We're not quite in the money

Another of those classic movies that TCM shows often enough because it's part of the old Turner library, but that I'd never actually seen before, is Gold Diggers of 1935. So, the last time it showed up on TCM I made the point of recording it so that I could do a post on it eventually.

The movie opens up with a ridiculous number of staff members making final preparations for what seems to be the grand opening of a new hotel, except that it's not new but only open for the summer which is why you wonder how it can support such a large staff. Among the staff are desk clerk Dick Curtis (Dick Powell), who is taking on this summer job in his years between college, as he's really hoping to complete his studies to become a doctor and marry his girlfriend Arline (Dorothy Dare).

Coming to the resort are the ultra-wealthy who have decamped from New York or Boston, one supposes, since this is mentioned as being New Hampshire. One such family is the Prentiss family, led by a matriarch widow (Alice Brady) with two adult children: Humbolt (Frank McHugh) and Ann (Gloria Stuart). Humbolt is a playboy who has already been through four wives and cost Mom a ton of money to get out of the marriages as a result. Ann is set to be married to T. Mosley Thorpe (Hugh Herbert), which is in many ways more of a marriage of convenience since Thorpe is even more fabulously wealthy than the Prentiss family. Ann certainly doesn't seem thrilled with the idea of this marriage.

And then we see why. Thorpe will also be spending the summer at this resort, working on his book, a monograph on snuff boxes. He has the hotel send up a secretary to take dictation, getting sent young Betty (Glenda Farrell) who falls for him and also sees dollar signs. You can already guess how part of the romantic conflict is going to be solved. The other half comes when Mrs. Prentiss hires Dick as a chaperone for Ann. Those two fall in love, which seems a bit mean to Arline but things are going to turn out OK for her in the end too.

Mrs. Prentiss is asked to put on a charity show, something the family has apparently been asked to do every year, and it's at this point that we learn that she's no longer as fabulously wealthy as she used to be, thanks to the Depression cutting the dividends her late husband's business interests yield. Stage producer Nicoleff (Adolphe Menjou) shows up; he's heavily in debt and gets the idea of taking Prentiss for as much as he can while putting on that show. The show is, of course, the big excuse for all the musical numbers the movie has around the wafer-thin plot, with the highlight musical number being "The Lullaby of Broadway".

The plot of Gold Diggers of 1935 is even sillier than some of the previous musicals Dick Powell had made, although again one doesn't watch a Busby Berkeley musical for the scintillating plots. Hugh Herbert is playing such a drip that it's only logical the only thing anybody really sees in him is his money. Dick Powell is appealing, although he doesn't have much to do. It's no wonder he wanted to do a movie like Murder, My Sweet so that he could be considered a more "serious" actor.

Having finally seen Gold Diggers of 1935, I understand why it's not as well known as its predecessor Gold Diggers of 1933. It's watchable, and the "Lullabye of Broadway" number is worth the price of admission, but it's not an all-time great either.

Reassessing Going My Way

I think I've mentioned a couple of times in the past that I have a disdain for the movie Going My Way, and that I think it's one of the times the people who vote on the Academy Awards really got things wrong. It's on TCM as part of 31 Days of Oscar, and that airing comes up tonight, February 26, at 8:00 PM. As I had it on my DVR, I figured I'd give it another watch to do an in-depth post on it.

Bing Crosby won the Best Actor Oscar, although we first see the other Best Actor nominee, Barry Fitzgerald. (Fitzgerald was nominated for both Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor, winning the latter. The Academy changed the rules so that this couldn't happen again.) Fitzgerald plays Fr. Fitzgibbon, who's been the head priest at the parish of St. Dominic's in New York ever since the church was consecrated back in the 1890s. The church has a mortgage on it, which the holder, Ted Haines Sr. (Gene Lockhart) wants to call in, and Fr. Fitzgibbon is up there in years. It's to the point where he should probably just retire, so the bishop sends in another priest ostensibly as an assistant but whose real job is to take over. That priest is Fr. O'Malley (Bing Crosby).

Fr. O'Malley has a backstory of his own. He grew up in St. Louis and had to choose between music and the priesthood, obviously having selected the latter. His childhood friend Timothy O'Dowd (Frank McHugh) also became a priest, and is working in a neighboring parish. Anyhow, before accepting the calling to become a priest, O'Malley had a girlfriend named Jenny who was a musical talent herself, eventually joining an opera company and traveling the world. It's that travel that caused her not to receive the letter from O'Malley informing her that he was going to take Holy Orders and could therefore no longer have her as a girlfriend. She goes on to bigger things, changes her name to Genevieve (Risë Stevens) and becomes a singer at the Met, running into O'Malley again.

