Daddy's Dipsomania

Another of the movies that had been sitting on my DVR for a while that I needed to watch before it expired was Papa's Delicate Condition. Once again, having finally gotten around to watching it, it's time to write up a review and schedule it on the blog.

Jackie Gleason stars as Jack Griffith, who works as a railroad superintendent in a small town in northeast Texas in the early part of the 20th century. (The movie is based on the memoirs of silent screen star Corinne Griffith, born in 1894, but the sets look closer to a pastiche of small-town American between about 1900 and 1915.) Jack has a wife Ambolyn (Glynis Johns), and two daughters: younger daughter Corinne (Linda Bruhl) and Augusta (Laurel Goodwin). Corinne is a bit of a mischief-maker, but also unfailingly honest. Dad, for his part, eschews church, which is mildly scandalous for the early 1900s. But that's not the real focus of the movie.

Instead, the main plot driver is what's referred to as the titular "delicate condition". Dad has a tendency to drink "medicinal" alcohol, which is of course not medicinal but just to get Dad good and sloshed. And when Dad does drink, he also gets rather irresponsible with the family's money. Now, he's trying to do good-hearted things with the money, but what he does is still not fiscally imprudent, to the point that you wonder how the family can afford to live in the nice house they have. One would think Dad's spendthrift ways had been going on for years and that Mom would have taken the kids home to her father. After all, her father Mr. Ghio (Charlie Ruggles) is the mayor of Texarkana.

The first time we see Dad spending the family money unwisely, it's to "help" a man who's painted his house in a garish color that Ambolyn doesn't like get the house repainted in white. Sure, it's dumb to see Jack do this, but you can understand him wanting to make his wife happy. Next up, however, Jack stops by a drug store where the guy behind the counter has a wife who's going into labor and can't get the time off bcause of nasty boss Mr. Cosgrove (Charles Lane). Jack takes over for an hour and gets into big trouble by service a kid a banana split. To get out of his trouble, Jack comes up with a plan to have a "syndicate" of his friends buy the place. He then blackmails his friends into co-funding the scheme!

And then the circus comes to town. Corinne like the pony and wishes she could have one. Unfortunately, the only way Jack can buy the pony is if he buys the whole damn circus. And, of course, he's stupid enough to pay the two crooked proprietors cash. They run off, leaving Jack owning a circus that's heavily in debt and has lots of process servers chasing them. Yeah, he really is that dumb. It's here that Ambolyn finally has the good sense to go off to Texarkana to be with her father. Jack, having screwed things up badly, realizes that he has to go where they can't find him, and takes a job as a railroad superintendent with a railroad in Louisiana. But this is also the sort of movie that you know is going to have a happy ending. So how is it going to get there?

I can see why people think a movie like Papa's Delicate Condition has its charms. For me, however, it had a bunch of problems, which are mostly down to the script. Jack Griffiths is, if not a nasty character, one for whom it's hard to have sympathy. He's causing all his own problems, and you keep wanting Ambolyn or perhaps her father to knock some sense into Jack. The other big issue is that Jackie Gleason is miscast for a period piece like this. It's as though he's still playing Ralph Kramden and not Jack Griffith.

Cry For Happy

Another of the stars who was honored in the 2025 Summer Under the Stars was Donald O'Connor, as it was his 100th anniversary of his birth. Once again, I recorded several of his movies that I hadn't seen before, one of which was the service comedy Cry for Happy.

O'Connor is the second lead here, behind Glenn Ford. Ford plays CPO Andy Cyphers, who as the movie beings is in US-occupied Japan in 1952. Cyphers officially works for the Navy's publicity office, developing the photographs and film reels that will be distributed to press outlets back in the States. It's not glamorous work, and with the housing situation in Japan Cyphers works out of a disused bank vault. He also engages in other unauthorized work, such as leasing cameras to a Japanese producer Endo in exchange for other services.

