The Out-of-Towners

TCM had a salute to actress Sandy Dennis some months back, and I'm pretty certain my posts on Sweet November and A Touch of Love were both recorded during that salute. I've got one more film from that programming block to write up a post on before the movie expires from my DVR, The Out-of-Towners.

Dennis plays Gwen Kellerman, a middle-class housewife in suburban Ohio who has two kids and a husband named George, played by Jack Lemmon. The kids aren't important to the story, however, as the action is driven mostly by George. He works for one of those big national companies that back in the day had their corporate headquarters in New York City, and he's up for a promotion. That promotion would involve moving the family to New York and definitely involves an interview at the headquarters. George has decided that he's going to do a nice thing for his wife by taking her to New York for a night on the town before the interview.

The interview is early the next morning, and George wants to make certain he gets in early, so he's taken every precaution to get on a flight that will allow more than enough time for him and Gwen to get in early and be able to enjoy that night out on the town. Except that, as you might guess, anything that can go wrong does. The weather seems nice enough when they get on the plane in Ohio, but apparently for the purposes of the plot weather forecasting wasn't good enough circa 1970 for the people running the airlines to realize that by the time the plane got to its destination an hour or two later, all three of the airports in the New York area are going to be socked in, and that the fog isn't going to lift for several hours. Long enough, in fact, that the flight is going to have to divert all the way to Boston.

Things continue to go wrong, as George can't find his luggage and then can't get a train to New York. They arrive in New York late enough that their hotel room has already been given to someone else, as there's a major shortage of hotel rooms in New York on the day for whatever reason. There's all sorts of strikes among government-sector workers, as if none of this was known to the people in the story and just magically happened at some point after George and Gwen got on the plane. Wouldn't such strikes have been major national news?

Everything keeps going wrong for the couple, to the point that you wonder whether or not George is going to be able to get to corporate headquarters in time for the interview. And even if he does, will he get the job?

The Out-of-Towners, with a screenplay by Neil Simon, is another of those movies that set in New York in the era that I like to refer to as being just before Gerald Ford told the city to drop dead. As such, there's all sorts of dysfunction that seems ripe for humor, with Neil Simon being just the person to write such humor. And yet, somehow it doesn't quite work here. I think that's in part because things are just a little too unrealistic: nothing can go that wrong. But the other part of the problem is that the Kellermans aren't the most sympathetic characters, with George coming across as a bit of a blowhard who thinks he knows everything.

If I were going to recommend Neil Simon movies to people, there are other movies I'd start with before The Out-of-Towners.

Missing

There are any number of films that came out when I was growing up in the late 1970s and 1980s that I had of course heard about when they came out, but never got to see in the theater because I would have been too young for them at the time. Another such film is Missing. So the last time it showed up on TCM I made a point to record it for the next time it showed up. That next time is tomorrow, May 13, at 3:00 PM.

The movie starts off on September 15, 1973. Charles Horman (John Shea) is riding in a car with his friend and presumptive co-worker Terry Simon (Melanie Mayron) being driven by a US diplomat with diplomatic plates. They're in Chile, riding back from the coastal resort of Viña Del Mar to Santiago, where Charles and Terry live and where Charles' wife Beth (Sissy Spacek) is waiting for them. They're stopped at a police checkpoint because four days earlier, there had been a coup in the country. Terry is somewhat thinking about leaving, but the airport is still closed, while Charles and Beth seem to show no desire to get out of what is clearly becoming a dangerous country.

Charles' job isn't fully made clear; he does some work translating articles for a local newspaper that one can guess opposes the new administration, and claims to be working on a novel. But they're also of the political persuasion that knows the wrong sort of people, as Charles is taking notes on what he's seen the past several days and is clearly worried about the new authorities finding those notes. Charles returns home the following morning, having had to spend the night in a hotel because of the curfew, and the next night when the couple is separated again, Beth returns home to find the house ransacked. And then Charles goes missing.

Beth tries to get help from the US Embassy, but feels like she's getting stonewalled. Back in the US, Charles' father Ed (Jack Lemmon) is a businessman with much more influence than the wife of a writer living thousands of miles away. Ed talks to a senator, a US Representative, and various people at the State Department, and feels like he too is getting the run-around. So he decided to fly to Chile to go look for his son himself.

At this point, we learn that father and son had some differences of opinion, with Dad thinking that perhaps his son should have been more careful; this obviously leads to all sorts of issues with his daughter-in-law too. But as Ed investigates, and in a series of flashbacks, we learn that Charles met some Americans in Viña Del Mar who claim to be involved with the US Navy and claim to have some involvement in helping to oust the previous president, something that would certainly explain why embassy staff are trying to give the Hormans the brushoff.

Missing is based on a true story, and is quite well-made as far as it goes, thanks to pretty good characterizations from Lemmon and Spacek. However, Missing also suffers a bit from omissions because of its basis on a true story. There's this impression that Chile just suddenly, magically had a US-engineered coup on September 11, 1973. Regarless of the extent to which the US was involved (the Nixon administration certainly would have hated a president like Allende who flirted with Marxism), the country had been unstable for some time at least since anti-Allende forces gained majorities in both houses of parliament in elections earlier that year. Certainly, things would have been deteriorating long enough that you'd expect normal people in the capital city to have an exit strategy. Also, a couple of Charles and Beth's American ex-pat friends are portrayed as being even more of the sort of people to wind up getting disappeared, except that they don't. Director Costa-Gavras had, a dozen years earlier, made Z, which was clearly about the military junta in his native Greece although he wisely doesn't mention Greece there. It makes for a better movie, I think, not that Missing is bad by any means. It just feels more unsubtle in its political views.

The bigger irony is that, in the intervening years -- I think I'd pin the shift to the start of the Barack Obama presidency -- there's been a sea-change in the perception of the US left and right to state power and the use of that power. Nowadays, it's those on the right who go on about "color revolutions" and how the western establishment attempts coups in other countries (eg. Ukraine in 2014) and goes after its political opponents (see the canceled presidential election in Romania last year for an example), while the left seems just fine with using state power against "populism". Not that anybody would have seen that coming when Missing was made. It's just an interesting point to ponder while watching the movie.

