This movie should have been a comedy

Sometimes, a movie gets made where you think it's going to be in one genre, but winds up being something else. Another example of this that I recently watched off my DVR was The First Hundred Years. (That, in and of itself, is a rather odd title for the movie since it doesn't seem to have anything to do with 100 years of, well, whatever.)

Robert Mongtomery plays David Conway. As the movie opens, he shows up at the New York office of theatrical agent Harry Borden (Warren William). He's looking for his wife Lynn (Virginia Bruce), who is not an actress but Harry's second-in-command, and good at what she does. In fact, she's been doing it long enough that she started under her maiden name and still uses that professionally. Not only that, but she makes enough money that the couple can afford a ridiculous Manhattan apartment and fine cars and dresses and whatnot.

This kind of bothers David, who has long felt that he's not paying his fair share into the relationship. He's a nautical engineer, designing yachts. However, the good shipbuilding jobs are not in New York. He's here to tell Lynn he's got a promotion lined up that is going to bring in more money -- $15K a year, which is more than Cary Grant's Mr. Blandings reveals his salary to be a decade later in Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House -- but that the job requires working out of New Bedford, MA. This presents an obvious problem for the late 1930s when the best technology could do was the telephone and there was no good way for couples to have a good relationship working this far apart.

Deep down inside, the two still love each other, but just don't know how to work through the issue, since Lynn still wants to work. Understandable by 2026 standards, although in the late 1930s this would have been seen as a bit scandalous. Further complicating matters is that Lynn, being good at what she does, is prized by Borden. She also signed a five-year contract to work with him just six months earlier, and getting out of that might be problematic. Borden certainly doesn't want her to get out of it, instead actively interfering with the help of his lawyer Walker (Alan Dinehart).

The differences between husband and wife are irreconcilable enough that the two separate, with Borden really intimating that the couple should divorce. Indeed, each of the spouses is seen with another person out to dinner at the same club, with all of them (including Binnie Barnes as David's companion Claudia) going to the other man's apartment for coffee and a nightcap. Lynn is torn between what to do with her husband, and what Borden wants her to do.

And then Lynn's uncle Dawson (Harry Davenport) shows up in New York from where he's going to be leaving on a round-the-world cruise. He doesn't know yet about the marital difficulties, so Lynn and David play at still being happy together. Dawson is no dummy and realizes something is up, and he tries to get everybody to see sense, while Borden is still trying to keep Lynn professionally. (As far as I could tell, he had no romantic designs on Lynn.) This being a 1930s movie, there is a happy ending in a way that would have made sense to 1930s audiences but may annoy audiences of today.

The bigger problem I had with The First Hundred Years wasn't the ending, but the fact that it's taking itself much too seriously. It's trying to be a drama, but the material just doesn't work, and you expect comedy to break out, especially with a lead like Robert Montgomery. Think something like The Awful Truth the previous year, which was about divorce but was nothing but comedy at heart. Montgomery was certainly capable of serious drama, but this script doesn't help him. So overall, The First Hundred Years is more of a historical curiosity that we should look at as a product of what values people in the late 1930s had.

Vol de nuit

A movie that airs fairly rarely on TCM despite being an MGM movie is Night Flight. The movie is based on a novel by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, who is better remembered for The Little Prince but, having been a pilot himself, wrote books about aviation. Part of the reason for the movie' infrequency on TCM is that for decades it was in rights limbo. I only got to see part of it when it first aired a dozen years or so ago, so was thrilled to see it show up again on TCM to be able to record it and do a post here.

The theme, as you can guess, if flying at night, which is commonplace enough today but in the early days of aviation when instruments weren't so good was a much more risky proposition. MGM got the rights to the book and immediately set about coming up with an all-star cast to fill the roles. The beginning of the movie, however, seemingly has nothing to do with aviation as a mother is worried sick at a hospital in Rio de Janerio in Brazil where her kid is sick with a case of infantile paralysis (polio). However, the doctors find out that there's no serum anywhere in Rio, or in fact anywhere this side of the Andes, which means that the serum is going to have to be flown in special delivery from Santiago. And as luck would have it, the Trans-Andean European Air Mail company, run by Rivière (John Barrymore) is just about to institute flights by night to get mail -- and small packages like polio serum -- out faster. Tasked with flying from Santiago over the Andes to Buenos Aires, where another plain picks up everything from points west and south, is Pellerin (Robert Mongtomery).

Rivière is, unsurprisingly, a strict taskmaster. In his defense, that's in part because he has an exceedingly tight schedule to meet. Everything has to get in to Buenos Aires in time for the plane to Recife in northeastern Brazil to take off and meet a French cargo ship there, as that's the closest main port in South America to Africa, from where planes take off to Africa toward Europe. Although Rivière runs the company, he's not the President, and is up against the President and others who don't want to take the risk that planes might not be able to make it through the night to Buenos Aires.

Pellerin isn't the only pilot whose flight is chronicled. There's also Fabian (Clark Gable), who is flying out of Punta Arenas in the south of Chile together with a radio operator. Their flight takes them over the southernmost part of the Andes before getting to the ports on the Atlantic side of Argentina and making their way up the coast. However, this flight finds itself getting into weather issues that push them off course and threaten the make the flight too long for how much fuel they have on board. And, in addition to having to contend with the company president, Rivière also has to deal with Fabian's terrified wife (Helen Hayes), who just knows something is wrong.

Since the beginning of the movie dealt with a sick child in Rio de Janeiro, and all the planes land in Buenos Aires, there's also going to be a flight from Buenos Aires to Rio. That pilot is a Brazilian, played by William Gargan, and like Fabian, he's got a worried wife (played by Myrna Loy). Rounding out the cast is Robineau (Lionel Barrymore), a former police inspector now dishing out discipline for Rivière.

All of the subplots in Night Flight are reasonably well handled, and yet for some reason the movie feels a bit less than the sum of its parts. I guess that's in part because there are so many stars and a relatively brief running time of under 90 minutes. There's not quite enough time for the characters to be well-developed, particularly Robert Montgomery's pilot. Still, Night Flight is a worthwhile watch with MGM bringing all the production values it could to what for the viewing public of 1933 would have been a novel topic.

Piccadilly Jim (1936)

Another of the movies that I recorded off of TCM because it sounded interesting was the 1936 Robert Montgomery vehicle Piccadilly Jim. Having watched it, now I can do a review on it for you.

Montgomery plays the title character, James Crocker Jr. He's an American-born artist living in London and making a living as a cartoonist doing caricatures for the London newspapers. He's apparently able to make a pretty darn good living at it, too, since he's got a butler in Bayliss (Eric Blore), and is also able to support his father, James Sr. (Frank Morgan). Dad is an actor, or was an actor at some point in the past; he doesn't seem to have worked in quite some time and everybody calls him a ham.

However, Dad has met a nice American woman, Eugenia Willis (Billie Burke), a widow traveling with her sister Nesta Pett (Cora Witherspoon) and Nesta's husband Herbert (Grant Mitchell). Dad has fallen in love with Eugenia, but unsurprisingly Nesta has the good sense to wonder if the elder Crocker isn't the sort of smooth operator looking for a mark to marry and live off the wife's money. (Haven't the Petts heard of a pre-nup?) Dad tells them his son is a successful artist, so the Petts would like to meet him which will also serve as a way to judge whether Dad is in fact suitable for Eugenia.

