Portrait in Black

A genre that's often fun even if the movies aren't necessarily very good is the potboiler of the 1950s and 1960s. Recently, I had the opportunity to see another of those movies: Portrait in Black.

Lana Turner is the star here, and she plays Sheila Cabot, the second wife of shipping magnate Matthew Cabot (Lloyd Nolan). Matthew is an extremely tough businessman, and that toughness is driving him to an early grave as he seems to need a series of injections from his doctor, Dr. David Rivera (Anthony Quinn). However, Matthew is tough in his personal life as well as his business life; as one example he seems quite ticked that Sheila has decided to get a learner's permit to be able to drive for herself. This, after, would mean she'd no longer be forced to use the chauffeur Cobb (Ray Walston) to go anywhere.

And goodness knows she's got places to go. She's secretly carrying on an affair with Dr. Rivera! Both of them have had the thought that they could hasten Matthew's death through an air-bubble induced embolism, although that would of course be unethical malpractice, and there's a reasonable chance somebody might figure things out since there are signs that Sheila is less than fully honest about where she's taking the car. Cathy (Sandra Dee), Matthew's adult daughter from his first marriage, notices that Sheila often goes "shopping" but comes home having bought nothing.

Of course, Cathy's relationship with her dad isn't much better. Cathy's boyfriend is Blake Richards (John Saxon), who runs one of the tugboat concessions in the San Francisco harbor. But, thanks in part to Dad, as well as Dad's second-in-commmand Howard Mason (Richard Basehart), Blake's dad was driven out of business, giving Blake good reason to hate Mr. Cabot. Worse, Mr. Cabot and Mason screw Blake over in awarding the new contract to deal with the Cabot Line.

And then Matthew dies suddenly, although it's not because of any untoward doings on anybody's part. However, a few days letter Sheila receives an hand-printed letter with no return address but a postmark from Carmel congratulating her on doing away with her husband! Sheila and David are convinced that somebody knows about their affair and is going to try to blackmail them. Suspicion eventually falls on Howard Mason's shoulders, and Dr. Rivera comes up with a ridiculous plan to bump off Howard in a shooting that could easily be blamed on a disgruntled longshoreman since there a labor dispute brewing. Except that the killing doesn't quite go to plan. Oh, Howard gets killed all right, but it takes two attempts and then Cathy starts trying to put two and two together....

Portrait in Black got scathing reviews at the time of its release in 1960, and it's not hard to see why. However, 65-plus years on, it's easier to sit back and have fun at how delightfully overwrought and bad this one is. It goes from one ridiculously over-the-top scene to the next, leading up the a climax where you know Anthony Quinn's character is going to get it if only because the Production Code was still in effect and demanded it. But the movie generally swims in a sea of hatred that's brewing just under the surface, with all the characters delivering bad dialogue.

Portrait in Black is definitely recommended, but not for the reasons the filmmakers at the time would have wanted you to see it.

Man Man

Another genre of films that I find myself getting jaded with is the 1960s spy movie. Well, not so much the parodies that sprang up after Doctor No made James Bond a big hit, but the "serious" spy movies that made the whole spy business seem like a cynical and meaningless game. That view was reinforced when I recently watched The Double Man.

The movie opens up with a brief establishing sequence in Berlin, which of course at the time was a divided city. Somebody leaves the American sector into the East, and there's talk between some intelligence types that results in a dossier showing the photo of Dan Slater (Yul Brynner). Cut to Austria, and a young man dies in a skiing accident that anybody watching the movie even without having seen the box guide synopsis of the plot knows fully well isn't really an accent. That man is Dan's son Robert, and news naturally gets back to Dan.

Dan works in Washington for the CIA under Edwards (Lloyd Nolan). Dan goes to the Austrian Alps in part to fetch his son's body and belongings, and in part to find out what really happened, since he has good enough reason to believe that it might not have been an accident. Presumably the Soviets knew that this was Dan's son and that Dan is a higher-up in the CIA, making him valuable for, well, reasons. Edwards and all the other CIA people have reason that this is a trap, designed to get Dan to some out of the way place where he can be captured or something; the exact nature of the trap isn't necessarily known.

Dan gets to the Tirolean ski resort of St. Anton, which in this print doesn't look quite as nice as it probably should. He begins to ask around, and goes up in the cable car that took Robert on his last ride, where he finds lovely young Gina (Britt Ekland), who was apparenty in the cable car with Robert and a couple of mysterious men on that fateful morning. But Gina won't talk to Dan. They get out at the same stop to ski the same route, and there's a third person, an older man who seems to be watching Dan.

Dan eventually talks to Gina's boss, Mrs. Carrington, which is an in to Gina, and learns that there were two men on the cable car, that older man and one wearing a ski mask so nobody can learn his identity. Further investigation reveals that all of these people are still in town, which piques Dan's curiosity. In any case, he also knows it's likely a trap, but he needs to be able to break it whatever it is. Edwards, for his part, is getting more worried and wants Dan to return home immediately if not sooner.

Sure enough, it is a trap, and the trap is that the Soviets have found a man that they can give plastic surgery to to look just like Dan. (Didn't they think about fingerprints?) They'll lure Dan to the ski resort, where they can capture him and replace him with the doppelgänger whom they'll send back to Washington. Yeah right this is going to work. Dan certainly has enough secrets that the replacement couldn't possibly figure out in such a short time.

And that's one of the big problems with The Double Man. The plot is daft, and in the end we just don't care all that much about these characters. And as I said earlier, although a good portion of the movie was filmed on location, it just doesn't look pretty at all. So I'm sorry to say that The Double Man isn't as good as it probably ought to have been.

Evil Lloyd Nolan

I'll have to admit that when I think of actors playing bad guys, somebody who is decidedly not at the top of that list would be Lloyd Nolan, a character actor whose appearances brightened the movies he was in for 50 years. A movie in which he does play the nominal bad guy, although at least one getting the chance to redeem himself, is the B western Apache Trail.