The Notorious Landlady

A few weeks ago, I did a post on The Velvet Touch. I was thinking about that movie a I watched another movie that for some reason I though was coming up on the TCM schedule soon, The Notorious Landlady.

The movie starts off with a bit of a prologue in a fashionable part of London where the residents include elderly Mrs. Dunhill (Estelle Winwood). On her travels in and out of the neighborhood, she has to deal with one of those bratty kids who keeps popping up to be bratty whenever that's what's needed for the plot. As the movie opens he likes to terrorize people by pointing his cap gun at them. Everybody hears a shot, except that this time it's not from the cap gun but from one of the other houses on the square.

Fast forward several months. Carly Hardwicke (Kim Novak) lives in one of the houses on the square, and has offered a flat to let, preferably to a couple. One family does show up, but they realize that this is Carly Hardwicke, and walk away, which means that she has a past. It doesn't take much to guess what that past is, since we saw the prologue. So we know what the "notorious" in the title is referring to.

Not knowing is Bill Gridley (Jack Lemmon). Bill is an American, working in the Foreign Service and having just been transferred to London from Saudi Arabia. So of course he wouldn't know what happened six months previously. He cottons on fairly quickly that Carly, dressed as the maid of the house, is in fact not a maid but the lady of the house, and that she's alone. Carly had wanted a couple to rent, but she's hard up for money, so she relents and rents the entire second story to Bill.

The next day at work, Bill mentions where he found a place to rent, and the name sounds very familiar to Bill's boss, Franklyn Ambruster (Fred Astaire). Ambruster does a bit of research, and realizes that Hardwicke is presumed to be the one who fired that shot that everybody heard in the prologue. The belief is that it killed her husband, who has been missing ever since that shot, and that Carly is therefore the obvious suspect in a murder case. The only thing is, nobody's been able to find Mr. Hardwicke's body, which is kind of important if you're going to try someone for murder.

Having an officer in the foreign service be involved in a case like this wouldn't do for the Americans, but they don't have much choice since Bill is renting that flat. So Ambruster brings in Scotland Yard and they impress on Bill the idea that he should help them in getting information by more or less spying on his landlady and getting whatever information he can that will either help prove her guilt or exonerate her.

It's not too hard to guess where things are going to go for much of the rest of the movie, since this is a more comedic mystery. Bill is going to fall in love with Carly, but there's going to be one misunderstanding after another that makes Bill think perhaps Carly really is a murderess. However, since it's a lighter movie, the viewer can presume that she is in fact not the killer. And indeed, Mr. Hardwicke does eventually show up.

The Notorious Landlady is another of those movies that doesn't quite work, in large part because it has to hew to so many of the tropes of the genre that we know where it's going to be going. If it were a noir, we'd know Mrs. Hardwicke is bad news; here, we know that some coincidence is going to come to exonerate her. The script is also a bit unoriginal, making unnecessary homages to some classic films. The Notorious Landlady was filmed in 1961 and has one scene of Jack Lemmon tell Kim Novak he "adores" her that felt like it came straight out of the final scene of The Apartment. And there's a scene of a shower drain that looked like it could have been taken from the editing room of Psycho. The Notorious Landlady also runs 123 minutes, which is a good half hour too long for material like this.

So I'd say it's with reason that The Notorious Landlady is not the best-remembered movie for any of its stars.

Irma the Sweet

TCM ran a night of Shirley MacLaine's films not too long ago. One of the films they ran then but that I hadn't posted on before is coming up again: Irma La Douce, tomorrow (June 10) at noon.

A narrator (apparently an uncredited Louis Jourdan) tells us about a particular working-class section of Paris that's up all night as opposed to some of the more well-to-do parts; the reason it never sleeps is because, well, the women there sleep for money. (OK. Sorry for the terrible pun.) Intersperesed throughout the opening credits is one such prostitute, Irma (Shirley MacLaine), whom we see giving different clients different reasons on why she became a prostitute.

The prostitutes are able to ply their trade mostly because the cop that patrols the beat looks the other way. Well, at least he looks the other way for a price, being on the take. He goes to the café run by Moustache (Lou Jacobi), where a lot of the prostitutes and their pimps, including Irma's pimp Hippolyte, gather; it's there that the cop gets his bribes paid. At least, until the police commanders go through the regular schedule of assigning rookie cops to their beats.

Nestor (Jack Lemmon) has been assigned to this particular part of Paris, and he's a decidedly honest cop. But one who's also a bit of a naïf, as he seems to believe Irma's excuses when he asks her about what she does. When he figures out what the women do, he has a whole bunch of them arrested and taken down to the station. Things don't go quite the way Nestor expects, however, as somebody higher up apparently wants to use the prostitutes as a safety valve. Nestor gets framed for bribery and summarily fired.

And yet, Nestor decides he's going to return to the neighborhood where everything went wrong. Then, in a wacky twist, he becomes friens with Irma, and tries to "save" her from her pimp. He does, but at a price of becoming a kept man. He moves in with Irma, but she insists that it's unbecoming for a prostitute not to be able to support herself, or even the man she's with. She very much believes that Nestor shouldn't have a job.

So Nestor comes up with a bizarre scheme of his own. He'll take an overnight job at the butcher's market, while also coming up with an alter ego, the British "Lord X". As Lord X, he'll become the sole client of Irma, with the money he makes at the meat market going to pay for Lord X's dalliances with Irma. Of course, Hippolyte is still in the background, and Irma wonders why Nestor is always so tired. And Nestor has not yet thought of a way to end this scheme. The way he picks, however, doesn't quite work....

It's a wonder how director Billy Wilder was able to get Irma La Douce made, since the Production Code was still in effect, even though it was beginning to weaken. It's based on a French stage musical, and you can see why Wilder would have liked the material, although the songs were more or less excised from the movie. (My understanding is that composer André Previn's musical themes here are based on the songs from the musical, but there's no singing of note.)

