Not to be confused with 10

TCM had a tribute to Roger Corman back in July, and some of the movies the ran included intros and outros from when Corman sat down with Ben Mankiewicz in 2016 to do a retrospective on his work when he Corman turned 90. One of the films I hadn't seen before was X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes. With a title like that, who wouldn't want to watch it?

Ray Milland plays Dr. James Xavier, and as the movie opens, he's getting an eye exam from colleage Dr. Brant (Harold J. Stone). Dr. Xavier is actually a research scientist working on improving vision for the foundation run in part by Dr. Diane Fairfax (Diana Van der Vlis). Xavier has the idea that perhaps a medicine can be found that would improve human vision beyond the standard range of visible light. Imagine the benefits to mankind if man could see X-rays, for example: doctors could look into the human body without cutting for blurry black-and-white X-ray images, and better diagnose without resorting to surgery what those images show. Or, at least, that's Dr. Xavier's theory; I'm not certain expanding the range of human vision would work that way.

Dr. Xavier has learned all he can by experimenting on monkeys; indeed, when he tries his new formula on one of the monkeys it's able to see through the white cardboard to see the blue and red cardboard as well but is unable to comprehend what it sees and promptly dies. So Dr. Xavier knows that he's going to have to experiment on himself, which seems like a dangerous but typically Hollywood thing to do. The potion Xavier drinks does seem to give him improved vision, although it's going to take him some training to learn how to deal with it.

Unfortunately, the formula also seems to have some side effects, although those don't show up until we get the more humorous and obligatory scenes such as one where his new-found vision ranges makes clothing invisible but not skin so he's able to see everybody naked. Oh, and this happens at a dance; watching Ray Milland try to do 1960s dancing is worth the price of admission all by itself. Eventually, though, it makes Dr. Xavier arrogant. Knowing from having used his X-ray vision that a fellow doctor is going to perform the wrong surgery, Xavier deliberately injures the doctor to prevent the surgery. And then getting into an argument afterwards, Xavier accidentally pushes the other doctor out a window, making him fall to his death.

Xavier knows he faces a murder rap, so he flees, first to the carnival shows at the Santa Monica pier where works for Crane (Don Rickles), and then further underground. But Crane figures out who Xavier is, and eventually Dr. Fairfax shows up again. Xavier has been using up what little of the formula he has left, but at the same time it's both giving him greater theoretical power and making him more unstable. Xavier needs more money to continue his research, and comes up with a plan to get it by reading cards in Las Vegas -- Xavier doesn't need to count cards; he can see right through the deck.

X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes is on the surface a fairly silly idea with a ton of plot holes, as Milland's vision always seems to work in just the way necessary to advance the plot. But it's another of those movies that's a heck of a lot of fun to watch. Milland gives it everything he's got, and Rickles is surprisingly effective in a non-comedic part. It's very much a piece of the 1960s, but that low budget lack of effects (at least by today's standards) is part of what makes X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes charming.

The Swiss Conspiracy

I've got an acquaintance on one of the non-movie blogs I regularly read who works for a Swiss multinational and jokes that he "will work for raclette" and that he goes off to the fondue mines. So when I came across a new-to-me movie available to stream on Tubi called The Swiss Conspiracy, I knew I had to watch it.

The movi was released in 1976 and was based on the existence in those days, as an opening title card also read in voiceover tells us, that Swiss banks were highly valued for their absolute secrecy, with accounts being numbered and nobody revealing the names behind the numbers. Of course there are humans behind the banking system, so it's theoretically possible to get at the humans in some way. Cut to a shot of a man eating dinner in a restaurant, with a waiter coming in pushing a cart full of food, only to reveal he's got a gun, shooting the patron dead!

We then go to the Hurtil Bank in Zürich, run by the Hurtil family, with the current president being Johann Hurtil (Ray Milland). Somebody comes in wanting to see the president, and carrying a letter. That person has received a blackmail letter, saying that that blackmailer knows the recipient has an account at the Hurtil bank and that if the victim doesn't pay up SFr. 1 million, the account information will be made public. This is an obvious problem for the victim, but it's just as much of a problem for the bank, as they don't want to reveal that they've been compromised.

Hurtil and his vice-president, Benninger (Anton Diffring), feel like they can't really go to the police, at least not with the emphasis of handling things through the traditional legal system, since the result would be a trial which would reveal way too much information about the loss of banking secrecy to the general public. So instead, they bring in a former agent from the US Treasury department, David Christopher (David Janssen).

