The Private Life of Don Juan

Merle Oberon was TCM's Star of the Month late last year, and that gave me the opportunity to record a movie or two that I hadn't seen before. This time out, the movie is one she made over in the UK: The Private Life of Don Juan.

Now, as you might guess, Merle Oberon is not playing Don Juan; that honor goes to Douglas Fairbanks (Sr.) in his final film role. And, as you might also guess considering this is a movie about Don Juan, there are a bunch of actresses in the movie with a fairly similar role, that being a woman who might want Don Juan.

Fairbanks was 51 when he made The Private Life of Don Juan, and that's part of the conceit of the movie. As they say in sports, "Father Time is unbeaten", and time is catching up to Don Juan too. He and his friend/assistant Leporello (Melville Cooper) have returned to Sevilla in part to get medical advice because Don Juan is at the age where he's not as spry as he used to be. However, Sevilla is also the home of Don Juan's wife Doña Dolores (Benita Hume), who basically has a warrant for Don Juan's arrest.

Complicating things is the fact that word of Don Juan's return has reached the city, so there are young men who idolized Don Juan. One of them, Rodrigo (Barry MacKay) is even imitating Don Juan by climbing up to women's balconies to try to seduce them, a fact that needless to say gets the women's husbands irritated.

And then, something happens that may or may not solve Don Juan's problems. Rodrigo goes after the wrong man's wife, resulting in the angry husband killing Rodrigo. Except that everybody thinks this is Don Juan, which at least in theory solves Don Juan's legal issues as well as any financial issues he might have. Don Juan and Leporello go off to a small village where nobody will recognize them. But then he realizes that women are no longer interested in some random middle-aged guy who isn't known to have the reputation that preceded Don Juan wherever he went. But how can Don Juan convince people that he's still alive, and that this claimant really is Don Juan? Never mind the fact that if his real identity were to come to light, he'd still face criminal proceedings.

In any case, Don Juan does try to tell everyone that no, he's not really dead. Some writers tried to cash in on Don Juan's death by writing a pulp fiction pamphlet about the exploits of Don Juan, a book that got turned into a play. Don Juan goes to a performance of that play and tries to tell everyone that hey, he's still alive, but unsurprisingly he's just laughed out of the theater. Perhaps Doña Dolores can vouch for Don Juan....

I really like the premise of The Private Life of Don Juan, which made me think of a movie like From Noon Till Three. Douglas Fairbanks does well as an aging Don Juan, and since he's the focus of the movie, that's important. However, there's something in the movie that's a bit off. I think the story is a bit too slow, or maybe barebones, for the movie. Despite the obvious charm, there's not a lot of there there.

The Lodger (1944)

I mentioned a few months back that one of the movies that's back in the FXM rotation is the 1944 version of The Lodger. I'd seen it before, but surprisingly, a search of the blog claims that I haven't done a post on it. With that in mind, I decided I'd wait for it to show up again on FXM so that I could re-watch it and do up a post to go with the FXM showing. That next showing is tomorrow, July 13, at 7:15 AM.

The Lodger is based on the same source material as the Alfred Hitchcock movie of the same title, a 1913 novel by Marie Belloc Lowndes; that novel was also the basis for the Jack Palance movie Man in the Attic. As you may know, the material is based on the famous Jack the Ripper serial murders of 1888, although, as the identity of the real Jack the Ripper was never determined, what happens to the stand-in character here is obviously different from whatever happened to Jack the Ripper.

In a portion of the Fox backlot that stands in for London, a drunken music-hall player heads for home, only to get waylaid and murdered by an unseen person. This is presented as not being the first of the Jack the Ripper murders, so the whole press already has been been reporting breathlessly for some time on the murders and everybody has been waiting for the next one to happen.

At about the same time, even though it's late evening, a man walks up to a middle-class house not quite where the murders have been occurring but close enough to get there at night. The man, taking the name Slade from a nearby street sign (Laird Cregar), says that he got the address of this house from an estate agent who told him that the house was letting out rooms. In fact, that is true; man of the house Robert Bonting (Cedric Hardwicke) has suffered some financial reverses and he and his wife Ellen (Sara Allgood) need to rent out the upper rooms to make ends meet. Slade is presented as someone we're obviously supposed to suspect of being Jack the Ripper, and he takes the rooms.

