A century before noir

Hedy Lamarr was honored in last year's edition of Summer Under the Stars, which allowed me to record a movie that I hadn't seen before, largely because it was an independent production that has fallen into the public domain: The Strange Woman.

We don't see Hedy Lamarr for a bit, because the movie opens up when her character is a kid in 1820s Bangor, Maine. Jenny Hager is the daughter of alcoholic widower Tim Hager, who is a scandal in town as he tries to get drinks off of shopkeeper Isaiah Poster (Gene Lockhart). Isaiah, for his part, is a widower himself with a son Ephraim. Out at the river, a bunch of kids are standing on the bridge when Jenny dares Ephraim to jump into the river, even though Ephraim can't swim and is afraid of the water. So Jenny pushes him in. When an adult, Judge Saladine (Alan Napier), shows up, Jenny drags Ephraim out of the water and claims she saved Jenny.

Jenny is already a wanton kid, and she's going to be a wanton woman, looking to marry rich. Matters come to a head one night when the now adult Jenny (that's Hedy Lamarr) pursues the sort of man Dad doesn't like. Dad tries to beat Jenny, so she beats him to death and runs off to Isaiah's house looking for help, in part because he's the richest man in town, and in part because this is a scheme. She claims Dad has suffered some sort of attack while trying to beat her, winning the sympathy of Isaiah and the Reverend Thatcher (Moroni Olsen) who both know Jenny needs to be married off. The only man around seems to be Isaiah, now that Ephraim is off to college, so Jenny marries Isaiah, which was sort of her plan all along because she wants that money.

Of course, Ephraim returns, and things get awkward because Jenny also has feelings for Ephraim that are mutual, not that Dad knows any of this. Dad by now owns not just a bunch of ships, but also forest inland, and has to deal with the lumberjacks who get rowdy when they come to town because they're in need of women. Isaiah is so concerned with the running of the town that he basically works himself to a heart attack, although this doesn't kill him as much as Jenny would be happy that it does. Jenny is looking for a way to inherit Isaiah's property, so when Isaiah decides to go up to the lumber camps, Jenny manipulates Ephraim into doing the same sort of thing Montgomery Clift may or may not have done to Shelley Winters in A Place in the Sun. And then Jenny, having inherited Isaiah's property, throws Ephraim out of the house!

Jenny then starts to seduce her business manager John Evered (George Sanders), who is also in love with Jenny's best friend Meg. Meanwhile, Ephraim has become a terrible drunk and confesses to Evered what he did to his father. Whether or not Evered truly believes this is a good question, considering how completely drunk Ephraim is.

Now, the movie was made in 1946, which means there's the little matter of the Production Code. Jenny isn't going to be able to get away with what she's done up to this point, so there's the question of how she's going to expiate her sins and how the rest of the movie is resolved. The screenwriters have sort of painted themselves into a corner by this point, and there's not really a good way to get out of it.

I knew The Strange Woman was going to be interesting when I saw in the opening credits that it was based on a book by Ben Ames Williams, who might be best known for Leave Her to Heaven. Sure enough, the movie is never less than interesting, although the plot is wildly implausible at times. There's also the question of whether the movie is truly noir. Hedy Lamarr's Jenny certainly is the sort of femme fatale who would appear in a noir, although I don't quite think the historical setting is a noir setting. It's perhaps closer to the historic melodrama of a movie like Forever Amber. In any case, it's definitely worth watching.

A Lady Without Passport

I didn't realize that I had a bunch of movies with second-tier actor James Craig on my DVR, largely I'd guess because he wasn't the memorable actor and for the most part didn't get to be the lead in bigger movies. Some months back, Noir Alley ran a film with him in it, which I recently got around to watching: A Lady Without Passport.

The movie starts off in New York, with a man named Ramon walking down a street and looking nervous. A car pulls up alongside ramon, with a man inside telling him that he can't get away with "it", whatever "it" is, and that Palinov wants his money. Ramon tries to get away, and gets run down for his troubles, much like "Christopher" at the beginning of The House on 92nd Street. The police investigate, and find half of a $1,000 bill in his pocket. More interestingly is the CSI-type examination that finds traces of sugar cane, and soil of a type most common to Cuba. This, they believe, is a case for Immigration and Naturalization.