At the same time Christopher is at the bank, he's introduced to two people of note. One is Denise Abbott (Senta Berger), who is a blackmail victim, having blackmailed men herself as their mistress and then hiding the money with Hurtil. You'll notice I wrote "a" blackmail victim, not "the". In fact, there are five victims. One has already been killed as we saw at the beginning of the movie; Abbott is a second; and Christopher is about to meet a third, Hayes (John Saxon), who is a Chicago mobster and absolutely pissed to see Christopher since he things the bank has gone to the American authorities. There are more victims: Texas oilman McGowan (John Ireland), and Dutch businessman Kosta.

Christopher's job is to find the blackmailer and handle the matter with discretion. Hurtil himself would seem like a place to start, as would Benninger. But beyond that, who? And when some thugs go after first Christopher and then Hayes, you have to wonder whether Swiss bankers would know enough to be able to hire such hitmen. (I must admit I have zero experience with Swiss banking.)

The Swiss Conspiracy feels like the sort of movie that might have been made because the producer had funds that they had to use in Switzerland, and wanted to get some Hollywood names (or former names) who wanted a working vacation in lovely Switzerland. That, and the movie has the feel of a TV Movie of the Week with a bunch of formerly big stars, much the way that The Love Boat did except that the running time is twice that of a traditional TV episode. The Swiss Conspiracy is moderately entertaining, but ultimately forgettable.

Love Story

Some years back, I blogged about the Ryan O'Neal movie What's Up, Doc?. If you've seen the movie, you'll recall the final lines have Barbra Streisand telling O'Neal "Love means never having to say you're sorry", to which O'Neal responds, "That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard". Audiences of the day, and I think a lot of people who are fans of old movies, would recognize Streisand's line as the tagline of O'Neal's earlier movie Love Story. TCM finally ran Love Story back in March during their programming tribute to the late Ryan O'Neal, so it gave me a shot to record it and finally be able to do a full-length post on it here.

Well, more or less full length since Love Story is one of those movies where people pretty much already know what it's about based on its reputation. Ryan O'Neal stars as Oliver Barrett IV. A name like that implies wealth and old family traditions, and you'd be right to expect that here. Young Oliver is a student at Harvard, star of the hockey team, and expected to go on to Harvard Law School, in part by his wealthy father, Oliver III (Ray Milland).

Harvard was one of the Ivy League schools that set up a complementary college for women, Radcliffe, before going officiall co-educational, and one day when Oliver goes to the library at Radcliffe to pick up a book, he meets librarian Jenny Cavilleri (Ali McGraw), doing the work-study thing to make it through college. She's everything Oliver is not: free-spirited, working-class, and Catholic. She doesn't seem to care for the rich, or for hockey either. But in a movie like this, you know they're going to fall in love.

Jenny's widower father is accepting of this despite thinking the young couple's lives together isn't going to be a bed of roses. Oliver's dad, however, is pissed. So ticked off, in fact, that he decides to cut young Oliver off from his trust fund which means that Oliver IV isn't going to be able to afford Harvard Law School and that nobody in a position of authority seems to have any understanding of this. But Jenny and Oliver get married anyway, with Jenny taking a job as a teacher to help Oliver work his way through law school.

Oliver does eventually graduate and gets a good job with a New York law firm, and would like to start a family. But for some reason, he seems unable to knock Jenny up. The reason, it turns out, is that Jenny has some sort of cinematic terminal illness, of the sort that makes her still look gorgeous by the standards of 1970 even as she's on her deathbed. Think the way Bette Davis suddenly drops dead at the end of Dark Victory, still looking like the glamorous Bette Davis of old, and you'll get the idea. (I had an uncle die of a brain tumor, and while he never looked like a picture of Hollywood glamour, he looked terrible in the final pictures we have of him.)

Love Story is the sort of movie that was a ridiculous runaway hit when it was released to theaters in 1970, and it's easy to see why. It's also the sort of movie that a lot of critics hated; again, it's easy to see why. Love Story is unashamedly mawkish and manipulative, and actively invites the viewer to go along for the ride. I tend to come closer to the critics on this, but at the same time I realize that if I had been around in 1970 I wouldn't have been in the target demographic for Love Story. If you're the sort of person into this genre of movie, then you'll love Love Story.