O'Malley, as the stereotypical newcomer often does, shakes things up as everybody seems to love him. He helps a young woman named Carol get a job; Carol eventually meets Ted Haines Jr. and the two wind up getting married without informing his father. O'Malley tries to sell some of the songs he's written, while bringing some music to the parish by setting up a boys' choir that becomes quite successful. O'Malley does enough good work to make St. Dominic's a going concern again that the bishop decides to give him a parish fully of his own and bring in O'Dowd to work as the new "assistant" to Fr. Fitzgibbon. But there are still a few more twists along the way.

Having watched Going My Way again, I still don't particularly like it, although I don't know that I have quite as much disdain for it as I had in the past. That's in part because I realize now that one of the things the movie had going for it was being released in the middle of World War II, at a time when audiences on the homefront were in need of a movie like this to soothe their discomforts in an age when there was thoroughly stressful news of the war all around them.

However, I will also say that I still hold to my view that the Academy got things badly wrong in selecting Going My Way for the Oscars that it won. Alexander Knox should have been a runaway winner of Best Actor for Wilson, even more so if you think that Crosby and Fitzgerald might have split a few votes. It's certainly not the Best Picture of 1944; that honor probably from a hindsight/revisionist point of view would go to Double Indemnity. From the point of view of 1944, even a homefront picture like Since You Went Away is better than Going My Way. And I still believe that 1944 is the one year that Alfred Hitchcock was robbed of the Best Director award. He was nominated five times and the other four lost to some remarkable directorial work. But his portrayal of mob justice in Lifeboat and doing it on a deliberately limited set in the way he does is really quite remarkable; like Knox, he should have been a heavy favorite.

The other thing working against Going My Way is that it runs a little over two hours. Not only is it syrupy, it's a slow-moving syrup where you want everyone to get on with things. Still, Going My Way was wildly popular on its original relase, so maybe some viewers today will liek it too.

Talk about bad luck in men

I don't know how many times I've mentioned it, but I'm always up for a pre-Code movie. One that I recorded a while back and thought that I did a post on, although a search of the site says I didn't, is Lilly Turner. With that in mind, I watched it again and now you get the belated post on the movie.

Ruth Chatterton plays the titular Lilly Turner, who as we see almost from the start of the movie has incredible "bad luck" in the sort of boyfriend she chooses, although at least in some cases she doesn't necessarily have much choice. Not with the first guy, however. Rex Durkee (Gordon Westcott) is a magician, and, being on the stage, is the sort of thing that seems to charm Lilly, who lives in one of those small towns that people in movies of this era always seemed to want to get away from. So, thinking Rex has made it big in vaudeville, she basically elopes with Rex against Mom's advice.

Fast-forward six months, and life on the road isn't nearly all that it's cracked up to be, as she's in one of those traveling carnivals that is struggling to make ends meet. Not only that, but Rex seems to be more interested in his assistant Hazel (Mae Busch in a small role). And then when Lilly finds out that she's gotten pregnant, Rex leaves in a hurry. Although, he's got other reasons for leaving, as we see when a process server comes in looking for him, with Mrs. Durkee in tow. Yes, there's already a Mrs. Durkee, which at least means Lilly isn't legally married and can dump him without consequences. (The baby is stillborn as a plot convenience.)

The closest thing Lilly has to a friend is one of the show's assistants, Dave Dixon (Frank McHugh), who cares about Lilly but also has the problem of being an alcoholic. The carnival boss gets fed up with that, so Dave and Lilly both leave the show, eventually winding up with a medicine show run by "doctor" McGill (Guy Kibbee) and his wife.

Part of the show involves showing how McGill's patent medicine works, and to do that, he has a "strongman" in Fritz (Robert Barrat). Fritz is thoroughly interested in Lilly, although the love is unrequited, and that fact is slowly driving Fritz insane. Literally. When taxi driver Bob Chandler (George Brent) shows up in the audience and starts making eyes at Lilly, Fritz gets some sort of "headache" that's diagnosed by a doctor as a precursor to hereditary insanity, sending Fritz to the insane asylum.

Bob takes on the strongman role, because the taxi driving is really beneath him. In fact, he's got a degree as a civil engineer, but with the depression on he hasn't been able to get any jobs in the area he's qualified for. As you can unsurprisingly guess, he and Lilly fall in love with each other. But then Fritz literally breaks out of the asylum, and comes lookin for poor Lilly....

