Another "I can save you, but..." movie

Barbara Stanwyck was TCM's Star of the Month some months back, which gave me the chance to record some of her movies that I hadn't seen before. One that has a fairly pedestrian plot, but is redeemed by good performances from the cast, is Gambling Lady.

Stanwyck is the titular gambling lady, a woman named Lady Lee who makes an OK living is the sort of "escort" provided by a gambling syndicate to people who need a dealer or something for a high-stakes poker game or some other form of gambling. Of course, the syndicate wants to boost the odds in its favor even if that's by less than honest means. This is something Lady Lee says she absolutely doesn't care for. As a bit of foreshadowing, one night at the club she meets wealthy Peter Madison (C. Aubrey Smith) who, for whatever reason, doesn't seem to mind being taken by this charming woman.

Not that there's going to be anything romantic between them, since Smith was about 70 at the time the movie was made. And Lady Lee already has someone theoretically more her type pursuing her in the from of horse racing bookie Charlie Lang (Pat O'Brien). For Lady, it's more of a friendship than anything romantic. As she works for the syndicate and makes good money, she keeps coming across young Garry (Joel McCrea), although she keeps rebuffing him even though he's clearly into her. One night he sneaks up to the room where Lady will be playing, only for undercover police to get in the elevator with Garry.

Garry wants to marry Lady, but she claims she won't fit into his society and doesn't want to anger his parents. Except that this is Garry Madison, son of Peter whom we've already met. So they marry and live happily ever after, yeah right since we're only a third of the way into the movie. On their honeymoon they meet Garry's old girlfriend Sheila (Claire), and when Garry and Lady invite society over on their return to America, Sheila has followed them and insists on gambling against Lady. Lady wins a bunch of Sheila's jewels, and takes the betting seriously, not giving Sheila back her jewelry even though Sheila obviously thought this was all a lark.

Things get more complicated when Charlie gets into legal issues requiring a large bail. Garry's money would cause scandal, so Lady pawns those jewels. Except, that also causes difficulties when Lady gives the pawn ticket to Charlie. Garry wants it so he can quietly get the jewels back without Lady knowing. However, Charlie gets killed, and all signs point to Garry since he's got the ticket. In fact, he was with Sheila, who has been trying to break up Garry and Lady's marriage.

Now, is this movie going to have a happy ending? The answer is yes, and that unfortunately is something that requires a bit of a cop-out for the movie to get that ending. The material is stuff that we've seen quite a few times in the early 1930s, and which frankly strains credulity. None of this is the fault of the cast, who all give it their best and mostly succeed. But that script? Oy. Gambling Lady is OK, as long as you can get past the unoriginality of it.

The Outriders

I've got a couple of movies on my DVR that are coming up in quick succession on TCM, both on the calendar day of March 5, at least in the Eastern time zone. As a result, I'm doing a post on one of them a good 36 hours before it shows up on TCM. That movie is The Outriders, which is airing at part of a night of westerns that takes up the prime time lineup of March 4-5, with The Outriders itself coming on at 1:15 AM (so March 5 in the east, but still late evening March 4 in the west).

The movie has opening titles about a Camp Benton, MO, in the last year of the Civil War. Camp Benton is a prison camp for those Confederates that the Union has captured in that portion of the war theater. Or, at least, you'd think the Union might want to keep POWs away from where Quantrill's raiders were operating, but then, it hadn't really occurred to me to go down the rabbit hole of where Union prison camps were located. Anyhow, there are enough prisoners in close proximity that disease is going through the camp and apparently spreading out to the locals. So the camp commanders order the POWs into a mass bath in the nearby river.

This gives three of the POWs -- Will Owen (Joel McCrea), Jesse Wallace (Barry Sullivan), and Clint Priest (James Whitmore) -- the idea that perhaps they could try to escape. They do so by violently killing one of the Union guards (which seems like it would cause major problems with the Production Code later in the movie) but have the Union hot on their tails as they head south and west, stopping off at a farmhouse before being forced to leave again because the farmer figures out they're Confederate POWs. They continue their escape until they're confronted by a band of fighters. Except it turns out that the fighters, led by Keeley (Jeff Corey), are an offshoot of Quantrill's raiders.

When Keeley learns that Owen and company are from the South, he give them a chance to do something useful in lieu of being summarily executed as a security risk. Keeley has learned of a shipment of gold that's going from New Mexico to Saint Louis. That gold could be highly useful to the Confederacy if somebody could capture the wagon train and abscond with the gold to take it to Richmond. Perhaps Owen and the others could fall in with the wagon train and "guide" it to an area where Keeley and his men can ambush it. Since they don't have much choice, and do after all support the South, Owen and the other two head off to New Mexico.

The Wagon train is being headed by Don Antonio Chaves (Ramon Novarro) and accompanied by a bunch of relatively inconsequential crew but also a priest and the widow Gort (Arlene Dahl) and her adolescent brother-in-law Roy (Claude Jarman Jr.). Chaves doesn't want to hire Owen at first because he's already got enough men, but when Owen sees an Indian attack about to happen, he's able to foil it in a way that gets Chaves to accept him.

Now, here the movie has a bit of a dilemma. Joel McCrea as Owen is the male lead, and he's not shown himself to be a mean enough bad guy that he's obviously going to get his comeuppance. Yet the Production Code (and the historicity of the South having lost the Civil War, of course) demands that the robbery plot not be successful. How to deal with that? Well, part of it has to do with Owen getting to know the Gorts and that starting to play on him emotionally. But there's also the deft plot point of the movie being set at just the right time that news of Lee's surrender reaches the wagon train just before the point at which th ambush is set to happen. Owen can plausibly say he's no longer at war and switch sides. Of course, Keeley is still out there, and there are Owen's two companions....

The Outriders is actually not a bad movie, despite my comments in the above paragraphs giving the suggestion that I'd have Production Code-inspired problems with the resolution. It does what it does well enough, although it was released in 1950, a few years before westerns began to get more psychologically complex, so it feels like a rather simplistic film at times. Having been made at MGM I think doesn't help in that regard, although it does have good production values and nice Technicolor cinematography.

If you want another movie where you can just sit back and be entertained, and you're up for a western, you could do a lot worse than The Outriders.

Barbary Coast

A few months back, I was looking through some of the offerings on Tubi, and saw an old movie I don't think I'd heard of, one with some pretty big stars in it: Howard Hawks' 1935 version of Barbary Coast. I finally got around to watching it, and it's one that doesn't have any indication of being about to expire.

Miriam Hopkins is the star here, playing Mary Rutledge. But before we meet her, we get a prologue informing us of how gold was discovered in California in 1848 and how that brought a ton of men to what the US had recently gained in the war against Mexico, and would soon become a state. Following those men is Mary, who is about to get off the boat in San Francisco in order to meet again with her fiancé, Dan Morgan. Unfortunately, she's informed by the denizens of San Francisco that Mr. Morgan is quite dead.

