Rock Hudon Romantic Comedy #8857432896578234768902

Another of the stars in the 2025 Summer Under the Stars was Gina Lollobrigida. She made a pair of movies with Rock Hudson. I already did a post on the first of them, Come September. The second is Strange Bedfellows, which, being a Universal movie, hadn't shown up on TCM before. (That would also explain why I hadn't heard of it.) In any case, I recorded it and recently got around to watching it to put up this post on it.

The movie starts off with an opening scene told in narration. In London in what would be the late 1950s, Carter Harrison (Rock Hudson) is an American working for the American-Allied Petroleum company in London. He's the sort of stereotypical conservative businessman type, but on his first day in London he meets bohemian Italian artist Toni Vincente (Gina Lollobrigida). They go to bed together that night, already married. And then they wake up the next morning to find out that they have nothing in common and that Toni can have a rather violent temper. So the two separate, which is also a bit unsurprising considering that Carter's work takes him to all sorts of oil-rich sheikdoms and similar places.

Fast forward to the present day. Although the husband and wife haven't seen each other for seven years and don't really have any intention of ever seeing each other again, they also haven't really bothered to go through the motions of getting a divorce. At least not until now, when TOni starts the proceedings which is also going to have them meet, at least with their solicitors in tow. But there's also a catch that comes up.

Carter's PR man with the firm, Richard Bramwell (Gig Young), informs Carter that he's up for a promotion to an executive position when he gets back to Boston. However, this being a conservative business, the president J.L. Stevens (Howard St. John) would like a family man in the position. Carter getting a divorce might be a problem, but then having Toni as she is would also cause issues. In addition to the bohemian artist type, she also involves herself in the sort of social causes that would make conservative executives blush. Since this is the 60s, there's nothing environmental here; it's more helping the third world and more importantly, freedom of expression, complaining about the American museum not wanting to display a supposedly controversial sculpture (never actually shown). Harry Jones (Edward Judd) is the point man for the organization, and you get the impression that he'd like to romance Toni if that divorce ever went through.

So Carter is trying to convince Toni that he really loves here, while Bramwell is working on a scheme that might prevent Toni from going ahead with the anti-American protest. Bramwell's scheme involves another oil-rich region where the restive natives are busy killing UN diplomats, and saying that Carter is going to be sent there to negotiate following a briefing in the Bahamas. That fake briefing is just a ruse to get Carter and Toni on vacation together before the board meeting in Boston. Harry, as you might well guess, figures that there's something hinky first about Carter trying to repair his relationship with Toni, and then all this stuff about Carter having to go on a potentially fatal diplomatic mission. So he sets up a ruse of his own to try to determine what's really going on.

This is the sort of romantic comedy where you have to figure that the Rock Hudon and Gina Lollobrigida characters are going to end up together at the end, so the question is how exactly they get there. There are parts of Strange Bedfellows that are good, but the resolution relies on stuff that's way too much a series of coincidences that feel more forced than funny. It's a bit of a shame considering the cast who all put in respectable performances. It's not really their fault that the scrip is letting them down.

Teacher's Pet

Every now and then, it surprises me to come across a studio-era film with big stars that I haven't seen before. Then again, TCM doesn't have the rights to films from studios like Universal and Paramount, so some of the stuff that's A-level but not famous doesn't show up on TCM all that often. A good example of this is Teacher's Pet, a late-1950s Paramount movie with two big names leading the cast: Clark Gable and Doris Day. So I recorded it the last time TCM ran it.

Clark Gable plays James Gannon, who works at the sort of big-city newspaper that was a staple of 1930s movies, with a hard-boiled editor trying to break news, especially on things like lurid murders, and up-and-coming reporters going out there to get the stories. One would-be reporter at the paper, who is only a copy boy since he can't get a real reporter's job, is Barney Kovac (Nick Adams), whose mom would rather he go to college.

You'll note that this is an era when reporters didn't necessarily have to go to J-school, although there were already college courses for journalism. One person teaching night classes at such a school is Erica Stone (Doris Day), whose father ages ago wrote for a small-town paper. As a result of her father's experiences, Erica has decided views on what journalism should be like, which isn't quite like what Gannon does. Erica has written to Gannon to give a guest lecture about city journalism, but Gannon turns it down because he really has a thing about journalism school as well as thoughts about lady reporters.

