Holiday (1930)

I mentioned earlier in August the birth anniversary of actress Ann Harding, and how I'd come across the 1930 version of Holiday on Tubi. As it turns out, it was still there, so I finally watched it.

Now you may know the more famous 1938 version of Holiday, which I blogged about back in 2015. This earlier version has pretty much the same plot, which I suppose is unsurprising. As the movie opens, Johnny Case (Robert Ames) is being brought home to the house of Julia Seton (Mary Astor). The two of them had met on a ski vacation up in Lake Placid, and Johnny proposed to Julia knowing little about her background. Now, it turns out that Julia is fabulously wealthy, as the older daughter of banker Edward Seton (the original William Holden, not the one from films like Stalag 17). Julia has a younger daughter Linda (Ann Harding), and a cynical alcoholic brother Ned (Monroe Owsley). Julia isn't quite so certain how to break the news of her engagement to Dad, since he's morally traditional, and this sort of quick engagement is anything but.

Linda offers to help, largely because she's the one person in the family who is decidedly not stuffy, and resents the sort of buttoned-down upbringing that Dad and his social class represent. To Linda it's stultifying and takes away one's individuality. So she sees Johnny as a breath of fresh air, especially because considering taking a sort of sabbatical before finally settling down to life, again the sort of thing that Mr. Seton would find shocking.

We can see just how square Dad is when Linda announces she wants to hold a small party up in what had been the children's play-room, with an intimate dinner for a few of Linda and Julia's friends, just calling them up. She specifically mentions not having engraved invitations, so what do we see in the next shot? You guessed it, an egraved invitation. Linda brings the few bohemian friends she has, Prof. Potter (Edward Everet Horton) and his wife (Hedda Hopper), and sulks up in the play-room, for good reason.

Now, at this point, it starts to become clear that Mr. Seton isn't going to be such a good influence on Johnny, either. Where Johnny wants to take a sabbatical, having worked hard in regular work to get to where he is, Dad wants him to join the family business and use the honeymoon to go to Europe to network with some of Dad's influential friends in the worlds of politics and high finance. Johnny begins to chafe, and you get the feeling that he might be better suited going off with Linda. Not that Linda would do such a thing to Julia. She genuinely likes her sister.

The Linda character is at the heart of the biggest differences between the two versions of the movie. In the remake, Linda was played by Katharine Hepburn, who was exactly the right person for the role. Hepburn could be obnoxious in a movie like Bringing Up Baby or getting her comeuppance in The Philadelphia Story, but since the character is supposed to be a rebellious free spirit, that sort of acting from Hepburn works. Ann Harding's Linda is much more the sort of person who's suffered in silence and is only now finally going to stand up for herself, even if she doesn't quite know how to do it. It's a different portrayal, and Harding does a good job, but the way Hepburn played it makes the movie much more lively.

Not that the Ann Harding version of Holiday is bad by any means. It's more that the remake is one of the all-time classics, while this version is a good movie that has the unfortunate luck of having been made at a time when movie makers were still figuring out sound along with having to compare to the remake.

Youngblood Hawke

I've always enjoyed the potboilers of the 1950s and 1960s. Even if they weren't particularly good, they're interesting, and some of them can be fun. One that's a fairly minor entry in the cycle is Youngblood Hawke.

James Franciscus stars as Arthur Youngblood Hawke, who as the movie opens is driving a coal truck in his home town in Kentucky and convinced that somebody is trespassing on the family land. He gets home and tells his mother Sarah (Mildred Dunnock) about this, and she's even more ticked about it. It seems that some years earlier, before Dad died, Dad's brothers dishonestly got the mineral rights on Dad's land, which is why they're rich and she and Youngblood isn't. She could use a good lawyer, and Youngblood could have been one, except that he decided to go to college to study creative writing in hopes of starting a writing career.

And then Youngblood gets a letter in the mail telling him that a publishing house in New York liked his manuscript and is thinking about publishing it, even though he submitted it unsolicited without an agent, which seems like a very bad idea. But in any case Youngblood goes to New York and gets treated like royalty by the publisher Jason Prince (Lee Bowman), who read the book along with his wife Fannie (Eva Gabor). If Youngblood signs the contract, he'll be working with editor Jeanne Green (Suzanne Pleshette). Youngblood wants more than the "standard" advance for a first-time writer, since he's been busy working on his second novel. A compromise is reached where that extra money is to be paid out in several monthly installments. Jeanne gets Youngblood a place one floor above her in her apartment building, and she proceeds to fall in love with him.

It's the first love in an exceedingly complicated life for Youngblood. At a Christmas party, he's introduecd to wealthy Frieda Winter (Geneviève Page), who loves studly young Youngblood albeit with the catch that she got her wealth by marrying a wealthy man (Kent Smith). She does things like secure Youngblood the use of a clients swanky Manhattan apartment while the client goes out to Hollywood to make a movie, something that ticks off Jeanne. Jeanne, for her part, has been thinking about going to another publishing company.

Where Youngblood's first book was at most a modest success, his second book is a big hit, and starts to give him a swollen head. Youngblood is approached by aging actress Irene Perry (Mary Astor) who wants him to adapt the first novel into a stage play with her as the lead actress. He also gets the idea of "investing" his money in various ways, including building out on Long Island along with starting his own publishing company. But this gets him into debt, and those debts are eventually going to be called in.

Youngblood is told, much like Fyodor Dostoevsky when he wrote The Gambler, that he has to deliver his next book by a certain time or else contractual clauses are going to leave him in a very bad state. Youngblood works himself into a very parlous state, while all his romantic relationships resolve themselves to varying degrees of satisfaction.

I called Youngblood Hawke a minor entry in the potboiler cycle largely because it's both not particularly good and not memorably bad. It's just there, as it were, and lingers on for over 130 minutes. Everybody does well enough with the material they're given; it's more that it's not very good material. Poor Suzanne Pleshette is used, and the whole mining rights subplot is never really examined as much as it should be.

Cynthia

Somehow I also wound up with a whole bunch of movies that starred the reliably bland actor George Murphy on my DVR, and it's not as if he was ever TCM's Star of the month. One of those movies is Cynthia, a light family drama trying to restore some sense of normalcy following World War II.

