Waiting for a star to fall

Another of the movies that I had sitting on my DVR for a while that I finally got around to watching was Boy Meets Girl. Considering the cast involved and the fact that this was made at Warner Bros., I was kind of surprised that I hadn't seen this one before.

As the movie opens, agent Rossetti (Frank McHugh) is taking his client, cowboy star Larry Toms (Dick Foran) to Royal pictures to talk about a comeback. Rosetti thinks that Royal's writing team of Law (James Cagney) and Benson (Pat O'Brien) has a script ready that would be perfect for Toms, although it turns out they've been lying because they're the sort of people who always seem to be trying to come up with some angle. It's the sort of role that had this been a 1940s picture would have been perfect for Jack Carson, except that this is also the sort of movie that wouldn't have been made after the US entered World War II in December 1941 since it's very much a product of its time.

Studio producer C.F. Friday (Ralph Bellamy) is none too happy with this. Meanwhile, he orders the studio equivalent of room service, which is brought up by commissary waitress Susie Seabrook (Marie Wilson). She faints in Friday's office, which as it turns out is because she's pregnant, which is rather shocking since she's not married and once the Production Code kicked in the idea of an unmarried woman being pregnant and it not being a big moral failure is something you don't expect. In any case, when they find about the pregnance, Law and Benson have a brilliant idea, which is to promote Susie's unborn child as the next big star, to be paired with Larry in a series of movies. Meanwhile, showing up at Friday's office when Susie is recovering from fainting is an English extra, Rodney Bowman (Bruce Lester), who is going to show up later in the plot.

Susie's kid Happy does in fact become a star, bigger than Larry. This ticks Larry off, so Rossetti plans to get Larry and Susie married off so that Susie and Happy will retire. But this is bad news for Law and Benson. They need to come up with a way to break up the relation. Their plan is, at the premiere of the next Errol Flynn movie, they'll have some guy show up claiming to be Happy's father who didn't really die at all. Their plan hits a snag, though, when they hire extra Rodney Bowman to play the part of the man claiming to be Happy's father. They don't know that Happy and Susie have already met.

So Law and Bowman have to come up with another plan that will save the studio. Their plan is to make it look like the British Teddington Studios (an in-joke, as Teddington was in fact Warner Bros.' British arm to make pictures satisfying the British quota system) is going to be buying Royal Pictures in order to get Happy under contract. This brings everybody back to Royal Pictures, and things are concluded more or less happily.

Boy Meets Girl is a movie I had a lot of problems with, mostly down to the script. The screenplay requires everybody to be incredibly loud and obnoxious, as well as dishonest with trying to scam one another. This is supposed to be a comedy, but the characters just aren't very sympathetic in my book. Still, everybody here is professional and do the best they can with the material. Maybe audiences of the late 1930s would have appreciated Boy Meets Girl more than I do in 2026.

Pay no attention to that map

One of the Noir Alley entries that Eddie Muller presented quite some time ago that I didn't get around to watching until just before it expired from the DVR, and then saved until much later to put up this post, is the 1947 film Riffraff. (Note that there are multiple films with this title, and the posters for the movie but not the title cards have the hyphenated title "Riff-Raff".)

The movie starts off with an interesting introductory sequence that doesn't have any of the main characters. A plane is flying somewhere over Latin America, except that it's a cargo plane carrying a couple of passengers of the sort who in another movie would be on one of those shady tramp steamers. The cargo door opens, and one of the passengers jumps out with a briefcase; the other passenger is no longer on the plane. The jumper winds up in Panama very close to the Canal Zone, since there are a whole lot of Americans soon to be around.

The man who jumped out of the plane is mysterious Charles Hasso (Marc Krah), and he goes to the office of fixer/factotum/sometimes detective Dan Hammer (Pat O'Brien), a man who knows the local area and knows how to get things done. Hasso's request is for Hammer to basically escort him around for two days and make certain nothing untoward happens to him. Meanwhile, he takes a map out of the briefcase and pins it to the room divider while Dan is on the other side of it changing into a fresh set of clothes!

Also getting in touch with Hammer is Gredson (Jerome Cowan), who works for an oil company based in Panama. Gredson was expecting the other man on that cargo plane to come to him with that map that Hasso pinned up in Hammer's office, as that map supposedly has the locations of some new oil discoveries in Peru to which nobody really has the concessions or something. And Gredson is willing to pay big bucks for that map.

Amazingly, nobody seems able to find that map despite it being in plain sight in Hammer's office! Among the people who have an interest in that map is Maxine (Anne Jeffreys), a nightclub singer who feigns romantic interest in Hammer while also trying to play the other side by working with Gredson. And then there's Molinar (Walter Slezak), who claims to be an artist but, because he's played by Walter Slezak, is obviously somebody with ulterior motives of his own and not exactly a protagonist. Worse, Hammer's office gets ransacked in a search for the map -- and nobody finds it!

For me, that's the big problem with Riffraff, unless you consider that the map is just another macguffin with the interactions between the characters being the main thing here. In my case, I just found it way too hard to believe that everybody could be this stupid that they couldn't find that map. There's also the addition of Percy Kilbride playing Hammer's assistant/driver. I think he's supposed to be a bit of comic relief, but his is the sort of character who isn't going to be to everybody's taste.

Still, Riffraff is a visually stylish movie at times, which shouldn't be a surprise since director Ted Tetzlaff had started as a cinematographer. It's just that that visual style is most evident in the opening and the story rather fizzles out.

Ragtime

I've metioned on quite a few occasions how, having been born in 1972, I grew up hearing about the release of a bunch of movies that might have sounded interesting, except that I was much too young to see them in the theater on their original release, so only got around to them much later. Another example of this is Ragtime, which TCM finally ran at the beginning of 2025 in honor of Debbie Allen's 75th birthday. So of course I recorded it, and eventually got around to watching it and writing up this review as part of the backlog of movies to post about.

The movie starts off in the first decade of the 1900s, although I think it doesn't quite get all of the historical events it portrays as quite accurately contemporaneous. Part of the opening involves Evelyn Nesbit (Elizabeth Montgomery), the chorus girl who was at the center of the celebrated case of Harry Thaw murdering Stanford White which was also covered in the movie The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing, which I blogged about all the way back in 2011.

Among the people interested in Evelyn is an unnamed young man known only as "Younger Brother" (Brad Dourif). He's the somewhat shiftless younger brother of a woman known as Mother (Mary Steenburgen) who married up to a man credited as Father (James Olson). Father runs an explosives factory and employs Younger Brother; Father is also not happy at all with his brother-in-law's dissolute life. Father is about to have a lot more to worry about, however, when a young black woman Sarah (Debbie Allen) gives birth and leaves the baby with the family, not being able to support it herself. Mother takes pity on Sarah, offering her a servant's job which will at least give her a place to stay and take care of the baby.