Still, Jim's boss insists he go to the class, so Jim goes undercover, pretending to be a salesman with the name Jim Gallagher. Surprisingly, Erica doesn't recognize him. If she did, we wouldn't have a rest of the movie. But Erica is so insulting to Gannon that he decides he's going to audit the class after all, if only to be able to show Erica just how wrong she is about what real reporting is like. Unsurprisingly, since Jim is a real reporter, he's able to handle the first assignment that Erica gives the students and come up with a much better story than any other student possibly could.

This leads to Erica, still not recognizing Jim for who he really is, offering to tutor him privately outside of class hours, since he can "learn" more that way than in class. The next unsurprising thing is that Jim falls in love with Erica. This is a bit of a problem considering that Erica already has a boyfriend in Dr. Hugo Pine (Gig Young), an intellectual who is superior to Jim at all the things that you'd stereotypically expect a female college professor to want in a man. Since Clark Gable is top-billed, however, you know things are going to work out such that it's Jim who winds up with Erica at the end of the movie, despite his dishonesty about his true identity.

Teacher's Pet is one of those movies that feels like it's breaking no new ground, but what makes it worth watching is the acting ability of the two leads, who take to the material well and make a surprisingly appealing couple despite their age difference. They fit their parts like wearing a comfortable pair of shoes, making for an enjoyable watch despite there being nothing new here. They're also helped by a pretty good screenplay and good supporting performances. If you can find Teacher's Pet, watch it and be entertained for two hours.

A Ticklish Affair

Another of those movies that I had seen show up on TCM several times in the past, but had never actually watched beyond a few small snippets, was the family romantic comedy A Ticklish Affair. So with that in mind, the last time it showed up on TCM I recorded it, and only recently finally got around to watching that recording. It's showing up on TCM tomorrow, August 25, at 8:00 AM as part of a Summer Under the Stars day of movies dedicated to Shirley Jones, so with that in mind I've schedule the post for today.

A bunch of sailors from the Coronado Naval Air Station in the San Diego area are on an excercise in the Pacific Ocean just off land. Looking off to shore, one of the sailors sees coming from some place on shore the same sort of blinking light that ships use to communicate to one another in Morse code. (Technically these lights aren't blinking, of course; it's that the venetian blind-like slats that obscure the light make it look like it's blinking.) The only thing is, this light is blinking "SOS", which unsurprisingly gets their attention. The Navy sends a couple of people out to investigate, and find that it looks like the signal is coming from a regular house.

A group led by Cmdr. Key Weedon (Gig Young) walks right in, thinking it's a real emergency, and find a woman under the sink. That woman is Amy Martin (Shirley Jones), a widowed mother with three sons who are a bit of a handful since they have a knack for getting into trouble even when they don't mean to. The kids, not having a father, immediately like Weedon and Weedon, for his part, likes Amy. Amy would be perfectly willing to consider Weedon a friend, but she absolutely doesn't want to go any farther than that. Her husband was in the navy and died in service, which would explain why she doesn't want to get involved with another Navy man. That and having to move around, since she feels, not without reason, that the young boys need a stable home.

As for the Morse code light, that was given to the boys by their uncle Simon (Red Buttons), a pilot who has a bit of an eccentric streak himself, since who would give young boys that sort of blinker as a present. His next gift for them is even more eccentric: a canister of helium and the sort of weather balloons that the navy used in those days. He then explains to the boys that such balloons are used in astronaut training: gravity on the moon is lower than that on earth, so putting a bunch of balloons on men with a ground harness supposedly simulates what walking on the moon would be like.

Meanwhile, Key keeps pursuing Amy, and would like to propose marriage, but he gets a transfer to Italy, which is really going to make Amy hesitant to accept. But the romantic relationship between Key and Amy gets interrupted by another SOS signal coming from the house. Grover, is trying out the helium balloon thing when he slips the tether and starts floating off, although he seems blithely unware of the danger. Somehow the phone line at the Martin house is out, so Key is going to have to go over to the Martin house to find out what's going on. This leads to the climax as the entire naval base is put into action to save Grover.

