Teacher's Pet

Every now and then, it surprises me to come across a studio-era film with big stars that I haven't seen before. Then again, TCM doesn't have the rights to films from studios like Universal and Paramount, so some of the stuff that's A-level but not famous doesn't show up on TCM all that often. A good example of this is Teacher's Pet, a late-1950s Paramount movie with two big names leading the cast: Clark Gable and Doris Day. So I recorded it the last time TCM ran it.

Clark Gable plays James Gannon, who works at the sort of big-city newspaper that was a staple of 1930s movies, with a hard-boiled editor trying to break news, especially on things like lurid murders, and up-and-coming reporters going out there to get the stories. One would-be reporter at the paper, who is only a copy boy since he can't get a real reporter's job, is Barney Kovac (Nick Adams), whose mom would rather he go to college.

You'll note that this is an era when reporters didn't necessarily have to go to J-school, although there were already college courses for journalism. One person teaching night classes at such a school is Erica Stone (Doris Day), whose father ages ago wrote for a small-town paper. As a result of her father's experiences, Erica has decided views on what journalism should be like, which isn't quite like what Gannon does. Erica has written to Gannon to give a guest lecture about city journalism, but Gannon turns it down because he really has a thing about journalism school as well as thoughts about lady reporters.

Still, Jim's boss insists he go to the class, so Jim goes undercover, pretending to be a salesman with the name Jim Gallagher. Surprisingly, Erica doesn't recognize him. If she did, we wouldn't have a rest of the movie. But Erica is so insulting to Gannon that he decides he's going to audit the class after all, if only to be able to show Erica just how wrong she is about what real reporting is like. Unsurprisingly, since Jim is a real reporter, he's able to handle the first assignment that Erica gives the students and come up with a much better story than any other student possibly could.

This leads to Erica, still not recognizing Jim for who he really is, offering to tutor him privately outside of class hours, since he can "learn" more that way than in class. The next unsurprising thing is that Jim falls in love with Erica. This is a bit of a problem considering that Erica already has a boyfriend in Dr. Hugo Pine (Gig Young), an intellectual who is superior to Jim at all the things that you'd stereotypically expect a female college professor to want in a man. Since Clark Gable is top-billed, however, you know things are going to work out such that it's Jim who winds up with Erica at the end of the movie, despite his dishonesty about his true identity.

Teacher's Pet is one of those movies that feels like it's breaking no new ground, but what makes it worth watching is the acting ability of the two leads, who take to the material well and make a surprisingly appealing couple despite their age difference. They fit their parts like wearing a comfortable pair of shoes, making for an enjoyable watch despite there being nothing new here. They're also helped by a pretty good screenplay and good supporting performances. If you can find Teacher's Pet, watch it and be entertained for two hours.

The World Gone Mad

On another blog I frequent, one of the contributors likes to use a poster from the 1933 movie The World Gone Mad to illustrate that the world of today is, in fact, going mad. I had never seen the movie before, but I'm always up for an interesting pre-Code, so when I noticed that the movie is available on TubiTV (granted, with ads, although when I watched it was only 9 minutes of ads for a 71-minute movie so much less than traditional TV), I decided to watch it.

The movie, as a 1933 release, deals with a couple of themes that were quite common in the early 1930s: Prohibition and the underworld crime that it caused; and how the Depression led to people trying to enrich themselves through stock deals that aren't quite legal. Add a crusading prosecutor and wisecracking journalists, and you've got a lot of the tropes of the era. As for the crooked business dealings, this involves Grover Cromwell, who heads an investment firm. One of the companies in which his company owns a large stake is Suburban Utilities, and two of Cromwell's underlings have a plot to loot the coffers of Suburban to enrich themselves.