Nolan gets top billing here, although the good guy protagonist and as much a lead as anybody in the movie is a young William Lundigan. Lundigan plays Tom O'Folliard, and as the movie opens he's just gotten out of prison. He runs across his brother, Trigger Bill (that's Lloyd Nolan), who offers Tom his cut of the money from the robbery that put Tom, but not Bill, in prison. Tom, feeling hard done by Bill, wants nothing more to do with crime, and simply wants to go back to his old job with the stage company.

Now, riding shotgun might not be such a good idea for a guy who spent time in prison, so his old boss decides to give him a rather more dangerous and less glamorous job, that of managing one of the way stations in a part of Apache Territory where the threat of ambush from the Apaches is very much real. However, that also gives him the chance to reunite with Mrs. Martinez and her soon to be an adult daughter Rosalia (Donna Reed), who you get the feeling always thought she'd be paired by her mom with Tom.

A stage comes, and on it is the sort of motley group of passengers that you expect for an ensemble piece like this: a widow, Constance Selden (Ann Ayers), who is fighting to get her late husband's cavalry pension that the government denied because he committed suicide; British artist James Thorne (Miles Mander) and his wife (Gloria Holden); and a group of cavalry officers who are ferrying the pay in a strongbox. So, one of the subplots is going to involve the possible romantic conflict between Tom, Rosalia, and Constance, although as you might guess the presence of a strongbox is more important.

That's because Bill shows up again. The Apache are getting restless, as can be seen from the smoke signals, and Bill has done something to piss them off so looks for refuge, with the stagecoach station being the best place he can think of. Not that his brother is happy to see him. But Tom has to go out to try to determine when and where the Apaches are going to attack, and this gives Bill the chance to try to rob the station of the strongbox. You'd think he would have seen enough westerns to realize that trying to get away with a strongbox just at the same time the Apaches are signalling their intention to attack isn't a good idea. Never mind he's the bad guy and hasn't had to pay for it yet under Production Code rules.

Apache Trail is a B western from MGM, so much of the film feels and looks like it's on sound stages and maybe the MGM ranch somewhere out in southern California. But it also has the presence of a fine cast, and they mostly elevate the pedestrian material to something better if not a memorable movie. To be fair, however, the movie was released in late 1942, at a time when studios were still cranking out B movies (this one is only 66 minutes) to give disposable product to movie theaters where people wanted a new movie each week, especially if by this point they wanted something to take their minds off World War II. Just like nobody expects most episodic television to be that memorable, also nobody I think expected the second features to be remembered 80 years later. Apache Trail is definitely worth a watch.

Out west with Stewart Granger

When you think of stars whom you wouldn't necessarily think of as doing westerns, there are any number that come to mind, although I think more stars from the studio era did at least one western at some point in their careers than you might realize. Stewart Granger, who was good enough in all those British-set costume pieces did a couple of westerns over the course of his career, including The Last Hunt.

The movie is set in the Dakota Territory in the mid-1880s. Opening titles inform us that before Europeans started pushing westward past the Mississippi, there were millions of buffalo roaming the Great Plains, although by the 1880s, hunting by both the Indians and the whites had pushed that number down to the four-figure range. Stewart Granger plays Sandy McKenzie, a former buffalo hunter who turned rancher after the hunting ceased being good and he tired of the killing. Unfortunately, there are still just enough buffalo left to stampede his cattle, leaving him in need of a way to make money.

Enter Charles Gilson, played by Robert Taylor. He served in the Civil War and decided to go west and hunt buffalo after the War because he discovered he had a taste for shooting things dead and was good at it. Charles needs a crew for the next buffalo hunt, and Sandy reluctantly joins because he needs the money. In town, they're able to find two more men to round out the crew. Woodfoot (Lloyd Nolan) is a good mule hand, while Jimmy (Russ Tamblyn) is mixed race but for whatever reason has decided he's going to thrown in his lot with the white man instead of his Sioux half.

It's not going to be an easy hunt, and not only because of the dwindling number of buffalo out there in the wild. The Sioux aren't happy that the white man has been killing off the buffalo, in part because the Sioux need the buffalo to survive just as much, if not more, as the white man does. The Sioux also have religious beliefs surrounding albino buffaloes, so when Charley kills one of those, the Sioux are really displeased. In trying to gain revenge on the Indians, Charley enters the reservation and takes a young Indian woman (Debra Paget) hostage.

The bigger issue, however, is the way that Charley likes killing and Sandy no longer does. This personality clash is going to grow bigger as Sandy gets the distinct impression that Charley is getting too violent for his own good. To that end, Sandy gets the idea that perhaps he should try to save the Indian woman by taking her away from Charley and the buffalo hunting party, but that's only going to make Charley more jealous and lead to the ultimate climax.

The Last Hunt is a competently-made movie, helped out in no small part by the location shooting as well as the assistance of the Department of the Interior who allowed MGM to shoot real footage of a buffalo cull since the herds rebounded by the time the movie was made to a number where the herds had to be managed. The color and widescreen photography really help the location shooting. Unfortunately, the story is only serviceable. It's not a bad story by any means, but there have been a lot of better western stories put to screen.

Don't Let the Sun Go Down on Me

Today being Christmas, I thought I'd look for a family-friendly film on my DVR to do a review on. It turned out that I have one in The Sun Comes Up, so I watched that to do a review on.

The nominal lead is Jeanette MacDonald, although the real star of the show is Lassie. MacDonald plays Helen Lorfied, the owner of Lassie, as well as a widowed opera singer who has a son who loves Lassie. Helen is in training for a comeback, and it looks like it's going to be a success. But after the concert, Lassie goes running off into the street, and Helen's kid chases after Lassie, getting run over by a truck in the process. Helen now no longer has any desire to enjoy life, and doesn't care for Lassie, either. But Lassie also has no other family, so Helen takes Lassie with her when she goes off to the country to live.

She winds up in the town of Brushy Gap, in the same sort of mountains we'd see a few years later in I'd Climb the Highest Mountain and sees a house in the middle of nowhere that's available for rent. She rents it from property manager and stereotypical country store owner Willie Williegood (Percy Kilbride). Mr. Williegood is just the first of many people not to be accepting of an outsider, although in their defense Helen doesn't seem particularly well-suited to live in a place like this. Anyhow, the kids from the orphanage use the property to play on, and everybody is none too pleased that Helen puts them out because she doesn't want to see kids.