Things get worse when the Bontings' niece, Kitty Langley (Merle Oberon) returns from France. She had been working there as a singer in a revue, but she's about to take on a new job as the lead in a London music-hall revue. However, she's also the same exact sort of actress whom Jack is believed to be attracted to. Slade seems to be OK keeping to himself, although Kitty takes an interest in him, trying to invite him to see her new show. This also serves to increase the suspense, as Kitty seems to have no clue that she might be in any sort of danger. Her aunt and uncle, however, begin to suspect that Slade and Jack the Ripper might be one and the same.

Meanwhile, an old acquaintance who used to work in the same theater where Kitty is now performing shows up briefly; after leaving she too gets murdered by Jack. This brings in Scotland Yard in the form of Detective Inspector Warwick (George Sanders). He too takes an interest in Kitty, although you might think this is a bit unprofessional. In any case, the police do have to be around to keep Kitty safe, since she is in their eyes an obvious target for Jack especially once her aunt and uncle bring their suspicions to the police.

This version of The Lodger effectively brings all of this to a successful climax. The one objection might be that, because of the Production Code we know the Jack the Ripper mystery can't be left unsolved. Be that as it may, the cast does a good job, especially Laird Cregar, who died much too young. There's a fair bit here that bears similarity to Cregar's final film, Hangover Square, another smallish picture that's very well done. Both of them deserve to be seen more often.

Deep in My Heart

Tonight is the final night of Merle Oberon's turn as TCM's Star of the Month. One of her movies that I haven't blogged about before, but had on my DVR, is Deep in My Heart, which airs overnight tonight at 12:45 AM (which is technically December 31 in the Eastern time zone but still December 30 in more westerly time zones). So, with that in mind, I held off on watching the movie and putting up a review until I could do it in conjunction with tonight's TCM showing.

Deep in My Heart starts off with the MGM orchestra performing an overture. This is actually a medley of songs composed by Sigmund Romberg, who is the subject of the movie. After the overture and opening credits, we're introduced to the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where a young Sigmund (José Ferrer) works as a waiter at a Viennese-style café owned by Anna Mueller (Helen Traubel), composing Strauss-style music for the band to play. A musical agent shows up and likes Romberg's ability, but notes that this is a type of music that's old fashioned: if Romberg wants to make it as a composer, he's going to have to write music that's more with the times.

Romberg does do this, coming up with a formulaic song called "Leg of Mutton", which brings him to the attention of J.J. Shubert (Walter Pidgeon), an impresario who together with his brother was about to open what is the Shubert Theater on Broadway that still stands to this day. Shubert is putting on a show with star Gaby Deslys (Tamara Toumanova) and would like Romberg to write a song for her. This leads to part of the dramatic tension of the movie, such as that is, in that Romberg has artistic principles while Shubert and a bunch of other people all know better than Romberg what would be commercially successful. Indeed, there's a scene late in the movie where an adolescent girl says she likes one of the songs, but decries the show as a whole as opera.

Back to the meeting with Shubert, and Romberg's song is enough of a hit that he gets to keep working with Shubert and makes a lot of money. Unfortunately, he spends even more money than he earns, which ultimately results in his declaring bankruptcy and being forced to go back to Shubert to work on the sort of material that Shubert knows will be a commercial hit and make Romberg a tidy sum of money. Along the way, Romberg meets another actress, Dorothy Donnelly (Merle Oberon), who is a bit of a champion of Romberg's and who has some pretentions to higher art of her own. While on a tour of Europe just after the Great War, she comes across a play called Old Heidelberg that she snapped up the rights to, to work on a translation with lyrics that could be set to music. She wants Romberg to write the music, and the result is the successful operetta The Student Prince.

To fill out the plot, there's a romantic angle involving how Romberg meets his wife Lillian (Doe Avedon) in the Adirondack resort town of Saranac Lake while trying to work on songs for a musical where he faces a very tight deadline. (In fact, this was Romberg's second wife; his first wife isn't mentioned and IMDb doesn't even list her.) But a lot of the movie is just an excuse to bring in MGM's stars to do musical numbers of Romberg's songs.

Not that this is a bad thing, of course; people who like the Freed Unit musicals that MGM was putting out in this era are probably going to love Deep in My Heart even if it is a slightly different type of music. For me, the one big problem with the movie is the sense that, the way things play out, Sigmund Romberg comes across as the sort of person whose life wasn't quite interesting enough to be the subject of a Hollywood biopic. The actors all do quite well with the material they're given, and the stars performing the musical numbers -- including Gene Kelly with his brother Frank; Rosemary Clooney; Cyd Charisse and her husband Tony Martin in different numbers; Ann Miller; and more -- are more than competent at what they're asked to do. But the music may not be to everyone's taste, and the dramatic scenes in getting to the musical numbers are slow.