Lilly Turner is a movie that has an absolutely bonkers plot, fitting so much into its 65 minute running time. And just when you think it's about to settle down, it gets even more nuts. Now, to be honest, for some movies that might be a strike against it, and I can't blame anybody who has a problem with Lilly Turner as a result. It probably didn't bear much resemblance to reality even in 1933. But the cast make this one so absurdly fun.

The Roaring Twenties

I'm pretty certain I had already seen the movie The Roaring Twenties once before, and I even thought that I had blogged about it here. But a search of the blog suggests that while I've mentioned the movie in passing a couple of times in conjunction with either Humphrey Bogart or James Cagney, and even posted the trailer. But apparently I'd never done a full-length post. That's why, when TCM ran the movie again recently, I made it a point to record it so that I could finally rewatch it to do an appropriate review here.

As you can guess, Cagney and Bogart are the two lead stars, with Cagney being the lead since this was released in 1939 and Cagney hadn't been eclipsed by Bogart movies like The Maltese Falcon and then the changing public tastes with World War II. And since the movie was released in 1939, there's no mention of any upcoming war, instead starting off with a scene set toward the end of the Great War. Cagney plays Eddie Bartlett, serving alongside George Hally (Bogart) with whom he's become a bit of a friend. The third friend in the group is Lloyd Hart (Jeffrey Lynn). All of them talk about what they're going to do when they get home from the war, with Eddie talking about a girl he's corresponded with, actress Jean Sherman.

The war ends in November 1918, but it takes until 1919 to get all the soldiers home. Eddie returns to his best friend from the pre-war days Danny Green (Frank McHugh), working as a taxi driver. Eddie plans to return to his job as a mechanic, and hopes to open his own garage, but when he returns to the business he finds his job has been given away. You can't really blame the manager for not being financially able to hold a job open for two years. Worse, 1920 was a year of an economic downturn, making it hard for Eddie to get a job in general and forcing him to drive second shift on Danny's taxi. Worst of all is that Eddie mees Jean (Priscilla Lane), who exaggerated her talents and is little more than a recent high-school graduate working girl.

In addition to the economic crisis I mentioned, 1920 also brought Prohibition to the US, along with the rampant attempts to get around the law. Eddie gets caught up in it when he's asked to deliver a package not realizing that it's liquor. But the club owner to whom he delivers it, Panama Smith (Gladys George), befriends him, and the two wind up going into business together. Eddie has been trying to open his own taxi business, and realizes that using the taxis to deliver hooch would be a good way to make money on the side.

Unsurprisingly, he gets hubris. He meets Jean again and still carries a torch for her, getting her a job singing in Panama's club even though she's really not much of a singer. And he steals a shipment of booze from Nick Brown (Paul Kelly), a competing gangster. This brings George back into a business partnership with Eddie, and George is eventually going to stab him in the back. Eddie brings in the one lawyer he knows, Lloyd Hart, to keep him "clean", but Lloyd is eventually going to chafe at that, falling in love with Jean along the way.

The Roaring Twenties is a very good film, but it was released in 1939, Hollywood's annus mirabilis in which so many all-time classics were made that it's so easy to overlook the movies that were only very good. I think it also doesn't help that with the US not too far from entering World War II, this sort of gangster movie was soon to go out of fashion with the viewing public. That's a shame, because Warner Bros. knew how to make a good 1930s gangster movie and had absolutely no difficulty churning out a top-notch movie with its big stars like Cagney. The Roaring Twenties is definitely a film that should be better known, and one that you should absolutely watch if you get the chance.

Top Speed

One of the movies that's been on my DVR for a while that I'm surprised never seemed to make its way to either the Warner Archive or one of those old four-film box sets they used to put out is the early Joe E. Brown movie Top Speed. Recently, I got around to watching it in full; as I mentioned ages ago I came across the end of the movie on TCM one time and immediately recognized Brown and his facial antics.

Brown plays Elmer Peters, who works at a clerk of sorts at a stock brokerage. He's not pulling down the big bucks but instead filling orders for the people who make the big money. He and his friend and co-worker Gerald Brooks (Jack Whiting) decide to go on vacation somewhere. But Elmer makes a mistake by going fishing in a land management area where fishing is forbidden for various reasons. This gets a sheriff on his case, and Elmer and Gerald have to escape, to a resort that they clearly can't afford and have had to scrimp and scrape for.

