Shelley Fabares is nowhere to be found

I'm getting near to the end of writing up reviews of the movies I recorded when George Raft was TCM's Star of the Month back at the beginning of 2025. This time, it's a film from the beginning of his descent into the realm of B movies: Johnny Angel. It will be on TCM tomorrow, January 13, at 11:30 AM.

Raft actually does play a character named Johnny Angel, and that seems to be the character's real name. Johnny is in the merchant marine, captaining a ship for the Gunderson Line run my George Gustafson (Marvin Miller) out of New Orleans during World War II. Johnny's boat plies the Gulf of Mexico, and as the film opens he and his crew spot another ship that appears to be adrift in the fog. Johnny boards it and finds that it was the ship that his father, also a ship's captain for the Gustafson Line, captained, except that there's nobody left on board, which is an obvious mystery.

Johnny tows his father's boat back to New Orleans, where we find that the shipping line isn't in as good shape as one might have hoped for. George is the latest in a line of Gustafsons, but he's got a wife Lilah (Claire Trevor) who seems to have married him for his money. The fact that Lilah used to be in a relationship with Johhny complicates matters. That, and a secretary Miss Drumm (Margaret Wycherly) who was George's governess back in the day and still seems to have a lot of influence. None of the three have any clue about what might have happened to Johnny's dad; worse, they don't much seem to care.

So Johnny goes back about his father's ship, which is where he finds a woman's shoe and a newspaper that looks like it was printed back in France. So with the help of cabbie Celestial (Hoagy Carmichael), Johnny goes looking for anybody who might have knowledge about a French woman who would likely be new to New Orleans. The fact that there's a war on would at least explain why such a woman would be seeking illicit passage aboard a cargo ship like the ones the Angel father and son captained.

Johnny and Celestial go to the various clubs and other spots where someone new in town might go to look for a cheap place to sleep and get a starter job, so you know they're eventually going to find a woman who might just be the one who was aboard Dad's boat. They do indeed find such a woman, Paulette (Signe Hasso), and she has a story to tell that would be incredibly improbable in real life, but par for the course in a Hollywood movie. Apparently she and her father were transporting Free French gold across the Atlantic for safekeeping, when some people who somehow learned of this come aboard the boat, killing everyone but Paulette who was able to hide or something. (Why there was no blood on the boat is a good question.) So Paulette is out to find that gold, and the people who took it. Johnny, for his part, is willing to help Paulette. But Mr. Gustafson puts a crimp in those plans. Is he in on the heist, or just stupid?

For me, the problem with Johnny Angel is that it had a plot that was too complex for its own good, especially in a B movie like this. George Raft is also not exactly the most charismatic romantic leading man out there. Still, everybody tries, and the movie is not uninteresting if at the same time not particularly great. Johnny Angel is enjoyable enough for a rainy day, but once again it's one of those movies where there are good reasons why it's not very well remembered 80 years on.

A Dangerous Profession

George Raft was TCM's Star of the Month in January 2025, and as always that gave me the chance to record a couple of his movies that I hadn't blogged about before, including the noirish movie A Dangerous Profession. Eventually I got around to watching it and writing up this post to schedule some time in advance.

The movie opens up with a monologue narrated by Los Angeles police detective Nick Farrone (Jim Backus) discussing the bail bond industry and how it's quite the money spinner, with firms such as that of Joe Farley (Pat O'Brien) and Vince Kane (George Raft). Kane, for his part, is a former police detective himself before leaving the force to join the bail bond industry and living the sort of life that the police probably wouldn't approve of. Indeed, it's at a craps game that Kane is contacted by Ferrone.

Ferrone is taken to the home of Claude Brackett (Bill Williams), a stockbrocker who has just been arrested in a case involving stolen bonds and that's going to involve a fairly substantial bail of the sort that a bail bond company lke Farley-Kane may be able to help with. However, when Kane gets there, he realizes that Claude's wife Lucy (Ella Raines) is in fact his own former girlfriend. Complicating matters is the fact that Claude and Lucy were separated from each other up until Claude got arrested for the robbery.

Bail is high, and Lucy can't raise all the money for it, until a mysterious lawyer named Dawson comes up with a bunch of the money even though Claude and Lucy claim to know nothing about this lawyer. Worse is that Kane dips into a greater portion of the company's funds to pay off the rest of the bail than the company normally does, with everybody thinking that Kane is doing it for personal reasons, which would be to try to win Lucy back for himself. Lucy, for her part, is claiming that she only married Claude for his money and that she still really loves Kane. Just how honest is she being?

Farley is more concerned, and rightly so, when word gets out that Brackett has jumped bail, and then it's found out that Brackett has been murdered! Kane is trying to figure out who this mysterious Dawson is and who hired him. He's also trying to solve a murder and figure out why he's being followed. All of this is happening while he's got both the police trying to solve the murder, and a business partner who is none too happy with everything that's going on considering how much of the company's money is involved.

