For some values of good, and 20 years after the news

One of those movies that shows up often enough on TCM but that I'd never really gotten around to watching is the 1947 version of Good News, which I think I'd generally avoided because it's a musical and because the male lead is played by Peter Lawford, who is not one of my favorite actors. But in any case, the last time it showed up on TCM I finally recorded it so that I could watch it before the next showing. That next showing will be tomorrow, June 1, at 9:30 AM.

The movie is based on a 1927 Broadway musical that had already been filmed once before, in 1930, and unsurprisingly set in 1927. As the opening informs us, it's the time of flappers and the Charleston, with college football being a much bigger sport than professional football in those days. Tait College, clearly on the MGM backlot, is one of those movie colleges that look like the smaller schools that dotted the midwest and where football was in fact a big deal. Tommy Marlowe (Peter Lawford) is the quarterback and captain of the football team, and as such all of the girls are interested in him.

One girl, however, who does not show interest in Tommy at first is transfer student Pat McClellan (Patricia Marshall). That's because she's come from the sort of boarding school where one learns French and where one learns to look for a man who's got a lot of money to marry. Tommy isn't loaded, while non-football player Peter Van Dyne III (Robert Strickland) is. You can tell just by the name. Worse, Pat insults Tommy in French, so that he can't understand just how she's insulting him.

Connie (June Allyson), meanwhile, is a more bookish student, working her way through Tati with a job in the school library, but also the sort of student who's just right to tutor the jocks if you're OK with having the jocks tutored by women and aren't worried about the risk that tutor and tutee might become romantically involved. Peter falls for Connie, and in many ways the feeling is mutual.

There's a problem, however, in that everybody cares about the big game, which means one, that Tommy has to be in the right frame of mind and not worried about romantic complications; and, two, that he be in good academic standing. Both of these get complicated. One is by Connie's roommate Babe thinking she's doing a good thing for Tommy by telling Pat that Tommy comes from money so that she'll be interested in him again, never mind what this does to poor Connie. Second is that Tommy fails one of his exams so that there's the question of academic eligibility. The big game comes, and it looks like Tait may lose to their rival, so everybody has to re-arrange things so that the right people can wind up together.

Along the way, there are any number of subplots about various teammates of Tommy's and their romantic issues, as well as the romantic isues of Connie's sorority sisters. Notably among the supporting cast is a young Mel Tormé. Also, this having been based on a musical, there's also a lot of musical numbers in the MGM style, with vibrant Technicolor and energetic dancing.

Having said all that, whether or not you like Good News is going to be dependent upon whether you like Peter Lawford and June Allyson on the one hand, and on the other whether the MGM musical style is your thing. I'm not the biggest fan of a lot of the MGM musicals, and Good News hasn't changed my opinion on Peter Lawford either. It's not that Good News is a bad movie by any stretch of the imagination; it's just that I'm not the sort of person MGM was trying to appeal to. If you like musicals you'll probably enjoy Good News.

What if a bunch of amateurs tried to make Knute Rockne, All American?

Football season is firmly under way, and a little known movie that TCM ran during 31 Days of Oscar because it received an editing nomination is the biopic Crazylegs. It's getting an airing on TCM tomorrow (November 12) at 6:00 AM, so now is the time for the post on it.

Crazylegs is about early NFL star Elroy "Crazylegs" Hirsch (playing himself); as the movie opens he's on a football field in civilian clothes and it seems like he's about to retire. The movie was released in 1953 and in real life, Hirsch didn't retire until several years later. We then get some narration by Lloyd Nolan, who plays the part of Hirsch's high school coach, Win Brockmeyer. As you can guess, we're about to get the obligatory flashback to Hirsch's high school career....