The District Attorney, Henderson, has gotten wind of this, and is getting the state examiners to investigate the books. So the embezzlers, knowing the jig is about to be up, do what any crook in the early 1930s would do, which is to arrange a rub-out. The DA is killed and replaced by his assistant, Lionel Houston (Neil Hamilton), who also happens to be the boyfriend of Cromwell's daughter Diane (Mary Brian). Houston, now that he takes over as acting DA, starts investigating the case, leading to an attempt on his own life and the suicide of an accountant that fingers Cromwell in the crime.

Houston also has a roommate, Andy Terrell (Pat O'Brien), who is a hard-boiled journalist. He investigates the case, too, since it's got enough lurid and headline-worthy elements that it's a natural for the big-city press to be covering, and because Terrell has an in what with being good friends with the new DA. Terrell's investigation is going to get himself in danger, too, before everything is resolved.

The World Gone Mad was made at Majestic Pictures, a Poverty Row studio. Majestic was fairly obviously, it seems to me, trying to pack as much into a small package as they could. Unfortunately, this doesn't always work to the movie's benefit. There's too much going on, and things move from one plot strand to another too quickly, making it difficult at times to figure out what's going on while at others one wonders whether critical material got left on the cutting-room floor. But despite all the flaws common to Poverty Row cheapies, The World Gone Mad isn't a bad little movie.

Note that some of the reviews suggest that at one point in the past, The World Gone Mad was included as part of a box set of public domain horror movies. The World Gone Mad is not horror in any way, and if you had come across it listed under that genre, you might be disappointed.

The original platinum blonde

Actress Jean Harlow is fairly well-known as a platinum blonde bombshell. I blogged about her movie Bombshell back in 2014, but she also made a movie called Platinum Blonde, early in her career before she went over to MGM. Indeed, Harlow is only billed third here. TCM ran it a few months back, and not having seen it before, I decided to record it.

The actress getting top billing here is Loretta Young, even though hers isn't the biggest character in the story. Young plays Gallagher, a columnist at the Post, where she works with star reporter Stew Smith (tragic Robert Williams). Smith gets called into the editor's office to tell him to get a big story. The Schuylers are one of those wealthy families out on Long Island who don't want any sort of scandal. But they've got a son who's made a big mistake by getting involved with a chorus girl and writing a bunch of love letters to her. She's threatening to sue, and rumor has it Mrs. Schuyler's (Louise Closser Hale) lawyer has paid a substantial sum to get those letters back. Stew should go to the Schuyler mansion to find out whether the rumors are in fact true.

This is where we meet Jean Harlow. She plays Ann Schuyler, the kid sister to Michael, the brother with the dalliances, although he's a rather minor character in this whole thing. Ann is completely innocent in this whole scandal, and it certainly wouldn't do to harm her by printing the story. A reporter from a rival paper shows up at the same time as Smith, and the lawyer bribes both of them not to print the story. Or attempts to; the rival reporter takes the bribe but not Smith. This is where Ann implores him not to hurt her by printing the story. However, he does so anyway.

The next day, at a speakeasy, we see Stew bragging to Gallagher about how he got the story, and about how he's going to go back to the Schuyler mansion to see Ann because he's fallen in love with her. He has an excuse to go back, having taken a book from the Schuyler library, but unsurprisingly Ann would rather not have anything to do with Stew. We also see here that Gallagher has the hots for Stew, but has never been able to tell him.

Stew has another reason for wanting to see the Schuylers. He was able to obtain the letters the chorus girls had, and is willing to sell them back to the Schuylers. That gets Ann to perk up her ears. When she fixes lunch for him, the two start to develop feelings for each other despite the previous rancor between them.

Logically, however, we know that Stew and Ann aren't really right for each other. Either that, or Ann isn't really right for her social class. But we've got a fairly long way to go before finding out which resolution we're going to get.

Platinum Blonde is an interesting if imperfect movie. A lot of people have suggested that Young and Harlow are miscast here and should have been given each other's roles. In many ways that makes some sense, but I don't know if the filmgoing public or the studios had realized yet just what they had in Harlow. Put her in a wisecracking journalist (think Torchy Blane) role here, and she'd be great. Young is made to be too muted and wasn't suited to the brassy nature that works best here. Likewise, Harlow isn't really the stodgy heiress, something Young could have done in her sleep.

