Fate Without Music

I was looking at the upcoming TCM schedule, and noticed that tomorrow, April 7, at 8:00 AM, you can catch the Howard Keel musical version of Kismet. It's from 1955, based on a then-recent musical, with the musical being based on an old stage play from the turn of the last century. That play had already been turned into a non-musical movie on multiple occasions, most notably a 1944 MGM Technicolor production also titled Kismet. I have that 1944 version sitting on my DVR, so I figure that now wouldn't be a bad time to do a post on it.

Thankfully, the movie has some opening narration that greatly helps to explain everything that's going on in the movie. The setting is Baghdad in its golden age, or "old Baghdad when it was new and shiny" as the narrator tells us. Hafiz (Ronald Colman) is a beggar by day who has somehow obtained some fancy clothes that enable him to go out at night disguising himself as a prince, calling himself Prince Hassir. It's as his prince that he makes his way into the palace of the Grand Vizier where he meets the Vizier's Macedonian wife Jamilla (Marlene Dietrich). But we're getting ahead of ourselves here.

Also given prominence in the opening narration is the nominal ruler of the empire, the Caliph (James Craig). The Caliph is smart enough to know that his advisers are going to engage in toadyism and tell him whatever they think he wants to hear, and that those things aren't necessarily going to be the truth. So he escapes from his own palace at night, dressing in regular clothes and passing himself off as the son of the royal gardener. This he does in order to be able to find out what his subjects honestly think. What they think isn't pretty, of course. But this going out at knight is also what brings him into contact with Hafiz as Hassir. One other person the Caliph meets is Marsinah (Joy Page). He falls in love with her, not knowing that she's really the daughter of Hafiz. Hafiz, meanwhile, has been feeding Marsinah a bunch of lies about how she's going to marry a prince and her life will be one of luxury.

Now, as I said earlier, Hafiz meets Jamilla, and is taken with her. The feeling is mutual, although Jamilla is smart enough to know that Hassir is a disguise as there's no real Prince Hassir in Baghdad. After all, the arrival of a prince would be big news, especially in the palaces. In any case, Jamilla is also the wife of the Vizier, played by Edward Arnold. Edward Arnold's casting is a sign that the Vizier is the baddie in the piece. While the Caliph is the nominal power, the Vizier fancies himself as the real power, and he's going to get into a power struggle with the Caliph. He also meets Hassir when Hafiz gets himself invited to the Vizier's place by posing as the prince. This is, unfortunately, going to cause a great deal of legal difficulty for Hafiz when the Vizier figures out the deception. But it also is what really puts the plot into motion for the second half of the movie.

Kismet received four Oscar nominations (which is why TCM aired it -- as part of 31 Days of Oscar) in various technical categories. It's easy to see why the movie picked up those nominations, but not for any of the more traditionally prestigious categories like acting or direction. The movie is certainly lovely to look at, and to be fair to the actors they do a reasonably good job with the material even if none of them look Arab. What makes this version of Kismet a movie that's not as well remembered as other 1940s classics is, I think, the screenplay, which is slow to develop and tends to meander, as if the screenwriters couldn't quite decide what to do.

That isn't to say this version of Kismet is bad. It's more to say that you wonder whether a truly classic movie could have been made from the material. I have yet to see the musical version, so maybe that musical will be the classic.

Angel of no particular color

I bought a four-film box set of Marlene Dietrich movies some time back, which I mentioned when I reviewed Seven Sinners a year ago. I recently watched another movie off of it, Angel.

Dietrich unsurprisingly plays the angel, although that's not her real name of course. She's first seen checking into a Paris hotel under an assumed name, which is for a good reason. She's in Paris looking up a friend, a Russian émigrée the Grand Duchess Anna Dmitrievna (Laura Hope Crews) so that she can commiserate about her personal problems.

To be honest, her personal problems could be a lot worse. Her real name is Lady Maria Barker, and she's married to a prominent British diplomat Sir Frederick (Herbert Marshall) who is prominent with the League of Nations in Geneva and is constantly going there because of all the important international political events going on (the movie was released in 1937, so things could still heat up more). Because Sir Frederick is away all the time, Lady Maria feels a bit neglected.

