The American Film Theatre

Back in the 1970s, producer Ely Landau tried a bold experiment of taking prominent, mostly modern playwrights, and producing more minimalist versions of their plays as movies. Tickets for these movies would then be sold together, like buying a subscription to a stage theater or the ballet or opera. This project, called the American Film Theatre, only lasted two years and produced about a dozen movies in all. Among them is a version of Edward Albee's play A Delicate Balance.

The leads here are Katharine Hepburn and Paul Scofield. They play a married couple, Agnes and Tobias respectively, who have made it in life and are living an upper middle class life in suburban Connecticut of the generation of American prosperity that followed the second World War (the play was first produced in 1966 and the movie was released in late 1973). The sort of older couple who would stay in on a Friday night and enjoy the fruits of their life of hard work. Or, at least it seems they've made it.

Unfortunately, Agnes has a sister Claire (Kate Reid) who drinks too much and has been in and out of Alcoholics Anonymous and has as been rather less of a success at life. As a result, Claire lives with Agnes and Tobias. I imagine it can't be much fun for Tobias, but then they're at an age where life it more about a pleasant enough routine than fun. They can settle down to a nice dinner before enjoying the weekend.

At least, they can until a couple of neighbors and best friends knock on their door. Harry (Joseph Cotten) and Edna (Betsy Blair) are a married couple who seem to have just as good a life as Agnes and Tobias. But somehow, suddenly, they've both decided they're going to have a midlife crisis at exactly the same time. The two have reached the conclusion that they're terrified of... something that they can't quite figure out what it is. Except that whatever it is, they know they can't live in their current house. So they're just going to knock on Agnes and Tobias' door and move right in. And Agnes and Tobias are willing to let them do this because they're such good friends and have enough spare bedrooms to do so. It's a turn of events that makes no sense in any sort of real life, but there you are.

Things go from bad to worse. Agnes and Tobias have an adult daughter, as well as a son who died some time back. The adult daughter, Julia (Lee Remick), has made an even bigger mess of her life than her aunt Claire, and has just announced she's getting a divorce from her fourth husband. So she's coming back to her parents' place since she needs a place to stay. And dammit, Harry and Edna have her room. So there's a lot now for everybody to bicker about and talk in unnatural stage dialogue.

I suppose that the material in A Delicate Balance is the sort of stuff that might work well on the live stage where you've got a live audience to play off of and play to with communal reactions. And I can certainly see why stage actors would read a script like this and jump at the chance to develop characters. But it's material that's decidedly not going to be to everyone's taste, as well as material that doesn't translate to film as well as other plays do. So definitely some people are going to like it. I'm just not one of those people.

Ayn Rand does Cyrano de Bergerac

One of those old movies I'd seen show up several times on the TCM schedule but never got around to recording or watching was the 1945 film Love Letters. With that in mind, the last time it ran on TCM, I made a point to put it on my DVR to get around to watch later. I've finally watched it, so now you get the review.

The movie starts off in Italy in World War II. Serving near enough to the front to hear the bombs are Alan Quinton (Joseph Cotten) and his friend Roger Morland. Roger has a girlfriend back in England named Victoria (Jennifer Jones), but Roger isn't much of a romantic, so he has Alan write the love letters to Victoria on behalf, which seems like nonsense since surely Victoria would recognize this as not her fiancé's writing. Worse, however, is that Alan realizes he's falling in love with Victoria even though he's never met her, while Victoria is in love with the letters, not with Roger.

At any rate, the letters are about to stop in part because Alan doesn't want to write any more, while Roger is going to be going back to England anyhow to train as a paratrooper. And on top of that, Alan gets injured in combat too and faces a lengthy recuperation before going back to England, no longer having to fight in the war. Roger visits Alan's parents, and has them tell Alan that he's married Victoria.

Some months later, Alan finally returns to England and visits his parents. He's had an aunt die in the meantime and bequeath him a place in County Essex, which is good because he knows that's near Longreach, which is the place where Victoria lived. However, Victoria isn't going to be around since Roger died in an accident before Alan got back to England. Meanwhile, Alan also has a fiancée himself, except that he's come to learn that since writing all those letters to Victoria, he's no longer in love with his fiancée.

Unfortunately, by this time Roger has died in an accident. Alan's brother tries to cheer him up by taking him to a party, wher he meets a woman named Dilly who happens to know Victoria and realizes that a drunken Alan is talking about Victoria when he talks about having written those letters for Roger in Italy. Alan finally goes to Longreach, only to learn that Victoria is dead too, which is not actually the case. The real truth is that Dilly is Victoria's cargiver, and that Victoria stabbed Roger to death, only to immediately develop a case of amnesia, taking the name Singleton. Dilly is terrified of what's going to happen should Singleton remember that she's really Victoria and especially if Victoria figures out she's talking to the guy who actually wrote those love letters for Roger.

Love Letters has what to me is a fairly ridiculous premise, but one that I suppose will appeal to people who like a certain type of romantic movie, such as Random Harvest. Not that I liked Random Harvest, although for me Love Letters didn't sink to being quite as mawkish as Random Harvest. Still, Love Letters is definitely another of those movies where you're going to need to watch and draw your own conclusions.

For those who like Hollywood movies trying to be hip

Another of the movies that I recorded due to it having an interesting synopsis and recently got around to watching was the 1968 film Petulia. Made at the height of the counterculture era, the movie is obviously trying to keep up with the times, but that's something which makes it a decidedly acquired taste.

