The Yearling

Actor Claude Jarman Jr. died earlier this year at the age of 90. It's not overly surprising that he didn't get a full prime-time programming tribute. Instead, he's one of the people being honored in tonight's schedule of movies dedicated to people who left us in 2025. Jarman is one of the stars of The Yearling, which comes on at 2:00 AM.

Jarman, who was about 12 years old at the time, plays young Jody Baxter. He lives in a backwater part of Florida around 1880, together with his parents Ezra nicknamed Penny (Gregory Peck), and Ora (Jane Wyman). They're hardscrabble farmers, living the sort of life that Thomas Hobbes may have been thinking of when he called it "nasty, brutish, and short". It's certainly been short for Jody's siblings who are all dead. The land is swampy, the family is always one bad harvest away from starvation, and don't even have a well on their property. You have to wonder what sort of life Ora had before getting married to Penny.

So it's a disaster when a bear kills some of the livestock, and one of their hunting dogs gets injured as father and son chase after the bear. It isn't the first disaster to befall the family, and it isn't going to be the last either. Yet Jody seems surprisingly equanimeous about the whole thing, as though he's got a whole lot of maturing to do. Indeed, he's certainly going to seem immature when it gets to the main plot of the movie, although we still have a good ways to get to that because The Yearling is a fairly slow-moving movie, in keeping with the pace of life in the rural south of that era.

Eventually, another disaster does happen, when the Baxters are looking for some of their pigs that have gone missing and might have been stolen. While tracking through the piney woods, Dad gets bitten by a rattlesnake. Instead of sucking the venom out, an apparent folk remedy is that if you can get a deer liver, that will suck the venom out. So Dad is able to kill it and get enough of the venom out that he's going to recover. However, it turns out that the deer had a fawn.

Now, this is where the movie goes around the bend. Jody should be old enough to know how precarious an existence the family has. But instead, he wants to raise the fawn because the poor thing doesn't have a mother any more. Ora is strict and smart enough to know this deer is going to be trouble; just ask any modern-day person who's tried to grow a garden in an area with deer. Sure enough, the deer starts eating crops. Jody cries and cries that his Mom is being too strict and that Jody can build a bigger fence. But eventually things go too far, and Jody is going to have to kill the yearling himself, leading up to a rite of passage and an eventual happy ending.

The Yearling was made in color with a lot of location shooting, two things which help the movie. The acting is also quite good, with Jarman getting an honorary juvenile acting award. But the script is unbelievably mawkish in addition to making Jody look shockingly immature.

Note that The Yearling is getting another airing on TCM on December 30 at 5:45 PM as part of a day of animal films.

The Stalking Moon

I think I'm down to the last of the movies I recorded last July when Eva Marie Saint was TCM's Star of the Month for her centenary. By the time this movie is posted here, it will have expired from my DVR, but I'm getting rather farther ahead of myself than I expected to. At any rate, the movie in question is a western I hadn't heard of before last July, The Stalking Moon.

Gregory Peck stars as Sam Varner, a scout working for the US Army cavalry circa 1880, when a fair portion of the western US was still just territories, and various Indian tribes were still pretty darn violent. Sam is close to the age where he can get his army pension, and has been saving up to buy some farmland over in the New Mexico Territory. His current mission, which should be his final one before getting that pension, is to help round up some Apaches who have wandered off the reservation and need to be brought back to the reservation.

Sam and the cavalry find the Apaches, but there's a catch. There's a white woman among them, one who was clearly kidnapped by the Apaches some time back. The best everyone can remember is that there was such a kidnapping a decade ago, and the woman still remembers English well enough to inform the men that her name is Sarah Carver (that's Eva Marie Saint), which would fit with that previous kidnapping. However, she also has a mixed-race child with her, which is an obvious ethical dilemma. One would guess that this child is the product of rape, so who gets custody of the child presuming Sarah doesn't want to be with the Apaches any longer. However, the kid is innocent, and doesn't really speak any English.

This being a Hollywood movie of the late 1960s, however, such niceties are ignored, and it's naturally assumed that since possession is nine-tenths of the law, and Sarah has the child with her, the child is going to go along with Sarah away from the Apaches. The plan is to put Sarah and the kid on a coach to the nearest train station, which will take them east. But while waiting for the coach, the kid goes running off, and when Sam and Sarah find him and bring him back to the stagecoach station, they find that the staff at the station have been murdered.

It stands to reason that the killer is the child's father, Salvaje, who not unreasonably wants the boy back. Since it wouldn't really be safe to take Sarah and the boy to the train station as that's where Salvaje would be looking, Sam decides to offer Sarah the chance to stay at his place over in New Mexico. He could use someone domestic around, and in theory New Mexico should be far enough away that Salvaje won't find them. Yeah right on that second part. As you might guess, people start getting killed in the vicinity of Sam's place.

The Stalking Moon is a well-enough made movie, and it's got a lot of nice cinematography. But it didn't feel to me like it was doing anything new. Fans of westerns will probably enjoy the movie, and it's certainly not bad. But I feel like if I were asked to recommend westerns to people not that into the genre, there's other more original stuff that I'd recommend first. I would never say that The Stalking Moon isn't worth watching. It's entertaining enough. It's just that there's more out there that's better.

How the West Was Won

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The decisive valley

Another of those movies that I saw a bunch of times in the TCM schedule but never got around to watching for some reason was one of MGM's prestige films from the mid-1940s, The Valley of Decision. It aired some time back so I watched it before it left the Watch TCM app, writing up this review and waiting for it to show up on TCM again so that I could finally do a review of it. Well, that next TCM showing is coming up tomorrow (August 14) at noon as part of Greer Garson's day in Summer Under the Stars, which means that now's the time to schedule this post.

Garson was probably MGM's biggest star at the time this movie was made, as it was just after Joan Crawford's contract was not renewed and before post-war stars started to make names for themselves. Garson plays Mary Rafferty, a young woman from the poor part of Pittsburgh in the 1870s. Steel was king in Pittsburgh, and Mary's father Pat (Lionel Barrymore) worked for many years at one of the steel mills, at least until getting injured in a workplace accident and requiring the use of a wheelchair. As a result, Dad hates the Scotts, the wealthy family that owns the mill where he worked.