The Grand Duchess runs a salon of sorts where fashionable people meet. One man who goes to the salon is Anthony Halton (Melvyn Douglas), and when he sees Lady Maria, he's immediately taken by her beauty. So he takes her out for a night on the town, although she doesn't say anything about what her identity is, or the fact that she's married. Anthony like her so much that he refers to her as the titular Angel. She likes him too, but isn't certain whether she's ready to be unfaithful to her husband. So she says if she wants to continue the relationship, she'll meet him same place, same time next week.

Lady Maria returns home to Sir Frederick, who has some time off from his business in Geneva. But what Lady Maria doesn't know is that Anthony served in World War I with Sir Frederick and know each other as a result. (Frederick obviously doesn't know anything about what happened in Paris.) And Anthony decides to show up that the Barker estate, not realizing that Angel is his old friend's wife. You can imagine the dilemma for Lady Maria.

Angel is an odd little movie. It was directed by Ernst Lubitsch and has an impressive cast, and yet it feels like something is missing. Maybe it's the script, but everything felt a little flat, as though it was hard to care about any of the characters or their personal problems. There's some comic relief from Edward Everett Horton, but even that doesn't come to as much as it should.

That's not to say Angel is bad at all, just that it could be better and is a fairly minor entry in the filmographies of all the main participants.

Two years before The Spoilers

One of my recent DVD purchases at amazon was this two-disc Marlene Dietrich set. This past weekend, I decided to watch a new-to-me movie off it, Seven Sinners.

Dietrich stars as Bijou, a nightclub singer who's been plying her trade in the islands of Southeast Asia. Based on the language used being American English, one might guess it's pre-war Philippines (which was an American territory at the time), although a shot of a map early on suggests she might have done some work in Dutch Indonesia or British Malaya. (Most other synopses claim it's the South Seas, which would make more sense if it weren't for that map.) Anyhow, her beauty cosistently causes the sailors to go riotously mad, something that the the authorities don't like for understandable reasons. So she's about to be deported from yet another island. She leaves with her two friends, dishonorably discharged US sailor Ned (a young Broderick Crawford), and magician/pickpocket Sasha (Mischa Auer). They're going to an island that Bijou has been to before, but the island is getting a new governor in Henderson (Samuel S. Hinds), so she figures she can go back there and fly under the radar as they say nowadays but didn't then since radar wasn't a thing.

Henderson has a lovely daughter Dorothy (Anna Lee) who is the romantic interest for a young navy lieutenant, Dan Brent (John Wayne). When Bijou gets off the boat, she runs into Brent, who understandably find his interest piqued because who wouldn't. All the other navy guys are even more interested. As for Bijou, she goes to the Seven Sinners club, where she worked in her previous stint. The club owner Tony (Billy Gilbert) is none too pleased because he's seen Bijou's reputation first hand. That, and he's got a new patron in Antro (Oskar Homolka) who has a predilection for throwing knives and who thinks he can keep Bijou for himself.

The rest of the plot is predictable. Brent falls fully in love with Bijou and intends to put his navy career in jeopardy in order to marry her, while she winds up in danger from Bijou, as does Brent, leading to the climactic fight scene. (You'd think the Navy would just declaer the Seven Sinners Club off-limits, as they did to various places in Sayonara, which would solve much of the navy's problems.)

Dietrich and Wayne have good chemistry in what was their first film together, and the film is moderately entertaining. But as I watched, I couldn't help but think of The Spoilers which they would make two years later. The characters and plot of Seven Sinners don't feel as fully fleshed out as in The Spoilers. Antro seems like he must have had more of a past with Bijou that isn't fully explained. That, and why he didn't get deported from the island for his criminal activities, since he seems to have an entire gang.

Still, I'd definitely recommend Seven Sinners. Especially on a moderately-priced box set. As for that set, it's got two movies on each disc, with no extras, but you get what you pay for. The image quality seemed OK, but I don't have a TV with high-enough resolution to notice mildly bad images. (It's nowhere near The Walls of Malapaga in terms of image quality, looking like it could air on TCM and not seem out of place.)

The Angel of Color

Another movie I watched off my DVR this weekend is the 1930 German version of The Blue Angel.

