Confidential Agent

Lauren Bacall was TCM's Star of the Month last September on the occasion of her centenary, and it gave me the opportunity to record a movie I wasn't certain whether I had seen before. That movie is Confidential Agent, and as it turns out I hadn't seen it. So I've rectified that situation by watching it in order to be able to do a review now.

Opening intertitles inform us that the movie takes place in October, 1937; as you may recall, that's smack dab in the middle of the Spanish Civil War. On a boat heading from somwhere on the Continent to England is Luis Denard (Charles Boyer). He's working for the Republicans, and has a thing against the fascist Loyalists since they killed his wife and daughter. When they reach the port of Southampton, Luis gets delayed by a customs search, and misses his train as a result.

Also missing the train is Rose Cullen (Lauren Bacall), who isn't British at all although she's playing one, the daughter of industrialist Lord Benditch (Holmes Herbert). Rose being a well-to-do daughter, she's able to rent a car to drive back home, and takes Luis with her. The trip doesn't go smoothly, however, as the car breaks down and Spanish Loyalist Licata tries to pressure Denard into selling a letter of credit that he's got and which is essential for his business in England.

That business is to buy a bunch of coal from the mining magnates, which includes Lord Benditch, in part because it's vital for the Republican war effort but also to keep it out of the hands of the Loyalists from whom it's also vital. So you can see why both sides would want the letter of credit. Denard eventually makes it to London and registers at a hotel where he thinks the owner is sympathetic to the Republican cause. That owner, Mrs. Melandez (Katina Paxinou), turns out to be on the side of the Loyalists which, as you might guess, puts Denard in all sorts of danger.

Denard meets his contact, Contreras (Peter Lorre), only to discover later that Contreras is yet another Loyalist sympathizer. Denard doesn't seem to have much support, but he's got a couple of important people his side. One is Rose who, once she learns Denard is there to buy coal, tries to help him get an in with her father, and is also willing to lie to the police to get Denard out of trouble. (I'm guessing that since she's doing it to aid the antifascist cause and the movie being released in 1945, the Production Code office let this one slide.) The other person helping Denard is young Else (Wanda Hendrix), the hotel maid. But Melandez figures out that Else is helping Denard, which also puts Else in severe danger. Eventually, people die from negligent manslaughter, forcing Denard to go on the run. But again thanks to the Production Code, the good guys are going to win in the end.

I think for me Confidential Agent had several flaws. One is in the casting, since Lauren Bacall is not British at all. (In her defense, she knew this and felt miscast while making the movie.) Another issue is that the plot has to do a lot of contortions to get both a happy ending and one that satisfies the Code office. But more than that, the plot is too convoluted for its own good, with sections of it feeling like they're putting in macguffins to drive the movie forward. It also doesn't help that Confidential Agent runs nearly two hours, which is a good 15 minutes longer than Casablanca. Sadly Confidential Agent often feels overlong as well.

It's not that Confidential Agent is a bad movie so much as it's another of those movies where something so much better could have been made considering the cast.

What's Kay Kyser like?

Tastes change, and things that were popular decades ago may not be so popular today. I think a good example of that would be bandleader Kay Kyser, who hosted a radio show calle the Kollege of Musical Knowledge that involved Kyser dressing like a professor among other this. It was popular enough that he was brought to Hollywood and made several movies. One that happens to be on my DVR is You'll Find Out, and you'll find out indeed if you watch the movie.

The movie opens up with a fictionalized version of Kyser doing his radio show. Chuck Deems (Dennis O'Keefe) is the band's manager, and he's got a girlfriend in socialite Janis Bellacrest (Helen Parrish). She's about to turn 21, and is living with her aunt Margo (Alma Kruger) at the family estate on an island with only one bridge (which means some obvious foreshadowing). But before everyone can get to the mansion, somebody tries to bump off Janis as she's exiting the auditorium where Kay Kyser does his show.

Kay and the band go to the mansion because they've been hired to perform for Janis' 21st birthday party, which gives Kay the chance to meet a bunch of offbeat characters. That's because Aunt Margo is one of those people that populated movies back in the day who believed in spiritualism. She's hired Prince Saliano (Bela Lugosi), who is a medium, to hold séances at which he can supposedly speak to the dead and which will allow Margo to hear from her dearly departed brother (ie. Janis' father). Kay doesn't believe in this stuff and wants to disprove it, while Janis and Chuck are worried that Aunt Margo is being scammed financially.