One kid, however, she's going to have to deal with, because he's actually pretty good at doing work around the place that a city slicker like Helen just doesn't know how to do. That kid is Jerry (Claude Jarman Jr.), who also lives at the orphanage because, as far as he knows, his mother was financially unable to take care of him (he would have been born during the Depression). Jerry also takes well to Lassie, and the feeling is mutual. Helen, of course, is not ready to have another adolescent boy in her life.

There's another hour to go in the movie, though, so we know that the two are going to figure out that they need each other, and it's going to be Lassie that brings the two of them together. Lloyd Nolan shows up as the owner of the house who ultimately convinces Helen to do the right thing, although it's also going to take a climactic fire rescue to bring Helen and Jerry together.

Jeanette MacDonald's singing isn't quite my cup of tea, and to be honest I'm also not the biggest fan of the stereotypical treatment of the locals that seems like it came straight out of the old Variety headline "Stix Nix Hick Pix". But then, this is a Lassie movie, so that's what you watch for, not so much the plot. In that regard, The Sun Comes Up will definitely be suitable for the whole family, although younger children will probably enjoy it more than older children.

Flight Test Center

I'm always surprised at how many new-to-me movies there still are on TCM, even from the studio era. I don't just mean movies that I'd already heard of the title but have never gotten around to watching; I mean things that I didn't know existed until they showed up on the TCM schedule. Another such movie that I recorded some months back is Toward the Unknown.

The opening credits as well as a card on screen thanking the US Air Force clearly give away, if you will, that this is going to be a movie about avaiation, and specifically test piloting. After all those credits, a man drives up to Edwards Air Force base, getting waved through the guard house, where the two men on duty identify the man as Maj. Lincoln Bond (William Holden) and wondering what he's up to know, which implies that he has a past.

We then hear radio chatter from the pilot to the ground about the difficulties one of the planes is having; that plane eventually crashes and burns, while Maj. Bond watches from the ground. At the officers' club, Maj. Bond hears from a fellow officer, Maj. Lee (Murray Hamilton), that the plan was being flown by Gen. Banner (Lloyd Nolan), who still likes to do test piloting even though you'd think as a general he's far too important for that as well a far too old. But this is also foreshadowing for what's to come later in the movie.

Maj. Bond then meets with Col. McKee (Charles McGraw), in a scene to provide character exposition and plot advancement. Bond has returned from Washington, and would like to start test flights. He had piloted planes in the past, but then the Korean War came. Bond was shot down and taken POW by the North Koreans, who tortured him until he broke. As a result, nobody really wants to trust him or let him fly planes again.

But one of the defense contractors is trying to sell the Air Force on a new plane, and that means lots of test flights as well as people to fly support behind the plane being tested. Maj. Bond does a test flight of the plane being marketed, and comes to the conclusion that the plane has fundamental engineering flaws that are going to make it unfit for purpose. Nobody wants to believe him thanks to his past in North Korea, and because other, lesser pilots don't spot any flaws.

Further complicating matters are two other subplots. One has been referenced before, which is Gen. Banner's advancing age. Maj. Bond sees him come close to collapse after a flight, but Banner still wants to conduct test flights. Worse is that Gen. Banner has as a secrtary and love interest Connie Mitchell (Virginia Leith). Connie is also the ex-girlfriend of Maj. Bond, from the days before he was taken prisoner in Korea.

Toward the Unknown doesn't tread any new ground -- or should I say airspace since this is an aviation moive. But what it does it does competently enough. And for the people into aviation is has a lot of footage that they'll like. It also has a fair number of good supporting performances. In addition to the aforementioned Nolan and McGraw, Paul Fix shows up as another general, while James Garner has one of his earliest roles as another test pilot. Toward the Unkown is certainly worth a watch for aviation buffs.

What if a bunch of amateurs tried to make Knute Rockne, All American?

Football season is firmly under way, and a little known movie that TCM ran during 31 Days of Oscar because it received an editing nomination is the biopic Crazylegs. It's getting an airing on TCM tomorrow (November 12) at 6:00 AM, so now is the time for the post on it.

Crazylegs is about early NFL star Elroy "Crazylegs" Hirsch (playing himself); as the movie opens he's on a football field in civilian clothes and it seems like he's about to retire. The movie was released in 1953 and in real life, Hirsch didn't retire until several years later. We then get some narration by Lloyd Nolan, who plays the part of Hirsch's high school coach, Win Brockmeyer. As you can guess, we're about to get the obligatory flashback to Hirsch's high school career....

Elroy Hirsch grew up in Wausau, WI, and got the nickname "Crazylegs" from his odd style of running, which he claimed came from running two miles to school every day and dodging various things in the sidewalks or on the side of the road. He finished high school in 1941, at a time when the college game was in some ways more corrupt, but in others didn't necessarily offer the money that's in it today. Hirsch's girlfriend and future wife Ruth (Joan Vohs) is accepted to the University of Wisconsin, so Elroy follows her there to play football.

But Elroy seems to care so much about football that he doesn't have time foor poor Joan. As a result, it's an on again, off again relationship although they do eventually get married (and in real life they were married 50-plus years until Elroy's death). World War II comes, but Elroy surprisingly doesn't get shipped off to fight. Instead, he enrolls in a Marine Corps program that allows him to do pilot training in conjunction with college, except that it's based out of the University of Michigan. So he goes there and becomes a several-sport star, eventually serving stateside after graduation.

Now, at this time, the NFL didn't exactly offer a lot of money, and there was a rival league, the All-American Football Conference. Hirsch had been drafted by the Los Angeles Rams of the NFL but decided to play for the Chicago Rockets of the AAFC. Unfortunately, he gets several injuries, ultimately getting hit in the head and a skull fracture that threatens to end his football career. But since he only knows football, he starts training like a maniac to try to get back to the professional game. Since this is a biopic, and the movie makes clear in the opening credits that it has several members of the world champion Rams of 1949 and 1951 playing themselves, we know that Hirsch is going to wind up on the Rams and then eventually be an integral part of their championship team.

