Oxford around a Yank

The past, wrote L.P. Hartley in The Go-Between, is a foreign country. I certainly couldn't help but think of the past as a very different place when I watched the late 1930s film A Yank at Oxford.

Lakedale College is another one of those small liberal-arts schools that dotted Hollywood pictures in the first half of the 20th century, located in one of those Hollywood-style small cities. Dan Sheridan (Lionel Barrymore) is the publisher of the local paper, but you wonder how the paper makes any money considering how it keeps missing the deadline while Dan waits for news about the latest athletic exploits of his son Lee (Robert Taylor), a star on the college's track team.

Lee's done well enough in athletics that it's giving him a swelled head, although the fawning headline press he gets from his father's paper isn't helping either. In part because of this and becaue he really is the biggest thing the town has going for it. So he's awarded a scholarship to one of the colleges at Oxford University, which you know he's going to accept because with a title like A Yank at Oxford, he kind of has to. So fairly quickly we get Lee sent over to Europe and then on a train to Oxford.

Except that Lee keeps being just as much an arrogant blankety-blank before he even gets to Oxford, pissing off his fellow train passengers Paul Beaumont (Griffith Jones), Ramsey (Peter Croft), and Wavertree (Robert Coote) without realising that these are going to be some of his fellow students. So they respond with a practical joke that gets Lee in trouble with the Dean of the college (Edmund Gwenn). And it's not the last bit of trouble that Lee gets himself into.

Lee more or less take's Paul's place on the track team, and then also starts dating Paul's sister Molly (Maureen O'Sullivan). As for Paul, he's busy seeing Elsa Craddock (Viven Leigh), who works at a local bookstore and often goes to London to hunt down rarer books for the customers. The only thing is, Elsa is Mrs. Craddock, wife of the bookstore owner. And as for Wavertree, he gets in even more ridiculous trouble. Apparently, he's got a rich uncle who got himself expelled from Oxford. If Wavertree can get himself expelled from Oxford, too, he'll be in line for a bigger inheritance.

More of the dew-eyed American look at olde England comes in the form of rowing. Not just small boats on ponds, but crew, as Lee gets himself on the team for the big Oxford v. Cambridge boat race. But things could go disastrous for everybody when Elsa decides to go see Paul on campus and Mr. Craddock gets suspicious. Having that sort of relationship is decidedly frowned upon and could get you expelled. Unfortunately the plot solution is not to pass of a relationship between Elsa and Wavertree, which would satisfy all of the students.

A Yank at Oxford might have been what audiences of 1938 wanted, but oh my goodness was this one full of The Quiet Man-style tropes for me, where everybody takes a sentimental look at a place as they think from far away it exists but in reality probably never was anything close to that. Normally I like that the past is different, and that's not really the problem here as the lazy stereotypes. Still, watch and judge for yourself.

Saratoga

It's fairly well-known that actress Jean Harlow died tragically young while she was in production for the 1937 movie Saratoga. Her fans demanded that MGM finish the movie so that they could see the last footage of her, and MGM relented and used a body double and voice actress to film the remaining scenes. For whatever reason, I had never actually seen Saratoga, so the last time it showed up on TCM I made the point to record it so that I could finally strike it off the list of films I hadn't seen.

Saratoga Springs, back in the 1930s and still today was known as a resort town that spent the month of August hosting a horse-racing meet that catered to the wealthy set. So, as you might guess, the movie deals with that horse set. Grandpa Clayton (Lionel Barrymore) owns Brookvale, a stud farm breeding racing horses. Or should I say owned, because he's fallen into debt and the bank is about to take everything from him. It doesn't help that his son Frank (Jonathan Hale) has incurred heavy gambling debts to professional gambler Duke Bradley (Clark Gable). But Duke likes Gramps as well as Frank's daughter Carol (Jean Harlow) and helps them keep the farm, or at least keep being able to run it, even if they're no longer going to own it -- Duke has the deed.

Carol, for her part has gone over to Europe to become cultured, where she meets a fellow American who's apparently been trying to gain some class too, Wall Street investment banker Hartley Madison (Walter Pidgeon). The two get engaged, although Carol is adamant that she's not going to use Hartley's money to buy back the deed to the farm from Duke.

Carol studies the horse-racing racket in an attempt to win back the money she'll need to buy the deed legitimately. This necessitates her spending a lot of time at racetracks all along the east coast, so she keeps meeting Duke and his gambling friends, Jesse (Frank Morgan) and Fritzi (Una Merkel). Fritzi realizes Duke is in love with Carol, and the more Carol keeps running into Duke, the less she dislikes him, to the point where you know the two are going to wind up together in the final reel even though Carol is still engaged to Hartley.

All of this is leading up to the eventual climax at Saratoga. Huntley has bought a horse after inadvertently outbidding Duke at a horse auction. Huntley wagers that this horse will be able to beat one that Duke is backing at the big race in Saratoga. Duke, for his part, has other ideas, and Carol still has divided loyalties....

It's hard to escape the poignancy of knowing that Jean Harlow died before Saratoga was completed while watching it. Not only that, but she was already terminally ill. Still, despite her health she does the best she can with the material and gives a reasonably good performance. The only thing is, the material isn't the greatest, not that this is the fault of anybody in the cast. They're all professional, while Hattie McDaniel as a maid gets to sing a verse as the whole train car does a song, and shows what a good performer she could have been if she had been given a real chance.

I also couldn't help but wonder what might have become of Harlow's career had she not died young. Sadly, I have the feeling that, as with several other big actresses of the 1930s, notably Joan Blondell or Kay Francis, World War II would have put a serious crimp in her career. She had talent, but the sort of roles that were good for her at MGM would have gone by the wayside once the more serious atmosphere the war engendered took hold.

For some values of "glorious"

Hollywood legend has long had it that silent film star John Gilbert was brought down by the advent of talking pictures and his having a voice that wasn't particularly suited to the new medium. Recently, TCM ran a night of movies dealing with the transition to sound, including the one credited with starting Gilbert's end: His Glorious Night.

The setting is one of those European resorts that catered to the upper crust of European society, especially in the pre-war years the nobility, that would have seemed exotic for American audiences of 1929, with an added vibe of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. It's the sort of place where the visitors amuse themselves watching polo and steeplechase, and dressing to the nines to go to dinner. Staying at the resort is Princess Orsolini (Catherine Dale Owen), accompanied by her mother Eugenie (Nance O'Neil) and a much older military attaché, Col. Krehl (Gustav von Seyffertitz). The princess is betrothed to Prince Luigi (Tyrell Davis), although he's an absolute drip and this is clearly a marriage of political convenience.

