Sweet Rosie O'Grady

Last year at Thanksgiving, Dave Karger sat down with comedy legend Carol Burnett to present some of her favorite movies, paired with the parodies that Burnett and her friends did on her weekly variety show in the late 1960s and early 1970s. One parody was The Doily Sisters, which if you know your old movies parodies The Dolly Sisters, a movie I wrote about back in 2017. Unfortunately, TCM couldn't work out the rights to that movie for some reason, so they obtained a different Betty Grable musical for Dave and Carol to talk about: Sweet Rosie O'Grady.

Grable plays Madeleine Marlowe, an American who's the hit of the London stage in the 1880s. She's about to head back to America to appear in her next musical. She's also had men pursuing her, especially Charles, the Duke of Trippingham (Reginald Gardiner). For various reasons, they're not getting married in England, and they're also not traveling back to America together. Madeleine will be going to America with her dresser Edna (Virginia Grey), while the Duke is going to be following in about a month. They'll get married and live happily ever after....

Yeah, right, since all of this is happening in the opening reel. Over in America, there's a scandal sheet called the Police Gazette, edited by Tom Moran (Adolphe Menjou). His best writer, Sam McGee (Robert Young), has heard rumors of Marlowe's past here in New York before she went off to London and became big star Madeleine Marlowe. It seems that Marlowe is a stage name for a "Rosie O'Grady" who worked in the sort of theater that wasn't considered so respectable to the London audiences that flocked to Marlowe shows, making Marlowe the sort of woman a duke might not want to marry. Worse, when Marlowe gets off the boat in New York, she's tricked into getting in a carriage with McGee, who uses this ruse as a way of getting an even more scandalous interview.

Rosie, as I'll call her for the rest of the post, is unhappy. But she's also not stupid. So she decides she's going to turn the tables on McGee by starting a publicity campaign to get everybody to believe that she and McGee are actually carrying on a romance together, which is something that McGee doesn't really want. And even though the intention is that this be a fake romance, the Duke gets all the news when he gets to America, so he's not quite so happy himself and decides that he'll get together with McGee to try to turn the tables back on Rosie again.

Complications ensue, but considering who's got the top two billing spots, you can figure out where things are going to go. (Hint: Rosie does not end up with Moran.) Then again, you also might have been able to figure it out if you've seen other classic movies. Sweet Rosie O'Grady is a remake of a Loretta Young movie called Love Is News. There's also a third version of the story, That Wonderful Urge, which I have apparently not done a post on yet.

The obvious difference with Sweet Rosie O'Grady is that, as a vehicle for Betty Grable, it's got extra musical numbers, most of which are presented as numbers for her stage actress character to perform in her various stage shows. The plot works well enough again, and Grable does fine with her musical numbers even if those aren't quite so necessary to the plot. Sweet Rosie O'Grady is also in Technicolor, and the print Fox ran was quite good. Somewhat surprising for a Grable movie is that the running time isn't padded out by the presence of those musical numbers. IMDb lists the running time as shorter than Love Is News, which wasn't a long movie to begin with.

Paris Interlude

Despite my writing this blog for 18 years now, it always surprises how many 1930s movies are that I still don't know about. The latest example of this came when I watched the programmer Paris Interlude.

The movie opens up in 1927, when Charles Lindbergh was making his transatlantic flight in The Spirit of St. Louis, and everybody in Paris waiting for Lindbergh to land. Especially the reporters, who wanted to be the first to get the story. Among those reporters is Sam Colt (Otto Kruger), who was a flyboy in World War I before he lost his left arm. He's become a reporter since, and at one time was a good reporter before he turned to drink and is the sort of dissolute ex-pat who was a thing back in popular culture in the years just before the Depression, although Paris Interlude was released in 1934. In any case, Colt enlists the help of aspiring writer Pat Wells (Robert Young) to help write the stories in a sort of apprentice relationship. It's not enough for Pat to make a living, and he wants to write fiction any way.

All of these characters spend just as much time at a local watering hole that has next to nothing French about it instead being a place for Americans to recreate their fantasy of what Parisian café life is about. Among these people are aimless Julie (Madge Evans), who moons over Sam because he's just so dashing and handsome, while not having any idea what to do with life. There's also fashion designer Cassie Bond (Una Merkel), and Ham (Edward Brophy), a naïve journalist on his way to the Soviet Union to cover the situation there although he never makes it for whatever reason.

Sam proposes to Julie and plans to take her back to the States, and she even tells her folks back there she's planning to come back a wife. But Sam gets an assignment covering the slow-burning Chinese civil war (at the time the movie was set, this would have been before Japan invaded Manchuria, although the movie was released some years after), forcing him to leave Julie behind. She feels she can't go back to America, so she starts working writing about the haute couture scene in Paris with her articles illustrated by Cassie. Pat falls in love with Julie but can't support her, while another American abroad, golfer Rex Fleming (George Meeker) shows up. And then news comes in that Sam has been shot down in China and is presumably dead.

Except that in a movie like this you have to expect that he's not in fact dead. So 20 minutes later into the movie, on the day that Julie is finally about to marry Sam who has sold a story, Sam arrives back in Paris looking just like he would have looked the day he was shot down in China which makes no sense in terms of plot. Wouldn't he have gotten cleaned up? But Sam's arrival makes Julie wonder just whom she should marry.

For some reason, I went into Paris Interlude thinking this movie was going to be a comedy. It isn't at all, and mostly wasn't intended to be apart from the comic relief character. It's not exactly a bad movie, but it's definitely the sort of thing that would have been what movie exhibitors wanted in 1934: something that could run for a week or two as the second feature and give audiences a movie to come to, only to fade into obscurity as something newer came to the screen. It's with good reason that I had never heard of this one before it showed up on the TCM schedule the last time it did.

This time, Joseph Calleia is the bad guy

A few months back, I did a post on a film I recorded when TCM did a double feature of films starring character actor Joseph Calleia. That movie, Man of the People, had Calleia playing a good guy; the other movie has him as the villain of the piece: Sworn Enemy.

The main good guy here is played by Robert Young relatively early in his career. He plays Hank Sherman, and is trying to work his way through law school. His current attempt to get a job is at Decker's produce, but when he shows up to move boxes of produce also showing up are representatives of the "protective association", which if you've seen enough 1930s movies you'll know is controlled by the racketeers. Hank says no, and for that the mob thugs are about to beat him up, when he's saved by Mr. Decker himself (Samuel S. Hinds) showing up. Decker doesn't want to pay the racket so takes kindly to Hank. Also in the car is his private secretary, Peg Gattle (Florence Rice).

It doesn't take too much to see that Hank and Peg are going to fall in love, although that's not the main story, which is of course the protection racket, ultimately run by Joe Emerald, the character played by Calleia. Peg has a good reason of her own for opposing the rackets, which is that they set up her father, Dr. Simon Gattle (Lewis Stone) to take the fall, and Simon is just finishing up a 12-year stretch in Sing Sing.

The racket gets so violent that it kills both Decker, as well as Hank's brother Steve, who was working as a promoter for the boxer Steamer Krupp (Nat Pendleton). Hank goes undercover with the DA to try to get the evidence on Emerald, whom they all know has to be behind the rackets but because of his cash dealings leave no evidence of his wrongdoing. If only they can find the safe with the evidence.