Cynthia is played by an adolescent Elizabeth Taylor, although we don't see her at first. Instead, we meet her parents, Larry Bishop (Goerge Murphy) and Louise (Mary Astor) when they were college students before they got married and Cynthia was born. Louise was a musician and Larry a med student in 1930 both hoping they'd be able to go to Vienna to study their respective fields, with Larry making money in the summer by working at the hardware store back in his home town of Napoleon, Ill., one of those small midwestern towns that consistently shows up in movies like this. But the two fall in love and get married, which in and of itself is not a big deal. However, Larry knocks up Louise, and the two need to support themselves somehow, which necessitates moving back to Napoleon.

Worse, Cynthia has been a sickly child, with the result being that she's been sheltered her whole life, and her parents feeing trapped in Napoleon. Indeed, stupid Larry, despite having three years of college education, hasn't even bothered to get any better job than still working at the hardware store, and the family have been living in the same rented house for the past 16 years or so.

Cynthia too is getting to the age where she sees all the nice experiences that the other kids her age have had the chance to do, like going to school dances or performing in the school play. This latter even though Cynthia seems to have some musical talent that she inherited from Mom and takes lessons from a local music professor Rosenkrants (S.Z. Sakall). Matters reach a head for the family when the guy who owns the house decides he needs to sell, which may necessitate the Bishops having to move out if they can't come up with the down payment.

And then one day Ricky Latham (Jimmy Lydon), who dropped out of school to join the navy and presumably fight World War II, returns to town in the hope of finishing up his high school, which is another plot point that makes no sense. The guy would have to be at least 20 now, much too old for Cynthia or high school in general. But he takes a shine to Cynthia, and she might get to go on her first date to the big high school prom. That is, if she's healthy enough to do so. She hasn't really been sick for a year now, but suddenly, with all this activity, she might be coming down with another flu....

Cynthia is one of those MGM movies that you can see fitting in with what Louis B. Mayer wanted to do: good family values in a wholesome package, with some added post-World War II escapism. If these are the worst problems a family has, things can't be too bad, much like the Andy Hardy series that was by this time winding down. Unfortunately, for me the whole thing strained credulity. Cynthia really couldn't be that sickly, and the people around the Bishops, especially Larry's sister (Spring Byington) and her doctor husband (Gene Lockhart), couldn't be that impolite. Everybody tries, but Cynthia is another of those movies that ultimately falls under the weight of a saccharine script.

Thousands Cheer

Red Skelton was TCM's Star of the Month back in April. One of his movies that I had on my DVR surprisingly enough was not shown as part of the tribute. But since the movie would be kinda-sorta appropriate for Memorial Day weekend (not that TCM is programming it), and because the movie is going to expire from my DVR relatively soon, I figure that now is a good time to blog about it. That movie is Thousands Cheer.

The opening credits of the movie announce that it's introducing José Iturbi, a Brazilian pianist/conductor who would appear in several muscially inclined movies over the next several years, and he's in the opening, leading a philharmonic concert where one of the performers is singer Kathryn Jones (Kathryn Grayson). After her musical number, she informs the audience that she's going to be taking a sabbatical from performing: her father Bill (John Boles) is a US Army colonel, and with the movie being made in 1943, it's smack-dab in the middle of World War II. Col. Jones is about to be assigned to another base, and Kathryn is going to follow him in order to provide morale for the troops stationed there about to go off to war.

One of those troops is Pvt. Eddy Marsh (Gene Kelly), who is on the same train to the base as Col. Boles. He implies to Kathryn that he loves her, not realizing that she too is going to be staying at the base, which is going to make things awkward when the two of them meet again. They do meet again on the base, and Eddy informs Kathryn that he doesn't really like the army. He was drafted, but he came from a family of circus aerialists, with the result that he feels much more comfortable up in the air than on the ground and as a result would really prefer to be transferred to the Air Corps.

Kathryn falls in love with Eddy along the way, although Eddy has a problem with the officer corps which means that by definition he also has a problem with the daughter of an officer. Additionally, Kathryn's mother Hyllary (Mary Astor) doesn't want her daughter marrying a soldier. Hyllary did so and suffered heartbreak thanks to her husband's transfers and basically being married to the military. Besides, Eddy's attitude is so bad that one wonders whether he's going to be court-martialed out of the military.

All of that occurs in the amount of running time that a movie might have if Thousands Cheer were a B movie. But it isn't, being one of MGM's big, morale-boosting films for the war effort. As such, Kathryn has to invite all her friends to help put on that big show for the soldiers about to go off to war. Mickey Rooney (playing himself) is the MC of that show, and he's brought his MGM friends (again playing themselves) to perform skits and musical numbers at the camp for the soldiers. This show-within-a-show takes the final third of the movie, with a coda at the end to resolve the main story. Quite a few of MGM's stars perform, including Skelton.

Thousands Cheer is an odd little -- or should I say big, since it runs a bit over two hours -- movie, since it's really two movies in one. Gene Kelly was fairly early in his career, but already shows his ability. However, he wasn't given a particularly interesting story in which to show that ability. It's not Kelly's fault, of course; the movie has to hit the propaganda notes of a serviceman redeeming himself by doing the right thing for his country, and it has to do that fairly briefly since we've got 45 minutes of MGM cameos to show, thank you very much.

Some of the cameos are better than others, with Frank Morgan being irritating while some of the singers do reasonably well. The aerialists might be the highlight of the camp show. That, and Mickey Rooney doing his impressions of some of his fellow MGM contract players. Not that they're notably good, but they're certainly fun. Interestingly, there's a conceit where one of the soldiers in the crowd, played by Ben Blue, goes googly-eyed over all the female singers. Except when Lena Horne shows up, but then again Horne's segment has obvious points where censors in the South could have cut so those sensitive southern moviegoers wouldn't have to see a black woman singing.

For me, Thousands Cheer comes across 80-plus years on as more of a time capsule than anything else, but it's one you may want to check out.

Private Secretary

I'm always interested in a new-to-me pre-Code, so when TCM ran Behind Office Doors some months back, I decided to record it to be able to watch later and do a post on it. Recently, I finally got around to watching it, so now we get the post on it.

Mary Astor plays Mary Linden, and as the movie opens she's walking up to her apartment where she lives with a co-worker roommate Delores (Kitty Kelly) who is hosting a party. One of the guests suggests they play a truth or dare-like game, which introduces Mary to Ronnie Wales (Ricardo Cortez) even though what we learn about his character makes us wonder how he learned about the party. Ronnie seems interested in Mary, but he's trapped in a loveless marriage, one of the tropes of movies of the day. Mary isn't interested in him beyond friendship, however.