The movie is probably best remembered for making a star out of Marlene Dietrich, but the movie is really about a different character. Prof. Immanuel Rath (Emil Jannings) is a teacher of English at the local Gymnasium, which in the old German system was the most advanced and academic type of secondary education, so even though the subtitles refer to the institution as a college, it's probably more accurate that the students are about 16 or 17 and not fully legal adults. Anyhow, Prof. Rath is very stuffy and old-fashioned, with his one real joy in life being a songbird that unfortunately dies in the opening scene. As his maid says, it stopped singing long ago.

When Rath gets to the Gymnasium, he finds that his students seem more interested in Lola Lola (Marlene Dietrich), who is one of the acts at the local nightclub, except that this is one of those lower-class nightclubs. Rath thinks that somebody like Lola Lola is corrupting to the morals of German youth, and he's horrified that they would even buy postcards with her image! (For heaven's sake, these are pubescent men. Of course they're going to have sex on the brain.) Not only that, but Rath thinks it's his place to do something about it, making one wonder where the hell the parents are.

So Rath gets the brilliant idea to go off to the nightclub, Der blaue Engel (the titular "Blue Angel"), to see Lola Lola and what it is about her that make the students spend so much time there. But Rath is so strait-laced that at first, he doesn't get it at first. It isn't until the second visit, when another patron tries to enter Lola's dressing room and take advantage of her in a way that Rath doesn't approve of. What Rath doesn't realize is that he's actually been falling in love with Lola, so after the fight with the other patron, Rath, marries Lola!

This costs Rath his job at the Gymnasium, but gets Rath a new job as a clown in the nightclub act, which starts going around Germany. However, it eventually comes back to Rath's home town to perform at Der blaue Engel, only for everybody in town to mock him....

The Blue Angel is rightly known for Dietrich's performance, and it's certainly noteworthy even though Dietrich isn't as good a singer as her reputation might lead you to believe. Jannings is good, although I failed to develop much sympathy for his character. Couldn't he understand simple human biology would lead his students to tak an interest in Lola?

For me, it didn't help that the print TCM ran wasn't the best. My German is generally good enough that I could more or less get by with cpationing in German. Here, I found the German soundtrack very difficult to follow. The visuals also didn't look particularly crisp to me.

The Blue Angel is available on DVD and Blu-ray, with a two-disc set from Kino Lorber, which includes both the German version and an English version that was made simultaneously (Hollywood also made multiple language versions of movies in the early sound days, most notably Anna Christie).

The Spoilers (1942)

I mentioned over the weekend that I watched the 1942 movie The Spoilers Since it's available on DVD, it's worth doing a full-length post on.

The plot is the sort of thing that's been done in a bunch of movies. It's about 1900, in Nome, Alaska, which as you'll know from my recent review of Klondike Annie, was an era when there was a gold rush going on, so everybody was trying to get to Alaska to strike it rich. Roy Glennister (John Wayne) has been there for a while, to the point that he and is partner Dextry (Harry Carey) have a gold claim that they've been prospecting for some time. However, since the law hasn't quite reached this remote part of the Alaska Territory yet, claim jumpers abound, and people who don't have the means that Glennister and Dextry have had are seeing their claims fraudulently questioned.

That's about to happen to Glennister and Dextry too. Their operation has been financed in part by saloonkeeper Cherry Malotte (Marlene Dietrich), who has been looking forward to Glennister's return from Seattle. Also on the boat from Seattle is the new Judge Stillman (Samuel S. Hinds), who is supposed to bring law to this part of Alaska. But he's accompanied by his niece Helen (Margaret Lindsay), to whom Glennister has taken a shine, much to Cherry's consternation. Rounding out the leads is new claims commissioner Alex McNamara (Randolph Scott). He sees Cherry trying to get Glennister's claim from the current records office; she's worried that the new claim jumpers are going to try to destroy the evidence.

Cherry has good reason to be fearful, as soon enough, there are people trying to dispute Glennister and Dextry's claim. They know they're in the right because they've been mining for years when there was almost nobody prospecting in Alaska, but good luck proving that to the judge. Dextry, for his part, isn't so certain he wants to trust the judge. And for once, his judgment and not Glennister's is more on the mark here. We eventually discover that Glennister and McNamara are in cahoots, perverting the course of justice to try to take Glennister and Dextry's claim away from them.