Taking Mary under his wing is Louis Chamalis (Edward G. Robinson). Now, if Barbary Coast were a pre-Code, Mary would have been his mistress, but the movie was released in 1935, when such a relationship couldn't be depicted. Louis runs one of the local gaming houses, and is a pretty big cheese in Frisco. So while Louis takes Mary on and gives her room and board, and presumably expects to start a romantic relationship with her, he also gives her a job as a croupier.

Of course, the roulette wheels are crooked, as that's just one way Louis makes his money and keeps it. There's not much real law here yet, so Louis has a bunch of henchmen led by Knuckles (Brian Donlevy) to mete out force so Louis can keep what's his, and he intends to get a bunch of that gold for himself without having to mine it. A lot of people are unhappy with this arrangement -- Dan Morgan would have been one such man, but he's dead now. One of Mary's fellow passengers, Col. Cobb, is also unimpressed, so he buys a printing press and vows to start a muckracking newspaper. Louis, unsurprisingly, threatens him.

That finally pushes Mary over the line, and she decides to go out by herself for a horseback ride just to get away for a day and clear her head. But the weather isn't good and, San Francisco not being a big city yet, Mary gets lost. She finds what she thinks is an abandoned cabin, except that it's being used by prospector Jim Carmichael (Joel McCrea). He lets her come in and dry off, and as this happens you know he and Mary are going to fall in love. Jim has finally hit gold, and is planning to head back to New York.

But in San Francisco while waiting for the boat, he learns what Mary does for a living, and this makes the two hate each other for some reason. Mary takes all of Jim's money at the roulette wheel, while Col. Cobb decides to start on a campaign of vigilante justice to get at Louis. Mary and Jim eventually get caught in all this, and it threatens to end tragically for the two of them.

Except, of course, that Barbary Coast was released in 1935. Had it been a pre-Code, you might possibly get at least an ambiguous ending. But because of the Code, you know that Louis is going to get what he deserves for his crimes, while Mary is going to find a way to expiate her sins.

Barbary Coast is another of those movies where the big problem I have with it is the fact that the Code forces a certain ending on them. Having read a bit more about the movie, it was based on a novel with a plot that, if not entirely different, at least is able to handle things with a much more grown-up sensibility. Joe Breen and friends were apparently thoroughly displeased, and forced all sorts of script changes, which are decidedly not to the movie's benefit, which is a huge shame given the cast.

Still, that does make Barbary Coast the sort of movie you should watch to see how the Production Code could hurt a Hollywood movie.

Woman Chases Man

Recently, while browsing through the Roku Channel (I really hate that name, since there's a bunch of channels in addition to all the streaming stuff) app, I was alerted to a new-to-me movie that sounded interesting, with a cast including several old stars whose movies I tend to enjoy, so I watched it. That movie was Woman Chases Man.

Kenneth Nolan (Joel McCrea) is a wealthy young man on a transatlantic liner coming home from Europe, about to surprise his fahter B.J. (Charles Winninger) when he gets home with the news that he's about to pop the question to Nina (Leona Maricle, and if you haven't heard that name before that might be a sign as to which character Kenneth will wind up with in the final reel) Tennyson. However, Dad surprises him first, with a collect radio call to the liner (in the days when this sort of thing would have been monstrously expensive) asking for money. However, Kenneth has heard it before.

Meanwhile, waiting outside B.J.'s office are a bunch of process servers. B.J. is no longer rich; his late wife had half of the couple's money, and when she died, she made certain the son got half of it so he'd have something to start on and so that B.J. wouldn't spend it all. B.J. isn't a bad guy; it's just that he has a habit of picking hare-brained inventions that won't work in real life and wind up costing him a bunch of money. The latest scheme, at least, doesn't sound so bad: a property development of planned houses for the lower social classes, to be called Nolan Heights. But he needs $100,000 to keep the creditors at bay.

Not knowing this is Virginia Travis (Miriam Hopkins). She goes to the building here B.J.'s office is along with a letter of introduction telling Nolan that she's an architect who would be good for the Nolan Heights project. Not that she has any clue that Nolan doesn't have the money to hire her, or anybody else, on. However, her moxie is able to drive the process servers away so the elder Nolan is going to see her. She faints, being in as bad a financial state as B.J. is and not having eaten in two days.

All this gives Dad an idea. Virginia should use her feminine wiles on Kenneth to get him to propose to her, or at least to sign a check for that $100,000 that Dad needs. That latter isn't going to be so easy, since as I said earlier Kenneth has seen all of the schemes up close and seen his father fritter away his money. Kenneth isn't about to let him blow the other half of the money that Mom had when she died. The former -- getting Kenneth to fall in love -- isn't going to be easy either, since as we know Kenneth is bring his girlfriend home with him.

Except that we eventually learn Nina isn't wealthy, and the "Uncle" Henri she's traveling with is really her boyfriend. She's just a gold-digger. And, since we know who the two leads are, we know where it's all going to go. As is so often the case with a movie like Woman Chases Man, the movie is more about how the characters get where we all know they're going.

Unfortunately, Woman Chases Man is one of the weaker screwball comedies I've seen. The situations are even phonier than in most screwball comedies, and the characters are almost all people it's hard to have sympathy with, the possible exception being Kenneth. But even he does a 180 just in time for the final reel. Of note, as a friend of Virginia's pressed into service as a butler, is a young Broderick Crawford.

Woman Chases Man isn't a particularly good movie. But at least it's mercifully short. And the print Roku showed had relatively few commercials -- I think 8½ minutes for a 70-minute movie. Traditional cable channels would probably have had 20 minutes.

Rockabye

Back in August, Constance Bennett was selected for Summer Under the Stars, and I pointed out that I had watched one of her movies scheduled that day, Rockabye, some time back, with the plan of watching it again for the next time it showed up on TCM. Well, it's on again tomorrow (Feb. 6) at 9:00 AM as part of a day of Joel McCrea's movies, so now is a good time to do a longer post on it.

Constance Bennett is clearly the star here, not McCrea. She plays Judy Carroll, a stage actress with a complicated personal life. She's hoping to adopt a child, but she's made the mistake of having an affair with a corrupt politician, Al Howard (Walter Pidgeon in an early role). He's now on trial, and her testifying against him causes her to lose custody of the child she was hoping to adopt. Her manager, Antonie (Paul Lukas, also in an early role), suggests that she go off to Europe for a while until the scandal dies down. She's got a public that will forgive her, an dafter a suitable absence she can go back on the stage. Another of the complications in Judy's personal life is that Antoine has always held a flame for Judy, even though Judy has apparently seen the relationship as professional, not personal.

While in Europe, Judy reads a play called Rockabye, and thinks it would be perfect for her, although Antoine doesn't really hold the same opinion. Judy gets the reasonable idea of contacting the playwright, Jacob van Riker Pell (Joel McCrea); perhaps he can help convince Antoine that Judy is right for the part. Jacob is hesitant at first, although as more of Judy's back story is revealed, he begins to realize that perhaps Judy might be right for the part after all.