Mary works for the Ritter Paper Company as the personal secretary to the president, John Ritter (Charles Sellon), and she's really the one who runs the place, as she knows everything before the boss knows it. Mary wasn't interested in Ronnie the previous night because she actually has the hots for one of the young salesmen there, James Duneen (Robert Ames). This, even though he doesn't realize it and it's an era where she can't be direct with him. Mary uses confidential information to help James get ahead, which seems highly unethical, but there you are.

Ritter, having built the company up from nothing over the past 40 years, has reached the age where the doctors tell him he has to retire, but what to do with the business? There's a depression on, the movie hiavng been released in 1931, and finding someone willing to buy the place might be tough. Mary is forward-thinking, however, and suggests that Ritter sell the company to the employees, who will pay back Ritter from the firm's profits. This would allow for promoting someone from the inside to the position of president, and we know who Mary has in mind.

But James doesn't get that Mary is interested in him, and has a string of girlfriends. He even hires his latest girlfriend to be secretary to the president once he gets that job, despite the fact that said girlfriend is utterly unsuited to the job. Things get even worse when Mary sets James up with a business connection with a prominent banker, and James winds up getting engaged to the banker's daughter! It's all too much for Mary, but what's she going to do? Will she end up with the right man and be able to find true happiness?

Despite the fact that Behind Office Doors is a pre-Code and certainly touches on any number of subjects that wouldn't be discussed a few years later, the ending becomes surprisingly conventional and doesn't quite hold up to the promise the first half. Mary Astor does well, but Robert Ames wasn't really leading man material here and Cortez isn't given enough to do. Still, Behind Office Doors offers an interesting enough look at the way Hollywood viewed business back in the early 1930s.

Not for love or money

Debbie Reynolds was TCM's Star of the Month back in March, and this gave me the opportunity to record several of her movies that I hadn't seen before. Back in September I mentioned Mary, Mary when TCM aired it, pointing out how it didn't really escape its stage origins. Another Reynolds film based on a stage play was This Happy Feeling.

We actually don't see Reynolds for a while. Instead we see Curt Jurgens. He plays Preston Mitchell, commonly called Mitch. Mitch is one of those stage stars in an era when everybody, at least of a certain demographic and residency, knew the stage stars. But he'd like to retire from the stage to a farm in Connecticut, much to the consternation of friend Nita Holloway (Alexis Smith) and a producer. They want him to play the father of a character to be played by the big new star of the stage, Tony Manza (Troy Donahue). Mitch politely turns them down, and goes home.

Storming into Mitch's house is neighbor Bill Tremayne (John Saxon). He, like everybody else in the area, has been invited to a housewarming party for a couple who recently moved to the area, the Dovers. Bill comes over to tell Mitch about it, and if Mitch doesn't want to come, at least perhaps Mitch can lend Bill his car so Bill doesn't have to walk over in the rain. It's at the party where we finally see the Debbie Reynolds character. She plays one Janet Blake, a secretary who went to the party with her boss. But she'd like to get away from her boss, because he's doing things that today would be considered sexual harassment.

Janet buttonholes Bill, trying to get him to take her home, or at least to to nearest commuter train station. Bill, seeing Janet and already having been revealed to be a ladies' man, starts showing the sort of interest in Janet that her boss had been showing her. Janet, being terribly ticked, gets out of the car and starts running -- anywhere -- to get the heck away from poor Bill. She winds up at Mitch's house, and Mitch is kind enough to offer her a room so she can dry off and have a place to spend the night.

Mitch decides to give her a job as his secretary, mostly out of convenience so that Nita won't think Mitch had any bad intentions having a lovely young thing like Janet in his house overnight. Bill shows up, and also suspects the motives of Janet and Mitch. More complications ensue, leading to the predictable ending.

This Happy Feeling is supposed to be a comedy, but for me, it wasn't all that funny, largely because none of the characters are particularly likeable or nice to each other. There's also a subplot involving Mitch's maid (Estelle Winwood) and a seagull she shot by mistake but did not kill. That subplot is equally grating. Also not helping is the fact that while the opening says the movie was filmed in Cinemascope, we only get a panned-and-scanned release in 4:3.

Fans of stage plays may like This Happy Feeling, but I'm sorry to say I didn't really care for it.

Technically it's a cyclone

We're in the middle of hurricane season here in the western hempisphere part of the Atlantic, and with that in mind I watched the copy of the 1937 movie The Hurricane that I've had on my DVR for several months, not to be confused with other movies with the same title.

The movie starts off with an establishing sequence of a boat sailing through the South Seas, with a Dr. Kersaint (Thomas Mitchell) among the passengers. The boat passes a deserted island, and Dr. Kersaint starts talking about the island to a female passenger. Kersaint had spent time in these islands, and he has bittersweet memories of them. As you might guess, this leads to a flashback....

The island in question, Manakoora, is part of an archipelago administered by France, who have sent a governor in the form of Eugene De Laage (Raymond Massey). This being the era before airplanes, and most of the islands not having suitable space for runways anyway, the islands are served by sailing ships that go from one island to another. Many of the ships use native Polynesins for the crews, since they have local knowledge of the seas and are accomplished seafarers, having gotten to all of these islands after all.

Among the sailors is Terangi (John Hall). The current voyage brings him back to the main island, where his fiancée Marama (Dorothy Lamour) is waiting for him. Also waiting with romantic interest for a passenger is the Governor, whose wife Germaine (Mary Astor) is on the boat. Also getting off the boat, at least with the movie making a point of showing him so we'll know it's an important cast member, is a new Catholic priest to serve the island, Fr. Paul (C. Aubrey Smith). Now that Terangi is returned to his home island, he can marry Marama and they can live happily ever after.

Well, not quite, since all of this has happened in the first 20 minutes or so. Terangi and Merama are in love, and Merama doesn't want Terangi to leave her. But his job is to go sailing, and he has to leave her, as there's no space for the wives of the sailors. This disappoints Marama, since the next voyage is taking the boat to Tahiti, the big island in the area.

But things go wrong on Tahiti, as a nasty European starts treating the Polynesian sailors like crap, even smacking Terangi. Terangi hits back in self-defense, but he breaks the other guy's jaw and this other guy has connections, which gets Terangi sent to prison for six months. Terangi is like Jean Valjean, having been oversentenced for a minor crime and wanting to escape. He keeps trying, again and again, to escape, which lengthens the sentence. But eventually he does escape, almost in time for the titular hurricane....