This sort of thing has been done before both in the guise of a gold rush -- indeed, this is the fourth version of The Spoilers and there was still one more to come in the mid-1950s -- as well as other sorts of westerns. But it's done quite entertainingly here. Wayne is suitably studly; Scott is suitably ambiguous as to whose side he's ultimately on; Dietrich is suitably feisty and sexually charged. There's also Richard Barthelmess at the end of his career as Cherry's second-in-command at the saloon. The romantic story line and the mining story line mesh well, and the movie climaxes with a big extended fight scene between Wayne and Scott.

Even though The Spoilers is treading really old ground, it's still an enormously fun movie, and one that is more than worth the watch.

TCM Star of the Month May 2018: Marlene Dietrich

We're a bit late into a new month to get a new TCM Star of the Month, but that's because TCM decided to spend last Thursday night honoring Robert Osborne. That, and they picked a star where getting enough movies for five nights might have been an issue. At any rate, tonight's the first night for that star, Marlene Dietrich. Her movies show up tonight and the rest of the Thursdays in May.

This being the first night of the salute, it's unsurprising that we get five of her earlier movies. The photo above is from Blonde Venus, airing overnight at 3:30 AM, which may be more interesting for the costumes than for the story. Oh, it's not bad, it's just the sort of creaky story that was a thing in the 30s but wouldn't work today.

I wouldn't say that The Scarlet Empress (10:00 PM) is a favorite of mine by any stretch, but the photography is stunning, making the movie worth one watch. I rather preferred Shanghai Express (midnight).

Desire

So I DVRed Desire when TCM ran it back in June as part of a night of Marlene Dietrich movies. It turns out that the movie is available on DVD as part of Universal's MOD scheme, so I can be comfortable blogging about it and anybody who wants to see it being able to.

Gary Cooper plays Tom Bradley, an American automotive engineer who has been doing some work in Paris, and who wants to go vacation in Spain for a bit before heading back to America. (The movie was released a few months before the start of the Spanish Civil War, for those paying attention.) The only thing is, he's going to have to drive there because of his employer's desire to have him do some PR work. On the way out of Paris, he has a bumper-to-bumper collision with Madeleine de Beaupre (Marlene Dietrich).

Madeleine goes to Duvalle, a fine jeweler, and decides to buy one of the finest strings of pearls in the shop. She tells the jeweler that she's the wife of Dr. Pauquet (Alan Mowbray), one of the most renowned neurologists in France even if they didn't use that term back in the day. When Madeleine goes to see Dr. Pauquet that she's Mme. Duvalle and that she's worried about her husband, who is going to try to bring a bill to Dr. Pauquet. Madeleine walks out of the doctor's office, basically having Pauquet, but especially Duvalle.

However, she has to get the pearls out of the country. At the border of France and Spain, who should she meet but good old Tom Bradley? She's able to slip him the pearls without his knowledge, and the pearls make it safely into Spain. However, Madeleine has car troubles and hitches a ride with Tom before ultimately stealing and crashing his car!

Of course, Tom is going to find out where Madeleine is staying in San Sebastian, in order to look her up to be reimbursed for the car. Tom, of course, knows nothing about the pearls. But Tom also knows he's beginning to fall in love with Madeleine. Madeleine, for her part, finds herself falling in love with Tom, too, which presents a bigger problem. Madeleine didn't steal those pearls herself; she's part of a gang with Margoli (John Halliday), who is posing in San Sebastian as her uncle. The last half (at least) of the movie is a cat-and-mouse game among the three involving both romance and the attempt to get those pearls.

Desire is another of those very well-made movies, down in no small part to Ernst Lubitsch being on board as the producer (not the director; that was Frank Borzage who was also pretty darn good). It helps to have Dietrich and Cooper, as well as the higher-end production values that Paramount was always able to bring.

As for the story, I have to admit that it fell slightly short of expectations for me. That's probably more because the drawing-room style of comedy that had been a bigger thing in the early 1930s when the camera was more static has never been my thing. Too much of the second half is stuck in that hotel room, and why is Tom staying with them anyway once they get the pearls off him? There's also the problem that, since Madeleine is after all a thief, the Production Code is going to have a problem with resolving the story in the way you'd expect of Tom and Madeleine ending up together. That's a minor quibble, however, and as more my slightly bigger problem, anybody who likes this style of comedy is absolutely going to love the movie.

The notorious ranch

Another of the movies I finally got around to watching off of my DVR that just happens to be available on DVD is Rancho Notorious.

