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.

The tower of whiteness

Another movie that I recorded some time back and has been sitting on my DVR waiting for me to watch it and do a post on it for the next airing is The White Tower. That next airing comes tomorrow, Sept. 17, at 8:45 AM, so today the post on it goes up.

The movie opens with a Carla Alten (Alida Valli) returning to the village of Kandermatt, Switzerland (IMDb says that, like The Passionate Friends, France is actually standing in for Switzerland here), not having been here since the war some years back. Andreas (Oskar Homolka) at the local inn recognizes her and likes her, but a lot of the other people in town aren't thrilled to see her, at least the mountain guides. It's revealed that Carla's father tried to climb the "White Tower", the mountain overlooking Kandermatt, before the war when Carla was last here with him, only to die in the attempt, which is why nobody involved with mountaineering wants to have anything to do with her.

An international cast of stock character types is spending time at the hotel: Martin Ordway (Glenn Ford) fought in the European theater of World War II, getting shot down and escaping to Switzerland, which is why he enjoys Kandermatt: it's a refuge where he doesn't have to face real life. Hein (Lloyd Bridges) is a German who was obviously a Nazi in the war; the first time we see him he's shirtless and obviously showing off his Aryan physical superiority. Dr. Radcliffe (Cedric Hardwicke) is a British geologist, and much too old to try to make the climb. Finally, there's DeLambre (Claude Rains), an alcoholic Frenchman who's come to Kandermatt to finish his latest book.

Carla needs an expedition of at least four people to do the climb, preferably six. But whom to pick? Carla doesn't particularly care for Hein, and with good reason, but he's also the best provisioned person in town. Ordway doesn't really want to go up the mountain, but eventually changes his mind because he's just so gosh darn in love with Carla, because there's another plot point we've never seen in a movie like this. Of course, the other men are all too old, but eventually all of the men join Carla, because why else would they be in the movie?

The expedition starts off well enough, and they make reasonably good time at least why they're going through the meadows and the lower climbs of the mountain that aren't so steep. But eventually they start getting to steeper sections where ropes are necessary, as well as portions that are more like rock climbing than mountain climbing. And wait until they get to the snow. As you might guess, with a bunch of disparate character types, there's going to be conflicts that open up between various characters. Will they be able to make it to the top? Will they be able to get back down if they do get to the top?

The White Tower is a nice enough looking movie, although heaven knows that it's formulaic. You get the feeling that RKO either had blocked funds they had to use in Europe, or were trying to lure some famous names with the promise of a working holidy in Europe. The White Tower isn't a terrible movie, but apart from the visuals it's not exactly a great movie either.

Marjorie Lawrence

Another of the movies that I had seen show up on TCM quite a bit, but for some reason never got around to watching, is yet another musical biopic: Interrupted Melody. So one of the more recent times it showed up on TCM, I made a point to put it on my DVR. It's got another airing, tomorrow, Sept. 3 at 6:00 AM, so I watched it to be able to put up a post for tomorrow's showing.

Eleanor Parker plays Marjorie Lawrence, and as the movie opens it's the mid-1920s on a farm in a rural part of Australia where Marjorie lives with the rest of her family including dad (Cecil Kellaway in a small role) and brother Cyril (Roger Moore in an early role). Marjorie is desperate to catch the train for Geelong, because there's a music competition being held there that she's been hoping to enter despite the fact that Dad doesn't quite approve. However, she wins the competition, and the prize of a music scholarship in Paris, so Dad figures that if God gave her this talent, she might as well use it.

On what we presume is her first day in Paris, she accidentally bumps into an American medical student, Thomas King (Glenn Ford). She then gets taken on as a student by a celebrated music teacher by singing outside the teacher's window, which makes no sense since she had supposedly won a scholarship in Paris. One would think such a prize involves having some one (or a school) engaged for the teaching already. But Marjorie works with the teacher, Cécile Gilly, and is eventually able to get a job with an opera company. Stardom follows although Dad dies, and Cyril serves as Marjorie's on again, off again manager.

Marjorie and Thomas keep running into each other even though it's implied that someone of more noble birth is more appropriate for Marjorie to be involved with. Not that she cares, as she eventually pursues Thomas to the point that she claims she's willing to give up her career to marry him. Thomas loves her and her singing, and he has no plans of letting her abandon the opera just to be his wife and the mother of his kids. Granted, balancing his obstetric practice with her career which has her traveling isn't necessarily going to be easy. But they do get married.

And then tragedy strikes. Marjorie is doing rehearsals for Tristan and Isolde, and she has trouble hitting some of the high notes. Worse, she takes a nasty fall which lands her in the hospital. The diagnosis is polio, which is a likely career ender. Except that with a movie like this, you have to expect that Marjorie might be able to overcome such a tragedy even if you didn't know that it's based on a true story.

Marjorie spends a while being pissed at the world since she's trapped in a wheelchair and doesn't have the vocal range she once did. It gets to the point that she considers suicide. But just as she's about to do that Thomas shows up to stop her and work with her to the point that one of Thomas' doctor friends suggests singing for the injured soldiers fighting World War II. (The real-life Lawrence contracted polio in 1941.) She's even able to return to opera in stagings that are modified to fit a singer who can't walk around the stage.

Interrupted Melody is a well-enough made movie, although I think even more than a lot of the other musician biopics I've done reviews on, it's the sort of material that's going to feel really dated. It's also opera, which is a genre that has a narrower appeal than the song standards that a lot of those other biopics had. And, in a move that surprised me on reading about the movie, MGM didn't have Marjorie Lawrence herself do the dubbing for Eleanor Parker.

So I have to say that I'm glad I've finally seen Interrupted Melody, but at the same time must admit that it's not my favorite and not the first thing I'd think of recommending to people for a movie of any of the stars involved or any of the themes in it.

Remembering Gene Hackman: Superman: The Movie

Gene Hackman's death was announced the other day, and I mentioned that I had his appearance in the 1978 film Superman: The Movie on my DVR. So I decided to watch it and schedule it now and move some other stuff around to be able to do a review on it.