Meanwhile, Jim Jr. goes out for a night on the town, which I'd guess would also serve as one of the ways he finds inspiration for the people he wants to caricature. But this time, while out, he meets a lovely young woman named Ann (Madge Evans). He falls in love with her, but she's not so quick to return the feelings. That's because there are several things he doesn't know about Ann, with the first of them bein that she is in fact engaged to another man, Lord Priory (Ralph Forbes). Jim Jr. keeps pursuing Ann, into the next day, with the result that he winds up tipsy at his meeting with the Petts, and they rightly reject the Crockers. This especially after finding out that young Jim is just a sketch artist.

The Petts go off to the Riviera, and this is the other thing we learn about Ann. She's actually the niece of Nesta and Eugenia, but Jim Jr. still doesn't know this. He, having been rebuffed by the Petts, decides to create a new comic strip lampooning the sort of rich Americans abroad that the Petts are, and this cartoon, From Rags to Riches, becomes a huge hit. Eventually, the Petts return from the Continent, and find that they're the butt of all jokes since everybody in London recognizes them as the source material for the comic strip. However, they -- and most importantly Ann -- are unaware of who the real artist behind the strip is.

Piccadilly Jim is based on a story by P.G. Wodehouse that was written 20 years before this movie adaptation. In fact, this isn't the first adaptation, as there was a silent version. There has since been, about 20 years ago, another adaptation of the material. The 1936 version of Piccadilly Jim works well, but it feels closer a lot like a programmer in tone. MGM had Robert Montgomery available, and had the rights to the story (they had planned to turn the material into a musical), and so they put two and two together.

Robert Montgomery is every bit the professional here, as is the rest of the cast. They all put in solid performances that make for a film that works, although at the end of the movie's running time it's not something that's spectacularly memorable. But when the studios were churning out as many movies as they were, "workmanlike" was part of the point. And even workmanlike work from the big studios made for a reasonably good movie.

To be honest, there's not much blushing

Looking through the movies on my DVR, and seeing that the 1930s have been slightly overlooked in the last few weeks of posts, I decided to watch Our Blushing Brides, an early Joan Crawford talkie.

If the title sounds familiar, it's because the movie is the third in a sort of unofficial trilogy with two silents also starring Crawford (and, in fact, a couple of the other female stars), Our Dancing Daughters and Our Modern Maidens. I know I've seen at least one, if not both, of those, but don't quite remember them well enough to do a full post on; in any case the women don't actually play the same characters in the three movies. Here, Crawford stars as Jerry, working in a New York department store together with her friends Connie (Anita Page) and Frankie (Dorothy Sebastian). The three also share an apartment in order to cut down on costs.

All three are single working girls, but this being 1930, it's the era when most women would be expected to stop doing work out in the wider world certainly once they became mothers, and often simply once they got married. Connie and Frankie seem to be OK doing what it takes to snag a richer man so they can live a life of more leisure, while Jerry wants virtue and not a man pushing her to be a trophy wife. Meanwhile, she's already getting approached at the department store by co-worker Joe Munsey (Edward Brophy) in a recurring comic sub-plot. This being 1930, many screen personas of actors in the sound era had not yet been set, but even in 1930, the idea of Edward Brophy as a romantic suitor is somehow rather humorous.

But as with the other two young women, Jerry also has a rich guy interested in her, partly because part of her job is to model dresses, something which implies that she's going to be seen by a lot of fabulously wealthy people, because who else can afford to buy the sort of clothes where you go and watch people model them. For Jerry, however, the rich man isn't one of the guys buying for his girlfriend; it's Tony Jardine (Robert Montgomery), the son of the store's owner. Tony has a kid brother David (Raymond Hackett), who happens to be pursuing Connie. Frankie also gets a rich guy who is interested in her, Martin Sanderson (John Miljan), who comes in looking for $500 worth of fabric. This being John Miljan, alarm bells probably should have gone off for Frankie; as it turns out, he's the mastermind behind gangs working the department store robbery racket, Frankie being totally ignorant of this.

Frankie goes off with Martin, while one evening, Jerry returns home to find a note from Connie telling her to call Connie at a certain phone number. Connie has been given an apartment by David, to live as a kept woman. Connie thinks David is going to marry him, but the second half of the movie turns to melodrama and Jerry learns that David has a girlfriend from the upper crust and is in fact going to marry that girlfriend. Jerry's also had some melodrama of her own with Tony, who has in her view trying to put the moves on her too fast in a fabulous (by the standards of 1930) treehouse.

Our Blushing Brides works best as a time capsule, now that it's well over 90 years old. Since the movie has three women's stories to tell, it has a tendency to veer rather sharply in tone when it goes from one subplot to another. As a result, there's some unintended comedy here. The movie is fairly slow in the first half, for me especially due to the fashion show aspect of it, but those as well as the set designs in general are part of the time capsule feel of the movie. And then there's that one scene where Joan Crawford has to wear a blonde wig and heavy makeup that makes her look ghoulish.

If I'm going to introduce people to early sound movies, there are other things I'd pick well before Our Blushing Brides. But for people who have already seen those other films, Our Blushing Brides is certainly an interesting, if mixed, glimpse into the past.

Lake Around the Lady

I've mentioned the Blind Spot blogathon before, where a blogger picks a dozen well-known movies they've not actually seen before and blogs about them over the course of the year. I haven't participated, largely because I don't know what movies I'm going to be watching over an entire year. But one of the movies that would have been a blind spot for me until now was the 1940s version of Lady in the Lake. I finally recorded it it last time it was on TCM, and since it's going to be on TCM again tomorrow, April 20, at 4:30 PM, I recently watched it in order to do a post on it.

Lady in the Lake is a hard movie to do a synopsis on, largely because the plot is so convoluted, thank you very much Raymond Chandler. Raymond Chandler's detective Phillip Marlowe is played here by Robert Montgomery, at least the few times you see him. We do see Marlowe giving the audience a bit of a prologue right at the top of the film, and then he tells us about how he wrote a story based on a case of a lady who drowned in a lake that may have been suicide, but was more likely murder.

As part of trying to flog the story, Marlowe goes to see Adrienne Fromsett (Audrey Totter), a publisher at a company run by Mr. Kingsby (Leon Ames). However, Adrienne's interest isn't really in Marlowe's story, but about his day job as a private investigator. Kingsby's wife has left him, ostensibly going to Mexico to seek a divorce, with some suggestion that Mrs. Kingsby is going to marry some guy named Lavery. Could Marlowe find out what's really going on?

The first indication that there's a problem comes at Lavery's place when, after a brief conversation in which Lavery insists he knows nothing about what's going on, he asks Marlowe if he has the time, despite there being a mantel clock in the room. This is really just an excuse to punch Marlowe out and pour alcohol on him, making him appear drunk like they do to Cary Grant in North by Northwest. That brings Marlowe into contact with the police, notably Lt. DeGarmot (Lloyd Nolan), who is investigating a bunch of the same people, but for a totally different reason.