As for Williams, he does very well as the star of the proceedings. Sadly, he suffered a ruptured appendix a few days after the movie's release and that killed him. Who knows what he would have been able to bring to the screen had he survived. Direction is by Frank Capra (including middle initial, apparently not famous enough to be the one and only Frank Capra), and the movie certainly has his touches evident.

Despite some flaws, Platinum Blonde is a lot of fun and one not to be missed.

I Cover the Waterfront

One of those movies whose title I'd seen in various of the sites that sell public domain movies on DVD is the 1933 feature I Cover the Waterfront, so when TCM ran it I made a point to record it so that I could finally watch it and write up a review here.

The movie starts off with opening credits done newspaper-style, and helpfully putting faces to names of who plays the man characters. We then see the main character, Joe Miller (Ben Lyon), climbing the stairs up to what would be a garret apartment if Miller were a starving artist in a movie set in Paris. But Joe is a reporter in one of the cities on the California coast, and his apartment overlooks the harbor. Indeed, Joe is trying to get a story involving the ships that come and go, although he has to work long hours and is fed up with it.

Joe's returned home to find another reporter, McCoy (Hobart Cavanaugh), coming out west to start a career in journalism here, which is fine by Joe since he'd rather go back east to a safer big city and reunite with his girlfriend whom he's hoping to marry. So now he'd have a chance to give his notice to his editor Phelps and finally make that big move. But before that can happen, Phelps calls him up with a different sort of story, about a lady calling from a house overlooking the coast who claims she sees a woman swimming stark naked in the Pacific!

Miller goes out to the coast to investigate, and finds that the woman is a pretty young thing named Julie Kirk (Claudette Colbert). Wouldn't you know it, but Julie just happens to be the daughter of Eli Kirk (Ernest Torrence), who is the very sea captain Miller has been investigating. Julie thinks that her father, like the captains of most of the boats in the harbor, is a fisherman and makes his money that way. But we see that Eli is really taking money to smuggle Chinese into the US by sea. Miller is on to this, and when he gets on a Coast Guard cutter to go after Kirk, he throws the guy he's smuggling overboard to his death! So we know less than a third of the way into the movie that Eli Kirk really is the bad guy in the piece.

Miller, having met Julie, now thinks he's got a new angle to get at Eli, and pretends to make nicey to her to get her to spill the goods on her father, not that she knows anything. But you can guess what happens next, which is that Joe is going to fall in love with Julie, and that the feeling is going to be mutual. To say that this puts both Joe and Julie in danger is an understatement.

I Cover the Waterfront is a pretty good movie for one that was produced independently and only has the running time of a B movie. Of course, having a young Claudette Colbert in the cast is a big help in that regard. The movie is actually kind of shocking at times, and also relevant today with the illegal immigrants flooding the US's southern border or in Europe all the illegals getting on boats and trying to cross the Mediterranean or get to the Canary Islands.

Thankfully, as I said at the beginning, I Cover the Waterfront fell into the public domain, so it's fairly easy to find.

The Famous Ferguson Case

One more movie that I noticed showing up again on the TCM schedule that I had recorded was The Famous Ferguson Case. Its next airing is tomorrow, October 23, at 2:30 PM, so I sat down to watch it in able to be able to do a post on it here.

The movie starts off with a "foreword", one of those scrolling establishing walls of text that were not uncommon in silent movies and then the first few decades of talkies (The Famous Ferguson Case was released in 1932). This one tells us about how some "journalists" didn't really care about "news", but sensationalism and reporting on things long since worthy of public discussion. Of course, we know nowadays that most journalists are sensationalists and panic mongers, and it's the honest journalist that's in the severe minority.