As a result, they have to pass themselves off as wealthier than they are which isn't that difficult to do since they can claim to be stockbrokers. They get to the resort more or less at the right time to help a couple of nice girls out. Virginia Rollins (Bernice Claire) is looking to meet up with her father, and taking her friend Babs Green (Laura Lee) along for the ride. However, they develop trouble with their car. Elmer takes them to the resort, but the two girls don't have a room, so they take Elmer and Gerald's room.

Meanwhile, both young men develop various problems in their lives. Elmer already has the sheriff on his tail, but he's also got some bonds on him that he's supposed to deliver for a client. By this time, his boss back in the big city has figured out that the bonds have gone missing, and will be alerting the law. If Elmer can't find the actual physical bonds, he's going to be in big trouble.

As for Gerald, he passes himself off as somebody who can drive a boat, impressing Virginia's father. Her dad has been thinking of entering his boat in a race, but the owner of the other boat is trying to get the driver to throw the race. Gerald takes over, but that other owner discovers that Gerald is just a lowly clerk instead of an upper-class stock broker who can take time off to do gentlemenly things like race boats.

In and among all this, some of the characters sing a song or two and do a dance or two, but that's where Top Speed shows some of its problems. I've mentioned a couple of times on this blog in conjunction with musicals released before 42nd Street that those early musicals were creaky, to the point that the musical became relative box office poison. Some of the musical numbers in those movies are incredibly static. Top Speed was originally conceived as a musical, and actually started off on Broadway as a musical. But with the decreasing popularity of the genre, Warner Bros. decided to cut some of the musical numbers, leading to some obvious and very clumsy cuts.

The disparate plots also don't always gel, either, and the Laura Lee character gets one extended scene where she engages in one of those comedies of lies that I am generally not a fan of. So Top Speed is an interesting artifact of the early sound era, but it's not exactly the greatest movie. Fans of Joe E. Brown's antics may like it, but there are other of his movies that I'd definitely recommend before this one.

Fashions of 1934

My posts here have been a bit more about more recent movies for a little while now, which is mostly because I've been seeing some of the more recent stuff that I have on my DVR showing up on one movie channel or another, leading me to want to do a post on it. Something rather older that I had on my DVR that got a Warner Archive release is Fashions of 1934. As always, I made a point of sitting down to watch it and do a post on here.

William Powell, nearing the end of his time at Warner Bros. before going to MGM to make The Thin Man, plays Sherwood Nash. As the film opens, Sherwood is one of those 1930s stockbrokers that were common in movies of the day, the sort who thinks he's got a deal for you but is really just trying to pull the wool over your eyes. He doesn't have a deal, however, as his phones are being repossessed, forcing Sherwood and his partner Snap (Frank McHugh) to go into another line of business.

Fortunately for them, they run into Lynn Mason (Bette Davis, stuck in a platinum blonde wig for the first time in her career). She's a fashion sketch artist, one who clearly has a lot of talent, but unfortunately doesn't have a job. International copyright protections weren't quite as well honored as they are nowadays, so Sherwood comes up with the idea of getting the designs for high fashion straight from Paris, before the people who actually paid big bucks for the right to use them in the US can get them. Obviously, when the knockoffs show up on the market, the legitimate licensees are pissed off.

Sherwood is forced to decamp to Paris along with Snap and Lynn, with a plan to institute some scheme or another to get them involved in the world of high fashion, but the big idea only hits them when they pass one of those street vendors selling vintage books. One of them has historical drawings, and Lynn, having an eye for drawings since she's a sketch artist herself, realizes that it's drawings like this that have been the inspiration for Paris designer Oscar Baroque (Reginald Owen).

Lynn starts creating such imitation drawings herself, but complicating matters by stamping the established designers' names on such images. Sherwood discovers that Baroque's girlfriend, the Grand Duchess Alix (Verree Teasdale), is an impostor, and somebody he new back in Hoboken in the 1930s. Sherwood uses this first to get Baroque to make the designs for a fashion revue, and then to get out of trouble once Baroque discovers that Lynn has been forging his signature.

Fashions of 1934 came across to me as much the sort of movie William Powell was making a lot of during his time at Warner Bros.: Powell as the suave man who may not be quite so honest, getting himself into a range of situations that may not be quite so legal. (I doubt it was deliberate that Powell switched studios just as the Production Code was going into strict enforcement, but it does seem like a very lucky move on his part.) This time, however, the Powell story has a bit of a musical grafted on it, at least in the form of a big production number choreographed by Busby Berkeley. It's an interesting pairing that doesn't quite always mesh.