Cut to the INS, where investigator Frank Westlake (that's James Craig) is responsible for the case. He knows that he's going to have to send one of his agents down to Havana. This being the early 1950s, it was a time when people could still travel easily between the US and Cuba, at least if they were citizens of one of the two countries. However, there are a lot of peopl from Europe who fled the continent after the war and got the idea that getting into the US via a third country might be a good idea. It isn't, but has resulted in a bunch of people flooding the American Embassy with their applications. And if they can't get in legally, perhaps they might get in illegally.

So Westlake finds an agent who can speak a suitable European language to be able to pose as a refugee. That man is Pete Karczag (John Hodiak), who speaks Hungarian and is sent down to Havana to get the dirt on the people responsible for trying to smuggle in people who can't get to America properly. They already have a good idea that that man is Palinov (George Macready), so Karczag goes there and immediately tried to befriend Palinov.

While at Palinov's bar, he also meets Marianne Lorress (Hedy Lamarr). She, like all of the others, is someone who fled the European troubles, and would like to get into America. Things get worse for her, however, when she tries to work at one of the nightclubs. She doesn't have a work permit, so Pete covers for her by claiming to be married to her. This is also a good way for him to try to get more information on the sly regarding Palinov. But of course, as Karczag walks around Havana (apparently, real location shooting was done), Karczag begins to fall in love with Lorress. Worse, Palinov figures out Karczag is an American agent.

But the real climax comes when some of the refugees finally get on a clandestine flight bound for Florida. The race is on to find these refugees, who are in danger because who knows what will happen to them if the Americans find them. I'm reminded of Secret Service of the Air, where the smugglers simply opened up the bomb bay and dropped the immigrants out of the plane to their deaths.

Unfortunately, A Lady Without Passport is little more than a programmer, with a worn out plot and longer sequences of not much happening. It's also not really a noir, but Eddie Muller keeps stretching the definition of noir.

The Heavenly Body

I've got another bunch of movies that are on my DVR coming up in fairly rapid succession on TCM. Thankfully, this time the first one gets an early morning airing while the other two are in prime time, so I don't have to start blogging about them too far in advance. The first one is part of a day of the films of Hedy Lamarr: The Heavenly Body, at 8:00 AM tomorrow (Nov. 8).

You could say that the title is a play on words, as Hedy Lamarr herself was one of the beauties of Hollywood. But the title also refers to an actual body up in the firmament. William Powell is the male lead here, playing William Whitley, an astronomer whose work, as makes sense, keeps him up at night since you can't really go to an observatory and make astronomical observations while the sun is shining. So he gets home from work and has his dinner just as everybody else is getting up and having their breakfast.

This everybody else includes William's long-suffering wife Vicki (that's Hedy Lamarr, as if you couldn't tell). She really wants her husband to take a vacation from work (never mind that there's a war going on; the movie was released in early 1944 and the war will become a plot point). He can't however, because he's got something big coming up. He's discovered a new comet, and if he's done the calculations correctly the comet is going to smash into the Moon -- as the Moon has no atmosphere even smaller meteors aren't going to burn up the way they might when they're approaching Earth. That impact is coming up soon, and William has to go to the observatory to do a presentation on it at the exact moment the comet is going to hit. (In reality, I don't think we had powerful enough telescopes at the time to see such an impact, but I could certainly be wrong on that.)

Worse for William is that his wife gets his astronomy mixed up with astrology. Astronomy is, of course, real science, while astrology is anything but. And if it got out that an astronomer was married to a woman who actually believed that nonsense, well, imagine the embarrassment for poor William. But this was the 1940s, when women were still mostly housewives and passed their days gossiping over the back fence, or at least that's what Hollywood would have us believe. And Vicki's neighbor, the widow Potter (Spring Byington), believes in astrology. She takes Vicki to her personal astrologer, Miss Sibyll (Fay Bainter), who gives Vicki the horoscope that she's going to meet a romantic stranger.

And wouldn't you know it, but a strange man stops by the Whitley place the next night while William is at work. That man is Lloyd Hunter (James Craig), who is the local air-raid warden. He looks fit, but he was a war correspondent who covered stories in all sorts of exotic places before getting injured and being reduced to supporting the war effort on the home front. Unsurprisingly, Vicki thinks this is the exotic stranger she was destined to meet, while William is understandably jealous.

Of course, the Production Code rather dictates the outcome of a movie like The Heavenly Body, and that's part of the problem with the movie. With a film like Grandma's Boy that I blogged about yesterday, you also know who's going to wind up with the girl at the end. But in that case, there's a clearly designed bad guy to root against. Lloyd isn't really a bad guy, and there's no good reason for Vicki to have a true dilemma. It also doesn't help that the humor tries too hard to be zany, and really shows that.

The Heavenly Body isn't exactly a bad movie, but it's another one where it definitely wouldn't be the sort of movie I'd show to non-movie buffs to try to get them intrested in any of the film's stars.

H.M. Pulham, Esq.

Another of the movies that I've had on my DVR for a while that I finally got around to watching because it's available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive (or at least was last I checked) is H.M. Pulham, Esq.

Robert Young plays Harry Moulson Pulham, who at the start of the movie is in his late 40s and, one can guess, a lawyer in private practice in Boston. He comes from the upper-crust of Boston society and lives the sort of "proper" life you expect from Bostonians of that era; think the Vales in Now, Voyager before Bette Davis insists on having that nervous breakdon. Mr. Pulham has a wife Kay (Ruth Hussey) and two children, and walks the dog every morning before walking to the office.

On this particular day, however, a couple of things shake up his routine. One is a call from Rodney Brown, nicknamed "Bo-Jo" (Leif Ericson). Brown was one of Pulham's friends from Harvard back in the day, and with their 25th class reunion coming up, wants to get together with all the friends and do some capsule bios of their lives in the quarter-century following graduation. The other is a message from a then young woman that Pulham knew from working with her in New York a few years after graduation, Marvin Myles (Hedy Lamarr). She's up in Boston, and invites Harry to see her at a partciular hotel. He goes, and looks at her, but can't brin himself to actually talk to her again....

Flash back to early in Harry's life, long before even meeting Marvin. He had a wealthy father in John Pulham (Charles Coburn) married to Mrs. Pulham (no first name given and played by Fay Holden from the Andy Hardy movies), and went to the right schools, even knowing Kay from a fairly early age but not caring for her because she, like a lot of the Boston families, are from stuffy stock. Then he goes off to Harvard and, after graduation, goes off to fight in World War I (the movie was actually released the week before Pearl Harbor; do the math).

World War I changed a lot of people, and Pulham seems to be one of them. He's not so certain he wants to go back to Boston, and one of his more liberal friends from Harvard, Bill King (Van Heflin), gets Pulham a job in advertising in New York, something that would scandalize the family, as this isn't exactly the most respectable job out there. Marvin is a copyrwiter at the agency, and Marvin and Harry seem to work a lot together.

Unsurprisingly, they fall in love too, although we know at the very beginning that they don't wind up together in the final reel since Harry and Kay are married in 1941. It turns out that Harry brings Bill and Marvin up to Boston to meet the family one weekend. Harry's kid sister Mary (Bonita Granville) likes Marvin, and Mom professes to, but Marvin understands that the whole familiy is so tradition-bound and stuffy that this could never be the place for her. But don't Marvin and Harry love each other?

H.M. Pulham, Esq. is one of those movies that MGM made well, much like Madame Bovary which I mentioned several weeks ago. Unfortunately, in the case of H.M. Pulham, Esq., the plot is a bit maddening. Harry and Marvin's reasons for breaking up just make me shrug my head and wonder why either of them thought they'd go on to live happily ever after snubbing each other.

So, while H.M. Pulham, Esq. is a stylish and well-acted movie, it's in service of a script that definitely has its problems. But, as always, judge for yourself.

Hedy Lamarr stars in Gaslight

TCM ran the movie Experiment Perilous during 31 Days of Oscar because it earned a nomination for its art direction. So I DVRed it and sat down to watch it recently.

George Brent plays Dr. Huntington Bailey, who gives a voiceover at the beginning about some days back in 1903 being the strangest days of his life. we then see Bailey on a train during a terrible rain storm, which is where he meets Cissie Bederaux (Olive Blakeney). They're both going back to New York where they live, although Cissie hasn't been there for five years which she spent at a sanitarium where she may or may not have had a heart problem. She vows to move out of her brother Nick's (Paul Lukas) house and asks Bailey to find a good apartment hotel for her. She then asks him to visit the Bederaux place where they'll be having high tea for her birthday.

Bailey shows up, but too late, as it turns out that Cissie has died of some heart condition. But Bailey meets Nick and his lovely wife Allida (Hedy Lamarr). Nick, on finding out that Bailey is a doctor with apparently some research in the then-new field of psychology, asks Bailey to examine Allida surreptitiously to find out what's wrong with her. Since Allida is so beautiful, Bailey naturally accepts.

But there's more going on. Bailey suggested Cissie stay at his apartment hotel, so she had her baggage delivered there. But thanks to a mix-up, she received one of Bailey's bags while he got one of hers. Bailey finds hers, which contains some diaries and research material for a biography she's writing on Nick's life. Apparently they had a tough childhood in Europe, with Mom dying giving birth to Nick and Dad committing suicide. As Bailey reads on, he gets the sinking suspicion that Nick is trying to do something to Allida and their kid, who's constantly kept away from everybody else in the top floor of the house. Allida has been complaining of being followed and Bailey realized he's being followed, too.

Bailey also realizes that he's probably in some trouble, since he knows that Nick will have received his bag. Then he'll put two and two together to determine that Bailey has Cissie's bag and has read the diaries. This probably has something to do with why Nick wanted Bailey to examine Allida too. The fact that Bailey is falling in love with Allida isn't helping, either.

As you can probably guess from the title of this post, I couldn't help but think of Gaslight as I was watching Experiment Perilous. I also couldn't help but think that Gaslight was rather the better movie. I think that a lot of it comes down to the casting of George Brent as the male lead. Brent was at his best at Warner Bros. playing the nominal male lead who was clearly second fiddle to the female lead, often someone like Bette Davis. Here, despite Lamarr's top billing, Brent is just as much a lead as Lamarr. It doesn't work to the movie's benefit. I also didn't find Lukas and Lamarr as good as Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman from Gaslight

Still, the movie is lovely to look at, and the story is interesting enough to make it worth at least one watch. It's available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive Collection.

Boom Town

When Clark Gable was honored in Summer Under the Stars last month, one of the movies TCM ran was 1940's Boom Town. It's going to be on TCM again tomorrow morning at 8:00 AM, and is available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive anyway.

Spencer Tracy plays "Square" John Sand, an independent oil driller in a town in the Texas oil boom of the 1920s. Unfortunately, he doesn't have enough money to buy the equipment to drill deep enough to extract the oil. He's in luck though, as he runs into, quite literally, Big John McMasters (Clark Gable). McMasters has more money than Sand, whom Big John calls "Shorty", and Square John misunderstands as thinking that he's got enough money to buy the equipment from local outfitter Luther Aldrich (Frank Morgan). So the two go into business together.

Square John was hoping to earn enough money to bring his girlfriend out to Texas so he could marry her, but therein lies a tale. Big John goes into town and runs into a beautiful new stranger, Betsy (Claudette Colbert). He falls in love with her immediately, and the feeling is close enough to mutual that the two actually get married that night. There's just one problem: Betsy was Square John's girlfriend. As you can imagine, this is going to drive a big wedge into their relationship. Eventually splitting up their partnership.

Each man goes his merry way, with Square John eventually working for an American extractor in one of the Latin American dictatorships where the fear of nationalization is omnipresent. Big John winds up in New York after first going through Square John's South American field, and then becoming an oil magnate in Oklahoma. Big John wants to go to New York and get involved in the refining (and later stages) part of the oil industry because he's always looking for new fields to conquer. In fact, it's because he wants to take on new rival Compton (Lionell Atwill), having met Compton's beautiful factotum Karen (Hedy Lamarr, who gets billed above the title even though she doesn't appear until more than halfway through the movie).

Anyhow, Square John's job gets nationalized out of existence, so he winds up in New York City too, and goes back into partnership with Big John, and Luther surprisingly in tow. It's a short-lived partnership, however, as Square John sees Karen for what she really is....

Boom Town is an interesting, sprawling movie that generally does well despite having some flaws. Claudette Colbert is one of those actress for whom it seems tough to wipe all teh glamor off. She does as well as she can, and it's not her fault, but at times she seems like a fish out of water in the oil towns. The movie also careens from one part of the plot to the next; unlike something like Cimarron the material here either calls for a more intimate story or fcusing only on the McMasters character's lifespan. And the ending came across to me as a bit unrealistic.

Still, with all that, Boom Town is an excellent example of the sort of quality work a studio like MGM could put out with its stable of actors and people behind the camera. Its pluses outweigh its minuses and the film ultimately works as a whole, and is thoroughly worth a watch.

Comrade X

TCM is putting the spotlight on director King Vidor tonight. Apparently Duel in the Sun (8:00 PM) and Ruby Gentry (10:30 PM), both of which I've blogged about before, must both be out of print, since TCM doesn't list either of them being available for purchase from the TCM shop. The Warner Archive, however, puts out Comrade X, so that one should always be avaiable. It's airing overnight at 4:00 AM (or very early tomorrow morning if you want to look at it that way).

Clark Gable plays the titular Comrade X. His real name is McKinley Thompson, who is an American journalist covering the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was of course a nasty dictatorship, spying on reporters and only feeding them propaganda so that they'd print positive things about the country for the papers back home; or, being unwilling to do that, at least they wouldn't be able to print the whole truth. Thompson, however, is getting the truth out, much to the consternation of the Soviet authorities. All they know is that one of the reporters is getting these stories out; they don't know which one, since all the stories are being signed "Comrade X". There is one person who does figure out Thompson's secret however: Vanya (Felix Bressart), the valet in the hotel where all of the foreign reporters are staying.

Vanya could expose Comrade X, but he's got a better idea: Stalin hasn't quite purged everybody yet, and with the conflict between Stalinists and Trotskyists still going on (at least if you believe the movie), it can be dangerous even for the Communists. In reality, quite a few of the people who surrounded Lenin and helped win the revolution and following civil war two decades earlier did fall afoul of Stalin, and were prominently purged in the show trials that began around 1935, but most of the show trials had concluded by the time the movie was made. But back to the movie, Vanya would like Thompson to smuggle his daughter, street-car driver Theodore (Hedy Lamarr), out of the country. The catch, though, is that the daughter is a committed Communist. Why would she want to leave the communist paradise?

Thompson comes up with the idea that she could preach the gospel of communism in the United States, an idea which seems ludicrous even for 1940, when the American communists would have been close to theie maximum influence with all those powerful New Deal levers to pull. But it's about the only way Thompson could possibly convince Theodore to leave the USSR. The only way she could leave, though, is as his husband, so it's off to the civil registry office to get married. Meanwhile, Comrade X's camera is discovered, hidden in Vanya's room, which means trouble for all three of them. This all eventually leads to the climax, which involves Thompson and Theodore commandeering a tank and driving it straight for the border with Romania, which was not yet a Communist satellite state since this is 1940.

Comrade X was made not long after Ninotchka was a huge success for MGM, so there are a lot of things in it that are reminiscent of the earlier movie. On the whole, though, it doesn't glitter the way Ninotchka does. It's still worth watching, though, because of a lot of enjoyable performances from the supporting actors. In addition to Bressart, there's Sig Ruman as a German reporter; Eve Arden as a fellow American reporter; and Oscar Homolka, playing a Soviet commissar. Gable is OK doing much the same role he played six years earlier in It Happened One Night, while Hedy Lamarr is lovely to look at.

I'm not certain if I'd want to pay Warner Archive prices for a movie like Comrade X that's OK but not quite great. If it were on one of those four-movie box sets, though, it would be a great bargain, as it's more than entertaining enough.

Predictable, but entertaining enough

TCM's lineup for this morning and afternoon is a bunch of movies all from 1941. One of those is Come Live With Me, at 3:45 PM ET. Halfway in you can guess where it's going, but the ride is still enjoyable.

Hedy Lamarr plays Johnny Jones, a nightclub singer who is also a refugee from Vienna. Despite her success as an entertainer, being in the country on a tourist visa she's about to have it revoked, which she fears would mean certain death, as she'd be sent back to war-torn Europe. The only way around it it to find somebody she can marry. This is a problem, though. She's got a man she loves, Barton Kendrick, (Ian Hunter), a publisher who already has a wife (Verree Teasdale). She meets writer Bill Smith (James Stewart), though, and it looks like there might be some hope for her. He's willing to marry her, and to prove that this is all business, she's willing to pay him a stipend to cover his expenses, which he considers strictly a loan. What she doesn't know is that he's perfectly willing to use the experience as the plot of his next book.

Worse is that he takes his book to Kendrick, of course not knowing about Kendrick's relationship with the lovely Miss Jones (now Mrs. Smith). Worse, Smith finds himself beginning to fall in love with his "wife". You can guess where the love triangle is heading: Bill takes his "wife" with him to visit his grandmother, and she begins to doubt just whom she really loves.

As I said, it's all predictable stuff, especially the whole two people thrown together by circumstance who wind up falling in love, especially when one of them is already in love with somebody else, part. In fact, Stewart did a movie reminiscent of this a few years earlier with It's a Wonderful World. Still, Stewart is always good in roles like this, and Lamarr is not just lovely, she's actually a capable enough actress. Add in the production values of MGM and you wind up with a movie that will never be considered truly great, but will always be good for a classic movie fan.

Come Live With Me got a release to the Warner Archive Collection, so it's availabe on DVD, but a bit pricey.

A William Powell movie that didn't air on his birthday

Last Thursday was the anniversary of William Powell's birth, and as I mentioned, TCM marked the occasion by showing a bunch of his movies. Of course, Powell made far too many movies to show in just one day, so they couldn't all be shown on his birthday. One that didn't get shown then is Crossroads, which is airing tomorrow morning at 8:00 AM ET on TCM.

Powell plays David Talbot, a prominent French diplomat with a lovely wife Lucienne (Hedy Lamarr). He's about to celebrate his anniversary with her, but the party is disturbed by a strange letter. A man is asking for one million francs, obviously implying that he knows a secret about Talbot's past. Talbot and the police set up a plan to catch the extortionist, but that's not the end of the story. The extortionist claims that Talbot is in fact the famous criminal Jean Pelletier from a dozen years ago! Talbot doesn't have a good way of disproving this, as Talbot and Pelletier were both involved in a train crash shortly after the celebrated crime, in which one of them died, and the now-Talbot suffered a curious case of amnesia that prevents him from remembering anything that happened before the crash. Doctors debate the nature of amnesia and memory, but the case is only resolved when a man named Sarrou (Basil Rathbone) testifies that he was with Pelletier at his death several years later.

The extortionist is duly convicted, but this of course is not the end of the problem for Talbot. Sarrou and his girlfriend Michelle (Claire Trevor) inform Talbot that Sarrou lied on the stand: Talbot is in fact not Talbot, but Pelletier! And Sarrou was involved in the crime with Pelletier! And Sarrou wants that one million francs the extortionist tried to get, since it is in fact Sarrou's share of the proceeds from the crime. If the now Talbot doesn't pay off, Sarrou threatens to go to the police, even though it will mean prison for him as well. At least the police will be more lenient on somebody who turns state's evidence. Is Talbot who he claims to be? Well, he can't remember who the hell he is, so maybe not. And Sarrou and Michelle have more than enough evidence that Talbot may in fact be Pelletier.

It goes without saying that I won't give away the ending to the movie. Let's just say that it's entertaining enough, although it comes across as a bit formulaic. It's also a movie that would work a bit better as a true noir; instead, the movie was made at MGM, the studio that had too much glitz back in 1942 to make anything really approaching noir. The performances are all just fine though; in addition to those I've named I should add character actors Felix Bressart as Talbot's personal physician; Sig Ruman as a doctor who testifies against Bressart at the opening trial; and Margaret Wycherly as an elderly lady who says she's Jean Pelletier's mother.

Fans of classic cinema will certainly enjoy Crossroads, although if I were trying to introduce people to the good mysteries of that era I'd pick something better. Crossroads has gotten a DVD release, although it's as part of the Warner Archive collection.