Cut to the town of Cornwall, somehwere in upstate New York (there's really a Cornwall-on-Hudson not too far north of New York City, but this Cornwall is presumed to be somewhere north of Albany based on a comment from one of the characters). We first meet the local denizens of Cornwall: Marcia Ferguson (Vivienne Osborne) is married to wealthy banker George (Purnell Pratt), who works down in the City and spends quite a few nights down there. To compensate, Marcia is having an affair with Judd Brooks (Leon Ames), who works as a teller at the local bank and has a wife of his own. They meet at the train station; also showing up is local cub reporter Bruce Foster (Tom Brown), who has a girlfriend of his own in Toni (Adrienne Dore), one of the secretaries at the local newspaper. She dreams of bigger things, and is busy pushing Bruce to advance his career and get a job in the big city.

And wouldn't you know, but Bruce gets the story of his life falling into his lap when he hears from the telephone operator that a call has been placed from the Ferguson residence to the sheriff's department. Bruce rushes over to investigate, and discovers that Marcia has been bound and gagged, with George having been shot to death.

Even if George hadn't been a wealthy banker in New York, this sort of lurid case would have brought a bunch of reporters, and sure enough, every paper in New York City sends one of their reporters north, led by Bob Parks (Kenneth Thomson). He's one of the yellow-press types, although as it turns out not all of the reporters in the gaggle are as manipulative as him. Martin Collins (Grant Mitchell) has his heart in the right place, but the heroine of the piece is Maizie (Joan Blondell), the one lady reporter in the bunch, and she's Lee Tracy-level cynical here.

Most of the reporters set out to manipulate the DA because that would make for a more "interesting" story. They've figured out that Marcia was seeing Judd, and get the DA to have Judd arrested and put on trial for the murder. Bruce, meanwhile, starts doing his own investigation, the sort of journalistic work that the big-city types no longer do because "prestige" reporting means letting the little people do all the grunt work while they hobnob with the powerful. Much like the press release-driven journalism of today. Bruce discovers that....

The Famous Ferguson Case is the sort of thing that Warner Bros. did exceedingly well. Blondell is unsurprisingly quite good as the cynical female journalist; this is no light Torchy Blane movie. Tom Brown as the naïf who learns a lot over the course of the movie is suprisingly good as well, and Grant Mitchell provides his usual good support. So do the rest of the cast, a bunch of names you'd recognize if you watch a lot of early 1930s movies but that are sadly largely forgotten today. The movie as a whole is one of those that's fallen through the cracks, in part because it wasn't one of Warners' prestige movies and in part because movies of today just aren't made like this.

That's a shame, because The Famous Ferguson Case is definitely worth watching.

Bannerline

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Front Page (1974)

The movie His Girl Friday is fairly well known, especially among fans of classic movies. The fact that it's a remake of the 1931 movie The Front Page, but with a gender switch in one of the key roles, is also well known. Having fallen somewhat through the cracks is the 1974 remake, again called The Front Page and reverting to the gender roles in the original play and movie. That 1974 remake is going to be on TCM tonight at 6:00 PM.

It's 1929 in Chicago, and anarchist Earl Williams (Austin Pendleton) is scheduled to be executed tomorrow morning for the murder of a cop, a crime Pendleton insists was an accident. All of Chicago's newspapers are covering the story. But Walter Burns (Walter Matthau), managing editor of the Examiner, is in a spot. His star reporter Hildy Johnson (Jack Lemmon) would be perfect for the story, especially to try to get a last-minute interview with Williams. But Hildy is unavailable.

The reason for that is because Hildy is schedule to leave Chicago on the midnight train for Philadelphia, together with one Peggy Grant (a young Susan Sarandon), on their way to get married with Hildy then taking a job at an advertising agency in Philadelphia. Hildy is insistent that he's done with the newspaper business, but if you've seen either of the two earlier versions of the movie, you know that's not quite the case....