I also felt like it was easy to see why Powell might want more of a challenge than being typecast at Warner Bros. Also, you can see from roles like this why Bette Davis would go on to stand up to the studio and flee to London. There's a fair bit here to like, but also a fair bit that feels like it's running out of steam. Still, despite the flaws, Fashions of 1934 is definitely worth a watch.

Four Wives

John Garfield was TCM's Star of the Month back in February, which gave me the opportunity to blog about the movie Four Daughters. That movie was popular enough that two sequels were made, the first of which was Four Wives.

In the first movie, Garfield played Mickey Borden, a hard-luck case who married one of the four Lemp daughters, Ann (Priscilla Lane), only to commit suicide because he couldn't support Ann. Now, Warner Bros. didn't realize at the time that John Garfield was going to become a star, since Four Daughters was his first movie, which presented a bit of a problem since they killed off his character in the first movie. So Mickey appears here briefly as a ghost in a couple of scenes.

Ann is disconsolate at having lost her husband, and composer Felix Deitz (Jeffrey Lynn) has returned from a work engagement to propose to Ann. But there's a pretty big complication, which is that Mickey got Ann pregnant before killing himself. The movie actually handles the material pretty tastefully for a 1930s movie, without the plot devices that seem like they were introduced to deal with the Production Code.

Meanwhile, sister Emma Lemp (Gale Page) married florist Ernest Talbot (Dick Foran). The two were hoping to have a baby, but it turns out that Emma is unable to get pregnant. That fact and Ann's pregnancy are discovered at the doctors' offices of the Forrests, Clinton Sr. and Clinton Jr. (Eddie Albert). Clinton Jr. talks to sister Kay (Rosemary Lane) about Ann's pregnancy and the need to handle Ann with care. She needs a psychologist, but not somebody who's obviously trying to treat her, so Forrest is brought in to handle those duties. It's fairly obvious from the beginning that he and Kay are going to fall in love.

The fourth sister is Thea (Lola Lane), who, as you may recall from the first movie, married banker Ben Crowley (Frank McHugh). Thea decides, seemingly with no input from her husband, to adopt a child, something that I woudn't have thought possible if the husband hadn't known is wife was planning it -- wouldn't they need both parents' signatures on the application?

But the movie focuses most on Ann, with Felix trying to make a success of it as a composer and conductor. He gets a very lucrative job offer, but it's going to require his going off to New York while his pregnant wife stays behind. Ann wants him to go since she's still thinking about Mickey, while Felix is willing to forgo career advancement for the sake of his wife.

Claude Rains reprises his role as Adam, the patriarch of the Lemp family, with May Robson around as well as Aunt Etta.

Four Wives works well as a sequel, at least if you've seen Four Daughters already. If you haven't, you might be confused by some of what's going on and think that some stuff is explained too quickly. A lot of people in current-day audiences will probably find the movie old-fashioned, and to be honest, even back in 1939 when the movie was released I don't think it would have been considered anything groundbreaking, just a feel-good movie for the audiences of the day. In that regard it definitely succeeds.

Four Wives is more drama than comedy, but it's a fairly light drama with a fair amount of comedy mixed in, especially in scenes dealing with the students at the music school Adam runs. Claude Rains is given a lot less to do here than in a lot of his movies, but looks like he could have done the role in his sleep. Frank McHugh looks ridiculous with a moustache, and May Robson adds energy as the octogenarian who just won't quit.

People who like classic Studio Era movies will really like Four Wives.

The Navy Comes Here

Some movies showed up in TCM's 31 Days of Oscar for rather surprising reasons. One example of this is Here Comes the Navy. I had never seen it before, so I recently sat down to watch it.

James Cagney plays Chesty O'Connor, a riveter at a shipyard who's good at what he does, at least until Biff (Pat O'Brien) comes along. Biff is an officer aboard the USS Arizona (yes, the ship that sank in Pearl Harbor), but on land when he first meets Chesty who's busy catching rivets. A dispute comes up between them, and the two men nearly come to blows for reasons that make no real sense.

Some time later, Chesty is with his co-workers at the Ironworkers' Ball, and who should show up but Biff. Chesty wants his revenge from the previous fight, but when all the men go out into the alley to fight, Chesty learns that he's no match for Biff, costing him a deposit on a tuxedo, his girlfriend Gladys (Dorothy Tree), and even his job thanks to his injuries.

