Rock Hudon Romantic Comedy #8857432896578234768902

Another of the stars in the 2025 Summer Under the Stars was Gina Lollobrigida. She made a pair of movies with Rock Hudson. I already did a post on the first of them, Come September. The second is Strange Bedfellows, which, being a Universal movie, hadn't shown up on TCM before. (That would also explain why I hadn't heard of it.) In any case, I recorded it and recently got around to watching it to put up this post on it.

The movie starts off with an opening scene told in narration. In London in what would be the late 1950s, Carter Harrison (Rock Hudson) is an American working for the American-Allied Petroleum company in London. He's the sort of stereotypical conservative businessman type, but on his first day in London he meets bohemian Italian artist Toni Vincente (Gina Lollobrigida). They go to bed together that night, already married. And then they wake up the next morning to find out that they have nothing in common and that Toni can have a rather violent temper. So the two separate, which is also a bit unsurprising considering that Carter's work takes him to all sorts of oil-rich sheikdoms and similar places.

Fast forward to the present day. Although the husband and wife haven't seen each other for seven years and don't really have any intention of ever seeing each other again, they also haven't really bothered to go through the motions of getting a divorce. At least not until now, when TOni starts the proceedings which is also going to have them meet, at least with their solicitors in tow. But there's also a catch that comes up.

Carter's PR man with the firm, Richard Bramwell (Gig Young), informs Carter that he's up for a promotion to an executive position when he gets back to Boston. However, this being a conservative business, the president J.L. Stevens (Howard St. John) would like a family man in the position. Carter getting a divorce might be a problem, but then having Toni as she is would also cause issues. In addition to the bohemian artist type, she also involves herself in the sort of social causes that would make conservative executives blush. Since this is the 60s, there's nothing environmental here; it's more helping the third world and more importantly, freedom of expression, complaining about the American museum not wanting to display a supposedly controversial sculpture (never actually shown). Harry Jones (Edward Judd) is the point man for the organization, and you get the impression that he'd like to romance Toni if that divorce ever went through.

So Carter is trying to convince Toni that he really loves here, while Bramwell is working on a scheme that might prevent Toni from going ahead with the anti-American protest. Bramwell's scheme involves another oil-rich region where the restive natives are busy killing UN diplomats, and saying that Carter is going to be sent there to negotiate following a briefing in the Bahamas. That fake briefing is just a ruse to get Carter and Toni on vacation together before the board meeting in Boston. Harry, as you might well guess, figures that there's something hinky first about Carter trying to repair his relationship with Toni, and then all this stuff about Carter having to go on a potentially fatal diplomatic mission. So he sets up a ruse of his own to try to determine what's really going on.

This is the sort of romantic comedy where you have to figure that the Rock Hudon and Gina Lollobrigida characters are going to end up together at the end, so the question is how exactly they get there. There are parts of Strange Bedfellows that are good, but the resolution relies on stuff that's way too much a series of coincidences that feel more forced than funny. It's a bit of a shame considering the cast who all put in respectable performances. It's not really their fault that the scrip is letting them down.

Fighter Squadron

As I mentioned last week, Rock Hudson is TCM's Star of the Month for November, and his movies are airing every Tuesday in prime time. This includes today, which happens to be Veterans' Day in the US, a time when TCM normally airs a bunch of military-themed movies in honor of the day. As it turns out, TCM has enough military movies with Hudson in the cast to use for tonight's prime time lineup, although the last one is Hudson's debut where he only has an uncredited bit part with just a few lines: Fighter Squadron, which is on at 5:15 AM tomorrow (Nov. 12), or the end of the prime-time lineup.

It's 1943, and war is raging in Europe. Since the western side of the Allies haven't been able to start their land invasion quite yet, at least not across the English Channel, much of the action is air raids over targets in Germany, which comes with a fairly heavy price. The planes are supposed to provide support flying in formation, and stay at a high altitude to avoide the German surface-to-air missiles. One pilot, Maj. Hardin (Edmond O'Brien), thinks these orders are the wrong ones, and that the pilots need more flexible measures for dealing with the Germans. Indeed, he had flown over China wiht the Flying Tigers, so he's already been exposed to that greater flexibility. The problem, however, is that he engages in that flexibility in direct violation of those orders.

