The Last of the Mohicans (1936)

One of those books that's relatively well-known as a book, and which has had multiple adaptations to film, is James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans. Surprisingly, I had never read the book or seen any of the film adaptations until TCM ran the 1936 version of The Last of the Mohicans. With that in mind, I recorded it and finally sat down to watch it.

In 1757, it was the second year of the Seven Years' War, which was fought on multiple continents among all the great European powers. The North American portion of that conflict is generally called the French and Indian War, fought because France and Britain disputed the boundary in the Mississippi River watershed among other things. France used its allies among the various native groups to harass British settlers, especially in the more northerly colonies since native tribes could come down from French Canada as well. The British have set up Fort William Henry at what is now the southern end of Lake George in New York, with Albany being the gateway to the Adirondacks as well as the Mohawk valley. The British want the settlers to help them fight against the French, but the settlers understand that their real conflict is not with the French but the Indians and want British help to go after the Indians.

Alice (Binnie Barnes) and Cora (Heather Angel) Munro are the two adult daughters of Col. Munro who is stationed at Fort William Henry. The want to go from Albany to the fort to be with him, and set out with British officer Maj. Heyward (Henry Wilcoxon) to get to Lake George. It's a dangerous overland trip, and sure enough Magua (Bruce Cabot), a Huron Indian guiding the British, turns on them. The British are saved by Natty Bumppo (Randolph Scott), better known as Hawkeye. Hawkeye is working with a rival but dying tribe, the Mohicans, and he's traveling with the Mohicans Uncas and Chingachgook.

When everybody gets to Fort William Henry, it's soon besieged by the French, with Magua planning to take the Hurons and murder the defenseless settlers. Hawkeye learns of this, and defies direct orders from the British and removes the settler militia to go defend the other settlers. This can be seen as insubordination, or worse, desertion, and is an act that could carry the death penalty. Except that there are more pressing matters to deal with before there can be any court-martial.

Magua has fallen for Cora, although she and Uncas of the Mohicans also have a thing. Meanwhile, Alice and Hawkeye are in love with each other. So Magua kidnaps the two women in order that he can have the bride he wants on one hand and an important hostage on the other hand. News comes that the Huron are planning to burn Alice alive at the stake. Hawkeye and Maj. Heyward both know that the one real way to save Alice is for one of them to sacrifice himself and take Alice's place at the stake, leading to a climax that certainly would have excited audiences of 1936.

The one big weakness of this version of The Last of the Mohicans is that it's the sort of movie that hasn't aged terribly well. It's got Hollywood's inaccurate view of the native tribes, something that's probably going to bother at least a certain portion of audiences in 2026. The "location" shooting, in various parts of California away from Hollywood, is about the best Hollywood could do in those days since location shooting someplace more distant would probably have been a logistical nightmare. On the plus side, Randolph Scott gives another fine performance showing that he was a pretty versatile actor before he decamped to westerns in the last 15 or 20 years of his career.

I still haven't read the book, and also haven't seen the Daniel Day-Lewis version of the movie, so I can't compare. But this version of The Last of the Mohicans stands on its own as a pretty good movie with some flaws.

Another pirate movie

Some time back I did a post on one of the MGM historical mystery shorts, Captain Kidd's Treasure. I mentioned at the time that I had a different movie Captain Kidd, on my DVR, uncertain whether I had seen it before. I watched it, and in fact had not seen it, so now we get a post on it.

Charles Laughton stars as the famed pirate William Kidd. As the movie opens, it's 1699, and Kidd is on a ship not far off the coast of Madagascar, having turned to piracy because his privateer work has come to naught leaving him heavily in debt. (At least, that's the real-life William Kidd, the movie legends play fast and loose with the facts.) Kidd and his men sink a British ship called the Twelve Apostles, and bury the treasure on one of the islands off of Madagascar. However, one of Kidd's men chafes a bit under Kidd's leadership, and gets shot for his trouble simply because Kidd is that brutal of a man.

Kidd returns to London, with a crew including Orange Povy (John Carradine) and Jose Lorenzo (Gilbert Roland). Kidd's plan is to ingratiate himself with the king, William III, in the hopes of getting a new ship and going out ostensibly in the King's service, but with the real intention of returning to piracy as well as getting to that island to get the booty from the Twelve Apostles. To that end, he needs to pass himself off as a gentleman, hiring the valet Shadwell (Reginald Owen).

The King buys Kidd's assertion that the captain of the Twevle Apostles was an actual pirate, and grants a commission to Kidd. Kidd goes to various prisons to round up a crew, seeing as most other men wouldn't want to go to sea if they could avoid it and condemned prisoners would be more likely to take up the job with the prospect of a pardon coming at the end of the tour at sea. They've got nothing to lose, after all. However, one of the prisoners seems a bit odd. Adam Mercy (Randolph Scott) is, among other things, able to write, and doesn't talk like the people of the social classes that make up the rest of the crew.

Out at sea, Mercy both ingratiates himself to Kidd and tries to spy, telling Kidd when he's caught out that His Majesty obviously wanted a representative on board to make certain everything is on the up and up. If something were to happen to Mercy, it could be bad news for Kidd. How much of that story is true is, well, something you'll have to watch to the end of the movie to find out. Meanwhile, Kidd is already plotting to kill the other men who were with him when they buried the treasure off of Madagascar.

In the Indian Ocean, Kidd's men destroy another British ship, although this one comes with more booty than just the traditional treasure. There's a good looking woman, Lady Anne (Barbara Britton), whose father was on board as the ambassador to one of the rajes in India looking to curry favor with King William. Lady Anne has the feeling she's seen Mercy before, while Kidd gets a stronger feeling Adam isn't what he seems or has claimed to be. Now, we know that the real-life Captain Kidd was hanged for his crims, so he's likely not going to get away with his perfidy here.

I have no idea how much of this version of Captain Kidd is real. From what I've read of Kidd's life, some names from Kidd's real life are used here, but that seems to be the extent of the basis in reality. But regardless of that lack of reality, Captain Kidd is entertaining enough, thanks to a production that knows how to get a lot out of a little, along with a pretty good cast. Laughton overacts, although that works here because Kidd is in many ways a larger-than-life figure. Scott isn't exactly British, but is OK with what he's asked to do here.

There are higher quality seafaring movies out there, but if you're looking to be entertained, Captain Kidd will fill the bill.

To the Last Man

Another recent watch off the Watch TCM app was To the Last Man. The print TCM ran said that it had been preserved by the Museum of Modern Art; supposedly there's a public domain print out there under the title Law of Vengeance.