Getting a job in the rackets himself to try to get the evidence doesn't work, so Hank tries another idea, which is to start promoting Steamer himself, since Joe has an interest in boxing as well. Steamer gets good enough to come to the attention of Joe, although Steamer is so loyal that he can only fight with Hank around, which is how Hank is able to get into Joe's inner circle as well as physically closer to the place where the incriminating records are kept. Hank also brings Peg into his scheme as a sort of cat's paw to lure Joe away, leading to a surprisingly exciting climax.

Sworn Enemy is a decidedly B movie from MGM, which means it has a bit more of a moralizing tone than a movie from Warner Bros. might have, but it's still well done for an MGM B. That's down in part to the cast, which includes a pretty good level of talent. Then again, MGM had all these people under contract, so it shouldn't be such a surprise. Sworn Enemy is definitely worth looking out for as an example of the good B movies the studios could churn out in those days.

Lady Be Good

Red Skelton is TCM's Star of the Month for April, and as I mentioned last week, I've got a couple of his movies on my DVR that are showing up as part of the salute to him. First up is a movie that has Skelton in a supporting role: Lady Be Good, early tomorrow (April 15) at 5:00 AM.

Eleanor Powell gets top billing here, although that was a ruse by MGM to get audiences into the theater. In fact, the female lead is Ann Sothern, whom MGM was trying to turn into a musical star. She plays Dixie Donegan, and as the movie opens, she's in divorce court, trying to obtain a divorce from her husband Eddie Crane (Robert Young). This introductory scene is a pretense to go to a flashback, as Donegan tells Judge Murdock (Lionel Barrymore) how the two met and why she wants a divorce. Before the marriage, Crane was a composer, and his girlfriend Dixie sees him and his lyricist have difficulty collaborating. Somehow, Dixie is able to come up with lyrics for Eddie's latest music, and the song they release together becomes a big hit, leading them to get married as well.

Eleanor Powell plays Marilyn Marsh, who is a friend of Dixie's and to a lesser extent Eddie's. She's also a star on Broadway who dances to the sort of music written by people like Eddie. She's happy to see the two married, but distressed by the fact that after they get married, Eddie lets success go to his head, where Dixie just wants to go on writing music for another Broadway show. This is what leads to the Dixie deciding she needs a divorce, even if we all know the two of them are still friends. They just can't work together as husband and wife, at least not until Eddie learns how to combine the two.

After the divorce, Dixie tries to find other composers, while Eddie seems unable to create new music. Eventually he calls Dixie and she thinks he's looking once again for a lyricist. Except that he wants someone to clean up his apartment, as if he thinks this way she'll come back to him. She's already got a new boyfriend, but once again we know this drip isn't right for her. Mutual friends like Marilyn, or Red Willet (that's Red Skelton) who plugs Eddie's and Dixie's songs, try to bring Dixie and Eddie back together. They're even seemingly successful, except that their second marriage hits a snag for the same exact reasons the first marriage did. Still, we know that Dixie and Eddie are going to wind up together in the final reel, so the question is how are they going to resolve their problems.

The on-again, off-again romance story in Lady Be Good is serviceable, and Young and Sothern are able to handle this light drama material well. Red Skelton was on his way up here, and was I think brought in for comic relief which he is unsurprisingly good at providing with his brand of physical comedy. But Lady Be Good is really to be watched for the music and dancing. Arthur Freed, who was of course a lyricist before he become a producer at MGM and made those big post-war Technicolor musicals, provides the song "Your Words and My Music", while some famous composers have old songs of theirs borrowed, with a couple of songs by the Gershwins (including the title number), and "The Last Time I Saw Paris" having been done by Oscar Hammerstein and Jerome Kern. Eleanor Powell has a very good dance number she does with a dog, but most critics mention a different Powell number as the highlight of the film, one danced to "Fascinating Rhythm".

Despite the story which feels like a retread, fans of MGM musicals and dancing will, I think, love Lady Be Good.

Dangerously Slight

A movie that I had surprisingly not seen despite it being part of the "Turner Library" of movies that for years made up the bulk of TCM's programming is Slightly Dangerous. So the last time that it showed up on TCM, I decided I'd record it in order to be able to watch it and then do a review here.

After the credits, a voiceover tells us about the town of Hotchkiss Falls, a made-up place supposedly in the mid-Hudson valley, which wouldn't be too far from where I am if it actually existed. But the towns here, places like Kingston and Poughkeepsie and Newburgh, are the same sort of boring places that the voiceover man tells us Hotchkiss Falls is. Anyhow, one of the residents of Hotchkiss Falls is Peggy Evans (Lana Turner), who typifies how boring the town is. She works at the soda counter of the local five-and-dime, and is getting a bonus for showing up on time for 1,000 consecutive shifts. Big deal, she thinks.

The place is so boring, that she gets into a debate with one of her co-workers about whether she could do her job blindfolded. A patron comes up, orders a sundae, and sure enough Peggy is able to fulfill the order properly while blindfolded. But as she was doing it, the store's new manager, Bob Stuart (Robert Young), walks in. Seeing a professional no-no, he calls Peggy into the office. It leads to an exchange in which Peggy, realizing how boring Hotchkiss Falls is, says she'll be Peggy Evans until the day she dies.

That gives her an idea as she thinks that she'll be Peggy Evans until the day Peggy Evans dies. With that in mind, she writes a note that could be construed as a suicide note, and goes running off to the big city, not telling a soul where she's gone. In New York, she starts thinking about getting a complete makeover, not just hair and clothes, but a new name as well. But she can't decide on what an appropriate new name would be.

Peggy decides to go to one of the newspapers to take out a classified ad that would presumably be like the billboard Gladys Glover rents in It Should Happen to You. But a sign painter is working over the evidence, and knocks down his paint bucket, hitting Peggy and temporarily knocking her unconscious. Having just undergone a makeover, she doesn't have any ID in her new pocketbook and no identifying marks on her new outfit. And when she comes to, she decides this would be a perfect opportunity to pretend to have a case of amnesia.

Editor Durstin (Eugene Pallette) decides to take Peggy's picture and put it in the papers to see if anybody can recognize her. Bob sees the story, and thinks he recognizes Peggy. But it's not an absolute, since part of the makeover involved getting her hair dyed blonde. And at the newspaper offices, we see that Bob isn't the only person who thinks he recognizes the mystery woman, although we know the rest of them are wrong.

Meanwhile, Peggy has been devious, looking through old newspapers at the library for a missing persons case that might involve someone who would now be close to her age. Eventually, she finds a Carol Burden who was supposedly kidnapped as a very young girl. Carol had a nurse named Baba (Dame May Whitty), so Peggy says she can remember the word "baba". Durstin has his researcher go through the files and he naturally finds the Burden case, with Caro's father Cornelius (Walter Brennan) being a very wealthy man.

However, they've already had to deal with other frauds claiming to be Carol Burden, so they're going to put Peggy-claiming-to-be-Carol through her paces to expose the fraud and prosecute to the full extent of the law. And of course Bob Stuart is waiting in the wings to recognize Peggy as well.

Slightly Dangerous is the sort of escapist light comedy that you can understand why audiences in 1943 when it was released would love. With a war raging in the real world, and Lana Turner being so glamorous, it's obviously just what the doctor ordered. And Lana Turner shows herself to be pretty adept at comedy as well. Somewhat more surprising is that Walter Brennan and Dame May Whitty also prove to do well in this sort of comedy. Not that they're bad actors, but Slightly Dangerous is rather more different from what they normally did.