But we need some more personal complications for Judy, and the obvious one is that Judy is going to begin to fall in love with Jacob, and this time, the feeling is mutual. Here, though, there's another catch. Jacob is married, although it's a loveless marriage, and Jacob is trying to get a divorce. Perhaps once the divorce is final, Judy and Jacob can get married, and then they'll have a nice respectable relationship.

In any case, rehearsals for the play Rockabye go on, and eventually the play has its premiere on Broadway, even though Jacob doesn't show up for the after-show party. That's because there are yet more complications in Jacob's relationship....

Rockabye the movie is one of those movies that to me feels like a decided product of its time. Not so much 1932 as part of the pre-Code era, but 1932 as before even World War II started liberating women, never mind the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. The film's central conceit, that Judy's personal life is somehow career-ending scandalous, seems a bit quaint 90 years on. Nowadays, I don't think people would care that much if a Judy-like actress had a complicated personal life and then fell in love with a married playwright.

Having said that, however, the performances are adequate, and Rockabye is certainly an interesting look at a time that was completely different. As they like to say, the past is like a different country.

The Silver Cord

I mentioned in this morning's post on Ingrid Bergman that there are a couple of movies coming up in the Thursday evening into Friday morning lineup on TCM that I wanted to blog about, so one of them would get a post today and the other one tomorrow. The first of the movies is The Silver Cord, which will be on overnight between Thursday and Friday (Dec. 3) at 3:30 PM (which is early Friday everywhere in the contiguous 48 states).

Christina (Irene Dunne) is a biology student studying under a prestigious researcher in Heidelberg. Just as she thinks she might have made an interesting discovery, who should walk into the room but David Phelps (Joel McCrea)? David is an architect who was in Europe for reasons not quite mentioned but aren't really important because the movie is about to go back to America anyway. David is also Christina's husband. He has a job offer with a prestigious architect in New York and wants to head back to America as a result. Christina, thankfully, had an offer from a research institute in New York that she may still be able to take up, so they'll both be able to work in New York and live happily ever after.

Not so fast, of course. David says to Christina that he'd like to introduce her to the rest of his family, now headed by his mother (Laura Hope Crews) since Dad died many years ago. It's a natural thing to do, but since they leave for America just a few minutes into the movie, you know that the visit is not going to go without a hitch. Sure enough, Ma Phelps seems stunned that Christina is actually a scientist -- why, women just didn't do such things back in her day! They were good mothers to their children and produced a generation of responsible adults.

Not that all of Mrs. Phelps' chlidren are responsible adults. David is, but there might be a question about his kid brother Robert (Eric Linden). Robert has fallen in love with a young woman, Hester (Frances Dee), and Mom thinks Hester isn't quite right for Robert. Worse, she fears that Robert and Hester might move away, leaving her all alone, and that's something she can't countenance. So she works on getting Robert to see the "error" of his ways and dumping poor Hester.

She also goes to work on David, since she doesn't want him to live in New York, especially if he's only goin gto be working his way up from the relative bottom. The family has a nice plot of land that could be developed as new housing, something which would both enable David to live nearby, and allow him to start a lot closer to the top of the architecture business. Of course, David and Christina would have to give up their dreams, but Mrs. Phelps doesn't care about those, only how she can keep her sons close to her.

If David and Robert have been raised by their mother so long and inculcated into this warped view of what a mother's love is to the point they can't see through it, Christina certainly isn't. She gets fairly quickly what's going on, and definitely takes Hester's side over the way Robert and especially Ma Phelps treat her. But it also means that there's going to be a lot of conflict between Christina and David before we get to the inevitable climax: who's it going to be, her or me?

The Silver Cord was based on a 1926 stage play, which explains why so much of the action is kept to a few rooms of the house, and also why a big housing development could be a thing in a movie that was made at the height of the Depression. In any case, all of the cast give very good performances, and while the script sometimes goes over the top by today's standards, that's not the actors' fault. One mild plot hole for me was thinking that the boat David and Christina took back to America would dock at New York, letting them set up house there before going to see Mom (the exact location of the Phelps manor is not mentioned); this would give David and Christina no good reason to stay with Mom. Also unanswered is why Mom let David go over to Europe alone in the first place.

But these are minor quibbles for what is a pretty darn interesting movie, and one that you should definitely watch.

Kept Husbands

A lot of times, studios didn't necessarily know what they had in their stars, so early in the stars' careers, they got put in a range of movies that seem odd looking back on things. Joel McCrea may be thought of now more for the westerns he did in the second half of his career, but early on he got some rather different stuff, such as Kept Husbands.

McCrea is second billed behind Dorothy Mackaill, who plays Dot Parker. Her father Arthur (Robert McWade) owns a steel mill, and even with a depression on -- not that it's mentioned in the movie -- he's still apparently making money hand over fist. One day he announces to his family that one of the employees saved several workers from an industrial accident, and that employee is going to get to come to the Parker mansion for dinner. Needless to say, everyone else thinks it's going to be a grand old time watching this poor hapless worker not be able to show any social graces, a sort of "rednecks in the mist" thing if you will.

Except that the employee in question is one Dick Brunton (Joel McCrea). He has dreams of becoming an engineer, helping to design industrial projects for the Parker mills' output. He was also an all-American football player back in college, in the days when football players were not necessarily the stereotypical "dumb jocks", all-Americans could come from places like the Ivy League, and society types would actually go to college football games. Dot notices the little football on Dick's watch chain, and puts two and two together. She also vows to her father that she's going to get married to Dick.

Dick, for his part, still lives with his mom (Mary Carr) because she needs the financial support; she's also taken in a boarder in the form of Dick's co-worker Hughie (Ned Sparks as the comic relief). Dick loves his mother and she's going to have good advice for both him and Dot later in the movie, but for now we only need know that she comes from much more modest circumstances, reminiscent of Thelma Ritter in The Mating Season so that we can see how big a gap there is between Dot and Dick.

But of course they get married. Dick is hoping to be able to take care of his wife on just his salary, especially considering that the lifestyle to which Dot had become accustomed would require them living on $50,000 a year in 1931 dollars. Her dad pays for the honeymoon, which involves taking the family yacht over to Europe and seeing all the great places, much to Dick's chagrin; he just wants to get back to his career and advancing that career.

When they do get back, to a home that Daddy gave to Dot, Dick's career does get advanced, but not in the way he'd like. He's bumped up to a vice-president's job which is probably more of a make-work job. Combined with all the social functions Dot wants Dick to attend, Dick doesn't seem to be getting much of anything done in the family business. When the opportunity to put over a bridge across the Mississippi using new materials and construnction techniques, Dick jumps at it, even though it's going to cause serious conflicts with Dot's social life.