The first thing about the movie that's interesting is how it introduces each of the main cast members, putting up the actor's name and character at the bottom of the screen the first time they appear. Now, some early talkies used a convention of showing the main characters with a shot from the movie right at the beginning. And there are also some silent films that would put the name of the actor in an intertitle when introducing a new character. But I hadn't seen it done quite like this before. Randolph Scott is the star here, and it's a bit odd to see his name show up on screen only when he first appears 20 minutes or more into the proceedings.

Anyhow, the plot itself starts off just after the end of the Civil War, with a newspaper etching informing us of Lee's surrender -- I don't think the technology to print photographs in newspapers was around in the 1860s. We then move to Kentucky, where Mark Hayden (Egon Brecher) is returning from the war. Mark's son Lynn (Jay Ward, but not the one who would go on to create Bullwinkle) witnesses Grandpa getting murdered, by one of the Colby gang, patriarch Jed (Noah Beery Sr.). The Colbys and Haydens have been feuding, but Mark doesn't want the violence to go on, having seen too much in the war. So instead of taking blood revenge, Mark gets Jed sent to prison for 15 years. The Haydens go west to Nevada to escape the feud, with Grandma taking care of young Lynn, she refusing to go west.

Those 15 years pass, and Jed is just about to get out of prison. During his time there, he made friends with fellow prisoner Jim Daggs (Jack La Rue), who got out a few months before Jed. Jim has raised a stake for him and the Colbys to go to Nevada to follow the Haydens, as Jed wants revenge for having lost 15 years of his life, not realizing it was his own damn fault. Jed also has an adult daughter, Ellen (Esther Ralston), who follows Dad and Jim out to Nevada.

Jed certainly attempts revenge, but things get complicated thanks to the presence of Ellen. Jim expects that Ellen is going to marry him, but who should show up from back east but a now grown up Lynn Hayden (Randolph Scott, but of course you'll figure that out from the credits). He first runs into Ellen as she's swimming and being menaced by Jim, and he saves Ellen, the two not realizing who each other are. When Ellen finds out this is another Hayden, she's pissed and wants nothing to do with Lynn. But Lynn doesn't want the feuding either even though it's unavoidable, and you can probably guess that Ellen is ging to fall in love with Lynn by the last reel.

What surprised me about To the Last Man was the sort of violence. The climax took an unexpectedly dark turn, and I found that this raised the level of an otherwise standard-issue 1930s western quite a bit. To the Last Man is interesting for a whole bunch of reasons, and definitely worth a watch if you can find it.

The Nevadan

Some time back I made my way through the first box set of Randolph Scott westerns that I picked up, so I bought a second set. Recently, I put in one of the DVDs to watch another Scott western I hadn't seen before, The Nevadan.

We don't see Scott right at the beginning. Instead, we see Forrest Tucker, who is playing Tom Tanner, a wanted criminal who is getting off a stagecoach in some western town while he and the marshal accompanying him wait for a change of coaches. Tanner uses this as an opportunty to escape, and he rides off into the wilderness, which is where he eventually catches up with Randolph Scott's character, Andrew Barclay.

The two fall in together, more as an alliance of convience, and make it to the next town, where Tanner goes into the bank to get something from what in the present day would be a safety deposit box if he were in a more advanced time and place. Instead the banker only has one lockbox with everybody's things, and fishes out the envelope Tanner requested. Except the banker wants to see some ID. Tanner uses a gun as his ID and, having taken the envelope, continues out into the wild with Barclay.

The two make there way somewhere -- we don't know yet where they're going -- when they come upon a pair of brothers, Jeff (Frank Faylen) and Bart (Jeff Corey). They want what Tanner get from the bank, except that we've already seen it's a piece of paper that Tanner burned without letting Barclay see it because it's none of Barclay's business. However, the brothers seem to know Tanner's past, and are able to deduce that he obtained a map to where a bunch of gold bullion that was stolen some years back was hidden, with the person holding the map apparently having died in the interim. The brothers would like the map for fairly obvious reasons.

They threaten to kill Tanner even though this would destroy the last source of knowledge of where the gold is hidden. In any case, Barclay saves Tanner's life, and has to beat a hasty escape before the brothers come upon him again. He winds up at the Galt ranch, where he meets Karen Galt (Dorothy Malone), daughter of the ranch owner, Edwrd (George Macready). Galt also owns the nearby town of Red Sand in one of those old western tropes.

Karen begins to take a liking to Barclay, not knowing why Barclay showed up and certainly not knowing anything about the gold. She also doesn't know that her father is among the people looking for that gold, he being the boss of Jeff and Bart. And why is Barclay around anyway...?

The Nevadan is in many ways a fairly standard B western. There's nothing particularly groundbreaking going on, but there's also nothing particularly wrong with it. In fact, thanks to the presence of a cast a cut above B actors, the quality of the movie is raised to something that's eminently entertaining even if you might find yourself confusing it with Scott's other westerns after a while. Still, it's absolutely worth a watch, and the sort of thing that's really nice to have on a box set like this.

The Desperadoes

Randolph Scott made enough westerns in his career that it's easy for a company to put out multiple box sets of his westerns. I got through all of the films on one of the Scott box sets I had, and some time back bought a second. I recently got around to watching one of the movies off that box set, The Desperadoes.

The first thing that surprised me is that the movie is in Technicolor, something I wouldn't have expected from Columbia producing what is really little more than a programmer during the height of World War II. But since Natalie Kalmus' name is on the credits, we know this isn't a colorized movie. Also mildly surprising is the cast, since two of the players were about to go on to bigger things.

Anyhow, as for the plot, it involves the town of Red Valley, Utah, during the Civil War. The local bank gets robbed, causing the settler depositors to question their confidence in the bank. Have no fear, says proprietor Clanton (Porter Hall); he's getting a better safe -- and indeed, there is a scene of the new safe arriving. But we also see in a brief scene where he's talking to livery stable owner Willie McLeod (Edgar Buchanan), this robbery is really an inside job by the two of them and an outlaw gang.

Randolph Scott is not, in fact, a member of that gang. Instead, he's the local sheriff, Steve Upton. He wasn't in town for the robbery because he was trying to catch some wanted criminals. To make matters worse, Steve was waylaid out in the wilderness by Cheyenne Rogers (Glenn Ford). Cheyenne was supposed to be one of the gunmen in the robbery, imported from well away so that nobody would recognize him, but he got delayed by the loss of his horse, and had to steal Steve's instead.

So when Rogers gets to town, using an obviously phony name like Bob or Bill Smith or somesuch, Willie's niece Allison (Evelyn Keyes) immediately figures something is amiss. That's because she recognizes the sheriff's horse, wondering why somebody else would be riding it. Worse for Cheyenne is that the lady who is in charge of the gambling at the saloon, calling herself the Countess (Claire Trever, future Oscar winner) knows Cheynne and knows of his criminal past.