John Gilbert plays Captain Kovacs, a military officer who, however, is not of high birth. He meets Orsolini, and it's love at first sight like Vronsky and Anna Karenina, except that in this case Orsolini is only engaged, not actually married. However, Orsolini discovers that Kovacs isn't of the nobility, and that makes going any further in their relationship a decided no. Mom and Krehl find out what's going on, and they're pissed about it. Kovacs, understanding that a lot of what's going on is being driven not by the princess but by her handlers, figures out a way to try to get back at them all, which is to make himself look even worse than he really is, so that if this information comes out it would be an even bigger scandal. To this end he drops hints of having spent time in prison and the implication that he's still a conman and the relationship is part of a con.

Mom wants to see Kovacs personally, and she and Krehl hope that they can come up with some way to get Kovacs to leave the resort, even if they have to pay him off to do it. Their plan is to get to his suite and look for any love notes the princess may have written to Kovacs, and then impress upon him that he could get in trouble if he doesn't leave. Kovacs is having none of it, and makes the demand that the princess spend an evening alone with him in his suite. However, while they're trying to talk things out, Orsolini faints. Since this happens on the balcony and Kovacs has to get Orsolini back to her room, this gets seen by at least one other person, and gossip gets around. Worse, at breakfast it's discovered that Kovacs is still there.

His Glorious Night was the first John Gilbert talkie to be released to theaters, although it was the second one filmed. While the movie may have helped to start the downward slide of Gilbert's career, I have to say that it's not because of Gilbert's voice. True, it's not as stereotypically deep as some other stars' voices would prove to be, but it's not as bad as legend would have you believe. Instead, there were a bunch of other factors at play. Chief among them is the dialog, which is terrible, and doesn't serve anybody well. Gilbert's protestations of love here were parodied in Singin' in the Rain, and it's easy to see why anybody who remembered the movie (and Arthur Freed was at MGM already in 1929) woud make the comparison. Catherine Dale Owen comes across as wooden here, and like a lot of early talkies the direction feels like it's done for the benefit of the microphone and not for artistic reasons.

I'd also suggest that with the depression about to come, there was also going to be a range of new faces coming to the movie screen to replace many of the stars of the 1920s. For the young romantic comedy type, Robert Montgomery was already at MGM and would make waves the following year in The Big House; Clark Gable would make even bigger waves in A Free Soul; and the elegant type could be done by someone like Leslie Howard who had the British accent for it. The sorts of movies that Gilbert featured in would be going on their way out.

TCM ran a restoration print of His Glorious Night, and the print itself looks and sounds quite good. It's just a shame that it couldn't have been in service of a better story.

Lady Be Good

Red Skelton is TCM's Star of the Month for April, and as I mentioned last week, I've got a couple of his movies on my DVR that are showing up as part of the salute to him. First up is a movie that has Skelton in a supporting role: Lady Be Good, early tomorrow (April 15) at 5:00 AM.

Eleanor Powell gets top billing here, although that was a ruse by MGM to get audiences into the theater. In fact, the female lead is Ann Sothern, whom MGM was trying to turn into a musical star. She plays Dixie Donegan, and as the movie opens, she's in divorce court, trying to obtain a divorce from her husband Eddie Crane (Robert Young). This introductory scene is a pretense to go to a flashback, as Donegan tells Judge Murdock (Lionel Barrymore) how the two met and why she wants a divorce. Before the marriage, Crane was a composer, and his girlfriend Dixie sees him and his lyricist have difficulty collaborating. Somehow, Dixie is able to come up with lyrics for Eddie's latest music, and the song they release together becomes a big hit, leading them to get married as well.

Eleanor Powell plays Marilyn Marsh, who is a friend of Dixie's and to a lesser extent Eddie's. She's also a star on Broadway who dances to the sort of music written by people like Eddie. She's happy to see the two married, but distressed by the fact that after they get married, Eddie lets success go to his head, where Dixie just wants to go on writing music for another Broadway show. This is what leads to the Dixie deciding she needs a divorce, even if we all know the two of them are still friends. They just can't work together as husband and wife, at least not until Eddie learns how to combine the two.

After the divorce, Dixie tries to find other composers, while Eddie seems unable to create new music. Eventually he calls Dixie and she thinks he's looking once again for a lyricist. Except that he wants someone to clean up his apartment, as if he thinks this way she'll come back to him. She's already got a new boyfriend, but once again we know this drip isn't right for her. Mutual friends like Marilyn, or Red Willet (that's Red Skelton) who plugs Eddie's and Dixie's songs, try to bring Dixie and Eddie back together. They're even seemingly successful, except that their second marriage hits a snag for the same exact reasons the first marriage did. Still, we know that Dixie and Eddie are going to wind up together in the final reel, so the question is how are they going to resolve their problems.

The on-again, off-again romance story in Lady Be Good is serviceable, and Young and Sothern are able to handle this light drama material well. Red Skelton was on his way up here, and was I think brought in for comic relief which he is unsurprisingly good at providing with his brand of physical comedy. But Lady Be Good is really to be watched for the music and dancing. Arthur Freed, who was of course a lyricist before he become a producer at MGM and made those big post-war Technicolor musicals, provides the song "Your Words and My Music", while some famous composers have old songs of theirs borrowed, with a couple of songs by the Gershwins (including the title number), and "The Last Time I Saw Paris" having been done by Oscar Hammerstein and Jerome Kern. Eleanor Powell has a very good dance number she does with a dog, but most critics mention a different Powell number as the highlight of the film, one danced to "Fascinating Rhythm".

Despite the story which feels like a retread, fans of MGM musicals and dancing will, I think, love Lady Be Good.

Vol de nuit

A movie that airs fairly rarely on TCM despite being an MGM movie is Night Flight. The movie is based on a novel by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, who is better remembered for The Little Prince but, having been a pilot himself, wrote books about aviation. Part of the reason for the movie' infrequency on TCM is that for decades it was in rights limbo. I only got to see part of it when it first aired a dozen years or so ago, so was thrilled to see it show up again on TCM to be able to record it and do a post here.

The theme, as you can guess, if flying at night, which is commonplace enough today but in the early days of aviation when instruments weren't so good was a much more risky proposition. MGM got the rights to the book and immediately set about coming up with an all-star cast to fill the roles. The beginning of the movie, however, seemingly has nothing to do with aviation as a mother is worried sick at a hospital in Rio de Janerio in Brazil where her kid is sick with a case of infantile paralysis (polio). However, the doctors find out that there's no serum anywhere in Rio, or in fact anywhere this side of the Andes, which means that the serum is going to have to be flown in special delivery from Santiago. And as luck would have it, the Trans-Andean European Air Mail company, run by Rivière (John Barrymore) is just about to institute flights by night to get mail -- and small packages like polio serum -- out faster. Tasked with flying from Santiago over the Andes to Buenos Aires, where another plain picks up everything from points west and south, is Pellerin (Robert Mongtomery).