If there's a problem with The Hurricane, it's that it goes on too long between the time Terangi gets sentenced and the time the storm comes, with there not really being enough plot development in between. Audiences of 1937 would have wanted to see the storm, however, and that's something that's definitely worth waiting for, as the special effects are quite good for 1937. It's just a shame that the effects aren't in service of a better story.

I guess tax day is Christmas for *some* people....

Another well-known movie that I'd never actually done a post on before is Meet Me in St. Louis. So, when TCM ran it during 31 Days of Oscar, I decided to record it so that I could rectify the omission of it from my reviews. With this being the 100th anniversary of MGM and TCM doing a retrospective of the studio every Monday, it's not a surprise that Meet Me in St. Louis is one of the films selected. That airing is coming up tomorrow, April 15, at 11:45 AM.

For good reason, Meet Me in St. Louis is thought of as a Christmas movie, that being the debut of the song that's now a Christmas standard, "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas". But two-thirds or more of the film is really not about Christmas. In fact, the movie is set in the run-up to the 1904 World's Fair held in St. Louis, and looks at the life of one family living in St. Louis, the Smiths.

Esther (Judy Garland) is the second oldest of four daughters of Anna (Mary Astor) and upper-middle-class lawyer Lon Sr. (Leon Ames); Lon Jr. is a fairly minor character in the story. As the film opens it's the summer of 1903. The family is thinking somewhat of the exposition coming to their growing city in the final year, but Esther and her elder sister Rose (Lucille Bremer) are both thinking about love. Rose has a beau currently in New York, Warren Sheffield, who is supposed to call long distance that night, which is a big deal for 1903. Rose and Esther are hoping Rose can get Warren to propose marriage to her during that call. Rose, for her part, loves the next-door neighbor, John Truett (Tom Drake), but he doesn't quite seem to notice it yet.

Fast-foward to the autumn, specifically Halloween. The two much younger daughters, Agnes (Joan Carroll) and Tootie (Margaret O'Brien), go out and engage in the sort of tricking that I suppose was done in the days before trick-or-treating. Tootie comes back claiming to have been beaten up by John, which threatens to put a crimp in the budding relationship between him and Esther. But putting a much bigger dent in those plans is one evening when Dad comes home and announces that the firm has given him a "promotion" that requires he transfer to New York. Everyone is going to have to start anew, which is a massive problem for the two eldest daughters. Not only that, but they'll miss the World's Fair!

We move again to winter, which means Christmas. There's a big formal ball coming up for Esther and Rose, but mishaps occur that may make the ball a disaster for the both of them. Also, with Christmas coming up, it means that the family's time in St. Louis is about to end, since the family is supposed to move to New York in the New Year. (I'd have thought they'd be closing up the house by Christmas, not leaving everything to literally the last week. Having moved my father a year ago from the house where he'd lived for almost 50 years, I know how arduous that is.) But, since we're getting to near the end of the TCM's allotted time slot for the movie, we know that a happy ending is about to come. The movie concludes with the spring of 1904, which is really a coda of the family at the exposition, lasting far shorter than the previous three seasons.

It's once again easy to see why audiences of 1944 when the movie was released loved it, flocking to it and making it a huge box-office hit. Released during World War II, it's a nostalgic look back much like some of the Fox musicals I've mentioned favorably here. The Technicolor is lovely, and the songs work for those who like musicals. I'm not the biggest fan of musicals in general or of Judy Garland's vocal stylings in particular; I'd much rather re-watch her in The Clock where she's excellent.

But just because Garland isn't to my personal taste doesn't mean the movie isn't good. A year or two earlier the Academy cut the number of Best Picture nominations from ten to five; if they hadn't I'm certain Meet Me in St. Louis would have been nominated. For anybody who's a fan of musicals, Meet Me in St. Louis should be highly appealing.

TCM Star of the Month November 2023: Gloria Grahame

We started a new month last week, but because of the vagaries of the schedule the new star of the month didn't come until tonight, November 7. That Star of the Month is Gloria Grahame, and her movies will be airing every Tuesday in prime time. This first Tuesday includes one of her early movies that I had on my DVR and hadn't blogged about before: Blonde Fever, overnight tonight at 1:15 AM (so technically November 8 here in the eastern time zone but still November 7 in the Pacific). As always, seeing such a movie show up on the schedule, I made a point to watch it so that I could do a review here.

The movie starts off with an establishing shot of the Café Donay, which is somewhere on the road between Reno, the divorce capital of the world, and Lake Tahoe. It's a way-too-upscale place for this part of the world, probably because the movie is based on a play by Ferenc Molnár which I'd bet was originally set somewhere else. But since Hollywood was making it and the movie was made during World War II, and the movie deals with divorce, the action had to be moved to Nevada.

Anyhow, showing up at the café on his motorbike is young Freddie (Marshall Thompson). He's in love with waitress Sally (a young Gloria Grahame, as if you couldn't tell from the looks or the voice), but he doesn't have the money to propose to Sally. That lack of money also bugs the proprietor of the café, Peter Donay (Philip Dorn), who doesn't want such low-class vehicles showing up at the front entrance to the café. Peter is married to Delilah (Mary Astor), while Sally has a crush on Peter, who she thinks of as worldly.

Unfortunately, there's the problem that not only is Peter married, but he's not a particularly good catch as a husband. Delilah stays more because she's got a stable enough life here and because she probably doesn't want to have to start over again. The café has been in financial difficulty in part because Peter has a gambling problem, yet another reason why he's been a lousy husband even though he claims not to have engaged in real gambling in a year or two. He has, however, but a raffle ticket in a national lottery and that's going to become an important point later.

Delilah decides she's going to try to save her marriage by bringing Sally and Freddie together. On the one hand, Delilah tells Sally about all the terrible things that Peter has done, and that the likelihood is one of Peter having an affair with Sally and then moving on to yet another someone else after growing tired of Sally. She also works on the financial front partly by getting Freddie a job at the place, and partly by telling Sally about Peter's gambling problem. But then Peter's raffle ticket pays off to the tune of $40,000, which is a couple years' salary in those days, so not enough to retire on but definitely enough to start a family if it were Freddie who had the money.

There are some fairly big problems with Blonde Fever. One is that Peter is written as such an irredeemable character that we don't understand why Delilah stands by him. The movie doesn't feel like a road house in Nevada (or anywhere) either, which is again down to the difficulty of taking what was likely an upscale play and trying to shoehorn it into Nevada. The air of unreality is added to by there being next to no mention of the war. Finally, the movie doesn't seem to have any idea whether it wants to be a comedy or a drama, and consistently gets things wrong.