However, Irma La Douce is a bit of a one-joke movie, and unlike Some Like It Hot where the joke is only stretched to two hours, and the joke doesn't really begin until a good 20-30 minutes in, Irma La Douce runs over 140 minutes and the joke gets staler much more quickly. It also doesn't help that both Lemmon and MacLaine seem a bit miscast here. They both try hard and are definitely professional, but I'm sorry to say that Irma La Douce is not one of Billy Wilder's greatest movies.

My Fellow Americans

I had a free preview weekend over Thanksgiving, back when I wasn't certain when I'd be moving into the new digs, so I recorded a whole bunch of movies more recent than most of what TCM shows. Not that they're terribly recent, as my next selection was released over a quarter of a century ago: My Fellow Americans.

The movie starts off with a brief establishing sequence that gives us half of the main conflict. A newscaster tells us of the tight election battle between Republican Senator Russell Kramer (Jack Lemmon) and Democratic Governor Matt Douglas (James Garner). Kramer wins. Fast forward four years, and the two men square off against each other, with Douglas winning. But Douglas only serves one term as well, being defeated by the Republicans' new ticket of William Haney (Dan Aykroyd) and Ted Matthews (John Heard). The two ex-presidents both go off to the lecture and public appearance circuit, which is really little more than an after-the-fact influence peddling scheme, much like today's presidential memoirs where no publisher is going to make back the advance. In and among all this, we also learn that unsurprisingly, the two ex-Presidents aren't exactly friends.

Anyhow, we're now three years into President Haney's administration, which means that it's about time for the next presidential campaign to get started. And there's a reasonable chance that the Haney administration could come crashing down. The head of the Democratic National Committee, Joe Hollis (Wilford Brimley), has heard about something called "Olympia", which appears to be some sort of defense procurement scandal. Hollis suggests that an ex-President like Douglas would be a perfect person to sniff around and do some investigation; in exchange, Hollis might be willing to help Douglas get renominated.

Meanwhile, the calculating President Haney has learned that Hollis has heard about Olympia. Haney knows it would be curtains for him, but what if he could figure out a way to fram ex-President Kramer for the scandal, even though Kramer knows nothing about it and was not involved at all. Kramer gets word of this, and starts poking around, just like Douglas.

Douglas is the first person to get to the defense contractor in question, but just as Douglas is about to get the scoop, the contractor is shot dead by a sniper, putting Douglas' life in danger. Not only that, but it puts Kramer's life in danger as well. The two have to team up together and go on the run to try to get to the bottom of the story.

My Fellow Americans is the sort of movie that has the potential to make some really trenchant commentary about the American political system, but never really does so. Instead, it trades in the sort of 1970s conspiracy theory tropes that aren't really realistic, as opposed to those things that are real, namely the permanent civil service acting in its own interest, actively trying to thwart anybody who could be perceived as an outsider and threat to the civil service's (and by extension the permanent state's) power. It's a theme that was brilliantly explored in the British sitcom Yes, Minister, while the six years since the election of Donald Trump showed that there's a similar permanent state with a lot of power. Nothing like shooting down Marine One is necessary.

My Fellow Americans also subordinates the plot to what is effectively a series of set pieces as the two ex-Presidents try to escape, in a sort of way lesser Alfred Hitchcock "wrong man on the road" movie. These set pieces do more or less work individually, helped by the fact that Lemmon and Garner feel like naturals in their roles, but together add up to a lot less than the sum of the parts. The movie is entertaining and amiable enough, but ultimately forgettable and leaving the feeling of something that the stars made to take on a fun job that comes with a nice paycheck, too.

It Happened to Jane

Doris Day was TCM's Star of the Month back in March, and I hadn't gotten through all of her movies that I DVRed during the tribute. Recently I watched another of the movies, It Happened to Jane.

Doris plays Jane, a widow in Cape Anne, ME, one of those old-fashioned New England towns that still has a town meeting and enough of a civic spirit that everybody in town attends the meeting. George Denham (Jack Lemmon) is an attorney in town who runs for First Selectman at every meeting and keeps losing; he's also in love with Jane and would love for her to marry him now that she's a widow. (The movie doesn't say how long she's been a widow, but implies that it's been long enough for her to consider dating and marriage again even though she has two kids.)

Jane supports her family by fishing for lobster, which she ships off to various hoity-toity places in New England and beyond courtesy of the Eastern and Portland Railroad, which is headed by Harry Foster Malone (Ernie Kovacs). However, due to staffing cuts at the railroad, one of her shipments was not able to be signed for by anybody at the station, with the result that it sat around for a couple of days and the live lobsters wound up dead, which defeats the point of having lobster. Jane is pissed, rightly so, and since she's out a good deal of money, George writes a threatening letter to the railroad.

Malone sends two lawyers up to Maine to meet with Jane and George. They know that the company is in the wrong, and offer her to settle for the value of the shipment, which is probably all they're legally liable for. However, Jane thinks she's lost more than just the value of the lobsters; there's a cost to her reuptation of being able to provide a good product. So she wants more, and sues the railroad.

Since the suit is held in a local court, Jane is able to win, but there's a problem with collecting the money. For Malone, there's the principal of the matter, even though he doesn't realize that trying to dick over a small businesswoman like this is going to be much worse for his business in the long run. So he has his lawyers take the case to the next higher court, meaning Jane doesn't get her money yet.

In the meantime, Jane learns that it's possible to attach somebody's property to get the money one is owed, and Jane has George do this to one of the railroad's trains, which I'd think is worth for more than the value in dispute in the case. Malone escalates further, and the case become a national cause célèbre, with Jane getting invited down to New York to do a round of all the New York-based shows. It's here that she meets reporter Larry Hall (Steve Forrest), who quickly falls in love with Jane too.