McCrea and Mackaill both give adequate performances in Kept Husbands, and you wish there were a simpler way for the two of them to come to a meeting of minds, like before they actually got married. But this is the sort of material that I think I've seen done in a bunch of early 1930s movies. There's nothing new here, and nothing particularly special.

Although the DVD might make it look like a pre-Code, but it's only a movie made before July 1934; boundary-pushing stuff one normally thinks of when one thinks of a "pre-Code" movie. It's worth a watch for McCrea, and I'm glad it got a release on a box set and not just a Warner Archive standalone.

Woman Wanted

It just so happens that two movies that I have on my DVR are both on the TCM lineup for the daytime on Friday. Since tomorrow is also Thursday Movie Picks, it means that I'm going to blog about one of the movies tomorrow and the other one today, a good 36-plus hours before its airing. That first movie is Woman Wanted.

Maureen O'Sullivan plays Ann Gray, a woman on trial for murder where the case has just gone to the jury. While waiting for the verdict, through the window her eyes catch those of lawyer Tony Baxter (Joel McCrea), who isn't involved in the case and doesn't recognize her at all, which seems mildly odd since this is apparently a prominent murder trial that would have been in all the papers. Tony pantomimes asking Ann to dinner, although for obvious reasons she's not available.

The jury comes back, and Ann is found... guilty! As she's being remanded into custody, some gangsters deliberately crash into the police car, allowing her the opportunity to escape. She naturally takes it, and winds up running into Baxter outside the entrance to his apartment hotel, so she takes him up on that offer for a meal, following him up to his apartment.

However, there are all sorts of problems, as you can guess with a woman who's a fugitive from justice, even if she insists she's not guilty, and the movie lets us know that this is in fact the case. Ann's picture is in all the papers so certainly somebody will recognize her; sure enough, that happens as the house detective and a policeman come up to Baxter's apartment looking for her. But that's not the only problem as far as Tony's side of the story is concerned. He's got a fiancée of sorts in Betty Randolph (Adrienne Ames), and she recognizes that there's another woman in the apartment, which needless to say displeases her.

As for Ann, her problems are with the gangsters who facilitated her escape. They weren't doing it for altruistic reasons. They know that Ann is not guilty. But the murder involved $250,000 in bonds that have gone missing. The gangsters think that Ann knows something about where those bonds are, and want her to tell them, even though she doesn't know where they are.

With that in mind, Tony and Ann set out and leave the city partly to escape the police, partly to stay one step ahead of the gangsters, led by Smiley (Louis Calhern), and partly to try to prove Ann's innocence. The action shifts fairly quickly to a road-house, then a boat house, and finally to Smiley's nightclub, where Ann seems to be in danger. But we know this is the sort of movie that's going to have a happy ending, even if the Production Code hadn't required the guilty party to get what's coming to him.

Woman Wanted is a perfectly acceptable B movie, surprisingly good in fact considering that it's an MGM movie released at a time (1935) when it was really Warner Bros. that was cranking out the great Bs and programmers like Fog Over Frisco, which came out about a year before Woman Wanted. In Woman Wanted, we have two appealing leads in O'Sullivan and McCrea, and a story that really zips along in its running time of 67 minutes.

Woman Wanted is definitely worth a watch, and is also available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive Collection.

Crown around my stars

Another of the movies that I finally got around to watching recently because it's on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive is Stars in My Crown.

Marshall Thompson narrates, playing the voice of the elder John Kenyon (played as a child by Dean Stockwell). Kenyon grew up in the southern town of Walesburg, remembering it fondly as well as many of the people who were adults when he was a child and who have long since passed on, the sort of stuff you could expect from John Nesbitt's Passing Parade shorts. But we have a real story to get to, sort of, since in may ways this is a slice-of-life movie.

Coming to town after having served in the Civil War and now wishing to turn to non-violence is Parson Josiah Gray (Joel McCrea). He wants to be parson even though the town doesn't have a church. He meets one of the town's leading citizens, Dr. Harris Sr. (Lewis Stone), a man who knows he's about to die, leaving the medical practice to his more officious and inexperienced son Harris Jr. (James Mitchell). Parson Gray falls in love with Harriet (Ellen Drew) and marries her, taking in John as a foster son. Elsewhere in town is the Isbell family, led by patriarch Jed (Alan Hale) who is most definitely not a churchgoer, and his farming neighbor Uncle Famous Prill (Juano Hernandez).

Prill forms the basis of one of the main sub-plots in the film. He's obviously a freed slave who got the little bit of land he owns, and that's all he wants out of life, being happy to live out the remainder of his days in peace and quiet. But another neighbor, Lon Bacektt (Ed Begley), has discovered mica on his property, and that the valuable seam continues on to Famous' land. Unfortunately, the only way to get at the mica is through strip-mining, so Backett wants to buy the land, at an obviously unfair price since Famous is black. And Backett will stop at nothing, including violence and the threat of sending a Klan-like organization to kill Famous if need be, to get that land.

The other main sub-plot involves John. During the summer, he's playing like a normal boy, stopping to take a drink from the well at the one-room schoolhouse. Nobody realizes that somehow, the well has become contaminated with typhus. John gets sick and nearly dies, and when the school year starts, the kids start coming down with the sickness too. The doctor thinks it's not the well at the school since John got sick before the school year (Dr. Harris doesn't know John did in fact drink there), and wants to force the parson into lockdown, being as ignorant and panicky as many of today's politicians have been during the coronavirus outbreak.

Stars in My Crown is the sort of movie that MGM put out as a programmer in the early 1950s, and I find a lot of these to be much more interesting than the prestige movies. Stars in My Crown is one of the best of them, thanks to a fine performance from McCrea as well as many of the supporting actors. If the movie has one flaw, it's that the story is a little too neat and tidy at times, and the climax with the attempted lynching feels a lot more antiseptic than if it had been done over at Warner Bros. (and indeed, Warner Bros. did it in Storm Warning a year later).

If you want a nice, gentle movie, than I can definitely recommend Stars in My Crown.

The Richest Girl in the World

Another of my recent movie viewings was The Richest Girl in the World, one of those old RKO movies that's available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive.

Dorothy Hunter is returning from Switzerland where she's been going to finishing school. She's set to be married to Donald (George Meeker), and she needs the approval of the lawyers handling her trust fund, a bunch of men who have never actually seen her. The approve since they want her happiness, but we learn that the woman who actually spoke to them is not Dorothy, but her secretary Sylvia (Fay Wray). The reason for this is that Dorothy has been afraid to have people know what she looks like and treat her differently because of her money.

Indeed, Donald realizes that he doesn't really love Dorothy and can't marry her, in part because of that money. And that's also going to be a problem for Sylvia, because she's recently gotten married to Phillip (Reginald Denny) and was waiting for Dorothy (Miriam Hopkins) to get married so that Sylvia's work impersonating Dorothy could be done and she could live her own life. The one other person how knows the deception is Dorothy's guardian John Connors (Henry Stephenson).