The are a bunch of problems with Crazylegs. One is that Hirsch's story isn't as cinematic as you might think. There's just not enough conflict to sustain a truly interesting picture. (Contrast this with, say, I, Tonya, which is loaded with conflict.) The movie was made on a fairly low budget, and that shows. A lot of real footage from Hirsch's games is used (this is probably what got the editing nomination), but it's in old newsreel format while the staged action is all blocked for a 1.66:1 aspect ratio. Having to edit the newsreels for that really makes them look poor-quality.

Elroy Hirsch also wan't much of an actor, although at least he's only playing himself. He comes across as an appealing personality, and you can see why people would like him and why someone might want to do a biopic of him. Lloyd Nolan is professional as always, and elevates anything he's in, no matter how dire everything around him is.

So Crazylegs is a bit of a curiosity, and one that football fans might enjoy.

Lake Around the Lady

I've mentioned the Blind Spot blogathon before, where a blogger picks a dozen well-known movies they've not actually seen before and blogs about them over the course of the year. I haven't participated, largely because I don't know what movies I'm going to be watching over an entire year. But one of the movies that would have been a blind spot for me until now was the 1940s version of Lady in the Lake. I finally recorded it it last time it was on TCM, and since it's going to be on TCM again tomorrow, April 20, at 4:30 PM, I recently watched it in order to do a post on it.

Lady in the Lake is a hard movie to do a synopsis on, largely because the plot is so convoluted, thank you very much Raymond Chandler. Raymond Chandler's detective Phillip Marlowe is played here by Robert Montgomery, at least the few times you see him. We do see Marlowe giving the audience a bit of a prologue right at the top of the film, and then he tells us about how he wrote a story based on a case of a lady who drowned in a lake that may have been suicide, but was more likely murder.

As part of trying to flog the story, Marlowe goes to see Adrienne Fromsett (Audrey Totter), a publisher at a company run by Mr. Kingsby (Leon Ames). However, Adrienne's interest isn't really in Marlowe's story, but about his day job as a private investigator. Kingsby's wife has left him, ostensibly going to Mexico to seek a divorce, with some suggestion that Mrs. Kingsby is going to marry some guy named Lavery. Could Marlowe find out what's really going on?

The first indication that there's a problem comes at Lavery's place when, after a brief conversation in which Lavery insists he knows nothing about what's going on, he asks Marlowe if he has the time, despite there being a mantel clock in the room. This is really just an excuse to punch Marlowe out and pour alcohol on him, making him appear drunk like they do to Cary Grant in North by Northwest. That brings Marlowe into contact with the police, notably Lt. DeGarmot (Lloyd Nolan), who is investigating a bunch of the same people, but for a totally different reason.

Apparently, there really was a lady in a lake, with that lake being on a property owned by none other than Kingsby. There's some thought that the dead body might be the wife of Kingsby's caretaker, and Marlowe gets caught up in a murder investigation alongside the cops, who seem decidedly unhappy to have him on the case as well. Likewise, none of the people being investigated seem happy either. But who killed whom?

Part of the problem with Lady in the Lake is that the movie is pretty convoluted, although at least that's not as severe a problem as with another famous movie filmed from a Chandler book, The Big Sleep, which is notorious for how its plot makes little sense. The much bigger problem is the reason the movie is still so well-known today, and that's its direction. Robert Montgomery came up with the intriguing idea of having the entire movie be told from Marlowe's point of view. And I don't just mean narration here; I mean that for almost the entire movie, it's shot as though we're looking through Marlowe's eyes.

Unfortunately, that doesn't work here, in part because the movie cameras in use in the 1940s weren't really capable of pulling off such a thing. Nowadays, when we have cheap GoPros and similar small camera that can be worn to give off a POV, it might work. And if the technique were being used as a brief diversion, especially if this were for comic effect, it might not be so bad. But 100 minutes of a very slow, clunky camera trying to do POV? Oh heavens no.

Still, Lady in the Lake is another one of those movies you probably need to see for yourself to see just why the movie goes wrong.

Seven Waves Away

Tyrone Power is today's star in TCM's Summer Under the Stars, and to be honest I've actually blogged about quite a few of the movies being shown. One I hadn't blogged about is Abandon Ship (as the movie is titled on the print TCM ran the last time they ran it; the original title is apparently Seven Waves Away and it's also known as Seven Days from Now), which concludes Power's day at 4:00 AM Monday, so early Monday or overnight tonight depending on your preference. I had recorded it when TCM did a spotlight on "Movies at Sea", and with the upcoming airing I recently watched it to do a post on here.

The movie starts off with the opening credits being superimposed over the images of first brochures for a luxury around the world cruse followed a naval mine, so it's obvious that something ominous is about to happen even if you couldn't figure this out from the title Abandon Ship. Sure enough, as the credits are ending we get an explosion with the ship Crescent Star having hit the mine and about to go under.

Alec Holmes (Tyrone Power) is an officer on the ship, and got off the ship, which went down so quickly that there wasn't time for any of the lifeboats to be filled and set off from the ship. There's a lot of flotsam, however, and Alec is able to get aboard one piece of flotsam that has another couple of stranded passengers. And then -- Holmes spots a lifeboat off in the distance!

Alec swims over to it, and finds that it isn't a normal lifeboat, but a smaller one that's only designed to hold nine people. However, so many people were desperate to get off the Crescent Star, and this was the only boat we see, that it's severely overloaded, even having a bunch of men having to hang off the side of the boat holding on to ropes and having a life preserver around them. Adding one more person to the boad is like adding insult to injury, even if Holmes is an officer.

If that's not bad enough, there are a lot of problems aboard this tiny lifeboat, starting with the captain's presence. OK, it's not the captain's presence that's a problem, but the fact that the captain was mortally wounded in the explosion. Despite the fact that the ship's nurse, Julie White (Mai Zetterling) is on board, he's beyond treatment, as are several other of the people in the boat. Soon enough the captain does die and Holmes, being senior among the officers left on the boat, is given command.

This doesn't sit will with several of the others, since this is Holmes' first command. There's a junior officer, McKinley (Stephen Boyd); a retired general who has commanded, if only on land; and a glamorous-looking woman, Edith Middeton (Moira Lister), who keeps referring derisively to Holmes as "brave captain". And the nurse is Holmes' old girlfriend, which adds some more tension. Fortunately, though, there was another ship in the area. Except that Sparks tells us the explosion hit so quickly and destroyed the radio equipment before they had a chance to send out an SOS call. Oops.