Kay would like to leave, but of course the storm that's been going on outside destroys the bridge. So Kay has to stay for the séance, which is a good thing because there's another attempt on Janis' life at the séance and Kay basically saves Janis. But who's trying to kill Janis, and why? Perhaps Prof. Fenninger (Peter Lorre), or Margo's lawyer, Judge Mainwaring (Boris Karloff), can answer those questions. More likely, it's going to be up to Kay and his band members to solve the mystery themselves.

As I mentioned above, the movie starts off with Kay doing his show, and frankly, it's full of the sort of cornball humor that may have worked in the days before World War II (the movie was released in 1940) but today is worse than groan-inducing. And some of Kay's band members are even worse, notably the cornetist with terrible hair who was given the stage name Ish Kabibble. One positive is that Kay is pretty much only playing himself, since I don't get any impression that he had much acting ability.

The story isn't exactly bad, although it's unoriginal, being part of a genre of haunted house movies that had started in the early 1930s and began to include comedy in the late 1930s with movies like The Cat and the Canary. Fans of the genre will probably enjoy seeing Karloff, Lugosi, and Lorre together, but the film isn't that great.

A less grand hotel

Another movie that's been sitting on my DVR for a while that I've finally gotten around to watching is Hotel Berlin.

The opening credits mention that this is based on a book by Vicki Baum, the Austrian-born writer who wrote Grand Hotel. I knew the famous Greta Garbo version of Grand Hotel had received a remake, but then I remembered the remake was titled Weekend at the Waldorf, which I also happen to have on my DVR and will eventually get around to doing a post on. In any case, both stories have the same basic conceit of having the lives of a bunch of people all come more or less together over the course of a few days at a luxury hotel.

Hotel Berlin, however, is different in that it was filmed around the turn of the year between 1944 and 1945, a time at which it was clear that Germany was going to lose World War II. A man comes into the hotel, and we see that the Gestapo are pursuing a Professor Koenig (Peter Lorre), as they think he has information on the whereabouts of one Martin Richter (Helmut Dantine). Richter was in one of the German concentration camps but escaped. Before the Gestapo can get any information, however, there's another air raid, and everybody has to go to the air raid shelter in the basement. This brings most of the main chracters together, and brings up all of the plots:

Richter is indeed in the hotel, and is given a waiter's uniform to hide his identity. He then provides room service to Lisa Dorn (Andrea King), an actress whose fame gives her a fair bit of pull in dealing with all of the daily hardships of life.
Lisa's boyfriend is General von Dahnwitz (Raymond Massey). Despite his being a general, he's understood for a while that the war is lost. With that in mind, he was part of the plot to kill Hitler in the summer of 1944. He's a wanted man, and hoping to escape Germany to neutral Sweden, even better if he can do so with Lisa. Meanwhile, a soldier on leave, Maj. Kauders (Kurt Kreuger), sees Lisa and falls for her.
Kauders, for his part, is pursued by Tillie (Faye Emerson), who works at the hotel but also provides "information" to the Nazis. She needs a new pair of shoes, and is desperate to get those shoes. As a result, she goes to Lisa's room, which brings her into the Lisa and Richter story line. Some other people from Tillie's past also show up at the hotel.
General von Dahnwitz has a friend, von Stetten (Henry Daniell), who informs him that trying to escape from Germany is hopeless and that he'd be better off taking the honorable way out of committing suicide. What von Dahnwitz doesn't know is that von Stetten is also one of those Nazis who himself is hoping to escape before the Allied victory, albeit for a different reason: he's one of the group that wants to reconstitute the Nazis down in South America.

Hotel Berlin was released to theaters in early March 1945, again before the German surrender, but close enough to the end that the writers were rushing to include topical references. More importantly, we know that the film is going to require that the bad people are going to get what's coming to them, and the good guys are going to have at least an honorable ending if not a happy one.