Still, Cheyenne stays in town, in part because the Countess thinks she caused Cheyenne to go bad back in Wyoming. And then there's the Sheriff, who knows Cheyenne and either doesn't know about Cheyenne's past, or doesn't care about it now that Cheynne is trying to get on the right side of the Production Code again. Complicating matters is that the Countess is also in love with Cheyenne, although he and Allison fall in love along the way. And then one of the gang members who actually robbed the bank outs Cheyenne, which puts him and the sheriff in danger.

As I said at the beginning, I was kind of surprised to see The Desperadoes in Technicolor, since for a 1940s western it's little more than standard stuff. At least when they got past 1953 and the introduction of Cinemascope, you can understand the programmer westerns wanting to use color to show off those wide vistas and compete with television, largely in black and white at the time. Although The Desperadoes is fairly standard, that doesn't mean it's a bad movie by any means. In fact, it's quite competently made, and will definitely entertain any fan of the western genre. It's not quite as good as the darker and more psychological westerns of the 1950s, or the A westerns, but it holds its own as a movie to watch on a rainy day or if you want something shorter.

Susannah of the Mounties

One of the movies that was recently added to the FXM rotation and which I had not seen before is Susannah of the Mounties. So I recorded one of last month's showings, planning to watch it and do a post on it the next time it shows up. Well, it's going to be on tomorrow (Nov. 9) at 6:00 AM and again on Thurdsay, Nov. 10.

As you can guess from an opening credits topped by Shirley Temple, it's Shirley playing Susannah. But first there's a little bit of scene-setting being done. It's the erly 1880s in what would now be Alberta or Saskatchewan, where the Canadians were building a railroad across their dominion, completing it in 1885. As with the more southerly locales in the US, the advance of white settlers meant conflict with various tribal peoples who were already on the land, in this case the Blackfeet (and indeed, Fox was able to get some real members of the Blackfeet for background roles, although of course the main Blackfeet adults were played by white guys). The Blackfeet have attacked one such group of pioneers, killing everybody but little Susannah, who hid under a barrell.

Susannah is rescued after the attack by Angus Montague (Randolph Scott), a member of the Mounties at a time when they were the law in this part of Canada and they didn't even have the army out there to keep order and pacify the Blackfeet. Indeed, it's the job of the Mounties to get the Blackfeet to sign a treaty. Needless to say, that's a controversial issue within the Blackfeet, with Chief Big Eagle (Maurice Moscovitch) more or less in favor and Wolf Pelt (Victor Jory) more or less opposed. But as a sign of good faith, Big Eagle sends Little Chief to stay at the Mounties' fort. One of the running subplots of the movie is that Little Chief and Susannah are going to become friends, but on his terms, which means Susannah is expected to act much the way a Blackfeet woman would. At the same time, Susannah becomes well-liked at the fort, because of course everybody loves little Shirley Temple.

The more grown-up plot involves the railroad being constructed in the area, with Harlan Chambers (Lester Matthews) managing the work crew. Some of their horses are stolen, which presents a problem, because it means there's a good possibility of renewed conflict between the whites and the Blackfeet. When Chambers discovers that the theft was done by Wolf Pelt, who was trying to sell Chambers back the horses he had stolen, Chambers threatens to call in the army to subjugate the Blackfeet. War is in the air.

The Blackfeet attack, kidnapping Montague in the process since they don't realize there's just as much infighting among the whites as there is among the Blackfeet over how to deal with the other side. Susannah is distraught, and actually sets out for the Blackfeet encampment to try to find Montague, leading to the film's climax.

Susannah of the Mounties has a lot of the formula that made Shirley so popular in the mid 1930s, although she was getting a little older and that formula isn't working quite so well. There's also a lot less singing and dancing than what you'd expect in most of Shirley's movies from her days at Fox. In fact, the scenes between Susannah and Little Chief are the best part of the movie, with Susannah learning about Blackfeet customs, even getting wasted after smoking a peace pipe. (I can't imagine little Shirley doing the "Dave's not here" bit, however.)

That's not to say that Susannah of the Mounties is bad by any means; it's more that it's not the first Shirley Temple movie I'd recommend to show people what she was really about. Note also that the print FXM is running is a colorized print. The color isn't bad, but the lack of Natalie Kalmus' name on the credits was a clear sign that this might not be real color.

The Bounty Hunter

Randolph Scott is today's star in TCM's Summer Under the Stars, and while I have a couple of box sets of his westerns one that doesn't seem to be on those sets is The Bounty Hunter. It's on overnight tonighat at 12:45 AM, which would still be late this evening in more westerly time zones. So as I had DVRed it the last time it was on TCM, I made a point of watching it now to do a review here.

Scott, unsurprisingly, plays the titular bounty hunter, a man named Jim Kipp. At the start of the movie, he's pursuing a man who held up a couple of stagecoaches and killed a couple of people in conjunction with those robberies. This is otherwise unimportant to the plot, only serving as expository information to show us that Kipp is indeed a bounty hunter, and one with enough of a reputation that everybody knows who he is.

This everybody includes the Pinkerton detective agency, who have a baffling crime on their hands. A year earlier, a gang of three masked robbers held up a train carrying currency from the Philadelphia mint out to Dodge City. Nobody has seen hide nor hair of the three since, with the exception of an ambush in southwestern Kansas, and rumors that they've moved on further west. More oddly, none of the money has been seen, and there was a lot of money. This suggests that the three are still somewhere in the States -- well, technically, they might be in a territory, but they're still under US jurisdiction -- because otherwise, some of the money would have shown up in a foreign country that couldn't extradite them.

Kipp isn't interested in trying to find these three at first, until he hears of the reward for the return of the currency. This sends him west, and rumors eventually lead him to the town of Twin Forks. There, he goes to a hotel under a pseudonym, and finds George Williams running the joint, together with his wife Alice (Marie Windsor), although Alice doesn't tell Kipp that she's married to George, instead trying to pump Kipp for information. Kipp, knowing that one of the fugitives was shot in the leg in that ambush in Kansas, talks to the town's only doctor, Dr. Spencer (Harry Antrim), who ministers to the town together with his daughter Julie (Dolores Dorn). Dr. Spencer has a past, and this past leads him to tell an obvious mistruth to Kipp. So now Kipp knows he must be getting close to the three fugitives.

The next morning, however, a young man who had escaped from prison but is now leading an honest life as a rancher, spot Kipp and knows his true identity, revealing that identity to the town. So now, as with No Name on the Bullet a few years later, everybody in town wonders whether Kipp is after them. After all, they know that Kipp is a bounty hunter, but he deliberately hasn't told anybody, not even Sheriff Brand (Howard Petrie), exactly what criminal he's looking for.