Pat being an adult woman without a husband, needs to go into work, and there weren't all that many jobs available for women in those days. Two of the biggies were teaching and being a servant, and Pat has possibilities of a job in that second field. The only thing is that her employers would be... the Scotts, which pisses Dad off to no end. But she needs a job, and takes it after the matriarch of the family, Clarissa (Gladys Cooper), takes a liking to Pat.

Pat walks into a house where she discovers a family that's somewhat divided over the family business. There's an old saying of going from shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations, and the younger generation is the third generation. Patriarch William (Donald Crisp) inherited the business and has run it as well as he can, intending to bequeath it to at least one of his four children. The only thing is that the four children have different views on what they want for the business. Daughter Constance (Marsha Hunt) doesn't particularly care since women weren't expected to be titans of industry in those days; she ends up marrying a titled Englishman. Youngest son Ted (Marshall Thompson) is a bit of a drifter; and, as the youngest, probably isn't intended to be the inheritor anyway. That leaves Paul (Gregory Peck) who has an interest in metallurgy, and William (Dan Duryea), who's hard-nosed and doesn't care much for the workers unlike Dad and Paul.

Things get complicated when Paul and Pat fall in love with each other. Since they're from totally different social classes, they really can't marry each other, so Pat leaves with Connie to go to the UK and work as maid to Connie and her husband when those two get married. But during her time in the UK, there's terrible labor trouble brewing at the industry. Pat's father and some of the other more militant men want to form a union, but William is staunchly opposed to that idea. Pat eventually returns to the US just in time for all the labor strife.

The Valley of Decision is another of those movies that's of a type MGM did well, at least if you don't think too hard about the labor strife section that probably would have been handled a lot differently at Warner Bros. Garson is way too old for the role at least at the start of the movie, but I don't know that MGM had a younger actress with the heft to play it. Lana Turner was on her way up at MGM, but she would have been terribly miscast in any of the female roles. This was made not long after Gaslight, but I don't think Angela Lansbury would have been able to carry Garson's part. Duryea is playing yet another of his bad-guy characters and Peck is pretty good as the good brother. Lionel Barrymore badly overacts, but at least his overacting is entertaining enough.

If you like glossy period pieces from the studio era, The Valley of Decision will be right up your alley.

Captain Horatio Hornblower

Another of the movies that I hadn't blogged about before but showed up during TCM's salute to Warner Bros. was the naval adventure Captain Horatio Hornblower. So, I recently sat down to watch it so that I could do a review on it here.

Gregory Peck plays Capt. Hornblower, captaining a relatively small ship, the HMS Lydia for England during the Napoleonic era, specifically during the era of the Peninsular War. For those who don't know their history, Napoleon had his brother Joseph installed as the king of Spain to make them a more pliant ally, although the Spanish ultimately revolted. If memory serves, it's also the backdrop for the Cary Grant movie The Pride and the Passion. Anyhow, at the time the movie starts, Spain is still an ally of France and still has all its colonies in the New World. But there are people in the Spanish colonies who aren't so thrilled with Napoleon's occupation of Spain, and perhaps the British could use that to their advantage.

To that end, the Lydia has been sent to the New World to get help from one of those restive Spanish local bigwigs. It's extremely stressful for the crew, as they have to go all the way around Cape Horn without knowing what their mission is and having to stay away from being sighted, since they are technically the enemy. And as it turns out, the Spanish commander they're supposed to meet is only in it for himself, which means that he may be a danger to the English as well.

The voyage to the New World is a long one; long enough that by the time they get there, Spain, or at least a significant portion of it, is nominally on the side of England, so that the commander the Lydia helped is actually no longer on the side of the English. To make matters worse, Hornblower gets himself involved in a battle with a Spanish ship that is really on his side, although he has know whay of knowing the political situation back in Europe changed since he was incommunicado.

The Spanish ship he attacked was fleeing Panama, where there was a yellow fever epidemic. They also had some English captives who were being removed from Panama because of their value as hostages. Specifically, that's Lady Barbara (Virginia Mayo), who happens to be the sister of the Duke of Wellington. No wonder she's so important. She and Hornblower, being at sea for months, fall in love, although there's a problem there as well in that Lady Barbara had been betrothed to another man back in the UK and Hornblower is going to have to keep his feelings for Lady Barbara a secret. But at least she's useful as a nurse tending to the sailors, until she gets sick herself.

After Hornblower gets back to England, having gained a son but lost a wife in childbirth, he has to go back to sea to help in a blockade of France. This provides the movie's third act, which is many ways really isn't related to the first two acts, although the action it provides is satisfying enough.

Captain Horatio Hornblower is an enjoyable enough movie, and certainly well made thanks to the Technicolor photography and the capable performace from Peck. But it also feels more like a bunch of set pieces with only a relatively bare plot on which to hook all those pieces. The connection between the first two acts at least is vaguely plausible, while the third act in France feels like it comes out of nowhere. So if you want a great story, you won't really get it here. If you just want to sit back, relax, and watch Gregory Peck do the adventure movie thing, however, I think you'll definitely be entertained.

The country of size

Gregory Peck was honored in TCM's Summer Under the Stars last August. That gave me the opportunity to record one of his films that I hadn't blogged about before, The Big Country. Actor Burl Ives picked up a Supporting Actor Oscar for his role, so TCM can use it during 31 Days of Oscar as well. Indeed, it shows up again this year, getting its airing tomorrow (March 30) at 11:15 AM. So as always, I made a point of watching it with an eye to doing a review on it here.

Gregory Peck stars as Jim McKay (but would not go on to host Wide World of Sports), a man who had worked as a captain in his family's shipping company but is now going west. That's because in port one of those times, he met Pat Terrill (Carroll Baker), who was going east for some reason not specified, since all of that took place before the action depicted in the movie. The two fell in love and McKay proposed to her, so now he's coming out to marry her since her father Maj. Henry Terrill (Charles Bickford) owns a substantial ranch.

McKay meets Pat in town, where Pat is staying with friend Julie Maragon (Jean Simmons). Julie is the local schoolteacher, but she owns a spread of her own that is fallow since the death of her father. The big thing about her spread, however, is the "Big Muddy", a lake which has a good deal of water on it that's important for watering one's cattle. Julie is intent on letting everybody water their cattle, but for obvious reasons various landowners want the lake for themselves.