One day Cyphers gets new staff in the form of junior officers Murray Prince (Donald O'Connor), Suzuki (James Shigeta), and Lank (Chet Douglas). They get an assignment to go over to Korea, which is something they really want since the movie is set while the Korean War is still a hot war, and cover the military's propaganda of having low-ranked servicemen speak to the people back home about why they're fighting. Somehow, the military press liaisons not only didn't include any members of the Navy to talk to, but the people who do talk actively make fun of the military. To counter this, Cyphers wants to talk about why the navy is fighting, and makes up a story about them helping out an orphanage back in Japan. Cyphers is, of course, enough of a grifter that this is a completely made up story. So to keep everyone from putting too much of a spotlight on them, he doesn't reveal the location of the fake orphanage and says they've wanted to do it with no publicity.

Now, this is where Endo comes back in. He has a way of doing favors for Cyphers in exchange for getting those movie cameras he needs to make the movie he wants (which turns out to be a Hollywood-style western only with an all-Japanese cast). So now Cyphers needs an orphanage and his staff need a place to stay. Endo finds a place where one of his cousins is living that's a geisha house, with four geishas still paying off their apprenticeships. It might be a good place to turn into a pretend orphanage, if only they had children. There's also the fact that there are four women there and of course the Navy men begin to fall in love with the geishas, notably Murray with Chiyoko (Miyoshi Umeki, who had portrayed a similar character in Sayonara).

Worse for Cyphers is that the orphanage becomes such a story that there's no way they can keep things under wraps. Besides, folks back in the States were so touched by the story that they've been donating money without even being hectored by Sally Stuthers. But this is the sort of romantic service comedy that really has to have a happy ending, so the question is how the story gets to that requisite happy ending.

I didn't particularly care for Cry for Happy, and if you've read this blog long enough you can probably guess some of the reasons why. The big one is CPO Cyphers. He's the sort of con artist whom I tend not to find a very sympathetic character. Worse, it's the sort of thing I've called a "comedy of lies" before, where the Cyphers character starts off with one lie, and then has to make up bigger and bigger lies to keep the original lie going. It's the sort of thing that's supposed to be funny, but that I've always just found grating. I have a feeling that viewers 65 years on will probably also have some issues with the portrayal of Japan here. There's quite a fair bit of what Americans would have thought the Japan of the era was like, with probably little of what the actual Japan was like. The cultural difference is supposed to be funny but once again feels more uncomfortable and a bit degrading than funny.

Not to be confused with Sonja Henie in Idaho

I've mentioned before that when Carol Burnett did a piece for TCM on Lucille Ball for Ball's turn as Star of the Month many years ago, Burnett suggested that the studio (RKO) just didn't know what to do with her. Like a lot of other people who weren't necessarily suited to the genre, she even got cast in a western, Valley of the Sun.

Ball is the female lead here, although we don't see her for several minutes. Instead, we see action at a US Army fort in what is now Tucson, AZ, in 1868. Male lead James Craig plays Jonathan Ware, a scout for the Army who has gotten himself in trouble with the army because he's been soft on some of the Indians who have long been causing a problem for the settlers moving west into the Arizona Territory as well as the Army. Ware, however, knows that the people the Bureau of Indian Affairs have been sending from Washington are corrupt and robbing the Indians blind, which is a big part of why they're attacking. Still, Ware gets court-martialed and sentenced to five years, although one of the soldiers informs him of how to get a horse and escape.

Escape Jonathan does, winding up for a while on the underside of a coach heading to the town of Desert Center. Two men are on the coach: James Sawyer (Dean Jagger), and a justice of the peace. James is heading out to Desert Center to meet up with Christine Larson (Lucille Ball). Christine runs the local watering hole, at least for now, with some help from dimwitted Willie (Peter Whitney). But she's planning on getting married to Sawyer, which is why he's on his way to Desert Center. Sawyer is none too happy to see this stowaway on the coach, and the two men become fast enemies.