Dorothy holds a party that's supposed to introduce her and was presumably to announce the engagement that now won't be, and one of the young men who shows up is young stockbroker Tony Travers (Joel McCrea). He meets Dorothy, who is still passing herself off as Sylvia, in the billiard room in a scene that made me think of A Place in the Sun, especially because the two go out on a canoe to get away from everybody else.

Tony falls in love with her, not realizing that this is actually the rich girl. She wants to make certain that he's in love with her, and not her money, so she keeps up the deception in an attempt to prove it. The problem is what's going to happen when the time comes to reveal the deception. That is, if their relationship can even get to that point since you'd think a guy would notice something not quite kosher was going on.

The Richest Girl in the World has the sort of story that sounds like it would be an interesting screwball comedy or a gentler romantic comedy. Instead, the writers decided to have it be a light drama. That, I think, is the big reason why I found the movie so maddening. The drama and the characterizations really don't work. Especially poorly treated by the script is Hopkins, who has a thankless role as a bit of a jerk. I couldn't understand why she couldn't face the trustees herself, for example, and things spiral downward from there.

The Richest Girl in the World is one of those movies that should have received a DVD release on one of those four-movie TCM-branded box sets that Warner Home Video was putting out, say, in honor of Joel McCrea. Instead, it's a standalone Warner Archive DVD that I personally think is too pricey.

Colorado Territory

I briefly mentioned Colorado Territory back in 2015 when it was airing on TCM in honor of the birthday salute to one of its stars, Virginia Mayo. It ran again last December as part of TCM's spotlight on remakes. I recently got around to watching it, so now we get a review.

While Mayo may be the female lead, the real star is Joel McCrea, playing Wes McQueen. At the start of the movie he's in prison in Missouri in 1871, but he's sprung by friends. The first thing he does is go to the farm where his old flame lived, but he finds that she died while he was in prison. So he goes west, out to Colorado where his old friend Rickard (Basil Ruysdael) has a job for him.

Along the way to Colorado, however, on the stagecoach he meets the Winslows, father Fred (Henry Hull) and daughter Julie (Dorothy Malone), whom Dad is bringing west because they're of too low a social class to marry her beau, and he wants to start a farm. Wes takes a liking to the two of them, and even thwarts a would-be gang of robbers from taking the coach's money box. The Winslows don't know Wes' true identity.

About that job that Rickard had for Wes? It's a criminal matter, of course, involving the robbery of a payroll from the Denver and Rio Grande railroad. While preparing for the robbery, he is to hide out at an abandoned mission, where he's going to meet the two other guys in the robbery, Reno and Duke (John Archer and James Mitchell, respectively). They're bad news, as should be seen by the fact that they've brought a woman with them to the hideout, Colorado Carson (that's Virginia Mayo). They treat her like crap, and fight amongst themselves, so it's unsurprising that Colorado takes a liking to Wes and eschews the other two guys.

The day of the robbery arrives, and it doesn't go off without a hitch. Reno and Duke try to double-cross Wes, even sicking the railroad police on Wes and Colorado; they get away although Wes gets shot in the shoulder during the escape. But there's a Production Code, so you know that Wes isn't really going to be able to get away. (Not that Reno and Duke do; we see their legs dangling after their necks have been stretched.)

Colorado Territory is a remake of High Sierra, and if there's a problem with the movie, I think it's surprisingly in the casting of Joel McCrea. Humphrey Bogart is tough enough to play the part where, while still engendering a bit of sympathy, we know he deserves to die as the Production Code warrants. This is especially true because Bogart had been mostly playing bad guys at the time he made High Sierra; it was only that same year starting with The Maltese Falcon that he really began to play good guys. McCrea comes across as too nice, not having the hardened edges that Bogart's reputation brought. I think the writing doesn't quite help McCrea; nor does his reputation up until that time which involved a lot more good guys.

That doesn't mean that Colorado Territory is at all bad, however. It's a serviceable western, and a solid retelling of High Sierra moved out to the old west. It's more that the movie could have been so much better. Colorado Territory is available on DVD from the Warner Archive should you care to watch for yourself.

The Lost Squadron

Some time back I DVRed The Lost Squadron on TCM, and only now got around to watching it. It's another of the movies available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive, so now's the time to do the blog post on the movie.

The movie starts on the morning of November 11, 1918, a few hours before the end of World War I. Four men: Gibby (Richard Dix), Woody (Robert Armstrong), Red (Joel McCrea) and Fritz (Hugh Herbert) are American flyers who went off to France to fight in the war and became friends as a result. The war ends, and the four vow to remain friends forever, going home to pick up the lives they left behind when they joined up for the war effort.

Yeah, right. Each of them gets home and finds that life is going to be vastly different for them. Gibby had a girlfriend in Follette (Mary Astor) who is an aspiring actress; she took a different boyfriend while Gibby was away. Woody had a business he left behind, and the partner embezzled all the money, leaving Woody flat broke. Red could have his old job back, but with the economic downturn, the boss has to fire somebody else to bring back Red, in this case a man whose wife gave birth not too long ago. Red isn't about to let that happen.

Not having any economic prospects, Red, Gibby, and Fritz decide to become hobos, hopping a freight train that will eventually take them to Los Angeles. Silent films are the big thing, the movie being set in the early 1920s, and our three friends stop by the premiere of director Arthur von Furst's (Erich von Stroheim) latest aviation picture. Whom should they meet but Woody, who has made it in Hollywood as a stunt pilot!

Woody vows to do what he can to get the other three guys jobs in the movie industry, as there's always a place for a good stunt pilot. Woody also introduces them to his sister, nicknamed "The Pest" (Dorothy Jordan). Gibby and Red both eventually fall in love with The Pest.

Woody is able to get the others jobs on the crew of von Furst's new movie, and who should be playing the female lead in the new picture but Follette! Not only that, but she's now Mrs. von Furst. Unfortunately, the director is a hard taskmaster, and uses planes that aren't in the best of condition. Making things more worrying for everybody is that Woody drinks, so they all wonder whether he can do his stunts.

Gibby, on meeting Follette, finds that she still holds a flame for him, something which is bound to enrage von Furst when he finds out. And when he does, he decides he's going to sabotage Gibby's plane. Only, Woody gets in that plane to do the stunt....

The Lost Squadron is a well-made movie, but I can't help but think at the same time that it's not necessarily going to be for everybody. That's partly because it's an early talkie, and not nearly as polished as later movies, which I think is a bit of a problem in the stunts. Something felt off that I couldn't quite put my finger on. I also feel like this particular love triangle (or the multiple triangles) came across a bit old-fashioned by modern sensibilities, more so than in other 1930s movies.

That's not to say that The Lost Squadron is a bad movie. It's just that there's other stuff from that era that I'd recommend first.