An opening establishing sequence mentions how the Superman comic book character was created in 1938, and that first issue apparently told the story of how Superman, real name Kal-El, was born on the planet Krypton a long time ago in a galaxy far away (wait, that's a different backstory). However, Krypton orbits a sun that's about to go nova, something that only scientist and prosecuting attorney Jor-El (Marlon Brando) is able to figure out. The rest of the Kryptonian elite don't want to panic the population. Jor-El also happens to be the father of infant Kal-El, so he creates a spaceship to send Kal-El to a distant planet which, as we all know, is Earth.

Kal-El's spaceship is perceived as a meteorite when it crashes into Earth near the town of Smallville, where Kal-El is found by Ma and Pa Kent (Glenn Ford and Phyllis Thaxter) and given the name Clark. They realizes he's got superhuman strengh, but keep the secret for various reasons, right up until the day Pa dies of a heart attack. Clark realizes he has to go off on a quest to figure out what his true purpose for being on Earth is.

Clark's (now played by Christopher Reeve) journey of course takes him to Metropolis, and gets him a job at a cub reporter at the Daily Planet, which is where he meets Lois Lane (Margot Kidder). It's also where he starts performing superhero feats, like when the helicopter Lois is riding in suffers a fault that leaves hanging off the edge of the Planet building. Clark Kent turns into Superman and saves her as well as doing several other good deeds. All of this brings Superman to public attention while nobody is bright enough to put two and two together to figure that Kent and Superman are one and the same. Meanwhile, Lois, despite being a modern woman, has hormones, so of course she's attracted to this big strong guy who saved her.

Superman: The Movie has a listed running time of 143 minutes, and at this point we're already into the second half of the movie without even having reached what is putatively the main plot line of the movie. That would involve supervillain Lex Luthor (Gene Hackman). Lex seems to have only one employee, bumbling Otis (Ned Beatty), as well as a girlfriend, Eve (Valerie Perrine), and lives in a secret lair 200 feet below Grand Centra Station. Lex also knows that one of the things you can't really make more of is land, so land is the key to wealth. And he plans to increase his wealth in a wacky way. You'll know from your geography classes how the San Andreas fault runs through California and how it's moving Los Angeles closer to San Francisco on a millions of years timescale. The thinking is that the part of California west of the fault is going to sink into the sea, so Lex has bought a ton of land to the east so that when the west sinks into the sea, his land will be seafront land worth zillions. Now he just needs to speed things up by exploding the San Andreas fault!

Like I said, it's ridiculous, but it's also the sort of fiendish plot that allows for all sorts of special effects; remember, the all-star disaster movie Earthquake had only come out a few years prior. Lois is out west trying to get a story on the corporation buying up all that land, while Lex has discovered somehow that kryptonite is a chemical that saps Superman's strength. Lex lures Superman to his lair, puts a chain of kryptonite around Superman's neck, and leaves before waiting for Superman to die. So as you can guess something is able to save Superman, and he's able to fly off and derail Luthor's devious plot.

A lot of people give Superman: The Movie very high marks, which I guess is because it's one of the movies that really made the idea of the big-budget superhero movie a viable thing. That, and its iconic John Williams score. However, I have to say that this is a movie where if you find yourself actually doing thinking you'll see how little of it really works. The buildup goes on way too long. Many of the characters are just way too stupid. Even by the standards of the 1970s, I didn't find the special effects very good. I don't know if TCM had a bad print, but a lot of the photography looks oversaturated. And Reeve's acting isn't very good here.

However, it you don't think much about what you're watching, it's easy to see why Superman: The Movie was such a box office hit. It's certainly extremely terribly entertaining despite its flaws. And there is that John Williams score. And Hackman looks like he's having a blast getting to go way over the top with the idea of the supervillain. So while Superman: The Movie has a lot of flaws, on the whole I think the entertainment value does outweigh those flaws, especially if you don't think too hard.

Miracle full of pockets

Fairly early on in the history of this blog, I did a post on the 1993 movie Lady for a Day. It was directed by Frank Capra who, at the end of his career, remade it and slightly expanded the storyline under the title Pocketful of Miracles. The last time TCM showed Pocketful of Miracles, I recorded it, and finally got around to watching it so that I could do the review here.

It's the early 1930s, which means that there's already a Depression on, and it's still in the era of Prohibition. So there's a large financial gap between those out of jobs and those who have amassed fortunes in the illicit part of the economy. In the former is Annie, better known as Apple Annie (Bette Davis). She sells apples to make a meager living; one of her regular buyers is a guy called Dave the Dude (Glenn Ford). Dave is a superstitious dude, buying the apples from Annie because he thinks they bring him good luck. But instead of -- or maybe in addition to -- bringing him luck, he's also brought the presence of one Queenie Martin (Hope Lange).

This time around, Queenie is the daughter of a former acquaintance of Dave's. Her dad amassed gambling debts, and when he couldn't pay, he was killed. Queenie is hoping she can do something to show good faith. Dave, influenced by Annie's advice, gives Queenie a nightclub and makes her a star. Indeed, she's able to pay off the debts with the proceeds from her club, although she's eventually going to have to close once Franklin Roosevelt gets elected President and helps get Prohibition ended.

But that's a subplot, of course. The main story involves Annie. She's got a daughter Louise who somehow wound up being raised by nuns in Spain for reasons that I don't think are mentioned well enough in either version of the movie. Louise is all grown up, and has actually done well for herself, finding a boyfriend Carlos who is the son of a count, Count Romero (Arthur O'Connell). Louise (played by Ann-Margret at the beginning of her career) wants to bring her fiancé and her future father-in-law to meet Mom, which is where things hit a serious hitch.