This goes up the chain of command, from Maj. Hardin's commanding officer Col. Brickley (John Rodney), to the generals, Maj. Gen McCready (Henry Hull), and above him Brig. Gen. Gilbert (Sheppard Strudwick). McCready has some sympathy, but others point out that the flexibility also comes with a short-term cost of more planes and pilots being damaged or lost. Brickley needs to think about keeping the men under his command safe to fly the next mission. Meanwhile, the other men in Hardin's squadron, notably best friend Capt. Hamilton (Robert Stack), like Hardin.

So the higher-ups decide to teach Hardin a lesson. Col. Brickley gets a promotion, and suggests that Hardin be promoted to take his place. Now that he'll be more or less grounded and have to have these other men now under his command, perhaps he'll understand why Brickley was the way he was with Hardin. Hardin tries to be nice to his men as the bombing raids continue, but there's one catch. He still believes in the idea that the men under his command shouldn't be married, because then pilots will think about their wives and not do some of the risk-your-life things necessary to carry out the mission. Hamilton just happens to be engaged, so he heads back to America when he gets leave and gets married, although he does return to the unit much to Hardin's consternation. More raids follow up to the unit's provision of air cover for the D-Day invasion.

Fighter Squadron is nothing if not formulaic, and decidedly a product of Hollywood. There's even a daft subplot about a pilot who has a series of girlfriends, and is able to get off base to see them through the ruse of obtaining a bunch of black cats. The other pilots don't like seeing black cats and ask him to take the cats away, which gives him a chance to go off base. It's supposed to be funny, but to me it was just irritating. Fighter Squadron is well-enough made, however, and I can see why audiences back in the day might have been entertained. Better and more inventive war movies, however, have come out in the intervening years.

There's a reason I didn't wait another two months to post this

Gina Lollobrigida died earlier this year, and TCM was eventually able to do a programming tribute to her after 31 Days of Oscar and the centenary salute to Warner Bros. I recorded several of the movies, with the first one I watched being Come September.

Rock Hudson plays Robert Talbot, a wealthy American businessman. At the start of the movie he's in Milan, one of the big industrial centers of the country, finalizing a deal with an Italian company. It's July, which is significant for the plot because what Talbot is about to do is a break from his usual habit. Talbot was able to buy a villa on the Italian Riviera after the war, and he's had a tradition of spending every September at the villa. However, since he's in Italy on business, he's decided to start his vacation a bit early after finishing up his business.

Talbot isn't spending that month at the villa alone. He's got a sort of Italian girlfriend, Lisa Fellini (Gina Lollobrigida). It's the sort of relationship where, if they spent more than a month out of the year in the same country, they would have already progressed to being engaged if not married. But because Talbot always goes back to the States, Lisa isn't certain whether he's ready for a long-term commitment, so she's accepted a proposal from a British man who's brought his two sisters down from the UK to meet Lisa. So when Lisa finds out that Talbot is back two months early, she isn't certain what to do.

Of course, since we know who the two stars of the movie are, we know Lisa is going to go to Talbot's villa. But she's not going to be the only one. Since Talbot is normally only there one month out of the year, he has a property manager, Maurice Clavell (Walter Slezak) look after the place. And Maurice has been a bit dishonest. Maurice knows that Talbot isn't going to show up until September 1, so he's been running the villa as a seasonal hotel, La Dolce Vista, until mid-August or so in order that he can make a little extra money. And with Talbot on the other side of the ocean, who's going to find out? It's not as if they had AirBnb or Vrbo in 1961, or even any internet for Talbot to find out about Maurice's deception.

But now Talbot is showing up. And Maurice has a group of young women, chaperoned by Margaret Allison (Brenda De Banzie) staying at the place. Talbot is bound to find out, and boy is he going to be ticked. Not only that, but those young women aren't the only ones about to be guests at La Dolce Vista. During his travel down the Italian coast, Talbot kept running into a group of American college men on vacation for the summer and led by Tony (Bobby Darin). Wouldn't you know it, but they have reservations at La Dolce Vista. And Tony is going to meet one of the young women there, Sandy Stevens (Sandra Dee), and fall in love.

Come September is the sort of movie that has an obvious formula to it, and you know exactly where the movie is going to end up in the final reel. But that's what audiences in 1961 wanted. Hudson shows himself once again to be adept at romantic comedy, and Lollobrigida is a suitable (and beautiful) romantic partner for him. Bobby Darin and Sandra Dee would go on to get married in real life. And the movie was shot on location, giving American audiences another thing they would have wanted in the era when traveling to Europe was a lot less common than it is these days.