The movie starts off the opening credits, over some some about the "legend of Chuck-a-Luck"; more on that later. After that, we get to some town in Wyoming where Vern Haskell (Arthur Kennedy) in town at the bank, where he sees his fiancée. However, she's not long for the world, as some criminal comes into the place and while she's alone in there, gets her to open the safe, at which point the criminal steals all the gold and kills Vern's fiancée! Needless to say, Vern is none too happy about this.

So Vern vows to find the man who murdered his fiancée. His initial investigations run in to the murderer's partner in crime, who has just been shot for wanting to split the gold now instead of at Chuck-a-Luck. Vern meets up with the shot partner-in-crime just before that guy finally kicks the bucket, and his last action is to whisper the word "Chuck-a-Luck" to Vern. Obviously, this is a reference to something other than the gambling game, but what?

Vern goes around the West, getting from one place to another amazingly quickly it seems and eventually finding out that there was some woman named Altar Keane (Marlene Dietrich) and that apparently, Chuck-a-Luck is her ranch near the border, a place where various criminals hide out from the authorities in exchange for giving a portion of their loot to her. Vern only learns the story in dribs and drabs, until one night in prison he meets outlaw Frenchy Fairmont (Mel Ferrer). Frenchy is on his way to Chuck-a-Luck to escape the authorities as well as to see Altar again, since he likes to think of himself as her romantic interest.

Things change, of course, when Vern gets to Chuck-a-Luck. He's trying to find the guy who killd his fiancée, but while at the ranch, he begins to fall in love with Altar, which needless to say causes all sorts of problems, since Frenchy is none too happy about it and all the other outlaws there don't exactly trust Frenchy for having brought Vern here. Eventually Vern does find the guy who killd his fiancée and there's a showdown....

Rancho Notorious is a film that, I think, should be better than it is. It's a western directed by Fritz Lang, a fact which by itself ought to make the movie an interesting proposition. And yet, I was underwhelmed by it. I think part of the problem is with the casting. I find Mel Ferrer and especially Arthur Kennedy to have all the charisma of a wet sponge. Kennedy is supposed to play the romantic lead here? Seriously? The plot also came across to me as a bit pedestrian, and not in a good way. Sure there are a lot of formulaic westerns (well, in every genre) that manage to be quite entertaining; the last western I blogged about, The Train Robbers, is one that I think ultimately succeeds more than it fails. Rancho Notorious, on the other hand, never game me that vibe.

Which brings me to the other big problem I have with the movie, which is that theme song. It's terrible, and badly used. There are odd songs that can make a movie interesting; the song about the "woman with a whip" in the Barbara Stanwyck western Forty Guns, and its placement in the movie, is a good example. But the "Legend of Chuck-a-Luck" is didactic at best and heavy-handed at worst.

Start with Lang's other two westerns, The Return of Frank James and Western Union.

Out of print update: Marlene Dietrich

I'm looking at the TCM schedule for tomorrow, August 21, and see several films that you can't get from the TCM Shop. Looking at Amazon, it looks as though they've all fallen out of print, since you can't get new copies from ther, either:

The Garden of Allah, at 11:15 AM, had Dietrich falling in love with monk Charles Boyer in northern Africa;

Stage Fright, at 2:45 PM, sees Dietrich possibly having murdered her husband. I'm surprised I haven't done a full-length post on this one, but then, it's been so many years since I've seen this one.

Witness For the Prosecution is the week's Essential, at 8:00 PM. Here, Dietrich plays the wife of Tyrone Power, who is on trial for the murder of an elderly lady.

Blonde Venus

TCM's Friday pre-Code marathon for this week includes several movies from Paramount, including a couple from the beginning of Cary Grant's career. One that seems to be coming up tonight and not again soon is Blonde Venus, at 8:00 PM.

Cary Grant only gets third billing, as the star is the woman who's pictured above, Marlene Dietrich. Dietrich plays Helen, who at one time in her life was a showgirl in glamorous nightclubs. But then she met research chemist Ned Faraday (Herbert Marshall) and they fell in love and got married. It wouldn't do for the wife of a respectable chemist to be doing her showgirl thing, so Helen settles down and becomes a respetable housewife and mother.