The rest of the movie is a game of cat and mouse as Kipp accelerates matters by telling the postmaster he's learned that a letter with a photograph of one of the fugitives should reach him by the next stage. But it's a moderately appealing game for the viewer. The Bounty Hunter is the sort of programmer running around 80 minutes that Scott was churning out one after the other in the 1950s. Scott makes them all worth a watch, and thanks to direction from Andre de Toth here, The Bounty Hunter rises a bit above the other programmers, if not to the level of the prestige westerns or even the films Scott would later make with Budd Boetticher.

Two other things are worth noting. One is an early performance by Ernest Borgnine, playing a hotel receptionist who has a limp that could make him an obvious suspect in the train holdup. The other is something I spotted in the opening credits, which are in a "vanishing perspective" style where the letters all have lines leading to one focal point. This made me suspect that the movie was originally in 3D, and sure enough, there are multiple scenes where something gets thrown or aimed directly at the camera. However, The Bounty Hunter was apparently only released to theaters in a 2D print.

Smoke Gets In Your Eyes

Another movie sitting on my DVR was the 1935 Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers musical Roberta, so I recently watched it to do a post on here. Interestingly enough, even though the pairing of Rogers and Astaire had become successful already, and they had starred together in The Gay Divorcee, they're not the stars here.

That honor goes to Irene Dunne, and to a lesser extent Randolph Scott, even though he gets biling below the other three. But the movie starts off with Fred, here playing a man named Huck Haines, leader of a band called the Wabash Indianans. They've made their way to Le Havre, the port that serves Paris, because they've been booked by the owners of one of the nightclubs. However, that owner (character actor Luis Alberni) that he was going to be getting Indians (as in feather and all the other stereotypes), not Indianians, so he cancels the contract on the spot.

Huck's friend John Kent (Randolph Scott) was going to go to Paris anyway to see his aunt Minnie, who goes by the pseudonym Robert (Helen Westley) because she runs a fashion house in Paris that apparently would be more successful under the Robert name than under the Minnie brand. Working for Roberta is Stephanie (Irene Dunne), who also does the designs and likely has an option to buy the business should Roberta retire. Unsurprisingly in a movie like this, John falls in love with Stephanie, even though he has an old flame Sophie (Claire Dodd) who is going to be coming over to Paris to join the fun.

I haven't mentioned Ginger Rogers yet. At one of the nightclubs John and Roberta are trying to get Huck and his band a gig at, one of the singers is the Russian émigrée Countess Schwarenka (Rogers). Except, Huck knows that's an act because he knows the alleged countess, real name Lizzie, from back in the States. The two wind up having a relationship a lot like the one that James Cagney and Joan Blondell had in their movies over at Warner Bros., and not one complicated by misunderstandings.

Those misunderstandings are for John and Stephanie. Sadly for all involved, Roberta suddenly drops dead; without a will, the fashion house goes to the nearest relative, which happens to be John. This even though he knows nothing about fashion design or this sort of business. Sophie, having heard about the inheritance, shows up, and it's up to Huck to make certain that John ends up with the right woman.

Among the interesting things here is that Fred and Ginger (and decidedly more so Ginger) are not the stars of the show, although they certainly get some dance numbers. And Randolph Scott gets the girl rather than playing the second banana in all those other romantic comedies.

And then there's the music. Roberta was based on a stage show with songs by Jerome Kern, including a tune that's gone on to become a standard, "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes". The bad news is that the script has Irene Dunne's character sing it, and her Jeanette MacDonald-like voice is, I think, entirely wrong for the song. That may, of course, be because like a lot of younger people, I would have heard the Platters' 1950s version on one of the oldies stations my parents would have listened to before seeing the movie. Other songs in the movie have also become standards, such as "Lovely to Look At".

Roberta, being stuck squarely in the 1930s, may not be for everybody, and certainly younger viewers are most likely not to appreciate something seemingly old-fashioned. But for anybody who likes the 1930s style of musical, Roberta should be right up your alley, and definitely worth a watch.

Grow Up With the Country

Not having anything ready for a review today and not wanting to do just a briefs post, I decided to put one of the DVDs from my Mae West box set into the DVD player and watch one of the films I hadn't reviewed yet, Go West Young Man.

West plays Mavis Arden, a Hollywood actress traveling the country to promote her latest film. She's got an exclusive five-year contract with the studio, and one of the clauses is that she not get married during those five years, something that poses no small problem for her PR man, Morgan (Warren William), as she's got a whole bunch of male admirers. And while Mavis says all the right things in her public appearances, in private she'd be more than happy to pay attention to at least some of those male admirers if they're good looking enough.

At her current apparance, in Washington DC, one of the men waiting for her after the show is Francis X. Harrigan (Lyle Talbot), who happened to know Mavis back in the day when they were both in Chicago together. He'd like to meet Mavis possibly for more than just old time's sake. This would be a problem for both of them, however, as it's implied that Harrigan may have some sort of past, and this could be used against him as he's now running for Congress. But the two agree to meet at a rooftop restaurant. Morgan, however, invites the press, to try to scuttle both Harrigan and Mavis, although it only appears to make both of them more popular.

Mavis' next engagement is in Harrisburg, PA, so after everything that happens in Washington Mavis and Morgan, along with her dresser and the chauffeur, pile in to her limo to head north. Unfortunately, mechanical problems beset them and there's no good way to get to Harrisburg on time. They're going to have to wait for the car to get fixed.

Fortunately, there's a nice little service station attached to a rooming house that can set them up while they wait and get the car fixed. The rooming house is run by Mrs. Struthers (Alice Brady), who has some of her family as staff, as well as a maid/waitress Gladys (Isabel Jewell), who is a big fan of Mavis'. At the service station, we initally see the more portly Clyde driving the tow truck, but the place is actually run by aspiring inventor Bud Norton (Randolph Scott).

It's not too difficult to figure out that Bud likes Mavis, especially considering he has an invention that he hopes will increase the quality of sound film recording, something that would get him out to Hollywood if anybody could notice him. And Bud being handsome, of course Mavis notices him. This causes problems for Morgan and some of the people at the rooming house, and leads Morgan to do something that probably ought to have landed him in jail except that the plot resolution requires that he evade jail.

Mae West was known for her sexual energy that she exuded on the screen, and the introduction of the Production Code in July 1934 certainly hampered her later movies, of which this is one. Indeed, a fair amount of the plot doesn't make that much sense, such as driving the Rolls Royce across the country, and the relatively short distance between Washington DC and Harrisburg being overlooked. Mae West, however, does about as well as possible with the somewhat neutered script, and makes Go West Young Man eminently watchable.