On their way out to Maj. Henry's ranch house, Jim and Pat run into the Hannassey brothers, whose father Rufus (Burl Ives) is one of the ranchers who wants Big Muddy and has been trying for years, obviously unsuccessfully, to get Julie to sell. Rufus at heart does have a sense of honor, as we'll see in the finale, but he's raised his kids badly as eldest brother Buck (future Rifleman Chuck Connors, getting to play one of his bad-guy roles) leads the rest of the brothers in trying to waylay Jim and Pat. Indeed, there's long been a feud between the Hannasseys and the Terrills.

Further complicating matters is the presence of Maj. Terrill's ranch foreman, Steve Leech (Charlton Heston). He has a feeling his position is going to be in jeopardy once Pat marries Jim, since the major has no sons to take over the ranch. Steve also isn't so sure an easterner who spent a lot of time on the ocean is one to know much about ranching, so he doesn't have much respect for Jim.

Things get more complicated for Jim as he begins to learn about all the things that have been going on in the time before he got to the area. Things get even worse when the major decides he's going to try to prevent the Hannasseys from watering their cattle, resorting to force if necessary. As mentioned earlier, Rufus Hannassey has been trying to get Julie to sell, and she hasn't. But Jim, unsurprising for a character played by Gregory Peck, has an uncompromising and unerring sense of right and wrong. After seeing first-hand the conflict between the major and Rufus, Jim decides to buy Julie's ranch, with the proviso that he's going to let everybody water their cattle there.

When Pat finds out about that wrinkle and that the ranch isn't a wedding present to her, she gets furious. Rufus understandably thinks that if Jim has bought the ranch, it's going to screw him over since everybody knows Jim and Pat are supposed to get married. (Well, nobody knows yet that the engagement has been broken off.) It leads to the final battle between the Hannasseys and the Terrills.

The Big Country is a big movie, running 166 minutes. And frankly, that's the one big problem with the movie. It's unsurprisingly well acted, with very nice cinematography. But at its heart it's a fairly simple western story that had no need to be expanded to 166 minutes. The writers could easily have distilled this down to around two hours and come up with something just as good. Still, the quality of the other parts of the movie is good enough that its length is less of a flaw than in some other movies.

So definitely give The Big Country a go. Just be aware that you're in for the long haul.

Not the sitcom in Atlanta

There are a couple of movies airing Thursday afternoon that I want to blog about, so I decided to start a day early and mention one of them today and the other tomorrow so that you have enough lead time to watch both. First up is Designing Woman, at 12:15 PM Thursday on TCM.

The movie uses a brief opening narration to introduce us to the dramatis personæ:
Gregory Peck as Mike Hagen, New York sportswriter;
Lauren Bacall as Marilla Brown, fashion designer who has some sort of difficult relationship with Mike;
Dolores Gray as Lori Shannon, Mike's former girlfriend;
Tom Helmore as Zachary, Marilla's ex-boyfriend; and
Mickey Shaughnessy as Maxie, a boxer who relates to all this somehow.

Flashback to how Mike met Marilla. Mike is one of those sportswriters who covers a lot of different sports; one week he gets sent out to Los Angeles to cover a golf tournament. He won big in the writers' betting pool on who would win, and uses that money to get extremely drunk, meeting Marilla the next morning and having no idea who she is. The two start one of those movie romances that you know is going to lead to a marriage much too soon, before they find out they might not be compatible for each other.

Sure enough, they get married, and upon returning home, Mike has to deal with ex-girlfriend Lori, who's been trying to break into the showbusiness world, with at least modest success. But the nature of Mike's telling Lori he's gotten married, followed by Marilla's meeting Mike just after Lori left, leads Marilla to worry about Mike possibly having had a former boyfriend.

The married couple is less-than compatible in other ways; Marilla has all sorts of friends in the hoity-toity theater world and gets hired to do the costumes for a big play. One night Mike tries to have the rotating poker night with his sportswriter friends at the couple's apartment while Marilla has her theater friends over. Needless to say, it doesn't go well.

Marilla also doesn't like Mike's coverage of boxing, since she sees it as a much too violent sport. It's also risky for Mike, as he's doing an exposé on boxing promoter Martin Daylor, who Mike says is in with the Mob and Mike is going to prove it. This prompts Martin to send a bunch of goons to Mike's apartment, led by Lucas McCain doing a Brooklyn accent (er, actually Chuck Connors), telling Mike to knock it off or he's going to get harmed. Mike goes into hiding without telling Marilla the truth, and Martin decides he's going to nab Marilla instead.

A good portion of the plot made me think of the Spencer Tracy/Katharine Hepburn vehicle Woman of the Year, and I'm not the first. That one was a bit better, although I think both it and Designing Woman are not the best movies in any of the stars' catalogs. Dolores Gray is badly cast, while Bacall is not a favorite of mine and comes across a bit bland again. There's also some script problems in that I found it implausible that Marilla would consider a man having had a girlfriend in the past a deal-breaker. That and Mike's not telling Marilla the truth about the danger he faces.

Still, Designing Woman is more or less watchable, and if you're a fan of Lauren Bacall or the theater world, you'll probably like it more than I did. It did get a DVD release courtesy of the Warner Archive, although the last time I checked, it's another of those movies that the TCM Shop oddly says is on backorder. Amazon has it on DVD and streaming, I believe.

Marooned

I don't normally like to recommend movies that are only available via streaming, but with how little space I've got on my DVR, I kind of have to. This time out, that movie is Marooned, which is available on Amazon and Google Play among others.

The movie starts off with little establishing action, showing the launch of an Apollo mission, but not one to the moon. This one is taking three astronauts: Pruett (Richard Crenna), Lloyd (Gene Hackman), and Stone (James Franciscus) to an orbiting space station where they're going to spend seven months to observe the effects of long-term space travel on humans, in preparation for the interplanetary space voyages that are supposedly going to become common (the movie was released at the end of 1969, before we knew what was going to happen to the space program). Five months into the mission, however, the folks back down on earth are seeing all sorts of mental issues with the astronauts, so it's decided to end the mission early and bring them home.

The astronauts get into the space capsule to go home, which requires firing the retrorockets. They flip the switch and... nothing happens. So, they try again, and... still nothing happens. This is a serious problem. In theory, the capsule could orbit the earth for decades, even without fuel to adjust the orbit, until the orbit degrades enough for the capsule to burn up in the atmosphere. Of course, the astronauts don't have food for decades, and far more importantly, they don't have oxygen for very long. At the current rate of usage, there's about 42 hours left, after which the astronauts would suffocate to death.