Eventually Malone decides to play hardball by just closing the line servicing Cape Anne. This would prevent Jane from shipping her product entirely, at least in a way that's not cost prohibitive, but would also make life difficult for the rest of the townsfolk since the town has a better rail connection than road connections. Jane could use that locomotive to ship the lobster, but she needs fuel and access to the tracks, and Malone is going to make that difficult, too....

As a game show fan, I knew that It Happened to Jane has some of the only color footage of the set to I've Got a Secret, as Jane appears on the show (with the actual host and regular panelists) with her secret being that she's in a legal fight against the meanest man in the world. But that and the other cameos might be the highlight of what is very much a lesser Doris Day vehicle. Cape Anne is just too stereotypically New England, replete with quirky characters. Malone is too one-dimensionally mean, and the humor overall feels too forced. I'd recommend one or another of Doris' movies with Rock Hudson or James Garner to those who don't know much about Doris Day rom-coms.

The Front Page (1974)

The movie His Girl Friday is fairly well known, especially among fans of classic movies. The fact that it's a remake of the 1931 movie The Front Page, but with a gender switch in one of the key roles, is also well known. Having fallen somewhat through the cracks is the 1974 remake, again called The Front Page and reverting to the gender roles in the original play and movie. That 1974 remake is going to be on TCM tonight at 6:00 PM.

It's 1929 in Chicago, and anarchist Earl Williams (Austin Pendleton) is scheduled to be executed tomorrow morning for the murder of a cop, a crime Pendleton insists was an accident. All of Chicago's newspapers are covering the story. But Walter Burns (Walter Matthau), managing editor of the Examiner, is in a spot. His star reporter Hildy Johnson (Jack Lemmon) would be perfect for the story, especially to try to get a last-minute interview with Williams. But Hildy is unavailable.

The reason for that is because Hildy is schedule to leave Chicago on the midnight train for Philadelphia, together with one Peggy Grant (a young Susan Sarandon), on their way to get married with Hildy then taking a job at an advertising agency in Philadelphia. Hildy is insistent that he's done with the newspaper business, but if you've seen either of the two earlier versions of the movie, you know that's not quite the case....

Walter tries every trick in the book to get Hildy to do this one last story, from the mild of pointing out that Hildy would have the time to do it before getting on the train, to the more extreme of trying to drive a wedge between Hildy and Peggy by posing as a probation officer and telling Peggy that Hildy is on probation as a sexual deviant! Frankly, if I found out my boss did something like that to me, there's no way I'd ever work for him again, but then we wouldn't have a movie, would we.

The actual story Walter wants Hildy to cover gets more complicated when a psychiatrist, Dr. Eggelhofer (Martin Gabel) is brought in to interview Williams to see whether he's competent to be executed. Eggelhofer's unorthodox methods give Williams a chance to get the sheriff's (Vincent Gardenia) gun and shoot his way out of custody, eventually winding up in the pressroom, hidden by Hildy in a roll-top desk. Williams knows a prostitute with a heart of gold, Mollie Malloy (Carol Burnett), who also shows up looking for Williams.

But then, you've probably seen one (or both) of the earlier movie versions of the story so know more or less what's going to happen. Director Billy Wilder did change things up a bit, in part by adding a cub reporter (Jon Korkes) to cover the execution for the Examiner, which really serves as Walter's means of playing on Hildy's pride -- this young reporter is so unfit for covering the execution that Hildy is just not going to be able to countenance the kid doing it, and take over himself. I think the Mollie Malloy role is also made bigger and given a resolution I don't remember from either of the previous two versions.

If Billy Wilder had found an old 1920s play and dusted it off to make an original movie out of The Front Page, what we get on screen wouldn't be a bad little movie, although some fans of studio-era movies might be less than pleased with the language. However, there's the well-known and deserved classic His Girl Friday sitting there, and that's a problem for any subsequent movie version. As a result, this 1974 version pales somewhat and it's easy to see why it hasn't stood the test of time the way His Girl Friday has. Wilder allows Carol Burnett to play her part too broadly, and Martin Gabel's antics don't work at all.

Overall, however, this version of The Front Page really isn't bad, and it's also the chance to see Allen Jenkins in his final film role, along with some other veterans getting smaller parts. It is available on DVD should you miss the TCM showing.

Airport '77

Some time back I bought the box set of the four Airport movies. Having done reviews of Airport and Airport '75, it's now time for the third movie in the series, Airport '77.

James Stewart plays Philip Stevens, an extremely wealthy businessman who is taking some of the fine art that he owns and has stored up north, and opening a museum down in Palm Beach, FL. Not only that, but he's inviting a galaxy of VIPs to the opening of the museum and flying both them and the artwork in on his lavishly appointed private 747. Christopher Lee plays businessman Martin Wallace, married to nasty Karen (Lee Grant); Olivia de Havilland and Joseph Cotten are a pair of elegant passengers who last met in London in 1936; Capt. Don Gallagher (Jack Lemmon) is the pilot; and Eve (Brenda Vaccare) is his girlfriend.

Anyhow, with all those rich folks and artwork on the plane, you know it's going to attract people who want to steal the stuff. This time, there's an inside plot involving to co-pilot Chambers (Robert Foxworth). They install some anesthetic gas that they'll be able to run through the ventilation system (they, of course, will be wearing gas masks), knocking the passengers out, and enabling Chambers and his men to fly the plane to a small abandoned airfield in the Bahamas where the paintings will be unloaded.

Or, at least, that's the plan, and it's one that doesn't quite go the way the bad guys had it figured out. After knocking the passengers out, they have to fly low in order to evade radar detection, and when they get into a fog bank, they find an oil platform sticking up out of the ocean at a height where they could run into it. Ultimately, they clip a wing, and are unable to correct out of this, resulting in the plane crashing into the ocean and sinking to the bottom.