Meanwhile, performing in various clubs in New York City is Coalhouse Walker (Howard Rollins), a fairly talented pianist. It doesn't take much to guess that he's the father of Sarah's child, so when he learns of the news of this abandoned child he's eventually able to put two and two together, showing up at the family's house asking to see Sarah, who isn't quite happy to see him although the two eventually reconcile and plan to get married. Those plans are put on hold, however, when Coalhouse is driving back to New York and is stopped by a racist firehouse chief Conklin (Kenneth McMillan) who claims Coalhouse is going to have to pay a toll to go down the road. When Coalhouse can't pay it, the firemen trash Coalhouse's Model T, leading to a cause célèbre. Theodore Roosevelt passes through town on a whistle-stop tour, so Sarah decides she's going to try to get the president's attention which might help her husband's case. Unfortunately, the police assume she's someone out to attack the president so they accost her, beating her to death.

This drives Coalhouse off the deep end, and he and some of his radical black friends respond with a campaign of terror against white firemen, ultimately leading to their takng over the J. Pierpont Morgan Library with the demand of handing over Conklin to their vigilante justice. Younger Brother, chafing under his brother-in-law's control, wants to rebel, and since he knows explosives, he gets in touch with Coalhouse offering to help with explosives. This brings us to probably the best known part of the movie, which was the return of classic era star James Cagney after 20 years away from the screen. He plays New York Police Commissioner Rhinelander Waldo, whose job it is to try to get a non-violent resolution to what eventually becomes a hostage crisis. After all, the library holds any number of priceless artifacts that nobody should want to see destroyed.

Ragtime was based on a book by E.L. Doctorow which I haven't read, but which is from what I've read of reviews an incredibly complex book that was thought to be tough to translate to the big screen without excising a lot of it. As it is, the movie runs over two and a half hours, yet some reviewers still think too much was excised from the book. Not having read the book, I have to say that I think the movie can stand by itself as a pretty darn good story, even if it is a bit long and has some characters who I think could have been excised without losing all that much. The performances are good and the production design is very good. If you haven't seen Ragtime before, it's definitely one worth watching.

A Dangerous Profession

George Raft was TCM's Star of the Month in January 2025, and as always that gave me the chance to record a couple of his movies that I hadn't blogged about before, including the noirish movie A Dangerous Profession. Eventually I got around to watching it and writing up this post to schedule some time in advance.

The movie opens up with a monologue narrated by Los Angeles police detective Nick Farrone (Jim Backus) discussing the bail bond industry and how it's quite the money spinner, with firms such as that of Joe Farley (Pat O'Brien) and Vince Kane (George Raft). Kane, for his part, is a former police detective himself before leaving the force to join the bail bond industry and living the sort of life that the police probably wouldn't approve of. Indeed, it's at a craps game that Kane is contacted by Ferrone.

Ferrone is taken to the home of Claude Brackett (Bill Williams), a stockbrocker who has just been arrested in a case involving stolen bonds and that's going to involve a fairly substantial bail of the sort that a bail bond company lke Farley-Kane may be able to help with. However, when Kane gets there, he realizes that Claude's wife Lucy (Ella Raines) is in fact his own former girlfriend. Complicating matters is the fact that Claude and Lucy were separated from each other up until Claude got arrested for the robbery.

Bail is high, and Lucy can't raise all the money for it, until a mysterious lawyer named Dawson comes up with a bunch of the money even though Claude and Lucy claim to know nothing about this lawyer. Worse is that Kane dips into a greater portion of the company's funds to pay off the rest of the bail than the company normally does, with everybody thinking that Kane is doing it for personal reasons, which would be to try to win Lucy back for himself. Lucy, for her part, is claiming that she only married Claude for his money and that she still really loves Kane. Just how honest is she being?

Farley is more concerned, and rightly so, when word gets out that Brackett has jumped bail, and then it's found out that Brackett has been murdered! Kane is trying to figure out who this mysterious Dawson is and who hired him. He's also trying to solve a murder and figure out why he's being followed. All of this is happening while he's got both the police trying to solve the murder, and a business partner who is none too happy with everything that's going on considering how much of the company's money is involved.

A Dangerous Profession is decidedly B noir, but it's entertaining enough. Everybody puts in a professional job, although the story itself feels like a bit of an overcomplicated mess at times. Even though this one was released by RKO and is therefore part of the old "Turner Library" that has always made up a substantial portion of the TCM schedule, I think it's not without reason that A Dangerous Profession isn't so well known.

The Boy With Green Hair

Next up on the list of movies that's been on my DVR and that is about to get another airing on TCM is The Boy With Green Hair. Its next airing is tomorrow, November 8, at 3:30 PM. With that in mind, I made the point as usual of watching it so that I could do the post here just in time for the airing.

The movie starts off at a police station, where a bald boy has been found, claiming to have a story nobody will believe, which is why the authorities have brought in a child psychologist, Dr. Evans (Robert Ryan in a small role) to try to get the kid named Peter (Dean Stockwell) to talk. Once again, as you might guess, this is going to lead to a flashback as to why the kid has no hair and why he's run away.

Peter is an orphan who has been shuttled around from one aunt and uncle to another; who knows how many of them he has. But for whatever reason, none of them were able to take care of him, so he wound up in the care of one last relative, Gramp (Pat O'Brian). Gramp -- if he even is the kid's real grandfather although that ultimately doesn't matter to the plot -- is a retired actor now living out his days in a small town. It's the years just following World War II, when people are afraid of the new atomic bomb. Peter, as an orphan, doesn't fit in in his new home, getting teased by the kids and nearly panicking when he overhears some of the adults talking about the threat of war.

Gramp tries to soothe Peter by telling him that there's a surprise awaiting Peter the next morning. Peter does get a surprise, but it's not what Gramp might have had planned. Peter takes a bath the next morning, and as he's drying off his hair, takes the towel off to discover -- he has green hair! Well, duh, how do you think the movie got its title. Needless to say, this is a shock for him, and the question of how his hair suddenly turned green is a reasonable one. So Gramp takes Peter to the doctor, who is unable to determine any reason from the medicine he knows why Peter's hair should have turned green. The adults are shocked, although one girl at least claims it's super.

That is, until word spreads around among the adults. Some of them think that perhaps he got it from the milk he drinks, which makes no sense because wouldn't other people have green hair too then? Perhaps it's a disease, but one that's contagious. So pretty soon, nobody wants to be around Peter for fear they too might wind up with the same green hair. Peter, as a result, runs away from Gramp and into the forest, where he comes upon a Brigadoon-like place. Except that this place is inhabited by children who are all war orphans like Peter. They tell him that he's been given the green hair so that perhaps people will pay attention to him as he tells them how bad war is.