A Dangerous Profession is decidedly B noir, but it's entertaining enough. Everybody puts in a professional job, although the story itself feels like a bit of an overcomplicated mess at times. Even though this one was released by RKO and is therefore part of the old "Turner Library" that has always made up a substantial portion of the TCM schedule, I think it's not without reason that A Dangerous Profession isn't so well known.

Don't look for Farley Granger

I've mentioned in the past that I'm always up for trying early talkies, even if many of them aren't all that good even by the standards of early sound pictures. One that showed up some time back on TCM was a 1929 movie called Side Street that's really more interesting for who is in the cast.

The first thing to note is that the three main characters are played by the three Moore brothers, who had all been silent film stars; here they're playing brothers as well. They're the sons in the Irish-American O'Farrell family. Jimmy (Tom Moore) is a police detective who has a girlfriend Kathleen whom he's looking to propose to and might just be able to now that he's getting a promotion on the force. John (Matt Moore) is a doctor working in the emergency department. He's been helped through medical school by the third brother, Dennis (Owen Moore). Dennis is in "business" that requires him to do a fair bit of traveling. It should be obvious what this "business" entails, but more on that later.

Kathleen gets invited to one of those swanky penthouse parties by hre friend Bunny who is going with her boyfriend. The party is being held in an apartment owned by Muller, who is the head of a notorious gang of bootleggers. At the party, she meets Silk, who is Muller's henchman and a guy who doesn't know how to keep his mouth shut. He claims to be the guy behind Muller's organization, and that the organization arranged for the murder in a case Jimmy is investigating. This is all important to the plot, but just as interesting is the dance number one of the guests stages. Classic movie fans should have no difficulty recognizing George Raft in a very early, uncredited role.

The party gets broken up by a fight. Some days later, Jimmy brings Kathleen and her father over for Thanksgiving, with the other two brothers showing up. Kathleen realizes she's already met Dennis before: he was at the Muller party, and his business is in fact being Muller himself! The fight at the party also has the police investigating, which is how John (called in to provide medical care) and Jimmy (investigating) both figure out what their brother is really doing. However, both of them know that it would break their mother's heart to discover the real truth about her beloved son. So how does the movie give us at least a semi-happy ending?

As I implied at the beginning, Side Street isn't the greatest movie, although I don't think it's as bad as some other reviewers may have you believe. Still, it's another one where the plot feels like we've been down this side street a dozen times before. The Moore brothers also all seem better suited to silent films. It's George Raft as a dancer (which he was in real life before becoming an actor full time) who steals the show with his one scene.

Background to Danger

George Raft is TCM's Star of the Month, and it turns out that I've got a film on my DVR that is part of the tribute and that a search of the blog claims I haven't blogged about before. (And, having watched the movie for this post, I don't think I'd seen it before.) That movie, Background to Danger, airs tonight (January 21) at 8:00 PM on TCM.

Although George Raft is the nominal star here, we don't see him for several minutes. Instead, we're transported to Ankara, capital of Turkey. The movie was released in 1943, the middle of World War II, and Turkey was one of the few countries in the region that managed to stay neutral, meaning that both Axis and Allied powers had embassies in the country and there was all sorts of opportunity for espionage hijinks to ensue. One such example in the movie, that actually did occur in real life, was a failed attempt on the life of the German ambassador to Turkey. In the movie, the attempt is portrayed as a false flag operation by the Nazis to attempt to stoke fear in Turkey that the Soviets are going to invade and get Turkey to join the Axis powers. German involvement is quickly determined, and the Nazi behind the scenes, a Colonel Robinson (Sydney Greenstreet) is seen in Berlin very annoyed at the failure of the scheme.

Cut to Aleppo, in northern Syria. It's a main stop on board the rail line from Istanbul to Baghdad. Getting on the train in the same car are American businessman Joe Barton (George Raft) and a mysterious woman named Ana Remzi (Osa Massen) who comes across as though she's clearly lying about who she is. She's also being followed by a slightly burly guy of vaguely not-quite western European appearance with a big bushy moustache. So she asks Joe to hold on to an envelope so that the authorities don't get it when the train crosses the border.

Joe, being a curious sort, rifles through the envelope when he gets to his hotel room, and finds what appears to be photostats of documents that would suggest someone is about to do something to Turkey, but who and why? In any case, Joe goes to return the envelope to Ana at her hotel, where he finds that she's been killed and he's been spotted at the scene such that he's a logical suspect. The police notify him of this, but these aren't real Turkish police. Instead, they're some of Robinson's men who take Joe to a secret location and rough him up to the extent that you'd think he'd have a pretty serious concussion and be out of commission for as long as it takes the events in the rest of the movie to transpire. But they didn't worry about concussions in those days.