Thankfully for the passengers, the bottom isn't so deep that the water pressure would crush the fuselage. That's the one piece of good news they have when they wake up. Well, the other one is that the hijackers are either dead or severely injured so they don't have to worry about that. However, they do have to worry about the panicking passengers; the ticking time bomb of being underwater; and the fact that they're off course so rescue crews don't know where to look. To save the plane, Capt. Gallagher and scuba diver Wallace are going to have to get a dinghy with a rescue beacon to the surface.

Airport '77 is a worthy entry in the disaster genre. It's entertaining, if not particularly great. Still, seeing all the grand old stars together with some then-new ones is always fun. Stewart is underused and given a boring role, almost as if he came in for one or two days to film all of his scenes. Lemmon is surprisingly interesting in a sort of role he never really essayed before. De Havilland and Cotten are nice throwbacks, and Lee Grant is a hoot.

As for the plot, sure it's full of holes and unrealistic, but a movie like this you watch for the stars and the disaster, and in that regard both of them come through. I can certainly recommend Airport '77.

Just plain "Cowboy"

TCM ran a couple of movies with cattle drive themes in prime time recently. One that was new to me was Cowboy. It's available on DVD, so I recorded it and watched it to do a post on it here.

Jack Lemmon plays Frank Harris, who at the start of the movie is an assistant manager at a hotel in Chicago. He's fallen in love with one of the guests, young Mexican Maria Vidal (Anna Kashfi), who is there with her father and aunt. He writes poetry to her and is winning to ask her hand in marriage, but also knows that her father wouldn't approve, Frank not being of the right social status.

Noy, you may be asking yourself why this is at the start of a movie with the title Cowboy. Soon enough, a cowboy comes into the hotel in the form of Tom Reese (Glenn Ford). Ah, there's a cowboy! He's got a bunch of cattle to sell, and then he's going to relax for a few weeks in Chicago before heading back to pick up some more cattle to drive to the meat market. Part of that relaxation involves playing poker after selling the old herd, and he loses enough money that he's going to have problems getting a new herd.

Thankfully, there's somebody with a little extra money, in the form of Frank, who's been saving up, probably to start of household if he could marry Maria. But she's abruptly gone back to Mexico since Dad knows about Frank's intended relationship. And when Frank learns that Tom is going to be going to the town where Maria's family is from to get a new herd of cattle, Frank has the brilliant idea of offering Tom money to become a partner in business, with the intention of also going down to Mexico to see Maria again.

Frank, of course, has never done anything remotely like being a cowboy, something which is naturally going to cause problems out on the trail at some point. And Tom really doesn't want a partner if he can avoid it. Still, Tom needs the money. So Frank joins the crew. Once he gets to Mexico, he finds that Maria has been married off to another man, and that's that for that subplot. But there's still the matter of getting a whole herd of cattle back to America, with Tom and Frank not particularly liking each other....

I found Cowboy to be another of those movies that I'd use words like "professional" and "pedestrian" to describe. I'm not the biggest fan of westerns, although they are growing on me. There's nothing particularly wrong with Cowboy, but to me it also felt like another movie where there's nothing particularly noteworthy, besides there being Jack Lemmon in a western. The difficult at times relationship between the two business partners by necessity, as well as the standard issue problems they face on the cattle drive, made it seem like the sort of plot I'd seen any number of times before. That having been said, everybody does a workmanlike job, and I can't find anything in the movie to pan it, either. Cowboy is a solid little movie that probably never had any expectations of rising to greatness, but which also does its job of entertaining. Those who enjoy westerns will probably enjoy sitting with a bowl of popcorn and watching Cowboy.

Glengarry Glen Ross

Tomorrow is apparently Alan Arkin's birthday. I had been looking through my DVR for something available on DVD to do a post about, and decided upon Glengarry Glen Ross before realizing Arkin's birthday was coming up, and it was pure serendipity that Arkin happens to be in the cast of Glengarry Glen Ross.

The setting is an office of a real estate/property development company. The office is a run-down dump, with four agents and their supervisor working it. The agents haven't been all that successful, as the head office brings in a top guy from the corporate office (Alec Baldwin, who only gets the one scene) to shake things up: at the end of the month, whoever has the most in closings gets a car as first prize. Second place gets a set of steak knives, and last place gets fired. Oh, and there's a set of promising new leads -- but you'll only get them if you can close on the old leads we're giving you.

As for the four salesmen, there's Ricky (Al Pacino), who misses the meeting with the guy from corporate because he's trying to close a deal with Mr. Lingk (Jonathan Pryce) at a restaurant. There's also Shelley Levene (Jack Lemmon), the old guy who used to be the top seller but has fallen on hard times; mousy Aaronow (Alan Arkin); and manipulative Dave Moss (Ed Harris). Their immediate boss Williamson (Kevin Spacey) frankly supports the scheme since he sees how worthless the office is and his job is probably on the line too.

None of the three guys who actually shows up to the meeting is happy about it, although Shelley seems to be the one who's actually going to try to close a deal however difficult that might be. Dave, for his part, hits upon the idea of stealing the new leads, and selling them to a competitor and going to work for that competitor. To that end, he's really putting the moves on Aaronow to break in and steal the leads. After all, everybody knows Dave has the motive, bo he needs an alibi while somebody else goes in on the deal with him.

The next morning, everybody shows up to work to find that the place has been burgled and if not quite ransacked, at least disturbed. Meanwhile, two of the salesmen have actually been successful in closing deals: Shelley and Ricky. But as it turns out, both of their deals have catches....

Glengarry Glen Ross is a movie I have big problems with, mostly because of the way the characters are drawn. I've mentioned several times in the past that I'm not a fan of what I call the "comedy of lies", where somebody gets in comedic trouble by telling a lie, and then gets in ever bigger trouble by expanding on those lies. Glengarry Glen Ross isn't a comedy by any means. But the characters all lie incessantly to try to close the deals, and they're all so thoroughly dishonest that it's difficult to like any of them. Ricky, in particular, isn't just dishonest; he's a blowhard spewing philosophical nonsense. They also swear all the time, to the point that the dialogue gets tedious. It's a shame, because Lemmon and Pacino both actually put in good performances.