If you want to escape with a slightly different comedy, don't hesitate to try Slightly Dangerous.

The Man of Property

You may have heard of The Forsyte Saga a series of books by British author John Galsworthy. Set near the end of the Victorian era, it's the sort of material that would be perfect for studio-era Hollywood to make a picture out of. Indeed, MGM had the rights, and in the late 1940s made a movie adaptation of the first book, a movie called That Forsyte Woman.

The movie opens with Irene Forsyte (Greer Garson) running into a hospital looking for a man to whom she is not related. So the man at the desk isn't so sure to let him in, but Irene is so distraught that they let her in. She's followed by two more people named Forsyte, cousins (not hers) Soames (Errol Flynn) and Jolyon (Walter Pidgeon). Irene doesn't want to see Soames, so Jolyon, a widower, takes her back to his house, where his adult daughter June (Janet Leigh) is none too pleased to see that her father has brought this woman home with him. Flash back to how everything wound up this way....

Soames is a "man of property", the latest in a long line of Forsytes involved in some sort of proper business. He's met Irene, a music teacher who is on her way to becoming a spinster, and seems to love her, which is a bit of a minor scandal because Forsytes always marry the right person. The rest of the family wonders whether she's a gold-digger, but Soames says he's been pursuing her for a year without her saying yes. Needless to say, she does eventually say yes, but the marriage doesn't quite go to plan, which is how we wind up with that opening scene.

Jolyon is the black sheep of the Forsyte family. He married and the wife died suddenly, with the rest of the Forsytes taking custody of daughter June. Jolyon is a struggling artist who went off to Paris but, as the flashback opens, is back in London where some of his works are part of an exhibition. Soames goes there looking for something good, while Irene falls in love with one of Jolyon's paintings. You get the feeling that Irene and Jolyon might make a better couple than Irene and Soames, but Soames is a jealous man who, once he gets a possession, isn't about to let it go. And Irene is going to become one of his possessions.

You'd also be right about Irene and Jolyon being better matched. But these are the Forsytes, and the thought of divorce is so horrifying to them that they'd never permit it. And Soames wouldn't permit it anyway. So things are going to have to reach that ending some other way. Enter Philip Bosinney (Robert Young). He's an architect, and of the sort who is exactly everything that Forsytes don't care for, being interested in new styles and materials while the Forsytes are decidedly old school.

But Bosinney and June Forsyte have met, and fallen in love. This being the late Victorian era, Bosinney feels he can't marry June until he's got an independent stake of his own, which means some sort of commission that's going to get his business off the ground. Irene, who has become friends with June since they're both different from the stodgy side of the Forsyte family, obliges by introducing the couple to the rest of the Forsytes as well as getting Bosinney hired to design the country house Soames wants to build for her. But Irene finds herself falling in love with Bosinney, too....

That Forsyte Woman is the sort of material that MGM could make really well, and in this case, it's definitely another quality production. It might not be so well remembered, something I think is down to the unorthodox casting. Errol Flynn wanted to stop the typecasting of the swashbuckling action star, so he decidedly wanted to take on the part of Soames when you might think Jolyon was more to his perceived character. Walter Pidgeon is also the person you think would be more suited to Soames. Flynn shows that he really was a good actor, while Pidgeon, well, not quite so much. Not that he's bad; it's just that he doesn't really overcome his typecasting the way Flynn does.

That Forsyte Woman is absolutely worth watching as another example of the quality MGM could bring to its period productions.

The parade of wetness

One of those titles that I saw show up on TCM several times over the years, but that for some reason I didn't think I'd ever gotten around to watching, is The Wet Parade. So the last time it was on, I made a point of recording it, so that I could finally watch it. (In fact, I had never seen it before.) That viewing recently occured, so now you get the review.

The opening credits have multiple screens for the cast, one screen mentioning the southerners, followed by a second screen for the northerners. The action then opens, in Louisiana in 1916, the bucolic Louisiana of plantations, riverboats, and Stephen Foster music where everything moves a little more slowly. Roger Chilcote Sr. (Lewis Stone) is the head of one of those gracious mansions, except that the house is in a more parlous state than perhaps he realizes. The family is apparently heavily in debt, and Dad is exacerbating the situation by drinking heavily and then gambling away the family's savings. His daughter Maggie May (Dorothy Jordan) is terrified of what's going to happen to Dad, but son Roger Jr. (Neil Hamilton) cares more about the book he's working on. Eventually, Dad realizes what he's done financially and, because he's already been drinking himself to death, he's sick and decided to kill himself. Dad's friends want to drink to Dad one last time, but Maggie May is horrified.

Roger Jr. moves north to New York to work on his book just in time for the Great War to come calling, with Woodrow Wilson getting Congress to declare war. Roger Jr. takes a room in a rooming house run by the Tarleton family. Or, more precisely, it's run by Mrs. Tarleton (Clara Blandick) and her son Kip (Robert Young). Dad (Walter Huston) is there too, but like the father in the Chilcote family, he's taken to the bottle much to the consternation of Mrs. Tarleton and Kip.

As I said, the Great War comes, and one of the consequences is the belief in a certain portion of the population is that grain which could go to feeding the soldiers "over there" is being used instead to make all sorts of intoxicating distilled spirits, and that the natural way to deal with this is by the prohibition of alcohol. Woodrow Wilson wouldn't go along with this, so the states realized they needed to amend the Constitution, which of course does happen, bringing the Prohibition era to the land.

Of course, Prohibition didn't stop people from drinking alcohol; it just made doing so illegal, and brought in all sorts of crime to the provision of alcohol to those who still wanted to drink it. Against the backdrop of all this, Maggie May comes north to meet her brother, and falls in love with Kip because both of them hate the demon liquor and are consequently horrified by Roger Jr.'s drinking. Things get worse when Pow is drinking in the basement of the rooming house against his wife's wishes. She tries to stop him, and he responds by beating her to deaath. This leads to the final act of the movie in which Kip joins the Feds to fight bootleggers.

The Wet Parade is an odd little movie, or perhaps I should say an odd big movie because MGM brought out so many of its second tier of stars and gave it a two-hour running time. In addition to those I've mentioned, there's also Jimmy Durante as Kip's parter in the Feds, and Myrna Loy before she became a big star opposite William Powell, here playing a speakeasy boss.

The Wet Parade is also a bit odd in that it rather hedges its bets on what side it's taking in all of the issues it covers. Although on the one hand it has decidedly anti-alcohol lead characters in the two played by Robert Young and Dorothy Jordan, it also has no lack of sympathy for the idea that Prohibition leads to worse consequences than the negative outcomes of alcohol still being legal. All the way, however, it's a compelling movie and a good example of how pre-Code movies could show not just lurid sex, but violence as well. Definitely worth a watch if you haven't seen it before.

More Ferenc Molnár

Hungarian writer Ferenc Molnár wrote a lot of works, mostly plays, that have been turned into movies on multiple occasions, as we most recently saw with Blonde Fever. A movie that I had recorded not knowing that it was based on yet another work by Molnár is The Bride Wore Red. Having finally gotten around to watching it, now's the time to do the review on it.

In Trieste, Italy, two upper-class gentlemen go slumming, the Count Armalia (George Zucco) and his friend Rudi Pal (Robert Young). The restaurant they go to has a bunch of women who are barely scraping by in life working there, and Armalia suggests that, Pygmalion-style, he could turn one of these women into a proper lady with the right clothes, grooming, and accent. Needless to say, we're going to find out if that is in fact the case, as the scene cuts to a singer at the club.