Hotel Berlin is interesting as a lower-budget version of those ensemble movies that Hollywood liked to make back in those days, only this time with almost no A-list people. (Compare this to Weekend at the Waldorf, which has Ginger Rogers and Lana Turner among others.) It's not exactly a bad movie, but it's a little complicated. Too much so for its own good considering the B-list cast, however. For me, when the stars are much more recognizable, it's easier to separate all the story lines. Andrea King and Faye Emerson in particular are weak links here. Still, Hotel Berlin is definitely worth a watch.

Background to Danger

George Raft is TCM's Star of the Month, and it turns out that I've got a film on my DVR that is part of the tribute and that a search of the blog claims I haven't blogged about before. (And, having watched the movie for this post, I don't think I'd seen it before.) That movie, Background to Danger, airs tonight (January 21) at 8:00 PM on TCM.

Although George Raft is the nominal star here, we don't see him for several minutes. Instead, we're transported to Ankara, capital of Turkey. The movie was released in 1943, the middle of World War II, and Turkey was one of the few countries in the region that managed to stay neutral, meaning that both Axis and Allied powers had embassies in the country and there was all sorts of opportunity for espionage hijinks to ensue. One such example in the movie, that actually did occur in real life, was a failed attempt on the life of the German ambassador to Turkey. In the movie, the attempt is portrayed as a false flag operation by the Nazis to attempt to stoke fear in Turkey that the Soviets are going to invade and get Turkey to join the Axis powers. German involvement is quickly determined, and the Nazi behind the scenes, a Colonel Robinson (Sydney Greenstreet) is seen in Berlin very annoyed at the failure of the scheme.

Cut to Aleppo, in northern Syria. It's a main stop on board the rail line from Istanbul to Baghdad. Getting on the train in the same car are American businessman Joe Barton (George Raft) and a mysterious woman named Ana Remzi (Osa Massen) who comes across as though she's clearly lying about who she is. She's also being followed by a slightly burly guy of vaguely not-quite western European appearance with a big bushy moustache. So she asks Joe to hold on to an envelope so that the authorities don't get it when the train crosses the border.

Joe, being a curious sort, rifles through the envelope when he gets to his hotel room, and finds what appears to be photostats of documents that would suggest someone is about to do something to Turkey, but who and why? In any case, Joe goes to return the envelope to Ana at her hotel, where he finds that she's been killed and he's been spotted at the scene such that he's a logical suspect. The police notify him of this, but these aren't real Turkish police. Instead, they're some of Robinson's men who take Joe to a secret location and rough him up to the extent that you'd think he'd have a pretty serious concussion and be out of commission for as long as it takes the events in the rest of the movie to transpire. But they didn't worry about concussions in those days.

Joe is magically saved by a man claiming to be Nikolia Zaleshoff (Peter Lorre), who is coy at first about who he is but then claims to be working for the Soviets, who were nominal allies of the US in the war leading to all sorts of hideous propaganda from Hollywood movies about the virtues of Soviet anti-fascists. He's in Turkey with his purported sister Tamara (Brenda Marshall), and they want that envelope too. As it turns out, Robinson wants the envelope because the documents are propaganda claiming that the Soviets are planning an invasion of Turkey, although again you'd think the Nazis could just draw up some more forgeries to have printed in the Turkish press. But are the Zaleshoffs really who they claim they are? And who was that man following Ana?

Background to Danger was apparently put into production after the success of Casablanca, and based on a novel from the interwar period by Eric Ambler. That would probably explain why when I came across this movie and the plot summary I couldn't help but wonder if I was getting it confused with Journey Into Fear, a Joseph Cotten film about war intrigue in Turkey. Background to Danger is moderately entertaining, at least in the way that a TV show like Columbo was entertaining 30 years later: you knew what you were going to get and that the bad guy was going to get his comeuppance, but the whole production has a perfunctory by-the-numbers feel to it. Background to Danger isn't terrible, but it's no surprise why so many other World War II movies are better remembered today.

Angel of Color

Another of the noirs that Eddie Muller selected for Noir Alley that I had never heard of before was the Universal film Black Angel. It sounded interesting, so I recorded it and recently got around to watching it.

