorney John Webb (Pat O'Brien), who wants to eliminate corruption and graft.

Complicating matters is that one of Webb's clients, Alma Brehmer (Claire Dodd) just happens to be the mistress of one Vincent Cushing. Webb and Cushing are brought together again when Alma invites Webb to a swanky party at a nightclub hosted by Cushing. It's also a place for Webb to meet chorine Ann Seymour (Ruth Terry), who thinks of Webb as someone to look up to as well as woo once he saves her from one of the brutes at Cushing's party trying to slap her around because he's jealous of her dancing briefly with Ann. Ann, however, seems mostly to be comic relief, which is surprising considering that Eve Arden is also in the film playing the part of Webb's secretary.

Up to now the movie has been more comedy than drama, although things are about to take a turn. Alma being one of Webb's clients, she wants him to see her about some jewelry Cushing gave her and that she wants appraised so she can have it added to her insurance policy. Webb goes up to her swanky apartment, and finds that somebody's stabbed her! Needless to say, since he's the one to have found her, he's an obvious suspect. Cushing's wife has good reason to worry that perhaps her husband could be held responsible, what with his having an obvious motive of trying to silence poor Alma. So she tries to keep anything bad about Cushing from being released. Worse for Webb is that Cushing's daughter actively wants to implicate Webb. Helping to save Webb is his legal firm partner Sampson (a young Broderick Crawford).

I mentioned above that the movie starts off on a somewhat humorous tone, and in the years before the US got involved in World War II there was quite a cycle of comic murder mystery-type movies. However, Strictly Honorable takes a slightly different tack of being humorous up to the murder and then tacking a much darker turn. It's an odd strategy, and one that doesn't always work. However, the flaws in the movie are also in part to it being a low-budget independently produced movie.

Not that Strictly Honorable is a bad movie; it's more that it's the sort of thing where it's easy to see why it's fallen through the cracks and become largely forgotten.

One Touch of Venus

Back in April, I mentioned how TCM was running a limited series called Two for One, in which 13 film people were selecting double features to run on Saturday nights through June. It says something about TCM's budget, I suppose, that TCM is rerunning the series starting tonight. On the other hand, it gives me several Saturday posts over the next few months, as I recorded a number of the movies that the programmers picked. That starts tonight, with Martin Scorsese's second selection, One Touch of Venus, at 9:45 PM.

The opening credits are over a Greek amphitheater-style backround. It's then revealed, however, that this is a miniature, as rising from behind is Eddie Hatch (Robert Walker). He's a window-dresser in the department store owned by Whitfield Savory (Tom Conway), designing the fancy front window displays. He's called in to Savory's office, although it's not for bad reasons. Savory bought some art for the store -- specifically, an expensive statue of Venus, the goddess of love. Savory wants to do a big reveal of the statue in the department store, and who better to design everything that goes around it thatn Eddie?

Meanwhile, everybody else at the department store, like Whitfield's secretary Molly (Eve Arden) and Eddie's co-worker and best friend Joe (Dick Haymes), worry about how much the statue cost. But that's soon to become the least of everybody's problems. Eddie is doing the display, and sees what a lovely statue his boss has bought. On a lark, Eddie climbs the stepladder and kisses the statue before going back to his work. He makes a comment to himself, and a voice responds. Eddie looks and notices... the statue has come to life! Venus is played by Ava Gardner, so it's no wonder the statue was so beautiful.

Unfortunately, Venus can't really go back to being a statue. And she's fallen for the man who kissed her, I suppose like Larry Hagman and Barbara Eden in I Dream of Jeannie many years later. Venus gets off the pedestal, and Eddie realizes that when it comes time for Savory to pull up the curtain revealing the statue, there isn't going to be any statue to reveal. Of course, how Eddie could have carried it away is a question. But there's no statue, so unsurprisingly Savory suspects Eddie.