The movie opens up at a charity ball in San Francisco designed to raise money for people who have suffered debilitating injuries in car accidents. Among the people attending is Dr. Archie Bollen (George C. Scott), an orthopedic surgeon who operates on the patients who are the focus of the benefit. Also there is Petulia Danner (Julie Christie). As we eventually learn, she's the foster parent to a young child who got hit by a bus and for whom Dr. Bollen performed the operation, which is why she has a good reason to be there too.

The two also have something else in common, which is that they're both in marriages which seem well on their way to divorce. Dr. Bollen is further down that road, no longer living with his wife Polo (Shirley Knight), and having an affair with another woman while only seeing his children on weekends. Petulia is in a loveless marriage to David (Richard Chamberlain), a controlling man who uses his father's (Joseph Cotten in a small role) influence to maintain that control while most likely being abusive to Petulia along the way.

Petulia meets Archie, and finding out what they have in common, immediately propositions him, with the two going to an odd urban motel where everybody parks right next to their hotel room door, except that everything is in a parking garage and the "front desk" is all remote, which would have been very uncommon in 1968. Petulia is odd in other ways, too, stealing a tuba and taking it to Archie's bachelor pad where she apparently expects him to sleep with her.

As all of this unfolds, we learn about the pasts of Archie and especially Petulia in a series of flashbacks that aren't so obviously flashbacks at first; this is how we learn the full story of Petulia's becoming a foster parent and how the kid wound up getting in that accident. However, because the flashbacks aren't particularly obvoius, it makes the narrative structure a bit of a mess.

And that's the huge problem with Petulia. It's easy to see what the producers as well as director Richard Lester were going for, but unlike some other movies from the same era that had a daring narrative structure -- I'm particularly thinking of Two for the Road -- it doesn't always work. If the movie had kept a linear structure, I'd have a lot less of a problem with Petulia. It still wouldn't be one of my favorites, to be honest, but it would be easier to see the good things about it, especially the view of San Francisco as it was in 1968.

Still, it's another of those movies where I can easily understand why people who want something arty and deliberately trying to upend Hollywood conventions would like it. So for some people, it's definitely going to be more than worth a watch.

The Angel Wore Red

Today is Ava Gardner's day in Summer Under the Stars. There's a documentary at 8:00, as well as a movie that aired just last month, The Angel Wore Red. It's going to be on overnight, or early tomorrow, at 4:00 AM.

The setting is an unnamed Spanish city in 1936; if you know your history, that means the start of the Spanish Civil War. This is a city run by the Republican side. Working in the city is American radio correspondent Hawthorne (Joseph Cotten), who wishes that he could get a human interest story to report on. And boy is he about to get one, with the city about to be besieged and a human drama about to break about among all the chaos.

Arturo Carrero (Dirk Bogarde) is a priest in the city, but one disillusioned with the Church taking the wrong side in Spanish politics, since there are lots of poor people that the Church is doing nothing to help. He leaves the priesthood, although nobody outside the bishop (Finlay Currie) and one or two other priests know. This presents a serious problem because the new local administration is seriously anti-clerical, planning to arrest all the priests and destroy the cathedral. The cathedral holds a religious relic, the blood of a local saint, and the bishop gives it to another priest, Canon Rota (Aldo Fabrizi), to store for safekeeping.

Arturo tries to escape in civilian clothes, but the government is spending all its resources on finding the two priests who escaped the government roundup. You'd think they would have more important stuff to deal with. But apparently, that relic is very important, as the locals believe that whoever has it can't be defeated. That may be nonsense, of course, but the fact that the locals believe it is a powerful motivator, which is why the Republicans want it.

Arturo eventually meets Soledad (Ava Gardner), who works in a local cabaret that is still going as though there's no civil war on. She shelters Arturo, at least until the noose become so tight that there's no hope of escape. Arturo gives himself up and Soledad, having sheltered him, is going to be in trouble too.

The authorities at first want Arturo to come up with the goods as to where that relic is, not believing that he had oh-so conveniently left the priesthood and has no idea. Ultimately, with not just Arturo in custody, but a lot others as well, and the Nationalists closing in, the local administration under military commander General Clave (Vittorio De Sica), comes up with an idea: use the prisoners as cannon fodder!

The Angel Wore Red is a perfectly reasonable premise, but one that becomes a bit muddled in the second half, largely because it's trying to do too much. There's the war story, the love story, and Arturo's personal struggles with his faith versus the Church hierarchy. I found it all fell a bit short. Part of that is due to Cotten's character. Cotten himself isn't the problem; it's the fact that this character is too convenient to have and be in places where a real correspondent wouldn't have been allowed. In fact, I think the script as a whole lets everybody down.

But judge for yourself. It's going to be on tonight, and it's avalilable on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive.

Untamed Frontier

For those of you who have the StarzEncore pagkage of movies, you have a chance to catch Untamed Frontier tomorrow morning at 6:19 AM.

Joseph Cotten plays Kirk Denbow, one member of a family who owns a whole bunch of land in the Arizona territory. However, there's also a bunch of land owned by the federal government, and under the Homestead Act they intend to parcel that land out to settlers. The problem is, the land is surrounded on all American sides by the Denbows' land. They use their own land and the Federal land to graze their cattle, and they're not about to give any settlers right-of-way across the Denbow land to settle since it would ultimately mean the loss of free grazing land that the Denbows are using.