Still, for anyone who wants a bit of musical history or who wants to see an MGM musical that isn't as well remembered, Deep in My Heart is a movie of a high technical standard.

The Cowboy and the Lady

Another movie I recorded some time back because it sounded interesting is The Cowboy and the Lady. I recently got around to watching it so that I could do a review on it here.

Merle Oberon appears first as the lady, because you don't expect her co-star Gary Cooper to be playing the lady. The lady in question, Mary Smith, is the daughter of Horace Smith (Henry Kolker), a wealthy man who's hoping to get nominated for president but needs the endorsement of some big power broker, this being the days before widespread presidential primaries. To that end, Dad doesn't want any scandal, which means that Mary hasn't gotten to do much with her life. At least her uncle Hannibal (Harry Davenport) has some sympathy for her plight.

Unfortunately, Mary has done something which might well bring scandal into her father's attempt to get that nomination. She went to a club one night, only for it to be one of those places that has illegal gambling. So of course the club was raided, and she wound up on the list of people caught up in the raid. Annoying for a run of the mill rich person, but possibly fatal to your father's hopes of securing the nomination. So Dad gets the brilliant idea of keeping his daughter out of the spotlight by sending her down to Palm Beach together with two maids, Katie (Patsy Kelly) and Elly (Mabel Todd).

The thing is, this isn't the Palm Beach of The Palm Beach Story or Some Like It Hot, but the Palm Beach of the off-season, when the other rich people don't go south for their health. Mary is there mostly alone, or at least only with the locals. (Looking it up, apparently Palm Beach swells by a factor of four during the snowbird season, and the Palm Beach County of 1940 had about 5% the population that it does doday.) Poor Mary,and she didn't do that much wrong.

For the locals, the rodeo is in town, and Katie and Elly decide they're going to go see the rodeo and then try to get dates with a couple of cowboys in the rodeo, which is how we get the title of the movie. Mary goes along, and is eventually paired with Stretch (Gary Cooper), who doesn't seem too interested in her. That leads Mary to tell a tall story about her family. Instead of being the well-to-do daughter of a possible presidential candidate, she's a made for a rich family looking after the Palm Beach home for the off-season and being the breadwinner for a drunken widowed father and four younger siblings. That gets Stretch's interest.

But of course you knew they were going to fall in love, or else we wouldn't have much of a movie. Stretch immediately wants Mary to marry him, something she doesn't think she can do because that would really cause a scandal. But she does love Stretch, so she follows him onto the steamer sailing back for Stretch's home, or at least to the port of Galveston from where he'll go overland to his ranch. But Mary falls in love with Stretch enough that she actually marries him on the boat!

How's she going to get out of this? Or how is she going to get out of causing her father a scandal. There are some twists and turns, but this is the sort of story where you know how it's going to end, mostly, with the titular cowboy and lady winding up together in the final reel.

There's not really anything wrong with The Cowboy and the Lady so much as it is a movie where you feel like everything's been done a bunch of times already, and done better. It's material that would have been perfect for Olivia de Havilland and somebody at Warner Bros., or Joan Fontaine at RKO, or perhaps for some people one of the studios was trying to groom for stardom. Gary Cooper had already shown his adeptness at a certain form of comedy, and what he's asked to do here comes extremely easy to him. Oberon is adequate, too.

If you're looking for a 1930s romantic comedy, you could do far worse than The Cowboy and the Lady. But you could also do far better.

Melodramatic 1930s love triangle #58347205723806

Merle Oberon was one of the stars honored in Summer Under the Stars last year, which gave me the chance to DVR a movie I hadn't blogged about before, The Dark Angel. I probably should have watched it in March since it was shown again for 31 Days of Oscar thanks in part to Oberon's nomination, but I only got to it recently.

Oberon plays Kitty Vane, who lives in one of those English manor houses in the early part of the 20th century. She's got two best friends who have all known each other since childhood, Alan Trent (Fredric March) and Gerald Shannon (Herbert Marshall). With these three knowing each other more or less all their lives, it's unsurprising that they would wind up having romantic feelings for one another, or at least heterosexual romantic feelings, since there's no way they could have depicted Alan and Gerald being in love with each other. But while both guys like Kitty, Kitty loves Alan and only considers Gerald a close platonic friend.