Nope, not going to work. Frankly, now that Peter has a message he's insufferable as well as being a misfit, which leads him to make the difficult decision to shave off his hair in the fact that it will grow back in its original color. Of course, we knew this was going to happen or else how would have little Peter have been found the way he is at the beginning of the movie.

If there's a problem with The Boy With Green Hair, it's that the message is nothing if not unsubtle. We get the point already. Perhaps the reason for this is that it's based on a short story, in which case trying to draw it out to feature length might have caused the problems. It doesn't help that the characters aren't the most appealing. Robert Ryan has nothing to do, so any of the movie's problems aren't his fault. Dean Stockwell is being asked to play a kid who has good reason to be morose and run away, so it's not really his fault either. Pat O'Brien goes for the Barry Fitzgerald Irish shtick at times, which comes across here as mildly obnoxious. And of course most of the rest of the characters are being asked to be mean to this poor kid.

It's not so much that The Boy With Green Hair is a bad movie, however, as much as it is material that it can be a bit hard to make palatable. So definitely watch and judge for yourself on this one.

For the love of God, stop calling us Boys Town!

Actor Darryl Hickman died in 2024 and was one of those people honored in TCM's end of the year night of movies of people who died during the year without getting a more traditional programming tribute. The film they picked for Hickman was one I hadn't seen before, Fighting Father Dunne.

The movie opens up yet again with an establishing scene leading to a flashback. Well, not quite, as even before that there's explanatory information about how good the boys who deliver newspapers today (1948) have it compared to the boys who stood on the street corner hawking papers back in the day. Responsible for that was, in part, Father Dunne. Only then do we go to the settlement house Dunne ran, which is portrayed as having two footprints on the front step, and a man who as a boy had lived in the settlement house wanting that bit of concrete saved as the building is undergoing renovations. Cue the flashback to why this man might want those footprints....

We flash back to St. Louis in 1905. Selling newspapers in those days is portrayed as being like On the Waterfront, where you have to muscle your way to the front to get newspapers to sell, and other people will try to stop you by force if necessary. Worse is that a circulation war is going on, leading to more violence. One cold winter's day, a couple of the boys seek out the help of Fr. Dunne (Pat O'Brien). The two boys and their friend are living in what looks like a cardboard crate in back of the stables. The friend has gotten sick so can't sell newspapers and the other two don't know what to do.

Fr. Dunne visits the sick kid and is unsurprisingly horrified by what he sees. So he takes the three kids back to the rectory and makes certain they get a hot meal and a place to stay for the night, even though he doesn't have much money. You'd think he could trot these kids out at his next Sunday Mass and get his parishioners to fill the collection with money or goods to help look after these kids. But as it is, Dunne has to make do with his sister Kate (Ruth Donnelly) who is the rectory housekeeper and her husband Emmett (Charles Kemper) with what he can bring in.

The kids continue to sell papers when they can, while Fr. Dunne is eventually able to find an empty place for the kids. Not that he can afford the rent on it. But he's got a charismatic personality, so he's able to use that to convince everybody he meets to contribute to his cause in one way or another, most notably wealthy Mr. O'Donnell (Arthur Shields, sounding mighty like Barry Fitzgerald since he was in real life Barry's kid brother) or Miss O'Rourke (Una O'Connor) who lives across the way from the first settlement house and becomes a sort of house mother since she's got time for it.

Hickman comes in later as Matt Davis. Matt is one of a trio of kids who steal a pony and cart from Mr. O'Donnell. The other two get caught by the police while Matt is able to escape. Fr. Dunne brings the other two back to the settlement house, and when Matt sees that they've got a much cushier life now, he decides to break his way into. Part of the point of the house is to try to reform the kids since they have to turn to petty crime just to survive. Matt eventually graduates and acts like he's been reformed and is making a good enough living, but that's just a lie, as he's turned to a life of crime that turns tragic when he shoots a cop.

It's no wonder that I and a bunch of the reviewers I read compare Fighting Father Dunne to Boys Town. The movie isn't terrible, but it certainly feels derivative and predictable since we all know where Boys Town went. Pat O'Brien and the supporting cast all do a professional job with the material they're give. But there's a reason Fighting Father Dunne isn't well remembered today, which is because it doesn't quite stack up to Boys Town.

Another "I can save you, but..." movie

Barbara Stanwyck was TCM's Star of the Month some months back, which gave me the chance to record some of her movies that I hadn't seen before. One that has a fairly pedestrian plot, but is redeemed by good performances from the cast, is Gambling Lady.

Stanwyck is the titular gambling lady, a woman named Lady Lee who makes an OK living is the sort of "escort" provided by a gambling syndicate to people who need a dealer or something for a high-stakes poker game or some other form of gambling. Of course, the syndicate wants to boost the odds in its favor even if that's by less than honest means. This is something Lady Lee says she absolutely doesn't care for. As a bit of foreshadowing, one night at the club she meets wealthy Peter Madison (C. Aubrey Smith) who, for whatever reason, doesn't seem to mind being taken by this charming woman.

Not that there's going to be anything romantic between them, since Smith was about 70 at the time the movie was made. And Lady Lee already has someone theoretically more her type pursuing her in the from of horse racing bookie Charlie Lang (Pat O'Brien). For Lady, it's more of a friendship than anything romantic. As she works for the syndicate and makes good money, she keeps coming across young Garry (Joel McCrea), although she keeps rebuffing him even though he's clearly into her. One night he sneaks up to the room where Lady will be playing, only for undercover police to get in the elevator with Garry.

Garry wants to marry Lady, but she claims she won't fit into his society and doesn't want to anger his parents. Except that this is Garry Madison, son of Peter whom we've already met. So they marry and live happily ever after, yeah right since we're only a third of the way into the movie. On their honeymoon they meet Garry's old girlfriend Sheila (Claire), and when Garry and Lady invite society over on their return to America, Sheila has followed them and insists on gambling against Lady. Lady wins a bunch of Sheila's jewels, and takes the betting seriously, not giving Sheila back her jewelry even though Sheila obviously thought this was all a lark.

Things get more complicated when Charlie gets into legal issues requiring a large bail. Garry's money would cause scandal, so Lady pawns those jewels. Except, that also causes difficulties when Lady gives the pawn ticket to Charlie. Garry wants it so he can quietly get the jewels back without Lady knowing. However, Charlie gets killed, and all signs point to Garry since he's got the ticket. In fact, he was with Sheila, who has been trying to break up Garry and Lady's marriage.