After some establishing shots of the Universal back lot substituting for Los Angeles, the camera pans to a window which is one in the apartment of Mavis Marlowe (Constance Dowling). After her maid goes out for the evening, she calls down to the doorman, and tells him that if a certain Martin Blair should come asking to go up and see her, the doorman is most emphatically not to let him up. Sure enough Marty (Dan Duryea) comes into the building, claiming to be married to Mavis. The doorman blocks him, but then soon enough for Marty to see it, anothr man, a Marko (Peter Lorre) shows up looking for Mavis, and the doorman lets him right up.

Marty is so ticked off that he goes off and gets stinking drunk, playing the piano at a local dive bar since he's also a musician. He was in fact married to Mavis, but the drinking is why she's left him. So one of Marty's friends takes him home. While Marty is passed out drunk, also going up to Mavis' apartment is Kirk Bennett. He'd been in a relationship with Mavis despite being married to Catherine (June Vincent), and Mavis was blackmailing him, which would explain why Kirk would go up to see Mavis.

The next thing we know, the cops stop by the Bennett place. Capt. Flood (Broderick Crawford) is looking for Kirk, since he was the last person to see Mavis, at least until the maid returned and found that Mavis was really quite dead, having been murdered. The maid also saw Kirk leaving the building, so it's unsurprising that the police would suspect him of the murder. He's put on trial for it, and found guilty. Catherine, however, still believes that he must be innocent. Or, at least, she's acting like she believes that.

Kirk is eventually found guilty, and Catherine decides she's going to spend the rest of her life, or at least until the day of the execution arrives, trying to clear her husband's name. She goes looking for Blair, since to her it seems obvious that he must have killed the wife who dumped him. At least, until she finds out that Marty was really quite drunk at the time Mavis is believed to have been killed, and that a couple of his friends can corrobrate that. He's willing to help Catherine find out who really did it.

But Marty has ulterior motives, which is that having seen Catherine, he's attracted to her. And this is where the story really gets weird. Catherine was a singer until she married Kirk, and since Marty is a piano player and songwriter, the two team up in order to get Catherine into places like Marko's nightclub, since Marko was in Mavis' apartment after Marty was sent away by the doorman. So in theory Marko could be a suspect too.

Eddie Muller, in his Noir Alley presentation, mentioned that this was based on a story by Cornel Woolrich, which means that you shouldn't always expect the story to be that logical. Having recently watched another Noir Alley movie also based on a Woolrich story that will be the subject of a post in the relatively near future, I can certainly understand Muller's comments about Woolrich. As for who killed Mavis, I won't say, other then to point out that a killer was revealed, since the Production Code probably required that.

Dan Duryea was already known as a smooth villain in noirs; Black Angel was made after The Woman in the Window and Scarlett Street. Duryea is unsurprisingly good here; ditto Lorre although this is a relatively small role for Lorre despite his being so high up in the cast. Black Angel works in spite of the story and is definitely one worth watching.

Why don't I see Paul Newman?

Another recent movie watch was the 1946 movie The Verdict which, having been made at Warner Bros., has unsurprisingly made its way to DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive scheme.

Sydney Greenstreet plays Grodman, Superintendent of Scotland Yard in the late Victorian era. His involvement in a recent case has sent yet another man to the gallows. But, it turns out that the man was innocent, as a witness proving the man's innocence returns from Australia. Oops. Poor Grodman has to resign, and his job is taken over by his great rival Buckley (George Coulouris).

Of course, crime goes on, and soon enough it looks like there might be more crime. Kendall (Morton Lowry) has a girlfriend on the side in the form of music hall singer Lottie (Joan Lorring), and a rival in an MP, Russell (Cavanagh). One morning, nothing is heard from Russell's room, and when his landlady Benson (Rosalind Ivan) tries to get him up, she gets worried enough to call Grodman, who lives across the street. Grodman breaks down the door, and the Benson recoils in horror as she sees a man dead!

He's obviously been murdered, since he was stabbed and there's no weapon nearby. But in a locked room with no way out? OK, obviously there had to be a way out, but there are no secret passages or anything. The new superintendent Buckley is brought in, and he's as perplexed by the case as everybody else.

Grodman, for his part, has an artist friend who lives in the same building as the murder victom, Emmric (Peter Lorre). The two see a way to conspire to embarrass Buckley publicly, since after all Buckley had embarrassed Grodman and cost him his job.