Charles Keith (Gregory Peck) is the commander of the mission back at NASA in Houston. He's got a lot to deal with in addition to the problem up in space. The three astronauts all have wives who know even if they don't want to admit it publicly that their husbands are probably going to die up in space. There's also all the media asking uncomfortable questions since NASA doesn't exactly want to be completely candid about the problems with the mission. And there's still the question of what to do.

Keith's underling, Ted Dougherty (David Janssen), has a daring idea. Apparently the Air Force has come up with an experimental rocket that is more maneuverable. Since the situation is desperate, why not send that up into space and rescue the stranded astronauts? Keith nixes the idea at first, probably because he doesn't want more people to die. But eventually he relents, and preparations are made.

But there are more complications, both on earth and up in space. The astronauts, in looking down at earth, saw the formation of a hurricane before anybody else, these being the days before satellite weather imagery became commonplace. Originally it looked as though the hurricane was going to go out to sea, but it winds up heading straight for Cape Canaveral! Further, the three astronauts up in space are getting antsy and rebelling to the extent they can. Finally, calculations are made that there might be enough oxygen left for two men, but not for three....

I really enjoyed Marooned. It's a gripping, simple story, made before the Apollo 13 mission even happened. The idea of a rescue mission is a bit unrealistic, but it's also not the sort of thing that's so ridiculous that you can't suspend disbelief. One thing that I really liked is that the story doesn't really get sidetracked by any of the characters having back stories. The wives (played by Lee Grant, Mariette Hartley, and Nancy Kovack) are there for the matter-of-fact reason that this was the practice. Nobody's really trying to overcome personal demons or such stuff.

Much is made of the special effects, which won an Oscar, and it's right to mention them. For the most part they seem quite good. The capsule is pretty claustrophobic, and the zero-gravity looks fairly realistic. The one quibble I had was with some of the matte shots of the earth in the background behind the space capsule. It took me a while to figure out where over the earth the capsule was at first, in part because the rendition of the Iberian and Italian peninsulas was rather inaccurate. For everything they did with the other effects, you'd think they would have noticed that. But that's also the sort of stuff I'm normally nitpicky about.

The minor quibble is nowhere near enough for me to give anything less than a high recommendation to Marooned, which I think still holds up well 50 years later. It's also one that really deserves to be on DVD.

Arabesque

With the recent news of the death of Stanley Donen, I decided that I would sit down and watch my DVD of Arabesque from the four-film Gregory Peck at Universal collection and do a fuller review than the one-paragraph mention I gave it some years back.

An opening scene involving an elderly professor getting killed at an eye doctor's office sets the scene that we're in for some sort of espionage. Cut to Prof. Pollock (Gregory Peck), a professor of Egyptology at a British university. The same eye doctor who killed the first professor approaches Pollock, offering him a job decoding some hieroglyphics, but Pollock wants more specifics.

One day after class he goes for his daily jog, which is where Pollock gets waylaid by a Rolls-Royce. That Rolls-Royce has as one of its passengers Prime Minister Jena (Carl Duering). He knows about the paper with the hieroglyphics on it, and that those must be some sort of code for what an opposition businessman, Beshraavi (Alan Badel), is doing. So the Prime Minister would like those hieroglyphics translated. (You'd think that Beshraavi already knows what he's going to do and thus wouldn't need the hieroglyphics translated, but I'm guessing that Beshraavi would have thought that hieroglyphics reveal what somebody else knows about him.)

Beshraavi is a ruthless businessman, keeping a peregrine falcon to go after anybody who is disloyal to him, so Pollock knows he's a sort of prisoner in Beshraavi's house. Also there is Yazmin (Sophia Loren), Beshraavi's lover and a mysterious woman. She realizes that Pollock is in over his head and in danger, suggesting that he try to get away with the piece of paper with the hieroglyphics. When he does, Beshraavi sends one of his men to try to kill Pollock and Yazmin.

They are able to flee to seeming safety, but it turns out there's another faction, led by Yussef Kasim (Kieron Moore) who also wants that paper. It all goes on like this until Pollock is able to determine the importance of this paper with the hieroglyphics, with a lot of twists and turns along the way.

The plot of Arabesque is in many ways a bit of a mess. The paper with the hieroglyphics, it turns out, is not a Macguffin, but otherwise figuring out how Beshraavi, Yazmin, and Yussef all fit into things will probably leave you confused. The fact that everybody's lying because of the espionage games doesn't help. Instead, watch for the various set pieces which come one after another, and are reasonably entertaining.

As for Stanley Donen, he has some rather stylish direction. The sets and cinematography are generally lovely, although there are any number of shots that some may not like, having been photographed through framing objects like chandeliers and various other odd perspectives. Arabesque is firmly dated in the 1960s, but it's a fun 1960s.

The Bravados

Over Thanksgiving when I had the free preview of the Starz/Encore package of channels, StarzEncore Westerns ran The Bravados. It doesn't seem to be on DVD, but it's going to come up again on StarzEncore Westerns tomorrow at 1:00 AM (which is still late tonight out on the west coast) and again tomorrow night at 9:49 PM.

Gregory Peck plays Jim Douglass, who at the start of the movie is riding toward the town of Rio Arriba. He's stopped by a sheriff's deputy, who says that nobody's coming into town unless his name is Simms. Jim's name isn't Simms, of course, but you can't really stop the free movement of people in America, so eventually the deputy reluctantly backs down and lets Jim pass, although he's going to have to surrender his weapon at the sheriff's office for the duration of his stay.

The reason for all this security is that there are four men scheduled to hang the next day for having robbed the bank and killed a teller in the robbery. Everybody is scared that somebody is going to try to spring these men, which is why they didn't want to let Jim into town. As it turns out, Jim wants to see these men, but not with the purpose of breaking them out of jail.

In town, Jim runs into Josefa (Joan Collins), an old flame whose real purpose in the story is the exposition of Jim's back story to explain why he's in Rio Arriba now. After Jim split from Josefa, he married another woman and fathered a child by that woman. However, one day when Jim was away from his ranch, some men broke in, and raped and murdered Jim's wife. Jim has reason to believe that the four men to be hanged in Rio Arriba are the ones responsible for his wife's murder, although he didn't see the people who committed the crime.