Now, is this movie going to have a happy ending? The answer is yes, and that unfortunately is something that requires a bit of a cop-out for the movie to get that ending. The material is stuff that we've seen quite a few times in the early 1930s, and which frankly strains credulity. None of this is the fault of the cast, who all give it their best and mostly succeed. But that script? Oy. Gambling Lady is OK, as long as you can get past the unoriginality of it.

Pat O'Brien grows a moustache

Ever since moving and getting access to reliable high-speed internet two years ago, I've been able to watch the FAST services. Tubi seems to have access to a whole bunch of stuff that wound up in the public domain. One that I hadn't heard of before seeing it in the "classic" movies section was Slightly Honorable.

The movie starts off with the idea that perhaps there's an island somewhere in the South Pacifc that doesn't have corruption, but we're in America, 8,000 miles away. Cut to a shot of the highway commissioner in some state getting killed in a road accident, which is the height of irony because the commissioner was the one more or less responsible for the shoddy state of the roads, what with all the graft in the highway department. At his funeral are newspaper publisher Vincent Cushing (Edward Arnold), who is in on the graft and getting wealthy from it; and attorney John Webb (Pat O'Brien), who wants to eliminate corruption and graft.

Complicating matters is that one of Webb's clients, Alma Brehmer (Claire Dodd) just happens to be the mistress of one Vincent Cushing. Webb and Cushing are brought together again when Alma invites Webb to a swanky party at a nightclub hosted by Cushing. It's also a place for Webb to meet chorine Ann Seymour (Ruth Terry), who thinks of Webb as someone to look up to as well as woo once he saves her from one of the brutes at Cushing's party trying to slap her around because he's jealous of her dancing briefly with Ann. Ann, however, seems mostly to be comic relief, which is surprising considering that Eve Arden is also in the film playing the part of Webb's secretary.

Up to now the movie has been more comedy than drama, although things are about to take a turn. Alma being one of Webb's clients, she wants him to see her about some jewelry Cushing gave her and that she wants appraised so she can have it added to her insurance policy. Webb goes up to her swanky apartment, and finds that somebody's stabbed her! Needless to say, since he's the one to have found her, he's an obvious suspect. Cushing's wife has good reason to worry that perhaps her husband could be held responsible, what with his having an obvious motive of trying to silence poor Alma. So she tries to keep anything bad about Cushing from being released. Worse for Webb is that Cushing's daughter actively wants to implicate Webb. Helping to save Webb is his legal firm partner Sampson (a young Broderick Crawford).

I mentioned above that the movie starts off on a somewhat humorous tone, and in the years before the US got involved in World War II there was quite a cycle of comic murder mystery-type movies. However, Strictly Honorable takes a slightly different tack of being humorous up to the murder and then tacking a much darker turn. It's an odd strategy, and one that doesn't always work. However, the flaws in the movie are also in part to it being a low-budget independently produced movie.

Not that Strictly Honorable is a bad movie; it's more that it's the sort of thing where it's easy to see why it's fallen through the cracks and become largely forgotten.

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.

Knute Rockne, All American

NFL training camps are in full swing, so with that in mind I thought I'd blog about one of the football movies that's been sitting on my DVR for some time: Knute Rockne, All American.

The movie opens up in Voss, Norway, in the early 1890s, where Lars Rockne (John Qualen) is a carriage maker. He's been planning on emigrating to the United States, specifically to Chicago where one of those great world's fairs is going to be held. In the next scene, we see that Lars has in fact made it to America with his family, including young son Knute (played as a boy by Johnny Sheffield). One day, little Knute comes across a group of older boys playing the relatively new game of football, and he falls in love with it despite it being violent.

Rockne is a good student and could do well if he could go to college, but he can't afford it, so he has to work for several years beforehand. Eventually, adult Knute (Pat O'Brien) has saved up enough money to go to Notre Dame, a Catholic school in South Bend, Indiana. This was the relatively early days of college football, when the sport was in many ways even more corrupt than it is now. Despite his age, he gets roped into trying out for the football team.

College president Fr. Callahan (Donald Crisp) and chemistry professor Fr. Nieuwland (Albert Bassermann) tell Rockne that he could make an excellent chemist, working on synthetic rubber. Knute spends the summer working as a lifeguard instead, although that's important because he goes on to meet Bonnie Skiles (Gale Page), who eventually becomes Mrs. Knute Rockne.

College-aged Knute helps Notre Dame win the big game against Army, one of the big teams of the era because they could recruit the very best athletes of the day thanks to the prestige of the Army. This was through Rockne's insistence on using the forward pass as the mainstay of the offense, which had only been made legal about a half-dozen years earlier. The game puts Notre Dame football on the map.

It also eventually gets Rockne named coach, and he would coach the team until his death a decade or so later in a plane crash. Along the way, Rockne coached George Gipp (Ronald Reagan), who would get an infection that killed him at a young age. This is, of course, the whole legend behind "Win one for the Gipper" and why Reagan would become known as the Gipper. But the Rockne portrayed her also suffered from heart issues, along with serving as the face of college football when Congress and other politicians started worrying about the corrupting influence college football might have on young men.

I'm not certain how much of Knute Rockne, All American is what actually happened in real life. Knute's widow was still very much alive when the movie was made, and there was no way the movie was getting made without her approval, which I assume led to a really sanitized view of Rockne and the romanticization of college football in general.

Having said that, however, the movie is very good as far as Hollywood biopics go, thanks to a fine performance from O'Brien. Ronald Reagan is often remembered for this movie, but I think that's as much because of what he'd go on to be. Reagan does well with what he's asked to do, but he only gets a couple of scenes, and is absolutely not the lead here.

If you want another good example of the old-time Hollywood biopic, you could do a lot worse than to watch Knute Rockne, All American.

Virtue

Recently I fired up Tubi, and one of the movies it recommended to me was one that I thought had been on the platform early but went away because the rights to show it ran out. That movie was the early Carole Lombard film Virtue, and either it's back, or it never left (or possibly I came across it on one of the other FAST streamers and now it's on a different streamer). In any case, it's there, so I decided to watch it.

There may be a problem with the print Tubi ran in that the first 60 seconds or so after the opening credits only have voice on a black screen, which doesn't seem right considering the subject material. Lombard play Mae, who as the movie starts has just been convicted on a solicitation charge in New York City, along with friends Lil (Mayo Methot) and Gert (Shirley Grey) and a bunch of others. The various prostitutes are given a choice: three months in the female work camp, or a one-way ticket out of New York. Needless to say, those who can take the hint and get out.

Mae makes her way to Danbury, CT, and getting off the train hires a taxi driven by Jimmy (a young Pat O'Brien). She doesn't quite have the money for the fare, but as the two talk, they become sort of friends. Taking the relationship farther than that is a bit off the table however, as Jimmy thinks that having a wife is only going to drag him down and take away money he needs. He's got his eye on running a service station, and has been saving up to put a payment on a half interest in one particular station.