And then the Great War comes, sending both of the guys off to fight. Both of them get leave at the same time, and when they get home, Alan decides he's going to propose to Kitty. Gerald accepts this, and Alan and Kitty think about having the marriage be as soon as possible. This would be doable with the ten days' leave he and Gerald have. But unfortunately, all leave gets cancelled just as Alan is going to get the marriage license. No vicar is going to be able to perform the ceremony before Alan has to go back to the front.

So at the other end of the railway line where the soldiers are going to depart for France, Alan and Kitty decide that they're going to spend the night together anyway, despite not being married. Lawrence, another soldier who knows Alan, Kitty, and Gerald, happens to see Alan in a compromising situation, and is a bit of a dick to Alan about it. You'd think Alan could just tell Lawrence that he's having dinner with Kitty, but the idea of an unmarried couple sharing a hotel room together is something their class of society would consider scandalous back in those days (see the later Merle Oberon movie The Divorce of Lady X).

Lawrence is enough of a dick that he lets Gerald in on the fact that Alan had somebody in his room with him, which leads to problems out on the front. Alan tries to put in for leave, but Gerald won't approve it because he thinks Alan has been dishonorable to Kitty. Instead, Alan winds up on one of those dangerous missions that could lead to his death, one that he in fact doesn't return from.

Gerald eventually returns to England and Kitty feeling responsible for Alan's death, more so when Kitty reveals it was she who was in the hotel with Alan that night. Worse, it turns out that Alan didn't die at all. He was only blinded by an explosion in the field and taken to a German hospital under a different name. After some time and with the war over, Alan is as well as he's ever going to be but still blind, and free to go back to England.

He takes the train to Kitty's home town, but decides not to get off because he doesn't want to be a burden. Instead, he goes to another town where he stays at an inn where the kids have never seen a blind person before. Alan treats the kids to some children's stories, which get written down and published under that different name. But you just know that eventually Alan's path is going to cross with the path that Gerald and Kitty are on. They've decided to marry, since Gerald always loved Kitty and they just know that Alan is dead.

If you like sappy 1930s melodramas, you're going to love The Dark Angel. It's well acted and the story certainly pours on the melodrama. If melodramas aren't your thing, then you probably won't care so much for it, since the characters make some pretty dumb (and dated) choices in their lives. Indeed, I don't think The Dark Angel is the sort of movie I'd pick if I were trying to get people not so interested in old movies into 1930s films. Better to pick a comedy or a drama with more of a payoff at the end like San Francisco with its depiction of the earthquake. But it's easy to see why audiences of the day would have flocked to The Dark Angel.

Torch Song in reverse

I noticed that Torch Song is on the TCM schedule, tomorrow morning at 8:30 AM. Not too long ago, I watched a different movie that reminded me of Torch Song. That one is called Night Song and, not having blogged about it before, now would be a good time to do so.

Merle Oberon plays Cathy Mallory, an unmarried socialite living in San Francisco with her aunt, Miss Willey (Ethel Barrymore) and who is a patron of the arts. She and some of her friends go to the symphony, and after that they go to a little hole-in-the-wall bar off a side street that has a jazz combo playing. The combo has a pianist, Dan Evans (Dana Andrews), and Cathy thinks he's pretty good.

Cathy goes over to the piano to chat up Dan, but he reveals that he's blind, and rather snottily bitter about it too, spurning any advances because after all, who's really going to love a blind guy? They're just going to pity him. Dan's best friend Chick (Hoagy Carmichael) would like to see Dan get better, and go back to working on that concerto that he was composing before he went blind, but who knows if that's going to happen?

So Cathy comes up with a daft idea. Perhaps Chick could arrange for Dan to be somewhere that Cathy could bump into him, like at the beach. Only this time, Cathy is going to pretend to be blind and not well-to-do, so that Dan won't think this new woman he's just met is taking pity on him. Now, of course, the obvious question is what's going to happen when Dan finds out that Cathy is in fact fully sighted. I'd think he'd hate her for lying to him and treating him as the butt of some sort of sick joke.

At any rate, Dan doesn't figure out that this is rich and sighted Cathy Mallory, and becomes friends with the woman he thinks is blind, her aunt in tow because she supposedly needs a sighted companion, too. Cathy hears the concerto and thinks it's good and that Dan should keep working on it. She also learns that this is one of those forms of blindness that might be curable, but it's going to need $5,000 (a fairly substantial sum back in the late 1940s) and a trip east for the operation to do so.