Now Chesty really wants revenge, but he finds out that Biff's ship has sailed, literally, since after all Biff is in the Navy. So Chesty decides he too is going to join the navy and get himself assigned to the same ship as Biff just to finish that fight and finally come out on top. This too makes no sense as I can't imagine the navy actually enlisting Chesty with such motivations, or Chesty ever getting anywhere close to the Arizona. He'd have ended up in the brig long before that with his constant insubordination.

But in that case, we wouldn't have a movie. So Chesty, along with his friend from training, Droopy (Frank McHugh), somehow get assigned to the Arizona, and Chesty immediately sets out to get himself booted from the Navy for his violent ways. Again, however, that just wouldn't do for the sort of movie Warner Bros. wanted to make, so we know that Chesty is going to be turned into a good person.

There's a big complication along the way, however. As part of a running joke about Droopy trying to buy his mother a set of false teeth (the running joke finally being revealed in the last scene), he and Chesty go to wire her the money. They meet telegraph office worker Dorothy (Gloria Stuart). Chesty immediately falls for her, and even gets her to invite him to her apartment for dinner the next night. What he doesn't know is that Dorthy is Dorothy Martin, Biff's sister. If Chesty wasn't in bad with Biff before, boy will he be now!

But Biff is going to get those chances to turn into a good person, when a couple of disasters happen and Chesty takes personal risk to save his fellow man, although in at least one case he only claims he's looking out for himself. Still, it's goin gto lead to the predictable ending that would have been pleasing for audiences of 1934 when the movie was released.

Amazingly, Here Comes the Navy got an Oscar nomination for Best Picture. In 1934, there were 12 nominees for Best Picture, which might explain it. It's not exactly bad, although it has all sorts of facepalm-inducing motivations and seems unoriginal today. This, however, was the first pairing of Cagney and O'Brien, so it might have been more original to audiences of 1934. The two, as well as the supporting players, go through their paces and make something that definitely would have entertained audiences back then, although it may seem dated today.

There's also the archival footage of both the USS Arizona (indeed, some scenes were also filmed on board the ship) as well as the navy dirigible USS Macon. Everybody knows what happened to the Arizona; the Macon went down in an accident in 1935. Both ships are an interesting part of America's naval history.

Four Daughters

John Garfield is the Star of the Month on TCM for February, and that's given me a chance to watch one of his movies that I've had on the DVR for a while, Four Daughters. It's going to be on in tomorrow's prime time lineup, at 12:15 AM Wednesday Feb. 17 (or still Feb. 16 in more westerly time zones).

Garfield isn't the official star here, since this was just his first feature film. The nominal star is Claude Rains. He's Adam Lemp, a widower who teaches at a school of music and has the titular four daughters, in whom he's tried to instill his love of and ability for music. He's done this with varying degrees of success. Daughter Key (Rosemary Lane) has dreams of getting a music scholarship in Philadelphia, while the other three: Thea (Lola Lane), Ann (Priscilla Lane) and Emma (Gale Page) are strictly amateurs.

Thea is being pursued by Ben Crowley (Frank McHugh with a ridiculous mustache), a well-to-do banker who could provide her security. Emma has a suitor in local florist Erniest (Dick Foran), while Ann being the youngest doesn't have anybody quite yet. But a man is about to come into everybody's lives.

That man is Felix Deitz (Jeffrey Lynn), an up-and-coming composer/conductor who is going to be living with the Lemps while he's working on a composition for a contest that, if he wins, would earn him a nice stipend. Ann and Emma both fall in love with him, although neither Ann nor Felix seem to realizes that Emma has any feelings for him.

And then another man comes into the movie, which shouldn't be surprising since we know this is being run for John Garfield's turn as Star of the Month. Garfield plays Mickey Borden, a friend of Felix's, an arranger responsible for creating good orchestrations for Felix. Unlike Dana Andrews in Night Song, he doesn't seem to have any interest in composing, or at least any expectation that he's going to be successful, since he thinks everything in life is stacked against him.

Despite Mickey's non-stop snarkiness, Ann seems to become friends with him. So much so that on what is supposed to be her wedding day to Felix, once she's found out the true depth of Emma's feelings for Felix, she decides to run off with Mickey and leave Felix at the altar! Ann and Mickey run off to New York and find out that life in the big city isn't a bed of roses, but don't want to let the rest of the family know that there's anything going wrong. This leads to the movie's dramatic climax, on Christmas Eve no less.