As I mentioned earlier, the townsfolk are worried that somebody is going to try to free the four men, and sure enough, that happens in the form of Simms (future Stooge Joe De Rita), who is not the real Simms but an imposter. The four men run off with a hostage in tow, and a posse is set up to chase down the four men. Jim heads off with the posse, but of course, he has his own reasons for wanting to find the four men.

I've stated on several occasions that western's have never been my favorite genre, although I've also warmed up to them in the 11 years I've been blogging. With that in mind, my assessment of The Bravados is probably going to be slightly less charitable than that of anybody who's a fan of westerns. There's really nothing wrong with the movie, other than possibly Collins being given too small a role. Yet, to me, the movie felt almost interchangeable with any of the other psychological westerns of the 1950s.

Peck, of course, is the sort of actor that was especially well-suited for the role of someone like Jim Douglass, and he gives a professional turn here that's quite good. The four bad guys (Lee Van Cleef, Stephen Boyd, Henry Silva, and Albert Salmi) don't get as meaty characterizations, but that's because the script is about Jim's quest for revenge than about what the villains did. The cinematography is good, with nice color and as far as I could tell in the proper Cinemascope aspect ratio.

Western fans will certainly enjoy The Bravados, although I can't help but think there's a reason it's a relatively forgotten movie.

At least it was better than Mister Buddwing

Looking through my DVDs to see what genre of movie I hadn't blogged about lately, I decided that I'd sit down and watch Mirage.

Gregory Peck plays David Stillwell, who at the start of the movie is working on the 27th floor of one of those corporate behemoth buildings in New York. The power has gone out, leaving everybody in the dark and David to walk down 27 flights of stairs to get out of the building. Just behind him is a mysterious woman Shela (Diane Baker); the two have a conversation along the way. They eventually go past the ground floor and through the sub-basements before Shela gets far enough ahead of David that she can just disappear.

When David gets out of the building, he hears an ambulance; it seems as if somebody fell, jumped, or was pushed out of a window in the building where David worked. And it was a 27th floor window. Eventually David goes back to his building to find Shela, and he's shocked to discover that there's no sub-basement! When he gets to his apartment, he finds that there's a man with a gun waiting for him in the hallway. Everybody is wanting him to go see "The Major", whoever that is. David tries to call his boss Josephson (Kevin McCarthy), but uses a number that's out of service. More and more things happen to David that lead him to believe that he's suffering from amnesia. The fact that he's got people chasing him trying to kill him doesn't help.

David tries to go to the police, but they're no help. More alarmingly, he goes to a psychiatrist who is extremely rude to him and doesn't want to help either. Is the pyschiatrist in on the conspiracy? Finally, David turns to a private detective, Ted Cassell (Walter Matthau), who reluctantly takes the case. When they go back to David's building, his old office isn't there, and in the basement that's not a sub-basement, the guy who was there before, Willard (George Kennedy), is there again threatening the two with a gun!

David goes around town trying to piece his past back together. The dead guy, Charles Calvin (Walter Abel) was apparently leading some sort of peace group, and David begins to realize that perhaps he knew Charles. But how? And what are all of David's flashbacks to a conversation on a grassy field about? Worse, David still has to deal with Willard chasing and trying to kill him....

The big problem I had with Mirage was the fact that nothing seemed to fit. Obviously, the movie was structured as it was to try to put the viewers in the predicament of a man who suddenly doesn't know who he was, which is the same conceit as Mister Buddwing a year later. I really disliked that one, and Mirage is only slightly less of a problem for me. I also had big issues with the whole conspiracy theory thing. You can't keep this much a secret, especially not in a big city. Granted, some of the things can probably be explained away by saying they were figures of David's amnesiac imagination. But things like the psychiatrist can't. The impression I got is that he was violating medical ethics treating David the way he did, and for no good reason. The ending also made me feel as though David's amnesia may have been resolved, but the viewers' issues weren't.

Still, this is another of those movies you should probably judge for yourself, and since it was on a cheap box set, it's not as if I wasted too much money on it.

His Arms Around the World

Another of my recent DVD purchases was this cheap four-film Gregory Peck set. The movie on it that was completely new to me was The World in His Arms.

Peck plays Jonathan Clark, the captain of a sealing boat, that is, one who goes up to Alaska and catches seal to sell down in San Francisco. It's 1850, which means that Alaska is still a Russian territory, and frankly, the Russians aren't happy about Clark taking their seals. Apparently, they're going to imprison him if he shows up in Alaska again. Meanwhile, he's short on the money he needs to fix up his ship and get back to Alaska. Meanwhile, he's got a friendly rival in the form of the Portugee (Anthony Quinn).

In San Francisco, Clark meets Countess Marina (Ann Blyth), a young woman who is the niece of the territorial governor in Alaska. But she's come down to San Francisco because she wants to get away from Prince Semyon (Carl Esmond). The thing is, she's been betrothed to Semyon in a marriage of political convenience, and she has absolutely no desire to marry Semyon. And if that was her desire when she fled Alaska, it's an even stronger desire once she meets Jonathan. Our good captain, unsurprisingly, is also taken with Marina, and he proposes to her, a proposal she's more than willing to accept. Except that she gets shanghaied back to Alaska for that arranged marriage to Semyon.

Jonathan is understandably pissed, since Marina never had the chance to tell her about the arranged marriage leading him to think that Marina was just stringing him along. The Portugee also goes on his ship, with the two going after Marina, the seals, and the danger presented by the Russian territorial government....

The World in His Arms is solid entertainment, no more and no less. It played out to me as the sort of movie studios put their stars in to keep them working and in the public eye. It's enjoyable, even if nobody would have remembered it as the best work of their career. If there is anything wrong with it, it's that the part in San Francisco drags on too long before getting to the good parts of the adventure. Oh, and Jonathan keeps a seal which is presumably to provide comic relief, although I thought that part was dumb. The movie is based on a book by Rex Beach, a name that really sounded familiar although I couldn't remember why. It turns out he also wrote The Spoilers, which was turned into a movie on multiple occasions. (I recorded the 1942 John Wayne/Marlene Dietrich version when Dietrich was Star of the Month, and intend to get around to that one at some point.)

