For some values of "nice"

Some months back, TCM ran a Sunday night double feature of films starring Deanna Durbin. The first was It Started with Eve, but when I sat down to watch it I had the distinct feeling I'd seen it before. So instead I watched the other, Nice Girl?, to do the obligatory post on here. Now, as it turns out, I have seen It Started With Eve, but have never done a post on it; I wouldn't be surprised if the last time it was on TCM was before I started blogging since Deanna Durbin was at Universal and TCM doesn't get the rights to their films all that often. So I'll watch it again and eventually do a post on it.

Durbin plays Jane Dara, middle daughter in a family that is somehow middle class enough to have a maid Cora (Helen Broderick), as well as a father Oliver (Robert Benchley) who is doing experiments on the diets of rabbits that Jane helps with. Indeed, Dad is hoping to get a fellowship with a prestigious institute in New York to be able to help fund his studies. Jane has a boyfriend in Don Webb (a young Robert Stack), who has an interest in cars and could probably make a reasonable living as an auto mechanic, although I get the impression that even in those days this wasn't necessarily the profession a middle class man would want his daughter to marry.

A running subplot is Cora's relationship, or her being pursued by, the mailman Hector (Walter Brennan), who also leads the town's band that meets in the small-town park band shell for holidays like July 4, this being one of those Connecticut small towns that populated Hollywood movies like this in the years leading up to World War II. Hector brings Oliver a special delivery letter informing him that the foundation is sending a man from New York to look over the experiments with a view to the foundation funding these experiments. Jane goes to the train station to pick that man up: Richard Calvert (Franchot Tone). Richard has done research on various pygmy populations and the extent to which diet has made them short, and this has caused him to travel all over the world (and as we'll see later, have an impossibly big New York apartment for someone of his employment). That travel makes him sophisticated in the eyes of the three daughters, all of whom put on airs in the hopes that he'll take an interest in them, even if they're all too young for him.

Eventually it's time for Calvert to go back to New York, and Jane offers to drive him to the train station, in Don's convertible since Don's working on her car. However, she sabotages the convertible so that it won't get to the station on time, meaning she has to drive him to New York. They get stuck in the rain, and in a series of coincidences, Jane winds up wearing a pair of pajamas belonging to Richard's sister while her own clothes are drying. Then when Calvert makes it clear there's no romantic interest between them, Jane drives home in the middle of the night, arriving home at a scandalous time and making the whole town gossip about her.

Now, this is a Deanna Durbin movie, so we know that everything is going to come out right in the end. But to see exactly how that's going to happen, you'll have to watch for youreself. Nice Girl? is the sort of movie that I can see why it would appeal to fans of Deanna Durbin, especially back in 1941 when it was released. However, I can also see why Deanna Durbin was growing tired of these ingenue roles and wanted something more talent-stretching. This being Deanna Durbin, there are also several opportunities for her to sing, which again fans of hers will enjoy. The misunderstandings plot doesn't always work, and to me it felt wrapped up a bit too quickly. But for the most part Nice Girl? is simply inoffensive fun.

Love Is a Headache

I'm going through the movies that I recorded when Mickey Rooney was TCM's Star of the Month. Next up is a movie made a year or so after the first Andy Hardy movie, but with Rooney still playing a juvenile role, and a supporting one at that: Love Is a Headache.

The male lead here is Franchot Tone, although first we see the female lead, Gladys George. She plays Carlotta Lee, a New York stage actress who, as the movie is opening, is seeing the play she's in closing. And it's not an uncommon occurrence, as the last four plays she's been in have all flopped. Tone plays Peter Lawrence, a gossip columnist who writes for a paper and has a radio show. He knows Carlotta from back in the day, and has always held a torch for her, to the point that he uses his columns to try to advance her career.

One of the problems is that Lee has had a knack for picking scripts that aren't right for her and aren't going to succeed on Broadway, so when Peter writes about them, his comments enrage Lee since she naturally figures he's being mean by writing horrible things about her. He's been known to do the same thing to other actors, without any real interest in advancing their careers. Why would it be any different for Carlotta.

And then the Mickey Rooney subplot takes over. Mickey plays Mike O'Toole, elder brother of Jake (Virginia Weidler). Their mother died a year or so ago, and they've since been raised by a single father who is a window washer. But Dad just died in a tragic accident, news of which reached Peter apparently before the next of kin could be notified. Peter knew Mr. O'Toole, and doesn't want the two kids to wind up in an orphanage where they'll be separated. So Peter uses his radio show to mention the plight of these two children, in the hopes that somebody will adopt them for real.

Carlotta's manager, Jimmy Slattery (Ted Healy in one of his final roles as the movie was released a few weeks after his untimely death), thinks this would be a great PR coup and get Carlotta's name in the papers in a good way which would make it more likely she could get better roles. SO the next morning the two kids are already in Lee's palatial apartment, which seems like it would violate all sorts of norms on the way trying to foster kids would work, but this is a 1930s Hollywood movie. Carlotta may not have a stable job, although she's got a wealthy man, Mr. Odell (Ralph Morgan), pursuing her.

