Twilight glory

Christopher Plummer was honored last year in TCM's Summer Under the Stars, with several of his pictures that I hadn't seen before. One of those was Stage Struck, which came early in Plummer's career.

Plummer isn't really the star here; that honor goes to Susan Strasberg, also early in her career. She plays Eva Lovelace, a young woman originally from Vermont who goes to New York City because she just knows she can make it on the stage. Indeed, she basically shows up unannounced at the office of theatrical producer Lewis Easton (Henry Fonda). Why not start out at the top, after all? Also waiting to see Easton are an actor on the glide path to the end of his career, Robert Hedges (Herbert Marshall), and an up-and-coming playwright, Joe Sheridan (Christopher Plummer). Nice people to meet if you're trying to make it on Broadway, I suppose.

Eva is so obnoxiously pushy that Easton, just to get her out of his hair, has Joe tell her to come for an audition for a suppoting role in Joe's new play where an aging diva of an actress is starring. Eva has her own ideas about how the role should be played which conflct with what the producer and playwright want, so of course the audition goes badly. Eva's pushiness causes even more problems when she runs into Joe outside the premiere of that new play and gets him to invite her to the afterparty at Easton's swanky apartment. She has too much to drink and, when she's stonking drunk, starts doing impromptu Shakespeare readings in front of the embarrassed guests!

Worse, she passes out drunk in the guest room and tells Lewis she loves him. Now, if all of this sounds familiar, that's because it's a remake of Morning Glory from 25 years earlier, in which Katharine Hepburn played the aspiring young actress. So you may know where the story is going. Eva has to suffer for her art before triumphing on the stage. Lewis is of two minds about her as she's really not right for such an older man. So he has his secretaries lie to her about his being out of town, and tries to get Joe to send her away from New York. But events conspire to bring us to the final act where Eva gets the leading role and makes a success of it.

I'm not the biggest fan of Katharine Hepburn, so Morning Glory isn't exactly a favorite of mine. Amazingly, Susan Strasberg takes the role and runs with it in what feels like a desperate attempt to be even more obnoxious than Katharine Hepburn ever was. Stage Struck feels artificial, like somebody who knows nothing about the Broadway stage writing about it, and Strasberg is so unlikeable here that it makes the rest of the movie hard to watch. Everybody else tries and is professional in their roles, so I suppose it's a good thing that this didn't sink Christopher Plummer. The movie does have some nice period photography, in color, of the way Broadway was in the late 1950s, but that's about the only thing good about this movie.

Not as cool as rebel girls

In the second half of the 1930s, Katharine Hepburn famously got the label of "box office poison". Having seen some of the movies she made before heading back to the New York stage for a few years, I think it's not hard to see the self-centered characters she had a tendency to play combined with her mannered nature not working for audiences of the day. She's less self-centered in A Woman Rebels, but then there's the plot....

Hepburn plays Pamela Thistlewaite, a young woman living in Victorian England with her younger sister Flora (Elizabeth Allan) and widower father Byron (Donald Crisp), a judge who frequently travels to London. He's strict and has ideas about women that lead to them having a very narrow place in the world, something that Pamela strongly disagrees with. Dad thinks women should be wives and mothers, and it's past time for the two daughters to be married off.

So when Dad introduces the daughters to the world, it's a relief to him that Flora meets a nice young naval officer, Lt. Freeland (David Manners). Pamela meets a man too, Lord Gaythorne (Van Heflin), but the catch in his case is that he's already married, and there's no way he's going to be able to leave his wife. This is the Victorian era, after all, so the idea of getting a divorce would have been somewhat scandalous, even if the Anglican church had been founded precisely on the idea that the king should be allowed to get his divorce.

So when Lt. Freeland gets a post in Italy as a naval attaché, Pamela eventually follows to spend time with her sister, who is already with child. In fact, Pamela is with child as well, having been knocked up by Gaythorne, so her going off to Italy is convenient so that nobody in England will know of the baby. In Italy, Pamela meets diplomat Thomas Lane (Herbert Marshall), and kinda falls in love with him, despite her complicated personal life. And things suddenly turn as Flora's husband is killed in a shipwreck. The shock causes her to miscarry, and then ultimately die. But this gives Pamela an idea! She'll have her own baby, but pass it off as Flora's, with the idea that Flora died in childbirth and this poor orphan needs an aunt to raise it.

Pamela returns to England, and writes some fiction that she's able to get published in a ladies' magazine, before becoming an editor there when the regular (male) editor is out. This in an era when taking such a job, even if it is at a ladies' journal, is treated as kind of scandalous. Doesn't Pamela know she's supposed to get married?

Pamela's daughter, still thinking she's Pamela's niece and named after Flora, grows up with... Lord Gaythorne's son, things really start to get complicated. Technically, since they're half-siblings, they really shouldn't get married. But Pamela can't tell young Flora the truth for fairly obvious reasons. But Pamela is going to have to meet the elder Gaythorne about all this, and this time their tryst is discovered, so there's going to be scandal anyway....