Joe is magically saved by a man claiming to be Nikolia Zaleshoff (Peter Lorre), who is coy at first about who he is but then claims to be working for the Soviets, who were nominal allies of the US in the war leading to all sorts of hideous propaganda from Hollywood movies about the virtues of Soviet anti-fascists. He's in Turkey with his purported sister Tamara (Brenda Marshall), and they want that envelope too. As it turns out, Robinson wants the envelope because the documents are propaganda claiming that the Soviets are planning an invasion of Turkey, although again you'd think the Nazis could just draw up some more forgeries to have printed in the Turkish press. But are the Zaleshoffs really who they claim they are? And who was that man following Ana?

Background to Danger was apparently put into production after the success of Casablanca, and based on a novel from the interwar period by Eric Ambler. That would probably explain why when I came across this movie and the plot summary I couldn't help but wonder if I was getting it confused with Journey Into Fear, a Joseph Cotten film about war intrigue in Turkey. Background to Danger is moderately entertaining, at least in the way that a TV show like Columbo was entertaining 30 years later: you knew what you were going to get and that the bad guy was going to get his comeuppance, but the whole production has a perfunctory by-the-numbers feel to it. Background to Danger isn't terrible, but it's no surprise why so many other World War II movies are better remembered today.

A Bullet for Joey

I've always mentioned how seeing a movie with an interesting synopsis is something that will generally get me to watch it, especially if it has classic Hollywood stars in it. I think I may have vaguely heard of A Bullet for Joey when I saw it show up on one of the streaming services recently, so I decided to sit down and watch it considering the cast and the plot.

The movie opens up in Montreal, where an organ grinder is plying the streets. Of course, this isn't a real organ grinder, but a man hired to spy on a certain person and get that man's daily routine down. Unfortunately for him, an officer of the RCMP figures out that something isn't quite right and questions the guy, who shoots the officer in the process. That brings in RCMP detective Raoul Leduc (Edward G. Robinson).

Meanwhile, in a development that we know is related only because this is a movie and we wouldn't have such unrelated stuff otherwise, the action briefly shifts to Lisbon, Portugal. There we find Joe Victor (George Raft), an immigrant to America who was deported because of his criminal activities. He'd like to get back to America, and this combined with those criminal activities, make him an ideal tool to be used by someone else....

That someone is Eric Hartman (Peter van Eyck). Hartman is a Communist, and this being the era of the Cold War, he's got some people in the West that he has a decided interest in. One of those is Carl Macklin (George Dolenz), a Canadian researcher into nuclear physics and advanced weapons systems. It's obvious why the Communists would have an interest in Macklin, and they'd like to kidnap him so that they can learn his secrets, or at least the scientific secrets. It's not as if Macklin has an exciting personal life.

Joe is hired to come up with the plan to kidnap Macklin, and that requires figuring out his personal routine as that organ-grinder was doing. Macklin just isn't very exciting, but Joe thinks any man will be excited when presented with a honey pot. Joe has just the woman for it, too, in the form of Joyce Geary (Audrey Totter). Joyce is Joe's on-again, off-again girlfriend, and she's not all that thrilled with the job she's being asked to do. Meanwhile, another associate of Joe's pulls the short-straw duty of trying to romance Macklin's homely spinster secretary. Said secretary lives with her older sister, who rather cruelly suspects something is going on because, really, who would want to date this woman?

Meanwhile, Leduc has been tracking down every organ-grinder in town, and all of them have good alibis. But other murders start happening, and they all seem to be linked to Macklin in some way, which eventually brings Leduc closer to the Joe Victor mob, although Leduc still doesn't get just who Joe is working for. It all leads up to a climax on a cargo ship going down the St. Lawrence River....

A Bullet for Joey is one of those movies that's serviceable, but nothing great. It feels like the sort of thing that was written with the express purpose of keeping a couple of older actors working, with the plot not always coming together. Additionally, it feels like another movie that's suffering from budget problems. It was produced independently, and that might have something to do with it. (The movie was not filmed in Canada; just establishing shots were.) Ultimately, A Bullet for Joey isn't a bad movie, but it's certainly not a great or memorable film either.

If I Had a Million

I had a post on a different movie scheduled to go up today, when I noticed that the anthology movie If I Had a Million was on the TCM schedule overnight tonight, or the early hours of Tuesday (July 18) at 2:15 AM. Note that this is still late Monday evening on the west coast. A search of the blog, however, claims that while I used the movie once for a Thursday Movie Picks, I've never actually done a full-length post on it. So, since the movie is definitely worth a watch, today's the day to do a more-or-less full-length review.