Rivière is, unsurprisingly, a strict taskmaster. In his defense, that's in part because he has an exceedingly tight schedule to meet. Everything has to get in to Buenos Aires in time for the plane to Recife in northeastern Brazil to take off and meet a French cargo ship there, as that's the closest main port in South America to Africa, from where planes take off to Africa toward Europe. Although Rivière runs the company, he's not the President, and is up against the President and others who don't want to take the risk that planes might not be able to make it through the night to Buenos Aires.

Pellerin isn't the only pilot whose flight is chronicled. There's also Fabian (Clark Gable), who is flying out of Punta Arenas in the south of Chile together with a radio operator. Their flight takes them over the southernmost part of the Andes before getting to the ports on the Atlantic side of Argentina and making their way up the coast. However, this flight finds itself getting into weather issues that push them off course and threaten the make the flight too long for how much fuel they have on board. And, in addition to having to contend with the company president, Rivière also has to deal with Fabian's terrified wife (Helen Hayes), who just knows something is wrong.

Since the beginning of the movie dealt with a sick child in Rio de Janeiro, and all the planes land in Buenos Aires, there's also going to be a flight from Buenos Aires to Rio. That pilot is a Brazilian, played by William Gargan, and like Fabian, he's got a worried wife (played by Myrna Loy). Rounding out the cast is Robineau (Lionel Barrymore), a former police inspector now dishing out discipline for Rivière.

All of the subplots in Night Flight are reasonably well handled, and yet for some reason the movie feels a bit less than the sum of its parts. I guess that's in part because there are so many stars and a relatively brief running time of under 90 minutes. There's not quite enough time for the characters to be well-developed, particularly Robert Montgomery's pilot. Still, Night Flight is a worthwhile watch with MGM bringing all the production values it could to what for the viewing public of 1933 would have been a novel topic.

The Part of Greer Garson is now being played by Claudette Colbert

Once Greer Garson came over the the US and started working at MGM, they teamed her with Walter Pidgeon in a series of movies like the recently-mentioned Mrs. Miniver that the audiences loved. A movie that feels like MGM had it planned for Garson, but which does not in fact star her, is The Secret Heart. I recorded it the last time it was on TCM, and recently watched it.

In an apartment in New York, a young man named Chase Addams (Robert Sterling) is returning home after a stint in the Navy, presumably having served in World War II since the movie was released in late 1946. He's returning to his girlfriend Kay (Patricia Medina) who is likely to become his fiancée. Kay informs Chase that his sister Penny (June Allyson) is also home, and that's a cue for Kay to reveal the first half of the back story. Penny is supposed to be at her boarding school, but she hasn't returned since Easter break. Chase is worried about her, and Kay informs him that Penny has gotten worse, playing the piano to think about her late father and stopping any time anyone else shows up. She doesn't even want to play with her own brother around.

At about the same time, Lee Addams (Claudette Colbert) walks in to the office of New York psychologist Dr. Rossiger (Lionel Barrymore). Lee has the same surname is Penny, but is in fact only Penny and Chase's stepmother. Penny has been seeing Dr. Rossiger, but Lee is worried about her. Meanwhile, Dr. Rossiger sees that some sort of family therapy might be in order so he asks Lee to reveal the other half of the back story.

Ten years earlier, Larry Addams was a widower with two younger children. He met Lee and the two fell in love, but Lee's aunt wasn't so sure the two should get married. After going to England to see her aunt, Lee decides she's going to marry Larry after all. On the ship back to New York, she meets Larry's friend Chris Matthews (Walter Pidgeon), and he falls in love with Lee not realizing that she is going to be married to Lee. They get married, but Penny doesn't seem to like her new step-mother all that much.

Larry, meanwhile, is an alcoholic who wanted to become a concert pianist but couldn't afford it, so he took up work as an investment banker and drinks to dull the pain. But he's also been embezzling money from his clients, and when that catches up with him, he decides to commit suicide by throwing himself off a cliff near their farmhouse in Rhode Island. Larry left his family with a lot of debt, and Lee sets about trying to pay off those debts, not telling Penny the truth about how the father she loved really died.

Back in the present, Dr. Rossiger suggests that if the family goes back to the farmhouse where Mr. Addams killed himself, perhaps Penny would finally be forced to confront the past and finally get over the trauma. Wouldn't you know it, but Chris, being into sailing, has a boat and country house near where the Addams' farmhouse is. Meeting up with Lee again and with her being a widow, it might be a good time to pursue her like in Imitation of Life. However, also like Imitation of Life, Penny finds herself falling in love with Chris. When the truth of whom Chris really loves comes out, that might just drive Penny over the edge....

The Secret Heart is another of those movies that MGM tried to make a Big Important Picture after the war, dealing with new themes in Freudian psychology, even though it's not quite a prestige picture. However, this is MGM, which means that once again we get all the glitz that MGM could bring to such a project even when glitz is not what the material needs.

The Secret Heart isn't a bad movie by any stretch of the imagination; it's just that it's one of those movies that consistently feels as though it's got something not quite right about it. As much as the stars try, than can't quite overcome the saccharine nature of what should be serious material. Everything from top to bottom is professionally made -- but it should have been made in some other way.

The decisive valley

Another of those movies that I saw a bunch of times in the TCM schedule but never got around to watching for some reason was one of MGM's prestige films from the mid-1940s, The Valley of Decision. It aired some time back so I watched it before it left the Watch TCM app, writing up this review and waiting for it to show up on TCM again so that I could finally do a review of it. Well, that next TCM showing is coming up tomorrow (August 14) at noon as part of Greer Garson's day in Summer Under the Stars, which means that now's the time to schedule this post.

Garson was probably MGM's biggest star at the time this movie was made, as it was just after Joan Crawford's contract was not renewed and before post-war stars started to make names for themselves. Garson plays Mary Rafferty, a young woman from the poor part of Pittsburgh in the 1870s. Steel was king in Pittsburgh, and Mary's father Pat (Lionel Barrymore) worked for many years at one of the steel mills, at least until getting injured in a workplace accident and requiring the use of a wheelchair. As a result, Dad hates the Scotts, the wealthy family that owns the mill where he worked.

Pat being an adult woman without a husband, needs to go into work, and there weren't all that many jobs available for women in those days. Two of the biggies were teaching and being a servant, and Pat has possibilities of a job in that second field. The only thing is that her employers would be... the Scotts, which pisses Dad off to no end. But she needs a job, and takes it after the matriarch of the family, Clarissa (Gladys Cooper), takes a liking to Pat.

Pat walks into a house where she discovers a family that's somewhat divided over the family business. There's an old saying of going from shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations, and the younger generation is the third generation. Patriarch William (Donald Crisp) inherited the business and has run it as well as he can, intending to bequeath it to at least one of his four children. The only thing is that the four children have different views on what they want for the business. Daughter Constance (Marsha Hunt) doesn't particularly care since women weren't expected to be titans of industry in those days; she ends up marrying a titled Englishman. Youngest son Ted (Marshall Thompson) is a bit of a drifter; and, as the youngest, probably isn't intended to be the inheritor anyway. That leaves Paul (Gregory Peck) who has an interest in metallurgy, and William (Dan Duryea), who's hard-nosed and doesn't care much for the workers unlike Dad and Paul.