Mom, of course, peddles apples to make a few bucks. But she's been lying for years to Louise. Instead, with the help of a hotel doorman, she's been getting hotel stationery and claiming to be living in one of those grand old apartment hotels. Annie just knows that when Louise finds out the truth, she'll be heartbroken. Worse, once the truth is revealed, Louise's fiancé will no longer want to marry her. Queenie and the others come up with the idea to put on a charade for just long enough to keep the Romeros in the dark until they head back to Spain that Annie really is a society lady with a judge for a husband and high-class friends. But will the charade work?

Well, if you've seen Lady for a Day, you'll know that the answer is yes, because a movie like this really wouldn't do with a downbeat ending. Having said that, I think Lady for a Day is a better movie for a host of reasons. One is that it was a contemporary film, having been released in 1933. Pocketful of Miracles is instead a period piece, so all of the backlot shooting really feels more out of place than a 1933-set movie actually filmed in 1933.

Pocketful of Miracles is also a good (or bad) 40 minutes longer, given in part to a new subplot about a Chicago gangster visiting New York as well as some nightclub numbers for Hope Lange. Lady for a Day is brisk; Pocketful of Miracles feels plodding. So of the two movies, I'd definitely recommend Lady for a Day well before I'd recommend Pocketful of Miracles.

Mr. Soft Touch

Another of those movies that I'd seen show up on TCM and one or another of the FAST channels (probably Cinevault Classics since this is a Columbia movie), but never actually got around to watching, is Mr. Soft Touch. TCM ran it last year at Christmas, and it says something about the backlog of movies I've got that I'm only now getting around to doing a post on it.

The movie opens up with a man named Joe Miracle (Glenn Ford) in a car chase. It's Christmastime, and Joe, after escaping over a drawbridge, gives a policeman raising money a $50 bill. This being the late 1940s, it's obvious that Joe has come into a bunch of money, and since he was being chased, it's obvious that he didn't come into that money quite honestly. After escaping from everybody, he makes his way to a Mr. and Mrs. Christopher, who happen to be the brother and sister-in-law of Joe's business partner.

The Christophers are supposed to have bought a ticket on a steamer out of the country, but since it's Christmas, Mr. Christopher is making merry with a bell that's extremely loud -- loud enough for the neighbors to make a noise complaint. Worse for Joe is that the ticket the Christophers got is for a boat that doesn't leave for another 36 hours, although in their defense that was the earliest ticket they could get. A radio announcer tells us how Joe got his money, which is from the club he used to run before World War II. While he was off fighting, the mob took over the club, and Joe wanted his money back.

Meanwhile, the police come to respond to the noise complaint, and think that Joe is actually Mr. Christopher, since the real Mr. Christopher is hiding. Meanwhile, somebody calls looking for Joe, which gives him an idea. He's going to get himself arrested as Mr. Christopher, so that when he gets the sentence of a night in jail for disturbing the peace, that will keep him safe from the mobsters who have been chasing him and presumably figured out where he's hiding.

But there's a catch. When the cops came for the bell-ringer the first time, barging in on the situation is Jennie Jones (Evelyn Keyes). She runs the local settlement house, being a do-gooder trying to solve the social problems of the lower classes. While Joe is on trial hoping to be sentenced, Jennie shows up and gets the judge to remand him to her custody! Will Joe be able to get away from Jennie and the settlement house? Will anybody recognize him? Already on the case in the latter issue is reporter "Early" Byrd (John Ireland).

Mr. Soft Touch is an odd little combination of noirish crime movie mixed with a Christmas movie. It's a tough mix of tones to pull off, but everybody does the best they can with it. They're not always successful, although I think that's more down to the script. At times it's stuck in its weird mash-up of genres, while at other times it gives in too much to clichés. It doesn't take much to guess that Joe and Jennie are going to develop an attraction for each other, as well as that Joe is going to be found just in time for the climax.

Still, the odd genres put together, combined with the presence of Glenn Ford, who is always worth watching, makes Mr. Soft Touch worth at least one watch.

Convicted Woman

I'm getting close to the end of all those B movies that TCM ran during the spotlight on B movies back in July or so. Today's selection is a prison movie from Columbia: Convicted Woman.

The movie starts off pleasantly enough, with a young woman named Betty Andrews (Rochelle Hudson) in a city park trying to get her shoe back from a dog. That's not relevant to the plot, other than her being in the park in the middle of the day is a sign that she is currently unemployed and looking for work. She had found a promising want ad in the paper, so she decides to go there and look for a job. That place is a department store, but she has to fill out an application form and then they'll inform her when there's an opening.

Betty goes into the female employees' lounge to fill out that form, and as she's doing so another woman comes in. Surprisingly, that woman looks a lot like Betty, and is even wearing the same dress! The woman then goes out onto the shop floor, where she sees a woman looking for a shop assistant. This other woman sees an opportunity. She takes the customer's $10 bill and claims she's going to make change, but she just disappears. And since Betty is wearing the same dress as the thief, it's unsurprising that the customer identifies Betty as the thief.

The case goes to trial, with a young reporter from the local paper, Jim Brent (Glenn Ford in an early role), covering it. He has quite a bit of sympathy for Betty, but there's not much he can do to help. Betty is found guilty, and despite the fact that the crime was only stealing $10, which seems like petty larceny, she's actually sent to the Curtiss women's prison for an entire year!

Under the direction of Chief Matron Brackett (Esther Dale), it's a tough place, leading one of the woman to commit suicide. Worse, the matron insists that the dead woman had pneumonia and that everybody knows it. Worse, if Betty tries to tell anybody about it, she's going to get in big trouble, like the worst jobs if not getting sent to solitary. Betty is able to get a call out to Jim, who shows up claiming to be her lawyer. When Jim prints the story, it comes to the attention of the Commissioner of Prisons, who appoints Mary Ellis (Frieda Inescort) the new warden. Mary has even more sympathy for Betty, because she was Betty's defense attorney at trial.

Mary sets about doing some Hollywood-standard prison reform, which is even going to involve furloughs, and that's going to lead to the climax over whether any of the women given a furlough is going to violate the terms, even if unwillingly.