There should be a lot to like about The Verdict, but I think the reason this one is less well-known than some of the other Lorre-Greenstreet movies is deserved. The whole thing seems overly complex and like nobody truly had their heart in it. It's competent, and not exactly bad, considering the help from first-time feature director Don Siegel who would go on to much bigger things. It's worth a watch, but not the sort of movie I'd spend Warner Archive prices on.

Three Strangers

I've mentioned any number of anthology movies, and movies will all-star casts and intertwining stories. A movie that combines elements of the two is Three Strangers.

Geraldine Fitzgerald plays Crystal Shackleford, a woman living in London in 1938. (The film was released in 1946, but was presumably set before the war so as not to deal with it and its aftermath, and because the original story was conceived in the late 1930s.) It's Chinese New Year, and she goes out on the street looking for a stranger, which she finds in the form of Jerome Arbutny (Sydney Greenstreet). She takes him back to her flat, where it turns out there's another stranger, Johnny West (Peter Lorre). Crystal brought the two men there because of a superstition. She's got a statue of a Chinese idol, and legend has it that if three strangers all make the same wish in front of it at midnight on Chinese New Year's, that wish will come true. Johnny has an Irish Sweepstakes lottery ticket, so the other two buy a one-third share and then they wish for the ticket to win.

If the ticket does win, each of them will come into £2,000, which was quite the sum back in 1938. And each of them needs the money. Crystal's estranged husband David (Alan Napier) is in Canada, and if Crystal can show she's got some independent money of her own, she thinks she can win him back. Jerome is a solicitor who would like to become a barrister, but there's a character exam, and right now there's no way Jerome can pass it. He's been embezzling a client's money to speculate on the stock market, and the £2,000 would cover the money he embezzled. As for Johnny, he's got some legal issues.

And so the movie goes back and forth between the three stories. Johnny is trying to stay one step ahead of the law: he's been implicated in a murder committed while he was too drunk to remember what really happened, and he and another witness are in hiding. That money could get him out of the country. But the one who needs the money right now is Jerome, and he becomes increasingly desirous of selling off the ticket after it's picked but before the race.

Three Strangers is a movie with an interesting idea, but one that I found had a big flaw for me. An idea like this is something that could work well as a traditional anthology movie, along the lines of If I Had a Million. Having the movie be an anthology with discrete stories would also help since none of the main characters knows each other. In, say, Phone Call From a Stranger, the characters spend the first half of the movie getting to know each other, but the susperstition is expressly supposed to disallow that here. And the stories really don't intertwine the way the plots of Grand Hotel or Dinner at Eight do. Something like The VIPs had all the strangers be trapped (more or less) together for a night, like the later disaster movies, so a device like that can also make the disparate stories work.

Three Strangers, however, has nothing like that. It goes back and forth between plot lines the way that a Dinner at Eight does, except that none of the characters ever winds up becoming part of another character's story in a way that would make the movie come together as a coherent whole. Which is why, I think, the movie really needed to be written as a traditional anthology. Each of the three strangers could talk in flashback about what happened that makes them need the money now, although again the constriction on the strangers being supposed to not know each other makes that difficult, too.

All in all, there's a fair bit to recommend about Three Strangers, especially the performances from the three leads. But there was something about the script that left me wanting something different.

Three Strangers is available on DVD from the Warner Archive collection.

Beat the Devil

We're in the first Friday of a new month, which means we get a new Friday Night Spotlight. On the first four Fridays of this month (Friday October 31 being Halloween, TCM will be skipping the Friday Night Spotlight for a bunch of horror movies), quiz show host Alex Trebek will be doing the intros for movies set in Africa. This first Friday in Africa sees a night of movies starring Humphrey Bogart, including Beat the Devil at midnight.

Humphrey Bogart plays Bill, an American in some decrepit port city in Italy who at the beginning of the movie is witnessing several people being taken into custody. It turns out that Bill knew these people, so he's going to tell us their story, as we go into that most original film device of the flashback.