Ah, but Cathy has a solution for that. She has the money to set up a contest to commission a new concerto, with a grand prize of... $5,000! Oh, and Cathy most definitely isn't in any way going to influence the judging to make certain that Dan's concerto wins, no sirree.

So of course we know that Dan is going to win the contest, and the prize also includes the great pianist Artur Rubinstein (a real concert pianist back in the day, playing himself) is going to perform the concerto... in New York in a few months' time, those few months being more than enough time for Dan to go to New York too and get that operation. Of course, once Dan regains his sight, he's not so sure he wants to see the "blind" Cathy any more since he doesn't want her to think he's pitying her. "Sighted" Cathy comes to New York....

Oh boy is the plot to Night Song ridiculous. The acting is good enough, but dammit if all those plot holes about the characters' motivation don't stay in the front of my mind throughout the movie. Fans of classical music will probably enjoy the music, although of course it really pops up at the end so you have to sit through a good 80 minutes or so before you get to it.

Night Song was originally released by RKO, so unsurprisingly it has received a DVD release courtesy of the Warner Archive collection.

A pimpernel's love is different from a square's

One of the first movies I put on the new DVR was the 1934 version of The Scarlet Pimpernel.

It's 1792 in France, and if you know your history which you should since I just mentioned this era a week or so ago regarding Désirée, there's a revolution on, and the revolutionaries are killing the non-revolutionary nobles. However, a cart driven by an elderly lady leaves Paris. Only it's not an elderly lady, but an Englishman, Percy Blakeney (Leslie Howard) in disguise. The guards let the cart pass because Percy says there's a patient with the plague in the back, which is why they don't inspect it. In fact, there's a nobleman who was slated for the guillotine.

Now, the authorities know about a man called the Scarlet Pimpernel who has been getting noblemen out of France, but they don't know the identity of the Pimpernel (if you haven't figured it out from my description, it's made quite clear that it's Blakeney). So Robespierre (Ernest Milton) sends his envoy Chauvelin (Raymond Massey) to England to try to figure out who the Pimpernel is, because after all there's a substantial French expat population in England.

One of those French is Blakeney's own wife Marguerite (Merle Oberon). Percy still loves her, but doesn't really trust her, because after all she's French and there's been some rumor that she was responsible for getting some noblemen arrested. Worse, Marguerite's brother Armand (Walter Rilla) is one of the Pimpernel's men in France, so Chauvelin has Armand arrested so that he can put pressure on Marguerite to reveal the identity of the Pimpernel (which she doesn't know).

The Pimpernel has to head back to France for his most dangerous mission, saving one of his own men, knowing fully well that Chauvelin has more men then ever trying to find the Pimpernel. Marguerite follows him to France to try to warn him, but that might be a mistake because if Chauvelin can get her in custody, then there's even more pressure on Percy.

The Scarlet Pimpernel is a Korda brothers production, made in England for London Films, which if you've seen enough movies from that era you know is a byword for high technical quality. The only thing is, I couldn't help but think the movie could have been better. But that's largely because knowing the basic plot synopsis, I was expecting more of an action movie. Instead, The Scarlet Pimpernel is rather talky at times, especially in a long section I haven't mentioned set at a society party attended by Percy and Chauvelin. The one big action scene comes in the finale, and even that doesn't have all that much action.

Still, as I implied in the previous paragraph, the acting and production values are both top-notch. So if you know going in that there's a bit less swashbuckling-type action, it's not a bad movie at all.

The TCM Shop has a DVD of the movie from Reel Vault available for purchase that doesn't seem to be on Amazon. Amazon, however, has the movie on streaming. The story has been filmed for the big screen and TV on quite a few occasions, so you may want to make certain you're getting the right version.

Time for the full-length post on Désirée

At the beginning of the month, I mentioned that the movie Désirée showed up on FXM, but that I didn't have the time to do a full-length post on it for various reasons. It's going to be on FXM again, tomorrow at 10:50 AM and then again at 8:00 AM Thanksgiving, so now's the time to do that full-length post.

Jean Simmons plays Désirée Clary, a young woman living with her family and working at the family's millinery in Marseilles, France in 1794. If you know your history, you'll recognize the date as toward the end of the French Revolution. So who should show up in the Clarys' milieu but Napoleon Bonaparte (Marlon Brando), together with his brother Joseph (Cameron Mitchell)? Napoleon has plans of going to Paris to do great things, and gets more or less betrothed to Désirée in Marseilles. Désirée has a sister Julie (Elizabeth Sellars) who gets engaged to Joseph.