Glengarry Glen Ross is a movie that probably will appeal to people who like intelligent drama and character study dealing with difficult situations. But I think it's also the sort of movie that's liable to produce a sharp divide in opinions, even more than the sort of movie that could be described as not being very good.

The Prisoner of Second Avenue

One of the films that I DVRed some time back and only recently got around to watching is The Prisoner of Second Avenue.

Jack Lemmon stars as Mel Edison. He's an ad exec in New York City in the era just before, as I like to put it, President Ford told the city to drop dead. It's tough living in the city, as it's suffering from a terrible heat wave, while the city seems almost to be falling apart. There have been rolling blackouts, and Mel just can't seem to catch a bus. And, it seems, the Edisons' apartment is falling apart too. There are cracks in the walls, they've had water problems, and the like.

Meanwhile, this being the mid-1970s, the economy isn't in such hot shape. Specifically, the advertising industry is having difficulties, which manifest themselves first in one of Mel's colleagues being sacked, and then Mel having to pay for his own lunch. But even worse is to come, when Mel is summarily sacked after 22 years. He can't bring himself to tell his wife Edna (Anne Bancroft), but how is a man his age going to get another good job

If having the infrastructure crumble around you and losing your job aren't bad enough indignities, there is worse to come. Mel and Edna go out to visit his brother Harry (Gene Saks), who lives in suburban Connecticut and has done quite well for himself financially, in the lighting fixture business. Who doesn't like good-looking lamps? But Harry's success has always been a sore spot for Mel, who isn't exactly looking forward to the visit.

Much worse is to come, though. Edna goes out to do the grocery shopping, and when she comes home, she finds that the place has been robbed -- not just robbed, but ransacked. Oh, and the elevator is out too, so she had to climb 14 floors to get back to the apartment.

It's all enough to drive a man mad, and that's what happens to Mel, as he suffers a nervous breakdown. How is he going to recover?

That's pretty much all there is to The Prisoner of Second Avenue. It was originally a two-act play by Neil Simon, but it was opened up for the movie. That having been said, I have to say I have a lot of problems with this one. I don't have any animus toward Neil Simon; I like The Odd Couple, Plaza Suite, and especially The Sunshine Boys. But as I watched I couldn't help but find the two main characters to be extremely tiresome. They're almost constantly screaming, and the situations aren't nearly as funny as I think Simon intended them to be. Not that it was supposed to be a straight-up comedy, but I don't think it was supposed to be a straight drama either. After all, a lot of the scenes are introduced by news bulletins that are clearly meant to be there for comic relief. Still, I don't want to laugh at these characters as much as I want to grab them by the throat and shake them. That having been said, a lot of the reviews on IMDb are highly positive, so give the movie a try and you may like it a whole lot more than I did.

The Prisoner of Second Avenue did get a DVD release, but I think it's out of print on DVD since it's not available at the TCM Shop. Amazon does offer the DVD, and I think streaming options too if you have the ability to do that.

The China Syndrome

Coming up this afternoon at 4:00 PM on TCM is the interesting, if sometimes polemical film The China Syndrome.

Jane Fonda stars as Kimberley Wells, a local TV news reporter out in southern California. She thinks she's a good reporter, but unfortunatley she's buried in the lunchtime features beat, doing crappy human interest stories that she doesn't care about because they're beneath her. She doesn't realize that one of those stories is about to blow up in her lap.

Wells andher cameraman Richard Adams (Michael Douglas) go to a nuclear power plant to do a report on how nuclear is going to solve America's energy problems, this being the era of oil embargos and such. As they get to the part of the plant that overlooks the control room, they have to turn off the camera for security reasons. While in that room, the plant has an incident. At first it just seems like a minor earthquake, since everybody feels shaking, and it's enough to trip some of the safety features. One of the features, however, malfunctions, as a water gauge seems to be showing more water than there should be. So when they shut of a valve, they think they're returning the water to its normal level, but in fact they're putting the water at a dangerously low level. Catastrophe is averted, however, and the plant is put off-line pending an investigation of the incident.

Kim isn't quite certain what to do, but Richard knows. He's much more of a hothead than she is, and just knows that the utility company and the federal regulators are pulling the wool over everybody's eyes, expecially when you consider that the utility has another nuke plant up for public discussion. The TV station, for its part, has its own problems. They have to produce a report that is factual lest they be subject to a libel suit, and also one that fits their contractual obligations, like not using footage that was surreptitiously obtained in direct conflict with a signed agreement.

Of course, Richar is not going to be the only one with questions about what's gone on at the facility. He steals the footage from the TV station (I told you he was a hothead), and shows it to some nuclear physicists who are firmly in the anti-nuclear power camp and claim that the plant was this close to suffering a meltdown. Far more important however, is what's going on inside the plant. The supervisor who was on duty at the time of the incident, Jack Godell (Jack Lemmon), has been doing some investigation of his own, and has come to the conclusion that there's a safety flaw at the plant caused by one of the subcontractors doing a shoddy job with the welding and not documenting it properly. He's willing to cooperate with Kim, but he's also discovered that he's got people tailing him, presumably to keep him from reporting what he knows. You'll have to watch the movie to see how Jack solves that problem.

The China Syndrome is a pretty entertaining movie, although it's one that's firmly grounded in the 1970s. Sometime after all that happened in Vietnam and with Watergate, Hollywood started making a lot of movies that have a conspiracy theory theme of how big business is evil and shady and controlling the government for its own ends. Soylent Green and The Parallax View come right to mind. The China Syndrome isn't quite as far to that end of the spectrum as especially The Parallax View, but as the movie goes on it does become increasingly clear in making the point that the utility company is going beyond bad in its handling of the situation. The ironic thing is that real life should eventually have disproved the movie. Shortly after the film was released, the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania had an event that was really quite minor, although those who would panic monger would have you believe otherwise.

Still, don't let all of that put you off The China Syndrome, which ultimately does succeed in entertaining, even if you'll dislike some of the good guys.