Convicted Woman is a B movie, to be sure, but it's not bad as far as B movies go. Glenn Ford was at the beginning of his career and the studios I think didn't yet know what they had in him which is why he's underused here. Rochelle Hudson does well, and the plot, while nothing new even in 1940, works well enough.

I don't know the next time Convicted Woman is going to show up on TCM, but having been released by Columbia, it might show up on their Cinevault Classics channel that's on the Roku Channel app.

As if some men in westerns aren't in fact violent

Barbara Stanwyck was one of the people honored in TCM's Summer Under the Stars last August, and there are quite a few of her movies that I still haven't seen. Among those movies that TCM showed was The Violent Men.

Barbara Stanwyck is the female lead, although first we meet the male lead, played by Glenn Ford. That man is John Parrish, who owns a ranch in one of those western areas that was beginning to develop the range wars between new homesteaders and the old ranchers who wanted an open range. Parrish served with distinction in the Civil War, and is really back in town to sell his ranch so that he can move back east with his fiancée Caroline (May Wynn) and take of work that's less taxing to his health, even though the doctor says he has no real health concerns.

Having arrived back in town, Parrish is shocked by why he sees. Lew Wilkinson (Edward G. Robinson) is the biggest landowner in the area, married to Martha (Barbara Stanwyck) and with an adult daughter Judith (Dianne Foster). Lew owns the Anchor Ranch, and being worried about the encroaching farmers, wants to get them out of the valley. He's willing to buy them out, but, if they don't take his lowball offers, Wilkinson's men will use violence at the behest of Martha as well as his younger brother Cole (Brian Keith).

Parrish is willing, more or less, to sell, since he had been planning on moving back east and has a fiancée who really wants him to do so. The people who work for him, as well as the other farmers and smallhoders, learn that Lew and his Anchor Ranch have put in a bid for the Parrish spread, and they're none too happy about it, so they try to convince him not to give in. Parrish is planning on ignoring them -- until Wilkinson's men create an excuse to try to kill one of Parrish's men.

Lew, meanwhile, wants to preserve what he's got, but since he's getting old and was crippled in the previous range war, would really like to do it without violence. What he doesn't know is that Martha has been scheming behind his back together with Cole to use that violence that we saw earlier. Not only that, but she seems to be romantically interested in Cole, despite the fact that he's got a Mexican girlfriend. Still, Martha eventually realizes that since Lew doesn't want violence, he's getting in the way of her plans and she may have to do something about him too.

So we get a violent, almost military-like campaign by Martha and her brother-in-law Cole to go after Parrish and his men. Parrish, however, has an ace up his sleeve in that he served in the war and served with the cavalry, which gives him some valuable military experience that he's going to be able to bring to use to try to defeat the Wilkinsons.

Sometime in the early 1950s, probably with the advent of television, Hollywood started giving us more "adult" westren movies with themes and vistas that the small screen couldn't give us. The Violent Men is squarely in that tradition. Robinson did make a couple of westerns, and does well here in a role where he's not quite to the decrepit level of a Spencer Tracy in Broken Lance, but getting there, with others in the family taking over. Glenn Ford made several westerns, and is good here as the reluctant hero. Stanwyck, once again, is excellent as a woman who's become tough as nails out of necessity.

The Violent Men is also a visually satisfying movie, with various locations in Arizona serving as the backdrop. Despite the themes not being particularly original, it's still a movie worth watching thanks to all those find acting performances.

Teahouse of the August Moon

If you think about it, Glenn Ford made a surprising number of war movies and service comedies over the course of his career. One that I hadn't seen before, so recorded the last time it showed up on TCM, was The Teahouse of the August Moon. Having watched it, I can finally do a review of it here.

After the opening credits, we get a scene that's going to be rather off-putting for a lot of viewers: that of Marlon Brando as Sakini, a Japanese man who can speak English and lives on the island of Okinawa in 1946. This is not long after the surrender of Japan ending World War II, and Okinawa and the rest of the Ryukyu Islands extending southwest from the Home Islands were put under a greater level of American control than the rest of the country. Sakini tells us how the locals are very good at learning from all the foreign occupations that have befallen his islands, and basically taking the best of it without the occupiers knowing what's really going on.

Cut to the officious Col. Purdy (Paul Ford). He's been given orders to bring the best of America to Okinawa in order to pacify the islands, but finds out that things are decidedly not going to plan. So he needs someone new to implement those plans. Thankfully, he's getting someone new to work under him in the form of Capt. Fisby (Glen Ford). Fisby is a bit of an incompetent at best, and maybe a bit of a dishonest if well-intentioned schemer at worst, having been drummed out of a bunch of other outfits in the Army before being reassigned to a backwater like Col. Purdy's bailiwick. Fisby's duty is to go to a village called Tobiki, and with the help of his interpreter Sakini, get a school built and a ladies' democracy league started.

As I mentioned, the locals are clever at gaming the system, and they don't really need a new school. What they want is to replace the old teahouse, a place where geisha would entertain men, and something that would presumably be good for tourism to the island, not that there was much tourism in 1946. They're going to need to rebuild the economy, however, and Fisby looks for some form of local industry. Back in those days, however, Made in Japan was the same sort of symbol of low-quality cheapness that Made in China is today, so none of the stuff they manufacture helps until it's discovered that the Okinawans are good as making certain distilled spirits.

Meanwhile, Fisby is growing to like the locals, and taking on some of their cultural mores, which is rather a no-no considering that he's got Army orders to get that school built. It isn't getting built, and Purdy is wondering what's taking so long, so he digs up an Army psychologist, Capt. McLean (Eddie Albert) to investigate what's going on. McLean is shocked at first to see what's happened to Fisby, but he too soon comes around to the locals' point of view.