Napoleon does go to Paris, and some time passes. Sadly, Désirée receives no word from Napoleon. So she rather impulsively goes to Paris in order to look for Napoleon. She finds that he's at a party, but it's one of those swanky invitation-only things held by high society, and not only does Désirée not have an invitation; who's going to let her in anyway. Thankfully for her, one of the guests, General Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte (Michael Rennie), shows up without a companion. He's so taken by Désirée's beauty and her ardent desire to get into the party that he makes her his guest.

Désirée, of course, is going to find that Napoleon has met Josephine (Merle Oberon), who is of much higher upbringing than the Clarys and so better for Napoleon to have politically. In theory he still could have loved Désirée -- and in some ways he still does. But he needs a marriage that can help him obtain his ultimate desire, which is power. Josephine can provide that; Désirée can't.

Désirée settles by marrying Bernadotte, and it turns into a marriage of love, which is more than can be said for Napoleon and Josephine. Napoleon also has the problem that Josephine is barren, and he needs an heir once he's crowned himself emperor. But Désirée already has children by Bernadotte, so she's out of the question.

Political events become more heated as Napoleon is trying to take over all of Europe. He's installed his brother Joseph on the throne of Spain, and then it turns out that Sweden needs a new monarch as well. So they call on Bernadotte, offering to make him King because their current royal house has no heirs. He accepts despite Désirée knowing no Swedish.

She's unhappy in Sweden with the austere court life and her lack of Swedish, so she eventually decides to return to France, just in time for Napoleon's disastrous 1812 campaign. This leaves her effectively a prisoner in France under house arrest. And after that comes Waterloo and Napoleon's refusal to abdicate. The other powers all think Désirée is the only one who can get Napoleon to go to St. Helena....

Désirée is a nice enough Hollywood look at history, with the House of Bernadotte being one of the parts of the Napoleonic era not to get much mention in any other Hollywood movie. I don't have much idea how inaccurate the movie is, of course. Still, it's nice to look at, and the main actors all do reasonably well. The one big problem is with the print FXM is running, which was letterboxed and pillarboxed. So if you've got a smaller TV screen, this one is going to look pretty darn tiny. It also doesn't seem to be on DVD, which is a shame.

A Song to Remember

One of the movies that I recorded during Paul Muni's turn as TCM's Star of the Month was A Song to Remember.

The movie is a biopic of Polish composer Frédéric Chopin, but Muni doesn't play Chopin despite getting top billing. Chopin as an adult is played by Cornel Wilde, while the movie starts of with Chopin still a child in his native Poland. Muni plays Jozef Elsner, who was one of Chopin's early music teachers (in real life, at the Warsaw Conservatory; in the movie, the lessons take place at the Chopin family home and start at a much younger age). In any case, Chopin's musical talent was recognized from a fairly young age. Elsner has a letter from Parisian piano builder and music publisher Louis Pleyel (George Coulouris) that if the young Chopin is such a talent, then bring him to Paris. But the Chopin family doesn't have the money to send young Frédéric to Paris.

Some years pass. If you know your history, after 1815 the part of Poland where the Chopins lived became a Russian possession, and Frédéric is none too happy about this, vowing that he's going to help the people of Poland become free. Chopin grows up and his agitation for Polish independence becomes politically dangerous. Thankfully, Elsner has saved up the money to go to Paris that the Chopins don't have, so he and Frédéric are able to make a hasty escape to France.

When they go to see Pleyel, Pleyel remembers nothing about the letter, which is probably because the letter is now 11 years old. Pleyel wanted a child prodigy; adult pianists/composers are a dime a dozen, regardless of how much talent they seem to have. But Chopin is saved when the compositions he left in the other room are played by another pianist who turns out to be Franz Liszt (the movie puts him as being some years older than Chopin where in reality he was a year younger). Liszt had been studying in Paris for several years, so his vote of approval is a big deal, and Liszt and Chopin become friends.

Chopin's first recital doesn't go well, however, with only the author Georges Sand (Merle Oberon) supporting Chopin. She's interesting to Frédéric because she believes nobody will take a woman author truly seriously, which is why she's given herself a male pseudonym and does male things like wear pants and smoke cigars. Chopin really likes her, going to her estate outside Paris regularly, and then to Majorca when his health starts going downhill.