Apparently, there really was a lady in a lake, with that lake being on a property owned by none other than Kingsby. There's some thought that the dead body might be the wife of Kingsby's caretaker, and Marlowe gets caught up in a murder investigation alongside the cops, who seem decidedly unhappy to have him on the case as well. Likewise, none of the people being investigated seem happy either. But who killed whom?

Part of the problem with Lady in the Lake is that the movie is pretty convoluted, although at least that's not as severe a problem as with another famous movie filmed from a Chandler book, The Big Sleep, which is notorious for how its plot makes little sense. The much bigger problem is the reason the movie is still so well-known today, and that's its direction. Robert Montgomery came up with the intriguing idea of having the entire movie be told from Marlowe's point of view. And I don't just mean narration here; I mean that for almost the entire movie, it's shot as though we're looking through Marlowe's eyes.

Unfortunately, that doesn't work here, in part because the movie cameras in use in the 1940s weren't really capable of pulling off such a thing. Nowadays, when we have cheap GoPros and similar small camera that can be worn to give off a POV, it might work. And if the technique were being used as a brief diversion, especially if this were for comic effect, it might not be so bad. But 100 minutes of a very slow, clunky camera trying to do POV? Oh heavens no.

Still, Lady in the Lake is another one of those movies you probably need to see for yourself to see just why the movie goes wrong.

Untamed (1929)

A movie that I saw ages ago but never did a blog post on is the Joan Crawford early talkie Untamed. (I did briefly mention it once since there's a completely different movie also called Untamed starring Susan Hayward on which I did a blog post over a decade ago.) It aired on TCM some months back, so I recorded it in order to be able to watch it again and finally do a post on it. I've gotten around to watching that recording, and now you get the review.

The movie starts off with an intertitle, not uncommon for early talkies, informing us that the action is set in South America in the remote valley of Zoro. We then meet one of the main characters, Bingo (Joan Crawford), doing a dance for some of the oil workers in the area, at least for some values of dancing since this is after all Joan Crawford. Now you might think that Bingo is some sort of exotic native, but in fact she's really the daughter of an oil prospector Dowling who is presumably a widower, otherwise, Bingo would be back in the US with Mom. In any case Bingo's dance is exotic enough that all the men want to dance with her, including some locals who put the moves on her in a way she doesn't appreciate.

Back at home base, Dowling meets a couple of old friends he invited to help him with the search for oil, Ben (Ernest Torrence) and Howard (Holmes Herbert). While the three of them are in some sort of makeshift office, one of the locals who had propositioned Bingo at the dance shows up, telling Dowling that he's going to be pursuing Bingo. Yeah, right. Dad isn't about to have any of that, but instead of just saying no and waiting to escalate only if the guy tries again, he decides to use force to get the guy to back off. When Dad starts hitting the guy with his cane, the guy pulls out a knife and stabs Dowling fatally.

Ben and Howard aren't certain what to do with Bingo. They had been planning on going with Dowling farther into the wilderness in their search for oil, but with old man Dowling dead they don't know if taking Bingo with them is such a good idea. And besides, Bingo is technically rich since the oil wells were successful and she's inheriting the company. With that in mind, the two men decide they should take Bingo back to New York and make a woman out of her so that she can find a "suitable" man from among the smart rich set, even though she's never been around such men.

On the boat back to New York, Bingo bumps into Andy McAllister (Robert Montgomery). They've never met before, but the two immediately fall for each other, even though Andy seems to have a girlfriend with him on the trip. (There's one particularly humorous scene in which Bingo and the other woman nearly come to blows.) There's a problem, however, in that Andy doesn't really have wealth; he's the sort of guy in these pre-World War II movies who's trying to work his way up the ladder and you can see him getting an offer for a "job in South America" that may speed up proposing to his girlfriend.

When they get to New York, Ben tries to get Bingo to realize that Andy can't really provide for Bingo the way that a stereotypical man should be able to provide for a wife, and nobody wants Andy to be living off Bingo's money. So they separate for a while, but that's not going to cool their ardor. Things really get creepy when we learn that Howard also has some sort of feelings for Bingo and wants to take on Bingo as his duty to the late Mr. Dowling.

Untamed starts off in the vein of being crazy fun, with Hollywood's highly inaccurate look at Latin America while never getting off the back lot. The characters seem thoroughly unrealistic, but in a way that's strange and not tedious. Once everybody gets back to New York, the movie becomes more conventional, but it's never uninteresting because of its provenance as an early talkie.

Untamed got a DVD release from the Warner Archive MOD scheme many years ago, even before I posted about the Susan Hayward Untamed. In fact, the Susan Hayward movie eventually got a DVD release from Fox's MOD scheme not long after I posted my review on it back in 2013. So if you want to see the Crawford movie, pay attention to what movie you're getting.

One month before It Happened One Night

One of the movies that's been sitting on my DVR for a long time was a little MGM movie I'd never heard of but sounded interesting, Fugitive Lovers. Recently, I sat down to watch it.

One of the fugitives is Letty, played by Madge Evans. She's a chorus girl in New York, and she's got gangster Legs Caffey (Nat Pendleton) all hot and bothered by her. The only thing is, she doesn't like the attention she's getting from Legs; presumably she'd rather get attention from somebody more respectable. So when he suggests the two of them go to Atlantic City to get married, she decides not to go to Atlantic City, but to get out of town in a different direction by hopping a cross-country bus headed for Los Angeles. Unfortunately for her Legs finds out what's going on and gets on the bus with her, claiming she's his wife.

The bus travels west, passing through a town in Pennsylvania that's home to one of the state prisons. Having just broken out of jail is Paul Porter (Robert Montgomery), who had a plan to get away by car with an accomplice. But when that plan goes south, Paul hops aboard the back of the bus, climbing up on the roof where the luggage was kept in those days and where he can get a change of clothes courtesy of fellow passenger Hector Withington (Ted Healy).

Now, well-read viewers may recall that Ted Healy is just as well known for being the manager of what would become the Three Stooges back in those days before they struck out on their own, so it's not a surprise that the Stooges appear here, although it's in a relatively straight role as a musical combo who are, like Withington, passengers on the bus. Anyhow, the buss reaches Harrisburg, where Paul is spotted, forcing him to go into hiding while Letty gets back on the bus as it heads farther west. Paul, already having met Letty -- and you know the two are going to fall in love -- vows to catch up with Letty in St. Louis.

Paul and Letty do meet in St. Louis, but Legs has also found them there, and threatens to out Paul until Legs realizes just how much Paul and Letty love each other, and has a change of heart. At this point, the movie has a surprising change of tone. It's the middle of winter, and Paul commandeers the bus in a snowstorm after everyone else gets out at one of those auto-camps like the one in It Happened One Night where Clark Gable tells Claudette Colbert how to eat a doughnut. The bus comes across a school bus that has gone off the road into a snowdrift, threatening to kill all the students like James Caan was nearly killed in Misery. Now if Kathy Bates had found this school bus....

When I first saw the plot synopsis of Fugitive Lovers and decided to DVR it, my thought was of another Robert Montgomery movie from the same era, Hide-Out. In fact, watching the movie made me think a lot more of It Happened One Night although IMDb says Fugitive Lovers was released a month before It Happened One Night (January 1934 vs. February 1934). Although there are definitely some thematic similarities between the two films, Fugitive Lovers is much more of an odd beast in that it feels like the movie is trying to tie together a bunch of disparate plot elements. It also has the issue of how to handle Montgomery being a criminal on the run, even though the Production Code wouldn't go into full effect until July of 1934.