Bill was the representative for the four, who were businessmen of a sort: Peterson (Robet Morley), Julius (Peter Lorre), the Major (Ivor Barnard), and Ravello (Marco Tulli). The four of them know about a region in British East Africa that's mineral-rich, specifically in uranium. These guys want to acquire the rights to the minerals, and make a killing off of it. However, they need to buy the title to the land, which they apparently have to do in Africa itself. They've got tickets on the next boat to AFrica, but unfortunately the boat has developed problems so the people are going to be dealyed in port for a couple of days while the boat is being fixed.

At the same time, the group meets a British couple who are also travelling to Africa. Harry Chelm (Edward Underdown) has inherited some land, and is going there with his wife Gwendolen (Jennifer Jones) to manage that land. Bill has a wife of his own, the lovely local girl Maria (Gina Lollobrigida). So the two couples go out together, with the thoroughly original plot twist that Bill and Gwendolen begin to develop some feelings for each other, while Harry and Maria do as well.

After a series of twists and turns, this whole gang of whack jobs winds up on the ship, but their attempts to get to Africa are all for naught as the ship breaks down again. Of course, you knew the scheme wouldn't work, since the four protagonists in it get arrested at the beginning of the movie.

Many of the IMDb reviewers say that to really enjoy this movie, you have to look at it as a very dry comedy poking fun at the phony characters as well as the genre of movie they're in. That may be, but I have to admit that I still found the movie a bit of a slog. I think that's mostly because I found the characters so thoroughly unappealing. Everybody's constantly lying to everybody else, and not in an entertaining Jack Carson is schmoozing you way. No; these characters come across as a bunch of jerks you wouldn't want to spend time with in real life. Robert Morley, in particular, is nearly as annoying as a Peter Ustinov in Topkapi.

But, you should probaly watch Beat the Devil and judge for yourself. A lot of the reviewers really like it.

Strange Cargo

TCM has been honoring Clark Gable today as part of its annual Star of the Month programming. Several of the movies they've shown have co-starred Joan Crawford: the two of them, being contract players at MGM in the 1930s, were repeatedly paired by the studio bosses. In fact, the two made eight pictures together, and the last of those eight, Strange Cargo, is airing at midnight.

Joan Crawford plays Julie, a brassy woman who shows up on an island where there is a prison colony. On the ship to the island, she's met Verne (Clark Gable), who is actually a prisoner being transported to the island. He tries to escape; she turns him in. Some relationship. Anyhow, Julie is presumably a woman of ill repute, and the authorities don't want her around. The only person who can help her is Monsieur Pig (Peter Lorre), who just oozes dirty creep from every pore of his body. Things aren't looking good for Julie.

But the movie is just as much about Verne, and we see him in the prison camp, along with a whole bunch of other prisoners who live in what are more or less barracks as opposed to cells. It's an island; who the hell is going to escape anyway? Sure enough, however, some of the prisoners are going to try to escape. They're led by Moll (Albert Dekker), who's in for murder. Moll takes along his young companion Dufond (John Arledge); serial killer Hessler (Paul Lukas); and Cambreau (Ian Hunter), who seems to have an influence on those around him. But more on that later. Moll and Verne hate each other, but Verne is able to blackmail his way into a spot in the escape, as an uneasy, impermanent truce forms among the various convicts.

Along the way, Verne gets attacked by Moll, is given a map of the escape route to the boat that's supposed to be waiting for them by Cambreau, finds Julie, who is now a kept woman, and then makes it to the boat. There's one catch: there's not enough water on the boat for them to last the whole journey. And if any of them drink the salt water, it's going to kill them. Still, Cambreau begins to work his influence on the various prisoners one by one, an influence which is almost Jesus-like. The movie's title, Strange Cargo, is certainly appropriate. There's a lot odd going on here.

Some of what goes on in the movie is predictable: Julie winds up falling in love with Verne, for example. Some of it is less predictable. Moll's relationship to Dufond, for example, is probably a homosexual relationship, although of course thanks to the Production Code this is only hinted at. But it's the obvious reason for why Moll would want the otherwise incompetent Dufond along on the escape. It also seems kind of difficult to believe that Cambreau could have the sort of influence on the various prisoners that he does. But then, I think Strange Cargo is supposed to be more of a morality play than a work based on realism.

As for the acting, it's uniformly good. The writing I find a bit uneven: at times it feels like the movie is going on a bit too slowly; at other times it feels as though, with all these prisoners, there's too much going on. But that's a minor flaw in what is otherwise a very interesting and worthy movie.