And then Eddie has his friens to deal with, including girlfriend Gloria (Olga San Juan). None of them are going to believe his story. And Gloria is definitely not going to like that there's another woman trying to steal Eddie away from her. Venus is about to make that a bigger thing for poor Eddie, as she shows up at Eddie's apartment. After several ruses to keep people from finding Venus, he decides to take her back to the department store. Perhaps when Savory finds her there the next day, she'll be able to explain things. After all, she does have the face of the statue Savory bought, and he should be able to recognize it.

One Touch of Venus is a silly romantic fantasy movie, but it's one that's more than fun enough. At the same time, however, it's the sort of fluff you probably shouldn't think too deeply about. Everybody does a good job with the material and it's entertaining, and sometimes that's all that's really necessary.

Bedtime Story

We're getting to the end of the year, so I'm doing a couple of posts on movies that are about endings in one way or another. First up is Bedtime Story, which isn't really about bedtime at all.

The movie opens up with the end of a stage play, like quite a few movies dealing with theater actors (The Guardsman comes to mind here). The stage star here is Jane Drake (Loretta Young), getting rapturous applause for her latest role. As she gets her curtain call, she informs the audience that it's the last time for her to play that role, and indeed it's going to be the last time the audience will see her in any role, as she's going to be retiring to a farm in Connecticut with her husband, Lucius "Luke" (Fredric March), a playwright who wrote the play.

Sadly, Luke was not able to make it to the final performance, and we quickly learn it's because he had different ideas about the direction his, and by extension Jane's, career was going to take. Luke has been working on a new play, and it goes without saying that he wrote it with the intention of giving Jane another big role to star in. Not only that, but he's hoping to build a new theater on Broadway just for Jane. Jane, however, is horrified when she learns that the money for the new theater is coming from Luke's having sold the farm in Connectict. Her response is to take a train to Reno to do the several weeks of separation necessary to be able to file for divorce.

Luke still wants to do the new play and wants Jane to star in it. With that in mind, he fakes a story about having lost it to one of those newspaper gossip columnists, knowing it will be printed in Reno. Sure enough, Jane returns, but she learns that it was all a ruse to get Jane to come back and do the play when the couple's best friend Eddie (Robert Benchley) comes to their apartment with a new young actress, Virginia Cole (Eve Arden), who would be just perfect for that starring role if it weren't for Jane. So Jane heads back to Reno.

Meanwhile, Jane had an old flame in the form of a banker, William Dudley (Allyn Joslyn), who was always in love with her and still is. So he shows up in Reno to try to start a relationship with Jane again. Eventually, Luke also shows up in Reno to try to get Jane to come back to him and do the play. There's still the question of whether all the conditions necessary to obtain the divorce have gone through, leading to the mildly madcap ending....

Bedtime Story had the great bad luck of being made in 1941 and not being released until Christmas 1941, three weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor that brought the US into World War II. The movie fits very well into the genre of the more upscale romantic comedy, but audience tastes were changing with the US now being at war. That, and the story here had been done enough that in Bedtime Story it's beginning to feel formulaic.

That's not to say that Bedtime Story is a bad movie by any stretch of the imagination. It's well made, and March and Young show that both of them can do comedy. Of course, having support from people like Benchley and Arden is a great help. It just feels like the movie could have been better and more original.

The Voice of the Turtle

TCM must have had an Eleanor Parker day, which would explain why I recorded a couple of her movies in close proximity. In addition of Many Rivers to Cross which I recently blogged about, my DVR also had One for the Book, which was based on a play titled The Voice of the Turtle and originally released to theaters under that title. (The print TCM showed in fact had a title card reading The Voice of the Turtle, but in the listings and in my YoutubeTV library it was listed as One for the Book.)

Parker plays Sally, a struggling actress in New York City in the later stages of World War II. (The play premiered in 1943 and was a big hit; the movie premiered just as the stage play was ending its run in 1947 and "updates" the action to late 1944.) Sally has been in a relationship with Kenneth (Kent Smith). But he's unwilling to make the sort of committment that Sally wants, so he basically breaks off the relationship and exits the movie.