My Favorite Wife

A search of the blog suggests that I haven't done a full-length review on My Favorite Wife before. I see that it's coming up on the TCM schedule, at 4:30 AM tomorrow (although since TCM's broadcast day generally begins at 6:00 AM, they'd say it's on tonight at 4:30 AM). Since I've got a copy of it on DVD as part of a TCM Cary Grant box set, I decided to put that DVD into the player and watch the movie to do a review on it here.

Grant plays Nick Arden, a lawyer who at the beginning of the movie is appearing before Judge Bryson (Granville Bates). It seems as though Nick's first wife Ellen was shipwrecked seven years ago and has been presumed missing ever since. Seven years is (or at least was back in those days) the amount of time somebody had to be missing before you could declare them legally dead, so Nick is now going through the motions of having Ellen declared dead. It's something that should be straightforward enough, but somehow, it's turned into fodder for comic relief here.

The reason why Nick is filing the paperwork to have Ellen declared dead is that, while searching for Ellen, he met another woman, Bianca Bates (Gail Patrick). She'd be a good mother to the two Arden children, so Nick wants to marry her, something he can't do if his first wife is still legally alive. Eventually, the judge figures out what's going on and performs the marriage ceremony, leaving the couple to go off on their honeymoon at a resort in the mountains where Nick and Ellen went on their honeymoon back in the day.

After Nick and Bianca leave for their honeymoon, a woman shows up at the Arden house looking for Nick. She's a stranger to the two children, although she seems to have some idea who they are. It's only when she goes inside the house that we learn that this woman is one Ellen Wagstaff (Irene Dunne), who married Nick all those years ago. She went on a scientific expedition in the Pacific when the ship sank and she wound up on a deserted island for seven years. Now, you'd think that news would have gotten out about her rescue from the ship that picked her up, and that would have been some weeks before she shows up at her old home. But no, nobody seems to know anything about her having been rescued.

When her mom tells her about Nick's new wife and where they went on honeymoon, Ellen immediately heads up there herself, surprising Nick. Nick, for some reason, can't bring himself to tell Bianca the truth about who this woman is, even though again, you'd think Bianca might have seen photos of Ellen. Ellen, for her part, isn't telling Bianca who she is, because reasons that make no sense to the plot.

Meanwhile, Nick learns from Ellen that she wasn't alone on the island, but that one other passenger survived on the same raft and washed ashore on the island, one Stephen Burkett (Randolph Scott). He, having spent seven years alone with Ellen, has fallen in love with her, and would like to marry her. Now, the fact that she's legally dead ought to mean that her marriage to Nick has been dissolved, leaving Stephen free to marry Ellen. Somehow, however, Nick is declared a bigamist.

There's an interesting dilemma at the heart of My Favorite Wife, one that naturally presents a bunch of opportunities for comedy. But as I was watching, I couldn't help but think of all the plot holes. Also, I found myself thinking of what I've often called the "comedy of lies", where a character has to tell a little white lie for some reason and is thereafter unable to bring himself to tell the truth, resorting to ever bigger lies. My Favorite Wife has that in spades, and I just wanted somebody to smack some sense into Cary Grant's character and have him tell his second wife the truth. For me, the movie grew increasingly less funny and more grating.

Other people, however, have rated My Favorite Wife much more highly, so it's definitely another movie you should watch and judge for yourself.

Buchanan Rides Alone

I've got a couple of box sets of Randolph Scott westerns; not having done a post on a real western recently and wanting to watch something a bit shorter and older, I decided to put one of the DVDs in the player and watch Buchanan Rides Alone.

Randolph Scott, unsurprisingly, plays Tom Buchanan, a man from west Texas who went down to Mexico to make enough money fighting in one of those revolutions that he'd be able to go back to Texas and get a big enough spread of land to start the ranch which is his real goal in life. Having done so, he's now returning to the US, although the fighting took him a ways west, as he crosses the border in California, in a town run by the Agry family.

The Agrys, who include among their number local judge Simon (Tol Avery), sheriff Lew (Barry Kelley), and innkeeper and town gossip Amos (Peter Whitney), aren't very happy about having strangers here, and try to get Buchanan out of town, at least until they find out he's got all that cash on hand they they can steal from him. In any case, Buchanan is probably planning to spend only one night before getting the hell out of here, getting a room at Amos' hotel and a $10 steak to feed himself.

Unfortunately for him, Simon's belligerent, dipsomaniac son shows up at the inn, looking for a drink and taking Buchanan's bottle of whiskey. This only makes him more belligerent, and he gets into a fight that results in a passing Mexican cowboy, Juan de la Vega (Manuel Rojas) shooting Roy in self-defense and killing him. THis being a corrupt little town, there's no way there's going to be any justice for Roy's killer. Juan is arrested in the killing and Buchanan is held as an accessory.

Thankfully, Buchanan is able to defend himself and be declared not guilty by the jury, although Juan isn't so lucky. The judge, however, is angling for higher office, and eventually comes up with a deal to release Juan to his father back over the Mexican border in exchange for $50,000 which of course the judge will keep. However, he's going to have to keep this secret until the deal can be done, since the townsfolk are braying for blood. Amos overhears the deal and tells the sheriff so they, and not the judge, can get the money.

As for Buchanan, he's been let go, but he's not allowed to leave town alone because the sheriff is a nasty man who doesn't want word of Buchanan's fleecing or the general town corruption to get out. So the sheriff sends two of his deputies to escort Buchanan out of town, with the expectation that what they'll really do is kill Buchanan. One of them is a Texan himself, which Buchanan can use to his advantage. Eventually everybody winds up back in the town of Agry for the finale.

Buchanan Rides Alone is one of several programmer-type westerns that Randolph Scott made together with director Budd Boetticher. If you've seen any of the others, you can presume, quite rightly, that Buchanan Rides Alone is a quality movie, even if it's one of those films that's never going to be remembered as an all-time great. Scott was very comfortable in the western genre, and he's helped out by a more than capable script and a cast of very good supporting actors.

In short, Buchanan Rides Alone is the sort of movie that's perfect for a box set, providing 80 minutes of solid entertainment at a nice price point.

Riding Shotgun

Randolph Scott made a bunch of westerns in the second half of his career. I've got a couple of box sets of his westerns, but not too long back TCM ran a western that I hadn't seen yet, Riding Shotgun. So recently, I watched it to do a post on here.

Scott plays Larry Delong, who does the titular "riding shotgun", that is, riding next to the guy who's got the reins of the horses on a stagecoach, shotgun in hand, to watch for Indians or possible robbers. He's been working for a bunch of different stagecoach lines all over the west, in part because he's good, but more because he's looking for a criminal who harmed him some years ago, Dan Marady (James Millican). Marady finds out that Delong is in the area, and has a plan for dealing with Delong.