Peter reads the news about Carlotta and the two kids and is pissed, as he wants a real family for the two kids and not a PR stunt. The kids realize, however, that they actually like Carlotta, and the feeling begins to become mutual. Remember, it wasn't her choice to do any of this as a PR stunt. But Peter decides that if Carlotta's agent is going to use the kids for a stunt, then Peter has to do anything he can to make certain Carlotta doesn't get the kids. It all leads up to the requisite happy ending that requires the audience overlook a lot of plot loopholes and threads that remain untied.

But then, Love Is a Headache runs a sprightly 73 minutes. It was never intended as anything more than a programmer, if not a straight-up B movie to keep people like Tone and Rooney in front of moviegoers. It's the sort of material that, 20 years later, would have formed the establishing story for some sort of TV sitcom. In that vein, the material works and is pleasant enough, but will probably not be considered memorable by anybody who watches. Certainly no more memorable than it would have been for audiences of the day.

More Ferenc Molnár

Hungarian writer Ferenc Molnár wrote a lot of works, mostly plays, that have been turned into movies on multiple occasions, as we most recently saw with Blonde Fever. A movie that I had recorded not knowing that it was based on yet another work by Molnár is The Bride Wore Red. Having finally gotten around to watching it, now's the time to do the review on it.

In Trieste, Italy, two upper-class gentlemen go slumming, the Count Armalia (George Zucco) and his friend Rudi Pal (Robert Young). The restaurant they go to has a bunch of women who are barely scraping by in life working there, and Armalia suggests that, Pygmalion-style, he could turn one of these women into a proper lady with the right clothes, grooming, and accent. Needless to say, we're going to find out if that is in fact the case, as the scene cuts to a singer at the club.

That woman is Anni Pavlovitch (Joan Crawford), and after her number, the count calls her over to give her the chance to test his theory, unbeknownst to Rudi. He'll get some good clothes for Anni and come up with a new identity for her, and then send her off to a resort in South Tyrol, which is part of Italy but has a large German population thanks to it having been part of Austria until the end of the Great War. Anni agrees to the proposition, giving her two weeks at a hoity-toity resort, but on the agreement that the count get her a red dress that will be hers to keep.

Cut to the train to the resort, where Anni, now named Anna Vivaldi, gets off, greeted by the telegraph operator/chauffeur Giulio (Franchot Tone), who was of course Joan Crawford's real-life husband at the time. Giulio is a relatively simple man, and you can guess that he's going to fall for her and that Anni is going to have mixed feelings about which man to choose.

OK, I'm getting a bit ahead of myself, but you know there's going to be another man. Before that, however, we learn that there's going to be at least one person at the resort who knows Anni's secret, that person being one of the chambermaids (not Armalia, who isn't there), which is a big problem since Anni is supposed to be a different social class from the chambermaid. As for the other man, that unsurprisingly turns out to be Rudi, who is at the resort together with his fiancée Maddalena and her father, an admiral (Reginald Owen).

You'll note I mentioned that Rudi is engaged, which presents further plot complications as it won't do for an engaged man to fall in love with one of the other guests at the resort. At the same time, however, it comes up with an interesting dilemma, which is whether Rudi will still love Anni if he finds out she's a working girl, or whether Anni will run off with Giulio. Quite a few of the comedies of the late 1930s had rich guys falling for working women where we knew they were supposed to wind up together in the final reel.

That having been said, The Bride Wore Red doesn't quite sparkle for some reason. I'm not quite sure why, considering the provenance from Ferenc Molnár, together with a very creditable cast. It's also the sort of material that was well-suited to MGM and their production values. But for whatever reason, it consistently feels slightly off, probably because Joan Crawford is never really convincingly Italian.

That's not to say The Bride Wore Red is bad; it's more that everybody in the cast had other stuff that they could point to as better. Still, Joan Crawford fans will definitely like this one, and it's another good example of how MGM seemed more able to put glitz on a movie than possibly any other studio in the golden age.

Three Comrades

In looking through the movies on my DVR, I noticed something that's coming up on TCM, so I figured I'd watch it now to do a post on it: Three Comrades, which airs at 6:30 AM January 30.

The movie starts off with an establishing shot that has the words "Nov. 11 1918" written in the clouds. Now, if you recall your history, you'll know that this was the day on which World War I ended, although at the time the movie was released it was still known as the Great War because the European theater of World War I was still a year away from kicking off. Als, if you paid attention to the opening credits, you'll have spotted the name Erich Maria Remarque, writer of All Quiet on the Western Front, so you can guess that this is written about Germans. Sure enough, we see a group of German officers and flyboys hoping that real peace can come to the world.