That woman is Anni Pavlovitch (Joan Crawford), and after her number, the count calls her over to give her the chance to test his theory, unbeknownst to Rudi. He'll get some good clothes for Anni and come up with a new identity for her, and then send her off to a resort in South Tyrol, which is part of Italy but has a large German population thanks to it having been part of Austria until the end of the Great War. Anni agrees to the proposition, giving her two weeks at a hoity-toity resort, but on the agreement that the count get her a red dress that will be hers to keep.

Cut to the train to the resort, where Anni, now named Anna Vivaldi, gets off, greeted by the telegraph operator/chauffeur Giulio (Franchot Tone), who was of course Joan Crawford's real-life husband at the time. Giulio is a relatively simple man, and you can guess that he's going to fall for her and that Anni is going to have mixed feelings about which man to choose.

OK, I'm getting a bit ahead of myself, but you know there's going to be another man. Before that, however, we learn that there's going to be at least one person at the resort who knows Anni's secret, that person being one of the chambermaids (not Armalia, who isn't there), which is a big problem since Anni is supposed to be a different social class from the chambermaid. As for the other man, that unsurprisingly turns out to be Rudi, who is at the resort together with his fiancée Maddalena and her father, an admiral (Reginald Owen).

You'll note I mentioned that Rudi is engaged, which presents further plot complications as it won't do for an engaged man to fall in love with one of the other guests at the resort. At the same time, however, it comes up with an interesting dilemma, which is whether Rudi will still love Anni if he finds out she's a working girl, or whether Anni will run off with Giulio. Quite a few of the comedies of the late 1930s had rich guys falling for working women where we knew they were supposed to wind up together in the final reel.

That having been said, The Bride Wore Red doesn't quite sparkle for some reason. I'm not quite sure why, considering the provenance from Ferenc Molnár, together with a very creditable cast. It's also the sort of material that was well-suited to MGM and their production values. But for whatever reason, it consistently feels slightly off, probably because Joan Crawford is never really convincingly Italian.

That's not to say The Bride Wore Red is bad; it's more that everybody in the cast had other stuff that they could point to as better. Still, Joan Crawford fans will definitely like this one, and it's another good example of how MGM seemed more able to put glitz on a movie than possibly any other studio in the golden age.

Let's make a low-budget pastiche of Rebecca and Gaslight

I was looking through another one of the streaming channels, this time one that specializes in mystery stuff that's presumably in the public domain. It's where I watched Death Goes to School, and this time, the movie in question was The Second Woman.

The on-screen synopsis mentioned Rebecca, and boy did the beginning remind me of Rebecca. Betsy Drake plays Ellen Foster, who like Joan Fontaine in Rebecca has a comment about not being able to go back to Manderley, because the house has burned to the ground. In this case, however, we're then informed that Ellen might be in danger because of who she has in her house. That person is Jeffrey (Robert Young), and at this point we get the flashback about how the two met and why Jeff might be trouble.

Ellen is an insurance actuary, working in risk calculation, and she's moved from the big city back to the California coast to be with her aunt Amelia (Florence Bates), although in Ellen's case she's not bad news the way that Barbara Stanwyck's Thelma Jordon was. As you can imagine, Ellen and Jeffrey meet, and the two begin to develop a close relationship, but it's complicated by the fact that bad things seem to keep happening to Jeffrey. Heck, we know that his house is going to burn down, although unlike Rebecca that happens midway through the movie, not at the climax.

There's even a first Mrs. DeWinter of sorts, although that woman didn't quite get married to Jeffrey. She was killed in a drunk driving accident just before their wedding, and Jeffrey's business partner, fellow architect Ben Sheppard, was the father of Jeffrey's fiancée. Jeffrey's trying to put his life back together, with a bit of help from his friends the Ferrises (John Sutton and Jean Rogers), although they're now a divorced couple, the sort of couple that winds up becoming better friends after the divorce than they were during the marriage.

As I said, a bunch of bad things happen to Jeffrey, and it's clear that, like Ingrid Bergman in Gaslight, somebody else is causing these bad things to happen in order to drive Jeffrey crazy. But who's doing that, and why? Ellen, being an actuary and studying risk, consequently has a bit of detective in her, so she starts investigating. That's part of why the opening bit mentions the possibility of her being in danger thanks to Jeffrey's presence.

The Second Woman isn't a bad movie, but it's one that you can't help but think of other movies while you're watching. And the problem is that those other movies are better, making The Second Woman look like a pale imitation. If you came to The Second Woman before those other movies -- and if it had a better print -- it might have a bit of a better reputation. And if it had been made at a major studio instead of being a United Artists release, it might be the sort of thing to wind up on one or another of the movie channels more frequently, which would put it at least a bit higher in people's consciousness. As it is, I hadn't even heard of the movie before seeing it on this streaming channel.

So definitely give The Second Woman a chance. It may not be the greatest movie out there, but it definitely deserves to be seen.

Three Comrades

In looking through the movies on my DVR, I noticed something that's coming up on TCM, so I figured I'd watch it now to do a post on it: Three Comrades, which airs at 6:30 AM January 30.

The movie starts off with an establishing shot that has the words "Nov. 11 1918" written in the clouds. Now, if you recall your history, you'll know that this was the day on which World War I ended, although at the time the movie was released it was still known as the Great War because the European theater of World War I was still a year away from kicking off. Als, if you paid attention to the opening credits, you'll have spotted the name Erich Maria Remarque, writer of All Quiet on the Western Front, so you can guess that this is written about Germans. Sure enough, we see a group of German officers and flyboys hoping that real peace can come to the world.

Among the flyboys are three who hope they can keep up their friendshpi and hope that in the new Germany they can put the skills they learned in the military to good use as auto mechanics. Those three are Erich Lohkamp (Robert Taylor), Gottfried Lenz (Robert Young), and Otto Koster (Franchot Tone). They meet up again in early 1920, and Otto actually has a car of his own, so they not only do an auto-repair business, they try to make money on the side by using the car as a taxi. While out for a joyride one day, they get in a race with a car that has a female passenger, Patricia Hollmann (Margaret Sullavan). Patricia was part of one of the pre-war noble families, but the war destroyed all that, and she's reduced to trying to get a sugar daddy (Lionel Atwill) to bankroll her.

All three of the young German friends like Patricia, but it's Erich who really falls in love with her. Eventually, he's convinced by his to try to start a relationship with Patricia, who loves Erich in return, even though Erich thinks his low social class will hurt him with Patricia. But no, she really loves him, so the two decide to get married.

The two go on a honeymoon someplace on the German coast that really looks more like the Northern California coast, but that's beside the point. It's not a happy honeymoon, however, as Patricia collapses with what is presumably tuberculosis although I don't think that's actually named in the movie. Dr. Jaffe (Monty Woolley, who only has a couple of scenes) is called in, and tells Erich that Patricia really needs to get to a sanitarium, the sooner the better.

Not that the three friends have the money for this. And they're also coming up against the political realities of early Weimar Germany. It's a volatile place, what with Germany having been defeated in the war and a lot of people chafing at the reparations, even though the real disasters of the 1923 hyperinflation still hadn't occurred. In any case, there's already political street violence, and it does eventually touch the three men. Gottfried believes in the teachings of a radical pacifist, and that's dangerous, as the proto-Fascists want to shut down such political expression, by force if necessary. (They didn't have social media giants to shut down such speech under the guise of "fake news" back in those days.) Gottfried gets shot and killed, although fortunately this is after Patricia has gone off to the sanitarium so she doesn't know about it.