In some ways, it would be easy to see The Teahouse of the August Moon as being a much more comedic version of a movie like A Bell for Adano, and set in Japan instead of Italy. But there was a lot more about it that didn't work for me. Everybody will virtue signal about how terrible it was to have Marlon Brando play Okinawan. But for me, even if the character had been played by someone Japanese I still would have hated the character: Sakini reminded me a lot of the character Barry Fitzgerald played in The Quiet Man, giving John Wayne a bunch of BS when Wayne simply wanted to get where he was going. It's supposed to be charming, but in real life such people are terribly tedious, and that makes The Teahouse of the August Moon a slog to get through.

Torpedo Run

In looking through my scheduled recordings on Youtube TV, I noticed a couple of movies that I recorded the last time they were on TCM. Ernest Borgnine is the star being saluted tomorrow (August 25) in Summer Under the Stars, and I just happen to have one of his movies on the DVR already that I haven't blogged about yet. That movie is Torpedo Run, which shows up at 6:00 PM on August 25. With that in mind, I sat down to watch the movie in order to be able to do a more timely review of it here.

Technically, the star of the movie is Glenn Ford, in yet another World War II movie, although this time it's most definitely not a service comedy. Ford plays Lt. Cmdr. Barney Doyle, commander of the Greyfish, a submarine plying the Pacific. As the movie opens, it's late 1942, and Doyle gets orders to try to destroy the Shimaru, a Japanese aircraft carrier that was part of the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. Meanwhile, everybody on the sub, led by Doyle's second-in-command Lt. Archie Sloan (Ernest Borgnine), is worried about Doyle because of his family.

Flash back to December 1941. Doyle and his wife (Diane Brewster) are living at one of the US military bases near Manila; recall that the Philippines were an American colony at the time. It's also on the other side of the International Date Line, so technically the attack on Pearl Harbor would have happened in the overnight hours between Sunday, Dec. 7 and Monday, Dec. 8 Manila time and the military people in the Philippines probably would have been woken up to the news of the attack, not at a garden party of the sort that's portrayed here. Doyle has been wanting his wife to head back to the States to save her and the kid, but she was born in Manila and considers it her home, so she's going to stay.

Of course, Japan took the Philippines over during the war and interned the westerners. In the context of the movie, Doyle is informed when he gets the order to go after the Shimaru that the Japanese have two destroyers guarding it, as well as a ship carrying a bunch of POWs -- which would include his family since they were on the base -- from the Philippines to Japan. There's a pretty good chance that when Doyle tries to destroy the Shimaru that he might also destroy the ship carrying his own wife.

Sure enough, that happens; worse, the Greyfish goes into Tokyo Bay where it pretty much gets trapped with a limited number of torpedoes and has to try to figure its way out of the bay and back to Pearl Harbor. Doyle has a crisis of leadership with Sloan tries to paper over in the hopes that he can prevent Doyle from being relieved of active command and stuck behind a desk for the duration of the war.

Since the movie is only half over by the time they get back to Pearl Harbor, we know that the Greyfish is going to have another chance to go after the Shimaru. Complicating matters is that Doyle's commander, Adm. Setton (Philip Ober), wants to give Sloan a command of his own as Sloan is one of the best first officers in the fleet.

I've argued before that there's only so much you can do with a submarine movie thanks to the inherent spatial limitations on a submarine. Torpedo Run has that issue; as a result there's not all that much original here. It's not to say that Torpedo Run is a bad movie, more that you've seen it before even if you haven't. If you want a World War II movie you haven't seen before, then Torpedo Run isn't a bad choice.

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.

Don't Go Near the Water

One of the movies that shows up a lot on TCM when they need marathons of military movies for Memorial Day or some other reason is Don't Go Near the Water. It's a change of pace from the action/epics, and an MGM movie that would have been part of the old Turner Library, so presumably cheap for the channel to program. It aired again this past Memorial Day weekend, which gave me the opportunity to finally watch it.

I don't want to say that there's no plot to the movie, but it's definitely more of an episodic movie than one with an overarching plot. The establishing story, as it were, involves Lt. Max Siegel (Glenn Ford), who's stationed on an island in the Pacific that's a ways away from the front lines, to the chagrin of at least some people who want to actually fight. The reason they're stuck in the rear is because their job is to be liaisons with the domestic press and the bigwigs like Congressmen who want to come closer to the front. Head of the PR corps, and happy not to have to fight, is Lt. Cmdr. Clinton Nash (Fred Clark). Indeed, one of the subplots involves him trying to make things easier for the other officers under his command and to avoid dealing with the admiral.

As I said, it's more episodic, or perhaps you could consider it as having a bunch of subplots. The first of these involves Siegel, who has been doing the goodwill thing at a local school, trying to get material for teacher Melora (Gia Scala). You could see the two of them falling in love, but Siegel is American and looking to get home after the war ends, while Melora doesn't want to leave the island because the islanders need teachers like her.

Under the officers are enlisted men like Ens. Garrett (Earl Holliman). He's one of those people who really wants to get into action, but at the same time, he also falls in love with one of the nurses, Lt. Tomlen (Anne Francis). She loves him too, but there's a catch, which is that officers and enlisted men aren't supposed to have that sort of relation. It's one of the biggest no-nos, but there you are. Siegel has to run interference, but it's going to wind up with him developing romantic feelings for Tomlen.

There's PR work to be done, and one of the pieces of PR work involves trying to put a regular enlisted man on a tour of the homefront much like one of those heroes getting time off from the front to do a war bond tour stateside. Unfortunately for Nash and his subordinates, they pick Farragut Jones (Mickey Shaughnessy), who is the most foul-mouthed sailor you can think of, making even the other sailors blush.

The other PR work involves a lady reporter from the states coming out to visit, Deborah Aldrich (Eva Gabor). She wants to get closer to the front so she can do some real reporting, but there's a reason why the navy brass don't want to put women aboard the ships sailing around the ocean, never mind the ones steaming toward the front lines. Deborah, however, gets aboard one of the ships surreptitiously and isn't discovered until it's too late for the commander to do anything about it.