Elroy Hirsch grew up in Wausau, WI, and got the nickname "Crazylegs" from his odd style of running, which he claimed came from running two miles to school every day and dodging various things in the sidewalks or on the side of the road. He finished high school in 1941, at a time when the college game was in some ways more corrupt, but in others didn't necessarily offer the money that's in it today. Hirsch's girlfriend and future wife Ruth (Joan Vohs) is accepted to the University of Wisconsin, so Elroy follows her there to play football.

But Elroy seems to care so much about football that he doesn't have time foor poor Joan. As a result, it's an on again, off again relationship although they do eventually get married (and in real life they were married 50-plus years until Elroy's death). World War II comes, but Elroy surprisingly doesn't get shipped off to fight. Instead, he enrolls in a Marine Corps program that allows him to do pilot training in conjunction with college, except that it's based out of the University of Michigan. So he goes there and becomes a several-sport star, eventually serving stateside after graduation.

Now, at this time, the NFL didn't exactly offer a lot of money, and there was a rival league, the All-American Football Conference. Hirsch had been drafted by the Los Angeles Rams of the NFL but decided to play for the Chicago Rockets of the AAFC. Unfortunately, he gets several injuries, ultimately getting hit in the head and a skull fracture that threatens to end his football career. But since he only knows football, he starts training like a maniac to try to get back to the professional game. Since this is a biopic, and the movie makes clear in the opening credits that it has several members of the world champion Rams of 1949 and 1951 playing themselves, we know that Hirsch is going to wind up on the Rams and then eventually be an integral part of their championship team.

The are a bunch of problems with Crazylegs. One is that Hirsch's story isn't as cinematic as you might think. There's just not enough conflict to sustain a truly interesting picture. (Contrast this with, say, I, Tonya, which is loaded with conflict.) The movie was made on a fairly low budget, and that shows. A lot of real footage from Hirsch's games is used (this is probably what got the editing nomination), but it's in old newsreel format while the staged action is all blocked for a 1.66:1 aspect ratio. Having to edit the newsreels for that really makes them look poor-quality.

Elroy Hirsch also wan't much of an actor, although at least he's only playing himself. He comes across as an appealing personality, and you can see why people would like him and why someone might want to do a biopic of him. Lloyd Nolan is professional as always, and elevates anything he's in, no matter how dire everything around him is.

So Crazylegs is a bit of a curiosity, and one that football fans might enjoy.

Knute Rockne, All American

NFL training camps are in full swing, so with that in mind I thought I'd blog about one of the football movies that's been sitting on my DVR for some time: Knute Rockne, All American.

The movie opens up in Voss, Norway, in the early 1890s, where Lars Rockne (John Qualen) is a carriage maker. He's been planning on emigrating to the United States, specifically to Chicago where one of those great world's fairs is going to be held. In the next scene, we see that Lars has in fact made it to America with his family, including young son Knute (played as a boy by Johnny Sheffield). One day, little Knute comes across a group of older boys playing the relatively new game of football, and he falls in love with it despite it being violent.

Rockne is a good student and could do well if he could go to college, but he can't afford it, so he has to work for several years beforehand. Eventually, adult Knute (Pat O'Brien) has saved up enough money to go to Notre Dame, a Catholic school in South Bend, Indiana. This was the relatively early days of college football, when the sport was in many ways even more corrupt than it is now. Despite his age, he gets roped into trying out for the football team.

College president Fr. Callahan (Donald Crisp) and chemistry professor Fr. Nieuwland (Albert Bassermann) tell Rockne that he could make an excellent chemist, working on synthetic rubber. Knute spends the summer working as a lifeguard instead, although that's important because he goes on to meet Bonnie Skiles (Gale Page), who eventually becomes Mrs. Knute Rockne.

College-aged Knute helps Notre Dame win the big game against Army, one of the big teams of the era because they could recruit the very best athletes of the day thanks to the prestige of the Army. This was through Rockne's insistence on using the forward pass as the mainstay of the offense, which had only been made legal about a half-dozen years earlier. The game puts Notre Dame football on the map.