I say "more or less" because, this being an anthology, the most natural thing to do is to have a one- or two-sentence synopsis of each segment. The framing story involves a wealthy man, John Glidden (Richard Bennett), who is on his deathbed. He's worth at least eight figures, which is a lot today but a huge sum back in 1932, and he's got a lot of grasping relatives he doesn't like. So he decides to give away a million bucks to several random strangers before he dies, by picking names out of the phone book. This leads to eight segments:

• Henry Peabody (Charlie Ruggles) works in a china shop and has a boss he doesn't like, so you can probably guess what he does with his million.
• Violet (Wynne Gibson) is a prostitute working at a bar on the docks. When she gets her million, she makes her way uptown, and....
• Eddie Jackson (George Raft) is a notorious forger who, having gotten a check from Glidden, realizes that no bank will accept it because they'll naturally believe it's a forgery.
• Emily La Rue (Alison Skipworth) is continuously vexed by bad drivers, so her husband Rollo (W.C. Fields) uses the money to buy cars and....
• Gene Raymond plays John Wallace, who is on death row and thinks the million dollars can buy him a new defense so he can be exonerated and go back to his wife Mary (Frances Dee).
• In what is probably the weakest segment, and surprising considering the star, Charles Laughton plays an office clerk who sees the million as what we would today call "fuck you" money.
• Steve Gallagher (Gary Cooper) is a marine in the stockade. He thinks the check is an April Fools joke, which has consequences when he gets out of the stockade.
• Finally, Mary Walker (May Robson) is a resident of an old folks' home where the administrators basically want to warehouse the residents until they die. Mary, however, wants the residents to be able to live, and now that she's got a million, she may be able to make it happen.

As with any anthology movie, different people are going to have different segments that they think are the best, and others which they think are weak. For me, the Wynne Gibson segment is surprisingly profound. Fields and Skipworth unsurprisingly do well with what is little more than zany comedy, but of the sort that was tailor-made for them. Laughton gets a shocking weak script to work with, although it's realistic because in real life all of us have people we'd like to be able to tell off, and having $1 million in 1932 dollars would certainly give one the money to do it.

If you haven't seen If I Had a Million before, by all means make it a point to watch or record this TCM airing. It doesn't show up all that often.

Invisible Stripes

I mentioned at the beginning of the month when I discussed the selection of Humphrey Bogart as Star of the Month that I had one of his supporting roles on my DVR that I hadn't blogged about before. That movie, Invisible Stripes, is finally coming up on the TCM schedule, tomorrow morning at 5:00, or overnight tonight if you want to think about it that way, especially if you're on the west coast.

Bogart isn't the star here, and the last time TCM ran it, it wasn't for Bogart, but for another future star who was even earlier in his career, a very young William Holden. Holden plays Tim Taylor, younger brother of Cliff, who is played by the film's real star, George Raft. Cliff has recently gotten out of prison, and has found that as a man on probation, it's very difficult to get a good job, because a lot of employers don't want to take a chance on somebody on probation. And when he does get a job, he always seems to have co-workers who find out about his stint in prison and make life hell for him because of it.

Meanwhile, back at home, young Tim has always been the good brother, and Cliff doesn't want to see Tim go the wrong way. Tim has a girlfriend in Peggy (Jane Bryan), and has dreams of becoming an auto mechanic and eventually even opening up his own shop. Of course, this being the late 1930s with the lingering effects of the Depression, those dreams seem an awfully long way away. Tim sees the treatment that Cliff is getting, and this really bugs Tim, who would like to defend his big brother.

As for Bogart, he plays Charles Martin, a guy that Cliff met in prison. Charles has gotten out of prison, too. But unlike Cliff, he doesn't have a younger brother, and indeed has a gang that he was the leader of back in the day. So for him it's a lot easier to return to crime, especially because it gives him the high life that honest chumps like Cliff and Tim aren't able to achieve.

Cliff decides he's going to sacrifice himself, more or less. He joins in with Martin's gang, with the plan of using his take of the haul to help Tim open up that garage. Obviously, Tim isn't about to take any money earned illicitly, so Cliff leaves the rest of the family behind, claiming that he's a salesman on the road, which is how he's earning good money, when in fact he's just in a different part of the same big city they've always lived in. That's important because of what happens when Cliff decides he wants out of the gang. The dissension with in the ranks leads to a botched job, and Martin trying to use Tim's garage as a place to escape to and then out the back. And he's got the knowledge of how Tim really got that money as a weapon he can hold over Tim's head.

If there's one problem with Invisible Stripes, it's that the movie has to hew to the Production Code, which makes the ending a bit of a mess. Other than that, it's a fine example of the B movies that Warner Bros. was putting out in the 1930s. While I've always suggested my view that Warner Bros. had the best B movies, Invisible Stripes is helped by an even better cast than usual. Bogart was pretty clearly on his way to stardom, even if he still wasn't being given leading roles in A movies. I don't think the studio had any idea how much of a star Holden would become. Raft, I think, was already on the way down, which is why he was reduced to leading lower-budget stuff like this.