The few bright points are Mary Astor, who certainly tries although she's given pretty dire material to work with. There's also a supporting performance by Felix Bressart, who also does the best he can. Thankfully, Blonde Fever didn't strangle Gloria Grahame's career in the cradle. But it's not that good of a movie.

The sort of programmer MGM was good at

I've suggested before that I think Warner Bros. made the best B movies and programmers. Having said that, other studios could make good programmers too, especially when it fit the sort of movie the studio was good at making. If MGM needed something glossy and upscale for one of its programmers like a romantic comedy, they didn't do so bad. There were also the "family" type movies to keep up the spirits of people during the depression, such as all those Andy Hardy movies. Another movie that fits more into that second group is Listen, Darling.

The family here is a sort of broken family, which is largely because Dad has died, leaving behind Mom, Mrs. Wingate (Mary Astor) to try to raise two children. Billy (Scotty Beckett) is the nortmal sort of Hollywood brat you get a lot of from younger children in the movies, but the elder child is already becoming an adult. Pinkie (Judy Garland) is about 15, finishing middle school, and already a talented singer. She ought to go to music school, but then, Mom's a widow now, and can't afford that.

Meanwhile, there's a well-meaning banker, Mr. Drubbs (Gene Lockhart), who likes Mrs. Wingate as something more than just a friend. He also doesn't dislike the children, and is willing to provide for them by marrying their mother. Mom doesn't exactly dislike Drubbs, but recognizes that it would be more of a marriage of convenience to give the kids what they need. It's a sacrifice, but one that Mom would be willing to make for her children.

The other problem is that Pinkie is getting to the age where she's mature enough to understand all of this. She wants her mom to be happy, and recognizes that Drubbs isn't right for Mom. But how to get Mom to recognize this? Well, Pinkie has a platonic friend in the form of Buzz Mitchell (Freddie Bartholomew) who is picking up some extra money by working at his uncle's service station. Buzz finds some law books in the Wingate family trailer, and gets the idea to shanghai Mrs. Wingate into the trailer and then taking the whole family on a trip, where hopefully they'll find a more suitable man for Mrs. Wingate. It's a ridiculous idea, least of all because one wonders how they'll get the money to keep gas in the car and keep the trailer powered.

But of course, this being a light MGM comedy, you know that the plan is going to have success, and if you know the formula of the movie, it'll have too much success. Also traveling around by trailer is the bachelor photographer Richard Thurlow (Walter Pidgeon). He and Mrs. Wingate keep meeting and eventually become friends, with the possibility that it could become love. But one of the places they camp is just down the road from the mansion of insurance executive J.J. Slattery (Alan Hale), and he and his butler take care of the children when they get lost and have an encounter with a skunk. Slattery could be a good father for the kids, too, but he knows better since he's further down the credits from Walter Pidgeon's character.

Judy Garland was on her way to stardom, although the hadn't quite attained it yet, as this was a year or so before The Wizard of Oz and the big musicals with Mickey Rooney like Babes in Arms. As such, she only merits the programmer treatment and not a prestige movie, especially not with this plot. And you'd think that a plot like this could become too syrupy, yet somehow it works surprisingly well. Especially Walter Pidgeon surprises at doing what is fairly light comedy. Contrast this with something like Scandal at Scourie a dozen years later where he's weighted down by a moralizing plot and the presence of Greer Garson.

If you were looking to watch an old-style movie night with a B movie or programmer before the big show, Listen, Darling would be a great movie to start off with.

The Zenda prisoner

A movie that, for whatever reason, I had never gotten around to watching, in fact not any of the versions of it, is the 1937 version of The Prisoner of Zenda. It was on TCM in March for 31 Days of Oscar, and so I recently watched it off the Watch TCM app.

To be honest, I sort of knew the basic story. In that great romantic age of the decades just before the Great War, a British gentleman named Rudolf Rassendyll (Ronald Colman) goes on the sort of trip to mysterious central Europe that only the idle rich could afford to do in those days, winding up in some unnamed kingdom roughly where the border of Hungary and Romania would be today. He gets an odd reception, which isn't explained to him until he meets some higher-up military men. Col. Zapt (C. Aubrey Smith) informs Rudolf that he looks amazingly like their country's crown prince, also named Rudolf; apparently, the two shared a common ancestor five or six generations prior.

Curiosity gets the better of everybody, and the two Rudolfs are introduced to each other. British Rudolf does look surprisingly like the Crown Prince, which isn't that much of a surprise when you understand that the continental Rudolf is also played by Ronald Colman. His coronation is supposed to be the next day, but he parties into the night with his new best friend Rudolf.

That's a mistake though, as Prince Rudolf's half-brother Michael (Raymond Massey) has given the prince a drugged bottle of wine. Rudolf drinks all of it and is unable to be roused for his coronation the next day, something that means Michael would be in line to take the throne. So you can understand why Michael would want to commit such a dastardly deed. Zapt understands that having King Michael would be a terrible thing, so he convinces the British Rudolf to stand in for the prince, as nobody will notice the difference. I suppose it's the reverse of Richard Basehart taking off his glasses and putting on contact lenses in Tension.

Michael, of course, knows there's a ruse, since he's the one who drugged his half-brother. Worse than that, he kidnaps the crown prince, so that when the British Rudolf thinks the hare-brained scheme of being a body double for a prince is just about over, it really isn't: nobody can find the prince who is technically a king now.

Even more complicated is the fact that Prince Rudolf has a personal life, and somehow nobody close to British Rudolf who isn't aware of the ruse is able to figure out that these two aren't the same people. This is especially true of Princess Flavia (Madeleine Carroll), another cousin. She's betrothed to Prince Rudolf, but it's more one of those royal marriages of convenience. She was willing to marry the prince out of duty, but she didn't really love him. British Rudolf, on the other hand is different, and while Flavia notices a change, she can't figure out what caused it.

Meanwhile, there's still the little problem of Prince Rudolf having been absconded with and being held somewhere. His supporters are going to have to rescue him, but Michael is no dummy and has made it very difficult for anybody to rescue him.

The plot to The Prisoner of Zenda is frankly a bit daft. But it's one of those movies where you should just sit back and not try to think too much about all the plot holes. If you can do that, you'll find that it's fairly grand entertainment, at least in the fashion of 1930s Hollywood. Everybody involved does a good job, and the story never really stops moving. It's definitely worth a watch.