It also eventually gets Rockne named coach, and he would coach the team until his death a decade or so later in a plane crash. Along the way, Rockne coached George Gipp (Ronald Reagan), who would get an infection that killed him at a young age. This is, of course, the whole legend behind "Win one for the Gipper" and why Reagan would become known as the Gipper. But the Rockne portrayed her also suffered from heart issues, along with serving as the face of college football when Congress and other politicians started worrying about the corrupting influence college football might have on young men.

I'm not certain how much of Knute Rockne, All American is what actually happened in real life. Knute's widow was still very much alive when the movie was made, and there was no way the movie was getting made without her approval, which I assume led to a really sanitized view of Rockne and the romanticization of college football in general.

Having said that, however, the movie is very good as far as Hollywood biopics go, thanks to a fine performance from O'Brien. Ronald Reagan is often remembered for this movie, but I think that's as much because of what he'd go on to be. Reagan does well with what he's asked to do, but he only gets a couple of scenes, and is absolutely not the lead here.

If you want another good example of the old-time Hollywood biopic, you could do a lot worse than to watch Knute Rockne, All American.

Number One

With this being football season, I recently had the chance to watch a new-to-me movie about football: Number One.

Charlton Heston plays Ron Catlan, quarterback for the New Orleans Saints. As the movie opens, it's the week of the final preseason game, and Catlan isn't doing very well. He's pushing 40, and although he led the team to a championship in the past, there's a young gun looking to take his place, and all the hits have been taking their toll. However, Catlan insists he can still lead the team to another championship.

Ron's long-suffering wife Julie (Jessica Walter), a successful fashion designer, wants to pick him up right after the game because they're supposed to be hosting a party, but Ron would rather drown his sorrows at a local restaurant. He does get picked up, however, by Ann (Diana Muldaur), a guest at a party being held by one of Ron's old, now-retired teammates, Richie Fowler (Bruce Dern).

Richie, having retired, has made the brilliant decision of going into business with a car dealership, leasing luxury cars to well-heeled clients. He suggests to Ron that perhaps Ron should hang it up and join him hawking cars. Later on, an executive at a computer company (these being the days of room-sized mainframes) offers Catlan a job, but he's going to have to take it now; it might not be there in even just a few months.

Ron, for his part, decides to sleep with Ann, something that's going to piss of Julie when she finds out, except that she's seen it before. In some ways she's to the point that she just doesn't care. Eventually, we get to opening week, at home against the Cowboys....

Number One is a movie that in theory has a lot going for it, but ultimately winds up falling well short of anything that it sets out to do. Probably the best thing is the vintage look at late 1960s football. The movie was released in 1969, and was made with the full cooperation of the New Orleans Saints (and presumably the NFL). Real Saints players and coaches of the time appear, although I don't think any of them are major characters. We also see the old Sugar Bowl stadium, since the Superdome wouldn't start construction until 1971.

As a narrative movie, however, the film is a mess. I suppose it's supposed to be more of a character study of Catlan, and anybody who's reached the end of the line should probably be able to identify with the character. But there's not much narrative here, and not much character in Catlan either. The structure of the movie isn't helped out much by an overuse of flashbacks. It ultimately feels more like a series of disconnected scenes rather than a coherent whole.

Still, I think anybody who's interested in vintage football when the sport was really beginning to take off thanks to color TV will probably be interested by the internal look at the Saints, as well as what the movie gets wrong because Heston was decidedly not a football player. Heston was 45 at the time and looks it. Also, although Heston had the size to be a football player, the Saints involved in the making of the movie said that he didn't look like a football player at all and certainly didn't have the ability.

Number One finally got a DVD release a few years back.

The Longest Yard (1974)

At the end of December, TCM ran a tribute to Burt Reynolds, who had died earlier in the year. I that I wanted to record and watch again since I hadn't blogged about it before is The Longest Yard.