Willie may not be smart in the traditional sense, but he knows people well enough to know that Sawyer isn't right for Christine. And, of course, we can guess that Jonathan is right since James Craig and Lucille Ball are the two leads. Granted, meeting up with Christine while he's taking a barrel bath isn't exactly the most auspicious start for Jonathan. Willie, of course, being a good judge of character, figures out that Jonathan might be better for Christine, and that the two of them need to do something to stop the wedding from going forward. Or, repeated somethings.

And then there's the fact that Jonathan is still a fugitive from justice, having escaped from military court. There's more comedy and action to come until the movie reaches the inevitable conclusion of justice being meted out to the people who are actually breaking the law, and the good guy getting the girl.

Valley of the Sun mixes a good dose of comedy in with the western themes, although interestingly enough it's mostly not Lucille Ball who gets to be zany here the way she would be on I Love Lucy a decade later. In RKO's defense, Lucy hadn't developed that zany persona yet. Ball does OK, although the movie is really more interesting for being offbeat than it is for actually being a notably good western. I think viewers will like it even if it's certainly not great.

Scared Stiff

Jerry Lewis was part of TCM's Summer Under the Stars this past August, and that gave me the chance to record a bunch of his movies that I hadn't seen before, since the ones they selected were mostly not the ones on my Jerry Lewis box set. So I'll be going through them over the next year or so. Next up is Scared Stiff.

Scared Stiff is one of the movies Lewis made when he was still part of a comedy team with Dean Martin, and we see Dean Martin first, as nightclub singer Larry Todd. Except that we don't see Martin right away either. Instead, there's an introductory scene of a waiter at the club being approached by a gangster's henchman because the waiter has been seeing the gangster Shorty's girlfriend Rosie (Dorothy Malone). When Larry enters the club, however, we learn that he too has been seeing Rosie. As for Jerry Lewis, he plays Myron Mertz, a busboy at the club which is a good way for Lewis to do physical comedy with food before a routine with Myron, Larry, and Rosie.

After the routine, Myron meets Larry in Larry's dressing room, and informs him of the waiter who was taken away by the gangster for being with a chorus girl, at which point Larry finds out that Rosie is a gangster's moll. Larry leaves he club in a panic, and Shorty calls Larry's dressing room only to get Myron. Myron decides he'll do a favor for Larry by going to the hotel where Larry has been summoned and confronting Shorty in Larry's stead.

Also at the hotel, and on the same floor as the gangsters, is Mary Carroll (Lizabeth Scott). She's spending her last night at the hotel before taking a cruise down to Cuba. She has an inheritance there, and it's an entire island with a castle. However, there's no electricity on the island, and there are rumors that the castle is haunted or something, since nobody's spent a full night in the castle in 20 years. Mary also draws the ire of Shorty by making a joke about murder during a power outage.

A gunfight ensues between one of Shorty's henchmen and a man trying to buy the castle from Mary. Larry is in the hallway trying to save Myron and has a gun of his own, and since he drew it he fears he might be arrested for murder. He escapes into one of the hotel rooms, which happens to be Mary's. He hides, but it's in Mary's trunk, which by the time the police are finished with their investigation has already been sent to the pier. So Myron and Mary go to the pier, and as you can guess, a comedy of errors occurs that results in Myron and Larry winding up on the cruise after it's set sail. Thanks to their comedy stylings, they're able to work their way to Havana, meeting singer Carmelita (Carmen Miranda in her final film role).

Larry and Mary fall in love along the way, and when they and Myron get to the island, they find out that someone has a reason for wanting to buy the castle from Mary, although they haven't quite yet figured out what that reason is. But since this is a comedy, you can guess that everything is going to be wrapped up with a happy ending.

Scared Stiff was based on an old Bob Hope comedy called The Ghost Breakers, which I have on my Bob Hope box set but have not yet seen. As such, I can't compare the two movies to see whether the remake is that much worse; any number of reviewers suggest that The Ghost Breakers is a better movie. As for standing on it's own, I'd say that Scared Stiff isn't that bad a movie, but some of the other Martin/Lewis pairings I've seen are better. Perhaps The Ghost Breakers just wasn't the best material to adapt to the strengths of Martin and Lewis.