Sally commiserates with her best friend and fellow actress Olive (Eve Arden, clearly here to provide the comic relief once again). She's got a thing for military men, this being the height of World War II, and is currently seeing naval Commander Ned Burling (Wayne Morris). But Ned isn't the first military guy she's been with during the war. Another of them, Sgt. Bill Page (Ronald Reagan), has gotten leave, and he's in town looking up Olive.

Olive doesn't want to be mean to Bill, so she decides to set him up on a dinner with Sally since both of them are looking for someone to go out on the town with. The two of them spend a pleasant enough evening together, but then Bill finds there's a mix-up with his hotel reservation and he no longer seems to have a place to stay for the night, something that was again a common theme during World War II. And as you can guess, the two start developing feelings for each other.

This causes problems for any number of reasons. Of course, society isn't necessarily going to look so highly on the idea of an unmarried woman having a man in her apartment overnight. And then there's Olive, who finds that perhaps she still has feelings for Bill. She's apparently not a one-woman man, and when the traditional rom-com trope of the two leads possibly breaking up before getting back together in the final reel comes, Olive is there waiting to pounce.

One for the Book is a pleasant enough romantic comedy, although it's also one that's pretty tightly bound to the era the play was created. When the movie was released in 1947, there was still enough respect for soldiers to make something like this work, but trends like the move to the suburbs and then less virtuous wars like Korea would change America enough to make something like this a museum piece. Sgt. Page is the sort of light and affable role that's perfect for Ronald Reagan, while Parker charms as well. Eve Arden is typically great as the comic relief. So although the movie is dated, it's still worth a watch to see an America that's never going to exist again.

Our Miss Brooks

Another of the people who got a day in TCM's Summer Under the Stars this past August was Eve Arden. This gave me the chance to record one of her movies that I hadn't blogged about before, Our Miss Brooks. Recently, I watched it to be able to do a post on it here.

I don't know if Our Miss Brooks was the first TV show to get turned into a movie, although it has to be one of the earlier ones. However, several radio programs had received movie treatment, and Our Miss Brooks started off as a radio program in the late 1940s. So people who have seen any of the TV shows either in syndication or on one of the vintage TV channels if any of them are showing it will probably recognize a good portion of the synopsis.

The movie is apparently an encapsulation of the TV series' backstory, with a couple of subplots added in, this even though the franchise had been around for several years. Miss Connie Brooks (Eve Arden), an unmarried woman of a certain age, shows up in the Anywhere, USA town of Madison to start her new job as an English teacher at Madison High, although it seems as though she's starting in the middle of a semester, or else the movie takes some big jumps in time not long after the opening. On her first day, she runs into biology teacher Phil Boynton (Robert Rockwell), who for whatever reason is doing shirtless exercise on one of the school's lawns, during what certainly seems like school hours. Miss Brooks, apparently not having reached menopause, immediately develops the hots for Mr. Boynton, something that as I understand it was a running theme of the TV show.

Meanwhile, Miss Brooks and everybody else at the school has to deal with officious prinicpal Mr. Conklin (Gale Gordon), who treates education as a military campaign and whom nobody particularly likes. His subplot is going to involve the school board that would like to get rid of him, with the faculty and students joining in when a new elected position opens up that everybody tries to get Conklin to run for on the theory that this is going to be a status upgrade for him.

Also reprising her role from the TV show is June Morgan playing Mrs. Davis, the woman from whom Miss Brooks rents a room. Mrs. Davis is presented here as eccentric, and also one given to telling people's fortunes. She winds up playing matchmaker between Miss Brooks and Mr. Boynton, in more ways than one.