Another chance at heaven

Back in May 2012, when Joel McCrea was TCM Star of the Month, I made a brief mention of the movie Chance at Heaven. It's airing again tomorrow afternoon at 12:45 PM on TCM as part of a birthday salute to McCrea. I still stand by what I wrote in that one paragraph, except for the bit about it not being on DVD: TCM's schedule now lists it as being available from the TCM Shop as part of the Warner Archive collection, and currently on sale. Still, I'd recommend watching the movie on TCM before buying the DVD.

Joel McCrea plays Blackie, who runs one of those old-style service stations that didn't just sell you gasoline, but could also fix your car back in the days when eveything wasn't computerized and you had to take your car to the dealer to get it looked at. Blackie is engaged to the girl next door, Marje (Ginger Rogers), and the two of them are sure to get married and live happily after. Well, of course you know that's not going to be true, because if it were, we wouldn't have a movie.

The service station is in the vicinity of Silver Beach, one of those little seaside towns where the rich people decamp to for the summer. This summer, that means Glory (Marian Nixon) and her family. Glory takes the car out and has problems with it, resulting in her winding up at Blackie's service station. She's immediately smitten with Blackie, becuase he's Joel McCrea. What woman wouldn't be smitten with young, handsome McCrea? The bigger problem is that Blackie feels the same way toward Glory. Although, again, to be fair, young Marian Nixon isn't bad looking, and with her big-city ways you can see why somebody like Blackie would be thrown for a loop before coming to his senses. The ohly thing is, he doesn't come to his senses. Even though Glory's parents don't like the idea of her having a relationship with a guy like Blackie, the two are in love. Marje knows she's licked, so she gives up Blackie and gives him her blessing to get married to Marje.

This is where the story gets weird. Glory doesn't know how to be a good housewife to Blackie, which shouldn't be surprising since she would have had a bunch of servants catering to her every need. What is bizarre is that Marje stays in the picture, helping teach Glory how to take care of Blackie. And she doesn't seem to be doing it with any intention of trying to take Blackie back! Eventually, Glory gets pregnant, because that's what married couples do. This life-changing event makes her decide that perhaps being married to a guy like Blackie isn't how she really wants to spend the rest of her life. So Glory up and goes home to mother!

The material in Chance at Heaven is really screwed up, especially towards the end. Everybody tries hard, but can't really save the movie. That having been said, the extent to which I found myself thinking what the hell these characters were doing makes Chance at Heaven worth a viewing. That, and the presence of Ginger Rogers and Joel McCrea.

Apparently, I haven't blogged about Banjo on My Knee before

FXM, or what's left of the Fox Movie Channel, is airing Banjo on My Knee tomorrow morning at 6:00 AM. I thought I had blogged about it, but apparently not. It also doesn't seem to be available on DVD, so I'd better blog about it now.

Joel McCrea stars as Ernie Holley, who at the start of the movie is living with his dad Newt (Walter Brennan) on a sort of houseboat on the Mississippi River as part of a "Shantytown" of houseboats where the locals have their own peculiar culture. It's a happy day for the Holley family, though, as Ernie is about to get married to landlubber Pearl (Barbara Stanwyck). She's willing to live the river life, and since Ernie and Pearl love each other, it's presumably a match made in heaven. Except that it's not going to work out that way. After the wedding, Slade (Victor Killian), who purchases the fish that the Shantytown people catch wholesale, tries to kiss the bride. Ernie doesn't like this, so he gives Slade a slug, and he falls off the boat into the river. Ernie fears that he's drowned Slade, and to make matters worse, his former girlfriend Leota (Katherine DeMille) is willing to call the police to have him arrested and ruin his life. If she can't have him, nobody will. So Ernie makes a quick escape, leaving poor Pearl behind.

Ernie shows up six months later, having worked as a sailor, and offers Pearl a plan: he's going to take her to Aruba, beyond American jurisdiction. But Pearl doesn't like that idea, nor the idea that Ernie should be making all the decisions for the couple. She she up and leaves for New Orleans, where she's been offered a job in a photography studio. The photographer turns out to be a lecher, however (he probably really would have been a pronographer, but they couldn't say that in a 1936 movie), so Pearl leaves him and takes a job at a small restaurant washing dishes in order to make ends meet. Ernie shows up at the photography studio looking for Pearl, but can't find her, of course, so he goes off again. Eventually Newt and another of the Shantytown folk, Buddy (Buddy Ebsen) find her, and try to get Ernie to make up with her. In the meantime, though, the restaurant's entertainment, singer Chick (Tony Martin), has fallen in love with Pearl and is willing to marry her. We know that Ernie and Pearl are really right for each other, but will they ever be able to get back together and find that true happiness?

Banjo on My Knee is an odd little movie, at least in the sense of its subject matter. As talented as both of the leads were, neither Stanwyck nor McCrea seems quite right to play the part of people almost outside regular society, living off the river and only interacting with the civilized world as required. Yes, I know McCrea did a somewhat similar role in Bed of Roses, and Stanwyck played outsiders in movies such as Baby Face, but these characters seem like they're supposed to be the river version of hillbillies. Still, Stanwyck and McCrea aren't as glaring errors in their parts as many other stars would be. (Try imagining William Powell and Myrna Loy playing these roles.) They're also helped by Brennan and Ebsen, who both it their roles quite well. The story is nothing particularly special, as it seems like a plot that could fit in a whole bunch of different settings. Overall, Banjo on My Knee is a very interesting, if somewhat imperfect, film, but one that's well worth a view. It's a shame that it isn't known better.

Primrose Path

While TCM is celebrating the centenary of Vivien Leigh today, it's also the birth anniversary of Joel McCrea, who was born on this day in 1905. TCM will be spending tomorrow morning and afternoon honoring McCrea, with movies including Primrose Path, tomorrow at 12:30 PM.

The star of the movie isn't McCrea, but Ginger Rogers, who plays Ellie May Adams. Ellie is the eldest daughter in a family that by the 80s would have been called dysfunctional. Dad Homer (Miles Mander) is at heart a good person, but he's an alcoholic who can't keep a job and depends on his wife to support him. That wife, Mamie (Marjorie Rambeau) has been making a living as a prostitute, something that's been going on in the family for over a generation, since Grandma (Queenie Vassar), who lives with them, was a prostitute herself -- and you get the feeling that she encoraged her daughter to become one.

Ellie wants a better life for herself, so one day when she's at the seashore digging for clama and meets a man, she takes her chance. That man, Ed Wallace (the aforementioned McCrea), works at a short-order diner on the beach. She falls in love with him, and seeing a way out of her family in the bad neighborhood, charmingly horns in on Ed's life in such a way that he eventually agrees to elope with her. Of course, Ellie hasn't told Ed about her family.

This is a problem for multiple reasons. First, as in a movie like The Mating Season, the spouse who has been kept in the dark is understandably rather displeased about not having been told the truth in the first place. You get the impression that if only Ellie had told Ed the truth, he might have loved her anyway, but lying to him is a big problem. Primrose Path, however, is not a comedy; not by a long shot. If you had any thoughts about it being a comedy, those will be disabused once Ellie introduces Ed to her family. It's here that Ed leaves Ellie. But her family hasn't reacted well, either. Mom and Grandma seem to think that they're going to lose their meal ticket for retirement if Ellie goes off with Ed and marries him. Just as Grandma had encouraged Mom to become a prostitute, now they're encouraging Ellie to follow in their footsteps.

It's here, though, that Primrose Path starts to develop some problems. The melodrama that gets piled on top of melodrama strains credulity, and the way the problems are resolved between Ellie and Ed don't seem realistic either, but forced to provide an ending that won't have the audience screaming at the movie screen. The writers probably also had to do quite a lot of contortions with the script to satisfy the Production Code: even though it's clear that prostitution runs in the family, that's never explicitly stated. That having been said, the cast members playing the folks in Ellie's family, as well as Rogers herself, are all excellent. The dysfunction in the Adams family is somewhat reminiscent of the family structure in A Patch of Blue, except that Ellie's supporting herself is more realistic. Both movies have an excellent portrayal of family dysfunction. McCrea is more than adequate, but he's not the center of attention here. Although the plot does have some problems, the movie as a whole more than overcomes those problems.

For whatever reason, Primrose Path doesn't receive quite the attention that many of Ginger Rogers' other films -- even the ones without Fred Astaire -- do. That's a shame, because it's really quite good, especially in those supporting performances. Primrose Path has at least received a DVD release from the Warner Archive Collection, so you can catch it any time you want.

Sullivan's Travels

I don't think I've ever blogged about Sullivan's Travels before. It's airing on Sunday, October 28 at 2:15 PM on TCM, and now is a good time to recommend it.

Joel McCrea stars as John L. Sullivan, a Hollywood director who's become prominent -- and wealthy -- by making light fluffy comedies and musicals with titles such as Ants in Your Pants of 1938. Despite the good pay, Sullivan wants to make "serious" pictures; especially something with a social message what with there still being a depression on. Specifically, in order to make the movie he wants to find out what it's like to live on the "other side", as a hobo with only a dime to his name. Needless to say, the studio execs don't like the idea. But they come up with an agreement. They come up with a good idea, however: treat it as publicity. So they follow Sullivan, with Sullivan trying to escape and learn more "authentic" poverty.

Stuck with only ten cents in his pocket at a roadside diner, Sullivan meets The Girl (Veronica Lake), a failed starlet who is going to be leaving Hollywood since she can't succeed there. Oh, Sullivan could have given her the success, but he can't really portray himself as Sullivan now, so he passes himself off as somebody who knew Sullivan, which at least gets him the run of the Sullivan place. The two really wind up living the hobo life, spending a night in a homeless shelter among other things, where Sullivan has his shoes stolen.

This is a problem because part of the agreement Sullivan had with the studio execs involved putting ID in the sole of his shoe while he was going to be on the road. The bosses would be able to prove that this was really Sullivan, but nobody else would, which was just the way Sullivan wanted it. As part of a plan to help the hobos out by distributing cash to them, he winds up at the same railyard as the guy who stole his shoes; the guy gets hit by a train after knocking Sullivan out and giving Sullivan a case of amnesia. Sullivan gets sent to a prison labor camp, and is about to learn what the other side is really like, if he didn't already know it from being a hobo.

Sullivan's Travels sounds like serious stuff, and it certainly does have a serious message, although what that message is could be debated. (I won't say anything more about that, because it would give away the ending of the movie.) The movie was directed by Preston Sturges, however, which means a lot of things. First, whatever message was intended is definitely somewhat anti-establishment. Second, you know there's going to be a lot of comedy here. There's slapstick with the people who would be Sullivan's entourage, and somewhat more intelligent humor for McCrea and Lake. Last but by no means least, you know you're going to get a great movie. McCrea is just right for the Sullivan part: not too glamorous, but not too rough either. I can't imagine somebody like Cary Grant being a believable wannabe hobo, or somebody like John Garfield playing the wealthy director. Veronica Lake is gorgeous as the failed actress, and Sturges was able to get several of his usuals to play the supporting roles, which they do to comedic perfection.

The Sport Parade

The fourth night of Joel McCrea's turn as TCM Star of the Month concludes at 8:15 AM tomorrow morning with The Sport Parade. Joel McCrea stars as Sandy, who is just finishing up his senior year at Dartmouth together with best friend Johnny (William Gargan). The two were both stars on the football team back in the days when college football was king and the game was such that relatively small white guys like them could succeed. (McCrea was certainly fit, but not football fit.) Being a college football star gives one connections, and Johnny uses them to go into journalism in New York. Sandy, however, likes football, and decides that he's going to become a professional football player.

Back in those days, of course, you couldn't make a living solely as a professional football player. You had to work in the off-season, and professional football wasn't particularly prestigious, either. So Sandy isn't able to make much of a success at pro football, and has to take a job with Johnny. This causes problems when both of them fall for Irene (Marian Marsh). Sandy goes back into the world of sports.

Eventually, to make ends meet, Sandy takes up professional wrestling. This is hard to believe, since all the photos I've seen of old-time professional wrestlers showed them to be, if not as big as today, still much bigger and burlier than McCrea. He's going to get himself killed. Well, except that he's not, because professional wrestling is more or less fake, with heavy emphasis on the "more". The climax comes when Irene bets Johnny that Sandy will win the big match: if Sandy loses the fight, Irene will marry Johnny. Sandy, however, has already agreed to throw the match....

Oh dear is the plot silly. It seems as if the only point to the whole thing is to get Joel McCrea in a series of scenes where he's not wearing much in the way of clothing, something I suppose the women (and gay men) of the day would have liked. The "two men in love with the same girl" plot device must have been old even then, and Joel McCrea just isn't believable in this role. Andy Devine had played football in college, as did John Wayne; maybe they could have done a part like this. Devine certainly could have played the wrestler part here too.

The Sport Parade is, I think, more interesting for its look at life and the world of sports back in the 1930s (six-day bicycle races?) than it is for the story. Oh, and if you like men, it's interesting for McCrea's body too, I suppose. It's not on DVD, so you're going to have to catch it on TCM.

Oh dear: Dead End isn't on DVD either

TCM's third Wednesday for Star of the Month Joel McCrea kicks off at 8:00 PM with Dead End. I didn't notice until today that it doesn't seem to have an in-print DVD, so you're going to have to catch the TCM showing.

McCrea plays Dave, a would-be architect living in a tenement district in the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the mid-1930s. He's in love with shop girl Drina (Sylvia Sidney). Both would like to leave the tenement district; he by remaking it into affordable housing for all, and she by moving up economically. But their relationship is only part of the story. Drina is also looking after her kid brother Tommy (Billy Halop). Tommy seems to spend his days idly with his friends, raising a ruckus and in one case taking advantage of a rich kid who lives just down the road.

Into all of this walks Baby Face Martin (Humphrey Bogart). He's a famous gangster who used to live in the area many years ago and is coming back to see his mother (Marjorie Main) and his old girlfriend Francey (Claire Trevor) -- only to find that both women have changed.

In some ways, Dead End is a slice of life movie about the neighborhood where all these people live, although there's also a bigger plot about Tommy and his friends looking up to Baby Face, and Baby Face being on the run from the police, something which leads Dave to try to influence the kids to do better than they could following Baby Face. As for those police, they show up courtesy of the parents of the rich kid Tommy and his friends took advantage of earlier in the movie....

Dead End was released in 1937, at a time when McCrea and Sidney were the actors who would have been known well enough to get top billing. (Bogart had actually already made The Petrified Forest, but the rest of his really good roles were to come along later.) Although they've got top billing, they aren't quite the stars. Bogart unsurprisingly puts in another memorable performance. But it's also Billy Halop and his friends for whom this was a seminal motion picture. Those friends, played by juvenile actors like Leo Gorcey and Huntz Hall, became known as the "Dead End Kids" as a result of this movie, and it pretty much typecast them. As the Dead End Kids, they wound up at Warner Bros., where they appeared alongside James Cagney in Angels With Dirty Faces and John Garfield in They Made Me a Criminal, in both cases nearly stealing the show. Gorcey, Hall, and a couple of others, would go on to morph into the Bowery Boys, who were of course the stars of a series of ultra-low budget comedies until the mid-1950s.

Any similarity to Foreign Correspondent is purely coincidental

TCM continues its salute to Star of the Month Joel McCrea this evening. McCrea's 1940 film Foreign Correspondent, which I've blogged about before, is airing at 9:30 PM. A similar movie that McCrea made one year earlier, Espionage Agent, is coming up later in the evening, overnight at 1:15 AM.

McCrea plays Barry Corvall, a man working in a US consulate in North Africa. He's about to return to the US to go to foreign service school for those who are intending to serve higher up in the diplomatic corps. But before that can happen, he meets a woman (Brenda Marshall) trying to escape the turmoil in Europe. The two eventually fall in love on the boat home, and against the better judgment of Barry's mother, he marries Brenda. He should have listened to mother: it turns out that Brenda is German, and the Nazis are trying to get her to start spying for them again. The fact that she's got a husband in the diplomatic corps makes her particularly valuable.

Brenda does have one thing going for her, though, which is that she wants to escape her Nazi past. Barry realizes that he's been compromised by marrying a former Nazi, and comes up with the brilliant idea of resigning from the diplomatic corps and independently getting the goods on the Nazis to show America what a danger Nazi agents in the US really are. So Barry and Brenda go to Switzerland, it apparently being much easier for a former American diplomat to enter there than Nazi Germany. Spying, however, is a dangerous business, and Brenda gets kidnapped and Barry has to rescue her before she winds up back in Germany....

Espionage Agent has echoes in a lot of other movies, such as the aforementioned Foreign Correspondent, as well as Night Train to Munich. The theme of German immigrants in America spying on the US for their country of birth is a theme that was also dealt with by Hollywood, both before the war in Confessions of a Nazi Spy and during/afterwards, in a film like The House on 92nd Street. Compared to these movies, Espionage Agent is entertaining, even if it's not quite as good overall. The other films have the feel of A-movies, while Espionage Agent is really more of a B-movie. Also, with the war in Europe already having started by the time Espionage Agent premiered in the US, it doesn't have quite the shock value that Confessions of a Nazi Spy, which premiered four months before the Nazi invasion of Poland, did. Still, Espionage Agent is an enjoyable movie.

Espionage Agent doesn't seem to have received a DVD release, and it shows up rather infrequently on TCM, so you'll have to record it if you want to see it.

Star of the Month, Joel McCrea, part 1

A lot of people over on the TCM message boards have wanted Joel McCrea to be Star of the Month for some time, and this is the month they finally get their chance. TCM will be showing films with McCrea every Wednesday night in prime time, leading into Thursday morning. McCrea spent the last 15 years or so of his career doing a lot of westerns, but before that he made a lot of other films. TCM is spending this first week in May showing some of those other films. Several of them I've recommended in the past, such as The Palm Beach Story, which is on at 9:45 PM. (The picture at left has McCrea and Claudette Colbert from The Palm Beach Story.) That's followed at 11:30 PM by The More the Merrier. Ond of the last films this week is One Man's Journey, which is all the way at 9:15 AM tomorrow morning. This week, however, I'd like to mention a McCrea film I don't think I've evern mentioned before: Bed of Roses. Unlike the other films I've mentioned above, it doesn't seem to be available on DVD. It's also airing in the middle of the night, at 4:15 AM, so you're going to have to record this one.

Joel McCrea is nominally the male lead, but he's not really the star. That would be Constance Bennett. At the start of the movie, Bennett (who plays Lorrie) is just getting out of prison along with her friend Minnie (Pert Kelton). Both of them are small time con artists whose stock in trade runs along the lines of acting like prostitutes, and then getting their clients drunk and stealing their money. In order to get away from the prison authorities, the two hop aboard a steamboat plying the Mississippi River in Louisiana. Lorrie tries the same scam, but this time it's discovered that she has the missing money. To escape going back to prison, Lorrie jumps ship, literally jumping into the Mississppi, and eventually getting dragged aboard a cotton barge run by Dan (here's Joel McCrea). There's clearly a sexual attraction between the two. But Lorrie wants more out of life than the captain of a barge can provide her, so when the barge gets to New Orleans, Lorrie gets off and immediately starts trying to live the good life. At least this time she's doing it slightly less dishonestly, by becoming the mistress of the wealthy Mr. Paige (John Halliday).

Being a mistress isn't all it's cracked up to be. If Bennett hadn't been under contract to RKO, she might have seen Joan Crawford over at MGM in Possessed a year or two earlier, and realized this was a bad idea. Besides, she really loves hot Dan. She realizes, though, that Dan could never love a kept woman, and could only love her if she makes her living honestly. So Lorrie decides to leave Mr. Paige and do honest work in a department store!

Eighty years on, the plot of Bed of Roses rather strains credulity. Do people like this even exist any more? I suppose there are gold diggers and there are still certainly boat captains and con artists, but I don't think they lok at all like what you see on the screen here. That having been said, the movie is quite enjoyable. McCrea and Bennett work well together, and their scenes together on the barge display a surprising sexual tension. Granted, it's nothing like today where things can be more explicit even than the pre-Code films like Bed of Roses. But there's something about the passion between Bennett and McCrea that's just palpable. Bed of Roses is well worth a watch.