How the West Was Won

I mentioned at the start of the week in conjunction with Debbie Reynolds being TCM's Star of the Month for March that there was was at least one of her movies that I've got on my DVR and haven't done a post on before. That movie is the epic How the West Was Won. It's coming up early tomorrow morning (March 30) at 4:30 AM, so now we get the post on it.

Spencer Tracy narrates this movie that at times feels like an anthology, but is really more of an episodic movie since some of the characters appear in multiple segments, and many of the characters who are only in one segment are all part of the same family. Anyhow, Tracy informs us that it hasn't been all that long since the American frontier was conquered, and that in the early days of trying to move west it was particularly difficult, at least until the construction of the Erie Canal (completed in 1825) really made it a good deal easier to get to at least western Missouri. We then cut to 1839 for the first segment....

The first segment, called "The River" deals with one family trying to migrate west in search of more fertile land, although west here more or less means the Ohio Valley, which I'd have though was fairly comprehensively settled by 1839; Wikipedia suggests Cincinnati had already been incorprated for a generation and had a population in the mid-five-figure range. In any case, the family, the Prescotts, consists of father Zebulan (Karl Malden), mom Rebecca (Agnes Moorehead) and daughters Eve (Carroll Baker) and Lilith (Debbie Reynolds). They meet trapper Linus (James Stewart) before all of them get waylaid by some dubious pirates of the river (their leader is played by Walter Brennan). An accident in river rapids kills Mom and Dad; Eve marries Linus and Lilith heads for greener pastures.

Those pastures take her to Saint Louis in 1850, where she's workin as an enterainer who finds out that she's somehow inherited a gold mine out in California. So as with Westward the Women mentioned recently, she has to go west to California to take possession of the mine. She's followed by some suitors, notably professional gambler Cleve Van Valen (Gregory Peck).

Back to Eve's side of the story, when the Civil War comes she's got an adult son Zeb (George Peppard). Linus and Zeb both go off to fight, but when Zeb sees the hell that war truly is, a confederate he meets (Russ Tamblyn) suggests the two of them desert and go off somewhere together. But there's a lot more tragedy to come.

After the Civil War, the Transcontinental Railroad gets built. Zeb is still in the Army, now in the cavalry, trying to keep the peace with the various Indian tribes despite the fact that Mr. King (Richard Widmark), the man from the railroad, wants to get the track laid and who cares what the Indians think.

Finally, after leaving the Army, there's one last segment that reunites the two branches of the Prescott family. Lilith is forced to sell her home in San Francisco, deciding to retire to a ranch in the Arizona territory. But she's old, so she invites her nephew Zeb, by now married (Carolyn Jones playing his wife) to come along and run the place. When they get to Arizona, Zeb runs into Gant (Eli Wallach), an outlaw who's there to try to steal one of the shipments of gold.

It's easy on watching How the West Was Won to see why it was such a massive commercial success when it was released. The story is actually fairly pedestrian, but the movie was made in Cinerama, so I can only imagine how spectacular it must have been to see the movie as it was intended to be seen in the original Cinerama.

Unfortunately, however, most people don't have the sort of curved screen necessary to see Cinerama in its original aspect ratio and presentation format. In days past, this meant that TV presentations would be cut down, and there would be severe crease-like lines where the various segments of the print were supposed to meet up. Nowadays, restorers have tried to solve that problem through the use of the "smilebox" format that attempts to replicate the experience one would have had in the theater where the left and right edges of the screen are closer to the viewer than the middle.