A Ticklish Affair starts off as a relatively conventional, if inoffensive, family rom-com. Indeed, just a few months earlier, Jones appeared in The Courtship of Eddie's father, only as the woman gaining a family as the next-door widower is pushed into a relationship with here character. But then that climax comes, and that really takes the movie in a direction that doesn't suit it was as it makes for a finale that's supposed to be zany but is more tedious. Even without such a mishandled climax, however, A Ticklish Affair wouldn't have been as good as The Courtship of Eddie's Father. So you might want to watch this one once just to see how a reasonably premise can go wrong.

Don't call me Byron Barr

Tonight into tomorrow brings the second night of Barbara Stanwyck's turn as TCM's Star of the Month. One of her movies that I hadn't seen before and recorded the last time TCM ran it is The Gay Sisters. It comes on as part of the Star of the Month salute tomorrow (March 13) at 1:00 PM, so I made a point of watching the movie to be able to do a post on it here.

The movie opens with a brief establishing scene set about 25 years before the main action. As the movie was released in 1942 and set more or less at that time (possibly just before Pearl Harbor although World War II doesn't play into the action), that means the opening is set in the mid-1910s, which is the run-up to World War I. The Gaylords are one of the richest families in America, and the current patriarch, Penn Gaylord (Donald Woods), has a wife and three young daughters. Or should I say had a wife. She was somehow traveling alone on the Lusitania, which as we all know was torpedoed and sunk in the Atlantic. Eventually the Americans entered the war, and Daddy Gaylord for some weird reason went off to fight despite having those three young daughters and presumably being the same sort of captain of industry as Jerry Lewis in Which Way to the Front. Dad gets it in France, leaving the thre girls orphans.

Two dozen years pass, and probating the will has been a nightmare. Apparently, somebody over in France claims that Papa Gaylord wrote a codicil before getting killed in action in which he gave ten percent of the family fortune to a French children's charity. The remaining Gaylords back home naturally contested this, and somehow international legal delays have dragged the case out for all these years, while the Gaylord sisters grew up and slowly lost the estate's cash. They have, however, held on to the land, because family tradition has it that land is more important than money.

The three sisters are Fiona (Barbara Stanwyck), the eldest, who is foster mom to an orphan child Austin; Evelyn (Geraldine Fitzgerald), who married an English nobleman and has come back to America in the only sop to the fact that there's now another war going on in Europe; and Susie (Nancy Coleman), who got married except that it's one of those loveless marriages she'd like annulled. Her unseen husband is willing to do it for a price, but since the money has been spent on contesting the will, Susie doesn't have the money. So although she's in a relationship with painter Gig Young (the print TCM ran has the character being played by the Gig Young who became a prominent supporting actor; he was born Byron Barr and took his stage name from this character although I don't know if he did that before the movie was first released or TCM only has a re-release print). Complicating matters is that when Evelyn returns to America, she sees Gig and starts pursuing him.

But since Barbara Stanwyck is the star here, she gets the biggest complication. That comes in the form of Charles Barclay (George Brent), who is contesting the will on behalf of that French charity. Of course, he really wants the land the Gaylord house is built on because he's a land developer who has bought all the surrounding land in order to be able to build a skyscraper. He also seems to know quite a bit about Fiona's past. More, even, than Fiona's first lawyer Gibbon (Gene Lockhart) who gets replaced with Ralph Pedloch (Donald Crisp). Even the poor foster kid gets dragged into all of this.

The Gay Sisters was based on a novel that I'm guessing was popular at the time to the extent that you can see why a studio would want to turn it into a movie. However, something goes wrong in the adaptation, which I think is the screenplay since it seems to go all over the place, with the reveal of Fiona's past being a bit bizarre. And if the Gaylords were supposed to value land over money, couldn't they have just given up that ten percent right at the beginning?

Still, The Gay Sisters isn't a terrible movie. It's just not what you'd want to show as the first movie for any of the main players involved.