As you might guess, Mae and Jimmy do wind up falling in love, and even tying the knot, although she hasn't yet told him about her past. Jimmy and Mae go on what is presumably going to be a brief honeymoon, but that's to Coney Island. Now, as you might know, Coney Island is in New York City, and Mae is still not supposed to be in the City. Somehow, she's recognized among the throng of people, which to me seemed like a serious plot hole because who really remembers that this is a prostitute who was arrested months ago. It's not like she's got a tramp stamp or anything like that. But when they go to the hotel for the night, there's a cop waiting for her.

Jimmy decides to give her a second chance, and Mae proves to be a surprisingly good wife, saving money out of the allowance that Jimmy gives her on top of the money Jimmy himself has been saving towards buying that service station. But then Gert calls, claiming to be seriously ill and needing $200 for an operation, which she'll repay when she gets the money from her parents. Mae is dumb enough to fall for this, giving the money to her before finding out that Gert has tried this on most of the unmarried cabbies.

Mae learns that Gert has gone to Atlantic City, so she goes and finds her, where she's with her boyfriend/pimp Toots (Jack La Rue), who also happens to be Lil's pimp. Mae walks in just as Toots is strangling Gert because she tried to steal the money back to give to Mae. You can probably guess how the rest of the movie plays out.

Virtue was released in 1932, so is decidedly a pre-Code movie. It was a bit surprising to me to see Carole Lombard at Columbia, as I wondered what she did to get the punishment of being on loan to a much lower studio than Paramount. Pat O'Brien's presence also surprised me, but apparently this was before O'Brien signed on at Warner Bros. The story is not particularly lurid beyond having the main character being a convicted prostitute, although that key plot point could not have been used just two years later.

Lombard unsurprisingly does well with the material, as does O'Brien. Virtue is another of the many, many pictures that doesn't really do anything wrong, although it also doesn't do a whole lot to stand out. But it's most definitely not a bad little movie, and certainly one that's worth a watch, and not just for fans of Carole Lombard.

The end, but not of the blog

In the nine months since I moved and have been able to do the whole streaming thing, I've mentioned how PlutoTV seems to be quite good at allowing you to do on-demand viewing. Another of the movies that I watched on Pluto because of the interesting premise was the Burt Reynolds comedy The End. I figured that with today being the end of the year, it would be an appropriate day to finally do my post on the movie.

Burt Reynolds stars as Sonny Lawson, a Los Angeles real estate man who at the beginning of the movie is seeing his doctor, Samuel Krugman (Norman Fell in one of many cameo roles the movie has). Dr. Krugman has some bad news for Sonny: Sonny has a blood disease that will kill him in somewhere from three months to a year. Sonny is quite displeased with the idea of dying, as he's fairly young and expected to live quite a bit longer yet.

Sonny becomes obsessed with the idea of dying, tailing funerals, talking to a priest (Robby Benson in another cameo), and eventually visiting a hospital to see if he can get a more up close look at what death is really going to be like for him. That last visit frightens him enough, and this was the days before euthanasia, that Sonny decides he wants his life to end on his terms, rather than suffering in an ICU or some such. As a result, he decides that he's going to kill himself.

But how? That, and he still has to tie up all his personal affairs like his will and dealing with a complicated personal life that includes oblivious parents (Pat O'Brien and Myrna Loy); an ex-wife (Joanne Woodward) and a somewhat estranged daughter (Kristy McNichol); and a girlfriend (Sally Field). After finally getting those affairs in order, he kills himself by taking an overdose of sleeping pills. The end.

Well, not quite. Sonny does try to overdose, but he doesn't take enough to kill him, with the result that his lawyer has him committed to a sanitarium of the sort you'd see in old movies like The Cobweb. One of the doctors (Carl Reiner) happens to be terminally ill himself and tries to assist Sonny in trying to come to grips with his impending death, ultimately doing it by dropping dead right in front of Sonny. Talk about dark comedy.

And among the patiens is Marlon Borunki (Dom DeLuise), someone who's criminally insane in that he hears voices like a schizophrenic, with one of those voices having told him to commit murder. So when Sonny tells Marlon how he's terminally ill and tried to commit suicide, Marlon has the logical-for-him idea that perhaps he can help Sonny die. But Marlon's efforts don't work -- hospitals dealing with mental patients have all sorts of anti-suicide measures in place -- and Marlon's efforts eventually bring Sonny to the point of thinking that perhaps letting the illness take its course instead might be the better option.

As I said, The End is quite the dark comedy, something that for the most part would fit in well with the George C. Scott movie The Hospital. Unfortunately, however, the movie really begins to falter once Dom DeLuise shows up. He's just a bit too zany for the movie's good, and one or two scenes with him would be more than enough to get the point. However, he fills probably the last third of the movie if not more.

Still, there are going to be people who appreciate Dom DeLuise, and for them they'll probably like all of The End, and not just the first half like I did.

Flowing Gold

I've mentioned Rex Beach in the past, as he's the writer responsible for the story that gave us several versions of The Spoilers. A different movie that's based on the work of Rex Beach is Flowing Gold. It aired a few months back on TCM, and I recorded it and recently watched it.

The movie opens with a scroll about oil, also known as "black gold", and its importance to modern-day civilization. Cut to some town in Oklahoma that's sprung up as part of the state's oil boom. Several people are waiting in front of a building with a help wanted sign, even though it's the middle of the night. Just as the bosses are about to take on new men for the day, a couple of policemen show up with a "wanted" poster, causing one of the men, Johnny Alexander (John Garfield) to flee. He should know, since he's the guy on the poster.

He gets in a truck that's going to another oil field, run by foreman Hap O'Connor Pat O'Brien. It's a tough place to work, especially since on of the men has been drinking on the job, which is even more dangerous. The man's drinking comes to light and Hap tries to fire him. The man responds by trying to attack Hap, but Johnny, now taking the name "Blake" to avoid discovery, saves Hap. Johnny then reveals that he's on the lam for a murder rap, although he insists it was in self-defense, something that's important because of the Production Code constrictions.

Eventually Johnny flees to a town called Eagle Rock, which is booming even more thanks to some new oil fields. Hap also goes there, finding that an old wildcatter friend of his, Chalmers (Raymond Walburn) is there, together with his daughter Linda (Frances Farmer), who is now all grown up and looking very nice indeed. Johnny comes across Linda one day when she gets her car stuck in the mud, and helps her out. It eventually results in a romance, but it takes some time.