Reynolds plays Paul "Wrecking" Crew, a former professional quarterback who got drummed out of the league thanks to a point-shaving scandal. He's living with his girlfriend Melissa, and when they get in an argument that involves her throwing a vase at him, he drives off in her sports car. So she calls the police, and eventually, they catch up with Crew, leading to his getting sent to prison.

For some odd reason, the prison warden, Hazen (Eddie Albert), has a semi-pro football team consisting of the prison guards, led by the head of the guards, Capt. Knauer (Ed Lauter). They're not bad, as far as semi-pro teams go, but they could be better. And now that Hazen has an ex-pro in his prison, he figures that he can call on the pro's knowledge to produce a better prison guard team. Of course, Knauer doesn't like this idea, as he absolutely hates Crew.

Crew is unwilling to help at first, which gets him sent to the worst prison work, cleaning out swamps. But he meets some useful people such as "Caretaker" (Jim Hampton), who can help people get anything on the inside. The swamp work is bad enough that Crew finally decides to make a suggestion to Hazen: find a crappy team, and use that as a pre-season warm-up game to get the prison guard team into shape.

So Hazen comes up with a brilliant idea, which is to have the guards play a team of prisoners. The prisoners will be so out of shape that they can't win, and the guards can get away with basically torturing the prisoners during the game. Crew doesn't want to play or coach, but he's blackmailed by being told his parole will be denied if he doesn't play.

Crew organizes a team, with most of them dumb enough to have no idea that they're supposedly going to have no chance to win. But they figure that they'll have the chance to get in a few licks on the guards, legally. (Well, not quite legally; much of what eventually goes on in the game should have gotten more penalty flags than it did.) The big day comes, and the prisoners are actually competitive. At least until Hazen tells Crew to throw the game....

The Longest Yard is pretty good, although I don't know quite how realistic it is. Reynolds had played college football so he's well-suited to playing a washed up player, and making the football look at least halfway authentic. There are still a lot of Hollywood touches, such as some irritating split screens, and a final play that reminded me of the staircase scene at the climax of Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious: Hitchcock needed to draw that scene out, so if you watch carefully you can see they're going down the same steps repeatedly. By the same token, the final play of The Longest Yard's football game looks like the same footage is looped in slow motion.

It's all minor quibbles, however. Reynolds is amiable, and the supporting cast is quite good, making for an enjoyable sports movie for those who like sports movies.

North Dallas Forty

Over the weekend, I finally got around to watching North Dallas Forty which I DVRed months ago. It's available on DVD, so I'm comfortable doing a full-length blog post on it.

The movie starts off with a scene I found reminiscent of Fat City: Phillip Elliott (Nick Nolte) gets out of bed clad in just his undies to go about his morning routine. Unlike Stacy Keach, however, Phillip's routine is rather more painful, and punctuated by memories of a football game. That's because Phillip Elliott is a wide receiver for the North Dallas Bulls, a professional football team. Phillip apparently both had a big drop and caught the winning touchdown pass in the last game, and that's what he's remembering. Eventually, some of his friends from the team come to pick him up to spend time together on their off day.

Phillip is rather blasé about the whole thing. His quarterback, Seth Maxwell (Mac Davis, whom I'd always thought of as a singer/songwriter, not an actor) is driving Phillip in a car, with linemen Jo Bob (Bo Svensson) and O.W. (John Matuszak, who really was a pro football player earlier in his life) drunk on the hood shooting at cattle. You can see why a non football player would be uncomfortable with the situation, but for a pro player? Well, that's because Phillip is getting on in years as far as football players go. He's not ready to give up the game since that's the only thing he knows, but he does seem to have a sense that his time will be coming.

That night, there's a wild party at one of the player's houses, which is where Phillip meets Charlotte (Dayle Haddon). She's just as blasé and ill at ease with the whole party as Phillip. But you wonder why she even came to the party. Phillip having to show up to his teammate's party is understandable; Charlotte claims she doesn't even like football. You get the sense, however, that the two are bound to wind up together, even though Charlotte leaves the party alone. Sure enough, Phillip leaves the party early and shows up at Charlotte's place, promptly falling asleep on the couch.