Touched by a Mink

Many years back, well before I started the blog, I saw the Cary Grant/Doris Day romantic comedy That Touch of Mink. I never got to blog about it, so when Cary Grant was TCM's Star of the Month and they got the rights to show it, I recorded it in order that I could finally watch it again to do a blog post on it.

Under the opening credits, we get to meet both Grant and Day's characters. Grant is Philip Shayne, an executive who rides through Manhattan in a chauffeured limousine. Day plays Cathy Timberlake, an unemployed computer operator in the days when computers meant punch-card programming and a device that took up a whole room. As she's on her way to the unemployment office, Philip's limousine accidentally drives through a puddle, splasing it all over Cathy and ruining her outfit. He wants to make it up to her, so sends his executive assistant Roger (Gig Young) out to try to find her.

Cathy, meanwhile, is facing trouble at the unemployment office, as the man in charge of her case, Beasley (John Astin) keeps putting the moves on her, which is thoroughly unprofessional and should have gotten him fired even in those days, let alone today. She lives with her best friend Connie (Audrey Meadows), who works at the Automat across the street from Shayne's office. So it's only natural that Shayne is going to see Cathy on the street and get Roger to talk to her.

Both of them would like to show Philip what-for, so Roger brings Cathy up to the office. However, Cathy is so totally taken by Philip that it's love at first sight for her. And it's similarly love at first sight for Philip. And since he's fabulously wealthy, he's able to take Cathy all over the place and do things that no mere mortal could do, like get Cathy into the dugout at a Yankees baseball game, which is an excuse for cameos for a couple of the Yankees' stars of the day.

But it's fairly quickly that Cathy realizes the relationship is getting serious, which means the possibility of sex -- and sex outside of marriage is a somewhat controversial thing for the early 1960s. Cathy is beginning to think she'd rather be married. At the same time, Cathy and Philip's friends are having misunderstandings of their own, with Connie still wondering whether Philip is taking advantage of her, while Roger seeing an analyst who completely gets the situation wrong.

Cathy finally comes to the conclusion that she's going to have to force the issue. She goes back to Beasley, and gets him to take her out in such a way that Philip will absolutely find out and do whatever it takes to win her back, leading to a climax that is madcap and more reminiscent of the old screwball comedies, with an ending that satisfies the Production Code.

That Touch of Mink is a physically pretty movie to watch, with lovely color showing off early 1960s design as it actually was (more or less), and not the idealized view people today have of the Kennedy era. As for the story, it feels really dated, and I hate to say that both Cary Grant and Doris Day are much too old for their roles. They do the best they can, and they're both still appealing as actors, but at times I can't help but want to reach through the screen and smack the writers.

But the appeal of Grant and Day makes That Touch of Mink a passable enough movie with flaws that some people are going to find easier to overlook than I did.

Old Acquaintance

Another of the movies that's been sitting on my DVR for a couple of months is Old Acquaintance. I don't think this one is coming up soon, but it's on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive, which is why I sat down to watch it recently and do a post on it.

Bette Davis plays Kit Morrow, a woman who's written a critically successful novel in 1924. She's returning to her smallish home town to be fêted and do a presentation on the novel, and her childhood best friend Millie Drake (Miriam Hopkins) is going to pick her up at the train station. Millie stayed behind to marry Preston (John Loder) and do the wealthy bored housewife thing -- and she's clearly jealous of Kit. She decides that she's going to start writing novels herself, although she has different ideas about what to write than Kit.

Fast forward eight or nine years. Kit lives a nice life doing the New York writer thing, currently having a play about to open while her latest "serious" novel is on the back burner. Millie's first, trashy novel was a big success, and she's been cranking out similar trashy stuff on a roughly annual basis like Sidney Sheldon or Danielle Steel in more recent times. She's also got a young daughter Deirdre (nicknamed Deedee), while Kit has remained unmarried and childless.