I'm sorry to say that this doesn't quite work. First, I get the impression that the smilebox format is really more curved than it needs to be. Some of the photos I've seen of Cinerama screens do show a clearly evident curve, but not as much as the smilebox format has. The bigger problem, however, is how translating Cinerama to the smilebox distorts motion. I've always felt like there was something off in Cinemascope backgrounds when there are scenes with long panning in that the motion in parts of the background don't look quite right. In the smilebox format, this is much more severe, almost like what you'd see if you were moving around a sphere with stuff being reflected off of it.

But if you're the sort of person who doesn't tend to notice such distortion, or if you ever get the chance to see it in the original Cinerama (I don't know how many Cinerama screens still exist; would it be possible to translate Cinerama to an IMAX screen?), give How the West Was Won a chance. It's certainly a spectacle.

Houdini

Today marks 97 years since the death of magician and escape artist Harry Houdini. His life story was loosely turned into a movie in the early 1950s with the unsurprising title Houdini. That movie is available on demand on Pluto TV, so I recently watched it since I figured Halloween was a suitable time to do a post on the movie.

Tony Curtis plays Harry Houdini (1874-1926), and as the movie opens he's working the carnival circuit as part of a show run by Schultz (Sig Ruman). Schultz doesn't necessarily care for Houdini's desire to do magic on stage, having hired him for other reasons. One evening at the show, in the audience is Bess Rahner (Janet Leigh, Tony Curtis' real-life wife at the time). Bess is infatuated with Harry, and keeps going to his shows, with him eventually getting her to realize that the two are in love, leading to an elopement, much to the chagrin of his mother (Angela Clark).

The two do traveling revues since Harry absolutely wants to make it as a magician, while Bess would be happy with him settling down and taking a normal job. After some abuse from a bunch of miners out west, Harry agrees, working in a lock and safe factory. But Harry still has the itch to do magic, so he takes his wife out to a gathering of the magicians' society for dinner. There, he goes up on stage to put on a strait-jacket, from which he's the only one to escape. His magic career is on its way.

Houdini's specialty becomes escape acts, escaping from handcuffs, locked boxes, submerged boxes, and a lot more. The career also takes him to Europe, where he hopes to meet a reclusive magician who supposedly learned the secret of dematerialization.

But them Mom dies, and Harry goes into a funk, not performing in public for years, wanting to make more contact with his mother. But Harry knows that the spiritualists who claim they can contact people on the other side are a bunch of fakes, so he decides he's going to debunk them publicly.

History tells us, however, that Houdini would die on Halloween in 1926. Houdini died from a ruptured appendix that wasn't diagnosed until too late, actually doing some shows with a high fever before dying in hospital. Not that this sort of death would be cinematic, however. So the movie portrays his death in a slightly different way....

Unsurprisingly, as with other Hollywood biopics of the era, this isn't the only liberty the movie takes with the truth. Despite the inaccuracies, Houdini is certainly an entertaining enough movie. Tony Curtis is a natural as Houdini, and Janet Leigh is appealing enough as his wife. The movie is also photographed in lovely Technicolor. In short, Houdini is good old-fashioned Hollywood entertainment.

It Started With a Kiss

Debbie Reynolds is today's featured star in TCM's Summer Under the Stars, which in theory would have given you a chance to catch Athena again, although by the time most of you see this post it will have already aired. And since I've blogged about Athena already, I decided to mention another movie: It Started With a Kiss, airing tonight at midnight (so technically the very start of Monday, August 7 in the Eastern Time Zone, but still the evening of August 6 in more westerly time zones).

Reynolds plays Maggie, who's selling raffle tickets to help raise money for the Fresh Air Fund, a real charity that sends poor kids from New York City out to more rural summer camp-type places for a week or two in the summer. We actually had a similar camp near where I grew up, but it was run by the Boys' and Girls' Club instead, and is now owned by one of Brooklyn's Orthodox Jewish communities as a summer camp for boys. But that's beside the point. The raffle tickets are for a designer car, and one of the people buying a ticket as a charitable deduction is an Air Force officer, Sgt. Joe Fitzpatrick (Glenn Ford).