Still, thanks to the level of talent here, Invisible Stripes is a cut above some of those other B movies. One interesting bit of trivia that I think I mentioned at the beginning of the month. Early in the movie, the characters are outside a movie theater showing a movie called You Can't Get Away With Murder. It turns out this is a real movie, and one that stars Humphrey Bogart, having been released a few months before Invisible Stripes. You'll have a chance to see You Can't Get Away With Murder at 7:15 AM tomorrow.

Whistle Stop

Not noticing anything on my DVR that was coming up on TV tomorrow, I decided to turn to my Mill Creek "Crime Wave" box set with 50 public domain movies. Since I've only gotten through half a dozen or so of them, I've got a lot left, and picked Whistle Stop.

Whistle Stop has an interesting cast in that it has Ava Gardner as the female lead, on the way up about a year before The Killers would jump-start her career. (The movie has a 1945 copyright, but IMBd gives a January 1946 release date.) Gardner plays Mary, returning to her sleepy hometown of Ashbury MI after spending some time away. This is the sort of station where you have to flag down the train to get it to stop, although it seems surprisingly big for such a town. Mary returns to the rooming house where she had apparently lived, one run by the Veeches (Florence Bates and Charles Judels). Dad drinks a lot and works at the train station, and has an adult son in Kenny (George Raft, who by the mid-1940s is definitely on the way down in his career), who drinks a lot and plays poker. They've also got an adult daughter who's engaged to be married.

Kenny apparently used to be Mary's boyfriend, and he's none too happy seeing her come home from the big city wearing a fur coat, wondering who would give her such a pricey gift. Mary, for her part, may or may not want Kenny back, even though he doesn't seem to have changed his ways at all. So she starts taking up with Lew Lenta (Tom Conway), who runs the sort of nightclub that you'd think they don't have in a sleepy town like Ashbury that only has a whistle-stop train station. But if the town didn't have such a club, we wouldn't have any romantic involvement for the finale. Working for Lew is a bartender Gitlow (Victor McLaglen), who also happens to be reasonably good friends with Kenny.

There's a long scene at the county fair, which doesn't seem to serve much purpose, although it does have a few things happen. First is that somebody takes Gitlow's handgun off of him, pick-pocket style, and plants it on Kenny. Mary is able to find it and take it off of Kenny, and one presumes she gives it to Lew, as Lew eventually winds up with the gun when the real action begins. The other big thing to happen at the fair is an accident in which a young woman falls off the dance platform, suffering a serious injury that she blames on Kenny, to the point that when Kenny finally visits her in the hospital, she goes stark raving bonkers with rage.

The subplot of Kenny's sister getting married, at least, has a bit more of a payoff. Kenny and Gitlow miss the wedding because Gitlow gets a call on the morning of the wedding that he should bring Kenny over to Lew's club so that the two can kiss and make up, well, without the kissing of course. Now, the logical course of action would be for Kenny and Gitlow to point out that they're about to go to a wedding, and could the reconciliation wait until after the wedding. But no. They're stupid enough to go to the club, where somebody has committed a murder with Gitlow's gun. Since he'll be the prime suspect, they flee, but the police have already been called. They try to escape the police but their gas tank gets shot, and eventually Kenny gets shot in the arm too. Thankfully they're able to hop a train.

But there's still a production code out there, which means that something is going to have to happen to exonerate Kenny and bring out the real killer, something that happens when Gitlow goes back to Ashbury.

I found as I was watching Whistle Stop that I had the same problem a lot of the IMDb reviewers had. The movie only runs 81 minutes, but it takes about an hour for the real action to begin. The first hour is slow and introduces characters who don't much matter and events that don't make much sense (such as the injured woman). Mary also has character motivations that don't make much sense: why did she return to town in the first place, and then why did she take up with Lew. The finale only partially makes up for the slow first hour.

Whistle Stop is one of those movies that's nice to have on a cheap box set, but even this cheap box set has had better movies of the ones I've watched.

Crime does not pay, but not MGM-style

I've mentioned the MGM Crime Does Not Pay shorts on a couple of occasions. Recently, I watched an odd little movie that shares the message of those shorts, but does it in an entirely different way: You and Me.

The movie starts off with a song about how you need money to get whatever you want, before we wind up in Morris' department store. Helen (Sylvia Sidney) is one of the shop clerks, and she's just found a woman trying to shoplift a satin blouse. The woman begs Helen not to be turned over to the authorities. When another clerk, Joe (George Raft), shows up to ask Helen if there's a problem, she lets the shoplifter off the hook by claiming there's a flaw in the blouse and the department store shouldn't be putting out gods like this.