What she does learn is that she needs an operation, because in those days a vague operation could apparently cure any serious illness other than cancer, which would invariably kill you within months. However, the operation involves her having to remain nearly still for weeks on end, and she may not be able to follow medical instructions....

Three Comrades is one of those movies that has all the gloss MGM could offer, although I couldn't help but feel that it was a bit of a mess. The plot twists of Patricia falling ill and then needing an operation felt more like a soap opera to me than what is supposed to be a serious film. MGM was also never the best studio to handle the sort of serious social commentary that's on offer here with the backdrop of Weimar political violence, so I felt like there was an earnest tone that didn't quite fit the material.

That having been said, there is the MGM gloss, which is definitely a sign of quality production values, while the cast also do the best they can with the material even if some of them are miscast. (Guy Kibbee in a supporting role is most definitely not German, but he's as professional as ever. And there are a lot of people who praise the movie much more highly than I do, so it's definitely worth a watch to judge for yourself.

Joan Crawford doesn't quite meet Stephen King

A few months back TCM had a birthday (I think) programming salute to Margaret Sullavan. One of her movies I hadn't seen before was The Shining Hour, so I recorded it in order to be able to watch it later.

Joan Crawford is the nominal star here, not Sullavan, although it's a bit more of an ensemble cast as the two male leads are just as important and we see one of them first. That one is Robert Young, playing David Linden. The Lindens must have become wealthy enough for them to be famous just for being famous, as David is flying cross country having heard the news of yet another marriage for his brother Henry (Melvyn Douglas). Indeed, it's the gossip among some of the other passengers on the plane, and the sort of marriage to an alleged chorus girl that David wants to stop.

In fact, the supposed chorus girl isn't quite a chorus girl, but still a performer. Olivia Riley (that's Joan Crawford) does the sort of finer dancing that you see when movies of this era visit a high-class nightclub and have a couple perform a ballroom type dance. They're nowhere near as good as Vernon and Irene Castle, or even Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, but they're good enough to get gigs like this club where Henry saw Olivia and fell in love with her. Olivia, for her part, likes Henry as a friend, and likes his positive attitude. It's easy to see, however, why other members of the family might not approve of the marriage.

That especially goes for Henry and David's nasty sister Hannah (Fay Bainter), who you might think is channeling Judith Anderson's performance as Mrs. Danvers in Rebecca, except that this movie came out two years before Rebecca. But you wonder if Hannah ever loved a man, and that's why she's so damn bitter. Anyhow, she does her best to make Olivia feel unwelcome. The one person who has complete sympathy for Olivia is David's wife Judy (Margaret Sullavan). Judy feels that they're in the same situation, as Judy is in a marriage that in her view has become the sort of loveless marriage that is a trope of movies like this.

Meanwhile, the Lindens own a bunch of land and farm it, with Henry planning to subdivide some of it so that he and Olivia can have a nice house of their own. While that house is being built, one of the workers, Benny Collins (Frank Albertson), tries putting the moves on Olivia, which is a big mistake. Worse, it's David who spots this and stops it, which leads to him developing feelings of his own for Olivia, which may be mutual. That's bad for the marriage between David and Judy, and bad for the marriage between Olivia and Henry. But worst of all is that Hannah is still there, waiting for the right opportunity to drive Olivia away. And you won't believe how Hannah tries to do it.

Joan Crawford, as I understand it, felt like MGM was deliberately giving her poor roles in her last few years to try to get rid of her, which is why she felt Mildred Pierce, her first film at Warner Bros., was so important. Having watched The Shining Hour, it's easy to have sympathy with Crawford. The movie is a thoroughly silly potboiler, and I don't mean silly in a good way here. Well, maybe I do for Hannah as a character since she's so nuts. But everybody else is weighed down by the material. I wonder if that's because one of the screenplay credits goes to Ogden Nash of light verse fame. I wouldn't expect him to be good at writing this sort of movie. The actors do the best they can with the material, however. And, since this was made at MGM, it has extremely high production values. But if anything, it's the sort of movie that should be watched to study how films can go wrong.

The Emperor's Candlesticks

I've argued before that certain studios back in the Golden Age of Hollywood made certain types of films better than others. Warner Bros., for example, was so good at the gangster and social commentary movies in the 1930s. MGM, on the other hand, was more suited to high-class stuff. A good example of this is The Emperor's Candlesticks.

The movie opens in Vienna sometime during the late 19th century. Russia still had a tsar, and the Tsar's son Peter (Robert Young) is on a secret visit to Vienna for a masked costume ball, togther with his adjutant Baron Suroff (Frank Morgan). A group of rebels are looking for Peter, and when they see him enter dressed as Romeo, they send a young woman dressed as Juliet (Maureen O'Sullivan) over to Peter's box. She captivates him, and he goes off with her.

But it's a trap. She's really Orlich, the daughter of a prominent Polish opposition figure, Poland having been completely divided and eaten up in the early 1790s, not to regain its independence until after World War I. She takes Peter to a safe house where the other conspirators hold him and Suroff hostage. Orlich's father is in prison in Russia, scheduled to be executed in a few weeks, and the Poles want him pardoned. So they force Peter to write a letter to his father telling of the captivity and asked the tsar to pardon Orlich.

But what does any of that have to do with the candlesticks, and the two stars who are credited above Robert Young? One of those stars is William Powell, playing Baron Wolensky. It's going to be his job to smuggle the letter into Russia and get it to the Tsar. Thankfully, he's given the perfect hiding place to keep that letter from getting noticed. He had a visit scheduled with his friend Prince Johann (Henry Stephenson), who would like Wolensky to deliver a pair of candlesticks to Johann's girlfriend in Russia. The candlesticks, dating back to French King Louis XV, have a hidden compartment that would be perfect for hiding the letter where nobody will find it.

The other star is Luise Rainer, playing Countess Mironova. Like Wolensky, she's a secret agent, but in the service of the Tsar. She's been given information that Wolensky is actually a particular agent whose identity the Tsarist secret police had previously not known, and she's given a letter to bring to Russia to tell that to the police. She, too, visits Johann, and Johann determines, not knowing anything about either of his two guests being secret agents, that it might be better to have a woman deliver those candlesticks. There goes Wolensky's hiding place.

Ah, but the Countess' maid is corrupt. She's got a boyfriend who is a thief, and plans to steal the Countess' jewels. He does steal them, but they're found rather quickly. However, he also steals the candlesticks, and gives them to the maid to fence. She takes them to Budapest, and thus begins a cross-continent hunt by Wolensky and Mironova to find the candlesticks. Unsurprisingly, they also develop romantic feelings for one another along the way.

The Emperor's Candlesticks is one of those period pieces that was perfect for MGM's sense of style, with the prop and costume departments making the movie look more lavish than it really is. It's too bad, however, that the source material from which the movie comes is rather threadbare. Robert Young and Frank Morgan are underused, while there's really less going on between Powell and Rainer than first meets the eye. However, Powell especially is so charming, and Rainer suitably exotic, that it's easy to overlook all of this and just see a movie that is an eminently watchable programmer.

1930s Romcom Programmer #493524052435243895386893117

Not having a good idea of what to watch off of my DVR, I decided that I'd put in another of the DVDs in my Claudette Colbert box set and watch a new-to-me movie, I Met Him in Paris.