Despite the oddness and being a decidedly lesser film than It Happened One Night, Fugitive Lovers is definitely interesting enough that it deserves a viewing. It probably should have gotten a DVD release one one of those old four-film box sets the Warner Archive used to put out, but as far as I can tell it never got a release, which is a shame.

They Were Expendable

Tomorrow is December 7, which is the anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that sent the US into World War II. In fact, it's the 80th anniversary, and there aren't many World War II veterans left. Unsurprisingly, TCM is once again showing a bunch of war movies to commemorate the day, all of them having the attack on Pearl Harbor as a significant plot point. One that I haven't blogged about before is They Were Expendable, at 5:30 PM, and since I have it on DVD as part of a box set of John Wayne war movies, I decided to pop it in the DVD player and watch it to do a post on here.

Robert Montgomery, who was still nominally a bigger star than Wayne at the time the movie was made in 1945, and certainly on the MGM lot since I don't think Wayne was under contract to the studio, plays Lt. John Brickley, who commands a bunch of men in the Philippines in the autumn of 1941, the Philippines being a US possession at the time. Lt. Ryan (John Wayne) works under Brickley, and the two seem to be relatively good friends. Brickley has an idea for a mobile fleet of small boats called portable torpedo boats, or PT boats, that he'd like the Navy to approve. But since the war isn't on yet officially for Americans, Washington is dragging its feet on the subject.

The viewer, of course, knows that December 7 is just about to come, and with that the US forces stationed in more distant places being in danger. Philippines is about as distant as you can get from the American mainland, and the naval men there know that they're in a very difficult situation once the actual war begins and they'll have to fight undermanned and underarmed. In one of the attacks, Lt. Ryan picks up an injury that deteriorates into blood poisiong, sending him to a makeshift field hospital where he's treated by nurse Lt. Sandy Davyss (Donna Reed), who serves as a romantic subplot popping up here and there throughout the movie.

Anyhow, the PT boats' basic job is to hold off the Japanese long enough to enable the other fighting forces to regroup or evacuate, much like Dunkirk 18 months or so earlier. It's not glamorous work, but somebody has to do it. As the few remaining PT boats continue their work, Washington realizes that perhaps the PT boats have some use, and recall Lts. Brickley and Ryan to Washington, if they can get out of the Philippines before the complete Japanese takeover.

What sets They Were Expendable apart from a lot of other Hollywood movies about World War II is that there's somewhat less of a rah-rah atmosphere, and more one of grim determination. Sure, the sailors all have morale, but a lot of other movies make the Americans seem almost invincible and the Japanese or Germans peternaturally stupid. Actually, I don't think we see any Japanese in the movie, just the planes flying overhead to attack. That's really to the benefit of the movie.

They Were Expendable also gets fine performances out of both John Wayne and Robert Montgomery, the latter being disproportionately known for light comedy before the war. Montgomery, in fact, took over directorial reins when director John Ford fell ill during production, and found that he liked directing so much that he would go on to direct another five films.

If you haven't seen They Were Expendable before, it's definitely worth a watch.

Blondie of the Follies

Another of the movies that I've had sitting on my DVR for quite a few months is Blondie of the Follies. Recently, I finally got around to watching it in order to clear up some space on my DVR.

Marion Davies plays Blondie McClune, who lives in a tenement apartment together with her parents (James Gleason and Sarah Padden) and siblings. Money is always tight since there's a depression on, and not even enough money to buy Blondie that new dress she wants. Also living in the building is Blondie's best friend Lottie Callahan (Billie Dove).

The two want to get into a big Broadway show, which Lottie eventually does, taking on the stage name Lurline and getting noticed by one of those rich guys who picked up chorines in movies of the early 1930s, one Larry Belmont (Robert Montgomery). Lottie meets Blondie and invites her over now that Lottie is living in a swanky apartment on Park Avenue.

This is where Larry meets Blondie, and immediately takes a liking to her. Blondie could consider any boyfriend of Lottie's a platonic friend, but she would never dream of trying to take Lottie's boyfriend away from her. Lottie, understandably, doesn't see things that way, and it's going to drive a huge wedge into the friendship, even after Blondie too gets a job in the Follies, which pisses her dad off since he doesn't think that's appropriate for a good woman.

Another rich guy, Murcheson (Douglass Dumbrille) is having a party on his yacht, and since Larry and Lottie are guests, Lottie brings Blondie along, which bugs Larry enough to drive a wedge between him and Lottie. Larry is freer to pursue Blondie, but she's still loyal enough to Lottie that she wouldn't dream of trying to take Larry away from Lottie.

Still to come are Blondie's tragic reunion with her father, as well as Lottie getting so mad at Blondie that she tries to ruin Blondie's big number, also with tragic results. But it's that latter tragedy that might just bring BLondie and Larry together. After all, Davies and Montgomery get top billing, a sure sign that they should be together.

The box guide referred to this as a comedy, although it really isn't. The one big comic scene comes when Jimmy Durante finally shows up, basically playing a variation of himself. He shows up at a party Blondie is throwing, and together the two do a spoof of Grand Hotel, with Durante taking the part of John Barrymore (to be fair, Durante does have a rather notable profile himself) and Davies doing Greta Garbo. It's fun comic relief that works.

The rest of the movie doesn't work quite as well, but it's not exactly a bad movie. It's more one of those dated early 1930s movies that would be a bit difficult for people not fans of older movies to get into. Although Davies and Montgomery both do an adequate enough job, they were both better in other things. Still, for anybody whose opinion of Davies is based on Orson Welles' reference to her in Citizen Kane, even Blondie of the Follies should dispel that notion.

Live, Love, and Learn

Robert Montgomery did a lot of breezy comedies and other light programmers in his 1930s days at MGM. So some of them get lost in the shuffle because they're like some of the others. A good example of this is Live, Love, and Learn.

Montgomery plays Bob Graham, a starving artist who at the start of the movie is somehwere out in the country, set up next to a stone wall and painting a landscape. Suddenly, a whole bunch of horsemen come jumping over the wall, obviously on a fox hunt, forcing Bob to keep ducking his head so that he doesn't get hit by any of the horses. The last person to jump over the wall is Julie Stoddard (Rosalind Russell), who doesn't make it, getting thrown from her horse and eventually going right through Bob's canvas, understandably ticking Bob off.

So what does Bob do? In the very next scene, we see him and Julie at a justice of the peace getting married! Bob keeps acting as though he's not really going to go through with it, but of course he does, and almost immediately after the wedding ceremony the two are on their way back to Bob's walk-up apartment in the starving artist part of town; Julie seemingly happy with all of this because she doesn't necessarily want the family money.

Not long after getting to the apartment, the couple is interrupted by Oscar (Robert Benchley), a thoroughly obnoxious drunk which probably wasn't that much of a stretch for Benchley to be playing. Oscar apparently kinda-sorta lived in the apartment with Bob or some such, as Bob seems to be quite used to Oscar, and Julie for whatever reason doesn't mind this either. But there's the question of how they're going to pay the bills.