Marady has a gang, with Pinto (Charles Bronson when he was still early enough in his career to be credited under the surmame Buchinsky) second-in-command, and plans to use those gang members to lure Delong away from the stagecoach. Marady has a special handgun he knows Delong will recognize, so one of the men in the gang takes it into the stagecoach station and makes certain Delong sees it. This leads to the gang capturing Delong and tying him down, leaving him to die.

Delong is eventually able to extricate himself, but in that time the Marady gang has robbed the coach on which Delong was supposed to be riding shotgun. The stage does make it back into town, but the passengers describe Delong having been with the gang members who showed him Marady's gun, so when the posse goes out looking for the gang that includes Marady, who is of course guilty of nothing more than negligence.

Delong shows up in town, alone, since he was of course not in the gang. But he can'tconvince anybody in town that he wasn't part of the gang, and they're out for blood what with the coach driver having been killed in Marady's attack. The only person who has any support for Delong is the sheriff's deputy, Tub Murphy (Wayne Morris). He at least wants Delong to get a "fair" trial, inasmuch as that might be possible.

Worse, Delong can't get anybody to believe what's more likely to happen. He's bright enough to figure that what Marady did was a ruse so that the townsfolk would find the coach and send a posse out to look for the gang. Marady then plans to come in to town and rob the local businesses. Delong tries to warn everybody but nobody will listen. And he can't leave town because nobody will give him a horse. Worse, they basically corner him with the intention of stringing him up if it weren't for Tub's presence.

Riding Shotgun is the sort of programmer western that was still being made in Hollywood into the mid-1950s, not too long before such stuff would be supplanted by episodic television. Riding Shotgun is more than competent, as is only to be expected considering the presence of somebody like Randolph Scott in the starring role; a director like Andre de Toth; and the resources that a major studio like Warner Bros. could bring to such a movie.

Sure, there are better westerns out there, but for people who already like westerns and want something undemanding that they might not have seen before, Riding Shotgun fits the bill just fine.

Comanche Station

Quite some time back, I bought a cheap box set of Randolph Scott westerns. I've already blogged about several of the films in the set because TCM ran a night of four of the films. But one that I hadn't blogged about before is Comanche Station. So I recently fired up the DVD player and watched it.

Randolph Scott plays Jefferson Cody, who at the start of the movie is riding through a desolate part of the west, before he's intercepted by a bunch of Indians. Unsurprisingly they take him back to their camp; surprisingly, it's what Cody wants. The thing is, there's a white woman who was taken hostage some months back, and Cody goes into Comanche country and pays ransoms for these whites. That woman, Nancy Lowe (Nancy Gates) lives near Lordsburg with her farmer husband.

Presumbaly, having paid the ransom on Nancy, Cody should have free passage to go through Comanche country to get back to Lordsburg. However, that doesn't mean that there's nobody who could be a danger. There's a stagecoach station that is apparently still in Comanche territory but that the Indians don't harass, having no reason to do so. But when Cody and Nancy show up there to water their horses, they find someone who is wanted by the Comanche, that being Ben Lane (Claude Akins). Ben has apparently had run-ins with the Comanche before, enough that they'll come after him any time they see him.

Ben isn't alone, either, being accompanied by two young men, Dobie (Richard Rust) and Frank (Skip Homeier), who have fallen in with Ben and turned to the bad side because it's the less difficult thing to do, they believe. They find out that Nancy's husband has a reward out for her return, but that he's going to pay it out whether Nancy is returned dead or alive. This gives Ben the idea of killing Nancy and collecting the reward on the dead body, something which the two young men are mildly uncomfortable about and which Cody isn't about to countenance.

But the Comanche show up looking for Ben, meaning that all of them have to leave the stagecoach station and head back to Lordsburg through Comanche territory with the Indians after them, and with Ben plotting a way to do in both Cody and Nancy.

Comanche Station is a western that doesn't really cover any new ground, but one which is very competently made, thanks to the high quality of the crew working on it. Burt Kennedy wrote the script, and Budd Boetticher directed. There's some good dialog and a good story, and nobody is over the top. For 75 minutes of solid entertainment, you definitely won't go wrong watching Comanche Station.

I found the print to be surprisingly good considering that this is a cheap Mill Creek box set. With three movies to a DVD, you'd wonder at the quality, and maybe it might be noticeable if you've got a 4K TV, which I don't (I've got a 12-year-old ~31-inch TV, so beyond a certain point I guess I'm not going to notice any improvements in picture quality; this one is past that point). But still, it's a great price.

A Lawless Street

Some time back I picked up a box set of Randolph Scott Westerns, on which one of the movies was A Lawless Street.

Scott plays Calem Ware, Marshal of Medicine Bend, his latest stop in a career that's taken him from town to town as he's more or lest led a wandering career for his own safety. Not only that, but it cost him the girl he loves. Little does he know all of this is going to catch up to him.

The west is slowly becoming civilized, but the business bigwigs of Medicine Bend want to keep it an open town, so they hire a gunman to kill Ware while he's at the barbershop, but it doesn't quite work. Meanwhile, Hamer Thorne (Warner Anderson), one of the men who hired the killer, is also bringing a troupe of actors to town. One of them is Tally (Angela Lansbury), who just happens to be the woman who left Ware because he refused to settle down, or who just really couldn't settle down, take your pick.

Now Ware has good reason to settle down, thinking perhaps he can finally win Tally back, but he's going to have to deal with one more hired killer, Harley (Michael Pate).

To be honest, A Lawless Street feels a lot like a programmer, a movie that has a competent plot but could be easily substituted for any of a hundred different 1950s westerns. I have to admit that I'm not the biggest fan of westerns, which is probably why although I didn't exactly find anything wrong with this, I also found it to be not particularly memorable. It's the sort of movie that's perfect for watching as a Saturday matinee if you want to be entertained, but if you want to watch something truly great, you'll need to watch something else.

At the price I paid, however, the box set is more than worth it, and will definitely be worth it to anybody who likes westerns in general, and Randolph Scott in particular.

The Spoilers (1942)

I mentioned over the weekend that I watched the 1942 movie The Spoilers Since it's available on DVD, it's worth doing a full-length post on.

The plot is the sort of thing that's been done in a bunch of movies. It's about 1900, in Nome, Alaska, which as you'll know from my recent review of Klondike Annie, was an era when there was a gold rush going on, so everybody was trying to get to Alaska to strike it rich. Roy Glennister (John Wayne) has been there for a while, to the point that he and is partner Dextry (Harry Carey) have a gold claim that they've been prospecting for some time. However, since the law hasn't quite reached this remote part of the Alaska Territory yet, claim jumpers abound, and people who don't have the means that Glennister and Dextry have had are seeing their claims fraudulently questioned.