Among the flyboys are three who hope they can keep up their friendshpi and hope that in the new Germany they can put the skills they learned in the military to good use as auto mechanics. Those three are Erich Lohkamp (Robert Taylor), Gottfried Lenz (Robert Young), and Otto Koster (Franchot Tone). They meet up again in early 1920, and Otto actually has a car of his own, so they not only do an auto-repair business, they try to make money on the side by using the car as a taxi. While out for a joyride one day, they get in a race with a car that has a female passenger, Patricia Hollmann (Margaret Sullavan). Patricia was part of one of the pre-war noble families, but the war destroyed all that, and she's reduced to trying to get a sugar daddy (Lionel Atwill) to bankroll her.

All three of the young German friends like Patricia, but it's Erich who really falls in love with her. Eventually, he's convinced by his to try to start a relationship with Patricia, who loves Erich in return, even though Erich thinks his low social class will hurt him with Patricia. But no, she really loves him, so the two decide to get married.

The two go on a honeymoon someplace on the German coast that really looks more like the Northern California coast, but that's beside the point. It's not a happy honeymoon, however, as Patricia collapses with what is presumably tuberculosis although I don't think that's actually named in the movie. Dr. Jaffe (Monty Woolley, who only has a couple of scenes) is called in, and tells Erich that Patricia really needs to get to a sanitarium, the sooner the better.

Not that the three friends have the money for this. And they're also coming up against the political realities of early Weimar Germany. It's a volatile place, what with Germany having been defeated in the war and a lot of people chafing at the reparations, even though the real disasters of the 1923 hyperinflation still hadn't occurred. In any case, there's already political street violence, and it does eventually touch the three men. Gottfried believes in the teachings of a radical pacifist, and that's dangerous, as the proto-Fascists want to shut down such political expression, by force if necessary. (They didn't have social media giants to shut down such speech under the guise of "fake news" back in those days.) Gottfried gets shot and killed, although fortunately this is after Patricia has gone off to the sanitarium so she doesn't know about it.

What she does learn is that she needs an operation, because in those days a vague operation could apparently cure any serious illness other than cancer, which would invariably kill you within months. However, the operation involves her having to remain nearly still for weeks on end, and she may not be able to follow medical instructions....

Three Comrades is one of those movies that has all the gloss MGM could offer, although I couldn't help but feel that it was a bit of a mess. The plot twists of Patricia falling ill and then needing an operation felt more like a soap opera to me than what is supposed to be a serious film. MGM was also never the best studio to handle the sort of serious social commentary that's on offer here with the backdrop of Weimar political violence, so I felt like there was an earnest tone that didn't quite fit the material.

That having been said, there is the MGM gloss, which is definitely a sign of quality production values, while the cast also do the best they can with the material even if some of them are miscast. (Guy Kibbee in a supporting role is most definitely not German, but he's as professional as ever. And there are a lot of people who praise the movie much more highly than I do, so it's definitely worth a watch to judge for yourself.

Franchot Tone loves trouble

Another movie that was sitting on my DVR for a few months was one I hadn't heard of before Eddie Muller plucked it out of obscurity for a showing on Noir Alley: a 1948 movie called I Love Trouble, not to be confused with the 1990s movie that has the same title but a completely different plot.

Franchot Tone stars as Stu Bailey, a Los Angeles private eye who one day gets a visit from an up-and-coming politician named Ralph Johnston (Tom Powers). Johnston has a wife, but she's gotten a blackmail letter and subsequently gone missing. So Johnston wants Stu to figure out what it is in Jane's past that would cause somebody to blackmail her, as well as to find who's doing the blackmailing and where Mrs. Johnston is.

That sounds simple enough, but it all gets a lot more complicated. Before the war, Mrs. Johnston was working at nightclubs under the stage name Janie Joy, and that she was originally from Portland, Oregon. One of the nightclubs is run by Keller (Steven Geray), who has a couple of henchmen working for him in the form of Herb (Raymond Burr) and Reno (John Ireland). Keller is suitably odious and dangerous for Bailey, but he's not the only possible suspect in what's going on.

There's also Buffin, who knew Jane before she left Portland, and who is now running a restaurant that's even more out of the way than the one near the climax of 99 River Street. Who on earth would ever visit a place like this to eat. Thankfully, we can deduce fairly quickly that Buffin is in fact not a suspect, but that's only because he gets shot and killed.

And then there are the women. One, Norma (Janet Blair) claims to be Jane's sister, although the camerawork makes it ridiculously obvious that she isn't since her monogram doesn't match Jane's last name. There's also Boots (Adele Jergens), who married into money and is involved somehow, as well as a mysterious third woman I won't go into too much detail about lest I give away too much about the plot, other than to say Bailey figures out someone's trying to frame him.