But Millie is still somehow jealous of Kit, something that's always bothered Preston, who has remained somewhat of a background figure while his wife has become the successful one in the family. He's resentful of this and has fallen in love with Kit, but while Kit is certainly a friend of his, she knows that it wouldn't do any good to start a relationship with Preston. So Preston decides that he's just going to walk out on Millie and file for divorce. This sends Millie over the deep end.

Or should I say it sends Miriam Hopkins over the deep end. Fast forward another nine or so years, and it's about 1942 (the movie was released in 1943). World War II is on, and Kit is on a fund-raising drive for the American Red Cross, while Millie is still a successful author. Kit has a guy who's interested in her, Rudd Kendall (Gig Young), but Kit isn't quite interested mostly because of the age difference, since she doesn't want to be a burden on a younger guy.

Who should hear the latest radio benefit drive but Preston, who's now a major in the Army? Having heard it, he decides that he wants to see Kit again, which gives Kit the opportunity to bring an adult Deedee (Dolores Moran) into her father's life. Millie finds out about all this, and starts engaging in hilarious histrionics.

Old Acquaintance is one of those "women's pictures" which were a big thing in Hollywood back in the 1930s and 1940s, with melodramatic story lines that might make a lot of guys crings. Indeed, as drama, I didn't find myself caring for it all that much. It's not exactly bad, but I didn't think of it as anything special.

What does make this movie a must-see is the performance of Miriam Hopkins. She and Davis had starred together in The Old Maid four years earlier, and supposedly that absolutely hated each other. So Hopkins must have wanted to upstage Davis or something, which would explain why she's so hilariously over the top, especially in the third act. That, or she saw some of Davis' rants and decided to emulate them. It results in a famous scene of Davis grabbing Hopkins and literally shaking some sense into her. It wasn't the intent that people find this stuff funny, but I certainly was laughing at it.

Old Acquaintance doesn't necessariy succeed in doing what it set out to do, but boy is it still a fun ride.

Hunt down lots of people

Tomorrow is the birth anniversary of actor Gig Young, so TCM is running several of his movies. One that's not seen very often is Hunt the Man Down, which will be airing at 7:45 AM.

Bill Jackson (James Anderson) works at a bar in Salinas, CA, together with Sally (Lynne Roberts), who holds a flame for him even though he seems reluctant to reciprocate. One night after closing, she's tallying up the receipts when an assailant comes in. Bill stops the would-be robbery, which ought to make him a hero, except that he's a rather reluctant hero, not even wanting his picture in the paper.

There's a good reason for that. An assistant DA down in Los Angeles shows his boss a coupy of the paper with the candid shot Bill didn't want taken, and the DA eventually recognizes Bill as Richard Kincaid, whom the DA had prosecuted for murder a dozen years earlier. Kincaid took an opportunity to escape since he knew there was no way the jury was going to acquit him what with the way the evidence was stacked against him. He's finally been found, and the DA is determined to get a conviction this time.

Kincaid has no money, so he's assigned a lawyer from the public defender's office, one Paul Bennett (Gig Young). Kincaid tells the story of the case. He was at a bar one night when he accidentally spilled his drink on a woman. That led to her party inviting him over to their table, which led to his going up to her apartment with them for a party. However, she's married, and when the husband shows up, he's pissed, thinking Kincaid is the woman's lover. The husband was shot, and naturally Kincaid is prosecuted.

The obvious thing to do is to look for all the witnesses. Technically, the DA's office is supposed to do this too, but they've already got the testimony from the previous trial. There were three couples plus the wife of the murder victim, and pretty much everybody seems to have disappeared, except for college football star "Brick" Appleby (Willard Parker). On interviewing him, Paul finds that he was drafted and blinded in World War II, and that his fiancée who was at that party died while he was in the hospital recovering.

So Paul and his retired cop father Wallace (Harry Shannon) go to skid row to see if they can get information from the stool pigeon drunks who hang out there. This leads them to "Lefty" McGuire (John Kellogg), who had been a ladies' man but is now an inveterate drunk. He was married to Alice (Mary Anderson) at the time, but they're divorced now.

Lefty takes a powder after this meeting, and when Wallace finds him again, Wallace finds a couple of thugs trailing him, eventually shooting at him and Lefty! And then some thug finds where Alice lives and tries to beat her to death too! Will Paul be able to find all the witness and piece together what really happened?