So with nothing else to do, Holmes comes up with the brilliant idea of trying to have the men row to get the boat into a current that will take them to Africa, which is the nearest attainable landfall although that's 1500 miles away and will take them 15 days if they're lucky. The rations were only designed for nine, and even with people having died there's still way too many people on board, forcing Holmes to make some extremely difficult decisions.

I've made the argument in conjunction with several submarine movies that there are only so many ways to go because of the extremely confined spaces. I'd say that the same is true with Abandon Ship, considering how tiny the lifeboat is. I unsurprisingly found myself thinking of Alfred Hitchcock's Lifeboat. I think that movie has the advantage of having fewer characters, as well as having Walter Slezak play a Nazi which brings up some severe dramatic tension. Abandon Ship doesn't have that, resulting in a movie that's a bit more of a one-note storyline.

Not that Abandon Ship is a bad movie, especially when the movie tells us at the end that it's actually based on a true story (apparently from 100 years earlier, if IMDb's trivia section is to be believed). Power does well and is more than the 40s swashbuckler. The movie raises some thought-provoking ideas, but unfortunately doesn't do much more than that.

It Happened in Flatbush

Lloyd Nolan brightened up a lot of movies in supporting roles. The rare occasions he did get to be a lead were mostly in the B movie series as the detective Michael Shayne. One other movie with Nolan in the lead is It Happened in Flatbush. FXM is running it tomorrow at 8:45 AM, and again on Saturday at 4:35 AM.

Brooklyn's baseball team (not called the Dodgers although Ebbets Field was used for establishing shots) is lousy again, to the point that the current manager has up and quit in the middle of the season. The owner, Mac McAvoy (Sara Allgood) is looking for a new manager, and she has just the person in mind. However, she's going to have to go looking for that man....

Frank Maguire (Lloyd Nolan) is in the independent minor leagues, managing a no-name team of no-name players when McAvoy shocks the players by entering the locker room. She's looking for Maguire because she has fond memories of him, and wants to give him a chance to redeem himself. Maguire, for his part, isn't so certain he wants to go back to Brooklyn. Seven years earlier, in a pennant race, he committed an error that cost the team a title, earning him the nickname Butterfingers and the opprobrium of all the Brooklyn fans.

Still, Maguire does take the job. But when he gets to Brooklyn, he finds out that McAvoy has died, bequeathing the team to a consortium of family members, headed by McAvoy's niece Kathryn (Carole Landis). She's an heiress from one of McAvoy's siblings, living as a socialite in Manhattan and knowing next to nothing about either Brooklyn or baseball. She'd just as happily go with the rest of the family and sell the team, but press agent Sam Sloan (William Frawley) convinces them to hold put for at least the rest of the season.

Two things happen. One is that Maguire and Kathryn begin to fall in love. The other is that Maguire shakes things up in the locker room to the point that the team starts winning. But that winning comes at a bit of a price as Maguire's focus on the team causes him to miss a date with Kathryn, who promptly falls out of love with him and is perfectly willing to sell the team out from under him again.

Amazingly, the result is that things suddenly start to go south for Maguire and the team just as the critical final three-game series against the Cardinals is about to begin. Maguire is willing to leave the team for no good reason, and when he does come back to the team, he's somehow unable to manage the team properly unless Kathryn is in the stands. But with this being a feel-good movie released early in the USA's involvement in World War II, it's quite easy to figure out how the movie is going to end.

Nolan and Landis do the best they can with the material, but in the end it's fairly slight and lets them down. Baseball fans may be interested in some of the vintage footage of Ebbets Field, but they'll also be interested (or cringing) in spotting all the baseball-related plot holes, with the most egregious being the climax ignoring that Brooklyn would bat in the bottom of the ninth inning if St. Louis does score the tying run.

In the end, It Happened in Flatbush is utterly pedestrian material that you might want to watch once if you're a Lloyd Nolan or Carole Landis completist, but it's nothing particularly memorable. Judge for yourself, however. The movie has been released to DVD courtesy of Fox's MOD scheme.

Hannah's sisters and her

A couple of months back, TCM had a tribute to the late actor Max von Sydow. One of his films they ran is one in which he's got a supporting role is Hannah and Her Sisters. It's going to be on again, early tomorrow morning at 4:00 AM (or, I suppose, overnight tonight depending on what time zone you're in).

Mia Farrow plays Hannah, one of three daughters in an acting family which is getting together for another Thanksgiving dinner. Patriarch Evan (Lloyd Nolan in his final film) and Mom Norma (Maureen O'Sullivan) do love each other even though they have their squabbles. Hannah is married to Elliot (Michael Caine), not an actor by any means, with a couple of kids. Hannah used to be married to Mickey (Woody Allen), a writer for a sketch comedy TV show.

Hannah's life seems the most in order, as each of her sisters seems to have bigger problems. Lee (Barbara Hershey) is unemployed and living in a sparse studio with her much older artist boyfriend Frederick (that's von Sydow, not that you couldn't figure out which role he was playing since he had a very distinctive look). The other sister, Holly (Dianne Wiest), is trying to get gigs on Broadway or in commercials or anything acting-related, but to shis point she's been rather less than successful, and is reduced to working as a caterer with her friend April (Carrie Fisher).

One Day, Elliot is in a different part of Manhattan for a business meeting but arrives early and has time to kill, so he decides to look for an independent bookstore to browse in. Who should he run into, however, but Lee, who claims to be on her way to her AA meeting? She knows where there's a good bookstore, and after spending some time browsing together, Elliot buys Lee a book of e.e. cummings poetry. The two wind up having an affair, meeting in out of the way hotel rooms.

Holly sees a couple of guys, too, but the relationships don't go so well. Hannah, after her divorce from Mickey, decides to help Mickey and Holly both out by setting the two of them up on a date, but that first date goes disastrously. Then there's an architect whom Holly and April meet at one of their catering gigs. He takes them out to show them the architecture of Manhattan, and Holly even thinks of going out with him, but he can't really decide between the two women.