Well, it's in part that I don't want to reveal plot twists, and partly because I Love Trouble is a fairly confusing movie, with an origin that Eddie Muller very helpfully explained in his intro and outro to the movie. The writer, Roy Huggins (who would go on to a very successful career writing and producing for TV), wanted to hone his writing skill by writing a character that emulated private eye Philip Marlowe very closely. To this. Huggins also added a lot of cynical humor. This humor was tailor made for Glenda Farrell, who plays the part of Bailey's secretary/girl Friday. Unsurprisingly, she runs with it.

I Love Trouble is decidedly lesser noir, but it's definitely watchable.

Mister Buddwing is now a stand-up comic

Last week's theme for the Thursday Movie Picks blogathon was Movies that Confused You. Unfortunately, I only watched Mickey One after doing that entry, or else I could have used it in the blogathon.

Warren Beatty plays Mickey, a stand-up comedian in Detroit who apparently likes to gamble and entertain the ladies when he's not up on stage. He's accrued some gambling debts, and somehow the Mob has gotten a hold of those debts and wants him to pay up now. But how much, and how the Mob got those debts is a mystery to the comic and, frankly, to the viewer as well.

So our comic decides that, since he can't pay those debts, he's going to go running off to Chicago to try to get away from the Mob. Fat lot of good that's going to do him. A lot of the better nightclubs have Mob ties, but which branch of the Mob is it? Getting in with the wrong branch could cause problems for Mickey.

With the help of a manager who looks like he should have died 20 years ago, Mickey gets gigs at some lesser clubs, and this eventually brings him to the attention of Castle (Hurd Hatfield), who manages a club called Xanadu, which has nothing to do with roller disco. The agent may be able to get Mickey a gig there, which may help Mickey at least figure out how much he owes and to whom. But Mickey worries that he's not seeing the right people.

Along the way, Mickey winds up with a girlfriend in Jenny (Alexandra Stewart). But he doesn't want to get too close to her because he doesn't want her to get hurt. And who knows, but she could be a lure to get him killed by the Mob. Or something like that.

I found Mickey One maddeningly hard to understand, and as I was watching, I couldn't help but think of another movie that's tough to decipher, Mister Buddwing. In that movie, James Garner plays a man who wakes up in a city park one day with a bad case of amnesia. I'm guessing that Warren Beatty's Mickey knows who he is, but the way everything is presented made me wonder whether a bunch of the scenes, such as Mickey in the auto junkyard, were supposed to be some sort of dream or allegory and not real. At least, that's the interpretation I gave it to try to make the movie less incomprehensible.

So I was frankly glad to get finished with Mickey One so that I could delete it from the DVR and make room for something else.

Sadie McKee

I thought I had blogged about Sadie McKee before, but a search of the blog claims I haven't. Having recently watched it and it being available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive, now you get a review of it.

Joan Crawford plays Sadie, who at the start of the movie is a domestic, having grown up with her cook mother in the home of the Aldersons. Their son Michael (Franchot Tone) is a lawyer who is in love with Sadie, but she's in love with a man from her social class, Tommy (Gene Raymond). Michael bad-mouths Tommy, so what does Sadie do? She gets together with Tommy and runs off to New York to elope with him!

But perhaps there was a reason Michael bad-mouthed Tommy and Sadie should have been with Michael. Sadie and Tommy arrive in New York too late to get married that day, so they get a room in a rooming house with the plan to get married the next day. Sadie looks for a job in the morning and plans to meet Tommy who is going to get the marriage license. But while she's out looking, Tommy meets a traveling performer who offers Tommy a job on the spot, which he takes even though it requires traveling and separation from Sadie.

Sadie, being in need of a job, gets one in a nightclub as a dancer. This is the sort of 1930s clubs that rich guys went to and threw away lots of money, including on dancers and waitresses who hoped to snag a rich man. Not that Sadie was expecting that, but it's going to happen anyway. Rich guy Jack Brennan (Edward Arnold) shows up one day and immediately falls in love with Sadie, who sees things more in terms of how this might be beneficial to her, not that she wants to hurt Jack.

There are two problems with Jack, however. One is that he's an alcoholic. The other is that among his friends is... Michael Alderson! So now he knows what Sadie's done with herself, and he knows (or at least is convinced) that it's going to be bad news for Sadie if she hooks up with Jack. Still, she does so, and even tries to help Jack sober up when she learns that if he doesn't sober up it will kill him. But she's still in love with Tommy....

Sadie McKee is one of those 1930s melodramas that are interesting if you don't focus too much on the plot, which really doesn't make that much sense. Crawford plays a lot of characters like this at MGM in the first half of the 1930s, and she does a perfectly fine job with it. Edward Arnold is also surprisingly good both as a drunk and as the fundamentally decent human who doesn't want to hurt Sadie. Raymond isn't around much, and Franchot Tone is acceptable at least.