Joe actually loves Helen, but there's a problem. He's an ex-convict, finishing up his parole. Mr. Morris (Harry Carey), who owns the store, believes in giving ex-cons jobs as a way of rehabilitating them, but the parolees are still under all sorts of restrictions, such as having to report to their parole officer constantly and not being allowed to get married. So Joe hasn't been willing to reveal his love to Helen up until now. Even then, he's decided that he doesn't want to saddle Helen with an ex-con for a wife, he's going to go west to California instead.

Helen is having nothing of it. She loves Joe too, and she decides that she's going to push the issue herself, asking Joe to marry her! Naturally, he accepts, and the two have a quickie wedding before starting off a life of marital bliss in her rooming house run by a very nice older couple who don't know anything about Joe's past.

They, and Joe himself, don't know much about Helen's past. It turns out that she too is a parolee, but her parole isn't up yet. So she's still under the prohibition on marriage, and she'd get in huge trouble if her parole officer or pretty much anybody but her landlords found out about the marriage. So she makes up a lie to Joe about Morris not wanting his employees to get married to each other.

Joe is obviously going to find out about Helen's lie at some point. Meanwhile, he and some of the other parolees working at Morris' (played by, among others, Roscoe Karns, Warren Hymer, and a young Robert Cummings) are getting approached by the big guy, Mickey (Barton MacLane) to do a job stealing from Morris' department store. Joe wasn't certain at first, but once he's learned his wife has been lying to him, he decides to go ahead with the job.

And here is where the story gets really weird. (Naturally, spoilers abound.) Helen decides once she hears about it from Gimpy (Hymer's character) that she's going to inform Morris. Normally, we'd get the police rounding up the bad guys as the Production Code would have retired. In You and Me, however, Morris has his detectives interrupt Joe and the gang in flagrante delicto, and then have Helen give the guys a lecture on the actual financial figures on crime not paying! It's a really bizarre resolution, but since the gang decides not to go ahead with the crime, it must have satisfied the enforcers of the Production Code.

You and Me, despite being a strange film, works and is quite interesting for all its weirdness. The casting is interesting, what with Sidney being an out-and-out con; ditto Karns and even more so Cummings. Nobody stands out as being particularly good or particularly bad, but together and under the direction of Fritz Lang they make a movie that absolutely needs to be seen at least once.

You and Me was released by Paramount; as with almost all of Paramount's talkies from before 1950, the rights were acquired by Universal. Many of these movies have the modern day Universal logo at the beginning, but You and Me had the 1930s vintage logo of a plane flying around the globe! The movie has received a DVD release from Universal's mod scheme, although it might be nicer had it been part of a box set.

Some dawns I die, some I don't

A few years back I bought a four-film set of James Cagney roles. I did a review of City for Conquest quite some time ago, and recently sat down to watch Each Dawn I die when a search of the blog suggested that I've never done a review of it before.

Cagney plays Frank Ross, an intrepid reporter for a big-city newspaper. He's investigating District Attorney Jesse Hanley (Thurston Hall), who is running for governor but corrupt as all get-out, as Frank spots him and aides burning the evidence late one night in an industrial zone. (Why Frank didn't take pictures is beyond me.) The story pisses Hanley off so much that he decides to frame Ross, much the way that the bad guys in North by Northwest made Cary Grant appear drunk.

Of course, in this case, the "drunk driving" causes a crash that kills three kids, so Frank gets sent up the river for a long time, up to 20 years. Frank's colleagues on the newspaper vow to get him freed, but it's not going to be easy. On the way to prison, Frank meets one of his fellow prisoners-to-be, "Hood" Stacey (George Raft), a big-time gangster who's being sent to prison for 199 years. Stacey, being a gangster, has enemies in this prison from the rival gang, and the prison guards don't much care if the gang members want to bump each other off.

Frank makes a friend in Stacey, however, when he trips a guy who was about to stab Stacey. But one of Stacey's rivals gets stabbed to death during the prison's movie night. This, however, gives Stacey and Frank ideas. Stacey plans an escape which will involved going on trial for the murder that he didn't actually commit, something which will require Frank to finger him. In exchange, Stacey, once on the outside, will look for the folks who were working for Hanley to set Frank up.

It doesn't quite work that way, though. Frank, being a reporter, tips off his newspaper to the escape attempt saying something big is going to happen at the trial. The attempt does succeed, but the press coverage pisses Stacey off, so he decides to renege on his part of the bargain. The prison authorities assume Frank was in on it, so when he won't name names, they put him in solitary confinement. And Frank's girlfriend Joyce (Jane Bryan), pissed that Stacey isn't holding up his end of the deal, begs Stacey to reconsider....