Bob goes out to paint in the park, and a couple of Navy guys don't care for Bob's painting. There are some guys from the Army, however, who like it, and this sets off a fight among the servicemen that makes the front page of the newspapers and brings a bunch of them to Bob's apartment. Not that he wants to talk to any of them, especially once they start lying and passing themselves off as art dealers. Among them is Mr. Bawltitude (Monty Woolley), who actually does own an art gallery but is treated horribly by Bob, Julie, and Oscar because they understandably think he's yet another journalist in disguise.

When they discover that Bawltitude really does on a gallery and can set up a showing for Bob, it opens doors for him that Julie doesn't particularly care to have opened. Bob is able to make enough money to support Julie and not be a starving artist any longer, but Julie thinks that this is going to cause Bob to lose what he had in his character that made him so much fun to be with in the first place.

To me there were a lot of standard tropes in Live, Love, and Learn, and the way they were put together didn't really gel all that well. It's even less understandable why these two got married than in other screwball comedies, for starters. Oscar is a really irritating character and why Julie is OK with him makes no sense. And half the time it tries to be too dramatic, with it never being funny enough when it's trying to be a comedy.

Robert Montgomery and Rosalind Russell both made much better stuff than this. But it's available on a Robert Montgomery box set if you want it.

If you like Noël Coward....

"Noël" happens to be the French word for "Christmas", but it's just a coincidence that I recently got around to watching Private Lives so that I could do a review on it here.

The movie starts out with a wedding, that of Elyot Chase (Robert Montgomery) getting married to Sibyl (Una Merkel). It's a fairly big British wedding. Cut to a second wedding, this one a much more modest affair in France, but betweeen two Britons, Victor Prynne (Reginald Denny) and Amanda (Norma Shearer), as though they're eloping. There's some fairly obvious foreshadowing here that the two couples are going to meet, even if you don't already know the plot.

After the two weddings, we cut to what is probably the French Riviera for the honeymoon. Elyot and Sibyl have booked a nice suite overlooking the Mediterranean, while Victor and Amanda have also booked a nice suite with a Mediterranean view. Again, you can guess that they're going to meet out on the terrace even if you didn't know anything about the plot or what to expect from a Noël Coward movie.

Victor and Elyot could probably get along together, and Sibyl and Amanda could probably also get along together. But there's one minor little problem. OK, it's not so minor. Elyot had previously been married to Amanda, and you can imagine not wanting to meet your ex-spouse on your honeymoon with your new spouse!

There's a bigger problem, however, which is that in some ways, Elyot and Amanda never really fell out of love. Or, they fell out of love but back into love repeatedly, with the divorce coming during one of those times when they were out of love. Now that the two have met each other again after a separation of some time, they realize that the old passion has returned, which really ought to create problems.

Technically, it does, as the two decide to run off with each other to enjoy a ski resort in the Swiss Alps. This time, they say, things are going to be different. Of course, that's not going to happen, and the couple is soon going to realize why they got divorced in the first place, as they start bickering in between bouts of falling back into love. But since they already got divorced once, you have to assume that they're going to reach the breaking point again.

Indeed they do, but this time things get more complicated in that while they're in separate bedrooms of a suite waiting the night out so that can part for good, Victor and Sibyl show up after having searched for the couple for some time. You can only imagine how awkward things are going to be in the morning after everybody wakes up....

I have to admit that I didn't particularly care for Private Lives, but at least I can understand why people who are fans of Noël Coward would enjoy the play in general and this version of it as well. To me, the dialogue came across as Coward thinking he was witter than he actually was, at least when he was writing this play. (Apparently, he originally wrote it for himself to be in the Elyot part, which he did on the stage.) There's a rapid-fire sense to the plot that even Howard Hawks would find impressive, although in my view it doesn't work as well as it does in a Hawks movie like His Girl Friday. I also found the characters irritating, as Elyot and Amanda's bickering quickly grew thin.

But there were also some plot difficulties that I had. I couldn't help but think that the play might be more interesting if Elyot and Amanda didn't run off when they first spotted each other in the adjoining suites, but instead found their old feelings coming back slowly over the course of the play while dealing with their current spouses. And then when Victor and Sibyl show up for the final act, I would have had them see the destruction Elyot and Amanda had wrought upon them and each other, and decided that Elyot and Amanda deserved each other while Victor and Sibyl can live happily ever after together.

Still, a lot of the IMDb reviews really like this movie, so I'm sure a lot of readers will probably enjoy it, too. Watch for yourself; the movie should be available from the Warner Archive although the TCM Shop has an odd tendency to claim some of the Warner Archive standalones are only available on backorder.

June Bride

Bette Davis didn't make too many comedies, although she was quite good in both The Man Who Came to Dinner and The Bride Came C.O.D. A much odder comedy for her is June Bride.

Bette Davis is paired in this romantic comedy with Robert Montgomery, whom we meet first. He plays Carey Jackson, who works for Towne, the head of a magazine conglomerate, as a foreign correspondent based in Vienna. However, other national capitals are more interesting and newsworthy, and all of those already have capable correspondents, so Towne is closing the Vienna office, in theory leaving Carey out of a job despite Towne agreeing that Carey is quite a good correspondent.

With that in mind, Towne has a job opening for Carey at another of the conglomerate's magazines, Home Life. As you might be able to guess from the name of the magazine, this is a domestic magazine aimed squarely at the upper-middle-class housewife demographic. Carey being a man and fitting the sort of hard-drinking man of action stereotype you might expect from other foreign correspondent films, he's decidedly not thrilled about working on Home Life.

Worse, the assignment means he's going to have to work under editor Linda Gilman (Bette Davis). Gilman is known for being tough to work with, as several top writers for Home Life have gotten out of the assignment after short periods. Even more so for Carey, there's a personal issue in that Carey and Linda were an item before Carey took up the position in Vienna. Carey might still be interested in Linda, but she's moved on, accepting that she'll probably never get married (and to be fair, he more or less stood her up). So Linda doesn't necessarily want Carey working for her.

Their big assignment is a wedding for the June issue of the magazine, one that's set to represent post-war middle America, so Carey and Linda head off to Indiana with several other staff members from the magazine (including Fay Bainter, Mary Wickes, and George O'Hanlon) to meet the Brinkmans. The Brinkmans live in a house that, as the cosmopolitan New Yorkers believe, looks more McKinley and less Truman. Mom Nellie (Marjorie Bennett) and dad Whitman (Tom Tully) have two daughter, Jeanne (Barbara Bates) and Boo (Betty Lynn). Jeanne is set to get married to Bud Mitchell (Raymond Roe), and the Brinkmans have graciously (presumably for a nice fee) allowed Home Life to disrupt the family's life and home to cover the wedding=.

At this point, the movie starts to get muddled. For whatever reason, Carey doesn't just want to do a regular story and get on with life, so he starts digging into the lives of the Brinkmans. He finds out that Boo had a thing for Bud, while Bud has an older brother Jim (Ray Montgomery) who apparently won't be able to make it to the wedding because he's in the army can't get leave. That might be for the best, since Jim had a thing for Jeanne. So Carey gets the Army PR guy up in Chicago where Jim is stationed to pull strings and get Jim leave, setting in motion a plot where you don't necessarily know who's going to end up with whom, other than Linda and Carey.