I suppose the fact that the Production Code was in full effect partly drives what's going on in A Woman Rebels, but boy is the plot here nutty even compared to some of the other movies of the era that had to contort their plots to fit into Production Code strictures. And this I think is one of those places where the casting of Katharine Hepburn doesn't help. Bette Davis might have made the material seem fresh, but Hepburn is as cold and distant as ever here.

Still, there are people who like Katharine Hepburn, so watch this one for yourself.

Tony Curtis in Merry Olde England

Another person who was honored last August in Summer Under the Stars is Tony Curtis. TCM showed a couple of hs movies that I hadn't seen before, or even heard of. First up is a period action movie from fairly early in his career: The Black Shield of Falworth.

The movie is set in the reign of English King Henry IV (played by Ian Keith showing up briefly toward the end), so around the beginning of the 15th century. The Earl of Alban (David Farrar) is traveling through the countryside with his retinue, and stops at a farm in search of water. The farmhouse is owned by Bowman (Rhys Williams), who is guardian to siblings Myles (Tony Curtis) and Meg (Barbara Rush). Alban and his men see a pretty young woman, so of course they think they can have her, which ticks off poor Myles. Myles fights back, which is a dangerous thing to do, so the three of them are forced to leave.

At the local church, the friar informs then that Myles' late father left a signet ring with a heraldic shield on it, as well as a letter of introduction to the Earl of Mackworth (Herbert Marshall) stating that this is the son of Falworth. Apparently, the elder Falworth did something than him afoul of the monarchy, with the punishment that that Falworth shield be stricken from the heraldic record and that the entire Falworth family be wiped from the face of the earth, which is why Myles and Meg are in danger. Mackworth is, however, a friend, and puts Myles and Meg into service: Myles as a squire, and Meg as a servant to Lady Anne (Janet Leigh).

Myles immediately proceeds to be a truculent little bastard, rebelling just for the sake of rebellion while trying to find out the truth about the shield on the ring. He also meets Anne and immediately falls for her, which is a problem since the two are, as far as everybody knows, not of the same social class. She's also going to be betrothed to Walter Blunt (Patrick O'Neal), who is at this point head squire and not yet knighted. Anne eventually falls in love with Myles as well. But all of this is buildup to the climax.

It's really the Earl of Alban who has been plotting against King Henry. When Henry plans to visit Mackworth Castle, part of the festivities require jousting against Henry's companion, a count from Burgundy. Mackworth names Myles, but only someone who's been knighted and joust against a count. Alban recognizes the Falworth shield and demands that Myles should be killed. Henry gives Myles the chance to save himself in trial by combat against Alban. Alban, however, has an even more devious trick up his sleeve, which is to have Henry killed while observing the trial by combat.

Henry IV was a real person, but most of the rest of the dramatis personæ in The Black Sheild of Falworth are wholly fictional. Universal conceived this as an action movie in color and widescreen as an attempt to get people to shut off their TVs and come back to the theaters. So while the movie is short of plot, it's another movie that's more than entertaining enough. This, even if Tony Curtis doesn't exactly personify late medieval England; this is the movie about which the legend of Curtis saying "Yonder lies the castle of my fodder" sprung, although Curtis doesn't say anything like that.

So The Black Shield of Falworth certainly isn't great, and it's easy to see why this isn't one of Tony Curtis' most remembered movies. Much better was still to come for Curtis in his career.

The Flame Within

I've got an acquaintance on a non-movie internet forum I frequent who's a psychiatrist of some reknown. One time, I accidentally compared him to a psychologist, and a fair bit of humor ensued over the idea that anybody would do something so scandalous as referring to the guy as a psychologist. Anyhow, I bring this up because I couldn't help but think of that acquaintance as I was watching the movie The Flame Within.

Ann Harding plays the psychiatrist in question, one named Dr. Mary White, although she really does seem closer to the popular perception of a psychologist, and the amount of stuff that could have passed for pop psychology decades later surprised me. There's a fellow doctor, Dr. Gordon Phillips (Herbert Marshall), who loves her and wants to marry her, but the movie was released in 1935 and everybody thinks marriage means Mary would have to give up her career which she's reluctant to do because psychiatry is a cutting-edge field and she wants to be a pioneer. (Who can blame her?)

Into this comes a patient, which ought not be surprising since these people are after all doctors. That patient is the idle rich young woman Lillian Belton (Maureen O'Sullivan), who has just tried to commit suicide, which is a decided no-no under the Production Code. Only evil people would do that. Lillian is brought to Dr. White's posh upper-story apartment/office, and in the course of one session tries to commit suicide again by jumping out the window! It turns out that Lillian was in Paris last season, and met another idle rich man, Jack Kerry (Louis Hayward). She immediately fell in love with him, although he only saw her as a friend at most. His true love is alcohol. Lillian thinks she can reform Jack and wants him to be with her instead of the bottle.