His health is one of the problems that threatens his career, with the other, at least in Elsner's eyes, being Sand herself. Then there are the political tensions back home, as the Polish revolutionaries Chopin knew before he left want him to raise money for their cause. It's all going to kill him at a young age....

A Song to Remember is a pretty movie to look at with its Technicolor photography, and lovely to listen to thanks to the music of Frédéric Chopin, played by José Iturbi. But very little of it is actually real. I mentioned a few mistakes already, while another big one I haven't mentioned is that Elsner did not go to Paris with Chopin, which rather makes all that follows with his character and the centrality of Elsner to the plot a bit tough to swallow if you're looking for authenticity. Still, all three of the leads do a creditable job and if you look at the movie strictly in entertainment terms instead of factualness, there's nothing wrong with it.

A Song to Remember is available on DVD and is more than worth a watch as an excellent example of the fictitious biopic from the studio era.

That Uncertain Feeling

In trying to get through the backlog of movies on my DVR, I watched That Uncertain Feeling.

Merle Oberon plays Jill Baker, a woman who has been happily married to her husband Larry (Melvyn Douglas) for six years, but has one problem: she has an intractable case of the hiccups that appear every time she gets nervous. So one of her friends suggests that she see the eminent psychoanalyst Dr. Vengard (Alan Mowbray). One wonders how much the doctor can do for her, but in the waiting room one day she meets a concert pianist, Alex Sebastian (played not by Claude Rains but by Burgess Meredith).

Alexander is a strange guy, as he seems to have backwards opinions about everything just for the sake of being contrarian. But Jill finds him interesting, so the meet each other from time to time at places such as art galleries. (This is actually a chance to show Alexander's character, as there's a Daliesque painting of a clock that's supposedly a portrait of Alexander.) Jill invites Alexander over for a dinner party her husband is holding for some Hungarian-American businessmen who might be buying his insurance.

It's there that Larry realizes he's got a problem on his hands. Jill seems to have an infatuation with Alexander, while she also realizes that Larry is as much married to his business as he is with her. So Larry sets about casually suggesting that perhaps he should grant Jill a divorce, as that will get her to focus her opinion and realize she really wants to stay with Larry.

It eventually does happen, as you can guess from this sort of light comedy, but not without some complications along the way, involving Larry's lawyer Mr. Jones (Harry Davenport) and Jones' secretary Sally (Eve Arden).

That Uncertain Feeling was directed by Ernst Lubitsch, but somehow the famed "Lubitsch touch" that shows up in many of his other movies isn't quite here. I think it's mostly down to the script. The movie is based on a French play from the late 1800s, when this sort of material was probably more daring. The movie was made four years after The Awful Truth, and after any number of glittering Lubitsch movies, so it feels old hat. It also doesn't help that I didn't have much sympathy for the Alexander character. He's not really a bad guy, but he's not somebody you'd want to get close to, either. I also really didn't care for the dinner party scene, which just seemed tedious.

Still, all the actors try their best, and the movie's problems are not any of there faults. This is particularly true for Meredith, with his difficult character. It's not a terrible movie by any means; it's just rather blah. It's also available on DVD, so you're always welcome to judge for yourself.

Not the tattooed movie

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yet another movie where we know the two leads are going to wind up together in the last reel

Earlier this week, I've mentioned a couple of movies where you just know the two stars are going to reunite at the end, despite all the romantic complications they face earlier on in the movie. There's another one coming up on TCM. This time, though, the movie is from Britain, and in early three-strip Technicolor: Over the Moon, at 10:30 AM tomorrow.

Young Merle Oberon plays June Benson. She plays the granddaughter of an elderly nobleman who at the beginning of the movie is dying in his estate house that looks as though it's seen better days: Jane has no idea how she's going to keep the place going once her grandfather finally dies. His doctor, Freddie Jarvis (Rex Harrison), has a good idea: marry him! He loves her, and she does like him, but there's also the problem of all the servants and what to do with the estate. And then the old guy finally dies. It turns out that the reason the estate didn't seem to be in such great shape is that Grandfather was a miser. During his life he saved up a princely £18 million, which is in late-1930s currency and so would probably be in the middle nine-figures range today, even in pounds, never mind the conversion rate to dollars. Any way you look at it, it's a substantial sum of money.