And then Ned gets sick with radiation poisoning, and needs to go off to Europe for the only treatment possible that will save his life. However, that's going to take money that the Faradays just don't have. Well, Helen could fairly quickly get the money if she went back to being a showgirl, but Ned obviously isn't happy about that. Still, Helen isn't about to let her husband die, so she goes to work at a club, which is where she meets Cary Grant, who this time is another wealthy playboy, named Nick Townsend. Nick gives Helen the money Ned needs for his treatment, and Ned goes off to Europe. Helen, meanwhile, stays home to work, as well as to spend some quality time with Nick.

All's well, more or less, until Ned gets cured early and comes home before everybody expects him, which is how he finds out what Helen's been doing with Nick. As the wronged husband, Ned is unsurprisingly unhappy, and wants to divorce Helen and take custody of the kid. It also shouldn't be a surprise that he wins the custody case, considering that he did nothing wrong here. But Helen doesn't want to give up her son, so she runs off with the kids, performing in less glamorous joints across the country until the law finally catches up with her, and she's forced to go off to Paris to work, which is where she becomes a true sensation. It's in Paris that she meets Nick again....

As I wrote the plot down, I noticed that it's all a bit nuts. And yet, the movie works well beyond the point that you'd notice that there's something not quite right with the plot. That, of course, is down to Marlene Dietrich, who is in her charismatic form here, helped out in part by a couple of riveting outfits. One, pictured above, is a dazzling sequined suit with leotard and tights that she wears in Paris and must have been even more dazzling on the big screen. The other is a more absurd gorilla number. But hey, it's Marlene Dietrich. She alone would be worth watching. But you've got a young and dashing Cary Grant showing up, as well as Herbert Marshall to provide the serious groiunding for the movie. The ultimate effect is a movie that's quite a bit better than it probably ought to be.

TCM lists Blonde Venus as being available from the TCM Shop.

The Scarlett Empress

The final star in this month's Summer Under the Stars is Marlene Dietrich, and prime time has one of her most visually impressive films: The Scarlett Empress, at 8:00 PM.

Dietrich plays the Empress, who is specifically Catherine II of Russia, commonly called Catherine the Great. Catherine was actually born Sophia of Anhalt-Zerbst, a principality in what is now eastern Germany. When she was a teenager, she was married off to her second cousin, Paul (aka Pavel), who was the Grand Duke of Russia, a position equivalent to the Crown Prince in other monarchies. (Paul is played by Sam Jaffe.) Paul continued as Grand Duke and Sophia took to making herself liked among the Russian people, learning the language and converting to Orthodox Christianity. Thankfully for her, she had a good 15 years before her mother-in-law, Empress Elizaveta, died. It turned out she needed those 15 years to become palatable to the Russian people, or more importantly, the Russian nobility. Pavel, it turned out, was spectacularly unfit to be Russian Emperor. He was erratic and preferred to play with his toy soldiers more than dealing with real matters of war, and having him in command would have been a disaster. So the nobility more or less convinced Catherine to take over in a coup, although they probably thought with a woman on the throne, they'd be the real power behind the throne. Catherine was, one would assume, happy with this, as she quickly found she didn't care much for Paul and would rather have lover after lover after lover, much like Elizabeth I of England (who was in love with far more than Essex).

I wouldn't say that history is portrayed in The Scarlet Empress with notable accuracy, although it doesn't have the horrible inaccuracy that many Hollywood has. In fact, the portrayal here is interesting for entirely different reasons. Although the movie was released in 1934, there are a lot of times where it plays out almost as if it had been conceived as a silent. There are a lot of fascinating visuals here, which make the movie look as much like a fantasy as it is a biopic. It's for these visuals, and not so much the acting or dialog that the movie should be watched. Visually, it's gorgeous: from a shot of Dietrich on a swing, to the use of candles, veils, and diffusion, there's always something visually stunning going on.

Marlene Dietrich makes an adventure movie

It might be difficult to imagine somebody as glamorous as Marlene Dietrich making a movie that's best categorized in the adventure genre, but such a film is coming up tomorrow at noon on TCM: Knight Without Armour.

Dietrich plays Countess Alexandra, a countess in Tsarist Russia in the days just before World War I. But more on her later. The beginning of the film belongs more to the male lead, Robert Donat. He plays a British man who's fluent in Russian, which brings him to the attention of the British Foreign Office. They know that there's a lot of intrigue going on in Russia, and they'd like to know exactly what is going to happen there. So, they recruit Donat to by a spy; specifically, they want him to play the part of a would-be revolutionary so that they can determine what the revolutionaries really want. It's dangerous work, because the British would have to deny all knowledge of his existence.