That's about to happen to Glennister and Dextry too. Their operation has been financed in part by saloonkeeper Cherry Malotte (Marlene Dietrich), who has been looking forward to Glennister's return from Seattle. Also on the boat from Seattle is the new Judge Stillman (Samuel S. Hinds), who is supposed to bring law to this part of Alaska. But he's accompanied by his niece Helen (Margaret Lindsay), to whom Glennister has taken a shine, much to Cherry's consternation. Rounding out the leads is new claims commissioner Alex McNamara (Randolph Scott). He sees Cherry trying to get Glennister's claim from the current records office; she's worried that the new claim jumpers are going to try to destroy the evidence.

Cherry has good reason to be fearful, as soon enough, there are people trying to dispute Glennister and Dextry's claim. They know they're in the right because they've been mining for years when there was almost nobody prospecting in Alaska, but good luck proving that to the judge. Dextry, for his part, isn't so certain he wants to trust the judge. And for once, his judgment and not Glennister's is more on the mark here. We eventually discover that Glennister and McNamara are in cahoots, perverting the course of justice to try to take Glennister and Dextry's claim away from them.

This sort of thing has been done before both in the guise of a gold rush -- indeed, this is the fourth version of The Spoilers and there was still one more to come in the mid-1950s -- as well as other sorts of westerns. But it's done quite entertainingly here. Wayne is suitably studly; Scott is suitably ambiguous as to whose side he's ultimately on; Dietrich is suitably feisty and sexually charged. There's also Richard Barthelmess at the end of his career as Cherry's second-in-command at the saloon. The romantic story line and the mining story line mesh well, and the movie climaxes with a big extended fight scene between Wayne and Scott.

Even though The Spoilers is treading really old ground, it's still an enormously fun movie, and one that is more than worth the watch.

Decision at Sundown

Not too long ago I recorded a night of Randolph Scott westerns on TCM. There were three with director Budd Boetticher and Colt .45. I've blogged about two of the three Boetticher movies, and all three of them are on a box set I recently bought off of Amazon. The third Boetticher movie TCM ran was Decision at Sundown.

Scott plays Bart Allison, who at the start of the movie holds up a stagecoach he's riding on so that it will stop in the middle of nowhere. Eventually meeting him at the hold-up point is his old friend Sam (Noah Beery Jr.), and the two ride together into the town of Sundown. The arrive just in time to find out that town boss Tate Kimbrough (John Carroll) is about to marry lovely Lucy (Karen Steele), daughter of the largest landowner (John Litel). Everybody in town is going to be going to the wedding.

Indeed, that's why Bart came to town. He has some unfinished business to attend to at the wedding, which soon comes to light when the JP performing the ceremony does the "speak now or forever hold your peace" bit and tries much too fast to go on to the next part of the ceremony. Oh hell no, Bart isn't going to stand for that. Bart asks Tate if he remembers a woman named Mary at Sabine Pass. Ultimately, we learn that while Bart was off fighting the Civil War for the South, Tate met Mary, who was Bart's Mrs. Bart Allison. The encounter eventually led Mary to commit suicide, and Bart naturally blames Tate for what happened. Bart plans to get revenge, and since Lucy doesn't want to be a widow, she runs back home to Daddy to await further developments.

Tate is none too happy, forcing Bart and Sam to make a quick getaway back to the livery stable, where they are besieged by Tate and his men. In addition to being the town boss, Tate apparently controls half of the men in town and they're able to draw their guns on the stable although it's easy enough for Bart and Sam to barricade the one entrance. However, it turns out that the other half of the town that isn't controlled by Tate has always resented him, as he's an interloper who only came to Sundown after whatever happened with Mary all those years ago. They might be willing to find a way to try to stand up to Tate for once.

That's pretty much all there is to Decision at Sundown. Or, at least, that's all I got out of it. There is in many ways a lot less action here than in a lot of other westerns, even than in most of the psychological westerns. When there is action, it seems a bit illogical. Tate says he'll let the two men out of the stable if they leave town, and Sam is willing to leave the stable. But then he gets the idiotic idea that Tate is going to let him back in. Even if there were an important message to sent to Bart, it would be done through a neutral intermediary like the JP or maybe even Lucy's father. I also found there to be a lot of backstory that probably could have been fleshed out more.

Overall, of the Scott/Boetticher westerns I've seen, I'd consider Decision at Sundown to be the least of them. Fans of Randolph Scott will probably like it, although if I were introducing people to Scott's westerns it's not the first one I'd pick. I wouldn't say that I didn't like it -- there are some movies I've seen recently that I had much more severe problems with -- it's just that I found something bigger lacking than in a fair number of other movies. It's on a box set, though, so even if you have more problems with it that I did, you can consider it a bonus movie.

Ride Lonesome

A few weeks back I recorded a night of Randolph Scott westerns since I hadn't blogged about any of them before and they're all on DVD. Second up is Ride Lonesome.

Scott plays Ben Brigade, who in the opening scene is approaching a man he's clearly been following for some time. That man is Billy John (James Best), and he's clearly a wanted criminal. Ben plans to bring him into town some distance away for the reward. That distance, however, is going to cause some problems. This isn't a courtroom drama, after all.

Some of those problems come into stark relief when Ben reaches the stagecoach station. The wife of the stationmaster, Mrs. Lane (Karen Steele), is there, but not her husband. Two other men show up, and they're both criminals: Sam (Pernell Roberts) and Whit (James Coburn). But for the time being they're going to be a lesser problem as everybody has to deal with an attack from the Indians who, as it turns out, also killed Mr. Lane.

Eventually they all set out for town, with the looming question of whether Sam and Whit will try to take Billy John themselves. There's an amnesty for whoever captures him, and the two could obviously use it. However, there's an even bigger problem in that Billy John's brother Frank (Lee Van Cleef) is in pursuit. Strangely to Sam and Whit, Ben seems to be taking his own sweet time in getting everybody to town. It's almost as if he wants Frank to catch up....

Ride Lonesome is solid entertainment. I didn't have any problem with it, other than the western not being my favorite genre. Reviewers who are western fans, however, generally praise the movie quite highly, and my comments are in no way a criticism of the movie. About the only criticism I could give is that it travels familiar territory: The Naked Spur and Along the Great Divide both came quickly to mind. If you want a familiar western, though, Ride Lonesome is a great place to start.

The Tall T

I recorded all four of the movies aired last night in the TCM salute to Randolph Scott. I think all four are available on DVD, so I'll start off with a post on the first one aired, The Tall T.

Scott plays Pat Brennan, whom we see at the film's opening riding up to the local stagecoach line station. Pat knows the station-master and his son, and Pat is becoming a sort of neighbor to them as he's taken a nearby ranch which he plans to operate and build up. To do that, however, he's going to need a bull to inseminate whatever cows he has, and to get that, he's going to have to see his old boss, Tenvoorde.