With all that money comes the possibility that Jane can finally live a life of comfort. More comfort than Jane could ever have living off of a doctor's salary. Also, her large inheritance has made national news, so there are lots of people who, wanting to live in comfort themselves, claim to be either distant relatives or some sort of suitor. Dr. Jarvis has principles, and one of those is apparently not being wealthy through a wife's inheritance. Either that, or money has just changed her to the point that he doesn't like her as she now is. Freddie's received an offer to do research at a clinic in Switzerland, so he takes that offer, and leaves Jane to her money.

Jane goes off to France and eventually to Monte Carlo, and it's at this point where the movie begins to go off the rails. We know that Jane and Freddie are ultimately meant for each other, and that they're supposed to end up together, but it takes Jane seemingly much too long to realize this, and the movie seems to run too slowly from here to the reunion. Freddie, for his part, finds that he's gotten into something he didn't bargain for, doctoring at a chic clinic for the rich, much like the work Robert Donat was doing in The Citadel, which was made after Over the Moon but released before.

Merle Oberon and Rex Harrison both try hard, but I think that in the end, the material really sinks them, making the movie a muddled plodding mess that I actually found a bit difficult to sit through even though it only runs about 80 minutes. It didn't help either that the print wasn't the best. If you want early British color, I'd really recommend starting off with The Divorce of Lady X instead.

I couldn't find any DVD release of Over the Moon, so you'll have to catch the TCM showing, which isn't very often.

Merle Oberon goes wild!

By the early 1960s, Merle Oberon was pushing 50. Being 50-plus in the Hollywood of that era meant that an actress wasn't going to get such meaty leading roles any longer, unless you wanted something that made you look your age. So what was an actress like Merle Oberon to do? Well, she went to Mexico and co-funded a production company that could then star her in a movie. The result is Of Love and Desire, which is airing on what's left of the Fox Movie Channel tomorrow afternoon (September 20) at 1:00 PM.

The movie starts off with Steve Corey (Steve Cochran) landing his private plane at an airport in Mexico. He's a mining engineer who is supposed to see Paul Beckmann (Curt Jürgens) about an engineering job at one of Beckermann's mines. But a mixup means that Corey can't get to business right away, instead getting taken to Beckermann's estate where he's holding a party. At that party, he meets Katherine (Oberon), Paul's half-sister, who immediately starts flirting with Steve. Another guy a the party who was working for Beckermann and is about to return home from Mexico, Bill Maxton (Steve Brody) tells Steve that he was Katherine's last boyfriend, and that Steve should watch out because she'll seduce any man at the drop of a hat.

Bill was right: after the party ends, Katherine takes Steve home to her private residence and immediately induces him into sleeping with her. Really, it's that quick. Paul is mildly irritated because he had gone to the trouble of putting Steve's stuff in the guest house on his estate, and also because Steve had said he wanted to get an early start assessing the mines early that morning, and sleeping with Katherine unsurprisingly dealyed that. Well, there's more to Paul's disapproval, but that comes up later in the movie.

Later that day, Katherine shows up at the mine where Steve is, bringing him lunch. Since the mine needs another week or two to be ready for Steve's portion of the job, Katherine convinces him to run off with her and see Mexico. She proves to be quite the high maintenance woman, though, needing a whole lot of emotional support. Apparently, her first love died in the war, and Steve reminds her of that first love. Or, more appropriately, Steve and all of the other 4821398574328584317859 men she's slept with reminded her in one way or another of that first love. There's quite the emotional hole here. And if you hear Paul talk about it, he'll tell you that there's a lot more that Katherine isn't letting on. Of course, Paul doesn't just have Katherine's best interests, or those of the men in her life, at heart in trying to keep them from getting too close to her.

Eventually, we reach a climax that has Steve convincing Katherine to elope with him to the United States. But, after packing and a confrontatoin with Paul, Katherine instead runs away, in a scene reminiscent of Polly Bergen at the beginning of The Caretakers that winds up with Katherine going nuts in a hotel with Steve running behind her, while she keeps running into man after man after man. By this time, I was laughing instead of really caring what happened to poor Katherine.

Of Love and Desire is a mess. In some ways, that's a shame. The movie was filmed in Mexico, where Oberon was living at the time, and if there were a wide-screen print of the movie available, it would probably be lovely to look at: the characters go around Mexico and there's some beautiful scenery to be had. But you don't really care about any of the characters, and even wonder whether any of them is telling the truth about their back stories. And as I said earlier, that climax with Oberon running through the hotel is one of those unintentionally funny scenes. It's just too bad that it takes the film too long to get to the unintentionally funny stuff.

As far as I know, Of Love and Desire has never been released to DVD.