Watching Four Daughters, I found it easy to see why Garfield became a star, even though I wanted somebody to put some sense in his character. It's also easy to see why the movie was a big hit, as it's the sort of material that would have been homey and comforting to audiences in the second half of the Depression. (Warner Bros. didn't intend Four Daughters as a prestige picture, but it wound up with several Oscar nominations, including Best Picture.)

That having been said, the nature of Garfield's character, combined with the sudden plot twist, do create some problems with Four Daughters that made it a bit less to my taste than some other people will probably find it. Even with its flaws, however, Four Daughters is definitely worth a watch.

Dust Be My Destiny

I've mentioned before that Warner Bros. seemed to make the most interesting social commentary movies back in the 1930s. Recently, I had the opportunity to watch another one, but this time I felt it had a surprising lack of punch: Dust Be My Destiny.

John Garfield plays Joe Bell, a man who was wrongly convicted of a crime he didn't commit, and spent 16 months in prison for it before the truth came out and was was released. He gets the hell out of town, and in hopping the trains, runs into two of the Bowery Boys, brothers Hank and Jimmy played by Billy Halop and Bobby Jordan respectively.

At one of the rail yards, these three get involved with another set of vagrants. Again, the only thing Joe's done wrong is to hop those trains without paying, but one thing leads to another and after getting into a fight with one of the other vagrants, Joe gets sent to the work farm while Hank and Jimmy ultimately wind up going west.

At the work farm, Joe meets Mabel (Priscilla Lane). She's the stepdaughter of the farm's foreman, Garreth (Stanley Ridges), and he somewhat understandably doesn't want Mabel hanging out with the criminals, even if we know that Joe isn't really a criminal to anywhere near the extent of the other guys in the farm. So of course Joe and Mabel fall in love and somehow get to keep seeing each other. Garreth generally doesn't treat Mabel so well, and now that she's seeing Joe surreptitiously, he gets even angrier, trying to hit Mabel to the point that Joe defends himself and Mabel and knocks out Garreth, who eventually dies of a heart attack.

Joe and Mabel have to flee, although they don't know yet that Garreth died. They don't have enough money for two rooms, which is a problem, because they're not married, which was of course a thing in those days. But they're in luck. A wacky promoter named Caruthers (Frank McHugh) needs a promotion for the traveling stage show, and decides to pack the audience in by having a real wedding live on stage! He needs a couple and they need a valid license since city hall is closed until morning, so this'll have to do.

Of course, the couple's pictures get taken, which means their location will be known to the general public. And since they also learn about Garreth's death and the obvious assumption on the part of the authorities that it's at the very least manslaughter if not murder (and who can blame them), Joe realizes the couple is going to have to go on the run and stay on the run. Mabel naïvely believes that if only Joe turns himself in, he'll get a fair hearing at the trial. Yeah right.

After running to another town or two, Joe gets an important photo in a bank robbery, one that a newspaper would pay big bucks for. And shockingly enough, the local editor, Mike Leonard (Alan Hale), could use a good photographer and doesn't care so much about Joe's past. But Joe's past is going to catch up to him anyway, leading to a trial and Mabel's character defense of Joe.

Dust Be My Destiny is a movie that I found I had a hard time suspending my disbelief over. There seem to be way too many coincidences here, and things that I wouldn't expect to happen in real life, such as finding Hank and Jimmy for the big trial at the end. Garfield does the best he can with the material he's given, but this stuff is second-rate material and Garfield would be in much better movies.

Dust Be My Destiny has received a standalone DVD release courtesy of the Warner Archive, but I think it's another of those movies that would really be better served as part of a box set.

The Dark Horse

Another of the movies that I recently watched off of my DVR that's availalbe on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive Collection is The Dark Horse.

The movie opens at a state Progressive Party's convention, where the convention has been deadlocked for days on end because neither of the two candidates fro governor can get the requisite votes. (It always amazes me that parties back then didn't have rules that after a certain number of ballots, you started eliminating the candidate with the fewest votes until either somebody got a majority or there were only two candidates left.) Among the delegats is Zachary Hicks (Guy Kibbee), who seems more concerned with how tight his shoes are than with political matters of the day.

The handlers for one of the two candidates comes up with the brilliant idea of nominating an outsider from an area that supports the other candidate, so as to split the other candidate's vote and win the party nomination. The other side calls this bluff, however, supporting the "dark horse" candidate, who duly wins the party's nomination. That candidate? You guessed it, Zachary Hicks.