All of the various portions of Don't Go Near the Water are competently handled, and it's not really as though there's a lot wrong with the picture. At the same time however, it also feels like there's not much noteworthy going on, along with a serious sense of being studio-bound. Glenn Ford shows he's adept at this sort of comedy, and everybody else acquits themselves well, so I can't not recommend it. It's just that it probably could have been a lot better, too.

The Desperadoes

Randolph Scott made enough westerns in his career that it's easy for a company to put out multiple box sets of his westerns. I got through all of the films on one of the Scott box sets I had, and some time back bought a second. I recently got around to watching one of the movies off that box set, The Desperadoes.

The first thing that surprised me is that the movie is in Technicolor, something I wouldn't have expected from Columbia producing what is really little more than a programmer during the height of World War II. But since Natalie Kalmus' name is on the credits, we know this isn't a colorized movie. Also mildly surprising is the cast, since two of the players were about to go on to bigger things.

Anyhow, as for the plot, it involves the town of Red Valley, Utah, during the Civil War. The local bank gets robbed, causing the settler depositors to question their confidence in the bank. Have no fear, says proprietor Clanton (Porter Hall); he's getting a better safe -- and indeed, there is a scene of the new safe arriving. But we also see in a brief scene where he's talking to livery stable owner Willie McLeod (Edgar Buchanan), this robbery is really an inside job by the two of them and an outlaw gang.

Randolph Scott is not, in fact, a member of that gang. Instead, he's the local sheriff, Steve Upton. He wasn't in town for the robbery because he was trying to catch some wanted criminals. To make matters worse, Steve was waylaid out in the wilderness by Cheyenne Rogers (Glenn Ford). Cheyenne was supposed to be one of the gunmen in the robbery, imported from well away so that nobody would recognize him, but he got delayed by the loss of his horse, and had to steal Steve's instead.

So when Rogers gets to town, using an obviously phony name like Bob or Bill Smith or somesuch, Willie's niece Allison (Evelyn Keyes) immediately figures something is amiss. That's because she recognizes the sheriff's horse, wondering why somebody else would be riding it. Worse for Cheyenne is that the lady who is in charge of the gambling at the saloon, calling herself the Countess (Claire Trever, future Oscar winner) knows Cheynne and knows of his criminal past.

Still, Cheyenne stays in town, in part because the Countess thinks she caused Cheyenne to go bad back in Wyoming. And then there's the Sheriff, who knows Cheyenne and either doesn't know about Cheyenne's past, or doesn't care about it now that Cheynne is trying to get on the right side of the Production Code again. Complicating matters is that the Countess is also in love with Cheyenne, although he and Allison fall in love along the way. And then one of the gang members who actually robbed the bank outs Cheyenne, which puts him and the sheriff in danger.

As I said at the beginning, I was kind of surprised to see The Desperadoes in Technicolor, since for a 1940s western it's little more than standard stuff. At least when they got past 1953 and the introduction of Cinemascope, you can understand the programmer westerns wanting to use color to show off those wide vistas and compete with television, largely in black and white at the time. Although The Desperadoes is fairly standard, that doesn't mean it's a bad movie by any means. In fact, it's quite competently made, and will definitely entertain any fan of the western genre. It's not quite as good as the darker and more psychological westerns of the 1950s, or the A westerns, but it holds its own as a movie to watch on a rainy day or if you want something shorter.

So Ends Our Night

TCM's daytime lineup for tomorrow is a bunch of movies starring Margaret Sullavan. One of them is a movie that was new to me when I first saw it on the TCM schedule a few weeks back: So Ends Our Night. I recorded it then because it sounded interesting, and since it's on the schedule for tomorrow at 5:45 PM, I decided to sit down and watch it to be able to do a review on it here.

Sullavan isn't the star here; that honor goes to Fredric March although the movie is somewhat more of an ensemble cast. March plays Josef Steiner, a dissident in Nazi Germany who's been forced to flee the country, leaving behind a wife Marie (Frances Dee in a tiny role), and leaving behind his passport. This means that Steiner is a refugee, and like many of the other refugees from Nazi Germany, unable to obtain work or legal permission to stay in whatever country he's fled to.

Steiner isn't the only one in this predicament; there are lots of Jews like Ludwig Kern (Glenn Ford in an early role) who at the start of the movie are in detention for having been picked up as illegal aliens. Sometimes they can get temporary work permits; sometimes they work under the table; but eventually they're found out and picked up by the police, being placed in detention until they can be deported into another country for the process to be repeated all over again. Nobody wanted them as refugees, in part because they were all recovering from the depression and had trouble creating enough work for the people who were born citizens of their countries.

It's around the end of 1937, a few months before the Anschluss in which Nazi Germany absorbed Austria, and Kern and Steiner have both been thrown out of Czechoslovakia into Austria. Steiner, only being a dissident, has a slightly easier time getting a false passport. Kern meets chemistry student Ruth Holland (that's Margaret Sullavan), who like Kern is Jewish and has fled Germany, studying chemistry where and when she can under a professor who himself is a fellow refugee.

Ludwig and Ruth are eventually found out and forced to leave Austria, this time heading for Switzerland, where they're able to hide for some time, although they're trying to make it to France since rumor has it that it's easier to get work permits there than in other European countries. (Obviously they wouldn't have known that the Nazis were going to overrun France in two years' time.) They do get to France, only to find out that it's not that much easier in France than anywhere else they've been. Steiner also makes it to France, which is where he gets a letter informing him that his wife is terminally ill back in Germany.

So Ends Our Night is another of those movies with an interesting premise. I mentioned quite a few years ago how Hollywood was for a long time unwilling to take on the issue of Nazi Germany's human rights problems, since Germany was still a big market for them. There was also the issue that a lot of Americans were still weary of the Great War and didn't want to get involved in another European war. Indeed, in the second half of 1941, Congress started hearings on the subject of those Hollywood movies that did dare to call out the Nazis, although of course those hearings would go by the wayside once the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Most of the other movies that did deal with Nazi Germany either had westerners getting caught up in the country, or Nazi spies in America. Even The Mortal Storm didn't mention Jews.