That's because Johnny has gotten a job with Chalmers' mortal enemy, who holds most of the leases, and is trying to squeeze Chalmers out, by any means necessary, including blocking roads and keeping the bankers from lending money to Chalmers. Johnny does wind up working for Hap again, however, and the plot leads to two main conflicts: will the oil well ever come in, and will Johnny be able to continue outrunning the law?

Flowing Gold is another of those movies that fits what Warner Bros. was quite good at doing, and giving the lead role to John Garfield is a move that works quite well. Once again, he's very appealing in a blue-collar role. Pat O'Brien is a bit miscast, but does fine with his part. The movie also packs both a surprising number of twists and turns, and a surprising amount of action, into its programmer-length running time of a shade over 80 minutes.

Flowing Gold is definitely worth watching for anybody who's a fan of the Warner Bros. programmers.

I've Got Your Number

In the latest installment of movies I've got in my Youtube TV library that happen to be coming up again soon on TCM, I noticed a breezy little movie called I've Got Your Number. It's going to be on again tomorrow (Sept. 19) at 11:30 AM, so I made a point of watching it to be able to do a review here to give you all a chance to watch it too.

Joan Blondell is nominally the star here as she gets top billing, but the real star of the proceedings is Pat O'Brien. He plays Terry, a linemen for the phone company. He's good at what he does, as we see when he goes up on the roof of a building to cut some wires in order to prevent more serious problems in the building next door that's on fire. In that incident, Terry saves the life of Schulyer (Henry O'Neill), a wealthy broker in stocks and bonds. But Terry also grates on his boss Mr. Flood (Eugene Pallette) by doing things that bring in customer complaints, especially from the female customers.

Joan Blondell plays Marie, who is a switchboard operator at an apartment hotel. Nicky (Gordon Westcott) shows an interest in her, and gets her to play what she thinks is a practical joke by switching a call intended for someone else to him. That call is in fact the result of a horse race that earns Nicky a ton of money instead of the legitimate target of the call. The hotel manager calls the phone company to check whether the lines could have been tapped, and Flood sends Terry and his partner John (Allen Jenkins).

Terry wastes no time in putting the moves on Marie, basically harassing her until she gives in and agrees to go on a date with him. In some ways, it's a bit fortuitous, since Terry has connections with the phone company that could get her a job as an operator for them, or, if that falls through, calling in a favor from Schuyler. So at least Marie will have a job working for Schuyler. Except that she spills the beans about some bonds to Nicky, who is able to come up with a scheme to get those bonds off of Schulyer. Marie is arrested, and it's up to Terry to try to exonerate Marie, with a little help from his lineman skills.

I've Got Your Number is exactly the sort of programmer-length rapid-fire film that was perfect for the lower half of a bill back in the early 1930s. The plot goes from one point to the next extremely quickly and doesn't always quite make sense, although it never stops entertaining. Warner Bros. also threw in several of its supporting stars, notably a scene with Glenda Farrell as a phony psychic and Louise Beavers as her assistant phoning things in from another room. Ninety years on, of course, people will look at Pat O'Brien's character and be a bit horrified, because he really is nasty in the way he goes after women. As an example, he knocks over Marie's dining table, destroying her dinner and a good portion of her dishes, just so she'll go out for dinner with him.

Still, I've Got Your Number is a fun enough ride for fans of movies from the early 1930s.

The Navy Comes Through

As I mentioned at the start of Summer Under the Stars, I've been watching movies either as they're about to expire from the Watch TCM app, or going through them on my DVR. As such, there's a few movies that aired a few months ago on TCM and are about to run again during Summer Under the Stars, my having watched them without realizing they're going to be on this month. The first movie to fall into this category is The Navy Comes Through, which is airing tomorrow (August 4) at 5:00 PM as part of a day of movies with Jackie Cooper in the cast.

Now, Jackie Cooper was more of a child star who kept working as an adult, but who was not as big an adult star. So he's not the star here; instead, the two stars are Pat O'Brien and George Murphy. Murphy plays Lt. Sands of the US Navy, and as the movie opens, it's 1940. Sands has been brought before a board of inquiry because of an accident on the ship he was on. Unfortunately, his good friend and fellow serviceman Mike Mallory (that's Pat O'Brien) testifies against Sands, with this testimony causing Sands to lose his rank and him deciding to resign from the force. It doesn't help the two men's relationship that Sands was in a romantic relationship with Mike's sister Myra (Jane Wyatt).

Fast forward to 1942, as the movie was released that year. Obviously the fast forward means that Pearl Harbor has already been attacked and the US is now a part of World War II. Mallory has been promoted in rank to Chief, about to be put on a ship that's convoying the merchant marine across the Atlantic and providing protection from U-boat attacks. Myra does her part for the war effor by becoming a naval nurse, and even Sands does his part by re-enlisting.

Now, you just know that Sands is going to wind up under Mallory's command, and that this is going to cause all sorts of problems. Meanwhile, everybody, and I mean everybody, does their part for the war effort, including immigrants like Cuban-American Pat Tarriba (Desi Arnaz, who was climbing the ladder at RKO at the time), and violinst Richard "Dutch" Croner (Carl Esmond), who fled Austria when the Nazis came in and is now fighting for America. Cooper plays Babe, who is one of the radiomen or something, as he has a radio and is able to adjust for the sideband phase shifting, revealing a plaintext transmission in German that the Nazis are sending. Now do you see why Dutch is aboard the ship? Never mind the existence of both the Enigma cipher as well as the existence of numbers stations. We really are expected to believe the Nazis are this stupid.

Sands wants to deal with the Germans in one way, while Mallory wants to complete the mission they were sent on. But togther, the whole crew saves the day after some tribulations, and Sands is able to get back together with Myra.

As you can guess, The Navy Comes Through is the sort of pure propaganda designed to maintain morale on the home front and show the US Navy being heroic. Nothing like In Which We Serve here. As such, the story is hokey and dated, but the sort of thing that audiences of the day would have liked. It's the sort of movie that should be seen as a sort of artifact of its time, and not as any sort of great cinema.

The Navy Comes Here

Some movies showed up in TCM's 31 Days of Oscar for rather surprising reasons. One example of this is Here Comes the Navy. I had never seen it before, so I recently sat down to watch it.

James Cagney plays Chesty O'Connor, a riveter at a shipyard who's good at what he does, at least until Biff (Pat O'Brien) comes along. Biff is an officer aboard the USS Arizona (yes, the ship that sank in Pearl Harbor), but on land when he first meets Chesty who's busy catching rivets. A dispute comes up between them, and the two men nearly come to blows for reasons that make no real sense.

Some time later, Chesty is with his co-workers at the Ironworkers' Ball, and who should show up but Biff. Chesty wants his revenge from the previous fight, but when all the men go out into the alley to fight, Chesty learns that he's no match for Biff, costing him a deposit on a tuxedo, his girlfriend Gladys (Dorothy Tree), and even his job thanks to his injuries.