So Drs. White and Phillips get in touch with Jack and get him to have a session with Dr. White. And over the course of several sessions, Dr. White finally convinces Jack to stop drinking and to try to get a job, in this case in airplane design although the job seems to have more to do with the passenger cabin than what we traditionally think of as aerospace.

The only cath is what in pop psychology would be called, if memory serves, transference. Dr. White having helped Jack, he thinks she's the right woman for him, not Lillian! And so naturally he starts gettin the hots for Dr. White and that makes Lillian unhappy. Now perhaps if Dr. White had been a psychologist she would have understood all this. But she's supposed to be a psychiatrist, so she doesn't see any of this. And while she doesn't actively try to take Jack away from Lillian, she doesn't actively try to stop his pursuing her while being married to Lillian. At least, not until Dr. Phillips has an intervention with her.

I suppose there might have been an interesting idea at the core of The Flame Within. But boy is that brought down by the script. On the bright side, it all comes crashing down so hard that the movie is unintenionally funny at times. The ending is pure Production Code and might enrage some people, but I saw it as just another symptom of how much of a mess the movie is. All of the actors try their best, but the can't overcome the turkey of a script.

Thankfully, The Flame Within is programmer-length, so watching it crash and burn won't take too much of your time. And it really is worth one watch if you're in the mood to watch the sort of movie that crashes and burns.

Melodramatic 1930s love triangle #58347205723806

Merle Oberon was one of the stars honored in Summer Under the Stars last year, which gave me the chance to DVR a movie I hadn't blogged about before, The Dark Angel. I probably should have watched it in March since it was shown again for 31 Days of Oscar thanks in part to Oberon's nomination, but I only got to it recently.

Oberon plays Kitty Vane, who lives in one of those English manor houses in the early part of the 20th century. She's got two best friends who have all known each other since childhood, Alan Trent (Fredric March) and Gerald Shannon (Herbert Marshall). With these three knowing each other more or less all their lives, it's unsurprising that they would wind up having romantic feelings for one another, or at least heterosexual romantic feelings, since there's no way they could have depicted Alan and Gerald being in love with each other. But while both guys like Kitty, Kitty loves Alan and only considers Gerald a close platonic friend.

And then the Great War comes, sending both of the guys off to fight. Both of them get leave at the same time, and when they get home, Alan decides he's going to propose to Kitty. Gerald accepts this, and Alan and Kitty think about having the marriage be as soon as possible. This would be doable with the ten days' leave he and Gerald have. But unfortunately, all leave gets cancelled just as Alan is going to get the marriage license. No vicar is going to be able to perform the ceremony before Alan has to go back to the front.

So at the other end of the railway line where the soldiers are going to depart for France, Alan and Kitty decide that they're going to spend the night together anyway, despite not being married. Lawrence, another soldier who knows Alan, Kitty, and Gerald, happens to see Alan in a compromising situation, and is a bit of a dick to Alan about it. You'd think Alan could just tell Lawrence that he's having dinner with Kitty, but the idea of an unmarried couple sharing a hotel room together is something their class of society would consider scandalous back in those days (see the later Merle Oberon movie The Divorce of Lady X).

Lawrence is enough of a dick that he lets Gerald in on the fact that Alan had somebody in his room with him, which leads to problems out on the front. Alan tries to put in for leave, but Gerald won't approve it because he thinks Alan has been dishonorable to Kitty. Instead, Alan winds up on one of those dangerous missions that could lead to his death, one that he in fact doesn't return from.

Gerald eventually returns to England and Kitty feeling responsible for Alan's death, more so when Kitty reveals it was she who was in the hotel with Alan that night. Worse, it turns out that Alan didn't die at all. He was only blinded by an explosion in the field and taken to a German hospital under a different name. After some time and with the war over, Alan is as well as he's ever going to be but still blind, and free to go back to England.

He takes the train to Kitty's home town, but decides not to get off because he doesn't want to be a burden. Instead, he goes to another town where he stays at an inn where the kids have never seen a blind person before. Alan treats the kids to some children's stories, which get written down and published under that different name. But you just know that eventually Alan's path is going to cross with the path that Gerald and Kitty are on. They've decided to marry, since Gerald always loved Kitty and they just know that Alan is dead.

If you like sappy 1930s melodramas, you're going to love The Dark Angel. It's well acted and the story certainly pours on the melodrama. If melodramas aren't your thing, then you probably won't care so much for it, since the characters make some pretty dumb (and dated) choices in their lives. Indeed, I don't think The Dark Angel is the sort of movie I'd pick if I were trying to get people not so interested in old movies into 1930s films. Better to pick a comedy or a drama with more of a payoff at the end like San Francisco with its depiction of the earthquake. But it's easy to see why audiences of the day would have flocked to The Dark Angel.

Make Way for a Lady

Anne Shirley was one of the honorees in last August's Summer Under the Stars. I finally got around to watching one of the movies that I recorded during the salute, Make Way for a Lady, available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive.