Meanwhile, there's a game to prepare for. Phillip's general manager Strothers (I think he's the general manager; he might be the head coach although I don't think he's ever referred to that way, unlike Coach Johnson, played by Charles Durning) tella Phillip that he's not playing as part of a team, and that he has to be more mature. He certainly seems more mature than the rest of the players, who like to carouse in the locker room and at film sessions. But there's also the physical therapy, which is where we can understand why Phillip is getting uncomfortable about the game. The trainers strongly encourage the players to take all sorts of pills and injections. Some players not only do so willy-nilly but are willing to raid the trainer's medicine cabinet for more pills; other players want to treat their body like a temple. All of this is in preparation for the big game in Chicago on Monday night, which is for the conference championship apparently. That game takes up the most of the last third of the movie.

North Dallas Forty is based on a book written by former professional football player Peter Gent; supposedly it's a pretty accurate look at what the NFL was like back in the early 70s. I haven't read the book and so can't comment on it, but I found that this movie version falls flat in spots. First, I found some of the characters intensely unappealing, particularly Joe Bob. Somebody injure him and get him on IR so we can be done with him already. He's a jerk, and not very funny. I also found a lot of continuity issues, for lack of a better description. The film may not actually have any continuity problems, but there's a lot that the screenplay doesn't present so well. It wasn't until near the very end of the movie that I realized the action had all taken place over just one week. There's also the problem with the "conference championship" game, as the movie implies that there will be another game next week for North Dallas regardless of the outcome. I also mentioned the issue with Strothers' position on the team.

Allthat having been said, I think Nolte gives a pretty good performance, and North Dallas Forty is certainly worth one viewing. It's also a movie I would definitely include if TCM were ever going to do one of its monthly spotlights on football. It's just not one I'm particularly interested in watching for a second time.

Easy Living (1949)

TCM is running a night of Victor Mature movies tonight, ending at 4:30 AM with Easy Living.

Mature plays Pete Wilson, who is the quarterback for the New York Chiefs, in an era when professional football was not king and the players didn't make all that much. That having been said, Wilson has done about as well as one possibly could out of football at the time, with a trophy wife Liza (Lizabeth Scott) who has become interior decorator to the smart set, and a presumptive offer to become the next coach at his old alma mater. That latter is apparently a big deal considering that college football was still a bigger thing than the pro game back then.

But there's a problem. Wilson isn't feeling well, and when he goes to a private doctor, it's discovered that he's been carrying a heart murmur all these years. Nowadays, they could probably do surgery to correct the problem, although the player would have to miss the remainder of the season. In 1949, however, medicine wasn't quite so advanced, and the diagnosis would have meant retire from playing football forthwith or else risk death. Well, it would be fairly easy to retire mid-season, especially considering that the ailment has already degraded his play to the point that the team is thinking of replacing him as the starting quarterback.

Again, however, there's a problem. Liza has liked living the good life in New York getting to meet all those high-class people when she does their redecorating for them. This even though she's really not all that good at it and is only getting the jobs because of her name. At any rate, however, she doesn't want to leave New York City for the life of a coach's wife at a midwestern state university. And dammit, she's going to do whatever it takes to make certain her husband is still living the good life for her sake, never mind what his sake involves!

There's even more going on with all of this. Lloyd Nolan plays Lenahan, the team's hands-on owner who sees Wilson's play degrading and is one of the people who wants to switch quarterbacks. His daughter-in-law Anne (Lucille Ball) is what seems to be a sort of executive assistant to him. She's a widow, and not certain she'd want to fall in love with another football player. But she is falling in love with Pete even though he's already married.