Walter tries every trick in the book to get Hildy to do this one last story, from the mild of pointing out that Hildy would have the time to do it before getting on the train, to the more extreme of trying to drive a wedge between Hildy and Peggy by posing as a probation officer and telling Peggy that Hildy is on probation as a sexual deviant! Frankly, if I found out my boss did something like that to me, there's no way I'd ever work for him again, but then we wouldn't have a movie, would we.

The actual story Walter wants Hildy to cover gets more complicated when a psychiatrist, Dr. Eggelhofer (Martin Gabel) is brought in to interview Williams to see whether he's competent to be executed. Eggelhofer's unorthodox methods give Williams a chance to get the sheriff's (Vincent Gardenia) gun and shoot his way out of custody, eventually winding up in the pressroom, hidden by Hildy in a roll-top desk. Williams knows a prostitute with a heart of gold, Mollie Malloy (Carol Burnett), who also shows up looking for Williams.

But then, you've probably seen one (or both) of the earlier movie versions of the story so know more or less what's going to happen. Director Billy Wilder did change things up a bit, in part by adding a cub reporter (Jon Korkes) to cover the execution for the Examiner, which really serves as Walter's means of playing on Hildy's pride -- this young reporter is so unfit for covering the execution that Hildy is just not going to be able to countenance the kid doing it, and take over himself. I think the Mollie Malloy role is also made bigger and given a resolution I don't remember from either of the previous two versions.

If Billy Wilder had found an old 1920s play and dusted it off to make an original movie out of The Front Page, what we get on screen wouldn't be a bad little movie, although some fans of studio-era movies might be less than pleased with the language. However, there's the well-known and deserved classic His Girl Friday sitting there, and that's a problem for any subsequent movie version. As a result, this 1974 version pales somewhat and it's easy to see why it hasn't stood the test of time the way His Girl Friday has. Wilder allows Carol Burnett to play her part too broadly, and Martin Gabel's antics don't work at all.

Overall, however, this version of The Front Page really isn't bad, and it's also the chance to see Allen Jenkins in his final film role, along with some other veterans getting smaller parts. It is available on DVD should you miss the TCM showing.

Whoa, Nellie!

Paul Muni was the Star of the Month some months back, before my old DVR died. But TCM ran another day of Muni's movies last month, which gave me the chance to watch Hi, Nellie!, which is available on DVD courtesy of one of Warner Bros. "Forbidden Hollywood" box sets.

I knew the story of Hi, Nellie! already, mostly because this is the first version of a movie Warner Bros. made four times betwen 1934 and 1949, and I'd already seen two of the remakes. Muni stars as Brad, which you'd think isn't a name somebody who looks like Muni would have, until it's revealed that "Brad" is short for his surname Bradshaw. Brad is managing editor at a big city newspaper, who has a bit of a maverick way of doing things that's going to get in trouble.

One of the big stories going on involves the failure of the Labor Bank -- after all, there is a depression going on. Canfield, one of the bank managers, has disappeared, as has a large amount of the bank deposits. So everybody naturally puts two and two together and fiures that Canfield has absconded with the money. Well, everybody but Brad, who believes that Canfield is an honest guy and that something else must have gone wrong what with all the political corruption in the city. However, news eventually comes out that there were illicit withdrawals made with the money going to Canfield. Game, set, and match.

Brad's boss, the publisher, is pissed with Brad for making his newspaper a laughingstock, and wants to demote Brad. Brad would rather just quit, until he realizes that there's a clause in his contract that if he quits, he doesn't get to keep the nice big paycheck. So Brad comes back and reluctantly decides to keep his job, except that his position is no longer going to be as managing editor, but as... the writer of the "Heartthrobs" column, an advice to the lovelorn column whose writer has always gone under the nom de plume Nellie.

The current Nellie, Gerry Krale (Glenda Farrell) is thrilled to be off the beat and back to serious reporting, while Brad is pissed. He's got one ally in Shammy (Ned Sparks), who is feeding him information from other parts of the newsroom, but there's no real way for Brad to do real journalism.