Bette Davis and Robert Montgomery are both capable actors, and they have a good supporting cast here. But I found June Bride to fall suprisingly flat, which I think is largely due to the script. I felt at times as though Warner Bros. was trying to recapture the magic of The Man Who Came to Dinner, but got a pair of actors who don't have the best chemistry together, as well as a script that's less coherent because there's no Monty Woolley holding it together.

Still, some people might be interested in what is a misfire for Davis. Others might want to see an older Montgomery effortlessly pulling off the same sort of roles he was doing 15 years earlier. June Bride, having been released by Warner Bros.,

One of several horses of color

I've always enjoyed Eddie Muller's presentation on Noir Alley, although I have to admit to having already seen quite a few of the films. Among the films I hadn't seen before is Ride the Pink Horse, so as always, I recorded it to watch at a later date. I've finally done that, so now you get the blog post.

Robert Montgomery plays Gagin, a man who gets off the bus in the New Mexico town of San Pablo one day. He's looking for the Hotel La Fonda, and the only person willing to help him is young Pila (Wanda Hendrix), this being a town with such a large Mexican-American population that apparently Spanish is still everybody's first language.

Gagin is told at the hotel that there aren't any rooms available here or at any other hotel, because of the big fiesta that's going to take place tomorrow night. But that's not really quite so important just yet. Gagin is also looking for one Frank Hugo (Fred Clark), and is able to use a ruse to find out what room Hugo is in, although he's not currently there, just his girlfriend Marjorie (Andrea King) and his butler.

Also at the hotel is one Bill Retz (Art Smith). Bill has been trailing Gagin, and knows that neither Gagin nor Hugo is up to any good. Apparently Hugo was engaged in some sort of misuse of government funds during the war, and Gagin's friend Shorty had a check that would prove Hugo's misdeeds. Shorty tried to blackmain Hugo and was killed for it, so now Gagin has the check and is trying to do the same thing, which isn't very bright.

At any rate, the night comes and Gagin has to find a place to stay, and at a hole-in-the-wall cantina, he's introduced to Pancho (Thomas Gomez), who makes a meager living by operating a carousel, living in a lean-to next to the carousel. He offers Gagin a place to stay for the night, and is eventually going to become a sort of friend to Gagin, helping him out.

But, after all, Gagin is trying to blackmail Hugo, and that's illegal. Since the Production Code is in effect and crime most definitely does not pay, he's going to be threatened by some of Hugo's hired goons, while Marjorie is trying to get some of that blackmail money for herself. The goons get in a knife fight with Gagin that winds up like the one in From Here to Eternity, and eventually brings about the denouement of the movie.

Ride the Pink Horse is an odd little movie, in part because all of the characters have odd motivations, and in part because something about the production seems slightly off. The backlot shooting looks decidedly sterile compared to whatever establishing shots they used. Montgomery directed as well as starring, and even though he's the main character he's not quite right in a way that's hard to pin down. Gomez earned a Supporting Actor Oscar nomination and gives the best performance.

All in all, Ride the Pink Horse is an interesting movie that deserves to be seen at least once despite the definite flaws that it has. It's available on DVD should you wish to watch.

Biogaphry of a Bachelor Girl

TCM ran the movie Biography of a Bachleor Girl not too long ago. It's going to be on again tomorrow morning at 6:00 AM if you want to watch it for yourself.

Ann Harding plays the titular unmarried woman, an artist named Marion Forsythe. She apparently gained some fame while she was over in Europe, and is now returning to her native America. Richard "Dickie" Kurt (Robert Montgomery in an odd pair of spectacles for him) is a magazine editor who has come up with a great idea to pitch to his publisher to help shore up the magazine's flagging fortunes. He'll get Marion to write her autobiography, which will be serialized in their magazine, and that will boost circulation.

Kurt goes to the boat Marion is sailing in on and finds that he's not the only one who wants her attention. There's also Feydak (Edward Arnold), brother of an artist Marion knew, but for whatever reason Feydak seems to drop out of the movie fairly early on. Eventually Kurt is able to talk to Marion about the biography, and since she's in need of money, she reluctantly accepts.

But this is going to cause other problems. Earlier in life, she met lawyer Leander "Bunny" Nelson (Edward Everett Horton) and apparently had a torrid affair with him. This shouldn't be a big deal nowadays, but for the mid-1930s such affairs probably were more scandalous. Bunny wasn't married at the time, but now he's engaged to Slade Kinnicott (Una Merkel), daughter of a newspaper publisher back in her and Bunny's home state. And Bunny is now running for the US Senate, so if news of that affair were to come out, he fears it would sink his candidacy.

So Bunny has what he feels is a perfectly good reason for trying to convince Marion not to write that memoir, while Kurt has own job to think of in trying to get Marion to fulfill their agreement. Eventually Marion goes back to a small town to consider her prospects, with everybody following her.

Biography of a Bachelor Girl came out in the beginning of 1935, and it really feels like the sort of movie that was badly neutered by the enforcement of the Production Code, which began in July 1934. There's a fair amount of potential in the material, but none of it was realized as the movie can't seem decide whether it wants to be a comedy or a drama. There's also the disappearance of Feydak, and the whole small-town thing not working here the way it did in many other movies.

Biography of a Bachelor Girl does not seem to be on DVD as far as I can tell, so you're going to have to watch the TCM showing.

Faithless

Just before the start of Summer Under the Stars, TCM ran a morning and afternoon of pre-Codes. One of them was Faithless, which sounded awfully familiar although I'd never done a full-length post on it before, at least according to a search of the site.

Tallulah Bankhead plays Carol Morgan, a trust fund baby in 1932, which for those of you who know your history you know is deep in the heart of the Depression. Don't worry if you don't know your history; the film makes very clear there's a depression on in the opening montage. Carol, having that trust fund, believes herself immune to the Depression and spends profligately because she wants to have an enjoyable time in life.

One day, Carol meets Bill Wade (Robert Montgomery), who isn't quite in Carol's social class although he earns the princely sum of $20,000 a year in the advertising business, which was quite a bit in the early 1930s when you consider that Jim Blandings in Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House 15 years later was upper-middle class and only pulling down $15,000 a year. But Bill still knows he's got a lot less money than Carol, and he's insistent about living on his money, not hers, which is why they have an on-again, off-again relationship.

But Carol keeps spending like there's no tomorrow, and sure enough, tomorrow comes. The administrators of her trust tell her that her father put the money in the trust in stocks instead of government bonds back in 1929, so she's wiped out too, and she's borrowed to the hilt against the her assets. She decides that now would be a good time to go marry Bill and live on his money, since she doesn't have any money of her own to live on. But she waited too long, because just as she's about to tell him she's ready to marry him, Bill informs her that the ad firm has gone under, so he's without a job too.

Bill goes off to Chicago to find a new job, while Carol starts mooching off all her old society friends, but eventually one after the other realizes what's going on and dump her from their social circle, to the point that she's left in Chicago with no money and seemingly no hope. Finally, when all hope is lost, she runs into Bill again, who by now is working in trucking. Or was, for the very day the two meet again, the trucking company for which he was driving goes bankrupt, leaving him without a job.