Colbert plays Kay Denham, an American working girl who's got a fiancé in nice but bland Berk Sutter (Lee Bowman). Kay hasn't had much of an opportunity to see the world, so she's decided that before she gets married, she's going to take some of the money that she's saved up and see a little bit of the world, specifically by getting on one of those transatlantic liners that were still a thing in the 30s and go off to Paris. Not that Berk is happy, but it's also not as if he can stop her.

At any rate, Kay gets on the boat and winds up in Paris, because there's nothing particularly interesting happening during the voyage in this iteration of the story. However, she doesn't speak much French and doesn't seem to be enjoying herself very much. That is, until she's spotted in the hotel restaurant alone by Gene Anders (Robert Young, who was of course a staple at MGM's variations on the 1930s rom-com theme). Gene is staying with a friend, writer George Potter (Melvyn Douglas). Gene immediately starts wooing Kay, while George doesn't seem one bit happy with that.

George's unhappiness is in part down to the fact that he finds himself falling for Kay too, although it's going to take her a while to warm up to him for various reasons. The other reason is because George is being less than honest with Kay. In fact, at one point, George threatens Gene that he'll tell Kay that Gene is in fact married! As I was watching the movie, I thought Gene should just point out that George is being a jerk willing to make up stories about Gene in order to get Kay to stop thinking about Gene and instead think about George.

Kay has by this time gotten bored with Paris, and decides that she wants to see Switzerland, so all three dump whatever they're doing and head off to Switzerland and one of those alpine resorts in the middle of winter. This gives the three an opportunity to show some comedic flair with various winter sports, while having a location where they're more or less shut off from the world. Kay finds herself falling a bit out of love with the increasingly jealous Gene, or at least in love with George, who isn't such a bad guy after all. But neither of them is perfect, and Kay has a fiancé back in the States anyway.

If I had a problem with I Met Him in Paris, it's that the resolution of Kay's dilemma isn't handled very well. Beyond that, the movie is a competent movie that fits squarely within the genre of 90-minute romantic comedies the studios were churning out in the latter half of the 1930s: a mix of glamorous locations and sophistication, combined with stars that the studios were trying to keep in the public eye. Apart from an ending I thought wasn't very strong, that's not anything notably wrong with the movie. It just doesn't rise above the rest of the genre, and heaven knows there were quite a few movies in the genre.

I Met Him in Paris is the sort of movie that it would be nice to see show up on TCM on some morning or afternoon as part of a birthday salute or some other theme. But it was made at Paramount and one of those movies that Universal got the rights to, which is why it never seems to show up anywhere. Definitely worth one watch, and nice to have in a box set, but not spectacular.

After "Love Before Breakfast" comes....

TCM ran a night of the movies of 1930s second-tier actress Florence Rice back in June. I had already had Four Girls in White on my DVR thinking it would air that night, but TCM had a different group of movies. So I recorded Married Before Breakfast and recently watched that.

The star here is Robert Young, playing Tom Wakefield. He's an inventor with a girlfriend June (June Clayworth) he'd like to marry if he could get the money. He thinks he's come up with a depilatory shaving cream that would obviate the need for razors, although it does tend to cause some swelling, enough that people might not want to use the product. The company he proposes it to, however, sees things differently, realizing they'd be put out of business if razors were made obsolete. So they offer Tom a cool quarter of a million dollars (in 1937 bucks!) for the rights, with the idea that they won't market it.

In any case, Tom has his money, and in addition to being able to marry June, he can spend some of it on the people closest to him by getting them the gifts they've always wanted. Kitty Brent (Florence Rice), however, is not one of those women. She's a ticket agent at the cruise line, and Tom only meets her when he's booking the cruise that's going to be his and June's honeymoon. It's expensive enough that Kitty will be willing to come around to Tom's place to pick up the check.

When doing so, Tom asks Kitty what she wants, which is to get married. She's got a boyfriend in Kenneth (a very young Hugh Marlowe) who could easily be her fiancé. But as with Tom and June, Kenneth doesn't have the money to marry June. He's an insurance salesman, and along the lines of Glengarry Glen Ross, his boss has offered him a bonus and promotion if he can sell a policy to the milkman Mr. Baglipp (Tom Kennedy). That would be enough for Kenneth to be able to get married.

Tom, being a generous sort, decides he's willing to help Kenneth sell that policy, which I suppose would include paying the first year's premiums if it would help. But this is a screwball comedy and not Double Indemnity, so Baglipp isn't going to get killed. He isn't going to get a moment's peace, however, as he most decidedly does not want an insurance policy. He's done well enough without one all these years.

At this point, Tom gets the ridiculous idea to cause an accident, because this will most assuredly get Baglipp to believe that he does in fact need an accident policy. Yeah, right. In any case, it leads to an increasingly wacky chain of events as Tom hires first a taxi, and then a bus, to try to catch up with Baglipp. He and Kitty, who is tagging along, also get mixed up with a gang of criminals. More predictably, you can guess that Tom and Kitty are going to fall in love despite the fact that each of them is engaged to somebody else.

Married Before Breakfast is decidedly a B movie, but it's a pretty darn fun B movie. True, you do have to suspend some disbelief to think anybody would go along with Tom's zany schemes, but there's not much more disbelief to suspend than in most screwball comedies. Robert Young and Florence Rice both do well in this light comedy, and it doesn't outstay its welcome.

H.M. Pulham, Esq.

Another of the movies that I've had on my DVR for a while that I finally got around to watching because it's available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive (or at least was last I checked) is H.M. Pulham, Esq.

Robert Young plays Harry Moulson Pulham, who at the start of the movie is in his late 40s and, one can guess, a lawyer in private practice in Boston. He comes from the upper-crust of Boston society and lives the sort of "proper" life you expect from Bostonians of that era; think the Vales in Now, Voyager before Bette Davis insists on having that nervous breakdon. Mr. Pulham has a wife Kay (Ruth Hussey) and two children, and walks the dog every morning before walking to the office.

On this particular day, however, a couple of things shake up his routine. One is a call from Rodney Brown, nicknamed "Bo-Jo" (Leif Ericson). Brown was one of Pulham's friends from Harvard back in the day, and with their 25th class reunion coming up, wants to get together with all the friends and do some capsule bios of their lives in the quarter-century following graduation. The other is a message from a then young woman that Pulham knew from working with her in New York a few years after graduation, Marvin Myles (Hedy Lamarr). She's up in Boston, and invites Harry to see her at a partciular hotel. He goes, and looks at her, but can't brin himself to actually talk to her again....

Flash back to early in Harry's life, long before even meeting Marvin. He had a wealthy father in John Pulham (Charles Coburn) married to Mrs. Pulham (no first name given and played by Fay Holden from the Andy Hardy movies), and went to the right schools, even knowing Kay from a fairly early age but not caring for her because she, like a lot of the Boston families, are from stuffy stock. Then he goes off to Harvard and, after graduation, goes off to fight in World War I (the movie was actually released the week before Pearl Harbor; do the math).

World War I changed a lot of people, and Pulham seems to be one of them. He's not so certain he wants to go back to Boston, and one of his more liberal friends from Harvard, Bill King (Van Heflin), gets Pulham a job in advertising in New York, something that would scandalize the family, as this isn't exactly the most respectable job out there. Marvin is a copyrwiter at the agency, and Marvin and Harry seem to work a lot together.