Shirley plays Jane Drew, high school-aged daughter of Chris (Herbert Marshall), a widowed publisher living in one of those smallish towns an hour or so away from New York that seemed to be the sort of setting common for 1930s movies. Jane has a guy who might become her boyfriend in the form of Billy Hopkins (Frank Coghlan Jr.), while Dad doesn't seem to have a woman in his life.

But then there's Valerie Broughton (Margot Grahame). She wrote a book that Mr. Drew's company published, and she's decided to take a house down the street from the Drews in order to work on her new book. She's also given Mr. Drew a first edition of her current best seller, with an inscription to him.

Jane reads the inscription and gets it in her head that Valerie wrote her book about her Dad, and that the two might be in love. So she's going to work on the two of them and try to get them together because Dad could use a new wife.

Unfortunately, Jane doesn't know that Valerie's book is really about another man and that Valerie loves that man. Also, Dad doesn't love Valerie, but Jane's teacher Miss Emerson (Gertrude Michael). Worse, Jane finds this out, and decides to tell Emerson that she wouldn't make a suitable stepmother because Dad's got another woman in mind!

I've always found that RKO's B movies are not as high-quality for me as Warner Bros.' B movies, which I generally consider the best of them. While Make Way for a Lady certainly isn't bad, even as a B movie it could have been better. Anne Shirley is asked to be too irritating here, and the plot is resolved much too quickly.

Make Way for a Lady is another of those movies that would have been good on those old four-movie sets that TCM and Warner Home Video used to put out, rather than on a standalone DVD.

Breakfast for Two

Herbert Marshall isn't particularly remembered for comedy. I think a good portion of the reason for that is that when he did get to do comedies, they were programmers at best. A good example of this is Breakfast for Two, which is going to be on TCM at 2:00 PM tomorrow.

Herbert Marshall plays Jonathan Blair, a wealthy businessman who has a butler named Butch (Eric Blore). One morning, Butch finds a woman named Valentine Ransome (Barbara Stanwyck) in Blair's house. It turns out that Blair went out for a night on the town, met Valentine, and got incredibly drunk; when Valentine brought him home, the dog wouldn't let her back out. So here we are.

Blair, although owning a shipping company, is the latest in what is a line Blairs in a family-owned business. And Jonathan has always seemed to be more interested in being a playboy than actually running the company, much to the consternation of the board. Valentine learns about this, so she maneuvers to take control of the company, not because she wants to be mean to Blair and take over the company through underhanded means a la Wallace Beery in Dinner at Eight; instead, she's concerned for Jonathan and doesn't want to see the company go under.

The thing is, Valentine kind of likes Jonathan. However, he already has a girlfriend in the form of actress Carol (Glenda Farrell), and indeed is even planning to marry her. Valentine thinks that too would be bad for the family business, so she has to maneuver to stop the wedding as well as keep the company afloat.

Now, we know that since Stanwyck is top-billed here, she's liable to end up with Herbert Marshall's character at the end, and the bigger reason for watching (or not watching) a movie like this is to see how the characters get to the inevitable wedding. In this case, it involves Valentine and Butch working together, much to the consternation of the Justice of the Peace (Donald Meek) who has been hired to preside over the wedding, and has to do so on multiple occasions because it keeps getting interrupted.

But for the most part, Breakfast for Two turns out to be rather lesser comedy, even in the œuvre of Herbert Marshall. In his case, I think I'd recommend Trouble in Paradise or maybe If You Could Only Cook first. Stanwyck, of course, made glittering comedies like Ball of Fire and The Lady Eve. Blore, and to a lesser extent Meek, are the best things in this one.

Breakfast for Two is one of those movies that probably should have wound up in a box set of either Marshall's or Stanwyck's movies, but instead has wound up on a standalone DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive collection.

Angel of no particular color

I bought a four-film box set of Marlene Dietrich movies some time back, which I mentioned when I reviewed Seven Sinners a year ago. I recently watched another movie off of it, Angel.

Dietrich unsurprisingly plays the angel, although that's not her real name of course. She's first seen checking into a Paris hotel under an assumed name, which is for a good reason. She's in Paris looking up a friend, a Russian émigrée the Grand Duchess Anna Dmitrievna (Laura Hope Crews) so that she can commiserate about her personal problems.

To be honest, her personal problems could be a lot worse. Her real name is Lady Maria Barker, and she's married to a prominent British diplomat Sir Frederick (Herbert Marshall) who is prominent with the League of Nations in Geneva and is constantly going there because of all the important international political events going on (the movie was released in 1937, so things could still heat up more). Because Sir Frederick is away all the time, Lady Maria feels a bit neglected.

The Grand Duchess runs a salon of sorts where fashionable people meet. One man who goes to the salon is Anthony Halton (Melvyn Douglas), and when he sees Lady Maria, he's immediately taken by her beauty. So he takes her out for a night on the town, although she doesn't say anything about what her identity is, or the fact that she's married. Anthony like her so much that he refers to her as the titular Angel. She likes him too, but isn't certain whether she's ready to be unfaithful to her husband. So she says if she wants to continue the relationship, she'll meet him same place, same time next week.