The party bigwigs are shocked when the start talking to Hicks and realize the sort of candidate they have, a complete nonentity who knows nothing about politics. He says one of his positions is the abolition of capital punishment, only to learn that the state abolished it six months ago. How such a man even became a party delegate is beyond me, but then we wouldn't have a movie, would we? At any rate, a secretary working for the party, Kay Russell (Bette Davis), has an idea, as she knows a good PR guy, Hal "Samson" Blake (Warren William).

There's only one problem with Blake. He's currently in jail, not having paid alimony to his ex-wife Maybelle (Vivienne Osborne). But the party bosses go down to the jail anyway and listen to Hal. They're so taken by his speechifying that they pay the back alimoney and spring him from jail to become Hick's campaign manager.

Blake proceeds to put Hicks into a series of public appearances, where Hicks comes up with his tag line, "Well yes, but then again, no", as a way of avoiding difficult questions, which for him is pretty much any question. Hicks might even stand a chance of winning when the Conservative candidate (Berton Churchill) is accused of plagiarism.

But Blake still has woman troubles. He's in love with Kay, but he keeps stringing her along to the point that she's sick of it. She knows about the ex-wife, and when Blake falls behind on the alimony again (why wouldn't the party just pay it off?), Maybelle actually shows up and threatens to have Hal put back in jail. Hicks, for his part, is so stupid that he lets Maybelle see Hal. The Conservatives learn they've got a potential weapon in Maybelle, and plan to use it.

Watching The Dark Horse, it really reminded me of another movie I reviewed several months back, William Powell's High Pressure. It turns out that this is deliberate; apparently, Warner Bros. wanted to use the High Pressure characters again but Powell wasn't interested. The Dark Horse is an interesting movie, and could have been fascinating if it had focused more on the political campaign side of the story. Unfortunately, it winds up being more about Blake, to the movie's detriment, as Blake is one of those annoying smooth operator types.

Still, this being a Warner Bros. movie, you get the good production values, a nice cast of supporting actors (I didn't mention Frank McHugh yet), and still some social commentary even if it's more limited due to the focus on Hal's character. This is early in Davis' career, so even though she's billed second, she doesn't have as much to do as you might think. The Dark Horse is definitely worth a watch.

It would be nice if The Dark Horse were part of a box set, but apparently it only seems to be available as a pricier standalone.

High Pressure

I mentioned some time back that I picked up a box set of William Powell at Warner Bros. since I hadn't ctually seen any of the movies on it. I recently sat down and watched another selection off of it, High Pressure.

Powell plays a man named Gar Evans doesn't show up at first; instead, his friend Mike Donahey (Frank McHugh) is looking for him on behalf of another man, "Colonel" Ginsburg (George Sidney). It seems as though Gar has been on the bender to end all benders, and nobody knows where he is, especially not his long-suffering girlfriend Francine (Evelyn Brent).

The "Colonel" wants to find Gar because Gar is a business promoter, and Ginsburg has come across a great invention that just needs venture capital: an inventor has figured out a way to take sewage and turn it into synthetic rubber. It's an idea that's guaranteed to make millions, if it will pan out. And one of the catches is that the inventor has gone missing. But more importantly right not, the first thing is setting up a business and making it look as though there's a lot going on.

You see, Gar is a rather less than honest promoter, skirting the edge of illegal activity. As part of that skirting, he does like Warren William in Lady For a Day and hires a bunch of Runyanesque characters to work in executive positions under him, most notably Clifford Gray (Guy Kibbee) to be the president of the new company. There's also a secretary (Evalyn Knapp) who's secretly engaged to a man Gar takes on as a salesman; these of course were the days when women commonly quit working once they got married. As for Francine, she's Gar's good luck charm, but she's finally decided to leave Gar for good and marry another man -- if Gar can't sweet-talk her out of that.

As I said earlier, the inventor is nowhere to be found, so the folks from the natural rubber companies don't believe this ridiculous scheme is real. (To be fair, the movie was made before the invention of nylon, so synthetics outside of the hard plastics weren't quite so well known.) And if they can't get proof, they're going to go to the authorities and have Gar's stock float be stopped as fraudulent.

High Pressure is a movie that's firmly a product of the early 30s, with the Depression going on and get-rich quick schemes and shady stock schemes being things. For me, the movie barely worked, almost entirely thanks to the energetic performance of Powell. This is the sort of material that I'm often not a fan of since Gar is such a shady character. It's not quite what I call the comedy of lies, but it's close. Also, Ginsburg and the inventor (once he's found) are irritating characters. Finally, I would have liked a different ending.

Still, High Pressure is part of a box set, and some of you will probably like it more than I did, so I'd certainly recommend giving the movie a try.