Midnight (1939)

A search of the blog reveals that I've never blogged about the Claudette Colbert film Midnight before. It was on TCM not too long ago, so I recorded it in order that I could do a review of it, not having seen it in ages.

Colbert plays Eve Peabody, who at the start of the movie shows up in Paris on a train from Monte Carlo and Nice. She's asleep in third class when the train stops, and the railyard worker who checks to make certain all the passengers have gotten off has to roust her to get her off the train. She also doesn't have any luggage with her, just the very fine gown on her back. Eve, you see, is a chorus girl who likes to gamble, and lost everything she had in Monte Carlo, to the point that she had to pawn her belongings to get to Paris.

Tibor Czerny (Don Ameche) is a Hungarian émigré living in Paris and working as a taxi driver. Eve sees him, and makes him an offer. He'll drive her around to all the nightclubs listed in the want ads as looking for singers, and if she gets a job, she'll pay him double the fare; otherwise, he'll have to eat the fare since she doesn't have any money. We get a montage of nighclub neon signs, as Eve finds herself unable to procure employment. But Tibor is already smitten with her, as he buys her dinner and offers her a place to crash for the night as he works the night shift.

Eve has other plans. She escapes to a hoity-toity classical music recital that's by invitation only. Well, she escapes to the outside of it, as she doesn't have an invitation, of course. So when she gets in line to enter, she presents her ticket from the pawn shop, since the guy handling admittance isn't checking the invitations so quickly. They check after everybody is in, and Stephanie, the woman running the concert (Hedda Hopper in a small role) spots the deception, asking if anybody is Eve Peabody, or knows her. The real Eve, of course, says nothing, but another man spots her trying to leave, and takes her into another room.

These are actually several people who would prefer to play bridge than listen to this classical music, among them Marcel, who brought Eve into the room; Georges Flammarion (John Barrymore); Georges' husband Helene (Mary Astor); and Helene's lover Jacques Picot (Francis Lederer). George knows fully well that Helene and Jacques are lovers, but he's not going to grant his wife a divorce, instead looking for a way to break up the relationship. Meanwhile, Eve loses 4000 francs playing bridge, money she doesn't have. Eve, of course, hasn't told these people she's Eve Peabody; instead she claims to be the Baroness Czerny, taking Tibor's name.

Georges, however, does have many, and slips some into Eve's pocketbook. He even books a suite for her at the Ritz so that Jacques won't discover the deception. Of course, he's got a plan for her, and my synopsis giving a bit too much away, you might have figured it out, which is that Georges wants Eve to get Jacques to fall in love with her so that Georges will be able to get Helene back for himself. Eve accepts the offer, because she doesn't really have much choice.

Complicating things is that Tibor would like to find Eve. And he's got the power of thousands of Parisian taxicab drivers on his side, having put up a pool wherein everybody who antes up can get the whole pool by finding Eve. Eventually, he learns that Eve has gone to the Flammarion place out in the country for one of those weekend-long parties in a movie like Gosford Park. And when he goes out there, and finds that Eve is using his name....

If Midnight suffers from one problem, it's one that's not of its own making, but of having been released in 1939. Old movie buffs tend to consider 1939 Hollywood's greatest year, and there are a lot of movies from that year that are better remembered than Midnight, with probably the most notable one for the purposes of this blog post being another Paris-set movie, Ninotchka. It's a bit of a shame, because Midnight is generally a fine movie, although at times the production values feel just slightly less glittering than Ninotchka.

But, in general, the actors all do quite well for themselves, including Monty Woolley as a judge in a divorce-court finale, and the script is excellent too. This later even though the screenwriters, the pair of Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett, apparently had some problems with Mitchell Leisen's direction -- not that I found anyhing notably wrong with it.

In short, Midnight is one of the underrated films of 1939, and if you haven't seen it, definitely do yourself a favor and watch it.

Cass Timberlane

Lana Turner was one of the stars TCM honored back in August in their annual Summer Under the Stars programming feature. One of the movies that this gave me the chance to record, not having blogged about it before, was Cass Timberlane. Recently I finally got around to watching it so I could do a post on it here.

Although Cass could easily be a woman's name, in this case Cass Timblerand is played by Spencer Tracy. He's a judge in the medium-sized town of Grand Republic, MN, one of those cities that populate the midwestern America of Hollywood movies during the studio era. In the movie's opening scene, he's seen denying a motion for divorce, telling the two parties that marriage is sacred and all that jazz. It's pretty clear, especially since we know that this is based on a novel by Sinclair Lewis, that the good judge is going to turn out to fall afoul of that in some way.

But not just yet. At the beginning of the movie, Cass is a widow, having lost his wife young, and living alone in a big house with a maid and not much else. He's friends with the town's upper class, with his lawyer friends trying to hook him up with Chris Grau (Margaret Lindsay), who they think would be right for him. Among his friends is Boone Havock (Albert Dekker), the lawyer for the town's one big industrial firm, owned by Webb Wargate (John Litel). Another good friend is another lawyer, the bachelor Bradd Criley (Zachary Scott).

Another of the cases over which Cass presides is of a boarding house owner on the wrong side of town, who is suing the city because they didn't properly clear ice from the sidewalk, causing her to slip and injure herself. Among the witnesses is one of her tenants, Ginny Marshland (Lana Turner). She's a designer and sometimes artist who among other things draws a political cartoon-like picture of Judge Timberlane, which Bradd finds and brings to the judge's attention when Ginny misplaces her notepad.

Cass decides he's going to make things right with Ginny by walking over to her side of town, apologizing to her when he meets her. But he also gets roped into umpiring a pick-up baseball game, and then going to a restaurant with Ginny where she eats dinner. This even though Cass is supposed to be at a country club party for one of the upper class couples' anniversary.

If they find out about Cass and Ginny, it's going to cause a scandal. And sure enough, Cass and Ginny start seeing each other more often, to the point that they eventually say the hell with convention and get married. As with All that Heaven Allows a decade later, the town really starts gossiping, and making life a bit challenging for the Timberlanes.

It doesn't help that Ginny feels she's put herself into a gilded cage, and she'd like to see more of the world. Bradd could show her more of that world, and he's just enough of a wolf that everybody would expect him to put the moves on Ginny.

Meanwhile, the Wargate company is being sued by some of the shareholders for profiteering during "the war" (whether it's World War I or World War II isn't made clear; all of the cars and clothes scream 1947 when the movie was released, but the action takes place over a long enough time that it would have had to start while the war was still on, which doesn't seem to be the case). The Wargates, Havocks, and the rest of the upper class expect Judge Timberlane to keep granting the defendants a stay in the case, which he grants until he has an epiphany in New York.