Things get complicated when Paul and Pat fall in love with each other. Since they're from totally different social classes, they really can't marry each other, so Pat leaves with Connie to go to the UK and work as maid to Connie and her husband when those two get married. But during her time in the UK, there's terrible labor trouble brewing at the industry. Pat's father and some of the other more militant men want to form a union, but William is staunchly opposed to that idea. Pat eventually returns to the US just in time for all the labor strife.

The Valley of Decision is another of those movies that's of a type MGM did well, at least if you don't think too hard about the labor strife section that probably would have been handled a lot differently at Warner Bros. Garson is way too old for the role at least at the start of the movie, but I don't know that MGM had a younger actress with the heft to play it. Lana Turner was on her way up at MGM, but she would have been terribly miscast in any of the female roles. This was made not long after Gaslight, but I don't think Angela Lansbury would have been able to carry Garson's part. Duryea is playing yet another of his bad-guy characters and Peck is pretty good as the good brother. Lionel Barrymore badly overacts, but at least his overacting is entertaining enough.

If you like glossy period pieces from the studio era, The Valley of Decision will be right up your alley.

Bannerline

I've mentioned before that the programmers MGM produced in the 1950s are often just as interesting as the Freed Unit musicals, if not more so. Of course, those programmres also include some clunkers, as I discovered when I watched Bannerline recently.

MGM was trying to make a star out of Keefe Brasselle, who had recently been in one of the lesser segments of It's a Big Country, so he gets the starring role in this film. Brasselle plays Mike Perrivale, a young reporter fresh out of J-school who thinks he knows more than the people who have been in the newspaper business since they were his age at the turn of the century. Mike works for a paper in one of those small towns MGM liked to use their backlot to recreate, only this time the town has the more ethnic-sounding name of Carravia. Mike is the low man on the totem pole, which means he gets the crappy assignments and doesn't even make enough to support his girlfriend, the teacher Richie Loomis (Sally Forrest), who still lives with her mom (Spring Byington).

Among the crappy assignments Mike gets is interviewing Hugo Trimble (Lionel Barrymore), the male equivalent of Jenny Jones in Good Morning, Miss Dove, a teacher who can be a bit tough but who is actually loved by the people who took his classes. Trimble has been teaching for 50 years, but he's terminally ill in hospital. Hugo is disappointed that he'll die with the town having done nothing about the man who really runs the place, mobster Frankie Scarbine (J. Carroll Naish).

After Hugo teaches Mike how to conduct an interview that people will actually want to read, Mike decides the way to thank Hugo is to use the newspaper as a print shop, since centuries before this the printers who published the earliest newspapers did take on all sorts of other print jobs. In this case, the plan is to make a fake front page in which it will be revealed that Scarbine has been indicted, and let Hugo read that on his dying day.

But then Mike, along with Josh (Lewis Stone), who runs the newspaper's morgue, comes up with an idiotic idea, which is to release the fake front page to the general public. Unsurpisingly, Mike's editor/publish Stambaugh (Larry Keating) is pissed, especially because Scarbine can get a whole bunch of businesses to pull their ads. But this is an MGM programmer, so even though they tried to take on social issues in the era after ditching Louis B. Mayer, they were never anywhere near as good at it as Warner Bros.

In this case, the solution is to engage in some good old witness tampering. There's a grand jury investigating Scarbine, so Stambaugh and the rest of the staff at the paper decide that since they know who the foreman of the jury is, they'll just tell him the grand jury should act independently. As I said, it's blatant witness tampering, but this perversion of the justice system is treated as a good thing.

Bannerline has a whole bunch of problems. Keefe Brasselle is bland, and it's not surprising that he didn't become a big star, never mind the issues in his personal life. This movie, more than a lot of others, looks like it's all done on the back lot. And never mind the journalistic ethics; the rest of the movie is pretty badly mawkish, too.

Then again, the lack of journalistic ethics in Bannerline shouldn't have surprised me, considering the way the press of today spent the past six years working with the the Beltway establishment to violate all sorts of journalistic and constitutional norms to go after who have the wrong views either about Donald Trump or the coronavirus. I suppose the press was just as bad in the 1950s.

Still, there are probably people who have enough trust in the media that they'll like Bannerline. I'm just not one of them.

Mark of the Vampire

Today being Halloween, I wanted to do a post on a horror movie, so I picked one that TCM ran earlier this month, the quickie Mark of the Vampire.

In a small village somewhere in the rural part of either Bohemia or Moravia, what would now be the Czech Republic, the residents have a fear of vampires, to the point that people put some plant they call "batthorn" (something that as far as I can tell is totaly fictitious) on their doors and windows to keep away the vampires. That, and a lot of people don't want to go out after dark. Things get worse when one of the wealthy villagers, Sir Karell Borotyn (Holmes Herbert) is found dead at his desk in the study of the old castle where he lived. This just before the planned wedding of his daughter Irena (Elizabeth Allan) to Fedor.

The townsfolk are practically in a panic, and they believe the killing was done by a vampire -- specifically, Count Mora (Bela Lugosi) or his creepy daughter Luna -- because the dead man has marks on his neck that sure look like they could be fang marks, and because he was drained of all his blood. Obviously, men of science don't believe this sort of stuff, and the authorities send in someone from the big city, police inspector Neumann (Lionel Atwill), to investigate.

Also coming in is Professor Zelin (Lionel Barrymore), who hopes to disprove the notion that it was a vampire that killed the elder Borotyn. Together with Irena's guardian, Baron Otto (Jean Hersholt), they start investigating. Time is of the essence, because Count Mora seems to be menacing poor Irena, and nobody would want to see her turned into a vampire. She starts acting erratically, scaring the bejeezus out of poor Fedor.

Even though Mark of the Vampire has Lionel Barrymore and Bela Lugosi, it feels like it's not even up to the level of a programmer. I think a lot of that is down to the script, with an ending that feels like a deus ex machina and some actions that seriously require suspension of disbelief. The tone also feels mixed, like it's too much of a comedy at some points and a serious film at others. Looking at Wikipedia suggests that MGM's original intention may have been for an 80-minute programmer-length movie that got cut down, something that certainly seems plausible.

Still, Mark of the Vampire is an interesting enough misfire, and if you do watch it, you've only spent an hour of your life on it.

The Miser's Heart

I didn't have anything planned to blog about today, so I went in the closet where I've got a bunch of my DVDs packed up and pulled out both the cheap Mill Creek box set of John Wayne films, and the two-disc set of D.W. Griffith Biograph shorts. Since the shorts are, well, shorter, I watched one of the movies on that disc that I hadn't seen before, The Miser's Heart.