Each Dawn I Die is the sort of movie where it's easy to see why it was so popular back in the day. It has the bite typical of the Warner Bros. movies of the 30s, and Cagney is as good as always. The one odd thing I found, however, was George Raft. His character, despite being a gangster sent up for 199 years, seems rather laid back, frankly unnaturally so. For whatever reason, this bugged me the whole movie.

Not that the movie is bad by any means. It's definitely worth a watch. In addition to the box set at Amazon you can also watch it via Prime Video if you can do the streaming thing.

Night after Night

A few months back, I bought a 3-disc collection of Mae West movies. Among the movies in the collection that I hadn't seen before is Night After Night.

Mae West is neither the star here, nor the female lead, this being her first film. The star is George Raft, playing Joe Anton. Joe owns a speakeasy in New York, assisted by high right-hand man Leo (Roscoe Karns). Joe's doing well enough for himself, but he's got some problems. One is Frankie (Bradley Page), a gangster who wants to buy the place what with this still being the Prohibition era and gansters not wanting competition.

Joe, however, seems more concerned with his romantic life. There's a woman named Healy (Constance Cummings) who comes into the place every night and sits alone. She seems much too high-class for Joe, so Joe has been taking lessons in being classier from Miss Jellyman (Alison Skipworth). Joes past, of course, threatens to make a mess of the whole situation. There's Iris (Wynne Gibson), a flapper type who seems to be a bit too much of ill repute. And then Joe gets a phone call from Maudie (Mae West). She's apparently returned from abroad, and would like to start seeing Joe again. Joe doesn't want this, presumably because it wouldn't look good to Healy or Jellyman, although it's never quite revealed what West's past is. (She does give an explanation, although you have to believe she's making it up.)

The main thrust of the movie has Joe pursuing Healy, who is also being pursued by Dick Bolton (Louis Calhern), and variously winning and losing her heart against backdrops of those other women and the gangsters wanting the place. To be honest, the movie is really a bit of a mixed bag. The main plot never quite goes anywhere -- or, at least, it veers wildly from one place to the next -- and it's more up to the comic relief to try to save the movie. Roscoe Karns does well as Leo, having to fix the messes created by Joe's inattention to detail. Skipworth also does well as Jellyman, both in her early prim-and-proper scenes and then later after she's had too much to drink. But, of course, it's Mae West who steals the show. She has a memorable first scene in which she responds to a coat-check girl who says, "Goodness, what beautiful diamonds!" with "Goodness had nothing to do with it, dearie." She then proceeds to worm her way into a dinner with Healy and Jellyman, teaching Jellyman a few things about how not to be the stuffy part of high-class all the time. West only gets three or four scenes, but she shines in them.

Several of the reviewers at IMDb say that Night After Night would probably be forgotten if it weren't for the presence of Mae West. I have to agree with this assessment. The movie is a run-of-the-mill pre-Code in many ways, up until Mae shows up, and then wow! The box set I got that included this movie is under $20, so it's not much to drop for nine movies. (And you get She Done Him Wrong, too.)

They Drive By Night

They Drive By Night showed up on TCM several months ago; surprisingly enough, it was one of those movies that I had never seen before. It's more than enjoyable enough, and so I waited for it to show up again on TCM so that I could do a full-length blog post on it. That TCM airing is tomorrow morning at 8:00 AM.

George Raft gets top billing as Joe Fabrini, who, together with his brother Paul (Humphrey Bogart, a year before success in High Sierra made him always be top-billed), runs an independent trucking operation. Well, it's only one truck, which the two of them drive together so that they can spend more hours of the day on the road as they ferry fruit between San Francisco and Los Angeles. Trucking that many hours a day can be dangerous, as one could fall asleep at the wheel, causing an accident. Indeed, we'll see a couple of accidents, but more on that in a bit. There's also the eternal struggle to stay one step ahead of the financing company in making the payments. Anyhow, at one of the vintage 1940 truck stops -- remember, there was no interstate highway system with divided highways and fancy rest areas at this point -- they meet a hash slinger who wants to get away from it all. So Cassie (Ann Sheridan) gets in the truck with our two brothers. She begins to fall in love with Joe, while Paul already has a wife down in Los Angeles.

As I said earlier, we're going to see a couple of accidents. The first is witnessed by the Fabrinis, and kills a fellow trucker. The second, however, involves the Fabrinis, and changes the plot of the movie, as Paul loses an arm. This makes him unfit to drive, and there goes the business. So Joe goes to work for the Carlsen trucking operation. It's run by Ed Carlsen (Alan Hale), a man who was a small-time trucker like the Fabrinis but made good and now has a fleet of trucks. He's also got a trophy wife named Lana (Ida Lupino). And therein lies another problem. Although Ed has made good financially, with a nice house including a detached garage with automatic opening and closing by electric eye, he hasn't made good socially. Oh, he tries, but he can be quite the drunken fool. Not a bad person; just one with no social graces. The irritates Lana no end, and when she sees what a good worker Joe is, she hatches a plan.