Lady Maria returns home to Sir Frederick, who has some time off from his business in Geneva. But what Lady Maria doesn't know is that Anthony served in World War I with Sir Frederick and know each other as a result. (Frederick obviously doesn't know anything about what happened in Paris.) And Anthony decides to show up that the Barker estate, not realizing that Angel is his old friend's wife. You can imagine the dilemma for Lady Maria.

Angel is an odd little movie. It was directed by Ernst Lubitsch and has an impressive cast, and yet it feels like something is missing. Maybe it's the script, but everything felt a little flat, as though it was hard to care about any of the characters or their personal problems. There's some comic relief from Edward Everett Horton, but even that doesn't come to as much as it should.

That's not to say Angel is bad at all, just that it could be better and is a fairly minor entry in the filmographies of all the main participants.

Not to be confused with Young Man With Ideas

Unfortunately, I've come down with a bad cold at just the wrong time of the year, so I don't have the energy to do reviews that are as extensive as I'd like. Thankfully, I recently watched a movie that doesn't need a big review: Young Ideas.

Mary Astor plays Jo Evans, a writer who's recently written an extremely successful -- and rather racy -- novel about life in Paris. Her agent Trent (Allyn Joslyn) has sent her on a speaking tour to discuss the book, but she hasn't shown up to her last several engagements, much to Trent's consternation.

The reason why she hasn't shown up is that she stopped in the college town of Digby, PA, where she met chemistry teacher Michael Kingsley (Herbert Marshall). It was love at first sight, and they got married, with Jo planning to live with Kingsley in Digby. This just won't do.

Jo has two young adult daughters, son Jeff (Elliott Reid) and daughter Susan (Susan Peters), and they're not pleased at all with the idea of their mom getting remarried to... a chemistry professor? So Jeff cooks up a scheme to turn Michael against his new wife.

Frankly, Jeff comes across as a really spoiled jerk here. He does get his comeuppance at the end, but not after any number of complications. Jeff and Susan both enroll at Digby, and while there Susan falls in love with English professor Tom Farrell (Richard Carlson), which is against university rules. But it make her think that perhaps they shouldn't be plotting against Mom. She becomes even more certain of this when Jeff tries to turn Tom against Susan.

This is a standard-issue MGM programmer, nothing particularly noteworthy, and not particularly bad except for the way the characters are written. It's available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive, but is really one of those movies that should be in a box set instead of (or in addition to) a standalone DVD.

The Foxes not of Harrow

One of tonight's Fredric March movies is Another Part of the Forest (11:00 PM), based on the play by Lillian Hellman. The family in this story is the same one in Hellman's earlier play The Little Foxes which was also turned into a movie, so I'm doing today's post on The Little Foxes.

Bette Davis plays Regina Giddens, married sister in an Alabama family from the turn of the 20th century which includes the Hubbard brothers: married Oscar (Carl Benton Reid) and unmarried Ben (Charles Dingle). Regina married the town banker Horace (Herbert Marshall), but he's been sick with a heart issue and seeing specialists up north in Baltimore. Regina wants Horace to return home, so she's gong to send their daughter Alexandra (Teresa Wright), nicknamed "Xan", up to Baltimore.

Regina has good reason to want her husband home. The Hubbards have been negotiating a business deal with Marshall, an industrialist from Chicago. He wants to open a mill down south to handle the cotton, but he needs a deal with the people who have the cotton, which means the Hubbards. The problem is that the Hubbards have to put up money, and it's going to come one-third from each sibling, more or less. The "more or less" is because Regina being a woman doesn't have the control over the family money that her brothers have. She needs Horace to approve of investing.

When Horace returns, we learn that he has no intention of investing the Giddens money. More alarmingly, we learn that he's going to die because his heart condition is untreatable. He's relatively OK with dying, too, because he and Regina have been at each other's throats for years thanks to a whole bunch of issues. Among them is the question of whom Alexandra should marry. Alexandra has been seeing, in an oh-so late 19th century way, David (Richard Carlson), who works at the local newspaper and is a nice young man but not of the Hubbard's financial class. Horace worries that the rest of the family is going to try to marry Xan off to her cousin (Oscar's son) Leo (Dan Duryea), who is in Horace's mind a nasty piece of work.

Horace is right to fear Leo. Leo works in Horace's bank, probably because he wasn't able to get any other job. Leo has been thoroughly unethical, to the point of rummaging through Uncle Horace's safety deposit box. He's found that Horace has $90,000 in bonds convertible as cash, which would be more than enough to cover that one-third of the investment in the cotton mill. Leo knows that Horace only looks at his safe deposit box twice a year or so, and isn't going to look at it again until the autumn, so Leo could "borrow" those bonds for five months, which would be enough time to raise the money to replace them. Leo, however, tells his father so much about them that we just know Horace is going to discover that his bonds are missing....