Unsurprisingly, they fall in love too, although we know at the very beginning that they don't wind up together in the final reel since Harry and Kay are married in 1941. It turns out that Harry brings Bill and Marvin up to Boston to meet the family one weekend. Harry's kid sister Mary (Bonita Granville) likes Marvin, and Mom professes to, but Marvin understands that the whole familiy is so tradition-bound and stuffy that this could never be the place for her. But don't Marvin and Harry love each other?

H.M. Pulham, Esq. is one of those movies that MGM made well, much like Madame Bovary which I mentioned several weeks ago. Unfortunately, in the case of H.M. Pulham, Esq., the plot is a bit maddening. Harry and Marvin's reasons for breaking up just make me shrug my head and wonder why either of them thought they'd go on to live happily ever after snubbing each other.

So, while H.M. Pulham, Esq. is a stylish and well-acted movie, it's in service of a script that definitely has its problems. But, as always, judge for yourself.

Why does Stowaway seem so familiar to me?

Another of the movies that showed up in the FXM rotation recently is Stowaway. A search of the blog claims I haven't blogged about it before, so I decided to DVR it and watch to do a post on it the next time it shows up on FXM. That time is coming up, with an airing tomorrow (October 17) at 6:00 AM. However, having watched it, the movie seemed awfully familiar to me.

Temple plays Ching-Ching, real name Barbara Stewart, a girl whose parents died in China and who has been looked after by a missionary organization in a provincial town. This being the era when there was a civil war going on in China, the town is under threat from bandits of one stripe or another, so the missionaries decides this American girl should be sent to Shanghai, which is relatively safe.

So Ching-Ching and her dog are put on a boat headed for Shanghai, where her handler runs off with the money left for her. She wakes up all alone (well, except for the dog, and doesn't know anybody, so she gets up, gets off the boat, and goes wandering in town looking for a bone for her dog. It's there that she meets Tommy Randall (Robert Young), a playboy tourist trying to haggle with a store clerk who doesn't speak English. Ah, but little Ching-Ching speaks both English and Mandarin, so she's able to translate!

Tommy offers to get her a meal, and when he's at his club telling some of his expat friends about Ching-Ching, she gets out of the car because the dog runs off, only to hide in the trunk to get out of the rain. So Tommy doesn't know where she's gone, when he goes to have his car put aboard a boat bound for various Southeast Asian destinations.

Ching-Ching doesn't know what's going on, either, until she wakes up in the cargo hold of the ship and her dog starts barking, which makes the crew think there's a stowaway on board. (To be fair, little Ching-Ching is a stowaway, but not intentionally.) When she realizes the crew is chasing her, she runs off and hides in the cabin of one of the wealthier travelers.

You'd think that traveler is Tommy Randall, but no. Actually it's a pair of people, young Susan Parker (Alice Faye) and her future mother-in-law, Mrs. Hope (Helen Westley). They're travelling to meet Susan's fiancé Richard (Allan Lane). Mom is pissed, but Susan has sympathy. And when she runs into Tommy and tells her about the girl, Tommy finds that it's little Ching-Ching.

Now, if you've seen a Shirley Temple movie, you can probably guess where this one is going, which is part of the reason why I felt as though I might have seen this one. But there's more, such as a lullaby scene which seemed awfully familiar, along with much of the interaction between Young and Temple.

That having been said, there's really not a whole lot wrong with Stowaway. Alice Faye does well with her songs; Shirley Temple is as charming as always and gets a particularly fun song that has her imitating, among others, Al Jolson -- that particular impression is a hoot. The movie ends with a courtroom scene reminiscent of the one in Bright Eyes, except that this one is far more unrealistic, which is probably the movie's one big flaw. Eugene Pallette is underused as one of Randall's friends, while Arthur Treacher is hilarious as Randall's butler.

Anybody who wants a good family movie, however, will certainly enjoy Stowaway, which showcases Shirley Temple in the sort of role that made her immensely popular during the Depression. If I wanted to introduce people who didn't know what Temple was all about, there are some other of her movies that I'd recommend, like the aforementioned Bright Eyes, but you won't go wrong with Stowaway. It's available on DVD on one or another box set of Shirley Temple films.

For some values of "adventure"

Another of my recent movie viewings was Adventure in Baltimore, which ran on TCM as part of a night of movies featuring suffragette characters.

To be honest, the suffrage part of the movie is minor, although the main charcter, Dinah Sheldon (Shirley Temple), is certainly a strong young woman. She's at an all-girls school circa 1905 in an art class where she declares that she's going to be a great artist; as such, she needs to learn how to draw the naked human form. Such shocking language gets her thrown out of school and sent home to her family in Baltimore.

Dinah's father is Dr. Andrew Sheldon (Robert Young), the doctor here being a doctor of divinity as he's an Episcopal priest up for the vacant bishop's position in his diocese. Dr. Sheldon is somewhat socially liberal, as he wants to discipline Dinah a lot more lightly than her mom (Josephine Hutchinson) does. This lack of discipline might just jeopardize Dr. Sheldon's chance at being named bishop, although nobody talks much about the sin of pride.

Dinah, having returned home, continues to be brash and bold and make life a mess for everybody. She's got a friend in the boy next door, Tom Wade (John Agar, Shirley's real-life husband at the time), who works for the boss in the new-fangled job of auto mechanic. In most movies set in this era, you'd expect Tom to be Dinah's boyfriend, and you can probably guess that's going to happen by the end of the movie. But Tom meets the much richer Bernice who becomes his girlfriend, and has to deal with Dinah.

First up is Dinah going to the park to paint, doing a portrait of a drunk on a park bench, and inadvertently starting a brawl among some other bums who debate whether she's got the colors right (not that we can tell, of course, since this is a black-and-white movie). Dinah and the bums all wind up in bail, and Dinah asks Tom to bail her out, saying that she's going to jump bail!

Then, Tom has to deliver a speech for some civic function, and Dinah offers to make things up by helping. Of course, her "help" is to give Tom a barely-edited speech on women's liberation that she has to know is going to embarrass Tom. But no, she goes ahead and gives him that speech. Finally, she asks Tom to model for a painting in an art contest, and her painting is to put Tom's head on a shirtless body. Tom's justifiably angry, and the rest of the community is scandalized by the painting. Dad, to try to save his nomination for bishop, finally relents to Mom to send Dinah off to an aunt until things die down....

Adventure in Baltimore is a movie that has some potential, but that I think ultimately doesn't quite live up to it. That's mostly down to the writing of Shirley Temple's character. She was 20 she made this movie and trying to transition into adult roles, something that never quite worked out for her. The script here doesn't help because she's made out to be so obnoxious that I couldn't help but dislike her. She's not so much an independent woman in the style of Betty Grable's from The Shocking Miss Pilgrim but a jerk who doesn't seem to think of others.

I also had a problem with the ending, which seemed too artificial and tacked on in order to satisfy the studio's need for a happy ending. I can't help but think the rest of the parishes in Dad's diocese would have been nowhere near as liberal as he was and that this would have caused much more serious conflict. This isn't the post-Vatican II Catholic church, after all.

If you want to see why Shirley Temple didn't make it as an adult actress, Adventure in Baltimore isn't a bad place to start.

Northwest Passage

Another of my recent DVR watches was Northwest Passage.