Another of those "Not best suited to MGM" movies

I've mentioned before how MGM was one of the top studios in the pre-TV era of Hollywood, but also how certain types of movies didn't really work at MGM because the studio seemed incapabale of making a movie not be glossy. Another movie that I think fits into that mold is the melodrama A Life of Her Own.

The movie starts off with Lily Brannel James (Lana Turner) taking a taxi in her small city (I'd call it a small town, but the buildings are too big for that) to the train station to catch a train to New York City where she's bound to make it big, and everybody in town knows it. Or at least, that's the sort of town it is. In the next scene, Lily is already in New York, sitting in the waiting room of the modeling agency run by Tom Caraway (Tom Ewell). She has to wait a while to get Tom's attention, but he does hire. Coming into the office at the same time is veteran model Mary Ashlon (Ann Dvorak), whose career has passed its peak.

The two wind up going out on the town together that night, making it a double date with lawyer Jim (Louis Calhern) and ad exec Lee (Barry Sullivan). Mary has too much to drink and winds up back in her upper-floor apartment with Lily, chewing Lily out on the grounds that Mary thinks Lily is trying to take her boyfriend away from her. The next morning, Lily walks into the office to hear all the other models talking about the news that Mary has killed herself by jumping out of her apartment window!

Since Lana Turner is the star of the movie, we know that she's going to make it as a model; as she starts to climb the ladder of success, she's accompanied by Jim, who sort of takes Lily under his wing. Meanwhile, he has a client, Steve Harleigh (Ray Milland), who is a copper miner from Montana and visiting New York on business reasons. Steve and Lily spend time together on a purely platonic basis since he's already married and realize that they can never have a real relationship even though they do start developing feelings for each other. So they part as friend when Steve goes back home.

Except that business is going to bring Steve back to New York, and this time he's even unhappier than he was the first time he was in New York. Steve may have fallen out of love with his wife Nora (Margaret Phillips), but then we learn what really happened between Steve and Nora: the two of them got in a car accident that was Steve's fault but it was Nora who wound up an invalid. To make matters worse, Nora decides to come out to New York since she hasn't seen him in a while and his birthday is coming up. Lily is the one who's going to be left out. Or will she make Steve and Nora confront the truth?

Part of the problem with A Life of Her Own is that it's the sort of melodrama that would have been better suited to Warner Bros. instead of MGM, where everyone can't help but be a bit too high-class for the material. But another part of the problem with the movie is that it was made while the Production Code was still utterly in effect. The material here really needed to be handled differently, but any of the ways to make it work better would have run up against the Code Office. (Indeed, reading up on the movie, the Office had issues with earlier drafts of the screenplay.) The cast tries hard, and it's not as if the movie is bad by any means. It's more that it's not quite right.

Still, A Life of Her Own probably deserves being seen in part to see how the Production Code could screw up a movie and in part for the professionalism of all involved.

Ambassador Bill

Another of my recent DVD purchases was a box set of Will Rogers movies, in fact Volume 2 from Fox. Recently, I decided to fire up my DVD player and watch one of the discs off that box set, namely the film Ambassador Bill.

Now the first thing I noticed is that the print used opens up with the Fox Fanfare, which was added much later, since Fox and 20th Century didn't merge until a good four years after this movie was released by the Fox Film Corporation. But that has no bearing on the rest of the movie. Rogers plays Bill Harper, an Oklahoma cattleman who has just been named the new American ambassador to Sylvania, one of those fictional countries somewhere in Central Europe (or more specifically in this case the Balkans which pop up in a lot of movies from this era. His job is to help the Americans secure a contract to develop Sylvania's infrastructure, which is going to be difficult given the country's political situation.

As Bill is flying in, he counts the shots from the cannonade, thinking he doesn't merit a 21-gun salute. But then a 22nd shot goes off, and his pilot Lothar (Ray Milland) informs him that the country is going through one of its regular revolutions. You'd think an ambassador would know a bit about the country he's being posted to.

One of the first things a new ambassador is supposed to do is to present his credentials to the country he's representing, and that's where we learn more about the country's complicated political situation. Sylvania is a kingdom, but the current King Paul (Tad Alexander) is only about 10 years old. That means he's got a regent, and the regent is the Queen Consort, Vanya (Marguerite Churchill). However, the real power behind the throne is the Prince Polikoff (Gustav von Seyffertitz), who engineered the abdication of the King.