So Ends Our Night is more unflinching, although it's in some ways unrelentingly grim, in that we get it after the second or third time the characters are forced back into hiding. The ending also seems unrealistically upbeat. But the main characters all give good performances, and as a look at how Hollywood tried to be daring before actually going to war with Germany, it's a movie that's absolutely worth a watch.

One note, however, and that's that the print TCM showed a few weeks back wasn't in the best of shape, being slightly wavy, almost as though whatever source material had been used for the transfer wasn't quite flat. It's not jumpy, but the scenes do have a sort of uncomfortable sway to them.

Follow the Sun

Another movie that's been on FXM for a few months now is Follow the Sun. It's going to be on again tomorrow at 6:00AM, and again next week.

The movie starts off with narration by Anne Baxter, who plays grown-up Valerie, mentioning that she grew up in Fort Worth, which is where she ran into Ben one day while their families were coming out of their respective churches. They meet again since they live close by, and eventually become friends, fall in love, and get married. But we're gettin ahead of ourselves here.

Ben is Ben Hogan, who of course would go on to become one of the best known golfers before the rise of Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus, but since the story begins before Hogan becomes a top golfer, we see him as a child being a caddy at the local country club who gets in what practice he can after the patrons' rounds, using clubs that probably aren't the right size for him.

Ben has dreams of becoming a professional golfer, but that's not going to come right away because he doesn't have the money to go on tour, so we see adult Ben (Glenn Ford) working as an auto mechanic while saving up the money to be able to join the PGA tour. Eventually he does save up enough where he figures he can try to make foney on the tour for a year, and if it doesn't work out he can always go back to his old job. Valerie joins him, mostly for support and not to have to keep two households. (You'd think she could get secretarial work or something.)

Life on the tour isn't easy. Ben meets professional Chuck Williams (not a real golfer but a made-up character played by Dennis O'Keefe), one of the top guys on tour who is also a bit of an entertainer out on the course. He befriends Ben, although Ben is most definitely not an entertainer, taking the game dead seriously. This causes conflict with one of the sportswriters, Jay Dexter (Larry Keating). As for Valerie, she spends time with the other golfers' wives, who all understand what it's like for young Valerie since they've been through this themselves.

It's a tough life since the prize money in those days was quite low and it's not uncommon to finish out of the money. Eventually, however, Ben starts doing better, even finishing in the top 10, and it's looking like he'll be able to stay on tour. As for Chuck, he marries Norma (June Havoc) and drinks way to much, which is eventually going to derail his career.

Ben's career gets derailed, too, when he's driving from one tournament to the next on a foggy road and runs into a bus. Valerie os OK, but Ben is seriously injured, and there's a question of whether he'll ever even be able to walk again, let alone play golf since the pros have to walk the course instead of riding golf carts. But, we know in real life what happened.

I'm not a golfer, so Follow the Sun is a movie I went into without any particular interest in the subject material. It's not terrible, but it's also certainly not the best in either Ford's or Baxter's careers. Part of the problem is that it's a formulaic Hollywood sanitized biopic. The other problem is the Chuck character, whom I found to be a bit unlikeable. Golf fans, on the other hand, will probably enjoy that in the last act, a couple of big-name golfers from that era have cameos as themselves, as does sportswriter Grantland Rice.

Follow the Sun has gotten a DVD release courtesy of Fox's MOD scheme.

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.

Imitation General

I recorded a couple of films during Glenn Ford's turn as Star of the Month last month. One that I hadn't blogged about before but is on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive is Imitation General.

The title, as you'll see, is actually fairly descriptive. The scene is France in August 1944, a time when the Allies were busy pushing the Nazis out of the country fur, not having fully done so, still faced stiff resistance. Some pockets of troops got too far ahead of the rest and got cut off and surrounded by the Germans. Glenn Ford stars as Master Sergeant Murphy Savage, driver to Brigadier General Lane (Kent Smith). They meet straggling US Army soldiers, and try to get them to round out as many other officers and soldiers in the area as they can.

Savage and Lane, and the third man in their unit, Cpl. Derby (Red Buttons), eventually come upon a farmhouse, and they check to see if it's safe to enter. Surprisingly, it's occupied not by the Nazis, but by a woman who seems to have been abandoned by events, Simone (Taina Elg), acting almost as if there's been no war in the area. Simone only speaks French, and Gen. Lane is the only one who speaks it.

While doing a bit of scouting just outside the farmhouse, Gen. Lane gets shot by a Nazi sniper and killed. That threatens to destroy the entire unit, until Savage comes up with an idea. Gen. Lane had talked about the importance for moral of having a real general out in the field with the enlisted men, as if that's the only way these separated soldiers would be able to fight their way out of the mess they're in. So Savage decides that he'd better play the part of the general so that the men will hvae a real leader.

There are a couple of problems with this idea, the first being that it's quite contrary to army regulations, to the point that if Savage is found out, he'll be court-martialed. And there are already a couple of people in the area who saw the general; surely they'll notice. More worrisome is that Savage discovers an old rival, Pvt. Hutchmeyer (Tige Andrews) is among the soldiers in the area. Savage was apparently involved in getting Hutchmeyer busted back down to private, so the guy would definitely like some revenge.

Gen. Lane's suggestion that the men seeing a general fighting out in the field would be good for morale actually turns out to be right. Showing up at the farmhouse is Cpl. Sellers (Dean Jones), a man suffering from battle fatigue. Savage as the general is able to whip him back into some semblance of shape and get him out to fight the Nazis. Still, it's going to be tough to break out.