If you're a football fan, there's a lot interesting here to see how Hollywood looked at professional football before television (and then especially the Sabols and NFL Films) came along and revolutionized the game and made it a big money affair. I don't know how realistic it all is -- probably not very. I also found most of the performances apart from Mature's to be quite good. Scott turns out to be nasty as the grasping wife; Nolan is as good as ever playing his tough but ultimately sympathetic authority figure; and Lucille Ball in a drama is always something nice to see. Ball didn't get enough chances to show off her acting chops, but she really coud act.

It looks as though Easy Living is available from the Warner Archive collection. But make certain you're getting the 1949 film. There's also a 1937 screwball comedy called Easy Living. While it's a really good movie, it has nothing to do with the 1949 movie other than sharing a title.

Horse Feathers

I have to admit I'm not the biggest fan of the Marx Brothers' style of humor. But as a football fan, I should point out that TCM's salute to Groucho Marx includes Horse Feathers, at 9:30 PM.

Groucho plays Professor Wagstaff, a professor at Huxley College who gets elected president because presumably nobody else wants the job. I mean, if you see the professor's acceptance speech, you'd wonder why anybody would want to keep this guy around as a professor, much less make him president of the college. But then, Huxley has fallen on hard times, to the extent that it may have to close if it can't get its financial house in order.

Wagstaff's son Frank (Zeppo Marx, who would leave the team after their following film, Duck Soup) has an idea. Football is popular, and perhaps Huxley could field a winning football team. To that end, Frank happens to know a couple of ringers that Huxley could recruit and put on their team. After all, this is the early 1930s, when lots of college football teams had ringers, at least in the movies, and colleges are all the time trying to recruit them. All Dad has to do is go down to the local speakeasy and sign the two players.

So Dad goes, but of course not knowing the first thing about football and thanks to a mix-up, he picks up the wrong two guys. Instead of the two high-quality football players, he recruits Pinky (Harpo Marx) and Baravelli (Chico Marx). No matter; they'll make Huxley a good football team. And so Huxley prepares for the big game against Darwin. Darwin's president (David Landau) has a lot riding on the game, so much so that he wants to use his assistant (Thelma Todd) to get Huxley's signals from Wagstaff (as if Wagstaff would know the signals).

Eventually, we get to the game itself, which forms the climactic action of the movie. Let's just say that this is the most unrealist football you'll ever see on screen, which is saying something considering how many movies Hollywood was putting out in the 1930s with thoroughly unrealistic looks at football. The closest I can think of would be Hold That Co-Ed, but I think Horse Feathers has it beat.

I mentioned my lackluster feelings towards the Marx Brothers' movies at the start of this post. I think part of it has to do with the movies' being just a bit too wacky. The football game certainly qualifies for that, and goes on too long, especially after the rest of the movie has also been wacky. (That's a problem that Hold That Co-Ed doesn't have.) The other thing is that Grouch fairly rapidly grates on me. You'd think that after five or ten minutes of having to deal with him, everybody else would slug him. And it's seemingly the same character in every single film.

But, of course, there are people who are big fans of the Marx Brothers, and will be thrilled to have another opportunity to watch Horse Feathers or the other movies airing today.

John Goldfarb, please stay over there!

When I blogged about Dondi back in April 2011, I had nothing but bad words to say about it. A movie that gives Dondi a run for its money in sheer awfulness despite having stars and presumably a big enough budget is John Goldfarb, Please Come Home!, which is airing on the Fox Movie Channel tomorrow at 3:00 AM and repeated at 11:00 AM.

John "Wrong Way" Goldfarb, played by Richard Crenna, is an Air Force pilot, whom we see at the beginning of the movie running into journalist Jenny Ericson (Shirley MacLaine) in a government building in Washington. She gave him the nickname "Wrong Way" some years back when, as a college football player, he ran the wrong way on the football field. However, he's had a series of similar incidents in his career since then, and he's none too happy about running into Jenny. Goldfarb is being asked by the CIA and its head, Heinous Overreach (Fred Clark) to go on a U2 reconnaisance mission over the Soviet Union. Jenny, for her part, is trying to get info on the US relationship with the Arab oil sheikhdoms. In a plot twist, Jenny's editor decides the best story for her to get involves going undercover in a harem in one of those countries, taking clandestine photos and using US diplomatic channels to get those photos out.