Hunt the Man Down is a B movie with noirish elements. Other than Gig Young, the cast is chock full of supporting actors, but it's something that works well for a movie like this which is decidedly about the less glamorous side of life. Everything about the movie says competently made but never rising to greatness. There's nothing wrong with that, except that in a few short years with the rise of TV something like this would probably have become an episode of Perry Mason or one of the many lawyer or detective shows.

I think anybody who likes noir or wants an hour of solid if unspectacular entertainment will enjoy Hunt the Man Down. It doesn't seem to be on DVD, so you're going to have to catch the rare TCM showing (I think the last time it ran was for Gig Young's birthday back in 2015).

Not part of Kirk Douglas day

This last day of TCM's Summer Under the Stars is dedicated to actor Kirk Douglas, still alive at 102 unless he's died very recently and the death hasn't been announced yet. I should mention that among the movies airing is Town Without Pity at 6:15 PM. It's one that I haven't seen in many years, and seems to be out of print on DVD. Douglas plays a lawyer for the US Army who gets the task of defending some soldiers stationed in Germany who are being brought up on rape charges, accused of having raped one of the locals. The thing I remember most about the movie was the way translation of German was handled, in a very heavy-handed voiceover that didn't work well.

Anyhow, not having looked far enough forward on the TCM schedule to see that Douglas was going to be honored today, a few weeks back I decided to pop in one of the DVDs from the Kirk Douglas box set I picked up a few months back and watch For Love or Money, a 1963 film which shares its title with several other movies. So that's the Douglas movie you're getting a post on today, even though it's not airing on TCM.

Douglas plays Deke Gentry, a San Francisco lawyer and best friend of wealthy playboy businessman Sonny Smith (Gig Young). They're out on their yacht one day when a helicopter shows up overhead, with the equally wealthy Chloe Brasher (Thelma Ritter) as the passenger. She needs to see Deke about an urgent matter involving her daughters.

Chloe is a widow, and provisions were made in her husband's will regarding the three daughters, who are all very headstrong and not about to follow their mother's advice. According to the will, they've got trust funds set up for them, but the daughters will be cut off from the trust funds if they don't get married to people Mom considers acceptable. So Mom wants Deke to convince the daughters to accept him as the new trustee on the fund, and to marry the husbands she's selected for them.

That's not going to be easy. Daughter Bonnie (Julie Newmar) is what nowadays would probably be a social media influencer, except that they didn't have social media back in 1963. She's a fitness/beauty geek who's got $1/month subscribers the accounting of which is bringing her into trouble with the IRS. Agent Harvey Wofford (Dick Sargent) is assigned to the case, and he just happens to be the man Mom has selected for her! Jan (Leslie Parrish) is into beatnik artist types, and Mom thinks she should marry old friend Sam (William Windom). The biggest hurdle, however, is with eldest daughter Kate (Mitzi Gaynor). Mom's pick for her is... Sonny Smith. Finally to make certain things go as planned, Mom has a private detective Joe (William Bendix) assigned to watch everything.

Unsurprisingly, things don't go as planned, and you can probbly guess how. Getting Sonny to meet Kate hits a bunch of snags, and Deke realizes he's beginning to fall in love with Kate. Meanwhile, Jan sees Sonny, and perhaps she's going to fall in love with him instead of Sam. Now, I'd think that Mom should OK with Kate marrying a nice staid lawyer. And if she picked out Sonny as a husband for one of the daughters, why is it a bad thing if it turns out that another of the daughters were to marry him. But that would ruin the premise of the movie.

For Love or Money is formulaic, but it's a formula that works well enough for undemanding entertainment. Kirk Douglas didn't make very many comedies in his career, but he handles the material just fine. The three daughters are nice to look at, and the older stars (Ritter, Young, and Bendix) all fit their roles like a hand in a glove. There's nothing special here, but also nothing wrong.

The Douglas centennial box set isn't overly expensive, and with as many movies as you get, spending a few bucks for a formulaic trifle like this is no waste.