Bill does get one more job, but he realizes too late it's as a scab, and the unionized workers are willing to resort to violent means to keep the scabs from working. Bill winds up injured and unable to work, and poor Carol doesn't have the money for any medical bills....

Faithless is an interesting movie, albeit one that's not without its flaws. Tallulah Bankhead is, I think, not quite the right person for the part of Carol. She comes across as too stupid and spoiled before going broke, to the point of being unsympathetic. She also doesn't look unglamorous after the fall. Montgomery fares better, although his role is a bit less demanding. The bigger problem both face is that they're at MGM, a studio where the gloss always shines through, even if it's in a movie that probably shouldn't have any gloss. I mentioned that recently with East Side, West Side, and it's even more evident here. This is supposed to be a tough Depression movie, and where Warner Bros. could do it well with its social commentary films, it's not something that ever came naturally to MGM.

Still, Faithless is more than worth a watch. It's available on a Robert Montgomery box set at both Amazon and the TCM Shop, although when I searched for it at Amazon, I had to search on "Robert Montgomery Collection" instead of the title Faithless.

Their Own Desire

Norma Shearer's turn as Star of the Month on TCM continues tonight with her early talkies. One I don't think I've ever mentioned here before is Their Own Desire, at 2:15 AM.

Shearer plays Lally Marlett, the sort of twentysomething woman who populates early talkies like this: carefree and born to wealthy parents (Belle Bennett and Lewis Stone). Her life seems happy, until one day when Dad suddenly comes home and tells his family that after many years of marriage, he's running off to marry Mrs. Cheever (Helene Millard). Lally, unsurprisingly, blames Dad entirely and she and Mom write Dad out of their lives.

Lally goes on being part of the wealthy set, however, which is where she meets Jack (Robert Montgomery). The two falls in love, because really, what woman in an early talkie isn't going to fall for a dashing young Robert Montgomery, who seems to have been born to play roles like this? They love eatch other, but there's a minor problem. Well, not all that minor. It turns out that Jack is Mrs. Cheever's son. Mrs. Marlett, as you can probably guess, is horrified at the idea that her daughter might run off with the son of the woman who took Mr. Marlett away from her. It's illogical since the affair wasn't Jack's fault, but it's the way human nature works.

There are histrionics, and Lally runs away from Jack to be by her mother's side, but the love that she feels for him can't keep her away from Jack too long. So after Mom recovers from the shock, Lally runs back off and elopes with Jack. They'll live happily ever after. Except that when they take Jack's boat out on Lake Michigan, a storm comes up and strands them on an island. Everybody thinks they're lost if not at sea, then at least at lake.

Their Own Desire is one of those very typical, at least to my thinking, early talkies. Melodramatic, and looking at the idle rich as though everybody really cares about them. (I always find it interesting when an establishing shot uses the "society" column in a newspaper.) It's not a bad movie, however; it's just very dated. Shearer and Montgomery aren't quite as good as they'd be a year later in The Divorcée and The Big House respectively, but Shearer was already an established star and Montgomery shows how capable he was going to be at playing the society types he'd spend a lot of the 1930s doing. It's also fun to watch Judge Hardy being the bad guy.

I think Their Own Desire has been released by the Warner Archive, but for a short early talkie like this, it's a bit pricey.

No More Ladies

What if MGM took another look at The Divorcée five years later, and saw that, with the imposition of the Production Code, there's no way they could make such a movie in the same way? And what if, having seen that, they tried to make an urbane comedy instead? The result might be something like No More Ladies, which is airing at midnight tonight on TCM.

Joan Crawford stars as Marcia, a socialite-type living with Grandma Fanny (Edna May Oliver). She's in love with Sherry (Robert Montgomery), even though he's a notorious playboy. Grandma warns Marcia about Sherry, as does marcia's cousin Edgar (Charlie Ruggles). But to no avail. Even though Sherry continues to stand up Marcia, she still keeps going back to him. After a while, Sherry proposes marriage to Marcia, and she accepts, even though they both admit that the chances of their having a successful marriage are rather low!

Sure enough, Sherry continues to be a playboy, on their honeymoon no less. And it's not as if he's a very convincing liar. On one of his trysts, he's seeing Edgar's date Theresa (Gail Patrick). Sherry lies to Marcia about it, claiming he's looking after Edgar, who's fallen ill. Marcia, and we, know that this is an utter lie, for an obvious reason: she's talking to Edgar in her room!

So, what's a woman who's being treated like this to do? Why not try getting revenge by treating her husband the same way he's been treating her? It's no more unreasonable than any other idea. And so Marcia finds Jim (Franchot Tone), whose wife Sherry romanced in the days before Sherry married Marcia. Suddenly, though, when the wife does it, it's not as acceptable when the husband does it.

No More Ladies is, to be honest, not much more than a little piffle. It's the kind of movie that I saw several years ago, but didn't register much more than all of the other mid-30s stuff I've seen. That's both bad, and good. Bad, of course, because it means the movie didn't do all that much special to be worth remembering. But good as well because it didn't do anything to make me remember it as a movie I wouldn't want to watch. In fact, one thing that makes the movie worth noting is the presence of the character Caroline. She's played by an 18-year-old actress credited as Joan Burfield. Burfield would soon take her stepfather's surname: Fontaine. Joan, despite having a surname of her own, wanted to distinguish herself from sister Olivia de Havilland. The rest, as they say, is history.

No More Ladies has received a Warner Archives release.

The Divorcee

Back in August 2010, when Norma Shearer was one of the stars given a day of films in TCM's Summer Under the Stars, TCM ran The Divorcee, which I wrote deserved a full-length post of its own. TCM doesn't run The Divorcee all that often, but it's getting another airing tomorrow morning at 11:45 AM.

The movie starts off at a vacation house somewhere out in the country, where a bunch of wealthy twenty-somethings of the late 1920s have gathered for a party. It's not quite the free love of the 1960s, but it seems as if the romantic attachments between various members of the group could be fluid. Among the leaders of this set are Jerry (Norma Shearer), the vivacious lady every man wants to be with. Paul (Conrad Nagel) loves Jerry, but she eventually secides to marry Ted (Chester Morris), much to everybody's surprise. Paul, for his part, decides to marry another woman, and they all live happily ever after.... Or do they?

You should be able to figure out that they're not going to live happily ever after, at least not until the last reel of the film, if at all. Oh, this movie makes it look at first as though they're going ot live happily. After Jerry marries Ted, the movie fast forwards three years to their third anniversary, bu which point they're living in a wonderfully luxurious New York apartment, and still hanging out with much the same social circle, which is mostly organized by Ted's friend Don (Robert Montgomery). At a party for their anniversary, Jerry learns that Ted hasn't been entirely faithful to her. Jerry's rather more liberal than the Anne Baxter character in My Wife's Best Friend, but Jerry is still hurt by her husband's infidelity, even though he says it means nothing to her. Jerry decides she's going to get back at him.