There are multiple stories going on here, although they all come together. Kathy is a little girl living with her mother, who falls ill, leaving Kathy to play on her own for the day. Kathy lives downstairs from the titular miser, who seems to be a bit less of a miser and more of a man who just doesn't trust banks and keeps his money in a safe in his apartment. But that's a target for thieves, and two men are going to come looking for that money.

Meanwhile, Jules (a young Lionel Barrymore) is a thief who steals a bag of food from a working class man, and runs off with the bag, winding up in the courtyard behind the building where Kathy and the miser live, so he meets Kathy and their stories intertwine first that way. But then, something more dramatic happens when the big-time thieves come, looking for the miser's money. Kathy happens to be in the miser's room at the time, so the thieves more or less kidnap her and hold her hostage outside, hanging from a second-story window!

Jules sees Kathy and is able to save the day, in what is an interesting little two-reeler that already shows Griffith's growing command of techniques like inter-cutting and how to build up suspense. The acting (which according to the cast list on IMDb and Wikipedia, as the movie has no credits, also includes a young Donald Crisp), is not much to write home about, since movies were still early enough and being churned out fast enough that learning the techniques for effect movie acting were still taking a back seat. But the movie is still entertaining enough.

One other thing to note is the presence of the American Biograph logo on the stairwell, which I presume was included as an extra attempt to maintain copyright, since the copyright laws still hadn't been updated to facilitate copyrighting entire movies.

The Miser's Heart is in the public domain now anyway and you should be able to find a copy on your favorite video site.

The Voice of Bugle Ann

With all that's been going on in my life, I haven't had so much time or energy to watch enough movies to keep the blog going on a daily basis. Recently, however, I did watch a pair of movies off of my DVR that just happen to be coming up this week on TCM as part of Summer Under the Stars. First up is The Voice of Bugle Ann, on TCM tomorrow, August 8, at 12:15 PM as part of a day of the films of Maureen O'Sullivan.

The nominal star here is Lionel Barrymore, playing Spring Davis, an old farmer in a rural part of Missouri who hunts foxes and raccoons together with his fellow farmers, using their dogs to track the prey. Spring has a long-time wife (Spring Byington), and an adult son Benjy (Eric Linden) who also works the farm. One of Spring's dogs has a littler, and Spring winds up taking care of the runt of the litter, a dog he names Bugle Ann because it grows up to have the perfect call for hunting.

Meanwhile, on an older farm in the area, a new man arrives, Jacob Terry (Dudley Digges). He's planning to raise sheep, which means fencing that will be dangerous to the dogs that roam the country. He's got an adult daughter Camden (Maureen O'Sullivan), who lives with Dad even though she has reason to think he's a mean guy. She and Benjy unsurprisingly fall in love, while nobody loves Jacob. Jacob, in fact, threatens to shoot dogs that trespass on his property.

This leads to a confrontation when Bugle Ann goes missing and presumed dead somewhere near the Terry property, and despite Jacob's protestations, every other farmer in the area is convinced that Terry shot an innocent dog. Jacob and Spring get into it, with Spring shooting Jacob dead when it looks like Jacob is about to draw his gun on Spring. Now, this is where the movie develops a bit of a problem, in that you'd think all the other witnesses around would say that Spring was shooting in self defense (even it it wasn't so clear). There's nobody who would support Jacob over Spring, so there ought to be insufficient evidence to convict. But Spring gets convicted and sent to a long prison sentence. Camden leaves, but refuses to sell the farm.

Things get really weird about a year later when everybody swears they could hear Bugle Ann's call again one night, even though they know she's dead because they eventually find her collar. And then Spring gets a mysterious pardon from the governor even though his is a case the governor really should take no interest in. What really happened that fateful night?

The Voice of Bugle Ann is the sort of movie that to me made me think of the famous Variety headline "Stix Nix Hick Pix" that had appeared about a year before the movie. It's not a bad movie; it's more that everything seems somewhat off. I don't know that Hollywood ever got the farm right, at least not in the days when they were mostly bound to the back lot. Now, there are stronger stories that overcome this, such as the lovely Hide-Out from a few years earlier. But The Voice of Bugle Ann really feels like it's missing something that I just can't put my finger on.

Still, it's worth a watch for the odd plot twist, and it doesn't show up all that often, so catch its rare TCM airing.

Mata Hari (1931)

Ramon Novarro was one of the stars in Summer Under the Stars last month, which gave me the chance to watch -- or maybe re-watch, since I might be confusing it with some of the other pre-Code spy movies -- Mata Hari.

Novarro is obviously not in the title role, since that's the famous female spy from World War I. So Mata Hari is played by Greta Garbo. In this movie, she's in Paris, wowing everybody in 1961, including the Russian army officers stationed there. (From reading the Wikipedia page on Mata Hari, there was a force sent to the western front by Tsarist Russia before the February 1917 revolution took the country out of the war.) That force is headed by Gen. Shubin (Lionel Barrymore). Flying in to France is dashing young Lt. Rosanoff (Ramon Novarro), with some coded dispatches from Russia for Shubin.

Needless to say, the other side would like those dispatches. Andriani (Lewis Stone) is the head of those enemy agents, with a bunch of people working under him, including Mata Hari as well as woman named Carlotta (Karen Morley). Working for the allies is Dubois (C. Henry Gordon), convinced Mata Hari is a spy but unable to prove it.

Mata, for her part, works as an exotic dancer at one of those nightclubs in Paris that, at the time the movie was made, so about 15 years after the setting of the movie, would be employing people like Josephine Baker as the entertainment. Mata Hari's exoticism and beauty charm all the men, and the newcomer Rosanoff is no exception. He would like to see her after the show, not realizing that she'd only be usin him to get those dispatches once she learns he has a copy of them.

Rosanoff also doesn't know that his superior, Gen. Shubin, has been carrying on an affair with Mata Hari. But Mata Hari falls in love with Rosanoff, too, which is unsurprising because Ramon Novarro is a much more obvious romantic lead than Judge Hardy. It all leads to Mata Hari getting caught since that's what happened in real life, and sentenced to death, although Rosanoff, having been injured in a plane crash, doesn't actually know what's going to happen to the woman he loves.

I'm not certain exactly how much bearing in reality this version of Mata Hari has. It's got the sort of competence that MGM was able to bring to its programmers, although since we're still in 1931, it doesn't have quite the technical expertise that later movies would have. Still, the story is interesting enough.

If I were going to recommend any of the movie's stars to people, I'd recommend other of their movies first, although that doesn't mean that Mata Hari is bad by any stretch of the imagination. It's just that there's other stuff easier for people to get into.

The Lady of the Camellias

Where yesterday's selection Our Time showed a young, naïve love, today's selection shows a rather more craven kind of love: the 1936 version of Camille.

Greta Garbo plays the lady of the camellias, named not Camille but Marguerite. She lives in the Paris of 1847 (just before the revolution of 1848 that brought Napoleon III to power but which isn't mentioned here; I couldn't do a good enough calculation of how long the events in the movie are spaced out to determine when it ended), where women of her sort woo wealthy men. Her matchmaker -- to use a polite term -- Prudence (Laura Hope Crews) is taking her to a theater where it's hoped she'll meet the wealthy Baron de Varville (Henry Daniell).

Unfortunately, she mistakes another man, Armand Duval (Robert Taylor), for de Varville. The two like each other, but he's only a diplomat's son and so of just moderate wealth. Armand falls in love with Marguerite, but he's not going to be able to support her in the manner to which she is accustomed.

The Baron, of course, could, but he's not going to marry her, especially when he knows what kind of woman she really is. In addition to being in love with another man, she's also a spendthrift, constantly owing money because she wants to spend on herself and even more so help others when possible. Armand's father (Lionel Barrymore) knows that Marguerite is financial bad news for Armand, but when he meets Marguerite he realizes that the two are in real, if doomed, love.

That doom isn't just because of Marguerite's profligate ways, but also because she has consumption, which in those days mean an early death, especially if Marguerite is living it up as she is. Armand and the Baron come in and out of Marguerite's life, until the three legs of the love triangle all meet at the opening of a new gambling club in Paris. Armand wins the money to pay Marguerite's debts off of the Baron in a game of baccarat, but it leads to a duel between Armand and the Baron which ultimately forces Armand to leave France. Will he be able to return before the consumption takes Marguerite?

Well, you can probably guess that the answer to that last question is yes, but that Armand sure won't be able to save Marguerite. Camille is the sort of movie that MGM was really good at making during Irving Thalberg's lifetime. It's got excellent production values, and a story and performances that I'm sure audiences of the 1930s loved.

However, watching it 80-plus years later, I realize that it's not exactly my cup of tea, as I felt like a whole lot of nothing was happening. Still, it's easy to see the quality of the movie, so I have no qualms about recommending it for people who know what they're getting into. The movie is available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive, should you wish to watch for yourself.

Down to the Sea in Ships

A good six years ago, I gave the old one-paragraph mention of the 1949 movie Down to the Sea in Ships. It's back out of the vault to run on FXM, tomorrow morning at 7:55 AM and again at 6:00 AM Friday.

Lionel Barrymore plays Bering Joy, captain of a whaling ship that's returning to New Beford MA in 1887 after a long voyage at see. Serving as cabin boy was Bering's grandson Jed (Dean Stockwell), who is getting to the age where he could become a full-fledged member of the crew, and is willing to move his stuff to the forecastle as a result. (Jed's parents are both dead, so Grandpa is his guardian.) But there's a problem, in that being at the age to join a crew means he's also at the age where he's subject to showing he's up to the educational standards the state has set, and if he can't show that, he's going to have to go to school. On land.

Bering wants to go out for one more voyage, with his grandson, but in addition to the problem of Jed's schooling that Bering is thoroughly unfit to provide, there's also the issue of his age and infirmity. (Barrymore is not in his wheelchair here, but on crutches and presumably having a double do any number of long shots that have him standing without crutches.) The insurance company doesn't necessarily want Bering going out to sea, and whaling company boss Harris (Harry Davenport) is offering a generous retirement.

Bering is a force of nature, however, and he's able to convince the whaling company to let him go, as well as to get the headmaster of the school to fudge Jed's grades. Apparently, Bering had had the headmaster on the previous voyage and gave him the profoundly good advice that he wasn't suited to a seaman's life. But with times changing, Bering is going to get a new first mate in Dan Lunceford (Richard Widmark). Dan went to college, and learned modern ways of being a ship's captain much in the way that people went to ag schools to learn about scientific agricultural managment.

Bering isn't too happy to have this "scientific" college guy on board with him, but he realizes there's a silver lining. Jed still needs his education, and in Dan, there's a guy with an education, so Bering gets Dan to teach Jed basic education. Dan isn't so pleased with the arrangement at first, either, because Jed isn't a particularly apt people thinking he only needs to learn that which is necessary for working on a ship.

Eventually things work out between Dan and Jed. Perhaps they work out too well, because Jed, not having a living father, is in strong need of a positive, capable role model. He finds that in Dan for fairly obvious reasons, and when Bering realizes what's happening, he gets nervous about it. This is doubly so when one of the small boats with Jed on it gets lost for several hours and Dan defies Bering's orders to deal with the situation.

There are all sorts of other problems, of the sort you can expect on a boat as well, with the biggest one being that since they're going to the Antarctic to catch whales, they have to deal with icebergs, something which would destroy those old wooden ships even more surely than they destroyed the badly-designed metal Titanic.

Down to the Sea in Ships was filmed in California and the waters off the coast, but other than that and the lack of Technicolor, the movie is one that fits in well with the grand old tradition of the Hollywood adventure story. Barrymore is surprisingly good, since I wouldn't have expected a man confined to a wheelchair to be able to handle the role. Widmark is in an early starring and good-guy role, and already shows that he had a range greater than the criminal heavies that would mark his early career. The supporting cast is good, too, with Cecil Kellaway as the cook and Harry Morgan among the crew members.

Down to the Sea in Ships is available on DVD courtesy of Fox's MOD scheme. There's an earlier silent movie by the same name with a different story that's on DVD, and also availalbe on Youtube since it's in the public domain. I'll be getting around to it at some point.

Test Pilot

Another recent movie watched off the DVR that's available from the Warner Archive is Test Pilot.

The movie starts off with Gunner (Spencer Tracy) checking a plane to make certain it's in good working order. Gunner's best friend Jim Lane (Clark Gable) is goin gto be getting in that plane to try to fly it across the country to set a new coast-to-coast speed record, these still being the days when aviation was young enough that coast-to-coast records and aviation records were still a thing. Anyhow, Gunner goes to get Lane, only to find that he's got one woman waiting for him, with Jim eventually showing up with another woman hanging from one arm. You get the impression that these aren't the only two women by any means.

Sadly for Jim, the attempt at the speed record is doomed to failure, as an oil line is going to break and Jim is going to be forced to crash land in a field somewhere in the middle of the country. As he's trying to fix the plane, he's approached by young Ann (Myrna Loy), a college graduate who lives with her parents on the farm where Jim crash landed, 20 miles outside Wichita KS. Jim immediately falls for Ann and the feeling is mutual. Ann, however, has conflicted feelings as she doesn't know whether she should go off with a pilot or take the safe way out of going with the man who's been pursuing her.

We all know there wouldn't me much of a movie if a leading lady like Loy walked off with the third wheel 20 minutes in, so we shouldn't be surprised that Jim and Ann elope and Jim shows up back at the office of his airplane-manufacturing boss Drake (Lionel Barrymore) with a wife, much to Drake's chagrin. Drake wants Jim to test a new plane before the big race, but Jim wants a honeymoon. Eventually, it leads to Jim quitting despite the financial hit he's going to take.

Being in constant financial straits is just one problem that Ann finds she's going to have in the marriage. There's a bigger problem, however, in that Ann is in many ways not Jim's wife but his mistress -- the real love of Jim's life is the sky, and Ann worries that the sky is never going to let Jim go, ultimately leading to Jim's doom. It goes on like this for the better part of two hours.

Test Pilot is the sort of movie that left me with no small amount of mixed feelings. It's well made, and yet there was something about it that just didn't seem quite right, and I couldn't quite put my finger on that something. One definite problem is with Jim's character, who for much of the movie comes across as a spoiled jerk. He wins a big air race, and then immediately squanders every last cent of the prize money on the bender to end all benders. If I had been in Gunner's position on finding Jim at the end of the bender, I probably would have beat the shit out of him and looked for a better job elsewhere, probably back with Drake.

Yet that I don't think was the only issue I had with the movie. For what is for large stretches an action movie, it has a very sterile feel to it. There's also a pretty big plot hole in the climactic flight also saying what it is gives some plot points away. The problem wasn't with the performances, I don't think. Gable does well in a caddish role; Spencer Tracy was still in his pre-Hepburn persona; and Myrna Loy is good as a wife who suffers a lot more than Nora Charles ever did. Ultimately, I can recommend the movie, although I think it could have been rather better.

Test Pilot is one of those movies that probably would benefit from being in a box set than only as a stand-alone DVD from the Warner Archive. It also looks as though they've increased the prices on the Warner Archive DVDs, as this one is listed at $21.99, although it's on sale at both Amazon and the TCM Shop.

The Stranger's Return

TCM is running a bunch of Miriam Hopkins movies tomorrow morning and afternoon. One that doesn't seem to be available on DVD is The Stranger's Return, which will be on at 7:45 AM.

Hopkins plays the nominal stranger, a big-city divorcée named Louise. Having just gotten a divorce, she wants to get away from it all, and decides that she's going to go back to the old family farm run by her grandfather (Lionel Barrymore), an 85-year-old Civil War veteran. This even though she's never been on the farm as an adult. But it'll do her good to get away and recharge.

Or so she thinks. Obviously, things aren't going to be completely easy. There are a couple of women relatives already living on the farm with Grandpa (Beulah Bondi as Beatrice and Aileen Carlyle as Thelma) and they don't take kindly to the new arrival, expecting that Grandpa is going to make certain she gets an inheritance in the will. They think he's too old to run the farm and they'd basically like to take it over for themselves.

And then there's the neighbor. Guy (Franchot Tone) is another farmer, although that's really a surprise, since he's college-educated and would like to have the finer things in life and the chance to talk about culture with somebody. Nothing against his wife Nettie (Irene Hervey); she just isn't cultured. You wonder how Guy ended up here. Anyhow, Guy and Louise meet and you know that they're going to feel an attraction for her. Nettie may not be cultured, but she's not stupid: she can see that Guy likes having this big-city woman around. Guy doesn't want to hurt his wife, and Louise doesn't want to break up their marriage, anyway.

But that story is going to have to take a back seat to the finale. Beatrice is trying to get Grandpa declared insane so that he's going to have to give up control of the farm to her. And Grandpa certainly is acting nutty. Louise, however, has come to love her grandfather and is willing to fight for him.

The Stranger's Return is one of those leisurely-paced programmers from the early days of sound. Sure there are a lot of movies from those days where they try to make the pace fast in order to get everything in in the short running time, but there are others that seem to meander along, more or less showing a slice of life. The Stranger's Return is definitely in the latter category, especially considering the amount of time they spend on a dinner for farmhands.

Still, the performances are good and the story does interest. The Stranger's Return ultimately succeeds as a programmer even if the ending is a bit hit-or-miss. This is another of those movies that Warner Home Video probably ought to put out on DVD on one of those four-film sets.

The Girl From Missouri

Over the weekend, I watched The Girl From Missouri, having recorded it on my DVD as part of the TCM salute to Jean Harlow a week earlier. It seems to have gotten a DVD release courtesy of the Warner Archive, since it's availalbe at Amazon. (Strangely enough, the TCM Shop lists it as being on back order.) So I can feel comfortable doing a full-length post on it here even though I don't think it's on the TCM schedule again any time soon.

Jean Harlow of course plays the titular girl from Missouri, although she doesn't spend much of the movie in Missouri. It's only the opening scene that's set there. Harlow plays Eadie, a young woman whose father died at some point in the past and whose mother apparently went through a succession of men. Mom, along with the current stepfather, run what is presumably a roadhouse-type night spot, but that's not the type of life for Eadie. So her friend Kitty (Patsy Kelly) is going to help her escape from the roadhouse, and take a train to New York.

Eadie intends to find a rich man and marry him, since that's the best way to get money. Even if there's love, Eadie still feels she can make it work. So she takes a job as a show girl, begging her boss to let her be part of the show that's going to a private party being given by the wealthy Frank Cousins (Lewis Stone). Boss relents and Eadie eventually wangles her way into Cousins' private office, where he eventually offers her his ruby cufflinks as a sort of engagement gift. What she doesn't know is that Cousins is actually bankrupt, and he's giving her those cufflinks as a parting gift since he plans to commit suicide! The police notice that the cufflinks are missing, and it's going to be Eadie's word against common sense as to how she got those cufflinks. Still, another rich man, banker T.R. Paige (Lionel Barrymore) helps her out, and even gives her some money to get by.

Eadie's plan, after Cousins offs himself, is to snare Paige! So she takes that money and follows him down to Palm Beach. When she goes to Paige's office in Palm Beach, she meets a young man who is interested in her, although the feeling isn't mutual. Still, the young man says he can get Eadie onto Paige's yacht. It turns out that the young man is in fact T.R. Paige, Jr. (Franchot Tone). He doesn't care about Eadie's background, since he believes she's really got a heart of gold, and dammit, he's going to keep pursuing her until she finally says yes. Dad, however, is none too happy about it, and does everything he can to put the kibosh on it....

The Girl From Missouri was released in August, 1934, about a month after Joe Breen started enforcing the stricter Production Code. That, I think, is to the movie's detriment. Harlow tries, but she's faced with material that doesn't really seem to know what to do with itself. In particular, it can't decide whether it wants to be a drama or a comedy. Franchot Tone is more than suitable as the young playboy type who falls for Eadie, and Patsy Kelly provides comic relief without going over the top. Barrymore is probably the weakest of the four leads here.

All in all, I think The Girl From Missouri is a movie that Jean Harlow fans will like. But if I were going to introduce people to the movies of Jean Harlow, I can think of several other movies I'd pick first.