Joe and Maggie get away from the fundraiser for a bit, and as they start talking, they suddenly start feeling the spark of romance, leading to a quickie marriage even though Maggie was saying she wouldn't get married at all. Unfortunately, just as the two get married, Joe learns that he's being transferred to one of the US air bases in Spain, since the Franco regime was a fairly substantial ally of the Americans during the Cold War.

However, Franco was a dictator, which meant that there was a substantial portion of the population that didn't care for him, not that this bit is mentioned in the movie. More importantly in terms of plot is that people consequently are ambivalent at best about the US military presence in the country, something that's been an issue pretty much everywhere the Americans have had bases abroad. The base commanders, on orders from well above in terms of Maj. Gen. O'Connell (Fred Clark), want the Americans to be seen as good neighbors, so there are all sorts of rules the American military has to follow, with a big one being no ostentatious displays of wealth.

You know this is going to be a problem from the way a big point is made of. Sure enough, if you remember that raffle at the beginning of the movie, it was for a Lincoln concept car (the car used in the movie would in real life be repurposed as the Batmobile of all things) that's worth quite a sum of money. And wouldn't you know, but Joe wins the car! Maggie is coming over to Spain to live with her new husband, and she's having the car shipped over as well, so you can see where the problems are going to come from.

Meanwhile, Joe is getting some less than stellar advice from his meddling friends, including Charles (Harry Morgan), so when Maggie shows up she finds more problems, leading her to declare marriage a trial marriage, with no physical contact. If that's not bad enough for Joe, the presence of that car -- and the taxes Joe is going to have to pay on it -- is a big deal. Further complicating issues is a bullfighter who falls for Maggie.

It Started With a Kiss is another one of those movies that has a good idea as the basis of it, but which doesn't quite live up to that idea in the execution. That's a shame, since the stars here are generally enjoyable to watch in a lot of their other movies. But everything feels contrived and predictable. Not that predictability is necessarily a bad thing on its own. There was some location shooting, at least for establishing shots, which is nice, but I couldn't help but feel walking away from this movie that it's the sort of thing that could have been a lot better.

Incendiary Blonde

One of TCM's programming themes this month has been "Wonder Women", which has been biopics of women who, in one way or another, been some sort of trailblazing. It's been running on Tuesday nights into Wednesday mornings, with the biopics classified by the sort of woman being profiled. This last Tuesday deals with women who are more or less involved in entertainment (the one stretch is Song of Love, starring Katharine Hepburn as composer Robert Schumann's wife Clara Wieck). There are two movies in Tuesday night's lineup I'd like to blog about, so I'm starting today with the first of those two, Incendiary Blonde, which kicks off the night's lineup at 8:00 PM Tuesday.

Betty Hutton plays Texas Guinan, and if you read the Wikipedia article and watch the movie you can see for yourself just how accurate the movie is or isn't. The movie starts off at her funeral, with her father (played by Barry Fitzgerald) in attendance, which leads to the inevitable flashback to how "Texas" became famous in the first place. This takes us from 1933 back to 1909, at a Wild West show in Texas. One of the show's attractions involves paying $50 to any man who can ride a notorious bucking bronco. Texas is, of course, not a man, but takes up the challenge, and her winning it leads to her getting a job in the show, run by Bill Kilgannon (Arturo de Cordova).

She helps the show get publicity by hiring a midget to play a baby and crawl out on the arena ahead of a stampede, to be rescued by Texas. This does bring them fame, except that there's a newspaperman Tim Callahan (Bill Goodwin). He figures out the ruse, and parlays it into a job as the company's PR man.

This sets up the romantic conflict that runs througout the course of the film. Tim loves Texas, and the two eventually get married. But Texas has always loved Kilgannon. He would be happy marrying her, except that he's got a wife in a sanatorium that he can't get divorced from.

Tim's publicity takes Texas to New York and fame in vaudeville and the Broadway stage, but then she decides to go to Hollywood, which leads to problems as Kilgannon gets caught up in a stock deal gone wrong; as such, this sours the relationship between him and Texas and eventually results in her going back to New York.