Wouldn't you know it, but that king is... Lothar, who piloted Bill into Sylvania and then shows up unannounced at the American embassy late one night to tell Bill the "true" story. Bill, meanwhile, has taken a liking to the poor boy king, seeing that Paul doesn't have any chance to be just a boy or to learn how to become a man. In what would seem like a major breach of diplomatic etiquette, Bill becomes a sort of foster father to Paul, teaching him baseball and rope-handling and the like. He also becomes a bit close to Vanya, who still holds a torch for Lothar.

Polikoff, for his part, has cards up his sleeve to play, and tries to entrap Bill with a honeypot, the Countess Ilka (Greta Nissen). This ultimately leads to another revolution. Since it's a Will Rogers film, you can guess which side wins.

Will Rogers was a big star in the first half of the 1930s up until his tragic death in a plane crash in the Alaskan bush, and watching movies like Ambassador Bill, it's easy to see why. He comes across as affable with an easy charm, and his homespun humor is always gentle. Ninety years on, his style may not be to everyone's taste and the material may not have aged well, but I think it's still important to see movies like this to see what America had a taste for in the early 1930s and what the phenomenon of Will Rogers was. Rogers may not have been the prototypical Hollywood star, but a star he most certainly was.

Penny Serenade meets Room for One More

I recently watched a Gene Tierney movie I hadn't heard of before: Close to My Heart.

Tierney plays Midge Sheridan, a housewife who at the start of the movie learns that she is going to be unable to have children, something that unsurprisingly leaves her disappointed, especially because she and her reporter husband Brad (Ray Milland) had a room of their house that they'd always planned to be the nursery even if they never put any furniture in it yet since she'd never gotten pregnant. Then again, you still couldn't use the word "pregnant" in a Hollywood movie of those times.

So when Brad placates Midge by telling her that yes, he still does want to have children, Midge goes to the adoption agency run by Mrs. Morrow (Fay Bainter), seemingly without telling Brad first. Midge finds out that there are a lot of parents who want a nice healthy baby to raise, not being so willing to take an older, hard-to-place child as is the subject of Room for One More. Midge is going to have to wait up to two years, and even then it's possible she and Brad might not be deemed suitable parents.

But somehow through the women's gossip network, Midge hears that some woman just dropped off a baby at the police station, and police have been unable to find the woman. Midge gets the crazy idea in her head that she can jump the line to adopt this child, since a lot of parents are a bit hesitant about adopting a child when the agency doesn't know who the mother is -- I'd guess the more resonable thinking behind this would be the possibility of a hereditary illness. Mrs. Morrow informs Midge that there's still a lot to be done before Baby Danny can be adopted out, and even then, the Sheridans might not be considered suitable parents. Especially after Midge has already decorated the nursery to be for a baby named Danny.

Brad, meanwhile, decides to use his reporter skills to find out about the provenance of the baby, if he can. He speaks to a woman who is not the mother, but who know the baby's mother, who is apparently dead now; this woman doesn't know who the father is. But things really hit a snag when the son of a prominent town citizen gets arrested for robbery. The son was, it just so happens, not only adopted, but in one of those adoptions where it was only found out after the adoption that the boy's biological parents were of bad moral stock. So now Brad is going to worry that if Danny also came from such stock, Danny might be doomed to the same fate. Or, at least, that's what the movie wants us to believe. And Mrs. Morrow understands that holding that kind of attitude really makes Brad unsuitable to adopt Danny.

Close to My Heart felt a lot like the sort of programmer Dore Schary would have made when he took over for Louis B. Mayer at MGM. But, in fact, the movie was made at Warner Bros. This might explain why the movie consistently feels somewhat off in tone. I don't think it helps that it's Gene Tierny and Ray Milland cast as the couple. They don't have the greatest chemistry together, and I don't know that either of them is quite right for the role they're asked to play. Bainter, however, shines in support.

Close to My Heart is an interesting artifact of how Hollywood looked at adoption in the early 1950s, even if it isn't the greatest of movies.

Something happened some time or another

Another of the movies that's been in the FXM rotation lately and that I haven't blogged about before is Everything Happens at Night. It's going to be on again tomorrow morning at 4:40 AM, so I recently watched it to post about here.

Robert Cummings plays Ken Morgan, Paris correspondent for a New York paper. He's about to escape a club where his boss is, but his boss has urgent news for him. Remember the story about the peace advocate Dr. Norden and how he was assassinated by the Nazis last year? Well, somebody's been sending unsigned letters that sound suspiciously like the same exact style Norden would use, meaning Norden might still be alive and moving from one location to another to stay one step ahead of the Nazis. The lastest information implies that this person, if it is Norden, is in a small village in Switzerland. Morgan is to go there and find out whether that really is Norden.

Now, you'd think this would really be putting Norden at risk if it is him, but as in a movie like Five Star Final, you've got editors and reporters who don't care about the damage they do to their subjects. So Morgan heads off to San Palo and gets the last available hotel room, this being a a small town during ski season. And just after Morgan arrives, who should show up but Geoffrey Thompson (Ray Milland), claiming to be a British botanist but obviously a journalist also on the trail of Norden to get the story.

Eventually they meet Louise (Sonja Henie), a lovely young woman who is playing nursemaid to a guy in town to get the mountain air for his health. Both journalists presume that this is Norden, but Louise isn't about to tell. Still, the obvious thing to do is to gain her confidence, although both journalists fall in love with her along the way, complicating matters. But since Morgan is the one who gets the ice skating fantasy sequence, it's a good guess that he's the one who's going to wind up with Louise in the last reel.

You can probably guess that Louise is in fact taking care of Norden, but the movie takes a really dark turn after that. Morgan files the story and Thompson tricks the telegraphist to send it to Thompson's editor in London; when the story breaks the Nazis now know precisely where Norden is. The chagrined journalists try to spirit Norden out of France, but the Nazis show up for a little covert action. How they lost track of him and didn't already have a bunch of spies in town, I'll never know.

Generally, you know what to expect when you see that Sonja Henie is the star of a movie. Surprisingly, however, Everything Happens at Night is much darker than the other of her movies I've seen. Henie wasn't much of a serious actress, but she's nice to look at and passable as a romantic lead. But she only gets the one ice skating number here, and not a finale. All along the way, Everything Happens at Night feels like a movie that can't decide what exactly what it wants to be, and never really gets the two sides together in a satisfying way.

Yet, because of this failure, Everything Happens at Night might still be more interesting than the Henie movies that are a higher overall quality or have the better ice skating numbers. The movie did get a DVD release courtesy of Fox's MOD scheme, in case you're unable to catch it on FXM.

Reap the Wild Wind

John Wayne got to wear a lot of costumes during the course of his career. A lot of them were old west duds, but there were also military uniforms. In some cases, such as Red Riber, the two were combined as he played a cavalryman in the West. But Wayne gets to wear a different period costume in Reap the Wild Wind, which is airing tonight at 10:00 PM on TCM: that of a mid-19th century ship's captain.

Wayne plays Captain Jack Stuart, the captain of a clipper ship that plies the route from New Orleans to New York, more or less. If you look on a map, you'll note that the quickest route involves going through the Florida Keys. That, of course, is dangerous, as there are all sorts of shoals on which a ship could run aground. Indeed, it's something we saw in Jamaica Inn, where you had people deliberately trying to get ships to run aground so that they can salvage the cargo. There's that in the Keys as well, and sure enough, Stuart is betrayed by one of his officers who is being paid off by the saboteurs to run the ship aground.

There are also legitimate salvage operations, since there are so many wrecks. Indeed, when Stuart's ship wsa scuttled, he himself is salvaged, so to say, by one of those salvagers, tomboyish Loxi Claiborne (Paulette Goddard). Loxi takes Jack home to recuperate, and you can guess that they're going to fall in love. You can also guess that there are going to be complications. Jack Stuart is a ship's captain, so in theory he should be leaving soon to take command of another of the shipping company's vessels. This is where another of the complications comes in: there has to be an investigation of the disaster, and that's being headed by the shipping company's lawyer, Stephen Tolliver (Ray Milland). Loxi belives Stephen is trying to keep Jack from getting another command, so she goes to him in Charleston to try to convince him otherwise, and when Stephen meets Loxi, he falls in love with her.

This sort of a love triangle may cause complications for the lives of the characters, but it's a fairly standard plot twist. The rest of the plot, however, begins to get rather more complicated at this point. Stephen had been planning to give Jack another command, and of the best ship in the line, but due to a series of mixups Jack and Loxi believe that it was Stephen's boss who approved this and Stephen is trying to keep Jack from getting the captaincy. So Jack joins in with the people who scuttled his previous command and tries to scuttle the shipping company's steamship. Loxi, however, discovers that everything was a mistake and heads off to try to stop Jack....

The story in Reap the Wild Wind is fairly silly, but damn if it isn't a terribly entertaining movie. John Wayne is good enough as a ship's captain, in many ways playing the same role he did when he'd play all those cavalrymen. Paulette Goddard is a bit miscast as a tomboy, but she doesn't do anything to drag the film down. Ray Milland is more than good enough as the other man, and the supporting characters are all enjoyable enough. And then there's the finale, which involves Wayne and Milland going underwater to try to find a key piece of evidence which will exonerate Jack. That is, until Milland gets attacked by a giant octopus! Yes, it's silly, but as I said, it's a fun silly.

Reap the Wild Wind is avialable on DVD, even from the TCM Shop.

You could fill Madison Square Garden!

I hadn't looked at the Fox Movie Channel schedule before writing my brief post about tonight's TCM repeats. If I had, I would have noticed that The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing is airing tomorrow morning at 8:00 AM on the Fox Movie Channel.

The movie is based on a true story that happened about 50 years before the movie was made; that is, the first decade of the 20th century. Ray Milland plays Stanford White, who was a prominent architect in New York City whose buildings included one of the previous incarnations of Madison Square Garden. He meets showgirl Evelyn Nesbit (Joan Collins) and is taken by her. But, he's got two problems. One is the fact that he's got a wife of his own, and will have some difficulty in obtaining a divorce. The other is that there's another suitor for Miss Nesbit. That other suitor is Harry Thaw. Thaw was born in Pittsubrgh to a coal baron, and is in New York trying to get himself societied up if you will. He sees Nesbit and is taken by her as well. After all, who wouldn't be?

Much love triangle stuff follows, during which time we discover that Harry is quite the jealous man. He wants what he feels is rightfully his, which is both a place in higher society, and Evelyn. Thanks the the previous Mrs. White, Stanford is eventually unable to have her, leaving Harry to marry her. They don't all live happily ever after, however. Stanford still wants Evelyn, and when he tries to see Evelyn again, it sends Harry into such a jealous rage that he kills Stanford! Worse, Evelyn eventually has to testify at the trial.

It's real-life material that should make for a great story, but unfortunately The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing falls a bit flat. Part of it probably has to do with the fact that the real-life Evelyn Nesbit was still alive at the time, aged only about 70; not only that, but she served as an advisor for the movie. The presumptive result is that the film is slanted in the direction Evelyn Nesbit wanted it slanted. That's a bit of a shame, because the real story should be better. Not only that, but it's obvious that Fox went to great pains to try to make a good movie. It's filmed in Technicolor and Cinemascope, and has a look as though a great deal of attention was paid to the set design and the costumes. As for the actors, they all give creditable performances despite being hamstrung by a subpar script. If you only remember Joan Collins from her days on Dynasty, which is how I first got to know her, you might be surprised to discover that she's not a bad actress.

The Lost Weekend

I've briefly mentioned The Lost Weekend a couple of times in the past, but never done a full blog post on the movie. It's airing again tonight at 8:00 PM on TCM as part of their salute to Star of the Month Ray Milland.

Milland plays writer Don Birnam. At the start of the movie, his brother Wick (Phillip Terry) is about to take him for a trip to the country. But we see that Don is thinking about a bottle that he's got tied to the windowsill outside their apartment, and we know that he's not going to go. And, we know why: Don is a raging alcoholic. Philip has been trying to cover for Don for years, including letting Don live with him, but at the same time he knows that he can't really keep Don from drinking if Don doesn't want to, so Philip eventually goes off to the country alone, while Don stays behind, as does his on again, off again girlfriend Helen (Jane Wyman).

Don quickly goes downward in a spiral of drinking, drinking, and more drinking, always looking for the next drink. As I wrote back in March 2008, my drinking is limited to a glass of wine at dinner, so I don't know quite how accurate Don's journey is. But it's certainly harrowing and not (yet) clichéd. (I can't help but wonder if this is the movie that started a lot of the alcoholic clichés.) Don gets into it with his bartender Nat (Howard Da Silva), tries to find a bottle that he hid in the ceiling light fixture, and winds up in Bellevue Hospital where he's warned about the insects and pink elephants; this last is a particularly jarring sequence.

Regardless of how accurate it is, The Lost Weekend is pretty darn good stuff. The movie does bog down with a few flashback scenes involving Don and Helen at the start of their relationship, but during all of the drunk scenes, it's more than suitably uncomfortable. The question of whether we should let the Don Birnams of the world drink themselves to death if that's what they're intent on doing is one that is still relevant today, not only regarding alcohol, but other drugs as well. Terry takes one side of that question, while Wyman takes the other. Milland's performance doesn't do much to make the answer any easier, and that's a good thing. The ending of the movie is a bit too hopeful, but that's something you have to expect from addict movies. The one exception might be Less Than Zero, and that's a movie that's got a lot of problems, to put it mildly.

Nowadays it would be a text message

TCM's Star of the Month for April is Ray Milland; he's getting a bunch of movies every Tuesday night this month. Tonight's salute to Milland brings a number of his suspense films. Surprisingly, I don't think I've ever recommended Dial M For Murder before; that's airing at 10:00 PM ET.

Milland plays former tennis pro Tony, who's married to the lovely Margot (Grace Kelly) and living in London. However, he suspects that she's having an affair with an old friend from America, mystery writer Mark (Robert Cummings). Tony is right that Margot is still in love with Mark, so Tony comes up with an elaborate plan to get Margot bumped off, which involves blackmailing one of his old friends from school, who will take Tony's key to get into the apartment and then strangle Margot. However, the plot goes wrong: instead of Margot winding up dead, she's able to grab a pair of scissors off the desk and stab her assailant in the back, killing him and leaving him on the floor of their apartment, which presents a bit of a problem for Tony.

However, quick-thinking Tony gets an idea: he'll pin the killing on Margot, suggesting that she did it because she was trying to kill a blackmailer. Having there be a motive other than pure self-defense means that Margot can be found guilty and sentenced to be executed, which for Tony is just as good as if the original assailant had killed Margot. And the plan would work too, if it weren't for those meddling kids -- or, at least, that meddling American mystery writer.

Dial M For Murder may not be Alfred Hitchcock's masterpiece, but it's one of the many very good movies that he made. It's never less than entertaining, and despite some gymnastics necessary to guide the movie through its limited setting (most of the film is set within Tony and Margot's apartment), it inventively solves most if not all of the plot holes and reaches its natural "crime does not pay" ending in a satisfying manner. The acting is nothing memorable here, but then, it's all in service of the story, which is the more important thing for a movie like this. And the story delivers.

Two other interesting bits about the movie: as I mentioned back in November 2009, the scene in which Milland tries to phone his wife from the club has an obvious prop. Second, the movie was originally supposed to be in 3-D, back in the 1950s incarnation of that overrated technology. The one scene where this is most obvious is when Grace Kelly is reaching for the scissors on the desk; it's shot in such a way that Kelly's hand appears to be coming out of the screen toward the audience.

Ministry of Fear

An interesting World War II-era spy movie, Ministry of Fear, shows up tomorrow morning at 9:00 AM ET on TCM.

Ray Milland plays Stephen Neale, a man who has been in an insane asylum in the UK for the past two years. He's just been adjudged sane, and ready for release. Unfortunately, Stephen's problems are just beginning. At a fair, he is given the correct weight in a "guess the weight of the cake" contest: obviously, somebody has mistaken him for the ringer who was supposed to get the cake. Indeed, after he gets the cake everybody seems to want it back; not only the people at the fair but the people on the train he takes to London. Worse, Stephen quickly finds that people are willing to kill him to get at the cake. It turns out that there's some sort of microfilm inside the cake, and a ring of Nazi spies is using the cake to try to smuggle that microfilm out of the country.

Stephen has more problems than real Nazis trying to kill him. Having been released from an asylum, he finds that nobody is about to believe him when he says there are people trying to get him. The old maxim that "Just because you're insane doesn't mean they're not out to get you" rings true. Like a character in a Hitchcock movie, Stephen is forced to go it alone and try to catch the Nazis himself. Also like a Hitchcock movie, the film is filled with dark humor and strange characters, as Stephen and the bad guys wind up at a séance together, among other set pieces.

However, Ministry of Fear was directed not by Hitchcock, but by Fritz Lang. Despite being reminiscent of Hitchcock's earlier The 39 Steps of Saboteur, Lang's Ministry of Fear holds up just as well as the Hitchcock movies. Sadly, it hasn't been released to DVD in North America (although Amazon does say a Region 2 DVD was released).