Things perk up, however, when a young woman comes in looking for help in patching up a dispute between her fiancé and her father. Shammy has come up with an address where Canfield had supposedly been seen, while the address that this young woman gives Nellie is the same address. So now Brad can legitimately go there and do some poking around into the Canfield case, while pretending to try to patch up a love match. Brad discovers that there's some sort of money laundering going on for phony funerals, and that might just have something to do with the Canfield disappearance. The game is back on!

A lot of sources list Hi, Nellie! as a comedy, but I found it to be more of a programmer drama with some comic elements, with the two remakes I've seen being lighter. Not that this is a heavy drama, mind you, since its 75-minute programmer length doesn't allow for a prestige level of depth. Still, everybody comes off as quite professional. The story and performances both work, and the movie most definitely succeeds in entertaining as much as other Warner Bros. programmers of the era.

Hi, Nellie is definitely worth a watch.

More journalism movies

Kirk Douglas in Ace in the Hole, tonight at 8:00 PM

The March spotlight on journalism and the movies continues with a night of what TCM is calling "Newspaper Noir". It kicks off at 8:00 PM with Ace in the Hole, in which Kirk Douglas plays an unethical reporter who gets a big story and decides to draw it out. It's a great movie, although I'm not certain I'd call it noir. I'd call The Blue Gardenia (overnight at 1:30 AM) the most noirish of the movies airing tonight.

To be honest, though, I'm really mentioning Ace in the Hole because I knew I had that photo of Kirk Douglas. I had posted it many years ago back when I was hosting all of the blog's photos at Photobucket. Of course, they went and got rid of hotlinking, trying to charge a ridiculous sum to allow it, and then changed to have a watermark when you hotlink your photos. So every time I think of a movie where I'm pretty certain I posted a photo, I look to repost it, hosting the photo on Blogger/Google. I haven't gotten around to editing the old posts, and frankly don't know that I will. I haven't been using quite so many photos recently, but still there are a lot of them to go through.

Blessed Event

A movie that I DVRed earlier in the month as part of TCM's Star of the Month salute to Dick Powell is Blessed Event. It's available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive, so now you get the full-length post treatment on it.

This was Dick Powell's film debut, so he's not the star here, although he gets a relatively big supporting role. The star here is Lee Tracy, so you should probably already know what to expect. Tracy plays Alvin Roberts, who's working his way up the ladder in the newspaper business. He gets a chance to move up when Moxley (Ned Sparks), the guy who writes the gossip column, goes on vacation leaving Alvin to write it. Alvin has a contact at the maternity hospital to the stars, so he starts dropping hints in the column that various famous people are going to be having "blessed events".

This ticks off a bunch of people who don't want their private lives discussed like this. It also bothers his girlfriend Gladys (Mary Brian), who thinks Alvin should be doing more honest work. On the other hand, the column proves to be a hit as circulation increases massively. With that, he also gets a radio show.

As for Dick Powell, he plays crooner Bunny Harmon, who has a radio show of his own what with his brand of band music being perfect for the radio. Alvin doesn't like crooners, and especially Bunny, for no real reason. So Alvin and Bunny have a rivalry throwing barbs at each other although these aren't just friendly barbs: the two really dislike each other. One final person who dislikes Alvin is the gangster Gobel (Edwin Maxwell), who sends underling Frankie (Allen Jenkins) to try to get Alvin to lay off those notices involving the unnamed gangster.

Of course, Alvin is unable to do so, especially because one of the stories he breaks involves the gangster in a way Alvin doesn't realize at first. But when it does, Gobel has a plan to get Alvin, and the opening of Bunny's new nightclub might be just the way to do it. Bunny doesn't want Alvin there crashing the party, of course, while Alvin knows he's going to be there. Gobel could arrange for Bunny to be there and get killed....