Jenny gets sent to Fawzia, which is run by King Fawz (Peter Ustinov). He's got a son, Prince Ammud, who is going to college over in the States -- specifically Notre Dame -- and has taken up football. So King Fawz has decided to use hsi petrodollars to help start a football program to be Ammud's plaything, although the longer-term goal seems to be getting Notre Dame to come over to Fawzia to play a game.

Thanks to John Goldfarb's nickname, and the title of the movie, you can probably guess what happens next. He has problems with his plane, and instead of going over the Soviet Union, he ends up over Arabia, being forced to make an emergency landing... in Fawzia. Imagine his surprise when he first meets Jenny as a harem girl. The authorities back in Washington are trying to figure out a way to get John Goldfarb back to the US without creating an internatinoal incident, which is tough since they don't even know where he landed! Meanwhile, Goldfarb and Jenny, who aren't exactly the best of friends, are trying to figure ways out of their predicaments. Goldfarb's has been made much more dificult by the fact that King Fawz has learned the Goldfarb played football. Fawz makes him the coach of the "University of Fawzia" football program, and expects him to lead the team to victory over Notre Dame -- or else.

Where to begin with how this film fails spectacularly? I think I'd pick Peter Ustinov, who shows up before the other problems. I've never been a particularly big fan of Ustinov's work, as I've always gotten the impression that someplace just below the surface, there are antics about to break out. Those antics break out here, and in a very bad way; he's far more irritating than the worst Jerry Lewis parody, or even the tic-ridden Dr. Strangelove character (in Peter Sellers' defense, the other two characters he plays in the movie are done well). Fawz's harem looks like it's taken out of one of those Bob Hope movies from the same era: somebody's stereotyped misconcetion of what a king's harem would be mixed with an attempt to be hip for the 1960s. Some people might find it offensive; I only found it dumb. And then there's the football game that climaxes the movie. Here, it looks like the filmmakers were trying to take what the Harlem Globetrotters do in basketball, and transfer it to the football field. A lot of Hollywood's portrayals of football are unrealistic; this one is simply an insult to viewers' intelligence, regardless of whether those viewers are football fans or not. The closest part to a redeeming aspect of the movie is the government flunkies back in Washington. In addition to the already mentioned Fred Clark, there's Richard Deacon from The Dick Van Dyke Show as the Secretary of Defense; Harry Morgan from M*A*S*H as the Secretary of State; and Jim Backus of Gilligan's Island as the State Department's Middle East expert. Even here, though, these characters are used for the standard tropes about US incompetence in foreign affairs.

All in all, John Goldfarb, Please Come Home! is terrible on so many levels. But, as always, you might want to watch and judge for yourself. I don't think this one is on DVD, so you'll have to catch the FMC airings.

Football films for December 11

TCM is showing a whole bunch of football movies tomorow, several of which are not available on DVD and don't get shown very often. One of them is The Cowboy Quarterback, which I've briefly mentioned a couple of times, at 1:45 PM. Bert Wheeler, after the death of Robert Woolsey, plays a cowboy from Montana who is discovered by a professional football scout (William Demarest) and becomes quarterback for a team called the Chicago Packers (seriously); our hero gets waylaid by gambling, and the folks to whom he owes money want him to throw the big game.

One of the movies that I've never recommended before is Gridiron Flash, which is airing at 10:00 AM. The movie starts off at a prison, where the prisoners are playing football, which is presumably supposed to rehabilitate them rather than take out their violence on each other. Watching them is Howard Smith (Grant Mitchell), a booster for Bedford College. Bedford is one of those staples of Hollywood's college football movies of the 1930s, a school that's likely to go bankrupt if they don't get a winning football team to bring in the money. Smith has heard of a guy who's got great skills at quarterback -- but the guy is in jail on burglary charges, having taken part in some big jewel heists.