By this time, it's Prohibition, and Texas gets a job as the headliner at a club which is taken over by gangster Joe Cadden (Albert Dekker). Texas makes the place a huge success, but unfortunately that brings the club to the attention of another bunch of gangsters, the Vettori brothers, who try to drive Cadden out of business so they can take over the place for themselves.

Meanwhile, Texas has always had a premonition that she's going to die young, something we know from her biography and the beginning of the movie does in fact happen. She sees a doctor who reveals that she's got cancer and maybe two years to live. Kilgannon's wife must have died, as he's now able to marry Texas, not knowing that she's got terminal cancer. There are also the Vettori brothers, who may kill Cadden and Kilgannon first.

Like most biopics, Incendiary Blonde takes a fair number of liberties with the truth, especially in Guinan's relationships with men. She had one legal marriage and two relationships that could probably have been called common-law marriages if the legal need arose, but the Kilgannon character doesn't seem to have been any of those men. The real-life Guinan probably was more involved in the alcohol business than the screen version, although Guinan was never convicted.

Even if the story is changed, it still works well, thanks to Betty Hutton's irrepressible personality. She's also given a lot of songs to sing, and the numbers are mostly well staged. Incendiary Blonde has a further plus in being filmed in vivid Technicolor, which works for a life story as garish as Guinan's.

As far as I could tell, I couldn't find Incendiary Blonde in print on DVD, so you're going to have to catch the rare TCM showing.

Advance to the Rear

Among the movies I recorded during Glenn Ford's turn as Star of the Month back in July was Advance to the Rear. It's available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive, so now you get your review of the movie here.

Glenn Ford plays Capt. Heath, who's serving on an obscure front of the Civil War for the North, under Col. Brackenbury (Melvyn Douglas). It's obscure enough that it doesn't seem to matter who wins. Each side shoots 30 rounds of artillery at a set time each morning, and that's it for the day. No trying to take land or anything like that. That is, until Heath shows some initiative, and on a patrol actually captures a couple of Confederate soldiers. Brackenbury is ticked, because he knows this means the other side will retaliate.

Sure enough, the Confederate commander does, more or less routing the Union. It leads to an inquiry to figure out what went wrong. When General Willoughby (Jim Backus), who is put in charge of the inquiry, finds out what's been going on, boy is he angry. Something has to be done to make certain these soldiers can't do anything to screw up the war effort. So a plan is hatched to find all of the most incompetent soldiers and transfer them into one company under Brackenbury and Heath, with the intention to send that company to an isolated outpost out west where they'll basically sit out the war.

Meanwhile, the Confederates learn what's happening, so they send a spy, the lovely Martha Lou (Stella Stevens) onto the riverboat the Union company is taking (presumably up either the Missouri or Mississippi) and figure out what they're up to. With a little help from madame Easy Jenny (Joan Blondell), it's determined that Martha Lou's back story is a fraud. But she's so good looking that Heath plans to woo her as if that's going to keep her from her mission. Not that there should be much of a mission of course since the company is being kept out of action.

Except that a snafu happens. When the company arrives at their destination, there's another company there that thinks it's getting relieved. And that other company was part of orders to guard a shipment of Union gold, so now it's up to our company of incompetents to do the guarding. The Confederates might be able to score a victory in at least one part of the war after all.

Advance to the Rear is a fairly light comedy, and I saw reading the IMDb reviews that I wasn't the first person to think of the sitcom F Troop, which came out a few years later than this movie. There's nothing particularly groundbreaking with the movie, but it's a pleasant enough way to spend 100 minutes, and everybody looks as though they were enjoying themselves making the movie. Ford was better at comedy than his list of movies might have you think, and Douglas takes his role and runs with it for all it's worth.

If you want a movie you can just sit back with a bowl of popcorn and have fun watching, rather than a "prestige" movie, you could do far worse than Advance to the Rear.