Sadie McKee is nothing special, but there's also nothing really wrong with it. It works well enough as a vehicle for Joan Crawford, and is enough to hold the interest of anybody who's already a fan of 1930s melodrama.

Lives of a Bengal Lancer

Another movie aired during Summer Under the Stars that I just got around to watching is The Lives of a Bengal Lancer, which is available on DVD courtesy of Universal's MOD scheme.

Gary Cooper plays Lt. McGregor, a Canadian servince with the British 41st Lancers on the Northwest Frontier in British India, an area which today would be the still-volatile border region between Pakistand and Afghanistan. McGregor goes out on a mission where he's expressly told not to shoot, except that two of his superior officers get shot to death right off their horses, leaving h im more or less in command and feeling he has to shoot back. Part of the reason for this introductory scene is to show McGregor's character and difficulties in dealing with the command structure, and the other part is to have a reason to bring in two greenhorn officers.

Those two are Lt. Forsythe (Franchot Tone), and, fresh out of Sandhurst, Lt. Stone (Richard Cromwell). Lt. Stone, in addition to having no clue about the way things work out in the real world on the frontier, is also the son of the base's commanding officer Col. Stone (Guy Standing). Col. Stone is insistent about doing everything by the book and making certain his son is shown no favoritism, but everybody else thinks that Lt. Stone is going to get different treatment. As you can imagine, young Lt. Stone has a difficult time having a father for a CO.

The three lieutenants get into some mild misadventures that serve as character development for the ultimate climax of the film; among these scenes are a particularly humorous one involving a cobra Lt. Forsythe is inadvertently charming, and a scene on a wild boar hunt. But eventually, more real life is going to intrude, in the form of Mohammed Khan (Douglass Dumbrille), who is trying to get his hands on a large stash of ammunition so that the various tribal groups can join together and take on the British.

This results in Lt. Stone being captured by the Khan's men and McGregor and Forsythe having to go rescue Stone, a mission which is going to put themselves in danger. Can the British cavalry rescue them in time?

A lot of the reviewers that I've read heap extremely high praise on Lives of a Bengal Lancer. I found it a good movie, but I was kind of surprised by the relative lack of action in the movie. Much of the movie before the climactic battle at the Khan's fortress was more of a character study than an adventure film. I suppose that had I known this coming in, I'd probably have an even higher opinion of the movie. Not that it's not good; I just thought it a bit understated. I'm sure most of the rest of you will like it even more than I did.

The Stranger's Return

TCM is running a bunch of Miriam Hopkins movies tomorrow morning and afternoon. One that doesn't seem to be available on DVD is The Stranger's Return, which will be on at 7:45 AM.

Hopkins plays the nominal stranger, a big-city divorcée named Louise. Having just gotten a divorce, she wants to get away from it all, and decides that she's going to go back to the old family farm run by her grandfather (Lionel Barrymore), an 85-year-old Civil War veteran. This even though she's never been on the farm as an adult. But it'll do her good to get away and recharge.

Or so she thinks. Obviously, things aren't going to be completely easy. There are a couple of women relatives already living on the farm with Grandpa (Beulah Bondi as Beatrice and Aileen Carlyle as Thelma) and they don't take kindly to the new arrival, expecting that Grandpa is going to make certain she gets an inheritance in the will. They think he's too old to run the farm and they'd basically like to take it over for themselves.

And then there's the neighbor. Guy (Franchot Tone) is another farmer, although that's really a surprise, since he's college-educated and would like to have the finer things in life and the chance to talk about culture with somebody. Nothing against his wife Nettie (Irene Hervey); she just isn't cultured. You wonder how Guy ended up here. Anyhow, Guy and Louise meet and you know that they're going to feel an attraction for her. Nettie may not be cultured, but she's not stupid: she can see that Guy likes having this big-city woman around. Guy doesn't want to hurt his wife, and Louise doesn't want to break up their marriage, anyway.

But that story is going to have to take a back seat to the finale. Beatrice is trying to get Grandpa declared insane so that he's going to have to give up control of the farm to her. And Grandpa certainly is acting nutty. Louise, however, has come to love her grandfather and is willing to fight for him.

The Stranger's Return is one of those leisurely-paced programmers from the early days of sound. Sure there are a lot of movies from those days where they try to make the pace fast in order to get everything in in the short running time, but there are others that seem to meander along, more or less showing a slice of life. The Stranger's Return is definitely in the latter category, especially considering the amount of time they spend on a dinner for farmhands.

Still, the performances are good and the story does interest. The Stranger's Return ultimately succeeds as a programmer even if the ending is a bit hit-or-miss. This is another of those movies that Warner Home Video probably ought to put out on DVD on one of those four-film sets.