That guy, Thomas Burke, is played by Eddie Quillan, complete with big smile every time he runs the ball. Burke has no real desire to play college football, but Smith has a plan for Burke: he can rob the jewels of all the wealthy people who come to the football games! (You'll recall that back in the 1930s, college football was bigger than the professional game; apparently it was perfectly normal for the smart set to go to big college football games.) And if that doesn't work, Smith's got another trick up his sleeve: lovely co-ed Jane Thurston (Betty Furness). Eventually, Burke gives in and decides to play.

The team does well, but deep down inside, everybody really has a standoffish relationship with Burke, and when he doesn't get to be the big man on campus, he has a crisis of conscience and quits the football team. Well, that and some of his old friends from the east who are into robbery. He tries to leave town, gets picked up on spurious charges, and only gets sprung out of jail just in time for him to score the winning touchdown in the big game!

Gridiron Flash is one of those movies that's chock full of the clichés that college football films had in the 1930s. Eddie Quillan is believable as a con artist in the Jack Carson mold, but he's one of the most unlikely football stars you'll ever see. He gets some fun scenes when it comes to the robbery, as he gets to rob a campus cup (Edgar Kennedy), only to discover later that the cop is the father of the Betty Furness character! Margaret Dumont plays a wealthy matron whose house Quillan and Mitchell case. If you like college football movies, Gridiron Flash is passable, but it's nowhere near the first film I'd recommend for college football, or for fans of 1930s B movies.

A different football scandal

If you're sick of the things coing on in college football in real life, perhaps you might like to reminisce about the days when everything, including college football, was simpler. And wouldn't you know that TCM is going to be showing such a movie. That film, Navy Blue and Gold, is airing tomorrow morning at 10:30 AM.

The movie is about three young men who all join the Naval Academy, become roommates together, and wind up on the football team together as well. Other than that, they come from different backgrounds. First is Roger (Robert Young), who is the sort of person who wants to coast through life, and thinks that being in the Naval Academy will allow him to find a good wife and retire well-off after doing his one hitch. That's clearly different from John (James Stewart), who is obviously from a more hardscrabble background, although we're not given the full details about that at first. Somewhere in the middle is the third guy, Dick (Tom Brown), who feels a sense of duty to his country even though he could live on easy street thanks to his parents (Samuel F. Hinds and Billie Burke). Dick has a pretty sister Pat (Florence Rice), and in one of the many clichés in this movie, you know that two guys are going to fight over her. (And you know those two guys are going to be the other roommates, Roger and John).

Having mentioned clichés, it's time to point out that this movie breaks no real new ground. There were a lot of college football-themed movies back in the 1930s and earlier, and even one, West Point, set against the backdrop of a service academy. The biggest of the clichés deals with the possible loss of the star player (Stewart) for the big game. John's background was tough largely because his father was drummed out of the navy, under circumstances that the navy itself has gotten totally wrong. When one of the instructors tells John's class the example of his father as one of how not to act in the navy, John stands up for his father, at which point we learn nobody at the academy knew of the father/son relationship. And John, having disguised his identity, has probably violated the honor code, which could get him expelled just in time for the big game against Army....

Speaking of that big game, we've got one man who is really looking forward to it: Lionel Barrymore, who has a smallish role as the oldest living alumnus of the Naval Academy, and a starter on Navy's first football team. (Yeah, right.) Just before the big game, he falls ill and winds up in the infirmary. Will the team be able to win for him?

All in all, Navy Blue and Gold is the sort of movie that should get panned as being trite and mawkish. And yet, it works, largely because of James Stewart's acting ability. He was always good at playing the conflicted but ultimately good sort of character that he has here, even though this time it's early in his career. Unfortunately, Navy Blue and Gold doesn't seem to have gotten a DVD release yet.