Imitation General is a movie that was billed as a comedy, but one that I found to be more of a light drama. The comedy bits, especially with Hutchmeyer at the end, didn't really work, although the story as a whole does work reasonably well. This is nothing particularly great, but also nothing particularly terrible. It's something that I'd watch once, and have no strong desire to watch again. But judge for yourself.

The Lady in Question

With Glenn Ford being the current Star of the Month on TCM, I've been taking the opportunity to record some of his movies that I haven't done blog posts on before. First up is The Lady in Question.

This is an early Ford film, so he's not the star here. That honor goes to Brian Aherne, playing Andre Morestan, that father in a Parisian family that runs a bicycle shop together with wife Michele (Irene Rich). Andre has been called for jury duty, a prospect that fills him with excitement. He's very much looking forward to doing his civic duty, unlike most people.

The trial he winds up sitting on is the murder trial of Natalie Roguin (Rita Hayworth). She had been seeing a rich guy and supposedly been looking to get more money out of him, with the guy eventually winding up being killed. Despite the fact that the evidence against her is fairly flimsy, the thinking is that she's going to be convicted. But Andre is apparently taken by her, interrupting the trial to ask questions and fighing for a not guilty verdict in the jury room.

Eventually he wins out, but another of the jurors remains convinced that Nathalie is guilty. As for Natalie herself, she became so notorious that nobody wants to give her a job. In need of money, she approaches Andre, he having given her his address after the trial in what seems like a reality-defying move. The result of the meeting is that Andre offers Nathalie a job at the bicycle shop, and a place to stay.

With Natalie at the shop, she meets Andre's son Pierre (Glenn Ford), and the two wind up falling in love although there are are a whole bunch of complications along the way. Mom wonders what's going on between her husband and Natalie, and one of the jurors keeps showing up insisting Natalie was actually guilty. It gets to the point that Dad might actually believe he voted the wrong way at trial.

I had a fair amount of problems with The Lady in Question, mostly having to do with the fact that the movie seemed so detached from reality. The trial in particular was supposed to be funny, but something I found grating. Aherne has to then keep engaging in a comedy of lies to keep people from finding out the truth, even though we know Pierre knows the truth since we saw him at the trial in one scene. Still, Hayworth and Ford do well together, and it's easy to see why they would be reunited a half dozen years later for Gilda. It's just too bad this first pairing wasn't in service of a better story.

The Lady in Question is available on DVD from Columbia's MOD scheme, so you can watch and judge for yourself should you like.

TCM Star of the Month July 2019: Glenn Ford

Glenn Ford and George Macready in Gilda (July 8 at 9:30 PM)

We're in a new month, and already it's time for a new Star of the Month on TCM. This time it's Glenn Ford, and his movies will be airing every Monday in prime time, in some weeks ending in the Tuesday morning part of the schedule.

In looking through the photos I've posted to the blog, it turns out there aren't too many of Ford, and nothing from the movies airing tonight as far as I could tell. There's one from Gilda which is on next Monday, and a smaller one from 3:10 to Yuma, which you can catch at 11:45 PM on July 15. It doesn't help that Photobucket is complaining harder about bandwidth use. 25MB a month for their free service? What's the point of still offering a free service?

Anyhow, as for tonight's lineup, it starts off with one of Ford's more entertaining films, The Big Heat at 8:00 PM. Among the lesser-remembered movies are the original version of Ransom! at 3:45 AM, and the British-made Terror on a Train at 5:45 AM.

Fate is the Hunter

The second of the two new-to-me movies that showed up on FXM at the beginning of May is Fate Is the Hunter. It's going to be on again tomorrow at 11:20 AM, as well as twice over the Memorial Day weekend.

The movie starts off rather spectacularly. Rod Taylor plays Capt. Jack Savage, who is a pilot for Consolidated Airlines Flight 22, from Los Angeles to Seattle. 49 passengers board, along with a rookie stewardess and more experienced stewardess Martha Webster (a very young Suzanne Pleshette). The plane takes off, and shortly into the flight, one of the two jet engines blows out, forcing the plane to head back to Los Angeles for an emergency landing that should be routine since the planes were designed to land with just one engine. But they'll be delayed a bit by three planes coming in for a landing that are going to have to move out of the flight path. And then the alarm comes on for the other engine being out, and the radio goes dead. They're going to have to do a crash landing. And it would have worked too, if it weren't for that goddamn pier on the beach. Everybody but Martha dies.

Glenn Ford plays Sam McBane, the director of flight operations for Consolidated and up for an executive position. He used to be a pilot, having served during part of World War II alongside Savage, so this crash has hit him personally. It's about to get a lot more personal, though, as the vulturous media are circling. They want answers so that the lawyers can start suing somebody. Sabotage is quickly dismissed, as is mechanical error. More worrying, during the recovery process it's determined that the second engine did not in fact blow out, despite Martha having reported it. The only explanation left is pilot error.

Sam starts doing his own investigation before the Civil Aeronautics Board can crucify Savage, and finds that his old friend's reputation precedes him. Savage was a Jack Carson-like manipulator during the war, taking a cavalier attitude and taking other people's women, as with Sam's date with Jane Russell (playing herself). It's continued, with Savage having broken off an engagement with Lisa (Dorothy Malone in an uncredited role) to take up with ichthyologist Sally (Nancy Kwan). Savage was also seen cruising a series of bars with friend Mickey, whom Sam does not know.

The first day of the hearing into the crash doesn't go well (or realistically) at all, which gives Sam the ridiculous idea of taking another identical plane up into the air to determine what might have happened. (They didn't have nearly the quality of simulators then that they do now.) Will this reveal whether Savage was not in fact at fault?

Fate Is the Hunter isn't a bad movie, but I have to admit that as I was watching it, I found myself thinking that the material might have been better-suited to a TV Movie of the Week. There's a lot of talk going on, and much of the movie seems designed to give each of several names one big cameo scene. Still, it's entertaining enough if nothing spectacularly good.

As far as I'm aware, Fate Is the Hunter is not available on DVD, so you're going to have to catch the FXM showings.