Jack Lemmon and Kim Novak

Tonight is TCM's third night of Kim Novak movies in her turn as Star of the Month. They'll be showing three of the movies she did with Jack Lemmon, as well as another showing of the interview she did with Robert Osborne at the TCM Film Festival at 10:00 PM. The night begins with Bell, Book, and Candle at 8:00 PM, a movie that I've briefly mentioned in passing a few times and one that I've said doesn't quite tickle my fancy the way I'm sure it will tickle other people's fancies. Another film with Lemmon and Novak about which I feel the same way is Phffft!, which is airing at 3:30 AM.

The title Phffft! comes from an onomatopoetic word used by gossip columnist Walter Winchell. Sounding somewhat lie the sound of all the air rushing out of a deflating balloon, the word was used to signify a celebrity marriage that was about to break up. In this case, that marriage involves Lemmon, but not Novak: the wife is played by Judy Holliday, who had recently starred alongside Lemmon in It Should Happen to You. Holliday plays Nina Tracey, who writes a soap opera in the days when soap opera were only making their move from radio to television. Lemmon plays her husband Robert, who served in the Navy in World War II and after the war became a successful tax attorney. Well, they've been married eight years, and things have hit one of those lulls. On an impulse, both parties think that the marriage isn't working, and decide to get a divorce.

Nina goes off to Reno to get the divorce, and when she returns, it's back to the dating game for both of them. Especially Robert. He moves in with his friend Charles (Jack Carson), who immediately starts setting up Robert on blind dates. One of those blind dates is with Janis (Kim Novak), and they begin to start a relatoinship. Meanwhile, Charles decides to try to put the moves on Nina, which would certainly create an awkward situation for all three of them. As for Nina, her mother Edith (Luella Gear) is also around, trying to help out Nina in the romance department.

You can probably guess where all of this is leading. Something is going to happen to make Nina and Robert meet not only by coincidence, but in a way that makes both of them wonder whether or not the two would have been better off not getting that divorce in the first place. It's a them that Hollywood visited earlier in The Awful Truth, which is coming on after Phffft! at 5:00 AM, ans which was only remade as Let's Do It Again a few years before Phffft! There's also Divorce, American Style, which came out in the 1960s and explored similar themes. Of the various movies, I think I like The Awful Truth the best, because Cary Grant (especially), Ralph Bellamy, and Irene Dunne simply glitter in this sort of romantic comedy. Divorce, American Style has the interesting angle of being able to explore things as far as comedies go from a more grown-up attitude thanks to the loosening strictures of the Production Code by the late 60s. (I suppose drama could have done a good job of being intelligent about the issue back in the 1950s, suddenly being reminded of Judy Holliday's own The Marrying Kind.) As for Phffft!, it's OK, but there's something about it that I find a bit bland. It's not a bad movie, mind you, but it's not one of my particular favorites.

Phffft! got a DVD release a couple of years back, although I don't know if it's still in print, since the TCM shop claims it's not available.

The Forutne Cookie

I have apparently never done a full-length post on The Fortune Cookie before. That was certainly surprising to me, but I suppose that not having done so before means that at least I've got something to blog about today. The Fortune Cookie is airing tonight at 11:15 PM on TCM.

Jack Lemmon stars as Harry Hinkle, who works as a TV cameraman for CBS covering the NFL. While working behind a camera as part of the crew at a Cleveland Browns game, the play comes in Harry's direction, and like any good professional camera operator, Harry keeps filming away, even though the play comes so much in Harry's direction that he gets bowled over by the player with the football, Luther Jackson (Ron Rich). (I'm not certain how true-to-life this is; I'd have thought even in the 1960s TV cameramen were further away from the field and on stationary platforms. But that's a minor quibble.) Harry is taken to the hospital for observation even though he doesn't think he's too badly injured, suffering nothing more than a minor concussion. Those of course were the days when head injuries weren't considered as severe as they are now.

That trip to the hospital is fortuitous, as it's about to change Harry's wife. Among the people who find out about Harry's incident are his ex-wife Sandy (Judi West), and his brother-in-law Willie Gingrich (Walter Mathau). Harry knows he's going to be OK, but Willie has other ideas. Willie is a lawyer, and sees that with this accident, he can sue everybody in sight for big bucks. But those big bucks are really only going to come if Harry is actually seriously injured, which of course he isn't. If only he could appear to be seriously injured, however.... That, of course, involves a lie, and Harry and Willie both know it's a lie, but Wilie doesn't care, and Harry is weak-willed enough that he eventually acquiesces and goes along with Willie's plan. Sandy sees the dollar signs as well, and she comes back into Harry's life, even though she was the one who had left him in the first place. Harry still has feelings for her, and if this bogus injury can bring her back, well, perhaps that's a benefit.

There are, unsurprisingly, people affected negatively by Harry's "injury". First off are all the people who are going to have to pay out those big bucks: Willie plans to sue the NFL, CBS, and the people who own the stadium. They don't want to, and suspect that there might be something untoward going on, so they hire a pair of private investigators to stalk Harry and catch him on film when he shows, as he's inevitably going to, that he's not really injured. But there's also Luther, who feels a terrible sense of remorse over how he "injured" Harry. Luther develops a friendship with Harry, although his play on the field is also deteriorating....

The Fortune Cookie is a comedy, but it's a fairly dark one, as director Billy Wilder is using the movie as a bitter satire on the state of American lawyers. Matthau, unsurprisingly, is excellent as the sleazy lawyer, and indeed won an Oscar for it. Lemmon is good too, as the man dragged kicking and screaming into this crazy scheme, much the way he was by Tony Curtis in Some Like It Hot (which is airing just before, at 9:00 PM). Ron Rich is believable in his decidedly supporting role. If anything, all of the cast is aided by a wonderful script, but you'd probably expect that from a script by Wilder and frequent collaborator I.A.L. Diamond.