As for the box set, one of the Amazon reviewers claims that two of the movies are not in the proper aspect ratio. I noticed that The World in His Arms was not letterboxed and was worried at first, until I saw the copyright date of 1952, so of course it was in the Academy ratio. (I didn't check the other movies yet.) The box set is bare-bones, with two movies on each disc, although both movies on the same side and each disc gets its own spindle. No extras on the disc I popped in. But for the price, what can you expect.

Gregory Peck's 100th birthday on TCM

Tomorrow happens to be the 100th anniversary of the birth of Oscar-winning actor Gregory Peck. TCM is going to be spending all morning and evening with Peck's films. Well, technically not quite the entire 24 hours. At 12:15 AM Wednesday, or still late on Tuesday evening in the more westerly time zones, TCM will be running the 1999 documentary A Conversation With Gregory Peck, which looks at Peck in part through personal time with his family and in part with Q&A sessions he did with fans at various movie events. It's a reasonably well-done look at the actor

One of Peck's movies I thought I had blogged about before is Man With a Million, but it turns out that I've only mentioned it briefly, back when its director, Bryan Forbes, passed away in 2013. Peck plays an American stranded in turn of the 20th century London who is approached by two wealthy Brits having a wager with each other. They give him a £1,000,000 note, with the caveat that he's not allowed to break it for smaller denominations. Since none of the people Peck's character will be dealing with would be able to make change anyway, Peck basically has to live on the credit that the note can bring. The men's wager deals with how people will deal with a man who may or may not have real wealth. It's an interesting idea with a bunch of good performances.

I could also point out another airing of On the Beach (5:45 PM), although it's not Peck's performance that I'd recommend this one for. Instead, if you're going to watch it, it's Fred Astaire in a dramatic non-dancing role who is really the revelation in this one.

Peck's Oscar-winning performance in To Kill a Mockingbird is also on the schedule, at 10:00 PM, following his other success from the same year, Cape Fear at 8:00 PM.

The Macomber Affair

I'm not particularly a fan of the stories of Ernest Hemingway. However, a movie that I found worth watching even though it was based upon one of Hemingway's short stories is The Macomber Affair. It's on TCM again tomorrow morning at 11:00 AM, so you have a chance to see it and judge for yourself.

Gregory Peck plays Robert Wilson, a safari guide in British Kenya back in the days when international travel was more difficult and to go on a safari like this would be an adventure reserved for the wealthy, or at least people with pretentions of wealth. At the beginning of the movie, Wilson is returning to Nairobi from a safari with two of those people in the latter category, Mr. and Mrs. Macomber. The only thing is, Mr. Macomber is really quite dead, having been shot in the back by his wife. Clearly it's a case of murder, or is it? Wilson has to file a report on the case, and under the cause of death, he wants to call it an accident....

As you can probably guess, much of the rest of the movie is told in flashback, as we have to see for ourselves what led to Mr. Macomber's death and whether or not it really was an accident. (I suppose Hemingway could have used the device of a trial, as in The Story on Page One.) Several days earlier in Nairobi, Wilson was at the bar in one of those hotels catering to the expat crowd, where he's approached by Francis Macomber (Robert Preston). Francis wants a guide to take him and his wife Margo (Joan Bennett) on a safari. Wilson doesn't like the idea of a woman going on safari, but it's good money. Besides, Francis has what he thinks is a good reason for wanting his wife along: their marriage has hit the skids, and he's trying to patch it up. She doesn't think he's enough of a man, and a safari is just the thing to show that yes, he is a real man.

So, everybody sets off for the savannah where they are, with any luck, going to find some big game and shoot it dead. The Macombers get one tent with Wilson in another; this gives a fortuitous chance for the screenwriters to insert some more dramatic tension of the Macombers by themselves, so we can see just how bad their relationship is. And of course it's about to get much worse. The next day everybody goes out hunting for lion, with Margo going in the car with them but staying there rather than do any tracking. Francis shoots but only wounds a lion, and when the time comes to do the actual killing, the lion tries to pounce with its last energy, causing Francis to flinch. Oh, I guess he's not a "real" man, at least not by Hemingway's definition of what a real man ought to be. This only causes Margo to lose more respect for him. But we knew that was happening already, since there are obvious signs that she's falling in love with Wilson -- and the feeling might be mutual.

Fast forward to the fateful shooting. This time, the party is out hunting buffalo, with Margo still ehind in the car. The hunt doesn't go quite right, with Francis and Wilson between Margo and a wounded buffalo that charges the two men. She shoots, and hits Francis. Accident or murder? Fast forward again, out of the flashback, to an inquest to determine whether or not it was an accident.

As I said at the beginning, I'm not a huge fan of Hemingway's work, because the way he presents mascuilinity in his work gives the impression that he was some sort of neurotic playing out his own issues in his writing, as well as the impression that he was some sort of utter jerk in real life. This adaptation of his story, "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber", however, worth watching. Gregory Peck was always quite good at playing morally ambiguous characters, and also looks like he could fit the part of a safari guide. Preston is a bit of a cipher, although I think that fits what his character is supposed to be. Joan Bennett does well in showing why a safari guide might fall for her even though it's against his better judgement. It's not the world's greatest movie, but it's ceratinly good enough.

The Macomber Affair doesn't seem to be avaiable on DVD, even at Amazon.

A brief post about Beloved Infidel

What's left of the Fox Movie Channel is running the movie Beloved Infidel tomorrow morning at 3:30 AM, and a further two times next week. Amazon suggests you can get it on "Instant Video", but other than that, I don't know if it's in print on DVD, at least here in North America.

Deborah Kerr plays Sheilah Graham. Graham was a London-born journalist who left London in the early 1930s for the United States, eventually becoming a Hollywood gossip columnist. In 1937, she met F. Scott Fitzgerald (Gregory Peck). Fitzgerald is of course best known for novels like The Great Gatsby and several others that have been turned into movies. But by 1937 he was in a difficult marriage with Zelda, who was suffering from mental illness and needed care in a sanatorium. In order to pay the bills, Scott went off to Hollywood to work as a screenwriter, contributing to several films although he only received screen credit for Three Comrades. Scott, for his part, was an alcoholic and not exactly pleasant to be with, and not exactly thrilled about having to do this sort of writing work.