In theory there's some promising material in Cass Timberlane, but it falls apart thanks to somebody deciding that what this material needs is a didactic, moralizing treatment. I'm not certain whether that somebody was Sinclair Lewis (I haven't read the book), or the suits at MGM. In any case, the slow deterioration of the Timberlane marriage veers into the ridiculous. Tracy does his best, and he's perfectly competent in a role that makes me think of Edward, My Son, but even he can't save the material. Lana Turner is nice to look at, and Zachary Scott has a role he could have played in his sleep, as if he walked off the set of Mildred Pierce one day and decided he'd start being Monty Beragon over at MGM the next.

Cass Timberlane is available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive collection.

The Lost Squadron

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mary Astor night

Tonight on TCM is devoted to the actress Mary Astor. The real reason I'm mentioning it, however, is because of the new-to-TCM documentary that's showing up, called Scandal: The Trial of Mary Astor. I haven't seen the documentary, but it sounds interesting, focusing on the 1936 custody trial between Astor and her ex-husband over the couple's 5-year-old daughter. I think I heard somebody on the TCM boards mention this back in 2018 when it showed up at the TCM film festival. The only thing that gives me pause is the presence of Molly Haskell.

The documentary kicks off the night at 8:00 PM, and like a lot of the new-to-TCM documentaries, there's a second airing for the benefit of people on the west coast, at 1:00 AM. The rest of the night has four of Astor's performance, including a really good one in Act of Violence at 4:30 AM Tuesday. One interesting thing is that Act of Violence is actually on the TCM schedule a second time this week, at 6:30 PM Friday.

Not to be confused with Young Man With Ideas

Unfortunately, I've come down with a bad cold at just the wrong time of the year, so I don't have the energy to do reviews that are as extensive as I'd like. Thankfully, I recently watched a movie that doesn't need a big review: Young Ideas.

Mary Astor plays Jo Evans, a writer who's recently written an extremely successful -- and rather racy -- novel about life in Paris. Her agent Trent (Allyn Joslyn) has sent her on a speaking tour to discuss the book, but she hasn't shown up to her last several engagements, much to Trent's consternation.

The reason why she hasn't shown up is that she stopped in the college town of Digby, PA, where she met chemistry teacher Michael Kingsley (Herbert Marshall). It was love at first sight, and they got married, with Jo planning to live with Kingsley in Digby. This just won't do.

Jo has two young adult daughters, son Jeff (Elliott Reid) and daughter Susan (Susan Peters), and they're not pleased at all with the idea of their mom getting remarried to... a chemistry professor? So Jeff cooks up a scheme to turn Michael against his new wife.

Frankly, Jeff comes across as a really spoiled jerk here. He does get his comeuppance at the end, but not after any number of complications. Jeff and Susan both enroll at Digby, and while there Susan falls in love with English professor Tom Farrell (Richard Carlson), which is against university rules. But it make her think that perhaps they shouldn't be plotting against Mom. She becomes even more certain of this when Jeff tries to turn Tom against Susan.

This is a standard-issue MGM programmer, nothing particularly noteworthy, and not particularly bad except for the way the characters are written. It's available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive, but is really one of those movies that should be in a box set instead of (or in addition to) a standalone DVD.

There's Always a Woman

During Summer Under the Stars, TCM ran a day of films devoted to Melvyn Douglas, whose very broad range goes from dramas like Hud to screwball comedies. Something much closer to the lattter is There's Always a Woman.

Douglas plays Bill Reardon, a private detective who doesn't particularly like it. Part of that is because he preferred his old job as an investigator for the district attorney, while the other part is because the business is failing due to lack of clients. His wife Sally (Joan Blondell) got him to start his own detective agency in the first place, and wants him to keep at it.

Bill goes out to approach the district attorney about getting his old job back, and wonder of wonders, a woman walks in the door looking for a detective! Lola Fraser (Mary Astor, which made me think a bit of The Maltese Falcon) is worried that her husband is cheating on her with his old girlfriend Anne (Frances Drake). Lola would like a detective to tail the husband and see what's going on. Sally sees that there's good money in this, so she's willing to take the job, even though she doesn't know the first thing about being a detective. That, and the first night of surveillance involves going to an expensive club, and Bill definitely does not know that Sally has taken a client.

At the club, we see a complicated love triangle as Anne has a fiancé in former gambler Jerry Marlowe (Robert Paige), so there are all sorts of reasons for sparks to fly. Except that the sparks don't fly there, but at the Fraser apartment, where the husband gets shot to death. Sally has a feeling she knows who did it, and actually calls up one of the papers to give them her story.

This is a problem for Bill, since the district attorney assigns him to investigate the case. And Sally isn't about to stop doing her own investigating, since she still has Lola as a client. So you can imagine where the comedy is coming from for the rest of the movie as husband and wife both investigate, with Bill trying to stop Sally from investigating, and Sally's moves constantly but unintentinally making life difficult for Bill.

Don't think too much about the mystery in There's Always a Woman, because that's not really the point of the movie. It's more about the give and take between the dueling investigators, and in that it works quite well. Every time I've seen Douglas in light comedy, he's been quite good, and that's the case here. Blondell worked especially well with Cagney back in the early 30s, but here she's able to work off of Douglas well too. She's not quite ditzy in a Gracie Allen way, just well-meaning but having everything backfire.

There's Always a Woman is a fun little comedy from the late 1930s that really deserves to be better known. It's on DVD courtesy of Sony/Columbia's MOD scheme, but that means it's a little pricey.

Red Hot Tires

I've mentioned on a number of occasions how much I enjoy the Warner Bros. B movies and programmers, which always have something really zippy about them. A good example of a movie that's more fun than it has any right being is Red Hot Tires.

Lyle Talbot plays Wallace "Wally" Storm, chief mechanic for Sanford Motors, a company that makes race cars led by dad Martin (Henry Kolker) and his daughter Patricia (Mary Astor), who has a surpisingly big part in the racing business for a woman of those days. Wally carries on a platonic relationship with Patricia, and also dreams of becoming a driver in the big league himself. But the Sanfords' current driver Bob (Gavin Gordon) also has the hots for Patricia and is none too pleased that Wally is getting ideas above his station. Eventually, Bob gets Wally fired, much to the consternation of Wally's mechanic Bud (Roscoe Karns) and protege Johnny (Frankie Darro).