Now Chesty really wants revenge, but he finds out that Biff's ship has sailed, literally, since after all Biff is in the Navy. So Chesty decides he too is going to join the navy and get himself assigned to the same ship as Biff just to finish that fight and finally come out on top. This too makes no sense as I can't imagine the navy actually enlisting Chesty with such motivations, or Chesty ever getting anywhere close to the Arizona. He'd have ended up in the brig long before that with his constant insubordination.

But in that case, we wouldn't have a movie. So Chesty, along with his friend from training, Droopy (Frank McHugh), somehow get assigned to the Arizona, and Chesty immediately sets out to get himself booted from the Navy for his violent ways. Again, however, that just wouldn't do for the sort of movie Warner Bros. wanted to make, so we know that Chesty is going to be turned into a good person.

There's a big complication along the way, however. As part of a running joke about Droopy trying to buy his mother a set of false teeth (the running joke finally being revealed in the last scene), he and Chesty go to wire her the money. They meet telegraph office worker Dorothy (Gloria Stuart). Chesty immediately falls for her, and even gets her to invite him to her apartment for dinner the next night. What he doesn't know is that Dorthy is Dorothy Martin, Biff's sister. If Chesty wasn't in bad with Biff before, boy will he be now!

But Biff is going to get those chances to turn into a good person, when a couple of disasters happen and Chesty takes personal risk to save his fellow man, although in at least one case he only claims he's looking out for himself. Still, it's goin gto lead to the predictable ending that would have been pleasing for audiences of 1934 when the movie was released.

Amazingly, Here Comes the Navy got an Oscar nomination for Best Picture. In 1934, there were 12 nominees for Best Picture, which might explain it. It's not exactly bad, although it has all sorts of facepalm-inducing motivations and seems unoriginal today. This, however, was the first pairing of Cagney and O'Brien, so it might have been more original to audiences of 1934. The two, as well as the supporting players, go through their paces and make something that definitely would have entertained audiences back then, although it may seem dated today.

There's also the archival footage of both the USS Arizona (indeed, some scenes were also filmed on board the ship) as well as the navy dirigible USS Macon. Everybody knows what happened to the Arizona; the Macon went down in an accident in 1935. Both ships are an interesting part of America's naval history.

Flying High

Early musicals, at least those before 42nd Street, were often a bit of an odd bird, either way too static or trying to do a little bit of everything. A good example of the latter is Flying High, which is going to be on TCM tomorrow morning at 10:45 AM.

Bert Lahr plays Rusty Krause. He's an aviation tinkerer, in that I don't think the term aerospace engineer had been invented yet. Instead, he's the sort of guy who worked as a mechanic in a small garage, and in his spare time invented something he calls the "aerocopter", which is probably like a precursor to the helicopter or the sort of autogyro you see in It Happened One Night. Rusty is at an air show, where he hopes to show off the aerocopter, but he needs a pilot, and more importantly, money.

Enter smooth-talking promoter Sport Waddell (Pat O'Brien), the sort of man who's liable to wind up in jail for his smooth talking, as one of his marks remarks. Sport might be willing to help out Rusty, but he too doesn't have the money necessary. He meets a Mr. Smith (Guy Kibbee), who could be an investor, except that he admits he has cash flow issues and can't buy the stock just yet. But meeting Mr. Smith brings Sport in contact with Smith's daughter Eileen (Kathryn Crawford), and Sport falls in love with her.

Meanwhile, working at the aerodrome is waitress Pansy Botts (Charlotte Greenwood). She's without a husband, and has just come into a modest inheritance from her uncle, so she'd even be willing to buy a husband. She's so desperate, in fact, that she's thinking of heading off to a logging camp to marry a cook there.

Sport has to work fast, and offers Pansy a husband in the form of Rusty, who is decidedly unwilling to get married. Sport, for his part, shows Pansy a photo of Clark Gable when mentioning Rusty to her, so imagine the surprise of both of them when they meet and realize they're supposed to marry each other. But they get married in time, and Rusty is able to get a pilot's license, which allows him to fly the autocopter himself -- except that Pansy doesn't want him flying off alone, joining him for the flight.

Along the way, there are several musical numbers, including two big pieces which were choreographed by Busby Berkeley, which is why the camerawork shows Berkeley's style a year and change before 42nd Street. Of course, one number in which the dancers spell out various aviators' names, really requires the camera to be overhead. There's also the pilots' license exam number, in which a doctor (Charles Winninger) examines a bunch of scantily clad women before Rusty shows up.

It's a mish-mash which doesn't always work. A little bit of Bert Lahr goes a long way, and there's a lot of Lahr here. Greenwood is underused, and the climax of the autocopter flight is deliberately unrealistic but also unfunny as a result. Hedda Hopper has a small role as Mrs. Smith.

If I were going to introduce Charlotte Greenwood to people who aren't familiar with her work, I'd probably start with The Gang's All Here; others would probably select one of the other Fox movies or maybe even Oklahoma. If I wanted to introduce one of her pre-Code movies, I'd probably pick something like So Long Letty for its bizarre plot and much greater usage of Greenwood. Flying High would be down the list a ways.

20,000 Years with John Garfield

I see that I still have a couple of movies left on the DVR from when Ann Sheridan was TCM Star of the Month back in June. Among them is Castle on the Hudson. Sheridan and male lead John Garfield being Warner Bros. contract players, it's unsurprising that this one got a DVD release courtesy of the Warner Archive.

Garfield plays Tommy Gordon, a gangster living the high life who seems to get away with the crimes he commits, except for the fact that he doesn't want to commit any crime on Saturday because that's his unlucky day. (That's a lot of foreshadowing.) Sheridan plays his girlfriend Kay, who'll stick by him through thick and thin.

Unfortunately, Tommy's underlings get him involved in a crime that takes place on a Saturday night, and sure enough, the police pinch him at a high-class nightclub that's presumably a mob front. In any case, Tommy gets convicted and sent up to Sing Sing.

Tommy thinks he'll be able to waltz through prison, especially since he's got a bunch of money. Obviously he'd seen Blackwell's Island and how the gangster prisoners there were able to run the place. But the warden here, Long (Pat O'Brien) isn't about to have any of that nonsense. He's one of those wardens who actually believes in rehabilitation, but is also not a softy. Everybody gets the same level of discipline until they show they deserve more or less, and that discipline is going to rehabilitate them.

In prison, Tommy becomes friends with Steven Rockford (Burgess Meredith), who is planning an escape. Steven sets up the plot such that Tommy should be able to escape with him, but then Tommy realizes that the planned break is on a Saturday. Fat chance of Tommy taking part in it. And sure enough, the plot fails, with Steven getting killed by the guards in the process.