This being a Woody Allen movie, we also have to talk about his character in more detail. This is another of Allen's nebbish, neurotic types, thinking both that he's got a deadly tumor in his ear and realizing that, as a non-observant Jew, he's got a crisis of faith in wondering what will be after he dies. So he considers joining other religions.

There's quite a lot going on in Hannah and Her Sisters, some of which is quite good, and some of it not as good. Nolan and O'Sullivan shine as the elderly parents in their Thanksgiving scenes together. The Hannah-Elliot-Lee triangle also works well, with all three actors doing a good job and Caine picking up a Supporting Actor Oscar for his part. And as with any Woody Allen movie, people who like New York City will like the photography of New York as it was circa 1985.

Ironically, however, for me, it's the presence of Allen that's one of the weak spots for me. I have to admit I'm not a huge fan of his neurotic shtick from about Annie Hall on, so I tend to be a bit biased against him as an actor. But the contrast in Hannah and Her Sisters was for me even starker than in some of his other movies. We get it, Woody, and it's not as funny as you might think it is.

Allen and Farrow were a couple at the time the movie was made, and some of their children get small roles as Hannah's children. (IMDb also says that Mia Farrow's own apartment was used as one of the sets.) Considering what eventually happened in the Allen/Farrow relationship, some people might find it a bit off-putting. But I didn't find myself thinking about that at all.

When I checked, Hannah and Her Sisters seemed to be out of print on DVD, although it is on Amazon Prime streaming. That's a shame, since the movie is really worth a watch for the performances of pretty much everybody but Woody Allen.

See You in Hell, Darling

There are some movies that aren't very good, but that received an Oscar nomination in the Best Original Song category, so TCM could run them in 31 Days of Oscar. A good example of this is An American Dream.

Stuart Whitman plays Stephen Rojack, a war hero who came home and got a TV talk show in Los Angeles, which is a crazy sort of show that has him ranting to a couple of guests who don't seem allowed to get a word in edgewise, while taking phone calls from the home audience. But he never actually puts the viewers' voices on air, just throwing out rapid-fire rejoinders based on what the viewers are supposedly saying.

One of those viewers is Deborah (Eleanor Parker), who just happens to be Stephen's estranged wife. She's waching from her bedroom in a penthouse apartment in a building her father Barney Kelly (Lloyd Nolan) built for her, while carrying on an affair with a guy who's in bed with her. She calls in not to talk about tonight's topic, which is police corruption and how they're letting the mobster Ganucci get away with mayhem; instead, she calls to taunt Stephen, she just having returned from Europe.

Stephen has decided that he's going to file for divorce since this is clearly a loveless marriage, and goes to Deborah's penthouse after the show. She absolutely does not want to grant a divorce, and tells Stephen this most histrionically, continuing to taunt him, throw things at him, and even break a liquor bottle and threaten him with that.

The struggle continues from Deborah's bedroom out to the balcony after Stephen stupidly tries to wash his face in the fountain out there rather then just getting the hell out of the apartment. She throws more stuff at him, and in the struggle, Deborah ends up on the railing. Eventually she goes over, falling to her death 30 stories below, in an incident that looks as though it might have been an accident Stephen could have prevented, or possibly getting pushed by Stephen -- make your own judgment.

Up to this point, An American Dream has been spectularly, hilarity-inducingly awful. Unfortunately once Deborah falls off the balcony the movie switches to being just tediously bad. Stephen gets down to street level where Deborah's body has been run over by a car... containing Ganucci (Joe De Santis), who for whatever reason returned to California despite having a subpoena to testify before the grand jury hanging over his head. Also in the car is Ganucci's nephew Nicky (Les Crane), and Nicky's girlfriend Cherry (Janet Leigh), who just happened to be Stephen's old girlfriend before he knocked her up and left her for Deborah and her fabulously wealthy father.

The police investigate and think that Stephen murdered Deborah, while he bizarrely claims suicide, and bizarrely doesn't clam up and request a lawyer the moment he's brought in for questioning. Stephen tries to ask Deborah for help, but her mob boyfriend and his friends are pissed with Stephen first for railing against Ganucci and then being the reason why Ganucci got brought in for questioning as well.

This material was based on a novel by Norman Mailer that I haven't read. In theory there's some interesting stuff here, but somehow it went way off the rails, which is a surprise considering the cast. Now, if it had been Skidoo or Valley of the Dolls-level bad, it would be fun. But as I said, it doesn't keep up that level once Eleanor Parker's character dies, and that's a shame. The movie understandably bombed at the box office, thanks in part to scathing criticism. Warner Bros. responded by renaming the movie See You in Hell, Darling, but that didn't help.

You can now watch An American Dream on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive.

More Michael Shayne

I mentioned Fox's series of movies about private detective Michael Shayne several years back. Another one of the movies is in the FXM rotation, The Man Who Wouldn't Die, which will be on FXM tomorrow at 8:50 AM and again Friday at 6:00 AM.

It takes a bit before Shayne (Lloyd Nolan) shows up. The movie starts at a big house owned by businessman Dudley Wolff (Paul Harvey). He and a couple of people working at his house are involved in a burial, and then his daughter Catherine (Marjorie Weaver) unexpectedly shows up. She tells Dad and her stepmother Anna (Helene Reynolds), that she's suddenly gotten married, which might not be a bad thing for Dad since her new hubby is a lawyer in DC who might be able to help with the Senate investigation that's looking into Dad. However, the husband wasn't able to get out of Washington just yet.

Catherine goes to bed, waking up with a start when a shadowy figure with glowing eyes enters her room and then shoots at her. Catherine is frightened, but when Dad and the rest of the folks come in, there's no evidence of a bullet, so they think she just dreamed being shot at. While going for a walk the next day, she runs into Shayne, who's an old friend, and tells him her story. Would he both investigate and pretend to be her husband? Dad obviously doesn't want the authorities around, so Shayne can't present himself as a private investigator.

Meanwhile, it's been discovered that the the body that Dad and the other guys buried has gone missing, so apparently he isn't quite dead! That, and Shayne does find the bullet, telling Catherine not to let anybody else know, but she's such a dum-dum that she blabs anyway.