Robert Young plays Langdon Towne, who is returning to his hometown of Portsmouth, NH in the late 1750s after having been expelled from Harvard. He and town drunk "Hunk" Marriner (Walter Brennan) decide the best way to deal with their troubles is to drink them away, so the two get good and drunk, saying some insulting things to a couple of British soldiers that requires the pair to beat a hasty retreat.

The two go out into the wilderness, Langdon being a budding artist who wants to do sketches of the Indians. But if you'll remember your history, this is during the French and Indian War, when the British and French (who still owned Quebec) were using various tribal groups as proxies to attack each other. Langdon and Hunk run into Robert Rogers, who had been given the task by one of the British generals of training a raiding force, eventually known as Rogers' Rangers, to help deal with the Indian raids. The big problem is that they'll be going into fairly inhospitable territory in what is now the Lake Champlain region as well as northern Vermont.

Eventually the plan is to raid a settlement at St. Francis, on the St. Lawrence River downstream of Montreal, which is probably supposed to be more of a psychological victory than a real military victory. Langdon and Hunk, having joined the Rangers, set out with Rogers on the dangerous march north. They have to watch out for both the Abenaki tribe as well as any French in the area, while also having to deal with a lack of food. Indeed, part of the plan for the mission is to raid the fort at St. Francis to get food for the return voyage.

In what is probably the high point of the movie, Rogers' men raid St. Francis and rout the inhabitants, also freeing some English settlers who had been taken prisoner. But they find that there's almost no food to take with them. And Langdon has been shot in the belly. Rogers' plan is to go overland to Fort Wentworth, in what is now northern New Hampshire, a march of about 150 miles. But can the men, who are growing increasingly disaffected thanks to the lack of food and what they see as Rogers' dictatorial ways, handle the march?

Northwest Passage is based on a 1936 book of the same title that deals both with this campaign and Rogers' later time out west looking for the Northwest Passage, hence the full title of the movie, Northwest Passage (Book I - Rogers' Rangers). The movie only deals with the French and Indian War, with a closing scene in which he tells his men they're going to be going out west (in real life, Rogers did go west to quell the Indians in the area around what is now Detroit). Apparently there were plans to make a second movie that never materializes, probably due to the intervention of World War II.

As for the movie we have, Northwest Passage isn't a bad movie, but one that I felt could have been a lot better. The big problem I have is that it runs 128 minutes, with a lot of nothing happening since the soldiers have to make a long march north to St. Francis, followed by one back to New Hampshire. The march back goes on and on, and still relatively little happens. I can't help but think they could have come up with a way to make this 20 to 30 minutes shorter which would suit the movie artistically. Of course, the location shooting and Technicolor probably demanded a longer movie to make a spectacle the public would want to go see.

Northwest Passage has been released to DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive Collection. The TCM Shop claims it's on backorder, which has never made sense to me with the MOD titles; it seems to be readily available at Amazon.

Claudia

Another recent watch off the DVR was the movie Claudia.

Dorothy McGuire plays Claudia Naughton, a relatively young and naïve bride who has recently moved to a house in the country in Connecticut together with her husband, the well-to-do architect David (Robert Young). Claudia is disappointed that she isn't going to be around her mother, Mrs. Brown (Ina Claire) any more, and also worried when they arrive at the house and she hears what she thinks sounds like a stranger.

One of the things Claudia doesn't realize is just how much she's going to be missing Mom. Mom says that she has to catch the train back to New York, only telling David that the reason she has to get back in now rather than stay over a night is because she's got a weekend doctor's appointment. This obviously means something serious, and in this case, that's a possible case of cancer, which had a much worse prognosis back in those days than it does now -- in fact if she has the cancer she does, it'll be a death sentence.

Meanwhile, there are multiple other subplots running throughout the movie. The first involves David's sister Julia (Jean Howard), who brings a singer Daruschka (Olga Baclanova) with her. The two of them and Claudia start talking, and it results in Claudia thinking she's sold the house to Daruschka at a profit, something that's going to surprise David when he finds out.

Second is a neighbor, Jerry (Reginald Gardiner). He has car problems that cause him to stop at the house, and when he returns the next day, Claudia's flakiness results in her and Jerry winding up in what looks like a compromising situation that David can't understand when he sees them. To be fair, Jerry can't really understand it either.

And then there's the two servants, Fritz and Bertha. They and the noise at the beginning that Claudia thought was a stranger eventually come together, as do a plot point about the money from selling eggs going missing. Further, Bertha ultimately takes enough of a liking to Claudia to realize that Claudia is likely pregnant and should see a doctor, figuring things out before everybody -- including Claudia -- does.

Claudia is an odd little movie, in part because it's so stuck in its time or even earlier. The movie was released in 1943, but there's no reference whatsoever to that war (at least none that I caught), making it feel like it was set a few years earlier. Part of that is likely because it's based on stories first published in the 1930s. The other reason it's stuck in its time is because you'd never meet a woman like Claudia these days. Frankly I found her behavior incredibly irritating, and couldn't figure what any man would ever have seen in her.

The movie was rather popular on release, however, to the point that there was a sequel made, Claudia and David. So obviously some people quite liked it. It and the sequel are available on DVD courtesy of Fox's MOD scheme should you wish to watch.

Secret Agent (1936)

Some years back I bought an ultra-cheap box set of Alfred Hitchcock movies. One of the only sound movies on the set that I hadn't seen before was Secret Agent, so I finally got around to watching it.

The movie starts off in 1916 with a funeral for the author Brodie. The only thing is, we learn after all the people leave the bier that the coffin is, in fact, quite empty. Brodie is not dead, but somebody wants it known that Brodie is dead. That somebody is His Majesty's Secret Service, who have a job for Brodie (John Gielgud). They tell him that there's a problem with the troops on the eastern front, which in this case means the Middle East. The Germans are trying to agitate against the British forces in the region, and are going to send a secret agent from Switzerland to do so. So it's Brodie's job to go to Switzerland, find that agent, and prevent him from getting to the Middle East.

Brodie has been given a new identity, Ashenden, and a new passport, and in Switzerland he's supposed to look for The General (Peter Lorre), a hired assassin who's actually supposed to do the killing. Oh, and to make Ashenden look innocent, he's in Switzerland on holiday with his wife, who is of course another secret agent real name Elsa (Madeleine Carroll, fresh from The 39 Steps).

Well, wouldn't you know it, but both Elsa and the General reach Switzerland before Ashenden, and when he gets to his hotel room he's surprised to find Elsa with... well, not the General, but with Marvin (Robert Young), an American abroad. Ashenden and the General start to search for the agent, but they're thwarted at various turns. And then Ashenden, and especially Elsa, start to wonder whether killing this guy is really something they can do. They're not secret agents by training the way the General is....

Personally, I found Secret Agent to be one of Hitchcock's weaker efforts in the post-Man Who Knew Too Much era. There are obvious Hitchcock touches, and a whole bunch of nice set pieces (one at a church and another in a chocolate factory), but I found the film dragged despite its shortish running time. And I didn't feel quite the emotional attachment for the characters as I do in other Hitchcock movies. Part of that may be intentional, deliberately showing how dehumanizing spy work can be. But Peter Lorre badly overacts and makes his character irritating. I also didn't like what seemed to be a deus ex machina ending, even if it can be plausibly explained (if, for example, you assume Elsa sent a telegraph to Britain and they were able to notify folks in the east).

Still, Hitchcock completists (now I've got just a bunch of silents to watch) will want to watch it. And as always, judge for yourself.