On Borrowed Time

I don't think I've ever done a full-length post on the film On Borrowed Time before. It shows up on TCM tomorrow morning at 8:45 AM, and is more than worth a watch if you haven't seen it before.

On Borrowed Time is one of those movies where the one-sentence synopsis really does the movie justice: an old man traps Death in a tree. That old man, "Gramps" Northrup, is played by Lionel Barrymore, is living with his wife (Beulah Bondi), and their orphaned grandson Pud (Bobs Watson), with a little help from housekeeper Marchia (Una Merkel). Pud was orphaned when his parents picked up a hitchhiker, one Mr. Brink (Cedric Hardwicke). They of course didn't know that Mr. Brink was actually the personification of death; indeed, about the only person who has any idea of it at first is Gramps.

Gramps doesn't want to die, and who can blame him? He's got people he loves, and people who love him, especially that grandson Pud. Besides, there are other considerations. Chief among those is Pud's aunt Demetria Riffle (Elly Malyon). She thinks that Gramps is unable to take care of Pud, and to an extent she's got a point. After all, what is Brink doing here if not to claim Gramps? Gramps also realizes that Demetria wants Pud's inheritance of $50,000 more than she wants Pud. Sure that doesn't sound like much, but in 1939 it would have been equivalent to several years' income, and who wouldn't want that much free money.

So Gramps lures Brink into an apple tree on the family's property and prevents him from getting down. You'd think that the personification of Death would be a little smarter than that. Sure, he could be tricked into the tree, but since there's no way Gramps can watch the tree 24/7, Death is going to figure out a way out of the tree. Apparently Death can't do that however, so as long as he's up there, nobody's dying, which obviously does start causing problems. Consider all those people who would have otherwise untreatable diseases. Simply trapping Death in a tree doesn't cure them, it only prolongs their life with an otherwise terminal illness. Imagine having to take care of a dementia patient for all eternity.

You can probably guess that the Production Code is going to require Gramps to let Brink out of the tree, but how can they achieve that in a way that will satisfy the audiences of 1939? That's why you have to watch the movie.

Lionel Barrymore is quite good as always, playing the crotchety old guy. In real life, he was finally confined to that wheelchair by the time he made this movie, but shows that you can act even from a wheelchair. MGM was also able to draw on all those great character actors in their stable: I haven't mentioned Henry Travers as the doctor or Grant Mitchell as the lawyer yet. The story is sentimental at times, and perhaps even a bit sappy, but for the most part it's well done. Watch that tree carefully; you might recognize it when you start watching other MGM films done on the backlot.

On Borrowed Time has been released to DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive Collection.

The Gorgeous Hussy

A search of the blog suggests that I have never mentioned the movie The Gorgeous Hussy before. It's showing tomorrow morning at 6:00 AM on TCM, so now's a good time to mention it.

Based on a true story, Joan Crawford plays what is supposed to be the title role; presumably, "hussy" meant something different back in the 1820s. Here, she's Peggy O'Neal, the daughter of an innkeeper in the Washington DC area (played by Gene Lockhart). She marries Navy Lieutenant Bow Timberlake (Robert Taylor), but he gets sent to sea. (Not that this should be a surprise; after all, that's the point of the Navy.) While at sea, he dies, leaving Peggy a widow. That's bad for her, but not so bad for Senator John Eaton from Tennessee (played by Franchot Tone). In real life, he may or may not have had a thing for Peggy while she was married to Lt. Timberlake. But now, with her being a widow, there's no such problem. Instead, the only problem is with Virginia Senator Randolph (Melvyn Douglas), who is also somewhat interested in Peggy. Peggy prefers Eaton because he doesn't go on as much about "states' rights" as Randolph does, and winds up marrying Eaton.

For whatever reason, this is a problem for a lot of people. Andrew Jackson (played by Lionel Barrymore, who I think is really miscast here) is the new President, and selects Seantor Eaton to be his Secretary of War. Several of the other Cabinet Wives don't like this, and give Peggy the silent treatment. Jackson has sympathy for Peggy, who in her defense really hasn't done anything wrong, or at least nothing to deserve the treatment she's getting from the other wives. The thing is, he too had a wife who caused scandal just by being his wife. (This is covered in the movie The President's Lady, although I don't believe that's available on DVD.) Rachel Jackson (played by Beulah Bondi) died in between the election fo 1828 and Jackson's inauguration, so it's understandable why Jackson would have the feelings he does. Eventually, Jackson was forced to shuffle his cabinet and send Eaton to Spain as ambassador, at least according to the movie. (In real life, Eaton was only named ambassador five years after the cabinet reshuffle.)

Historical dramas in the studio era can be problematic if they're based on real events. The studios really glossed over things while taking obvious sides. Also, a lot of the actresses were much too glamorous to look like people from the olden days. (Pioneer women in particular aged badly, due to all that hard work.) Bondi is the only one who fits; Rachel Robards Jackson was 61 when she died while Bondi's craggy face made her look old enough to play mothers to a lot of actors who weren't that much different to her age in real life. (Bondi would have been about 45 when she made this.) Crawford looks like she belongs in the 19th century about as much as Bette Davis does in Jezebel. So you have to overlook some things when watching these movies based on real history. In that regard, I don't think The Gorgeous Hussy is bad at all.

The Gorgeous Hussy has gotten a release on the Warner Archive.

Guilty Hands

I mentioned the movie Guilty Hands back in April, saying that it wasn't available on DVD and that I didn't know when it would be airing again. It's still not on DVD, but it's on tonight at 8:00 PM as part of TCM's salute to Kay Francis in Summer Under the Stars.

The comments that I wrote back in April still hold, I think:

And then there's Guilty Hands, which ran this morning. It sounded like an interesting premise -- former district attorney Lionel Barrymore commits murder and tries to pin it on Kay Francis -- but the execution was off. That having been said, the execution was off in a way that makes parts of the movie really interesting.

A few things I didn't mention in April: Barrymore commits the murder thinking that he's doing the right thing for his daughter (Madge Evans), by protecting her from the man she thinks she loves (Alan Mowbray) but that Dad knows would be wrong for her. There's also no mystery in this movie, or at least not the traditional mystery. We know from the start who the killer is, so Hitchcock would probably classify this as suspense: will the killer get away with it? Since the movie dates to 1931, there is a reasonable chance that the killer could well get away with it, which is another thing that makes the movie worth one watch. If it were a movie made after they started enforcing the Production Code, the point of the movie would have to be seeing how the plot goes wrong. Not that you can't make a good movie along those lines; Double Indemnity springs immediately to mind. It's just that pre-Code movies allow for the possibility of something different.

Overall, I think Guilty Hands is the sort of movie that's worth one watching. Not the greatest thing by any stretch, but an enjoyable enough little curiosity, and a window to 1930s values.