To be honest, the mystery in The Man Who Wouldn't Die is rather too complicated and solved by a bit of a deus ex machina. But that doesn't stop the movie from being a nice little entry in what is another of the many B mystery series that were being cranked out in the 1930s and 40s. Lloyd Nolan is good yet again as the wisecracking detective, and everybody else is adequate. The Man Who Wouldn't Die is the sort of film you should sit back with a bowl of popcorn and watch when you want something that's not too demanding.

As far as I can tell, The Man Who Wouldn't Die hasn't gotten a DVD release yet, so you're going to have to catch the FXM showings.

Johnny Apollo

Doing a search of the blog posts on my hard drive, it looks as though another movie I have yet to do a full-length blog-post on is Johnny Apollo. It's coming up on TCM tonight at 10:00 PM.

Tyrone Power stars as Robert Cain Jr., the son of wealthy businessman Robert Cain Sr. (Edward Arnold). Cain Jr. is a student at Harvard, presumably being groomed to join Dad's business, which is a stock brokerage. However, the son's happy world is about to come crashing down upon him. Well, Dad's is about to, as well, because Dad is being indicted and convicted of embezzlement. There's no more money for college, so it's off to find a job in the real world. However, no honest business seems to want a Robert Cain in their workforce. At least, not any of the businesses that hire people out of Harvard; one supposes the younger Cain could have gone into blue-collar work. So Cain changes his name and gets a job -- which he's able to hold until it's discovered that his real name is Robert Cain. This time, the boss says that he would have been willing to hire him if only he had used his real name. Yeah right.

Without any good prospects, young Robert goes to see lawyer Emmett Brennan (Charley Grapewin) to see if the lawyer can obtain parole for his father. After all, the guy succeeded in gettting another guy who was sentenced at the same time as Dad out on parole. That guy is Mickey Dwyer (Lloyd Nolan), who runs the gang that has a monopoly more or less on the underworld. Robert Jr. needs money to get a parole for Dad, and honest labor seems a closed door to him, so he decides to join Dwyer's gang. Also there is "Lucky" Dubarry (Dorothy Lamour), a street-smart woman who nkows more than Cain.

What a bright idea. Robert, now going by the name Johnny Apollo, proves himself to be quite good at the rackets. But these of course are crimes, and we know from Code movies that crime does not pay. Further complicating matters is that Lucky has fallen for Cain/Johnny Apollo -- considering that Lucky was Dwyer's moll, this is a problem. Eventually the law catches up with the Dwyer gang, and the two men get sent to prison. Dad discovers that his son has joined the rackets, and is not one bit happy with it. You see, he spent his time being an impossibly model prisoner, or the sort that you wonder whether they exist in real life. How can Johnny Apollo atone for his crimes, and regain his father's love?

Johnny Apollo isn't a bad movie. Tyrone Power had never played a character like this before, previously having done some period pieces like Lloyd's of London and some light comedies like Love Is News. Perhaps the meatiest work he had done was in The Rains Came the previous year, and even that is a costume drama. Power does reasonably well here, although somebody like Clark Gable over at MGM or Humphrey Bogart at Warner Bros. would have found the material right up their alley (even though they would both have been much too old for the part). Edward Arnold is fairly good as well, even if his character is a bit unrealistic. Lloyd Nolan is interestingly cast, since he played a lot of good guys at Fox; Johnny Apollo came before most of those however. If there's a problem with the movie, it's that the script is problematic, especially once the younger Robert Cain gets sent to prison. Still, Johnny Apollo rises above the script problems and is more than worth a watch.

Johnny Apollo is available from the TCM Shop as part of a Tyrone Power box set; I'm not certain if it's available as a stand-alone.

Bad Boy

I should have blogged about Bad Boy last night. It's airing at 1:45 PM today on TCM, and it's not available on DVD. It's also well worth a viewing.

Bad Boy is the first starring role for Audie Murphy. Here, he plays the young Danny, who at the beginning of the film is working as a bellboy in a Texas hotel, trying to evade the authorities because he's got a long string of petty crimes he's committed. Indeed, he's still involved in a life of crime, as he and some friends try to rob a craps game going on at the hotel. This time, Danny is arrested, and sent before that old Hollywood trope, a sympathetic judge (Selena Royle). She gives Danny a second chance: go to the Variety Club Boys ranch or go to jail. Obviously, Danny picks the ranch, figuring he can be a smooth operator and break out of the ranch.

To that end, Danny begins working on the ranch owner, Marshall Brown (played by Lloyd Nolan) and his wife Maud (Jane Wyatt) almost as soon as he gets there, with the intent that it all be a ruse. Danny doesn't even want to get close to the other boys. The other boys, for their part, seem mostly willing to make fun of Danny if he's not going to get with the program. Marshall, of course, has other ideas. He believes all these boys can be reformed, by having them work the ranch and give them whatever education they missed as well as the chance to learn a trade. Danny's a tougher nut, but Marshall is convinced that there has to be something that caused Danny to run away from home and take up a life of crime.

Of course, there's something, and it's fairly traumatic. Danny's father died when he was very young, and Mom remarried a man (Rhys Williams) who had an older daughter (Martha Vickes). Needless to say, neither of them is too sympathetic toward Danny. Stepdad is, I suppose you could say, the 1940s version of Dr. Phil: a pop psychologist who's taken his show out of the doctor's office (he does radio and the carnival circuit; TV of course not being much around at the time) to become the sort of man you can't help but wonder whether he's on the level or whether he's more in it for the money. Stepdad thinks Danny is kind of weak (reminiscent of the Bobby Darin character in Pressure Point), and also might have been responsible for his mother's death. (In the stepfamily's defense, Mom died after Danny helpfully tried to give her some medicine that he probably shouldn't have.)

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Danny is still intent on breaking out, and his activities have gotten to the point that the police are really taking notice, which could be curtains for Danny, as he'd be forced to go to prison, which would obviously be much worse than the ranch. Will the police catch Danny? Or will Marshall finally be able to get to the bottom of Danny's psychological trauma and intercede on Danny's behalf before the court?