Wally gets to ride in a big race against Bob, but Bob has a trick up his sleeve involving something in the tires that is supposed to doom anybody who gets too close to his tires, apparently a common tactic in racing in those days. Sure enough, Wally gets too close to Bob's tires, but it backfires, as Bob is the one who goes off the track and down a ravine, killing him. Based on vague threats Wally had spoken about, he's put on trial for the murder of Bob, and convicted!

Johnny saw but couldn't hear Bob's plan to get Wally, and when he and Patricia investigate they're able to get a pardon for Wally. (Really, at most a new trial would be in order.) But on the evening that the pardon is to be delivered, Bud springs Wally from prison! The two friends go down to South America to escape extradition, and Wally becomes the famous American race car driver Bulldog. Patricia puts two and two togehter....

Red Hot Tires has all sorts of continuity problems and veers from one part of the plot to another overly quickly, getting everything done in a little over an hour. And yet, all along the way it's a lot of fun, thanks to professional performances from all the main stars. There's nothing great here, but you'll be entertained for an hour.

Red Hot Tires has been released to DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive collection.

Briefly on Other Men's Women

Sometimes, there are movies that you know you've seen before; you just can't remember when it was you saw them. A good example would be Other Men's Women, which is airing this afternoon at 5:15 PM as part of the last of the 24-hour marathons in the Friday Night Spotlight of pre-Codes.

The plot involves Grant Withers and Regis Toomey playing a pair of railroad engineers who are also best friends. That friendship gets tested, however, due to the presence of Toomey's wife, played by Mary Astor. Withers falls for her and falls hard, which obviosuly puts a strain on the friendship. James Cagney gets fourth billing, and even further down the cast list is Joan Blondell, playing a hash-slinger at a diner. Cagney and Blondell had already appeared together and turned heads in Sinners' Holiday several months earlier; interestingly that one also has Grant Withers as the male lead. (It's not on the schedule.) But it was still a couple of months before The Public Enemy (following Other Men's Women on TCM this evening at 6:30 PM) would make Cagney a huge star. William Wellman, who directed Cagney in Other Men's Women, must have realized he had something good; the studio bosses only realized it when they saw the first day's rushes of The Public Enemy since Cagney was originally slated to play the sidekick.

At any rate, I'm not certain when the last time is that I actually saw Other Men's Women. Female lead Mary Astor was TCM's Star of the Month back in March, but I'm pretty certain I didn't watch it then. James Cagney was Star of the Month a couple of Decembers ago, I think, and I wouldn't be surprised if I watched the movie again back then. If you look at the link to Sinners' Holiday, that aired on a day in Summer Under the Stars honoring Blondell, and I wouldn't be surprised if TCM ran Other Men's Women back then. But I think the first time I actually saw it would have been when TCM spent a month honoring William Wellman back in 2006 ot 2007, with Wellman's son sitting down with Robert Osborne to discuss Dad's movies.

Other Men's Women did get a DVD release several years back, as part of one of the Forbidden Hollywood box sets that also featured Frisco Jenny. I think that box set is no longer in print, however, since it's not available from the TCM Shop.

A Successful Calamity

TCM's Star of the Month Mary Astor had a long career, lasting some 40 years from the silent era to 1964's Hush, Hush... Sweet Charlotte. Her career crossed genres as well as eras, with this week's look at Astor covering 25 years, and comedies, dramas, and a mystery in there. One surprisingly good movie in the lineup is the early talkie A Successful Calamity, at 6:45 AM tomorrow.

Astor is second-billed, playng Emmy Wilton, the second wife of banker Henry Wilton (George Arliss, the star of the proceedings). Henry is returning from Europe, where he's been negotiating on behalf of the US government to provide loans to various European countries after World War I. Henry's banking work has helped make the family wealthy, and after a year in Europe, he's almost anxious to return home to see the family. Unfortunately, they not as anxious to see him as he is to see them. Not because they're bad people; it's just that the kids are all grown up and have lives of their own, while Emmy has been keeping herself busy while Henry was away too. Emmy has become patron to a musician Pietro (Fortunio Bonanova) whose music Henry really doesn't care for. Son Eddie (William Janney) has become a moderately successful polo player under coach Larry Rivers (a very young Randolph Scott), and goes from polo match to date, barely noticing Dad has come home. Daughter Peggy (Evalyn Knapp) has romantic problems of her own: secretly, she loves Larry, but he wouldn't be a right fit to marry a yound socialite of Peggy's standing, so she has to feign a romantic attachment to Struthers, somebody more suitably wealthy (Hale Hamilton), even though he's a drip and we know he's not right for her. About the only person who still pays attention to Henry is his faithful valet Connors (Grant Mitchell).

So what's a neglected father to do? Connors tells him that because the servants and others of their social standing aren't well-to-do, they have to come up with ways to entertain themselves, rather than going to soirées or polo matches or whatnot. In short, they spend more time together, even if we've seen in a lot of other movies from the early 1930s that the working classes didn't have a home life that was as idyllic as Connors seems to portray it. But it gives Henry an idea! He finally gets everybody together at dinner and tells them that while he was away in Europe, the business apparently suffered some financial reverses, and this has left the Wiltons flat broke. Now, as I said at the beginning, Henry's family are supposed to be at heart good people; it's just that they had their own lives to lead. So when they hear that Dad is broke, they immediately do a 180, as opposed to the family in something like My Man Godfrey where the family members remain just as screwed up. Emmy tries to sell some of her jewelry to raise money, while Eddie tries to get honest work. Some of Wilton's business rivals even try to get the better of him when he's "broke", but they play right into his hands. Eventually Dad tells the family they aren't really broke, and everybody more or less lives happily ever after, except possibly Struthers.

A Successful Calamity is, to be honest, a fairly wispy trifle. It moves along breezily running about 70 minutes, and not all that much really happens. And yet it's a lovely little trifle. This, I think, is almost entirely down to having George Arliss in the lead. The cast around Arliss is all reasonably good, but they pale in comparion to Arliss every time he's on screen. Arliss imbues the Henry Wilton character with a vitality that makes you care what happens to him, even if you don't care all that much about the rest of the family or remember them very much after the end of the film. In fact, Arliss got put in multiple trifling movies like this one and made them a joy to watch. A Successful Calamity isn't the best plot out there, but George Arliss takes what little there is and makes a lot of entertainment value out of it.

A Successful Calamity did get a DVD release as part of a George Arliss box set that can be purchased from the TCM Shop.