Graham immediately fell for Scott, even though there was no way he was going to be able to get a divorce, and immediately began to have an affair with him. It lasted for three years or so until Scott's death in 1940, his dead body apparently being discovered by Graham. Graham wrote about this in her book Beloved Infidel, and that book was turned into the movie that's showing up in the wee hours of tomorrow morning. Since it's from one of the participants in the relatoinship, I don't know how much of it is fully accurate, and how much of it is what we would nowadays call spin, with Graham presenting her side of the story in what would have been a relatively scandalous thing, I suppose. A difficult relationship, too, what with Scott's alcoholism.

Beloved Infidel is another of those movies that I haven't seen in years, since the previous go-round of FMC airings that would have been four? five? years ago? So it's another one of those movies that I have fuzzier memories of how good or bad it really was. But Gregory Peck is always worth watching, as is Deborah Kerr. So even if it's not the world's greatest movie, it still deserves a viewing.

The Gunfighter

I mentioned this morning that there are some movies coming up on the Fox Movie Channel that I wanted to recommend. One of them is The Gunfighter, airing tomorrow morning at 7:30 AM.

Gregory Peck stars as Jimmy Ringo, whom we see at the beginning of the movie walking into a bar in some Old West town. We don't know right off the bat that he's the gunfighter of the title, but all the other characters do. He's got a reputation that precedes itself, and there are apparently quite a lot of young men who idolize him for his gunfighting skills. That's kind of unfortunate for Ringo, who would really like to settle down. One of the young bucks at the bar keeps needling Ringo even though it's clear that Ringo would just like to be left alone. Eventually, the young man reaches for his gun, but Ringo is still a faster draw, and shoots the young man dead. That's a big problem, since the young man has three brothers who will want revenge. But again, Ringo is able to outsmart them and disarm them and let their horses free, allowing him to get at least a few hours' head start.

Ringo eventually makes his way to the town of Cayenne, where the marshal (Mallard Mitchell) is a man who used to be in a gang with Ringo. Ringo has specifically selected this town because his wife (Helen Westcott) and kid are living there, and he'd like them to go someplace with him to settle down. But he walks into the bar looking for information on where they might be, and once again, all the men recognize him. In this town, it's worse, as all the young boys look up to him and crowd the sidewalk in front of the bar, trying to peer into the window. On the other hand, you've got a marshal who doesn't want any trouble in his town, and as such would really like nothing better than if Ringo left right away. The boys' mothers also don't want Ringo around. They're puritan bitches of the shrieking "Won't somebody think of the children?" mold that still exists today and exerts too much influence over politics. Worse, though, is that Ringo's wife has tried to start a life of her own as the town's teacher, and the son doesn't know anything about his father.

And then there's the young man (Skip Homeier) who, like in the previous town, wants to challenge Ringo. He apparently thinks that if he can be the man to take down Ringo, he'll be revered like Jimmy Stewart's character in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Ringo, on the other hand, knows differently, and knows that the only future that would await Homeier is one constantly on the run trying to escape from all the people who would want to take him down.

The Gunfighter is an intelligent, grown-up movie that is not quite a traditional western so much as it is a psychological drama set in the Old West. Peck is as good as ever, and the rest of the cast around him does a good job. One I haven't mentioned yet is Karl Malden, who seems a bit miscast as the barkeeper in Cayenne. I think he's really better in more urban dramas, but he does a fine job here.

In a black and white movie, the sky is always gray

Tomorrow at noon, the Fox Movie Channel is showing the enjoyable western Yellow Sky.

Gregory Peck stars as Stretch, the leader of a gang of bank robbers out in the old west. Their latest robbery doesn't go quite right, and the gang winds up with the sheriff and a posse chasing after them, guns blazing. The only way to escape is across 70 miles of salt flats, and needless to say, the rest of the gang thinks that's not such a good idea: surely nobody can make it across such a barren expanse. Now, Yellow Sky could be an interesting movie if all it were about were people trying to make it across those salt flats and inevitably failing (the Production Code wouldn't let bank robbers succeed, of course, if it meant they escaped the law). Watching the movie, in fact, the salt flats sequences only take up a portion of the movie, but are harrowing enough if you look at what happens to the poor horses, never mind what happens to the one robber who had decided to fill has canteen with whiskey instead of water. However, the movie is about something different, and our robbers eventually do make it through the salt flats, winding up at a watering hole just outside the ghost town of Yellow Sky.

Only, it's not quite a ghost town. It turns out that there's an elderly man (James Barton) and his granddaughter Constance (Anne Baxter), nicknamed "Mike", living there. Stretch realizes that they're there for a reason, as do the rest of the gang. Here, we really start getting into conflict. There's the natural conflict between the gang and the two prospectors. But there's also a growing conflict among the robbers. Second-in-command Dude (Richard Widmark) wasn't thrilled with the idea of going across the salt flats, and now he's even less pleased with Stretch's plans for dealing with the old man and his granddaughter. Dude figures they're hiding gold someplace, and wants the gold now. Stretch, on the other hand, is more concerned with safety, and realizes the old man has to be on good terms with the local Indian tribe, which is probably not so likely to care for the robbers. Further, there's the beginnings of a romantic conflict, as several members of the gang find "Mike" quite attractive.

There's nothing particularly groundbreaking here, as we know the movie is going to wind up with the obligatory shootout, with the bad guys getting their due, and the good guys.... Well, the writers had to satisfy the constraints of the Production Code, so the ending is a bit contrived, which doesn't really work to the movie's benefit. That having been said, this is more one to watch for the acting. Peck is quite good in the morally ambiguous role, while Widmark is just as good a gangster in a western as he was in the more modern gangster movies like Kiss of Death. Baxter is both suitably good to look at, and effective as a would-be tough woman who doesn't have the experience that her grandfather does. Watch for Harry Morgan later of M*A*S*H as the gangster "Half Pint"; he's credited here as "Henry Morgan" as he often was in movies of the 1940s. Direction is handled well by William Wellman. All in all, Yellow Sky isn't quite great, but it's more than good enough.

Yellow Sky has also been released to DVD, so you don't necessarily have to wait for the FMC showings.

So Lent begins tomorrow

At least it does, if you're one of those Christian denominations that takes Lent more than moderately seriously. The Fox Movie Channel has scheduled for the day by having a morning of religious-themed movies, including the Biblical mess David and Bathsheba, tomorrow morning at 6:00 AM ET.