The Girl From Missouri

Over the weekend, I watched The Girl From Missouri, having recorded it on my DVD as part of the TCM salute to Jean Harlow a week earlier. It seems to have gotten a DVD release courtesy of the Warner Archive, since it's availalbe at Amazon. (Strangely enough, the TCM Shop lists it as being on back order.) So I can feel comfortable doing a full-length post on it here even though I don't think it's on the TCM schedule again any time soon.

Jean Harlow of course plays the titular girl from Missouri, although she doesn't spend much of the movie in Missouri. It's only the opening scene that's set there. Harlow plays Eadie, a young woman whose father died at some point in the past and whose mother apparently went through a succession of men. Mom, along with the current stepfather, run what is presumably a roadhouse-type night spot, but that's not the type of life for Eadie. So her friend Kitty (Patsy Kelly) is going to help her escape from the roadhouse, and take a train to New York.

Eadie intends to find a rich man and marry him, since that's the best way to get money. Even if there's love, Eadie still feels she can make it work. So she takes a job as a show girl, begging her boss to let her be part of the show that's going to a private party being given by the wealthy Frank Cousins (Lewis Stone). Boss relents and Eadie eventually wangles her way into Cousins' private office, where he eventually offers her his ruby cufflinks as a sort of engagement gift. What she doesn't know is that Cousins is actually bankrupt, and he's giving her those cufflinks as a parting gift since he plans to commit suicide! The police notice that the cufflinks are missing, and it's going to be Eadie's word against common sense as to how she got those cufflinks. Still, another rich man, banker T.R. Paige (Lionel Barrymore) helps her out, and even gives her some money to get by.

Eadie's plan, after Cousins offs himself, is to snare Paige! So she takes that money and follows him down to Palm Beach. When she goes to Paige's office in Palm Beach, she meets a young man who is interested in her, although the feeling isn't mutual. Still, the young man says he can get Eadie onto Paige's yacht. It turns out that the young man is in fact T.R. Paige, Jr. (Franchot Tone). He doesn't care about Eadie's background, since he believes she's really got a heart of gold, and dammit, he's going to keep pursuing her until she finally says yes. Dad, however, is none too happy about it, and does everything he can to put the kibosh on it....

The Girl From Missouri was released in August, 1934, about a month after Joe Breen started enforcing the stricter Production Code. That, I think, is to the movie's detriment. Harlow tries, but she's faced with material that doesn't really seem to know what to do with itself. In particular, it can't decide whether it wants to be a drama or a comedy. Franchot Tone is more than suitable as the young playboy type who falls for Eadie, and Patsy Kelly provides comic relief without going over the top. Barrymore is probably the weakest of the four leads here.

All in all, I think The Girl From Missouri is a movie that Jean Harlow fans will like. But if I were going to introduce people to the movies of Jean Harlow, I can think of several other movies I'd pick first.

Bombshell

Sometime a couple of years ago, possibly during Jean Harlow's turn as TCM's Star of the Month in her centenary month of March 2011, I sat down to watch her film Bombshell. I found the characters so irritating that I said the heck with it after a half hour or so. Bombshell came on again last month when Lee Tracy was being honored in Summer Under the Stars, so I figured I'd suck it up and finally watch the movie in full and see if my first impression might have been wrong. No; the characters were still intensely irritating for the most part. Bombshell is on the TCM schedule again this afternoon at 4:45 PM as part of the Friday pre-Code marathon, so you can give it a look and judge for yourself.

Jean Harlow plays the least annoying by far of the main characters. She's the title bombshell, a platinum blonde actress named Lola Burns. She's made it big in Hollywood, enough so that all the gossip magazines want a piece of her and her family has been able to come out to California to live with her. Her family members, combined with her own personal life, have combined to keep her constantly in the 1930s equivalent of TMZ, although of course it was print only back then since there was no TV. Dad (Frank Morgan) and her brother Junior (Ted Healy, here without the Stooges) are layabouts who seem to be living off Lola's money, and getting into some trouble at times. Meanwhile, Lola's love life involves an ex in the form of director Jim Brogan (Pat O'Brien) and current love the Marquis (Ivan Lebedeff).

So, you can see why Lola would be in the tabloids all the time. She hates it, but the studio publicist/firefighter, Space Hanlon (Lee Tracy) tries to tell Lola it's a good thing. After all, if you're not in the public eye, your fans are going to stop thinking about you, and pretty soon you're not going to have any fans. But it's not just the idea that any publicity is good publicity: Space is deliberately creating many of these situations to make certain Lola's name will be in the news. The first time Lola realizes this, she decides that she'd like to change her image by adopting a baby. Space, for his part, thinks this change of image would be bad for the studio, so he does what he can to sabotage it, and when Lola discovers the sabotage, she runs away from Hollywood entirely.