Blessed Event is a fun little movie, although it's in many ways typical of the sort of thing Lee Tracy was doing in the pre-Code (and pre-public urination) portion of his career. So it's not bad by any means; it's more a feeling of having seen it before because it's really not treading any new ground. Sometimes, though, you want something comfortable, and if you want that out of a pre-Code, Blessed Event isn't a bad way to get that. Tracy is as good as always; Powell shows promise for his first film; and Ruth Donnelly is a lot of fun as Tracy's secretary.

The Murder Man

Going through my DVR to clear some space, I found another movie that's available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive so I can do a full-length post on it: The Murder Man.

Spencer Tracy, not long after moving to MGM from Fox, is the star here, although he doesn't show up until a little ways in. The opening is set in the investment firm of Halford and Mander. This is one of those Depression-era firms that took clients' money and invested it rather too riskily, on inside information or on hot bonds, losing money for a lot of clients who were understandably pissed as a result. Indeed, Halford finds that Mander (Harvey Stephens) has taken a bunch of money out of the firm to buy some bonds, and that's the breaking point. Later that evening, Halford is found shot to death.

Meanwhile, another very brief scene that really only makes sense at the end involves a woman who jumps to her death from a ferry, drowning in the river. It's only after these opening scenes that we get to meet Tracy, who is playing star reporter Steve Grey. However, Steve isn't doing any reporting just now, going on the mother of all benders. His editor (Robert Barrat) is looking for him, though, because of Halford's murder.

You see, Steve is known as "the murder man", a name he's gotten because he seems to be good not only at getting the evidence that convicts people, the way that somebody like Torchy Blane over at Warner Bros. did, but because he's able to get that information to the public before anybody else -- sometimes including the police -- can. It leads to his constantly scooping all the other reporters.

Now, Mander is an obvious suspect in the Halford murder, but so are a host of other people, all those investors who had their money stolen by the firm. But Steve overhears that Mander and Halford had an insurance policy that if one of the two died, the other would get a big payout, and Steve puts two and two together. He figures out the audacious scheme that Mander went to a shooting gallery and used one of the gallery's rifles to kill Halford across the street!

This case caused a strain on Steve, however, because after it's over and Mander is sent to the chair, Mander just wants to go off and drink and write a book. Mander, however, is granted an interview on the day he's supposed to be executed, and Steve's editor is insistent that he do the interview, thereby dragging him back into the case he wanted to forget about, and setting up the interesting ending.

The Murder Man is, despite Tracy's leading the cast, strictly a programmer. As I said at the beginning it was one of his first films at MGM, and it would take another year until San Francisco and Libeled Lady that's he'd become a prestige movie star. Tracy was already quite good, having honed his craft over the previous five years at Fox, and does a fine job here. Virginia Bruce plays an advice columnist for the paper and on-again, off-again girlfriend. James Stewart, at the very beginning of his career, plays another reporter. Overall, however, I think the more notable thing about the movie is the turn the plot takes. And that plot certainly makes the movie watching.

Hot News Margie

During Saturday's Wallace Beery marathon on TCM, they showed a short called Hot News Margie, from 1931. The one-sentence synopsis sounded interesting: a tabloid reporter gets the story on whether a college football star is married. The movie is certainly silly. Marjorie Beebe stars as Margie, and to get the story she goes undercover as a player on the football team! This completely strains credulity, especially as she's trying to run down the field alongside the target of her story, a football quarterback named "Babe Booth", which seems pretty clearly a reference to baseball player Babe Ruth and his outsized celebrity status.

Hot News Margie is a one-reeler from Vitaphone, which strikes me as uncommon, at least when it comes to the comedy shorts they were making by this time. Certainly in later years they were putting out a lot of two-reelers. But a full two reels would be a bit too long for this one, which is really a one-joke plot. At least, until the stunning ending.

I have to admit to never having heard of Marjorie Beebe before seeing this short. It doesn't seem to be on DVD as an extra to anything; it would probably fit in with one or another of the newsroom comedies that the Warner Archive could put out. Someplace like a Torchy movie would be good for it, for example. But, somebody put it up on Youtube: