Tourneur Classic Movies revisited

Director Jacques Tourneur was born in November, but for whatever reason TCM honors him from time to time with a daytime lineup of some of his movies. Such is the case today, September 9, and one of his films that I haven't recommended before is the western Great Day in the Morning, which concludes the afternoon lineup at 6:15 PM.

Robert Stack stars as Owen Pentecost, and as the movie opens it's the beginning of 1861. Now, this means the start of the Civil War, although that hasn't happened yet. Owen is making his way west to Colorado, still a territory at the time, and along they way is saved from Indians by Steven Kirby (Alex Nicol). Steven is also helping a northerner make her way west, in the form of Ann Alaine (Virginia Mayo). Owen, however, is from North Carolina, which is going to secede in the not too distant future, but since the war hasn't begun yet Ann is able to stand up for Owen and break up any fighting between northern and southern men.

In a surprisingly small (and snowless, since it's still late March) Devner, they stop at a hotel which, like a lot in town, is owned by Jumbo Means (Raymond Burr) and staffed by barkeep Boston Grant (Ruth Roman). Owen and Jumbo begin to play poker against each other, although Jumbo is an inveterate cheat. Owen spots the cheating and challenges Jumbo to a fair game, eventually bankrupting Jumbo, although the question of how much Boston is helping is an open one: both Boston and Ann have a thing for Owen.

Among the things Owen wins from Jumbo are a bunch of mining claims, as it's thought there's gold in them thar hills. Owen goes out to visit the mining area, and finds a bunch of southerners trying to eke out a living with the hopes of finding gold. They're hoping that in the upcoming war, they'll be able to help the Confederate cause. Owen isn't unwilling, but is there to make money first and foremost. His fellow southerners aren't happy, but Owen has the power.

Pre-war tensions continue to mount and, as you might guess, things break down along the lines of which state people came from back east. Owen would stil rather be more of a mercenary, but with everybody around him being violent, he's forced to defend himself, killing a miner trying to cheat him and winding up taking care of the dead man's orphaned son. And then news reaches Colorado that the Confederates have attacked Fort Sumter, kicking off the Civil War and forcing Owen finally to take sides. The rest of the personal stories of these characters play out against this backdrop.

Great Day in the Morning is another of those well-enough made mid-tier westerns that Hollywood was still cranking out in the 1950s, with them being a bit more grown-up in themes to contrast with what was moving to television. The actors all do a professional job with the material which is competent if not spectactular. The print that TCM ran was also a very good one with nice color and wide-screen photography. If you want to be entertained, you could certainly do far worse than to watch Great Day in the Morning.

Abandoned

There's often some dispute over what counts as a noir when you're on the edges of the genre. Some movies have decided noirish elements even if I think they're not quite noir. But I can see why other people might group them in with noir. Such is the case with one of Eddie Muller's Noir Alley choices from several months back, the 1949 crime/suspense movie Abandoned.

After some narration that would have been right at home in The Naked City a year earlier, we're introduced to one of the main characters. Paula Considine (Gale Storm) walks into a police station in Los Angeles looking for the Bureau of Missing Persons. She's arrived in the big city from a small town in Pennsylvania, after having gotten a letter from her big sister. Since then, radio silence from big sister. The man at the desk is about to finish up his shift for the night, so he suggests Paula fill out the form overnight and come back in the morning.

Meanwhile, a fairly nosy man shows up at the desk and starts chatting up Paula. That man is Mark Sitko (Dennis O'Keefe), a reporter for the Mirror. Sitko may have been looking for information on somebody else, but he knows a good story when he hears it, and having heard Paula's story, he suspects a good one here. Eventually they go to the morgue and, looking through the book of unidentified dead people there, Paula recognizes her sister's photo. The sister was found in a car in the garage of a building under construction, dead of carbon monoxide poisoning, in what to the coroner seems like an obvious suicide. Except that Paula knows her sister didn't know how to drive, which to her suggests it's not a suicide.

Then, on the way out of the morgue, Mark is smart enough to realize that Paula is being tailed by a figure in the shadows. Mark comes up with a plan to get the man out of the shadows, and when that happens he recognizes the man as Kerric (Raymond Burr), a private investigator. He claims that he was working for Paula's father to try to find Paula's sister; once Paula left Pennsylvania her dad wanted Kerric to find her too. But of course all of this is several years before the premiere of Perry Mason on TV, so the presence of Raymond Burr in the cast likely means a bad guy.

Meanwhile, it's been revealed to us that the letter Paula received from her sister is on the letterhead of a hospital, and that the sister was pregnant and there to give birth. Mark thinks that there's something fishy going on, and that the sister may have gotten involved with what is not a reputable adoption agency. So they take the case to the district attorney (Jeff Chandler), who informs them that he's swamped, so they're going to have to do some investigating themselves.

As for Kerric, he goes to visit a Mrs. Donner (Marjorie Rambeau), and it's revealed that she's the woman involved with running the illegal adoption ring, paying the expenses of the unwed mothers and then selling off the babies to parents who can't wait to adopt through the normal channels. All of this is within the first 20 minutes or so of the movie, so there's not much mystery here. Instead, as Alfred Hitchcock would argue, it's suspense in that we know who the bad guys are and what they're doing, but will the reporter and sister be able to find out and get out of danger?

Abandoned was the sort of movie something between a B-movie and a programmer that Hollywood produced in the years after World War II; I've argued that MGM's equivalent tended to be the sort of films that paid for the Freed Unit to make all those musicals. This one, however, was made at Universal; that combined with definitely not being a prestige picture and not having the biggest stars goes a long way to explaining why it's not very well known today.

There are some obvious noir elements in the photography and the heavies that make it easy to understand why Eddie Muller would program it for Noir Alley. The fact that I consider it more of a crime/suspense movie than a noir doesn't mean I didn't like it, however. It's quite well done for a movie on a budget, with a fairly effective story and good characterizations, especially from Rambeau.

Abandoned is available on DVD from Universal's MOD scheme, and is definitely worth a watch.

William Castle in antiquity

Rhonda Fleming was honored in TCM's Summer Under the Stars last August. TCM ran a couple of sword-and-sandal type movies with her as the female lead. I already did a post on Revolt of the Slaves; another one they aired was Serpent of the Nile.

The movie doesn't start out with Fleming. Instead, we get some opening narration about the assasination of Julius Caesar in Rome in 44 BC. This led to infighting among the various members of the cabal that got rid of Caesar, with Brutus and Cassius on one side, and Marc Anthony (Raymond Burr) and Octavian (Michael Fox) on the other. Now, we know that Octavian would later become Emperor Augustine. But first, he and Marc Anthony have to defeat Brutus and Cassius. General Lucilius (William Lundigan) has been serving Brutus, but he realizes the cause is hopeless, so he tries to come up with a way to get Octavian and Marc Anthony to accept his turning to their side.

While Octavian goes back to Rome, Lucilius gets captured by Antony's men. Antony already has a woman by his side, but it's not Cleopatra (that's Rhonda Fleming when we finally get to her) yet. He accepts Lucilius' pledge of loyalty to Rome, claiming that they're two of the same kind. And to make Rome truly peaceful, they're going to have to go to Egypt to pacify Cleopatra. She's been a canny politician, playing Brutus off of Octavian and Anthony in order to keep her dynasty going even if Egypt has to be a vassal of Rome.

Although, to be honest, Cleopatra has always been one to try to get more power for herself. That's why, before Julius Caesar got bumped off, she had been maneuvering to get herself married to Julius so that the two of them could be co-rulers of Roman dominions. Lucilius was with Julius back in those days, so he knows just how clever and beguiling Cleopatra can be. He tries to warn Antony that Cleopatra could be quite dangerous to him, as she was in many ways to Julius.

But as we know, Antony wasn't thinking with his big head, and he eventually falls for Cleopatra and her beauty and lavish displays of opulence. Lucilius sees it coming from a mile away and this makes him a danger to Cleopatra, who has him put under house arrest. But this Antony begins to realize that perhaps Cleopatra really is a danger like Lucilius had been warning him.

Serpent of the Nile was distributed by Columbia under the direction of William Castle and producer Sam Katzman, a couple of names I've mentioned, more briefly in the case of Katzman. Both of them were known for producing as much spectacle as they could get with a very low budget, and that colors this version of the Cleopatra story. Fleming's Cleopatra is really out for herself, not so much looking to be co-ruler of Rome and not as much in love with Antony as other versions. Cleopatra's attempted seduction of Antony includes women with whips and Julie Newmar painted in gold, and that's just the first time.

The casting also makes Serpent of the Nile a bit of a hoot, as Raymond Burr is almost as badly cast playing Marc Antony as many of the casting decisions in The Story of Mankind a few years later. It doesn't help that the dialogue doesn't serve any of them well.

It's easy to see why Serpent of the Nile isn't very highly rated. But it's one of those movies where you know how it's finally going to end being based on famous histoty. It's how it gets there that makes it fun to watch.

Franchot Tone loves trouble

Another movie that was sitting on my DVR for a few months was one I hadn't heard of before Eddie Muller plucked it out of obscurity for a showing on Noir Alley: a 1948 movie called I Love Trouble, not to be confused with the 1990s movie that has the same title but a completely different plot.

Franchot Tone stars as Stu Bailey, a Los Angeles private eye who one day gets a visit from an up-and-coming politician named Ralph Johnston (Tom Powers). Johnston has a wife, but she's gotten a blackmail letter and subsequently gone missing. So Johnston wants Stu to figure out what it is in Jane's past that would cause somebody to blackmail her, as well as to find who's doing the blackmailing and where Mrs. Johnston is.

That sounds simple enough, but it all gets a lot more complicated. Before the war, Mrs. Johnston was working at nightclubs under the stage name Janie Joy, and that she was originally from Portland, Oregon. One of the nightclubs is run by Keller (Steven Geray), who has a couple of henchmen working for him in the form of Herb (Raymond Burr) and Reno (John Ireland). Keller is suitably odious and dangerous for Bailey, but he's not the only possible suspect in what's going on.

There's also Buffin, who knew Jane before she left Portland, and who is now running a restaurant that's even more out of the way than the one near the climax of 99 River Street. Who on earth would ever visit a place like this to eat. Thankfully, we can deduce fairly quickly that Buffin is in fact not a suspect, but that's only because he gets shot and killed.

And then there are the women. One, Norma (Janet Blair) claims to be Jane's sister, although the camerawork makes it ridiculously obvious that she isn't since her monogram doesn't match Jane's last name. There's also Boots (Adele Jergens), who married into money and is involved somehow, as well as a mysterious third woman I won't go into too much detail about lest I give away too much about the plot, other than to say Bailey figures out someone's trying to frame him.

Well, it's in part that I don't want to reveal plot twists, and partly because I Love Trouble is a fairly confusing movie, with an origin that Eddie Muller very helpfully explained in his intro and outro to the movie. The writer, Roy Huggins (who would go on to a very successful career writing and producing for TV), wanted to hone his writing skill by writing a character that emulated private eye Philip Marlowe very closely. To this. Huggins also added a lot of cynical humor. This humor was tailor made for Glenda Farrell, who plays the part of Bailey's secretary/girl Friday. Unsurprisingly, she runs with it.

I Love Trouble is decidedly lesser noir, but it's definitely watchable.

Underwater with the Maltese Falcon

A lot of the movies I blog about here are recorded off of TCM and available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive. Every now and then, I see one that's coming up on TCM and watch it so I can blog about it because of the upcoming airing. That's the case with Mara Maru, which will be on TCM early tomorrow morning at 4:00 AM (or overnight tonight if you're out in the Pacific time zone).

Errol Flynn plays Gregory Mason, who at the start of the movie is doing some undersea welding on the hull of his boat docked somewhere around Manila or whatever port handles the cargo for Manila. He's called topside because there's some news about his business partner Andy Callahan (Richard Webb). He's drunk in a bar, but has been blabbering on about some alleged treasure.

Andy is in an estranged marriage with Stella (Ruth Roman), who doesn't want to be in the Philippines and wants to return home to Americal Andy and Gregory only being here because they served in World War II together when the Philippines was still a US possession and think that there are still good business opportunities in the now-independent country.

And then Gregory gets summoned to the house of one Brock Benedict, who we know is a Bad Guy in part because of the pompous name like Brock Benedict and in part because the role is played by Raymond Burr before he played Perry Mason on TV and started becoming a good guy. Brock knows that Gregory and Andy were on a PT boat together during the war, and that they survived the boat's sinking by the Japanese. Brock and Andy have learned that one of the passengers they were evacuating was carrying some sort of treasure, the buried treasure that Andy was raving about in the bar. Brock would like Gregory to help him find it.

Not that Gregory has much choice, what with a man like Brock funding the salvage operation. It doesn't help that Andy gets killed with the murder carried out in such a way as to frame Gregory. Stella decides she's going to stay behind to get her share of the buried treasure, although it wouldn't be stupid to wonder whether or not she and Gregory are going to fall in love by the end of the story and whether that emotion is sincere on the part of either or the both of them.

Of course, with Andy dead, Gregory is the only one who knows the precise location of that PT boat's sinking. He also has the good sense to realize that Brock means no good, and is planning to double-cross Gregory once the location of the PT boat is revealed. So Gregory decides he's going to give a false location at first to see how Brock and Stella will respond. Eventually they get to the real location, and it turns out that there actually is a treasure. But who will get away with it? And will anybody get away considering that there's a typhoon approaching?

While I was watching Mara Maru, I couldn't help but think of The Maltese Falcon, since the broad idea between the two stories has a lot in common. Not that this is anywhere near the Humphrey Bogart movie. It was made right near the end of Errol Flynn's time at Warner Bros., and he had aged quite a bit over the previous few years. A lot of people consider it one of Flynn's worst movies from his Warner Bros. days (some of his final movies might well be much worse), although to be honest, I didn't think it was anywhere near that bad. It's formulaic and by-the-numbers with an absolutely silly ending, but none of that is Flynn's fault. There's a lot better with Flynn out there, but if you want to be entertained for an hour and a half, you'll get that from Mara Maru.

Mara Maru does seem to have received a DVD release from the Warner Archive, but for whatever reason it's only showing up at Amazon but not the TCM Shop.

Adventures of Don Juan

I see that The Adventures of Don Juan is on TV tomorrow morning at 9:00 AM on TCM. I recorded it the previous time it was on, so I recently sat down to watch it and do a post for tomorrow's airing.

Errol Flynn plays Don Juan de Maraña, the famous Spanish lover of legend. In this telling of the tale, Don Juan starts off in England in the later years of Elizabeth I's rule. He's seducing a lovely young Englishwoman, which in and of itself wouldn't be a big deal, except that she's engaged to be married to some Spanish nobleman, who finds the two in her chambers, forcing Don Juan to make a hasty retreat.

The English understandably don't want him any more, so the ambassador, Don José de Polan (Robert Warwick), who is a friend of Don Juan's, comes to his aid. Don José writes a letter of recommendation to the monarch, Philip III (Romney Brent) and his wife Queen Margaret (Viveca Lindfors), to get Don Juan a job in Spain and possibly get back in people's good graces.

Don Juan and his sidekick Leporello (Alan Hale) return to a country that's got quite a bit of intrigue, although he does not yet realize it. Philip has grown weak and, while Margaret is trying to advise him, she's a woman and the real power behind the throne is the Duke de Lorca (Robert Douglas). He's trying to consolidate his power, and when Polan is set to come back to Spain, Lorca has his second-in-command Alvares (Raymond Burr) kidnap Polan and torture him for information.

Don Juan has a job as a fencing instructor, which brings him into relatively close contact with the Queen; Don Juan finds himself falling in love with her although he realizes he can never have her so he needs to try to keep his feelings for her a secret. But along the way, he discovers Lorca's plot, while Lorca, discovering Don Juan's dalliances since he's returned to Spain, decides that now is the time to strike, arresting Don Juan and making the king little more than a figurehead. But you know Don Juan is going to escape....

Watching The Adventures of Don Juan, I couldn't help but think of Errol Flynn's earlier movie, The Adventures of Robin Hood. Apparently Warner Bros. first came up with the idea for another Don Juan not long after Robin Hood. But plans fell through a couple of times before it finally got off the ground at the end of 1947 (apparently, in part, because Robin Hood had had a successful re-release).

Flynn tries, but unfortunately at times he really looks like he's aged the nine years since Robin Hood, and then some, with Hale having aged even more. For the most part, however, the movie is a reasonable success, if not as grand as Robin Hood. You'll be entertained, but the movie probably could have been quite a bit better.

The Adventures of Don Juan received multiple DVD releases, but it seems to be out of print. It is, however, available on Prime Video if you do the streaming thing.

Mayors Go Wild

While making the 1935 movie Call of the Wild, Clark Gable had an affair with his co-star, Loretta Young, that resulted in her getting knocked up, going off in private for several months to have the child, and "adopting" the child. Fifteen years later, the two stars would be reunited for the movie Key to the City.

Young plays Clarissa Standish, the mayor of Wenonah, ME, one of those medium-sized towns that populated Hollywood movies and which there seem to be too many of compared to the US population as a whole. She's in San Francicso with a whole bunch of other mayors from similarly made-up medium-sized towns for a convention. (The US Conference of Mayors claims to represent 1400 mayors of cities with populations of at least 30,000; I don't know how many cities of that size there were back in 1950 when Key to the City was released.). Mayor Standish is there presumably to look into the latest in fire trucks of something. But a lot of the mayors seem to be there more to schmooze and party.

One of the mayors in the latter category is Steve Fisk (that's Clark Gable if you couldn't tell), mayor of Puget City, CA. He was a longshoreman and worked his way up to mayor. Having gotten into politics this way, he's not as secure in his position as somebody like Clarissa who is the niece of a federal judge (Lewis Stone). As for Steve, he's there with his fire chief(? -- why would the fire chief be there?) Duggan (Frank Morgan in his final movie; this one was released after he died).

Steve and Clarissa meet and it's love at first sight, although there are going to be complications along the way. A bunch of the mayors go to a nightclub where the star attraction is the dancer Sheila (Marilyn Maxwell). Steve unintentionally starts a riot that results in a bunch of people getting hauled into the police department, where Sgt. Hogan (James Gleason) tries to keep the mayors' predicament from becoming public.

Of course, things do go public for both Fisk and Standish. It's a bigger problem for Fisk, since he's got strong political opposition back in Puget City, where Taggart (Raymond Burr) is trying to get some sort of housing development nixed in the short term so that he can get his contractors the contract to build it, or something like that. By this time, Clarissa has agreed to marry Steve, so she follows him to Puget City where he tries to salvage his political career.

Key to the City is one of those many post-World War II movies made at MGM which seem to have gone wrong somehow. I don't know if it's just that they didn't change with the times quickly enough or whether they were more concerned with the Freed Unit musicals, but increasingly when I watch MGM's A movies from this period they all seem to have something not quite right about them. In this case, Key to the City really feels like a movie that would/should have been made before the war. A decade later, however, and everything feels perfunctory and sterile. The movie also feels like it's got some sort of bad plot hole that made what's supposed to be a farce ending tediously unfunny for me.

Still, Key to the City is filled with competent performances by aging character actors who try their best in the supporting roles, only to be brought down by a subpar script. It's available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive collection, so you can judge for yourself.

Desperate

This past weekend's Noir Alley selection was one I hadn't seen before: Desperate. It's on one of the Warner Film Noir box sets, so I watched it on Sunday.

Steve Brodie plays Steve Randall, a trucker who is recently married to Anne (Audrey Long); it's recent enough, in fact, the the two are planning to ceelbrate their four-month wedding anniversary. Just before they can begin to celebrate, however, Steve gets a phone call from a man who says that he needs a trucker pronto that night and that there's pretty good money in it. (Well, $50 was a lot more in 1947 than it is today.) Steve isn't so certain, but Anne says go ahead.

Steve shouldn't have. The caller was representing Walt Radak (Raymond Burr), who is looking to transport a bunch of stolen furs. Steve wants no part in this, but the truck is already at the warehouse; there are more of Radak's gang than just the one poor Steve; and Radak's men have guns anyway. When a cop approaches, Steve tries to get the cop's attention by flashing his headlights, which is another mistake because it only serves to enrage Walt's men. Worse for Steve, Walt's kid brother shoots the cop and gets arrested in the incident, which means the chair for the brother.

Walt gives Steve an ultimatum: take the fall for the whole thing, or else. Steve doesn't like either option, but Walt is planning to send a man to pick up Anne and hold her hostage, which would give Steve even less of an option. So he takes his first chance to escape and tells Anne to get to the train station and they'll head west together.

Thankfully, Anne has an aunt an uncle who own a farm up in Minnesota, and that would be a good place for the young couple on the run to hide out for a while. Or, it would have been if it weren't for the fact that Walt has hired a private detective to find Steve and Anne. Where the detective goes, Walt can't be far behind....

Eddie Muller introduced Desperate saying that it has plot holes you can drive a truck through, and although I'd tend to agree with that assessment, it's still an entertaining movie. You can't help but think Steve should have told Anne to go to the police instead of the train station, and he could have tried to plead his case right then and there with Walt not able to get at Anne. The resolution of the plot also strains credulity.

Still, the movie is an enjoyable watch, and looks nice thanks to good black-and-white cinematography and direction by Anthony Mann early in his career. I'm not certain I'd want to spend the money for a standalone Warner Archive disk, but I'm glad to see the movie is part of a box set.

Crime of Passion

I mentioned a while back that I had DVRed Crime of Passion when it showed up on Noir Alley back in the spring, but didn't do a full-length blog post because it was out of print on DVD. Except that it was scheduled for a DVD release on September 5, which is of course yesterday. For some reason, both the TCM Shop and Amazon are listing the DVD as scheduled for a release yesterday, but either on backorder (TCM Shop) or temporarily out of stock (Amazon). Having said that, Amazon is currently offering it via streaming video.

Stanwyck plays Kathy Ferguson, who at the start of the movie is a women's advice columnist at a San Francisco newspaper, single and proud of her career. This even though she writes sappy crap. San Francisco is in the news because a female murder suspect from Los Angeles has fled there, and the LA police send a pair of cops up to find the suspect and bring her back to justice in Los Angeles. It's because of this that Kathy meets Bill (Sterling Hayden) and his partner Charlie (Royal Dano).

Both of the cops are dismissive of Kathy, Charlie more so, but Kathy apparently begins to feel some sort of lust for Bill. She was going to take a better job in New York, but she suddenly decides to drop everything and go down to Los Angeles to marry Bill! Not only this, but she's going to become a housewife and give up the columnist gig! It's never really made clear why Kathy does something so out of character. Maybe her biological clock was ticking, although Stanwyck in real life was pushing 50 by the time she made the movie.

Back to Kathy's idiot motivation, she soon realizes she's done something incredibly stupid, since she doesn't care for the gossipy wives, and the men don't respect her intellect. Eventually Kathy gets so fed up with it that she decides she's going to help her husband's career by getting to know the Popes. Tony (Raymond Burr) is Bill's boss, married to Alice (Fay Wray). If she can do this, she can possibly put a good word in for Bill and get him a promotion. So she starts stalking Mrs. Pope and eventually causes an accident.

Mr. Pope sees right through this, asking Kathy what she was doing over there since it was way out of the way for her. But in a movie where several of the main characters have screwed up motivations, he's willing to succumb to her attempts to seduce him! To be fair, Mrs. Pope has been on the verge of a nervous breakdown, hoping that hubby would retire so she doesn't have to worry about him. And if he does retire, well there's a great career opportunity for Bill. And if Mr. Pope passes Bill by? Well hell hath no fury like a woman scorned!

Crime of Passion is a movie that I have decidedly mixed feelings about. The movie is really only partly a noir, being at the end of the noir cycle; the other part is more of a soap opera as you could easily see a Joan Crawford character doing many of the things Barbara Stanwyck's character does. The characters act in ways that are almost ludicrous at times, leading me to laugh at times when that most likely wasn't the intent of the movie.

Stanwyck does the best she can with the material. Burr does fairly well; he was still a heavy at the time as it was still another few months before Perry Mason would premiere on TV. But his character suddenly finds his conscience again, making for a rapid volte-face in yet another plot veer. Sterling Hayden doesn't have to do much other than be sturdy, something which was easy for him to do.

All in all, Crime of Passion is not without interest, but is another of those movies that would probably be better in a box set.

Raymond Burr, 1917-1993

Raymond Burr and Natalie Wood in A Cry in the Night

Today marks the birth anniversary of Raymond Burr, whom I find to be one of the more intriguing heavies of the 1940s and 1950s. I guess that intrigue stems from the fact that my first experience with Burr was as a good guy from TV. I don't remember whether I first saw Burr on reruns of Perry Mason or of Ironside, but in both of those he was the good guy. And of course, in those days it was only a couple of TV channels and little in the way of old movies.

Probably the first time I would have seen Burr as a bad guy was in Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window, where he's the man wheelchair-bound photographer James Stewart sees across the courtyard going in and out at odd hours, giving Stewart the belief that the man has murdered his wife. And while Rear Window is an excellent movie, there are other movies in which Burr gets to be much more entertaining as the bad guy. After all, in Rear Window most of the conversation is among the three main players (Stewart, Grace Kelly, and Thelma Ritter) in Stewart's apartment; we only hear the other stuff as we would hear it across a courtyard in real life.

The picture at the top is from a fun if overheated movie called A Cry in the Night, in which mama's boy Burr kidnaps Natalie Wood, not realizing she's the daughter of a police officer who is going to go nuts trying to find his daughter. Burr is super-creepy here.

In Pitfall, Burr plays a man who was trying to put the moves on a woman whom Dick Powell gets involved with as part of an insurance fraud case. Burr, needless to say, is quite unhappy about this and proceeds to make everybody's life hell.

And then there's Red Light, in which future TV good guy Burr gets fellow future TV good guy Harry Morgan to kill the brother of Burr's former boss, a boss (George Raft) who sent Burr to prison on an embezzlement charge. Burr, of course, has the perfect alibi for the murder: he's still in prison. There are some serious plot holes, but the movie as a whole is entertaining.

Which movie has your favorite Raymond Burr heavy?

I remember the video game

Dick Powell, who is being honored by TCM in Summer Under the Stars today, spent the first half of his career making light musicals, and much of the second half of his career making rather darker movies. One of those darker movies that I've never blogged about before is Pitfall, which comes on at 4:15 PM.

Powell plays John Forbes, who at the start of the movie is enjoying his solid middle-class life in a suburban house with his wife Sue (Jane Wyatt) and son Tommy, eating one of those typical middle-class breakfasts from the middle of the last century that show up on film and TV. Sue drives John to the insurance agency where he's been working the same job for years, and reminds John of that night's dinner date, which has been with the same people they've been having dinner with once a week every week for years. It's a solid, but boring life.

In fact, John makes such an obviously overloud complaint about his boring lot in life that you know his life is going to become much less boring in a reel or two. That excitement starts off when John gets to his office and finds private investigator MacDonald (Raymond Burr) in his office. This was in the stage of Burr's career whne he was playing the bad guys, and even just in that first scene in Forbes' office, we can see that his character is rather creepy. MacDonald had been hired by the insurance company to find out what a convicted embezzler named Smiley did with the money, since Forbes' firm is having ot pay out on the insurance claim to the company from which Smiley had embezzled. It turns out that Smiley had bought a bunch of gifts for his girlfriend Mona (Lizabeth Scott), so the insurance company is going to try to repossess those items. MacDonald has done his job; now it's time for Forbes to take over.

So Forbes heads over to Mona's place. Unsurprisingly, Mona doesn't like him at first -- would you like a guy whose job it was to repossess your stuff? Mona realizes, though, as the rest of us do, that Forbes' job is kind of boring, so she's determined to make it more exciting, fur by taking him out for a drink, and then the next day taking him for a ride on the boat that was one of the things Smiley had bought for her. Forbes is beginning to spend entirely too much time with Mona, and predictably, he's beginning to fall for her. He's about to get that excitement he wanted in life, but who says it's a good thing?

Obivously, Forbes' relationship with Mona is a problem because of the fact that he's already married. But there's another problem: the ever-creepy MacDonald. MacDonald had also fallen for Mona when he was investigated her, and he's not about to have anybody else muscle in on his relationship with Mona. Never mind what Mona wants, which is certainly not a relationship with MacDonald. Heck, she's even willing to break off the relationship with Forbes when she finds out that he's married. But MacDonald is still harassing her, and Forbes is the only person who can do anything about it....

Pitfall is quite enjoyable. Dick Powell is eminently capable as the basically good guy who screws up big time, drawing on his experience making all those musicals to play the good father, and then the experience from those darker movies when he's trying to cover up his mistakes. Lizabeth Scott is more than suitable as the femme fatale; it's easy to see why both Forbes and MacDonald would fall for her. Once again, though, it's Raymond Burr as the heavy who's the most entertaining to watch. He's a manipulative bastard here, and boy is Raymond Burr making his character look like a creepy jerk.

Pitfall did get a DVD release a couple of years ago, in that it's available at Amazon, but it seems to be out of print as it's not available at the TCM Shop.

Count Three and Pray

I probably should have done a full-length post about Count Three and Pray yesterday, since it's coming on fairly early this afternoon at 2:00 PM on TCM, and it doesn't seem to be available on DVD. That, and TCM doesn't list it as coming up on the schedule after tomorrow at any time through August. But with any luck you can catch this afternoon's airing.

Ven Heflin stars as Luke Fargo, whom we see at the beginning of the film returning to his southern hometown fresh from having fought the Civil War. However, he fought on the Northern side, which is going to be a problem with any number of the townsfolk, especially shop owner Yancey Huggins (Raymond Burr). Before the War, Luke led a dissolute life, romancing the girls such as young Georgina Derais (Allison Hayes), and carousing. But something happened in the war: he was at the battle of Vicksburg, where he saw a chaplain die. He kept the man's bible and, disturbed by the horrors he saw at Vickburg, vowed that he was going to become a man of peace, spreading God's word. In fact, he's returned to his hometown to rebuild the church, which was burned down during the war.

However, there are several problems. First among these is that somebody else hs already take up residence in the parsonage, an orphan girl named Lissy (Joanne Woodward), who was obviously driven out of her own home -- wherever that was -- and took up residence here because nobody else was. It just wouldn't do for an unmarried preacher to be sharing the parsonage with an underage woman who isn't a maid or anything like that. Why, they're practically living in sin! And Lissy has absolutely no intentions of moving out.

There's also the problem of actually building the church. Luke just doesn't have the funds to do it, and doesn't have a flock who can help donate the funds or the labor. So in a scene you'd be able to see coming a mile away, Luke winds up betting on his horse against the owner of the local lumber mill -- something that Luke would have done back in his former high-living life, but just shouldn't be done by a preacher. It's the sort of trope we already saw in Friendly Persuasion when I blogged about it back in February 2012, but in fact Count Three and Pray came out a year before Friendly Persuasion.

The next complication is that although Luke believes he's gotten the calling, in fact he doesn't have much ability to be a preacher, being a lousy public speaker and not really knowing what to talk about even if he did have the gift of delivering a speech well. The other preacher thing he doesn't have is the ordination. Nowadays this theoretically wouldn't be a problem, what with all those independent megachurches out there. But back in the 19th century actually having been ordained would have been a pretty big deal for a lot of townsfolk.

And some of those townsfolk, especially the aforementioned Yancy, would like nothing better than to see Luke fail in his attempt to become a preacher and bring goodness and love to this town. Finding out that he hasn't been ordained could just get his growing flock to abandon him, but worse is that relationship with Lissy, who is still living with him.

You can probably guess where everything winds up going, just as you could see the horse racing scene coming. Count Three and Pray is nothing earth-shatteringly original, instead being an amiable little picture that meanders its way to a conclusion that satisfies the strictures of the Production Code, as well as being reasonable if unspectacular for the viewers. Instead, Count Three and Pray should be judged on the basis of the performances in it, which are all more than good enough, if not the best work that any of the principals put on screen. Van Heflin, who was never glamorous, is however always good as a conflicted man like he is here. Joanne Woodward is too old for her role, but does well enough with it. Raymond Burr was still about a year away from starting Perry Mason, and was still playing a lot of bad guys. This one isn't quite as bad as some of his others, but he's still entertainingly hissable.

All in all, Count Three and Pray is a nice, well-made little movie. It's unprepossessing and, while it will never wind up in any list of the greatest films made, it's solid enough and succeeds at what it sets out to do. It's more than worth a watch.

No, not the Madonna song

Some months back, or maybe it was a year or two or more, I had the chance to watch a TCM airing of Borderline. The fact that I don't even have a vague idea of how far ago it was probably says something not so good about the quality of the movie (and it will certainly say something bout the quality of this post). But, the movie is on again tomorrow morning at 7:00 AM, so you've got a chance to see it and judge for yourself.

Claire Trevor plays Madeleine, a lady police officer in the LAPD. She's been tapped for special duty, which is to go undercover to help bring down a drug smuggler. However, that smuggler's operations go into Mexico, which is why this is special duty. Madeleine is being asked to play a nightclub girl in one of those little Mexican joints to try to get better acquainted with Richie (Raymond Burr), who runs the whole shebang. So she heads to Mexico and, while she can't quite get close to Richie at first, she gets to one of his underlings, which is a good place to start. At least until Richie breaks in on her snooping around the underling's room. That might look bad for her, but suddenly, there's a complication: in barges Johnny (Fred MacMurray). He's working for another drug smuggling operation, and gets Madeleine away from Richie.

This is where the story really begins to get complicated. Johnny is actually not working for that other smuggler. He, too, has gone undercover, but he's a federal narcotics officer. And the wonderfully competent government has totally failed to co-ordinate operations among various police departments, to the point that when Johnny takes Madeleine away from Richie's place, he has no idea that she's really working with the police. Madeleine, for her part, understandably has no idea that Johnny is working for the feds, not having been told by her superior officers. And it's also completely understandable that neither of them should tell each other of their true identities, since each of them has perfectly good reason to believe the other one is part of the criminal organization.

It's a good premise, but one that never lives up to its promise. I'm not quite certain why. There are some dark elements to the movie as well as some opportunity for humor, and Fred MacMurray was good at playing in both genres. Claire Trevor could also certainly play hard-boiled dames, which is something she's good at doing, too. Raymond Burr was also in his element here, as he played a whole bunch of heavies before taking on the role of Perry Mason on TV. And yet, the whole movie comes across as not quite sure what it's trying to do, being a bit of a slog at times, rather than a simply entertaining ride. Borderline isn't terrible, mind you; it's just not nearly as good as it could be. See it once, and then probably forget it.

Borderline has apparently received several releases to DVD, at least according to Amazon. I'm not certain whether any of them are still in print, though.

A Cry in the Night

I could swear that I'd already blogged about A Cry in the Night before. A search of the blog, however, claims that I haven't. It's airing tomorrow morning at 7:30 AM on TCM, so now would be a good time to do a post on the movie.

The film starts off late one evening on a Lovers' Lane type place where all the teens and other people who want to make out in secret congregate -- nobody's going to let out the other people's secrets, lest their own secrets be relesaed, too. Among the neckers is young Liz Taggart (Nathalie Wood), daughter of police detective Dan (Edmond O'Brien). She's here with her fiancé Owen (Richard Anderson), but hasn't had the courage to tell Daddy about Owen yet; she knows he won't approve. But that's soon about to become the least of her problems. Hanging around all those couples is Harold Loftus (Raymond Burr), engaging in some voyeurism. His actions are heard but not seen, and Owen gets out of the car to figure out what's going on. At this point, Harold hits Owen over the head, knocking Owen out. Harold then takes Owen's car, with Liz in it! The other lovebirds flee, not wanting to be caught making out or accused over what happened to Owen.

Eventually, Owen is found by a cop, and brought to the station, where the night captain on duty (Brian Donlevy) thinks Owen is drunk. The doctor diagnoses a concussion and some short-term memory loss, and when all that clears up, Owen is able to tell them what happened, and how the police must have a kidnapping case on their hands. Worse than that, it's the kidnapping of a member of a cop family. Worst of all, it's the daughter of a cop who's going to go through the roof when he discovers that his precious little daughter was making out on a lovers' lane with this Owen guy; kidnapping only makes it that much worse.

Ah, but back to Harold the kidnapper. He's the much more fun character than Detective Taggart. He's taken Liz to his hideaway, an abandoned foreman's shack in a disused brickworks. He's not just a kidnapper; he's a psycopath, too. Apparently, he's never been with a woman before, as he has no idea of how to treat Liz. At times he's almost trying to romance her; when she undesrtandably refuses his romances, he goes ballistic. Harold is the way he is in part because of his mother Mabel (Carol Veazie). He lives with her and supports her, and when he doesn't come home that night, having kidnapped Liz (of course, Mom knows nothing about this), Mabel calls the police! The police aren't that stupid, and eventually are able to put two and two together and figure out that perhaps they and Mabel are interested in the same person.

If A Cry in the Night has one problem, it's that it was made during the era when the Production Code was still being enforced; that means that there's really only one possible outcome. The brickworks, however, provides a nice backdrop for the eventual climax, somewha reminiscent in terms of industrial imagery of the refinery in White Heat or the industrial-sized gas tanks in Odds Against Tomorrow. Burr had played psycho bad guys in several earlier movies, and is pretty good here. Nathalie Wood's purpose in the movie is little more than the damsel in distress, and she pulls off that role well enough. O'Brien is OK if a bit too strident as the angry cop, while Carol Veazie gets the fun stuff as the mother who's given her son issues. A Cry in the Night is another of the many movies that's nothing particularly groundbreaking, but is quite enjoyable.

As far as I know A Cry in the Night has not received a DVD release, so you're going to have to catch the TCM showing.

When good TV characters go bad

There are some actors out there who are generally best remembered for characters they played on the small screen. Two such actors show up together to conspire to commit murder in the 1949 film Red Light, airing tomorrow morning at 6:00 AM on TCM

George Raft is not one of those actors; he's the star of the movie, however. He plays Johnny Torno, who runs a successful trucking company in San Francisco. He's got a brother Jess (Arthur Franz) who is a Catholic priest who spent the last several years serving as an army chaplain in World War II, and winning a medal for his heroic work in a POW camp. The kid brother is finally coming home to a happy reunion with his brother and an assignment to a parish of his own in northern California.

Meanwhile, back at the prison ranch, you've got Perry Mason. Er, not Perry Mason, but Raymond Burr playing Nick Cherney. Nick was a bookkeeper at the Torno trucking company, until he rather foolishly decided to embezzle a substantial amount of money from Torno. Torno sent Nick to prison, and Nick wants revenge. Fortunately he's got a way of exacting revenge while keeping the perfect alibi: his prison comrade, Col. Sherman Potter from the M*A*S*H unit. Er, actually it's Harry Morgan, back in the days when he was going by "Henry" in screen credits, playing fellow prisoner Rocky. Rocky is gonig to get out on parole a few days before Nick, so Nick has Rocky kill Jess while Nick is still in prison.

Rocky shoots the brother to death in his hotel room, but the brother survives long enough for Johnny to get there. Johnny hears his brother's dying words, which is that the answer he seeks can be found in the Bible. Johnny looks through his brother's bible, but can't find the name of the killer written in it anywhere. Johnny figures that Jess must have written it in the hotel room's Gideon Bible -- but that's been taken from the room! Johnny tries to find that bible, and even enlists the help of one of the people who had the room after his brother was killed (Virginia Mayo) in his attempt to find it. Mayo, meanwhile, becomes a bit frightened of the lengths Johnny is willing to go to to gain revenge....

Red Light is one of those lower-budget noirish movies which is actually quite entertaining. Raymond Burr, to be honest, had played several heavies before becoming Perry Mason (most notably the killer in Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window), and is good here as Nick. Harry Morgan, I think, didn't play quite so many heavies, but he's just as good as Burr. George Raft never had much range, but his man looking for revenge character fits into that limited range. The one problem with the movie is that it has any number of plot holes. First off is the question of why Jess is being billeted in a hotel room. He's an army chaplain who has a brother who's thrilled to see him. You'd think that either the military would have room at a army base for him; he'd stay at the rectory of the bishop's cathedral; or he'd stay at his brother's apartment. More importantly, you'd wonder why Jess didn't write anything in his own Bible. It would have been just as easy for him to get his personal bible from his suitcase after being shot as it would have been for him to get the Gideon Bible from the desk drawer. (And how big were Gideon Bibles back then? The last time I was in a hotel room that had a Gideon Bible, the thing was surprisingly small and wouldn't have had enough room to write much of anything.)

Despite its plot flaws, Red Light is a fun movie. Sadly, it doesn't seem to have gotten a DVD release, so you're going to have to watch the TCM showing.

Desire in the Dust

If you want to see a very overboiled potboiler, you could do far worse than to watch the southern family melodrama Desire in the Dust, which is airing tomorrow morning at 9:00 AM on the Fox Movie Channel. (Even the title sounds fun.)

The movie starts off with a bunch of people waiting for the next train into town, which we know means that Somebody Important to the Plot is about to get off. That's followed by a cut to a shot of the town's doyenne, Mrs. Marquand (Joan Bennett), celebrating her son's birthday, only for the camera to pull out and reveal the birthday is at his grave: the kid has been dead for six years and that death has pushed Mrs. Marquand off her rocker. These two items are going to come together, and thankfully, the movie does this for us fairly quickly. The man getting off the train is Lonnie (Ken Scott), who has just spent six years in the state penitentiary for the vehicular homicide conviction of the little boy.

But there's so much more going on. Lonnie is the son of a sharecropper, and it turns out that the sharecropper family has many more connections to the noble Marquands. Lonnie, before going to prison, had a thing of Melinda (Martha Hyer), the daugher of the Marquand family. And Peter, the other Marquand brother, has fallen in love with one of the sharecropper girls, a fact that irritates the father, Col. Ben, to no end. The Colonel is played by Perry Mason. Er, make that Raymond Burr; watching Burr ham it up as he tries to play a southern patriarch is part of the fun of this movie. Our Colonel is a domineering man, to put it mildly. He's got ambitions to hold higher elective office, and when his son died six years earlier, he realized the circumstances behind it could be problematic for him. But we're getting ahead of ourselves. We're not supposed to know the details of this; all we know at first is that the editor of the local newspaper suspects something.

Anyhow, Lonnie had been in love with Melinda, and when he gets out, he still wants her all for himself. The only problem is that in the meantime, she got married to Dr. Ned (Brett Halsey), the doctor looking after Mrs. Marquand. It's good for the Colonel, who wants Melinda married to somebody respectable, but bad for Lonnie, who is determined to get Melinda back all for himself. She'll go with anybody she can, it seems, tempting Lonnie by wearing a series of dresses that do things to her breasts that should violate all of the laws of physics, and then not paying off. And then there's Daddy's relationship with her, which at times seems to imply that there's been some incest going on!

As I said at the beginning, Desire in the Dust is a potboiler that includes a little of everything as it goes way over the top. I haven't even include The Corrupt Sheriff or the shootings, the trope of The Reporter Willing to Break the Law to Prove the Truth, or the Colonel's treatment of his wife and his son Peter. Poor Joan Bennett has fairly little to do other than to provide seeming comic relief by breaking all of the breakable set pieces every time somebody has the nerve to tell her her younger son is actually dead. Until the finale when we know she's finally going to accept the truth, much like Katharine Hepburn in Suddenly Last Summer The Colonel is also still treating Peter like a little boy.

All in all, Desire in the Dust is one of those films that isn't all that good, but is a hell of a lot of fun.