Lola goes to a desert resort, and while horesback riding, she meets nice Gifford Middleton (Franchot Tone). He's wealthy and from a good family (parents played by Mary Forbes and C. Aubrey Smith). Gifford would like to marry Lola, but first he's got to meet her family, which of course poses a bit of a dilemma for Lola. And to make matters more complicated, Space figured out where Lola ran off to, and has showed up himself. Surely he's got to be there for the possibility of publicity. Or is this finally the time Lola can trust him?

The big problem I have with Bombshell, as I stated at the beginning of the post, is that most of the characters are unappealing. Harlow's Lola Burns is the most sympathetic, but she plays the role frenetically. To be fair, I think the script and director (Victor Fleming) must have called for it, because everybody's frenetic. It still makes Lola mildly unappealing. Space is a complete jerk, although I suppose some people will just say he's doing his job. The question is what sort of moral reprobate would take this dishonest publicity job in the first place. Lola's dad and brother are also selfish jerks, and you wonder why Lola doesn't kik at least the brother out of the house. O'Brien isn't too bad as the director ex, although his character isn't given much to work with. He and Lebedeff's marquis both disappear halfway through the movie. C. Aubrey Smith is a bit of a bright spot, although he shows up too late. And then the ending made me want to scream at the TV.

A lot of people like Bombshell, however. So you can watch today and judge for yourself, or get a copy of the movie on DVD from the Warner Archvie.

Unsafe

I believe that I've never done a full-length post on the film Dangerous before. I probably shouldn't be surprised, since it's one that shows up astonishingly infrequently on TCM, despite the fact that it's a Warner Bros. movie and it won Bette Davis the first of her two Best Actress Oscars. It's getting one of its rare showings tomorrow morning at 8:30 AM on TCM, so now might be a good time to recommend it.

Franchot Tone is the male lead, playing Don Bellows, a prominent young well-to-do architect, engaged to lovely Gail Armitage (Margaret Lindsay). Several years earlier, Don had seen the actress Joyce Heath (Bette Davis) give a perfromance on Broadway that changed his life, convincing him that he ought to go into a field that would allow him to show off his creative side, which is why he became an architect. Time hasn't been kind to Joyce, who turned to the bottle and lost her prominent place on stage, now looking about as haggard as Davis' character from Of Human Bondage a year earlier. Don sees Joyce one day, and feels he just has to tell her what an influence she had on his life.

Well, actually he feels he has to do more than that. He has to try to rehabilitate her. Why go on such a fool's errand, I don't know, but we wouldn't have a movie if Don didn't do something so obviously stupid. At least Joyce has the good sense to warn Don not to do it. She insists that she's a bad influence on every man she touches, and he shouldn't waste his time or money trying to help her. For not only is Don wasting his time; he's decided it would be a good idea to use his wealth to help her too! He's willing to be the financial backer for a new play starring Joyce, allowing her to get back on her feet and return to a successful acting career.

Now, of course, it doesn't go as Don plans. He should have known this based on Joyce's warnings, be he wouldn't listen. It's much worse than that: he's fallen in love with her. As I'm writing this review, I'm finding myself laughing at the sheer ludicrousness of the plot developments, but bear with me. The movie handles eerything much better than my laughter is making it seem. Don wants Joyce to marry him. She refuses, but that shouldn't be a surprise. She's already warned Don that she's a jinx, and not only doesn't want to marry Don, but insists she can't marry him.

At this point, we learn that the reason she can't marry Don is because she's already got a husband, whom she ruined financially. She wants to give him his freedom, but he refuses, apparently being happy with Joyce. At this point, the film really takes a melodramatic turn, but I can't really say what Joyce does next without giving away key plot points.

As I implied earlier, Dangerous is the sort of melodrama that sounds as though it ought to be a complete mess. In fact, though, it turns out to be a pretty good movie, largely down to the performance from Davis. She won the Oscar, even though she supposedly felt she shouldn't have and that the Academy was making up for not nominating her the previous year for Of Human Bondage. Davis felt that Katharine Hepburn gave a better performance in Alice Adams. In defense of the idea that Davis deserved this Oscar, I'd have to say that Hepburn had wonderful material to work with. She certainly shines above and beyond everybody else, but it's easy to shine with a script like Alice Adams. Bette Davis takes material that probably should be sub-par, and makes you forget that it's sub-par. Compare this to The Star, in which Davis fails to raise the level of the script, turning it into unintential comedy. Perhaps part of the credit ought to be in the casting of Franchot Tone; he's much more convincing of the man wasting his life for Bette Davis' benefit than Sterling Hayden was. The script also give him more realistic motivations; I'm probably being a bit harsh if I'm suggesting that the script of Dangerous is as much of a mess as that of The Star.

In any case, Dangerous is well worth a viewing. It's also gotten a DVD release courtesy of the Warner Archive Collection.