Anyhow, fast forward several years to 1917. If you know your history, you'll know that the autumn of 1917 brought about the October Revolution, which nominally brought the Communists to power. I say "nominally" because while they deposed the Provisional Government, there was a significant anti-Communist movement in Russia, with the result that there was a civil war which lasted several years. Countess Alexandra unsurprisingly gets caught up in all this, as her servants leave and the Reds take her hostage. Alexandra, having been part of the old nobility, is clearly an enemy of the New Communist Man.

Donat has been caught up in the Civil War as well, which is similarly unsurprising since he's been playing at a revolutionary. However, for perfectly understandable reasons he wants out (and besides, the Foreign Office probably doesn't need him any longer). Meeting the good Countess gives him another reason to get out, hopefully with her following close behind. And so, the two begin to try to make their way to the border. But with a civil war going on, there are a lot of obstactles as well as a lot of danger facing them.

Knight Without Armour was made by the Korda brothers at London Film in the mid-1930s, which means it's one of those movies that hasn't become very well known in the US. Indeed, I had never heard of it before it had its TCM premiere some time back. However, it's a pretty darn good movie. The Korda brothers tried their hardest to come up with exquisite production values, and the look is better than other British movies of the same time, and even a lot of Hollywood movies not made at MGM. The story, to be fair, is not particularly special; if you've seen one escape movie you might not have seen them all, but you'll recognize similar elements. Still, Knight Without Armour is suitably suspenseful, and has the right amount of dark humor. This is especially true in one scene where the two leads meet a railway station master who is insistent that the trains at his station are going to run on time, even if there aren't any trains.

Amazon lists Knight Without Armour as having gotten a DVD release in Australia, while TCM's database doesn't seem to have it available on DVD.

Marlene Dietrich night

TCM is showing several movies this evening starring the always wonderful Marlene Dietrich. One that I haven't recommended before is this week's TCM Essential, A Foreign Affair, which kicks off the night at 8:00 PM ET.

The scene is Berlin, not long after the end of World War II. A delegation from the US House of Representatives, including Representative Phoebe Frost from Iowa (Jean Arthur), has flown to West Berlin to investigate the morale of the American troops stationed there; namely, are they fraternizing too much with some of the Germans? After all, in those days West Berlin was filled not only with Germans who would still have sympathized with the Nazis, but spies for the Communists as well. (Berlin Express, which deserves a post of its own one of these days, is another good period example of this; one that's a straight-up thriller.) Rep. Cates is pretty quickly put in touch with US Army Capt. John Pringle (John Lund), who just happens to be one of Cates' constituents. Together, the two are supposed to determine the real truth about the US soldiers and particularly, their relationship with nightclub singer Erika von Schlütow (Marlene Dietrich), who under the previous regime had had some romantic dalliances with high-ranking Nazis.

The investigation develops some predictable problems at this point. We quickly learn that von Schlütow is a woman who will romance almost anybody for the purpose of survival; now that the Nazis have been defeated, that means cozying up to the occupation forces, specifically in the person of one Capt. John Pringle. It's not the only problem John has; he finds that some sparks are beginning to form between him and Rep. Frost. That's just as big a problem for Frost, who is supposed to be no-nonsense. It, however, is not her only problem; she's getting stonewalled from the military higher-ups and the rest of the congressional delegation.

Billy Wilder directed and as often happened co-wrote the screenplay, so you can see how the plot gets so complex and intertwined. Wilder isn't just telling us a good story; he's also giving us some subtle social commentary. As for the performances, Jean Arthur gets to let her hair down once again, singing an "Iowa Corn Song" in the nightclub where Dietrich's character works. Dietrich probably has the tougher task, playing a woman who is at heart amoral and just trying to survive, but does a good job not only of that, but of entertaining us during her musical numbers. I've mentioned before that I'm not a huge fan of John Lund, and while he's adequate here, that's all he is. Still, with Billy Wilder and the two female leads, it's tough to go wrong.

A Foreign Affair does not seem to have gotten a DVD release yet, which is surprising. So you'll have to catch it on TCM.