She does so by going out with the other men in their social circle. But while it's perfectly OK for a man to sleep with other women, a woman who sleeps with other men is apparently a slut or something, even though a movie like The Divorcee released back in 1930 could never use such langauge. Not that this particular movie would use it even if it could; it's much too elegant for that. No; The Divorcee just makes its moral point by having Ted get righteously indignant over Jerry's infidelity because it's somehow different from his. The two get a divorce, and go their separate ways. Jerry goes to Paris, and eventually runs into Paul, who by this time is no longer happily married. So the two of them start up an affair, but you know there's no way it can work out in the long run....

There's something about The Divorcee that I find a bit, if not maddening, then at least not quite right. I'm not certain if it's the morals: The Divorcee certainly isn't accepting of the double standard, and yet the ending does seem to bring everything else Jerry did during the movie into question. There's nothing wrong with ambiguous morality, but here, the morals seem almos indecisive. Also, I get this feeling watching The Divorcee as though there's some action missing, as the movie jumps too quickly from the opening scenes in which Jerry and Ted decide to get married, to their third anniversary, to Jerry's carousing, to Jerry as divorcée. I get this impression that there needs to be something more holding everything together. I don't think it helps that, being an early talkie, you have a few scenes that look slow because of the technical constraints.

That's not to say The Divorcee isn't a good movie. It's excellent, down almost entirely to Norma Shearer's performance. She's the constant center of attention, and deservedly so, as for most of the movie her character's motivations are perfectly understandable, up until that ending. The supporting cast is good, with Robert Montgomery standing out a bit more than the others playing a role that presages all those elegant gentlemen he played throughout the 1930s. The Divorcee received a DVD release on one of Warner's pre-Code box sets, so even though TCM doesn't show it all that often, you can still watch it whenever you want.

The Mystery of Mr. X

The Asphalt Jungle in 1950 is, I think, a seminal film because it's one of the very first heist movies, at least, in the more modern style that gave rise to a whole host of similar movies. Jewel thieves did show up in earlier Hollywood mvies, especially before World War II, but the feel of those movies is something entirely different. TCM is showing several of those 1930s jewel robber movies tomorrow morning into the afternoon, including 1934's The Mystery of Mr. X at 7:15 AM.

Robert Montgomery stars as Revel. He's one of those gentlemanly jewel thieves in London who I can't help but think were a wholly fictitious trope, especially when you compare him to the characters in The Asphalt Jungle. Revel goes into the mansions of the rich, steals their jewels, and then fences them, looking like a gentleman even when he's robbing. (To be fair, Robert Montgomery always looked like an upper-class gentleman, even when he was going after Dame May Whitty in Night Must Fall. This comes easy to him.) There's only one problem, though. All of Scotland Yard is on edge because there's a serial klller who's been bumping off bobbies with a cane/sword reminiscent of George Macready's little friend in Gilda. It's led to a greater police presence which should make getting away with robberies more difficult. But, there's a much more immediate problem for Revel: while he's in the middle of committing his latest robbery, that serial killer has the unmitigated gall to commit the latest of his murders right in front of the house where Revel is cracking the safe and stealing a diamond! Revel, not being a dummy, realizes that the police are going to link the two crimes and he, not having an alibi for the jewel robbery (hell, he can't even fence the diamond), will be accused of the police killings, and probably sent to the gallows for it.

What's a wrongly accused man to do? Revel realizes that the only real way to save his own skin is to find the real cop killer. Whether or not he'll be caught for the robberies, and whethre he'd get a reduced sentence for having committed the good deed of finding the cop killer, isn't quite mentioned if memory serves. The Mystery of Mr. X was released in February 1934, which was still a few months before the Production Code crackdown, so it would be possible for Revel to get away with the robberies. But back to the movie, while trying to come up with some red herrings for the police to keep the heat off of him, Revel meets Jane Freansham (Elizabeth Allan), the daughter of the chief investigator (Henry Stephenson) on the cop killer case. Jane is engaged to another man, but you know that Revel is so darn charming that by the last reel of the movie, Jane's going to end up with Revel. That, and the real killer is going to be caught too.

In many ways, The Mystery of Mr. X is a fairly simple movie: the action develops quickly and is direct at getting where it wants to go, first in setting up Revel's dilemma and then in his figuring the way out of his predicament. But the movie is still a lot of fun, which is almost entirely due to Montgomery. This is his film all the way, and his charm and elegance make the movie a pleasure to watch, even though it's not one of Montgomery's best-known movies, and probably wasn't one of MGM's prestige movies for 1934. But it says something about the craft that could be put in to even what was ostensibly a run-of-the-mill project like this that the studios were cranking out by the dozens in the 1930s. It doesn't do anything to be deserving of being called "great"; instead, it just entertains. And there's really nothing wrong with a movie doing nothing more than that.

I don't believe The Mystery of Mr. X has ever received a DVD release, and it doesn't show up on TCM very often, so you're going to have to catch tomorrow's showing.

Rage in Heaven

TCM is showing Rage in Heaven today, although by the time you read this post, you'll probably have missed the movie. I briefly mentioned it back in April 2009, if only to point out that it wasn't avaiable on DVD. Thanks to the Warner Archive, however, that's changed, although the standard caveat about Warner Archive DVDs being a bit pricier than average stands.

Robert Montgomery stars as Philip Monrell, the scion of a family of wealthy industrialists in England. He's just returned from Paris where, unbeknownst to the rest of the family, he was seeking psychiatric help. When he returns home, he meets his mother's (Lucile Watson) new personal secretary Stella (Ingrid Bergman), and falls in love with her. The only thing is, the chief engineer at the company, Ward (George Sanders), also falls for Stella, somthing which makes Philip insanely jealous. Anyhow, Philip gets married to Stella, despite the fact that he spent time seemingly encouraging Stella to start a relationship with Ward, and despite the fact that Philip is an insecure drip. That insecurity only serves to make Philip even more jealous. Well, it also serves to cause problems when the time comes for him to run the factory. The workers don't like him, and eventually revolt.

All of this builds up to Philip's reaching the breaking point. When I commented on the movie back in 2009, I mentioned that I would compare it to Leave Her to Heaven. Not only is Philip as insanely jealous as Gene Tierney's Ellen Behrend, he fakes his own murder, committing suicide and making it look as though Ward did it. And there's enough circumstation evidence that Ward could have done it, especially his fingerprints on the murder weapon. The viewer of course knows the real story, but the characters in the film don't, and Ward is found guilty in a court of law, leaving Stella frantic to try to find the evidence that will exonerate Ward before he can be executed.

It's an idea that's interesting, since it was so well carried out in Leave Her to Heaven. Here, though, everything is a mess. The movie was released in 1941, but obviously has to be set several years earlier, since the characters are able to travel freely between London and Paris, which at the time the movie was released would have been occupied by the Nazis. That's the least of the movie's problems. The movie also has the bad, or at least the inappropriate, part of the MGM touch, much like Johnny Eager, another movie with a great idea that just goes way wrong somehow. The rest have to do with the personal problems the cast was having, at least according to Ingrid Bergman in her autobiography. She says that Montgomery was assigned by the studio to do the movie, didn't want to do it, and rebelled by giving as flat a performance as possible. Sanders didn't like the movie, and Bergman didn't like the director. That must have been one interesting set.

As I said at the beginning, Rage in Heaven has gotten a Warner Archive release, if you want to see how a movie can go so wrong.