Strange Cargo has been released to DVD as part of a Joan Crawfod box set. I'm not certain whether it's available as a stand-alone DVD, however.

Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea

Another movie that's returning to the Fox Movie Channel lineup in March is Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. It's airing today at 1:00 PM, but don't worry if you don't read today's post until later in the day. You have another chance to catch the movie tomorrow at 9:30 AM, and then Sunday at 4:00 AM. (There are also several airings in April.)

Walter Pidgeon stars as Adm. Harriman Nelson, the designer of the Seaview, the newest and best submarine in the US Navy's nuclear fleet. At the beginning of the movie, he's putting the sub through its paces up in the Arctic, when something surprising happens: pieces of icebergs are breaking off and "raining" down on the sub below. This is, to put it mildly, highly unusual. The reason for the icebergs breaking up is even more unusual. Solar flares or something have caused the Van Allen radiation belts (which had only been discovered a couple of years before the movie was released) a couple thousand miles above the earth to catch fire! It's a problem that could doom mankind to a fiery death, and nobody knows how to solve it!

So, the scientists of the world have been brought together by the United Nations to figure out what to do, and understandbly, they can't reach any agreement, since this is a problem they've never seen before, and there's no way to do experiments. But, the scientists that the political leaders of the world consider the "best and brightest" minds, tend to think that the fire will burn itself out, and that mankind should be able to survive until this happens. Adm. Nelson, on the other hand, has a different idea. He thinks he can use the missiles on board his ship as a sort of fire extinguisher, but to do so requires getting to the bottom of the Marianas Trench, the deepest point in the ocean, at a precise time to fire the missile. It goes without saying that the scientific establishment thinks this is cockamamie, and may only make the problem worse.

Adm. Nelson, for his part, sets off for the Marianas Trench, with the navies of the world sending subs after the Seaview to try to prevent Adm. Nelson from carrying out his plan. Adm. Nelson has his old friend, Commodore Emery (Peter Lorre) along, who supports Nelson's scientific belief. Many of the crew, however, aren't so certain, led by the ship's commanding officer (Robert Sterling). Joan Fontaine plays a psychologist who had come aboard to study the stress submarine crews face, and God knows they're going to get a lot of stress on this mission. Barbara Eden was along for eye candy in Five Weeks in a Balloon, which I recommended yesterday; she's here as well, playing Nelson's secretary who is also the fiancée of Sterling's character. And for the teens, there's not Fabian, but Frankie Avalon.

The movie is scientific nonsense for the most part. This does not, however, mean that the movie can't be entertaining. It recycles a lot of clichés about ship- and submarine-bound films, to be sure, and there are also some terrible effects, notably with the giant squid. Some of the plot points are also badly telescoped. A point is made of making certain everybody on board the Seaview has a radiation detector clipped to their shirt, so you know at some point one of those detectors is going to indicate a fatal dose of radiation poisoning. Still, as with yesterday's Five Weeks in a Balloon, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea is one of those popcorn movies: sit back with a bowl of popcorn and prepare yourself for an implausible by entertaining enough ride.

Five Weeks in a Balloon

Tomorrow is the first day of a new month, which means TCM is going to have some new programming salutes, at least once 31 Days of Oscar ends on Sunday: we'll finally get back to having a new Star of the Month and a new season of The Essentials. Before that, however,the Fox Movie Channel is taking a few movies out of its vault that they haven't shown in years. Two of them show up tomorrow, and immediately get repeated on Saturday. The first of these is Five Weeks in a Balloon, which you can see at 9:00 AM tomorrow on FMC, with a repeat at 6:00 AM Saturday.

Based on the novel by Jules Verne, Five Weeks in a Balloon stars Cedric Hardwicke as Ferguson, a Victorian-era balloonist who has invented a new type of balloon that allows for more lift and can stay in the air longer. He's about to take it out for a test flight in the British East African colonies, but Mother England is calling. Apparently there's slave trading in the interior of West Africa (which was mostly French, but don't let that plot hole stop you) that the British government needs to put down, and apparently Ferguson's balloon is the quickest way to get there unnoticed. So, could Ferguson take along a British agent Sir Henry (Richard Haydn)? Also along for the ride is an American journalist, Donald O'Shay (Red Buttons), Barbara Eden as a teacher, and Canadian Jacques (Fabian).