Tenvoorde drives a hard bargain and would franly like Brennan back as a ranch foreman since Brennan was the best one he ever had. Instead, he engages in a bet with Brennan, his bull for Brennan's horse, which is just a set up for Brennan to lose his horse and get to the next piece of action. While Brennan was in town before going to see Tenvoorde, he met stagecoach driver Rintoon (Arthur Hunnicutt), who was getting badgered by bookkeeper Mims (John Hubbard) about hiring a private coach to take him and his new wife to Bisbee for their honeymoon. It turns out that the new Mrs. Doretta Mims (Maureen O'Sullivan) is the daughter of the man with the biggest copper claim in the territory, and so fabulously wealthy as a result. No wonder Mims would want the plain spinster when nobody else seemed to.

Anyhow, Brennan had to walk back to his ranch having lost his horse, which is how he meets up with Rintoon driving the private coach hired by Mr. Mims. They stop at the station where Brennan is hoping to borrow a horse, and find that the station is deserted. Or, at least, the station master and his son don't respond to calls. It turns out that there are three men there, led by outlaw Frank Usher (Richard Boone), and Usher had planned to hijack the stagecoach. He just didn't realize that there was going to be a private coach stopping at the station before the regularly scheduled coach.

So now he's got four hostages he doesn't know what to do with. Thankfully, it's about to become three since Rintoon plays the hero and gets himself shot for it. However, Usher also has a pair of accomplices in Billy Jack (Skip Homeier) and Chink (Henry Silva) he doesn't particularly like. Usher doesn't like to kill, while the other two are gun happy and talk incessantly about women. But Usher is in a bit of luck when he learns about Doretta's rich father....

The Tall T is a taut, well-made little western. Pretty much everybody in the movie does a good job with their role, although I didn't particularly care for the fact that Rintoon was on the irritating side. I don't know whether that was Hunnicutt's fault, or the way the character was written. The story is also well-plotted, being based on a story by Elmore Leonard. The cinematography on the print TCM ran seemed slightly uneven to me: excellent on the long shots, but a bit off on both some of the close shots and the credits, where the background scenes behind the credits seemed a bit grainy. Perhaps that was just my eyes.

All in all, I can recommend The Tall T to any fan of westerns, and am happy to see that the prices on the DVDs are good (although that may mean the prints aren't as good).

Hot Saturday

One of the more fun and shocking pre-codes that showed up back in September as part of the Friday Spotlight of pre-Codes was Hot Saturday. It's on TCM again tomorrow morning at 10:30 AM, and is certainly worth a viewing if you haven't seen any of the previous recent TMC showings.

Nancy Carroll stars as Ruth Brock. She's a secretary at the local bank, and in some ways the belle of the bank. At least, all of the male tellers want her. Chief among these young men is Conny Billop (Edward Woods), who's trying to get her to be his date when everybody goes out to the local weekend spot out on the lake. They're planning to go as a group, evne though the town's older residents wonder whether the young folk enjoying themselves this way is such a good idea. That having been said, they wonder even more whether the guy on the other side of the lake is good. That guy is the notorious playboy Romer Sheffield (Cary Grant). He's got a place on the lake, and a girlfriend whom he just got rid of by writing a $10,000 check, which of course is a huge sum of money back in those days. Romer comes into the bank and invites the young people who work there to his place on Saturday afternoon before they all head off to the night spot.

So everybody goes to Romer's lakehouse which looks like it would be a fabulous place to have if you could afford it. And even though the parents' generation all think Romer is a terrible influence, the party the youngsters have at his place that afternoon is fairly innocent with the possible exception of the alcoholic drinks being served, which would have been problematic considering that this was still the Prohibition era. Meanwhile, Romer has shown Ruth a little more of his side of the lake, completely innocently of course. Eventually, they all decamp to the other side of the lake to enjoy the evening. Conny takes Ruth out on a boat and is a total jerk to her, trying to paw her when clearly she doesn't want it. So she runs away when the boat gets to shore again, and this being the opposite side of the lake, she makes her way to Romer's place. They talk fairly innocently for several hours before he takes her home.

When she gets back home, she finds that the family has a guest. That guest is old family friend Bill Fadden (Randolph Scott). He's a minerals engineer who went off to school and now several years later, he's returned on his way to the mountains where he's going to do some geological surveying for an oil company. Bill is unsurprisingly, like every other guy in town, smitten with Ruth, and her parents (William Collier and Jane Darwell) think that he'd be right for Ruth to marry. But that's not going to happen so quickly.

When Romer took Ruth home, a couple of the young people saw him drop her off. And they start gossiping. This being one of those small towns, gossip travels fast, and the lies about what Ruth and Romer are accused of having done spread quickly. Romer doesn't care since he lives outside of town and has the money to go off to the big city; in fact, he doesn't even know about any of the gossip. For Ruth, however, it's tragic, as she gets fired from the bank. Ah, but at least there's Bill, in love with her and willing to marry her immediately to solve all her problems, since his work is generally going to take him away from this crummy old town. So they get engaged and go to that night spot on the lake to celebrate with everybody. Conny, however, feeling himself a spurned lover, decides to gain revene on Ruth by inviting Romer to the little shindig....

The plot synopsis is relatively old-fashioned, in that it's hard to believe 80 years on that a town would immediatley gossip just because one of their young people returned home in the middle of the night. But what makes the movie is a couple of thoroughly pre-Code scenes. The first of these comes early in the movie, when Ruth returns home and wants to change into a new pair of undergarments that she had bought for when she goes out. She discobers that her kid sister Annie (Rose Coghlan) has taken them and is wearing them, and dammit, Ruth is going to get them back, even if she has to tear them off Annie's body! (The scene doesn't go [i]quite[/i] that far.) Later, there's a scene when Ruth goes running off to Bill after news of her "indiscretion" with Romer has made its way around town. Bill has already gone off to the mountains, and when Ruth gets there, it's pouring rain. She collapses, and Bill takes her into his tent to take care of her lest she get pneumonia or something. She wakes up with a blanket covering her and above her head, we get a pan shot of every last stitch of clothing she had on! Bill had strictily honorable intentions, of course, but still it's shocking. And then there's the shock at the end, which I won't give away. Let's just say that the ending of this movie is one that would never have made it to screen after 1934.

Cary Grant gets top billing in this, one of his earliest movies. But it's really Nancy Carroll's movie, and she's a lot of fun to watch. Grant is good, although watching a movie like this you can see why he ended up as the elegant gentleman type in his later movies. Randolph Scott is upright enough, but a bit boring, although that's probably because the script requires him to be more bland. Fans of old movies will recognize Grady Sutton as one of the bank workers. All in all, Hot Saturday is a really surprising pre-Code.