Tommy may not exactly be a model prisoner, but he is at least more docile from the time he spent in solitary and the other indignities that Warden Long visited upon him for not wanting to go along with the prison rules. And Long eventually thinks that perhaps even someone like Tommy is being rehabilitated.

But then poor Kay is the passenger in a car crash that nearly kills her. Tommy gets a telegram, and Long rather bizarrely gives Tommy a one-day furlough -- on the honor system! -- so that Tommy can go to New York and see Kay before she dies. Some of Tommy's enemies see him and set up an attempted hit, which is foiled by... Kay, who shoots Tommy's enemy dead. Not that the authorities are going to believe any of this, even if Kay should survive.

If the plot sounds familiar, that's because Castle on the Hudson is a remake of Warner Bros. pre-Code movie 20,000 Years in Sing Sing. It's basically a programmer for Garfield, who was a rising star at Warner Bros. from the very beginning of his career, as well as for Sheridan, running about 77 minutes.

Even though it's just a programmer, having the cast that it does ensures that it's a pretty good movie. It might be better remembered if it weren't such a close remake of 20,000 Years in Sing Sing, which had even bigger stars, but that's unfair to Castle on the Hudson. It really can stand on its own, and the movie's big fault, that furlough, is a problem in both movies.

So you should probably watch both Castle on the Hudson and 20,000 Years in Sing Sing, and judge for yourself.

The People Against O'Hara

Some weeks back, Noir Alley ran the movie The People Against O'Hara. I hadn't done a review of it before, so I decided to DVR it and watch it to do that review.

The movie starts off with a couple of people coming out of a diner one night, and on the steps of a house across the way they see a murder being committed! Police run the plates on the car, which belongs to one Johnny O'Har (James Arness), so he's the natural person to ask his whereabouts. The other is Johnny's erstwhile friend Frank Korvac (William Campbell), whose prints are found in the car. Johnny says the car was stolen, but Frank is willing to take a plea deal in exchange for putting the finger on Johnny.

The O'Haras only know one lawyer, James Curtayne (Spencer Tracy). He used to be a big-time lawyer, but he turned to drink, and had to give up showy defense law in exchange for the sort of cheap transactional law that pays the bills. They turn to him for help, and he's reluctant because he doesn't think he's up to the stress any more, having given up alcohol. His adult daughter Ginny (Diana Lynn) also doesn't want him to take the case, because she knows he'll turn to drink if he does. As it is, she's put her life on hold for him, not marrying her fiancé (Richard Anderson), who is even more resentful of Dad than she is.

Still, Curtayne eventually does decide to take the case, realizing that perhaps he shouldn't have. He's got a particularly unhelpful client. Johnny claims that at the time of the alleged murder, he was checking up on some of the fish tanks at the fish market where he works for Knuckles (Eduardo Ciannelli), the Mob boss who runs the entire fish market. But a cursory inspection shows this to be complete balderdash. Obviously, Johnny is lying to protect somebody, but who?

If only he could find a witness. Ah, there is that witness mentioned at the beginning, who turns out to be a Swedish sailor, Sven Norson (Jay C. Flippen). Curtayne, in a profoundly stupid move, decides to bribe the guy to say he didn't see Johnny! Not only is it a bribe, but Curtayne leaves a paper trail by writing a check to a foreigner who probably doesn't even have a bank account in the States.

After some more investigation, Curtayne finally finds an angle to break the case open, and possibly redeem himself. But it's also going to put him at some personal danger....

Even though I know The People Against O'Hara wasn't the first noir the studio released -- and they actually did release a couple of good ones in Act of Violence and the slightly less noirish The Bribe and The Asphalt Jungle, this one plays out like you'd expect if MGM used all its glitz to make a noir. The idea is good, but everything seems a bit too neat and tidy. Tracy gives a very good performance as always; Pat O'Brien is underused as a police detective; and Arness and Campbell both show promise early in their careers. But the script feels a bit perfunctory and flat.

Overall, The People Against O'Hara isn't a bad movie by any stretch of the imagination. It's just that compared to other noirs, and other stuff Spencer Tracy did in his career, there's so much out that that's better. The People Against O'Hara is available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive should you wish to watch it.

Consolation Marriage

An interesting and little-known pre-Code is coming up on TCM tomorrow morning at 6:15 AM: Consolation Marriage. It deserves a viewing and a blog post.

Irene Dunne plays Mary, a working girl trying to make her way through the late 1920s with her boyfriend Aubrey (Lester Vail). Unfortunately, he decides that he would be happier marrying into wealth. So he runs off with a rich girl and leaves poor Mary alone. While Mary is licking her wounds, she runs into Steve (Pat O'Brien). He's a newspaperman who has just suffered the same fate as his girl Elaine (a young Myrna Loy) has left him for a better-off partner. There's an obvious solution for these two jilted lovers that you should be able to figure out.

Ah, but there's a twist. Mary and Steve do decide to get married, but they have an agreement that it's going to be a more or less "open" marriage. Not so much in the sense that they're going to be sleeping around, but more that if either of them decides they don't want to be in the marriage any longer, they can just up and end the marriage. Seems like a pretty daring idea for the early 1930s, even taking into account that Hollywood movies probably had more divorces in them than America as a whole. That having been said, the marriage seems to be a reasonably happy one, and one that obviously includes sex, since Mary ultimately has a baby. (I suppose that in true Hollywood tradition, they could have had sex exactly once and that's what produced the baby.)

For a movie like this to be interesting, however, there's going to have to be some dramatic conflict. In Penny Serenade, that conflict involved killing off the poor little child. Consolation Marriage isn't going to be so mean here. And, in fact, it comes up with a more interesting dilemma. Aubrey and Elaine both return to announce that they're not happy with their marriages, and both of them would be happy running off with their old lovers. A fun solution would be for Aubrey and Elaine to marry each other and then live together with Mary and Steve, but the cinema of the early 1930s couldn't be that daring. Instead, what we get is a dramatic conflict over whether Mary, Steve, or both of them will go back to their old lovers. And who's going to take custody of the baby?

Consolation Marriage is an interesting idea, even if the execution isn't always perfect. But it's that idea that makes it so well worth watching, at least once. Most of us who are into old movies know well about Joe Breen's enforcement of the Production Code in 1934 and how, before then, movies could do things that were more daring. But even then, a lot of what was done is pretty tame compared to what you can show on screen today. The sort of marriage practiced by Mary and Steve, however, is different, and that's one of the things that makes the movie worth a watch.

I don't think Consolation Marriage has been released to DVD here in North America, so you'll have to catch the rare TCM showing.