Kirk is the most pragmatic member of the family. He's got a cousin in Glenn (Scott Brady) who is much more of a hothead. Indeed, he's currently in town raising a ruckus as well as seeing his girlfriend Jane (Shelley Winters), who, while she loves him, also has sympathy for the settlers. Eventually, Glenn gets in a gunfight with somebody who, it turns out, is not armed, so the legal system is going to come after him, and by association the Denbows.

Matt Denbow (Minor Watson), patriarch of the family, comes up with the idea to spirit Jane away to Texas since she's the one witness who could convict Glenn. She's too honest to do that. So Matt and Glenn come up with another idea, which is to have Glenn marry Jane! That way she'll be his wife and can't be forced to testify against Glenn. (Couldn't she choose to testify?) Since she does like Glenn, she marries him and starts living at the ranch.

She soon realizes the mistake she made. Glenn has another girlfriend in Lottie (Suzan Ball), and Jane starts becoming friends with Kirk. Meanwhile, the settlers are massing for an invasion of the strip of land they'd have to cross to get to the federal land....

Universal made a whole bunch of programmer westerns in the 1950s, of which this is one. They're short (Untamed Frontier clocks in at 78 minutes) and capably produced if nothing spectacular. Untamed Frontier fits in perfectly in that mold. Everybody does an adequate job, but the story feels as though it could be interchangeable with the cast of whatever other western was being produced at the time. You'll likely be entertained, but it won't linger in your memory like the great westerns.

Untamed Frontier does not seem ever to have gotten a DVD release in the US, so you're going to have to catch the rare cable showing.

Not as magnificent as legend has it

Another recent watch off my DVR was The Magnificent Ambersons, the 1942 movie that is probably best remembered for the fact that the studio edited it over the objections of its director, Orson Welles.

Dolores Costello plays Isabel Amberson, daughter in a wealthy family in Indiana in the late 19th century. She's being pursued romantically by Eugene Morgan (Joseph Cotten), but Cotten makes the mistake of getting drunk while serenading her, which cases her father to break off the engagement. Instead, Isabel marries Minafer (Don Dillaway), while Eugnee goes off to become a success in life.

Roughly two dozen years pass, to around 1900. Isabel has an adult son George (Tim Holt), and they live in the old Amberson mansion together with Isabel's sister-in-law Fanny (Agnes Moorehead). Eugene, for his part, has become relatively successful as a manufacture of the new-fangled automobile. He's a widower with a daughter Lucy (Anne Baxter) who is about George's age. George has been spoiled rotten, and thinks that automobiles are an idiotic idea. Worse, he gets it in his head that Eugene has only returned for two reasons, both having to do with Isabel: one is that Eugene might still love Isabel; the other is that George thinks Eugene is fishing for an infusion of capital, specifically, Isabel's inheritance.

Idiotic George, for his part, announces that there's no way in hell he's going to do real work, either taking a profession like the law or doing manual labor. Instead, he's going to be a yachtsman or something; how the hell he ever thought he was going to make ends meet living like this is a mystery. General scuttlebutt is that George and Lucy would make a good couple, and they do go riding together, but Lucy wants a stable future, not a flake with no idea what he wants to do in life. George's father dies, revealing that there's not much to inherit, and to keep Isabel from Eugene, since the two really did remain friends, George takes her on a long trip which effectively kills her and depletes the family fortune.

The Magnificent Ambersons isn't a bad movie, but it's not without its flaws, and those aren't necessarily due to the editing. Welles insisted on using all sorts of camera tricks, and most of them not only add little to the movie, they detract by making the camera tricks the focus of the movie and not the plot. The story and acting are good, although George is an irritating enough character that at times when he's on the screen I found the movie a bit tougher to watch.

Supposedly, the original cut of the movie flopped badly in previews, which is why RKO edited it down by chopping about 50 minutes and leaving us with an 88-minute movie. Would Welles' original vision be better? I wouldn't be surprised if it would. But I also don't think it would be the masterpiece a lot of people believe it would have been. My guess, since none of the cut footage is known to survive, is that the original cut probably did need some editing since it came in at nearly two and a half hours, but that it wouldn't have needed to be cut down to 90 minutes. Also, the studio did have the impetus of that disastrous preview showing, Welles' going over budget, and changing tastes thanks to the American entry into World War II. And as I said above, The Magnificent Ambersons is still pretty good.

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.

Thursday Movie Picks #134: Artists/Painters

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

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

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

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

The Steel Trap

A movie that's got an interesting premise but which unfortunately goes wrong in the execution is The Steel Trap, which is on TCM this evening at 10:00 PM.

Joseph Cotten stars as Jim Osborne, a man whose life seems somewhat reminiscent of the character played by Dick Powell in Pitfall. Osborne is a middle class (by early 1950s standards) bank assistant manager, married to a lovely wife Laurie (Teresa Wright) and father to an infant daughter. Now, if you saw Pitfall, you know there was a femme fatale. There's a femme fatale of sorts in The Steel Trap, too, but it's an inanimate one: the almighty dollar.

Jim Osborne suggests that if you work for a bank long enough, it's only logical that once in a while, your thoughts are going to wander to whether or not you can get away with getting any of that money for yourself. The only thing is, there are all sorts of security measures to try to keep people from stealing that money. The bank vault is on a timer; the assistant manager knows only half the combination, with the other half being entrusted to a second person; there's no place to go with all that money; and so on. But Jim decides that it would be easy to look over the shoulders of the people who have the other halves of the various combinations, and starts doing research into how he can get around the other dificulties. The most difficult one is not getting extradited back to the United States. Theoretically, I assume the communist countries of the day might not have extradited him, but getting into those countries would have been a problem. But Jim discovers that there's a loophole in the extradition treaty with Brazil, so he's going to steal the money and hop on a flight to Brazil with his wife and kid!

This is where the movie starts to go wrong. Jim has to steal the money after the close of business on a Friday, so that he can get on that plane and make it to Brazil before Monday morning when the bank opens, it's discovered that a lot of money is missing, and the suspicion points to Jim. (Remember, this is in the era before jet travel, when even plane travel was a good deal slower than it is today.) This isn't a crime of keeping people from figuring out who did it; it's a crime of getting oneself outside the scope of law and who cares who neat or messy the crime is. However, there's one catch. The bank has seasonal opening hours that include a couple of hours on a Saturday morning, and that season is just about to begin next week. If Jim doesn't pull off the job This Friday, he's going to have to wait months to pull it off. Any logical person would spend those months preparing for the job, but stupid Jim takes the other option of committing the deed now.

And with this, Jim starts to reveal himself not as a suave criminal who could con people, but as a bullying jerk who commits one blunt lie after another that everybody should be able to see through. Jim and Laurie don't have passports, because international travel wasn't so common back in the early 1950s and you didn't need a passport to travel to Canada or Mexico back then. Some of those six months could have been used to get those passports: since Jim works for the Bank of Italy, he could make up a smoother lie about being interested in getting into the international banking part of their business, and getting the passports for him and his wife to prepare for that. But no; Jim has to get na emergency expedited passport for him and his wife, which is where the scheme should fall apart. It doesn't, and the film goes on for another 40 or 50 minutes with Jim compounding his lies and being exceedingly dislikeable in doing so.

Or, at least, that's the impression I got watching this movie. A lot of other reviewers have much kinder things to say about the film, so this is definitely one you'll want to watch for yourself to judge. Cotten and Wright are generally quite good actors, too, so that should make it easier to like the film.

The Steel Trap

So The Steel Trap was on yesterday as part of the Summer Under the Stars salute to Joseph Cotten. Looking at the reviews on IMDb, I must be one of the few people who didn't care for it. But it's been released to DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive, so you've got a chance to judge for yourself.

Cotten stars as Jim Osborne, a family man who talks about his family life almost the same way Dick Powell does at the beginning of Pitfall which I mentioned at the beginning of the week. Jim works as the assistant manager at a bank. In a voice-over narration, Osborne tells us about his work at the bank, and the security measures that greatly lessen the chance of a bank robbery: the tellers only know half the combination to their little safe inside the vault where they keep their money after the bank closes; the managers (including Osborne) know the other half. Unsurprisingly, Osborne has daydreamed about whether it would be possible to look over the tellers' shoulders to steal their combinations and then steal their money. Of course, there's a problem, which is the question of where you're going to go after you've stolen all that money. So Osborne actually starts doing research on the topic, discovering that Brazil is the one country with a flaw in the extradition treaty that would allow Osborne to make an escape -- and he could get from Los Angeles to Brazil over a weekend, from Friday afternoon when the bank closes to Monday morning when the bank reopens and the money will be discovered missing.

It's here that the film hits its big problem. Jim has to lie to his wife Laurie (Teresa Wright) about what he's doing. Now, there are interesting liars on screen, such as Charles Boyer in Gaslight, whose lies are so chillingly smooth as to make him a compelling character. Unfortunately for The Steel Trap, however, Jim Osborne is just a whiny jerk of a liar. And his lies get compounded one upon the other the way they do in one of those bad early 1930s drawing room comedies. The other thing that makes the movie have a big problem is the plot holes of nobody catching any of these lies. Osborne notes that the bank is going to be going to its winter hours next week, which means the bank will be open on Saturday, so the plot to steal the money has to be done this Friday. No! Why not use the winter to perfect your plan? Also, going to Brazil requires a passport, which is something most Americans didn't have back in those days, since you didn't need one to go to Canada (or, I think, Mexico). So he has to get the passports in like two days when, if he bided his time over the winter, he'd have the passports ready for whenever. And the guy at the consulate doesn't catch his lie about needing the passport in an emergency.

The idea behind The Steel Trap is a good one. But somewhere along the way, the script goes wrong, leaving me at least with something rather unappealing. But everybody else seems to have high praise for the movie. So watch it for yourself and judge.

Not the tattooed movie

Joseph Cotten will be TCM's star for Summer Under the Stars tomorrow, August 29. The first of his movies on the schedule is Lydia, at 6:00 AM.

Obviously, Joseph Cotten does not play the title character; that honor goes to Merle Oberon. At the beginning of the movie, Oberon's Lydia MacMillian is a wealthy spinster who is being honored for her charitable work. Dr. Michael Fitzpatrick (that's Cotten) hears the ceremony on the radio, and decides to pay a visit on Miss MacMillian, since the two knew each other decades ago, back in the dark ages of the 19th century. There was a professional relationship, but there was also a personal relationship, as Michael was one of several boyfriends Lydia had coming in and out of her life. You just know they're going to reminisce about the past....

That reminiscing comes a couple of days later at Michael's apartment. He's managed to bring together three of Lydia's four lovers: himself; the dashing (at least when he was young) Bob Willard (George Reeves); and the blind pianist Frank André (Hans Jaray). The only one missing is the man Lydia claims was the one true love of her life, sailor Richard Mason (Alan Marshal). Michael, however, assures Lydia that Mason is going to show up. With that, the four start discussing their collective past.

Michael knew Lydia first. His father was butler to Lydia and her grandmother Sarah (Edna May Oliver) when Lydia was young, and Sarah was an inveterate hypochondriac. Since young Michael has just become a doctor, Dad brings him in, which is how Michael meets Lydia, and they're taken with each other. But Bob, the Yale football hero, is also taken with Lydia, and he tries to steal Lydia out from under Michael. When Michael goes off to fight the Spanish-American War, Lydia meets a blind kid which is what introduces her to the charity work. That's how she meets Frank, the blind pianist. And then at a ball she meets that sailor, who isn't like the other guys. It goes on like this for another hour or so.

There's something not quite right about Lydia although I find it hard to put into words exactly what it is. It's more that, as the movie wore on, I found myself caring less and less about any of these characters. We know that Lydia isn't going to end up with any of her suitors, and the sailor just seems to come out of nowhere. Lydia probably ought to be a very good movie, but it winds up fizzling out into a mess.

I don't think Lydia is available on DVD, so you're going to have to catch the rare TCM showing.

That film they "destroyed"

TCM is showing The Magnificent Ambersons tonight at 8:00 PM in honor of costume designer Edward Stevenson. I have to admit that this is one of those movies that I've always found a tough slog for whatever reason, and I don't think I've actually seen it all the way through. It's one of those movies that I first learned about, I believe, from watching some documentary or another on PBS back in the days where you had to be in a huge city to have more than four or five TV channels. It was mentioned, of course, because it's the Orson Welles movie that was "destroyed" by the studio. Those evil studio bosses, ruining the movie!

Ever since I first tried to watch the movie, though, I've wondered how much of the problem I had is because of the studio editing it, and how much is down to the movie perhaps not being quite as good as it's cracked up to be. Finally having done a bit of online research, I'm still not certain. Apparently, Orson Welles' original edit of hte movie was quite a bit longer than the roughly 90-minute version we have today. There's nothing wrong with longer movies, of course; even Welles' previous Citizen Kane ran two hours and is damn good at that running time. But, for whatever reason, the preview audiences didn't like the first cut, or a second preview that had brief edits. It's after this tht the big changes were made.

Robert Wise, who worked as an editor on the film, this being before he became a top-notch director, would later claim that Welles' original wasn't all that it was cracked up to be. Composer Bernard Herrmann, on the other hand, so a large portion of his score go when about a third of the movie was excised, to the point that he decided he didn't want his name on the credits. They also changed the ending, although supposedly the studio ending is more true to the book. I haven't read the original book either, and my relatively brief searching didn't yield much information on what Tarkington himself thought. He died four years after the movie was released but was blind by the end of his life.

The impression I'm beginning to get now is that there probably was a great movie to be made from Tarkington's original source material, but that neither the 1942 movie we got, nor what Orson Welles conceived, was quite it. Kind of like Greed in that regard. But judge for yourself.

Under Capricorn

Back in May, I made brief mention of the Alfred Hitchcock film Under Capricorn. Four months ago, I said it was airing in July and I might do a full-legnth post about it then. I didn't, with one of the big reasons being that it's not one of my favorite Hitchcock films, and that's putting it politely. But, at any rate, it's getting another airing tomorrow morning at 10:00 AM as part of TCM's month-long salute to Alfred Hitchcock. So now might be a good time to blog about it.

Michael Wilding plays Charles Adare, an Irishman of good breeding who is going to the Australia of the 1830s to make a better life for himself. On the boat he travels with the new colonial governor (Cecil Parker, whom we saw last week in Storm in a Teacup), who cautions him about life in Australia. So we know fairly early that things are going to take a turn for Charles. Not long after arriving in Australia, he meets Sam Flusky (Joseph Cotten), a former prisoner who has been granted his emancipation, and is now a wealthy landowner. However, Flusky is also, if not persona non grata, the sort of person that the rest of "polite" society wishes they didn't have to deal with. Flusky, however, is willing to get involved in a land deal with Charles, and Charles not knowing any better, and sensing that Flusky is familiar, decides to take the deal.

It turns out there's a good reason Flusky seemed familiar to Charles. He had been the groomsman in the stables of his childhood friend Henrietta. In fact, the two ould eventually get married despite her parents' insistence that this would be a bad idea. And know Henrietta (Ingrid Bergman), or "Hattie", is living here with Sam, close to Charles! But Hattie is also the reason why the rest of the society people don't like Flusky. She's either an alcoholic, or mentally deranged, or both. Milly, Hattie's servant (Margaret Leighton) will swear to it. She has an episode at a party at the Flusky house where all the society men show up but refuse to bring their wives, and Charles turns out to be the only one who can calm her down.

Charles winds up getting rather closer to Hattie, which ultimately bothers Sam because he fears Hattie is in love with Charles. Charles, for his part, are trying to figure out what if anything is really up with Sam and Hattie. It all goes on like this for nearly two hours....

And there's the problem. Under Capricorn drags, and drags, and drags. The problem isn't that Hitchcock couldn't do a period piece, considering that he did a fine job with Jamaica Inn. I think the biggest problem is the characters, whom I find difficult to care about. Ingrid Bergman is given a thankless task playing the woman of an uncertain mental state caused by, well what, really? Hitchcock, for his part, did make a mistake in trying to repeat some of the success of Rope. He uses several longer shots that limit what he can do technically and distract from what is already a not very good story. Under Capricorn has echoes of other stuff set in the mid-19th century like Dragonwyck or Jane Eyre, but the story is inferior to both.

Under Capricorn has been released to DVD, but not in a version available from the TCM Shop.

Since You Went Away

I've briefly mentioned Since You Went Away several times in comparison to other moviews about World War II. It's airing again tonight at 10:15 PM on TCM as part of Cher's look at studio-era movies with strong portrayals of women; this week's theme being women during wartime.

Claudette Colbert stars as Anne Hilton, a wife and mother of two. There's a war on, of course, and Mr. Hilton has gone off to fight, leaving Anne alone to raise two young adult daughters. Jane, the elder of the two, is played by Jennifer Jones, while Bridget, the younger, is played by Shirley Temple. The family was at least middle-class before the war, and probably higher on the economic ladder than that considering how big their house is and the fact they used to have a maid they had to let go because they could no longer afford to keep her on, what with the husband's salary being replaced by allotment checks. What's a mother to do? Well, she decides to advertise for roomers for the last bedroom, with a preference for military personnel. What they get is Col. William Smollett (Monty Woolley). He's military, all right -- a colonel from the first World War! But he's no dummy, either, and points out that he is military, which is what they wanted, so they really have to take him.

Col. Smollett proceeds to turn everybody's life upside down. He's a difficult, exacting person who expects everything to be run his way, and that forces the three women to change the way the house is run. However, it turns out he's also got a grandson, William II (Robert Walker). The young William is an enlisted man, and one who seemingly can do nothing right by his grandfather, which understandably frustrates him. Jane feels sympathy for him and eventually he begins to pursue her romantically. This is also an issue for Jane as she's had her eyes on a much older man, Lt. Tony Willett (Joseph Cotten). He's an old friend of Anne's who's in the military on business that I don't think is ever quite made specific. The movie is sprawling and there's a lot of detail that's easy to miss.

Eventually, the war starts to turn personal for all the women, at least in the sense that it begins to hit home and makes them make real sacrifices and suffer far more than just having to share a bedroom. Young William is called off to war; young men on the periphery of the Hiltons' lives get killed in action; and a telegram arrives containing the sad news that Mr. Hilton is missing in action. Where the first half of the movie is a bit slow, the second half picks up and becomes rather more forceful.

The bad news is that forceful doesn't always mean powerful in a good sense. Since You Went Away was released in 1944, and as such had to provide a sense of morale on the home front. So there are some scenes that are almost obvious in the way they're trying to deliver their message. There's one with an immigrant, and one where Anne tells off a gossipy woman (Agnes Moorehead) about "doing one's part" for the war effort. And some of the action is telegraphed. But there are also some quite excellent sequences, such as when young William gets on the train to go off to war, leaving Jane behind. The performances are also quite good, with Colbert being strong in the lead and Monty Woolley providing very good light relief.

I don't know that Since You Went Away is the best of the movies about the home front. It was compared in its time to Mrs. Miniver, a movie that audiences back in the day loved but which I find interminable at times. It could also be thought of as a bookend to The Best Years of Our Lives, seeing as how both of them run about 170 minutes and deal with the way war affected people: the former with the women and how they handled things during the war, and the latter with the men having to adjust to the end of the war. The Best Years of Our Lives never feels too long despite its 170 minutes; Since You Went Away does feel too long at times. And I've also mentioned a few foreign films that look at the homefront, in places where the war came much closer; In Which We Serve and The Cranes Are Flying come to mind. Still, Since You Went Away is a worthy movie, both on its own and as a contemporary look at how America was handling the homefront back in 1944.

Since You Went Away got a DVD release years ago, but I don't know if it's in print. The movie is available for purchase on Amazon, but not at the TCM shop.

The Man With a Cloak

TCM's last night of movies for Star of the Month Barbara Stanwyck kicks off with a bunch of westerns, but by Thursday afternoon switches to a mish-mash of interesting stuff. One of those interesting movies on Thursday afternoon is The Man With a Cloak, at 1:45 PM.

Leslie Caron plays Madeline Minot, a young woman who's just come off the boat from France in New York City in 1848. For those who don't know European history, 1848 was a year in which a whole bunch of European countries saw revolutions -- including France, where the revolution ultimately resulted in the ending of the monarchy and the naming of Emperor Napoleon III. But the fate of the revolution wasn't known until the end of 1848, so at the time of Madeline's arrival in New York, there were still students manning the barricades, at least if you believe the timeline of the movie. Madeline, for her part, is visiting New York on behalf of her fiancé. He's one of the students in revolt, and his grandfather, M. Thevenet (Louis Calhern), who emigrated to America some time back and holds a substantial fortune. Thenevet it dying, and the grandson could use the money to help his fellow revolutionaries. But because he needs to help manage the students, he sent Madeline to New York to try to get the money.

What Madeline finds is a possible plot to kill Thevenet. The butler (Joe De Santis) and the manageress of the house (Barbara Stanwyck) seem really standoffish to poor Madeline, and it also seems as if they want the money that they know the dying Thenevet has -- and they may be willing to kill him to get it. Fortunately, however, Madeline also finds an ally in New York, in the form of Dupin (Joseph Cotten), a starving author who has a taste for mysteries. He takes a liking to Madeline, and upon hearing from Madeline what's going on in the house, he takes it upon himself to help her investigate.

The Man With a Cloak is an interesting movie, if not one that's particularly great. It's got a surprisingly dark atmosphere for a film set in this time period: it's always seemed to me as though period pieces from the studio era are generally either brighter or at least more elegant. One of the few other movies I can think of that's set in the same time period, The Heiress, at least has more of an air of elegance due to having a star like Olivia de Havilland. The Man With a Cloak, on the other hand, was made at MGM in 1951, and feels a lot like those films that I think of as MGM's B message pictures of the early 1950s: movies that don't have the Technicolor and big production values of the musicals the Freed Unit was putting out, but still do a lot with a little thanks to the professionalism of all the staff at MGM.

So I had seen The Killer Is Loose before

I mentioned the other day the film The Killer Is Loose, and how it had a plot that looked awfully familiar. There's a good reason for that: I had in fact seen the movie on a previous TCM showing. TCM's website lists a DVD available for purchase, although, oddly enough, IMDb/Amazon doesn't. But since you can apparently buy it at TCM, it's worth a blog post.

My reason for bringing it up the other day was the presence of Joseph Cotten as a police detective. We don't see him until a bit of the way into the movie, however. In fact, the movie starts off at a loan office where one of the tellers is Leon Poole, nicknamed "Foggy" and played by Wendell Corey. Things are about to go sour for him and everybody else in the bank, as a couple of men come in and hold up the place. Poole tries to stop them, and gets pistol-whipped for his effort.

Enter Detective Wagner, played by the aforementioned Jospeh Cotten. He's investigating the case, and the clues point to an inside job. The police here having your typical Hollywood efficiency, they quickly discover that Poole is the inside man. They go to his apartment to apprehend him, but a shootout ensues, in which Wagner shoots Poole's wife, killing her. Poole gets sent to jail, and having been devoted to his wife, he vows revenge.

You can figure out what's going to happen next. Poole becomes a model prisoner, with the intent (obviously not revealed to anybody) to get placed in a minimum-security area, from which he can escape and go back to the city and kill all the people who put him in jail! That means not only Det. Wagner, but also his poor put-upon wife (Rhonda Fleming), who doesn't like that her husband is doing the dangerous work he is, and is terrified of Poole's excape.

The Killer Is Loose is a decided B movie, but for the most part it's highly entertaining. A good portion of this has to do with the direction of Budd Boetticher, who is probably better known for his westerns but always did a good job with B movies. I think the lion's share of the credit, however, has to go to Wendell Corey. Corey is somebody about whom I've always wondered how he became anything more than a character actor. It's not that he couldn't act; it's more that he always seems like the wrong man for the leading roles he got. What would Joan Crawford's Harriet Craig ever see in Wendell Corey? And then there's Barbara Stanwyck in The File on Thelma Jordon. But Corey is actually surprisingly good here. He seems to be playing a character who is on the verge of breaking down psychologically, but nobody around him can see that this is happening. When he gets out of prison, he's quite flat and almost emotionless in the way he treats the people he encounters, especially Otto Flanders, one of the men who helped put him in prison. Poole more or less holds the Flanderses hostage, until deciding to off Mr. Flanders. I did, however, find myself a bit incredulous when Poole asked Mrs. Flanders for some food. There was a pot on the stove, and you'd think that perhaps Mrs. Flanders might have seen The Big Heat and learned something from Lee Marvin and Gloria Grahame.

The ending of The Killer Is Loose also feels a bit rushed. We know thanks to the Production Code that Poole is going to get what's coming to him. Here, that comes in the form of Poole, having stolen some of Mrs. Flanders' clothes, going to Det. Wagner's house in drag, following behind Mrs. Wagner, who's walking to the house for reasons of her own. The cops recognize Poole fairly quickly and are of course perfect shots. I can't imagine real-life copes being this good at what they do, and taking down a criminal with no collateral damage at all. But then this was the 1950s; perhaps the cops really were more virtuous than they are today. (I suppose Serpico might disagree.)

Still, you can't be that surprised that The Killer Is Loose has problems. It is, after all, a B movie. And for what it does, it's quite entertaining and well worth the watch.

Joseph Cotten, and not Joseph Cotten

TCM is running a night of "old dark house" movies tonight, and one of them is Gaslight, at 12:30 AM. Now, the only thing is, in order to fit it into a 90-minute time slot, TCM has selected the 1940 original instead of the more-familiar Ingrid Bergman version. Not that there's anything wrong with it; I happen to enjoy both movies. But for those of you who wanted to see Joseph Cotten as a police detective, you're out of luck.

Or maybe not. Tomorrow morning at 9:15 AM, TCM is showing The Killer Is Loose, a mvoie which sounds really familiar. Cotten plays a police detective who accidentally shoots bank robber Wendell Corey's wife. When Corey gets out of prison, he wants to gain revenge on Cotten by killing Cotten's wife (Rhonda Fleming). I have a feeling I've seen this one before. It's directed by Budd Boetticher, so I think I might have seen it several years back when TCM premiered its documentary on Boetticher and ran a night of his films.

From the Earth to the Moon

TCM is showing a bunch of "lost in space" themed movies tonight, concluding with From the Earth to the Moon at 4:15 AM ET.

Based on a novel by Jules Verne, From the Earth to the Moon is set in the US not long after the end of the Civil War. Joseph Cotten plays Victor Barbicane, a maker of armaments for the Union who had to keep developing newer and more powerful explosives to deal with the armor developed by Confederate Stuyvesant Nicholl (George Sanders). What to do with these arms now that the war is over? Well, that's a matter of some debate, but Victor and his wealthy friends come up with an idea to send a projectile of some sort to the moon, as it will demonstrate Victor's latest explosive! (They didn't know about rockets back in Jules Verne's day, of course.)

Nicholl doesn't believe in the power of this "Factor X", but a demonstration shows it might just work -- at least, it works against Nicholl's armors -- and Nicholl joins the moon shot. Well, not quite; he's secretly bent on sabotaging it. Along the way, there's a silly love story involving Nicholl's daughter (Debra Paget), who ends up as a stowaway on the space capsule that Daddy and Mr. Barbicane are on.

From the Earth to the Moon suffers from a whole host of problems. The story wasn't well adapted from the Verne novel, instead reading like a mishmash of old Hollywood tropes. Two rivals forced to work together? Pretty daughter? One of the rivals turning on the other? A forced happy ending? We've seen all of these before. Visually, the movie looks terrible, due to the fact that it was being made just as the decision was made at RKO to shut down production. This was one of the very last films produced at RKO, and it shows. That in and of itself makes it worth seeing at least once.

Despite the two well-known actors in the leads, From the Earth to the Moon hasn't received a DVD release.

A group of aging thespians

TCM showed Grumpy Old Men on Wednesday night as part of the "Star of the Month" salute to Jack Lemmon. A large portion of the cast consisted of veterans in their 60s and 70s who had made a lot of movies. It's always nice to see the older actors get back together, and TCM are showing another movie with a similar cast at 8:00 PM ET on January 30: Hush... Hush, Sweet Charlotte.

Bette Davis plays Charlotte, a southern spinster who used to be a belle, but became a recluse in her plantation after her lover, with whom she was planning to elope, winds up brutally murdered. It's four decades later now, and the authorities (in the form of George Kennedy) are going to force her to leave her house because they've taken the property over by eminent domain and plan to build a new highway through the property. She won't leave, though, because she thinks there's evidence on the property that her father murdered her lover, and she doesn't want Father's reputation sullied. The only person Charlotte trusts to come into the house is her doctor, Drew Bayliss (Joseph Cotten) -- and he can't get her to leave. So he gets in touch with Charlotte's cousin Miriam (Olivia de Havilland) and gets her to come visit Charlotte, in the hopes that she can get Charlotte to leave. She and the good doctor meet again for the first time in years and....

In the meantime, an insurance investigator (Cecil Kellaway) shows up in town. He has his own reasons for looking into the murder. He knows that the dead man left behind a widow (Mary Astor), and perhaps she knows something about what happened. After all, she's been strangely silent these past four decades. Eventually, the two plot halves come together, but to explain how would be to give away too much of the story.

Bette Davis is fun here. Hush... Hush, Sweet Charlotte came two years after her Oscar-nominated performance in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane, a movie which created a demand for her -- and other aging actresses -- to play older women in gothic movies. (The really need to re-release Tallulah Bankhead's Die! Die! My Darling! to DVD.) At least, the movies were supposed to be gothic; nowadays, the whole genre is generally looked at as pure camp. It only makes the movies that much more fun. Davis especially appears to be going over the top, which pushes most of the other cast members a bit over the top, too. Astor is an exception, but she doesn't have many scenes with Davis. That having been said, it's quite enjoyable to watch all of them one more time. The cinematography -- thankfully in black and white, as color would make it look too dated -- is lovely, too, adding the right amount of atmosphere.

There are some well-known bits of trivia regarding the making of Hush... Hush, Sweet Charlotte. First is that the Olivia de Havilland role was supposed to be played by Joan Crawford, who had starred opposite Davis in the aforementioned What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?. However, the two hated each other, so much so that Davis tried to extract revenge on Crawford, the widow of a Pepsi CEO, by having a Coca-Cola vending machine placed prominently at the studio. Crawford eventually claimed illness. A second interesting tidbit is the murdered lover at the beginning of the movie. That's a young Bruce Dern. In 1964, the year this movie was made, he also played a man who gets brutally murdered in Marnie.

Incongruous couples

I mentioned the casting as husband and wife of Wallace Beery and Jean Harlow in Dinner at Eight. If you think that's odd, tune in to TCM at 8:00 PM ET on January 11 for Niagara.

The couple here is Marilyn Monroe and... Joseph Cotten, playing George and Rose Loomis. They take a vacation to Niagara falls, with Cotten not knowing that Monroe is taking her there with the intention of killing him! She's fallen in love with another man, and the two of them decide that Cotten's not the most stable man mentally, so they're going to cause him to have an "accident" at Niagara Falls.

In the meantime, the Loomises meet another couple at the bungalow resort they're staying at, the Cutlers. Mrs. Cutler tries to comfort Mrs. Loomis after the loss of Mr. Loomis, but strange things start happeing. Indeed, Mrs. Cutler thinks she's seen the ghost of the dead Mr. Loomis!

Niagara isn't that bad a movie. Monroe is generally remembered for her comedies, but she was a better actress than that. She is more than capable of handling the material in a movie like Niagara. Cotten is good, as always. The rest of the cast, however, is filled with relative unknowns, and they don't give Niagara the heft that it really deserves.

On the other hand, Niagara also has beautiful scenery. It's in color, and as such, it's a lovely look at how the once-popular honeymoon destination (back in the days when overnight train was the easiest way to travel somewhere) looked 55 years ago. Thankfully, Niagara has been released to DVD.