The Little Foxes is a really fun little movie, a sort of light version of Tennessee Williams' southern Gothic. I think not going all the way to Williams' level makes it better, since I tend to find Williams to go way over the top. Davis is ruthless but actually also tones it down from some of her other movies, again to the benefit of the movie. Wright is good as the young woman who has to grow up; Reid and Dingle are more than passable in supporting roles. Duryea nearly steals the show as a thoroughly nasty man in his first real role (IMDb claims he had an uncredited role in one movie before this). It's an obvious precursor to those noir heavies he'd play. The one weak link is Patricia Collinge as the crazy aunt. She's more obnoxious than possibly insane.

I was very favorably impressed by The Little Foxes, and I think you'll be, too.

The Painted Veil (1934)

I'm not a big fan of Greta Garbo. But I do have to say that it's not her fault that The Painted Veil is a mess. The movie is available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive, so you can watch and decide for yourself how much of a mess it is.

Garbo, at 28, plays unmarried Katrin, an Austrian who still lives with her parents. Her kid sister gets married, and one of the attendees is British Dr. Fane (Herbert Marshall), whose career involves studying cholera in Hong Kong and dealing with any outbreaks on the mainland. Garbo is so desperate that she decides to marry him and go off to China with him!

Katrin, now in Hong Kong, doesn't know anybody there, so she's bored out of her mind until she meets British civil servant Townsend (George Brent), also stationed in Hong Kong. Townsend seems to be relatively wealthy by Hong Kong standards, and is also intersted in Katrin. Katrin has nothing else to do because her husband is spending all his time on his epidemiology studies, so she naturally does what any woman in her situation would do, which is to take a lover in the afternoon.

Of course, Dr. Fane finds out and he's none too pleased. He has no desire to divorce her, but what's a good way to punish her? (Never mind the fact that he should have paid attention to her.) Well, the good doctor but lousy husband is in luck! A cholera epidemic has broken out on the mainland, and Dr. Fane is needed to treat the patients and find the source of the outbreak. Only this time, he's not going to leave Katrin behind to romance Townsend. Oh, no, he's going to take Katrin with him to middle-of-nowhere China even if it kills her. Or especially if it kills her. Of course, he's the one to get cholera eventually.

The Painted Veil is sunk by its thoroughly ludicrous plot. Garbo as a woman who is unmarried and not by her choice is nonsense. If she weren't married, it's because she didn't want a man, like the characters in the recently-mentioned Antonia's Line. The movie also completely overlooks the fact that both of them screwed up in the marriage. George Brent is also the sort of actor who would be right in Herbert Marshall's role, but not as the lover Katrin takes on the side. And the resolution of the whole cholera thing left me shaking my head at the improbability of it.

Still, as I said at the beginning, you may want to judge for yourself. The movie was based on a story by Somerset Maugham, and was remade about a decade ago. The 2007 version has actually been released as part of a box set, but not the Garbo version, which is only on the pricier standalone Warner Archive DVD.

Midnight Lace

I watched Midnight Lace some months back because I'd seen TCM hawk that four-film Doris Day box set from Universal and figured since I hade Midnight Lace on my DVR, I'd watch it and do a full-length post on it. It turned out that the box set is now out of print. But a standalone DVD was in the works, and that DVD is being released today.

Doris Day plays Kit Preston, an American in London who's living there because she got married a few months back to businessman Anthony (Rex Harrison). They're well-to-do, as Kit doesn't need to work, and they even have a maid. Anyhow, today she's dealing with her new passport and then is going to do some shopping. But she's warned that it's one of those days where London's stereotypical fog has rolled in, and if she wants they'll call a taxi for her.

Kit decides to walk home, which sets in motion a series of events that changes everybody's lives. While going through Grosvenor Square, she hears a voice that tells her he's watching her, and that he's coming to get her. Needless to say, this sends Kit into a panic -- I mean, who wouldn't be shocked by some strange voice calling you out in the fog where you can't see it?

So Kit tells everybody when she gets home, but of course people don't particularly believe her. At most, it's just the sort of practical joke that people play on each other when the fog rolls in and nobody can see who's doing what. But then Kit gets a call at home from the same guy, which really stuns her. After all, who has their phone number? And why would anybody call her at home. But still it always seems to happen when there's nobody else around to confirm it.

On Kit's side are her husband, fellow tenant Peggy (Natasha Perry), and Kit's Aunt Bea, about to visit from London (Myrna Loy). Oh, and there's the Scotland Yard inspector (John Williams). And of course, there are several obvious suspects. First off is the son of her housekeeper, Malcolm (Roddy McDowall). He seems to be short of money all the time, and frankly, his constant attempts to grasp for money bother Kit. She liks the housekeeper, but not Malcolm. Then there's Brian (John Gavin), a construction foreman at a building site next to the Preston's building. He always seems to be in the right place at the right time. Finally, there's a man who seems to be following Kit, but always just out of sight.