I'll admit that I don't know the Biblical story of David and Bathsheba very well, so I don't know quite how faithful this movie adaptation is to the 3000-year-old story. Gregory Peck stars as David, the King of the Israelites, currently making war against some other tribe, with the help of his military commander Uriah (Kieron Moore). David can't always be at the front, and returns to Jerusalem to do the people's business, as well deal with his wife Michal (Jayne Meadows). She unfortunately is a harpie, constantly hen-pecking David for being born a shepherd, for constantly having an eye for other women, and all sorts of other things. (I guess wives have always been nags.) David, unsurprisingly, turns his attention to other things, most notably the woman he can see bathing when he looks down from his terrace. That woman is Bathsheba (Susan Heyward), and when he invites her to the palace for dinner, they immediately hit it off.

To say that David and Bathsheba hit it off is a bit of an understatement. They almost immediately begin a passionate love affair, even though Bathsheba tells David that she's also Mrs. Uriah. You know that things aren't going to end well from all this, and we get a foreshadowing of this in a scene in which David shows he's lost his mojo with the slingshot. (Viewers may recall that David smote Goliath, something which is shown near the end of the movie.) Things go from bad to worse when Bathsheba informs David that she's gotten knocked up, and that he has to be the father because she hasn't slept with Uriah in months, he being off fighting David's war. David calls Uriah back to Jerusalem and devises a devious plan to get Uriah to sleep with Bathsheba, and -- miracle of miracles -- the one time that Uriah has sex with Bathsheba will be the time that Bathseba gets pregnant. But Uriah is so filled with zeal that he doesn't go home to Bathsheba, which means that David will have to get Uriah killed so that he can marry Bathsheba and the child will be legitimate, having been conceived just in time.

It's at this point that things really go from worse to worst, with the Israelites suffering drought and, presumably, other plagues that don't get shown on screen. David suffers too, as the new kid dies. The prophet Nathan (Raymond Massey) leads a bunch of disgruntled Israelites who are going to force Bathsheba to stand trial for adultery, the penalty for which is stoning (with David being forced to cast the first stone), but David repents just in time and everything turns about reasonably well for the Israelites.

Or so the movie's story goes. As I said at the beginning, there are probably liberties taken here, but since I don't know the Biblical story, I can lok at this more as a straight-up movie. In that way, it's problematic. Every plot turn is just oh-so-convenient, to the point of being laughable. And if the plot turns are laughable, the dialog is even more so. You really have to feel for poor Gregory Peck having to spout these lines. Still, David and Bathsheba is at least entertaining enough for a laugh, and might even be better than that. It's gotten a DVD release too, so you don't have to get up at 6:00 AM to watch it.

Dean Jagger, 1903-1991

Today marks the birth anniversary of Dean Jagger, who appeared in all sorts of movies in his long career: as Brigham Young in the Fox biopic of the same name, to horror movies such as Revolt of the Zombies, to comedic roles as in the Jim Hutton/Paula Prentiss comedy The Honeymoon Machine. He also won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar, for the 1949 movie Twelve O'Clock High.

The movie starts off with Jagger, playing Army Major Stovall, back in England after the war and finding something in a shop that reminds him of his past. The causes him to want to drive back to the airfield where he spent a pivotal period of World War II. What happens next is the obligatory flashback....

The time is well before D-Day, a time when morale isn't too high. It's particularly low at this particular air base, as the pilots are given the thankless task of running daytime bombing raids over Nazi Germany. Bombing raids are tough enough at night, but during the day, when the enemy can see you, is even worse. Naturally, nobody's happy about this, but somebody's got to do the job. Given the job of increasing the morale of the flyboys is General Savage, played by Gregory Peck.

Savage is determined to give the outfit discipline and a sense of pride, even if the way he goes about it angers his underlings at first: he's a taskmaster who cuts off their liquor, and then proceeds to push them much further than any of them thought they could be pushed. What they don't see is that their general is pushing himself too, possibly to the breaking point.

Peck's General Savage is a tough man and a tough character to play, and Peck does a superb job. Jagger, on the other hand, has the task of playing a foil to Peck, the sort of character who is designed as a source of stability and a contrast to the turmoil that Peck, and everybody else at the base, faces. It's the sort of role that looks easy to play, but in its own was is probably just as difficult as the job Peck had. It's to Jagger's credit that he makes the part look effortless.

Twelve O'Clock High has made it to DVD, so you don't have to wait for it to show up on the Fox Movie Channel.

(Edit: Obviously, I didn't notice that I mistyped the year of Jagger's death. Oope!)

Gregory Peck, military man

TCM's salute to Star of the Month Gregory Peck contines this evening with several movies in which Peck plays a member of the military. Among these is Captain Newman, M.D., at 10:00 PM ET.

Peck plays the title character, an Army psychiatrist at a medical base in Arizona during World War II. Newman's running the place, and his job is to put the soldiers back together mentally so that they can return to combat duty, preferably immediately if not sooner. Of course, there's a war on, making running the place a bit difficult, especially when you consider that many of the higher ups think you should just tough it out -- the views on combat fatigue weren't what they are today. Helping Capt. Newman fight the bureaucracy is Corporal Jake Leibowitz (Tony Curtis), a man who isn't that much different from Tony Curtis' character in Operation Petticoat; namely that of a schemer who uses skills of dubious legality to get things done. Among the nurses are Angie Dickinson and Jane Withers.

Captain Newman, M.D. is partly about the tribulations the staff faces from the military bureaucracy, from higher-ups who think they know better how to run the place than the doctors, to finding themselves with a bunch of Italian POWs on hand. But the patients are just as important. Among them are Eddie Albert, a colonel who's suffered a nervous breakdown; a catatonic Robert Duvall; and Bobby Darin, who is clearly suffering from what would now be called post traumatic stress disorder. He gives an almost harrowing portrayal when Captain Newman puts him under truth serum to reveal what it is that he's been repressing.

Captain Newman, M.D. walks a fine line between comedy and drama, and for the most part, does it pretty well. Gregory Peck wasn't a comic actor, but he's not really expected to be one here, either. Instead, he's the foil for all the antics of Tony Curtis' character, and Peck pulls off the part of poor put-upon Captain Newman well. Tony Curtis, on the other hand, was quite adept at comedy and, already having played a similar role, portrays Leibowitz with ease. The three main patients are all quite good, and the nurses are adequate, although not the most important part of the movie.

Apparently, Captain Newman, M.D. hasn't been released to DVD, and remains one of Peck's lesser-known movies. That's a shame, because it's really a pretty good movie.