Finally, we get two characters who are apparently new to the movie. Gary Nolan (a young Nick Adams) is a student in Miss Brooks' English class who has decided to stop taking any interest in English class, with the logical result that his grades start to suffer. Miss Brooks, on asking him about it, finds out that Gary's father Lawrence (Don Porter) is the editor/publisher of the local newspaper, and even owns the new television station in town. Dad seems to want his son to follow in his footsteps, and Gary isn't so certain of it. Miss Brooks starts tutoring Gary after school, and the romantic subplot is that Gary's father begins to take a liking to Miss Brooks -- I can't imagine a light comedy of this era having a teacher/student romance.

You don't need to know anything about the TV series to follow the plot of Our Miss Brooks, as the script as written could just have easily been written about original characters. However, the script also feels like warmed-over sitcom plots from an era when a lot of shows weren't as good as nostalgia might have us remember. The movie is also a time capsule of how middle-class white America would have wanted to see itself in the 1950s.

For that, Our Miss Brooks is definitely worth one viewing. Just don't expect a particularly high-quality movie.

Not quite Tallulah Bankhead in Faithless

Zachary Scott, Ann Sheridan, and Lew Ayres (from left to right) in The Unfaithful

A couple of months back, Ann Sheridan was TCM's Star of the Month, which gave me the chance to record a bunch of movie available on DVD from the Warner Archive but that I hadn't blogged about before. Among them is The Unfaithful. So I recently rectified that situation and watched it to do a post on here.

Sheridan plays Chris Hunter, who married her husband Bob (Zachary Scott) just before he went off to World War II. The war is over and he's been back, working as a builder and flying to various places on the west coast supervising the construction of suburban housing developments. While he's away this time, Chris is invited to a party held by Chris' cousin Paula (Eve Arden) to celebrate her divorce.

Chris returns home from the party to find a man waiting outside her house. He forces her into the house, and in silhouette we see what appears to be a struggle between them before Chris kills the man. Bob returns from Oregon the next morning to find the police at his house, with bad news for him.

With the help of the family lawyer, Larry Hannaford (Lew Ayres), Chris gives a statement about the killing that clearly makes it out to be self-defense. But if that were the case, we wouldn't have much of a movie, would we? So we know that something more is going to happen. Eventually, we hear from Martin Barrow (Steven Geray). He's an art dealer who has... a really bad bust of Chris' head. (Unfortunately, I don't have the movie on DVD, and I couldn't find an image of the bust online.) That in and of itself would be no big deal, but it turns out that the bust was sculpted by... the guy she killed!

There, as you can see, is the problem. The idea that the guy she killed in "self-defense" now has some holes in it, and any bright and ambitious prosecutor should be able to find this out in the investigation into the man's death. To make matters even worse, Barrow and the dead guy's wife want to blackmail Chris for a substantial sum of money not to have the information be made public.

But it's not just the public Chris would like to keep the information a secret from. The thing is, Chris really did have an affair with the dead guy while Bob was away fighting the war. In her defense, it was a whirlwind romance that Chris and Bob had before he left, something that was not uncommon in 1941/2, and just as a fair number of servicemen picked up war romances or even war brides, the women back home still had physical needs.

Now, if a lot of this sounds like The Letter, that's not by coincidence. Warner Bros. wanted to revisit the material, although in this case the screenwriters changed enough of it to avoid having it be a full remake of The Letter. Still, anybody who watches is can't help but make the comparisons, and judge the movie in that light.

That's a bit unfair to The Unfaithful, because while it's not quite as good as either version of The Letter, it's not exactly a bad movie in its own right. If it has flaws, it's that it runs too long (it should probably have been written to clock in at about 90 minutes instead of close to 110), and, surprisingly, Eve Arden. I think she's supposed to be playing the same sort of sounding board she did in Mildred Pierce, but where it worked well in Mildred Pierce to break up the tension, The Unfaithful is more of a straight drama instead of a melodrama, and Arden just doesn't work quite as well here.

Still, The Unfaithful is absolutely worth watching for the performances from the other three leads, and for its all around solid production, especially for people not particularly familiar with Ann Sheridan.