The Fortune Cookie is available on DVD. There are some standalone releases available on Amazon, althoguh I'm not certain if they're still in print. TCM, for its part, is offering the movie as part of a box set.

The Days of Wine and Roses

I've briefly mentioned The Days of Wine and Roses several times before, but I've never done a full-length blog posting about it. It's getting another airing tonight at 8:00 PM as part of a night of movies dedicated to the music of Henry Mancini. If you haven't seen The Days of Wine and Roses before, you're in for an excellent movie.

Jack Lemmon stars as Joe Clay, who works as a public relations man for a large company in San Francisco. One of his job duties seems to be coordinating "entertainment" for visitng businessmen, which in this case means procuring lovely young women as the accompaniment for a business party on board a yacht. Joe deals with the drudgery and unpleasantness of his job by drinking, constantly asking the bartender to provide him with another drink. And then Joe meets Kirsten Arnesen (Lee Remick), whom his mistakenly believes is the kind of woman who owuld fit in at those "business parties". That's not the case at all -- she loves chocolate, not drinking. But, as unalike as the two are, they eventually fall in love.

At first, Joe loves Kirsten, but he also loves the bottle, leading to his drinking more and more. Kirsten wants to make her husband happy, so after a while, she decides to try a drink herself, and finds that she likes the taste of the mixed drink. You can probably figure out that what's going to happen next involves Kristen quickly becoming just as heavy a drinker as her husband, as well as the long downward spiral it puts both of them on. For Joe, that downward spiral means losing his PR job and then having to work a series of jobs as he's unable to hold down a good one. For Kirsten, it means drinking alone when Joe gets sent on a business trip. Eventually, her carelessness when she neglects other things for drink causes her to set fire to their apartment.

Joe and Kirsten then move back in with Kirsten's father Ellis (Charles Bickford), who runs a flower nursery north of San Francisco. He, understandably, isn't so certain he wants Joe around. After all, Ellis sees what Joe did to his daughter. To be fair, one wonders if Ellis' strict upbringing caused Kirsten to rebel when she finally got the chance, and that sort of rebellion could lead to drinking too much just to spite one's parents. Obviously, not drinking is one of the conditions Dad puts upon his daughter and son-in-law to live with him, and they're able to follow that... at least for a few weeks...

It's clear that the only way these two people are going to stop drinking is with some serious help. That help comes in the form of Jim (Jack Klugman), an alcoholic himself who has been able to stop his drinking thanks to the help of Alcoholics Anonymous. Joe starts attending meetings himself, and he's able to avoid the drink. But he's still got a problem: he's living with Kirsten, who is still a drinker. Can an alcoholic stay on the wagon if he's living with somebody who's still drinking? Or can he perhaps convince her that she too needs to try Alcoholics Anonymous and stop drinking.

The Days of Wine and Roses is not a pretty story. I don't have first-hand experience of living with an alcoholic, and my drinking is limited to maybe two glasses of wine or two mixed drinks with dinner. (Well, I did have too much to drink once when I was studying in Sankt-Peterburg, Russia, decades ago. But that's another story.) Still, the movie has the feeilng of authenticity. Compare that to, say Bigger than Life, which has a climax that makes me laugh at its ludicrousness. There's no such comedy in The Days of Wine and Roses. The performances are also quite good. Jack Lemmon is wonderful, while Remick does a tremendous job as the woman we see become an alcoholic before our very eyes. Bickford and Klugman are also quite good in their supporting performances.

TCM lists The Days of Wine and Roses as being available for purchase from the TCM shop for a surprisingly low price.

"Epic" does not necessarily mean "good"

Sure, ever since movies like Heaven's Gate were huge bombs (and why did we even get Kevin Costner's Waterworld?), we've known that spending the entire budget of Lesotho on a movie doesn't guarantee it will be any good; nor does putting more stars in it than there were in Dinner at Eight (which, coincidentally, is airing tomorrow morning at 6:00 AM ET on TCM) automatically make for a classic. TCM is running three "comedy epics" tonight, and one of them clearly doesn't stand up today: The Great Race, overnight at 2:30 AM ET.

Tony Curtis plays the Great Leslie, a handsome and virtuous daredevil in th efirst decade of the 20th century who performs feats of danger that wow the ladies. He's got a rival, though, in the form of Professor Fate (Jack Lemmon), who tries to sabotage all of Leslie's stunts. Leslie decides, in conjunction with one of the early automobile makers, that his next stunt should involve taking part in (and winning, of course) a car race from New York to Paris, via a transpacific crossing. Professor Fate learns about this, and immediately decides he has to enter the race, and ensure that nobody else can win.

The two rivals, however, are not alone. Maggie Dubois is a suffragette who, in trying to raise the status of women, insists on forcing the publisher of one of New York's newspapers (Arthur O'Connell) to give her a job as a correspondent. And what would be the perfect job? Going on the "great race" in a Stanley Steamer and reporting on the race. The publisher doesn't like the idea, but his wife (Vivian Vance, TV's Ethel Mertz in one of her rare movie roles) is rather warmer to the idea, so off goes Maggie. You know that the two male rivals are going to compete over her as well, although they've got a third rival, in the form of her ideals. As for the race, it sets off, with Leslie being a team with his longtime assistant Hezekiah (Keenan Wynn), and Prof. Fate having assistant Max (Peter Falk) accompanying him.

The problem with The Great Race is that the humor largely falls flat, if not inducing cringes. The movie all too slowly makes its way through the American west, followed by a trip across the Bering Strait on a melting iceberg, and eventually ends up in an unnamed eastern European principality in a parody of The Prisoner of Zenda. The Zenda sequence, in particular, goes on much too long, climaxing with a pie fight that's much more tedious than funny.

Still, some people may enjoy The Great Race, and Natalie Wood gets some nice period costumes to wear. (Although, how she could pack all those changes of clothes is a mystery.) For those are new to the "epic comedies", the first two are rather better:
It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World at 8:00 PM; followed by
Around the World in 80 Days at 11:15 PM.