So they head west, and the crew meets with the sorts of adventures you'd expect from a Hollywood movie about Africa, which means stereotypes galore, along with establishing shots. That, and the standard squabbles among the various people in the balloon, and problems with the balloon. Along the way, they pick up slave trader Ahmed (Peter Lorre, looking corpulent and sickly), who's got a woman of his own in tow (Barbara Luna, clearly there as eye candy).

The result of all this is thoroughly mediocre, albeit not without its interesting points. Fabian was clearly cast because the producers thought he'd appeal to the teens, as he'd already been a teen idol a few short years earlier. Bu the same token, the two Barbaras, Eden and Luna, are clearly there to appeal to another segment of the demographic. And the whole plot, being taken from the Jules Verne novel, is something you'd have to think would appeal to kids, at least boys interested in adventure novels. Adults with a discerning eye will get to laugh at the bad parts of the movie, including some truly awful dialog. As Peter Lorre exclaims, "Kismet! We are doomed!" You might unfairly think the movie is doomed, too. At least, you might if you're looking for something more than dated escapist fare.

Five Weeks in a Balloon received a DVD release several years ago, but I'm not certain if it's still in print.

The first noir?

TCM is showing the movie which is often referred to as the first noir: Stranger on the Third Floor, tomorrow morning at 7:45 AM. Whether or not it's really the first noir is beside the point, although I'll comment on that a bit at the end of this post. The movie is extremely well worth watching in its own right.

John McGuire plays Mike, a journalist working in the big city, in love with his girl Jane (Margaret Tallichet). He's also a witness in a murder trial: apparently he saw the defendant Joe (Elisha Cook, Jr.) threaten the victim, and the victim wound up quite dead, having had his throat slit. John testifies, and his testimony gets Joe convicted and sent to the electric chair. So far, so good, right? Of course not! Jane isn't so sure of Joe's guilt, and that's the least of Mike's problems.

Mike's got a neighbor Meng (Charles Halton) who seems to have something against Mike, getting the landlord to have Jane sent home when she spends too long in Mike's apartment. (If you'll recall the old days of rooming houses, many of them were single-sex and especially the ones for women discoaraged having single guests of the opposite sex and closing the doors.) Mike rather stupidly threatens Meng, in much the same way that Joe threatened his murder victim. The next morning, Meng is found dead, and obviously, Mike is accused of being the murderer.

Mike, for his part, claims to have been asleep when the murder would have occurred (and boy did he have the nightmare to prove it; at least, we viewers get to see the nightmare). Not only that, but he claims to have seen a shadowy strnager in the building who, unsurprisingly, has disappeared. You'd think the police would be able to find blood in Mike's room after a murder as vicious as slitting somebody's throat, especially since he didn't have the facilities to clean his hands and blood the way, say, OJ Simpson did. But the police weren't so good 70 years ago. It's up to Jane to find out whether or not there really was a stranger there.

The Stranger on the Third Floor is a great little film. As you can probably guess from the list of actors I've mentioned above, this was decidedly a B movie. In fact, the one really recognizable name is Peter Lorre, playing the stranger, who doesn't show up until toward the end of the movie and doesn't speak much, although what he does say and do he does quite well. Supposedly he had a brief period left on his contract at RKO and the studio came up with this "small" role to finish out the contract. Lorre makes a lot out of it. Being a B movie, the writer and director were forced to come up with lighting and camera techniques to add to what is a fine story, even if one of mistaken identity that had probably been done before. It is that lighting (stuff that you could imagine Val Lewton doing a few years later at RKO), combined with the plot turning on Mike, that makes The Stranger on the Third Floor fit somewhat into the noir genre. It doesn't really have the femme fatale or later movies that are unambiguously noir, but many of the elements or noir are unmistakably there. So a proto-noir, definitely. Was it the first? Well, I don't think so; noir came about from the French, who in the late 1930s made movies like Le jour se lève (which I've briefly mentioned a couple of times, but never done a full-length post on). Still, I think The Stranger on the Third Floor is a reasonably important movie in American cinematic history, and a pretty darn good one, too.