Doris Day didn't get too many chances to do serious drama, and for the most part she does well. This is a part in which the character has good reason to question her own sanity, which is a tough role for anybody to play. It's easy to go too far over the top and turn things into an unintentional parody. Day comes close to the line at times, but generally gives a good performance. (It may just be that I don't like her vocal quality and it's this that makes her sound like she's going over the top.) Rex Harrison is good but nothing special. Myrna Loy does her usual fine job in a supporting role while John Gavin is solid in a role that calls for him to be nothing more than solid. McDowall probably comes closest to going over the top, as he makes his character too much of a jerk. Herbert Marshall and Richard Ney also lend support.

Midnight Lace is a pretty good thriller. Sure, there are plot holes, but it entertains right up until the end. And the standalone DVD is relatively inexpensive.

Thursday Movie Picks #134: Artists/Painters

This being Thursday, it's time for another Thursday Movie Picks, run by the Wandering Through the Shelves blog. This week's theme is movies about artists or painters, and as a fan of old movies, I've naturally picked three older ones.

First up is The Moon and Sixpence (1942). George Sanders plays an artist who is based more or less on Paul Gauguin. He starts the film as a middle-class businessman with a wife and family, but that passion for art consumes him, to the point where he leaves his family and London first for Paris, and then for the South Seas. Herbert Marshall plays the friend of the family (played by Herbert Marshall and apparently based on Somerset Maugham, who wrote the story) who tries to find Sanders.

Next up is Scarlet Street (1945). Edward G. Robinson plays a cashier/bookkeeper for a small business whose passion on the side is art. This even though he's not very good at it and has a wife who treats him like dirt for it. So when he runs into a beautiful woman (Joan Bennett) who tells him he's good, he falls for the woman. He doesn't realize that this is supposed to be a noir and he's the victim of the femme fatale. Dan Duryea plays Bennett's partner in crime. Robinson is as good as ever here.

Portrait of Jennie (1948). Joseph Cotten plays the artist here, a Depression-era man who is struggling because, while he has passion, he can't get anybody to buy any of his work. One day in Central Park, he runs into a young girl (Jennifer Jones) who seems like she's from out of the past. And then the next time he runs into her a few days later, she seems to have aged months if not years. Cotten has to learn what happened to this girl, as he paints her portrait. Ethel Barrymore is excellent as an art dealer who supports Cotten's passion; Cecil Kellaway is her business partner.

Blonde Venus

TCM's Friday pre-Code marathon for this week includes several movies from Paramount, including a couple from the beginning of Cary Grant's career. One that seems to be coming up tonight and not again soon is Blonde Venus, at 8:00 PM.

Cary Grant only gets third billing, as the star is the woman who's pictured above, Marlene Dietrich. Dietrich plays Helen, who at one time in her life was a showgirl in glamorous nightclubs. But then she met research chemist Ned Faraday (Herbert Marshall) and they fell in love and got married. It wouldn't do for the wife of a respectable chemist to be doing her showgirl thing, so Helen settles down and becomes a respetable housewife and mother.

And then Ned gets sick with radiation poisoning, and needs to go off to Europe for the only treatment possible that will save his life. However, that's going to take money that the Faradays just don't have. Well, Helen could fairly quickly get the money if she went back to being a showgirl, but Ned obviously isn't happy about that. Still, Helen isn't about to let her husband die, so she goes to work at a club, which is where she meets Cary Grant, who this time is another wealthy playboy, named Nick Townsend. Nick gives Helen the money Ned needs for his treatment, and Ned goes off to Europe. Helen, meanwhile, stays home to work, as well as to spend some quality time with Nick.

All's well, more or less, until Ned gets cured early and comes home before everybody expects him, which is how he finds out what Helen's been doing with Nick. As the wronged husband, Ned is unsurprisingly unhappy, and wants to divorce Helen and take custody of the kid. It also shouldn't be a surprise that he wins the custody case, considering that he did nothing wrong here. But Helen doesn't want to give up her son, so she runs off with the kids, performing in less glamorous joints across the country until the law finally catches up with her, and she's forced to go off to Paris to work, which is where she becomes a true sensation. It's in Paris that she meets Nick again....

As I wrote the plot down, I noticed that it's all a bit nuts. And yet, the movie works well beyond the point that you'd notice that there's something not quite right with the plot. That, of course, is down to Marlene Dietrich, who is in her charismatic form here, helped out in part by a couple of riveting outfits. One, pictured above, is a dazzling sequined suit with leotard and tights that she wears in Paris and must have been even more dazzling on the big screen. The other is a more absurd gorilla number. But hey, it's Marlene Dietrich. She alone would be worth watching. But you've got a young and dashing Cary Grant showing up, as well as Herbert Marshall to provide the serious groiunding for the movie. The ultimate effect is a movie that's quite a bit better than it probably ought to be.

TCM lists Blonde Venus as being available from the TCM Shop.

The Moon and Sixpence

TCM will be marking the birth anniversary of George Sanders tomorrow with a morning and afternoon of his movies. One that I've never recommended before is The Moon and Sixpence, which is coming on tomorrow morning at 11:15 AM.

George Sanders stars as Charles Strickland, who at the start of the movie is a stockbroker living in Victorian London with his wife and kids, and friends with writer Geoffrey Wolfe (Herbert Marshall). However, what Strickland would really like to do is be an artist. So one day, he just gets up and runs off to Paris, so that he can be where the action is and away from all the people he knew, who would only serve to distract him from his art! Mrs. Strickland gets word of her husband's presences in Paris, so she sends Geoffrey to go see him and with any luck, Geoffrey can put some sense into Charles and get him to return to England. Yeah, right. Strickland is living in poverty, but he's got passion for art, and he's actually quite good at it, not that commercial success concerns him.

Time passes, and Wolfe returns to Paris, where he finds out that Strickland has a friend! Well, not quite: he's got a man who thinks Charles is a friend, but Charles doesn't give a damn either way. That man is Dutch artist Dirk Stroeve (Steven Geray) who, like Strickland and a lot of other artists, has moved to Paris with his wife Blanche (Doris Dudley). Dirk doesn't have that much talent himself, but he realizes that Strickland has it in spades, as we already knew. Dirk supports Strickland and even goes so far as to take him in when the state of poverty in which Strickland has been living leads to Strickland's falling seriously ill. Not that Strickland wants the attention, and not that Mrs. Stroeve likes it either.

Eventually, Strickland realizes that the only way he can truly engage his passion for art is to get away from it all by going all the way to the end of the world, which in this case means the South Seas. It's here that Strickland finally meets a woman he can love and who is willing to put up with him, allowing to create art better than he ever had back in Europe. However, it's going to come at the price of his health, as Geoffrey discovers when he goes to the South Seas to discover what ever happened to Strickland....

The Moon and Sixpence is George Sanders' film all the way, and he's excellent. His character is a jerk to everybody around him, but to be fair, a lot of the time he'd really be happier being left alone. People are lavishing attention on him that he never even asked for, and that helps us to be more sympathetic to Strickland. It doesn't hurt either that Sanders was generally quite good at playing the caddish character we like to hate. Everybody else is more than good enough in their supporting roles, although the roles are nothing more than supporting roles. The story, from a novel by Somerset Maugham, is quite good, and the cinematography is interesting, effectively using both sepiatone and for the finale, Technicolor. The Moon and Sixpence deserves to be better remembered than it is, and I'm glad that TCM is showing it again.

Amazon implies that The Moon and Sixpence did get a DVD release at some point, but it looks to be out of print now.

Alfred Hitchcock Month

Tomorrow is September 1, which means a new month and new programming features on TCM. One of these is Alfred Hitchcock running much of the day on each of the five Sundays in September. This includes several of the silents, which I'm not certain have aired on TCM before. It's also going to include the one film from Hitchcock's American career that I don't think has ever been on TCM before, Lifeboat. (Lifeboat, in fact, is getting two airings; one on a Sunday and one as a TCM Essential.) But, before that, the month is kicking off tomorrow morning at 10:00 AM with Hitchcock's 1930 British flim Murder!

The movie opens up with the titular murder. Or, at least, just after the murder. Diana Baring (played by Norah Baring) is an actress who is at the scene, and that, combined with circumstantial evidence, is enough to put her in a very sticky situation when it comes time for the trial. Sir John Menier (Herbert Marshall) is the foreman of the jury, and he's not quite comfortable with the idea of convicting Baring on circumstantial evidence, especially in a case that carries the death penalty. However, in a jury-room scene in which Hitchcock experiments with sound by having the other jurors repeating "What do you think of that, Sir John?", Sir John gets worn down, eventually voting to convict. Poor Diana

But, in that old movie trope, somebody who's had a part in convicting a defendant just isn't so sure of the defendant's guilt, and tries to solve the case himself! Now, in real life, there's no good reason why somebody trained as an actor like Sir John ought to be able to find the real murderer, and certainly not in the fashin he does. More likely to do it would be a journalist like the one Rex Harrison played in the recently-mentioned Storm in a Teacup. But if it weren't for Sir John, we wouldn't have a story. Needless to say, Sir John solves the case, just before the planned execution (oh, there's another trope; the just-in-time rescue). It should be pointed out that unlike a lot of Hitchcock's later work, Murder! is a mystery, and not a suspense thriller. In later movies such as Saboteur, we know pretty darn early who the bad guy is; here, we don't find out until close to the end.

This is a very early Hitchcock sound film, so he, like all directors, was working out the difficulties of filming a talking picture. For the most part, that's not where any problems this movie has lie. In fact, the aforementioned scene in the jury room, and one that has Sir John's thoughts audible while he was silent to anybody in the scene are inventive for 1930, if incredibly pedestrian today. (Actually, the jury room scene could easily be seen as a timeless message about bullying. Some things never seem to change.) If the movie has problems, it's in the script. The murderer's motivation is silly, since it had to be changed from the original story and play on which the movie is based. And the murderer's confession seems a little too convenient.

Murder! is available on DVD, in several releases.