No More Ladies

What if MGM took another look at The Divorcée five years later, and saw that, with the imposition of the Production Code, there's no way they could make such a movie in the same way? And what if, having seen that, they tried to make an urbane comedy instead? The result might be something like No More Ladies, which is airing at midnight tonight on TCM.

Joan Crawford stars as Marcia, a socialite-type living with Grandma Fanny (Edna May Oliver). She's in love with Sherry (Robert Montgomery), even though he's a notorious playboy. Grandma warns Marcia about Sherry, as does marcia's cousin Edgar (Charlie Ruggles). But to no avail. Even though Sherry continues to stand up Marcia, she still keeps going back to him. After a while, Sherry proposes marriage to Marcia, and she accepts, even though they both admit that the chances of their having a successful marriage are rather low!

Sure enough, Sherry continues to be a playboy, on their honeymoon no less. And it's not as if he's a very convincing liar. On one of his trysts, he's seeing Edgar's date Theresa (Gail Patrick). Sherry lies to Marcia about it, claiming he's looking after Edgar, who's fallen ill. Marcia, and we, know that this is an utter lie, for an obvious reason: she's talking to Edgar in her room!

So, what's a woman who's being treated like this to do? Why not try getting revenge by treating her husband the same way he's been treating her? It's no more unreasonable than any other idea. And so Marcia finds Jim (Franchot Tone), whose wife Sherry romanced in the days before Sherry married Marcia. Suddenly, though, when the wife does it, it's not as acceptable when the husband does it.

No More Ladies is, to be honest, not much more than a little piffle. It's the kind of movie that I saw several years ago, but didn't register much more than all of the other mid-30s stuff I've seen. That's both bad, and good. Bad, of course, because it means the movie didn't do all that much special to be worth remembering. But good as well because it didn't do anything to make me remember it as a movie I wouldn't want to watch. In fact, one thing that makes the movie worth noting is the presence of the character Caroline. She's played by an 18-year-old actress credited as Joan Burfield. Burfield would soon take her stepfather's surname: Fontaine. Joan, despite having a surname of her own, wanted to distinguish herself from sister Olivia de Havilland. The rest, as they say, is history.

No More Ladies has received a Warner Archives release.

The Gorgeous Hussy

A search of the blog suggests that I have never mentioned the movie The Gorgeous Hussy before. It's showing tomorrow morning at 6:00 AM on TCM, so now's a good time to mention it.

Based on a true story, Joan Crawford plays what is supposed to be the title role; presumably, "hussy" meant something different back in the 1820s. Here, she's Peggy O'Neal, the daughter of an innkeeper in the Washington DC area (played by Gene Lockhart). She marries Navy Lieutenant Bow Timberlake (Robert Taylor), but he gets sent to sea. (Not that this should be a surprise; after all, that's the point of the Navy.) While at sea, he dies, leaving Peggy a widow. That's bad for her, but not so bad for Senator John Eaton from Tennessee (played by Franchot Tone). In real life, he may or may not have had a thing for Peggy while she was married to Lt. Timberlake. But now, with her being a widow, there's no such problem. Instead, the only problem is with Virginia Senator Randolph (Melvyn Douglas), who is also somewhat interested in Peggy. Peggy prefers Eaton because he doesn't go on as much about "states' rights" as Randolph does, and winds up marrying Eaton.

For whatever reason, this is a problem for a lot of people. Andrew Jackson (played by Lionel Barrymore, who I think is really miscast here) is the new President, and selects Seantor Eaton to be his Secretary of War. Several of the other Cabinet Wives don't like this, and give Peggy the silent treatment. Jackson has sympathy for Peggy, who in her defense really hasn't done anything wrong, or at least nothing to deserve the treatment she's getting from the other wives. The thing is, he too had a wife who caused scandal just by being his wife. (This is covered in the movie The President's Lady, although I don't believe that's available on DVD.) Rachel Jackson (played by Beulah Bondi) died in between the election fo 1828 and Jackson's inauguration, so it's understandable why Jackson would have the feelings he does. Eventually, Jackson was forced to shuffle his cabinet and send Eaton to Spain as ambassador, at least according to the movie. (In real life, Eaton was only named ambassador five years after the cabinet reshuffle.)

Historical dramas in the studio era can be problematic if they're based on real events. The studios really glossed over things while taking obvious sides. Also, a lot of the actresses were much too glamorous to look like people from the olden days. (Pioneer women in particular aged badly, due to all that hard work.) Bondi is the only one who fits; Rachel Robards Jackson was 61 when she died while Bondi's craggy face made her look old enough to play mothers to a lot of actors who weren't that much different to her age in real life. (Bondi would have been about 45 when she made this.) Crawford looks like she belongs in the 19th century about as much as Bette Davis does in Jezebel. So you have to overlook some things when watching these movies based on real history. In that regard, I don't think The Gorgeous Hussy is bad at all.

The Gorgeous Hussy has gotten a release on the Warner Archive.