Lana has fallen in love with Joe, and she intends to get Ed drunk, have him park the car in the garage, and then have it close on him with the car's motor still running, which will lead Ed passed out drunk in the car to die of carbon monoxide poisoning! Oh, Ed does die all right, and Lana really starts putting the moves on Joe, who had no desire whatsoever to see Ed die and doesn't particularly have any romantic feelings for Lana either. But this being a movie in the Code era, you know Lana isn't going to be able to get away with all of this.

They Drive By Night is, for the most part, a darn entertaining movie. George Raft, who generally wasn't the most talented actor, does OK here. Ann Sheridan gets to deliver a lot of zesty lines. Bogart is underused, but the studio didn't know he was on the cusp of stardom. Alan Hale is playing the same garrulous, gregarious figure he did in a whole bunch of character roles, from It Happened One Night to The Adventures of Robin Hood and beyond. Ida Lupino, however, really gets to chew the scenery. At times, it's a problem, as the Code forces her to pay for her sins, making her veer nearly into territory plumbed by Bette Davis in Now, Voyager while doing it. It's laughable in that it's rather over the top, and not quite fitting in to an otherwise solid drama. But it doesn't sink the movie, which overall succeeds in entertaining, even if it falls a bit short of greatness.

The TCM Shop lists They Drive By Night as being part of one of those four movie box sets, this one of Humphrey Bogart movies.

When good TV characters go bad

There are some actors out there who are generally best remembered for characters they played on the small screen. Two such actors show up together to conspire to commit murder in the 1949 film Red Light, airing tomorrow morning at 6:00 AM on TCM

George Raft is not one of those actors; he's the star of the movie, however. He plays Johnny Torno, who runs a successful trucking company in San Francisco. He's got a brother Jess (Arthur Franz) who is a Catholic priest who spent the last several years serving as an army chaplain in World War II, and winning a medal for his heroic work in a POW camp. The kid brother is finally coming home to a happy reunion with his brother and an assignment to a parish of his own in northern California.

Meanwhile, back at the prison ranch, you've got Perry Mason. Er, not Perry Mason, but Raymond Burr playing Nick Cherney. Nick was a bookkeeper at the Torno trucking company, until he rather foolishly decided to embezzle a substantial amount of money from Torno. Torno sent Nick to prison, and Nick wants revenge. Fortunately he's got a way of exacting revenge while keeping the perfect alibi: his prison comrade, Col. Sherman Potter from the M*A*S*H unit. Er, actually it's Harry Morgan, back in the days when he was going by "Henry" in screen credits, playing fellow prisoner Rocky. Rocky is gonig to get out on parole a few days before Nick, so Nick has Rocky kill Jess while Nick is still in prison.

Rocky shoots the brother to death in his hotel room, but the brother survives long enough for Johnny to get there. Johnny hears his brother's dying words, which is that the answer he seeks can be found in the Bible. Johnny looks through his brother's bible, but can't find the name of the killer written in it anywhere. Johnny figures that Jess must have written it in the hotel room's Gideon Bible -- but that's been taken from the room! Johnny tries to find that bible, and even enlists the help of one of the people who had the room after his brother was killed (Virginia Mayo) in his attempt to find it. Mayo, meanwhile, becomes a bit frightened of the lengths Johnny is willing to go to to gain revenge....

Red Light is one of those lower-budget noirish movies which is actually quite entertaining. Raymond Burr, to be honest, had played several heavies before becoming Perry Mason (most notably the killer in Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window), and is good here as Nick. Harry Morgan, I think, didn't play quite so many heavies, but he's just as good as Burr. George Raft never had much range, but his man looking for revenge character fits into that limited range. The one problem with the movie is that it has any number of plot holes. First off is the question of why Jess is being billeted in a hotel room. He's an army chaplain who has a brother who's thrilled to see him. You'd think that either the military would have room at a army base for him; he'd stay at the rectory of the bishop's cathedral; or he'd stay at his brother's apartment. More importantly, you'd wonder why Jess didn't write anything in his own Bible. It would have been just as easy for him to get his personal bible from his suitcase after being shot as it would have been for him to get the Gideon Bible from the desk drawer. (And how big were Gideon Bibles back then? The last time I was in a hotel room that had a Gideon Bible, the thing was surprisingly small and wouldn't have had enough room to write much of anything.)

Despite its plot flaws, Red Light is a fun movie. Sadly, it doesn't seem to have gotten a DVD release, so you're going to have to watch the TCM showing.