Audie Murphy is pretty good in an early role. He's no Jack Carson in the unctuous user department, but he's also a better straight-up crook than Carson could be, and I don't think Carson would have done well in any sort of horse opera. Lloyd Nolan seems to have played quite a lot of sympathetic types, and he does that very well here. Also of note is James Gleason as the ranch foreman. Bad Boy isn't a prestige movie, having been made by low-budget Allied Artists, but for what it is, it's very well made. It's too bad that, having been made at Allied Artists, it's probably less likely to receive a DVD release.

Fox mystery series

I briefly mentioned the Lone Wolf mystery series a few weeks back; the movies are airing on Saturday mornings on TCM for the next several weeks. Mystery series -- that is, B-movies in which an actor played the same detective over the course of several pictures -- were quite popular in the late 1930s and early 1940s. 20th Century-Fox had their own series, the seven Michael Shayne movies. Two of them are airing tomorrow on FMC: Just off Broadway at 7:30 AM, followed by Dressed to Kill at 9:00 AM.

I haven't seen Just Off Broadway, so I can't really comment on it. But Dressed to Kill showed up a few weeks back, and it's a pretty entertaining little mystery. Fox contract player Lloyd Nolan plays detective Michael Shayne, who at the start of this movie is supposed to get married to his long suffereing girlfriend Joanne (Mary Beth Hughes). Suddenly he hears a scream in the apartment hotel where he's staying, and discovers that another of the tenants, a wealthy Broadway producer, has been shot along with a female companion. Just as interestingly, they're both in costume, and the shootings seem to have been particularly ingenious. Michael, of course, begins to investigate and finds a particularly baffling mystery. The producer had gathered together several of the surviving cast members from a show he had done 25 years earlier, and it seems as if everybody at the dinner had a motive to kill him.

To be honest, this is fairly standard stuff for a mystery series. There are the red herrings, the hidden identities, and perhaps most fun in Dressed to Kill, the bumbling police detective, who is played by William Demarest. Demarest was one of the great comedic character actors and is in fine form here as the policeman who is trying to stay one step ahead of Shayne but always seems to be one step behind. The resolution of the mystery isn't perfect, although to be fair, that's the case in a lot of mystery movies. Still, Dressed to Kill provides good entertainment value for its B-movie level.

Gotta love those '50s soap operas!

Movies like A Summer Place may be overwrought, but they can be a hell of a lot of fun precisely because they're overwrought. A movie with a very different plot which has the same qualities is A Hatful of Rain, which is airing at 2:00 PM ET tomorrow on the Fox Movie Channel.

Don Murray stars as Korean War veteran Johnny Pope,who is living in a one of those 1950s concrete New York City apartments with his wife Celia (Eva Marie Saint). Unfortunately, Johnny was injured in the war, and probably thanks in part to the painkillers he got from Uncle Sam, he's become a narcotics addict, with an expensive habit and a pusher (Henry Silva) he can't pay. He's also got trouble holding down a job thanks to the heroin habit. But his wife, not knowing about the habit, loves him, and he's got a brother Polo (Anthony Franciosa) who is willing to be co-dependent and try to keep Johnny's nuts out of the fire. It's not much, but it's a sort of a living.

This equilibrium is about to be spoiled, however, by the arrival of Johnny and Polo's father John Sr., played by 1940s Fox stalwart Lloyd Nolan. Dad knows nothing about his son's drug habit, thanks to a complex and strained relationship between the father and his two sons that leads neither of them to want to tell him about it: Johnny because he doesn't want to tell anybody, and Polo because he's always felt Dad loved Johnny more than him. It's going to be tough to keep the habit a secret from Dad, especially because Johnny has the pusher coming after him.

Now, there are good movies about addiction. The Lost Weekend, about alcoholism, is excellent, and The Days of Wine and Roses is almost as good. As for heroin, you can watch the very good The Man With the Golden Arm. However, there seems something not quite right about A Hatful of Rain. I think it's the fact that the movie tries to include the family drama in with the drug addiction story. There are quite a few family drama movies out there from the 1950s and 1960s, and they're all a bit over the top, even supposed classics like Rebel Without a Cause. Indeed, I think it's the same thing that makes movies like the Lana Turner version of Imitation of Life things that I laugh at. That having been said, A Hatful of Rain benefits from location shooting: those ugly post-war housing projects, cramped and with the cold, steril concrete stairwells and white walls, are brought out very well.

A Hatful of Rain hasn't made its way to DVD yet, and despite all its flaws, is a movie that deserves at least one viewing.

Somewhere in the Night

One of the movies in the current Fox Movie Channel rotation that I haven't recommended before is Somewhere in the Night, which is airing tomorrow morning at 10:30 AM ET.

John Hodiak stars as a World War II veteran who got injured pretty badly in the war, and is suffering a case of amnesia as a result. The only things he knows is that his girlfriend was going to leave him for some reason, and his friend Larry Cravat left him $5,000 in a bank in Los Angeles. So, he heads off to Los Angeles, only to find out that he's unable to see Mr. Cravat, despite the fact that a lot of people out there would like to see Larry. And being a friend of Larry Cravat's might not be such a good thing for him. The other people looking for Cravat send thugs after Hodiak, leading him to escape into the dressing room of nightclub singer Nancy Guild (an actress who never really made it to the big time). She might be willing to help him, and thinks that her boss, Richard Conte, can certainly help him. Even better for Hodiak is the fact that there's a kindly police detective (Lloyd Nolan) who also wants the goods on Cravat -- apparently, that $5,000 Cravat had promised is part of a cool million.

Thus begins our tale of mystery and murder. The bad news is, it's an extremely twisty tale, one that you have to pay close attention to if you don't want to get confused as to what's going on. Also, the cast is mostly people who are OK, but not great. That having been said, it's not notably bad, either. If you're willing to put in a little effort, it's more than entertaining enough. But if you're trying to interest somebody who isn't already a fan of 40s movies and noirs in either genre, there are a lot of better movies with which to start off.

Fox went through a phase of releasing a lot of their noirs to DVD, with the result that there are a lot of 40s films from them on DVD that you might not otherwise expect. Somewhere in the Night is one of them.