Sixty years on, the plot of Come September may have worn around the edges, but to criticize a movie for that is a bit unfair. It entertains when a romantic comedy is the sort of movie you're looking for, and it's lovely to look at on multiple levels.

Edna Ferber movies Cimarron down to Texas

Another of the movies that would have been on my "Blind Spot" list if I were taking part in that blogathon is Giant. It was on TCM during Summer Under the Stars as part of a day of Elizabeth Taylor movies, and I recorded it then. It will be on again tomorrow at 4:30 PM, so I recently sat down to watch it and do a post on it here.

Rock Hudson plays Joradn "Bick" Benedict Jr., who inherited a giant ranch from his father in Texas. However, at the start of the movie he's on a train to Maryland because he's looking to buy some horses from one of those southern gentlemen of a type, Dr. Lynnton (Paul Fix). Dr. Lynnton has two daughters, but for the purposes of our story the important one is Leslie (Elizabeth Taylor). She's being pursued by a young Britsh diplomat (Rod Taylor in a small role), but when she sees Bick, she immediately falls in love with him. She's also quite open about speaking her mind. The feeling between the two winds up being mutual, so Leslie marries Bick and goes back to Texas with him on the train.

There's shades of The Sea of Grass here, as Leslie has never been on a ranch, and doesn't yet know how to run it even if she is now technically the mistress of the ranch. Heretofore, running the ranch house and working well with Bick has been his elder sister Luz (Mercedes McCambridge). Unsurprisingly, it's going to be a rough adjustment for both of the women, although thankfully for Leslie Luz dies off about a third of the way through the movie.

Working for Bick on the ranch is Jett Rink (James Dean), the sort of person polite society sees as uncouth and who bristles at being looked down upon. When Luz dies, she's bequeathed a small plot of land to Jett. Bick doesn't want Jett anywhere near the ranch, and offers to buy Jett out, but this is only going to make Jett angrier and determined to become a success as he prospects for oil on that small plot of land. This really ticks off Bick as the land is supposed to be for cattle, not oil. Eventually, of course, Jett does find that oil, and vows to show everybody just how big a guy he really is.

But I'm getting ahead of myself here. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Bick and Leslie have obviously been busy having sex because Leslie first has twins who grow up to be Luz II (Carroll Baker) and Jordan "Jordy" Benedict III (Dennis Hopper), followed by a third child. Bick loves Jordy and doesn't really care for Luz, but that turns out to be better for Luz: Bick is raising Jordy to inherit the ranch, and Jordy would much rather become a doctor than a rancher. In fact, it's the third child, Judy, who would rather get into farming, although when she marries young ranch hand Bob, they would rather work their own land. This being a sprawling epic, World War II intervenes about here.

After the war is when Jett really becomes fabulously wealthy and, Charles Foster Kane-style, wants to use it. Young Luz, meanwhile, has fallen in love with Jett, because women apparently think James Dean is gorgeous, even when he has a horrible pencil moustache. Bick and Leslie don't know about this relationship, and are horrified when they learn about it.

For me, the big problem with Giant is that it veers too wildly from one plot line to the next, being the sort of story that probably would have worked better as a TV miniseries rather than a movie that, at 200 minutes without any sort of roadshow presentation like an overture or intermission, is way too long. I didn't even mention the racial tolerance part of the plot that's especially tacked on at the end: Leslie has been trying to help the poor Mexicans living in a shantytown on the ranch throughout the movie, while Jordy marries a young Mexican woman.

Even with the flaws, Giant is a memorable movie, thanks to excellent production design and good performances from all of the members of the elder generation. Among those I haven't mentioned in smaller roles in that generation are Jane Withers and Chill Wills; Sal Mineo plays a Mexican of about Jordy's age who gets killed in action in World War II. And I'm sure there are a lot of people out there who will like the movie more than I did. So definitely give it a watch.

Pretty Maids All in a Row

Another of the movies that I recently got around to watching that is available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive collection is a really odd little thing from the early 1970s: Pretty Maids All in a Row.

The opening credits play out over a song by the Osmonds, while young Ponce (John David Carson) is driving to his high school in suburban Los Angeles and ogling all the girls, Ponce being a typical sex-obsessed teenaged male. The only thing is, he's never actually had sex. It's going to get particularly bad when Ponce finds that he's got a substitute teacher in his English class, Miss Smith (Angie Dickinson). She's hot, and she gets extremely close to Ponce. So close, in fact, that Ponce has to take a bathroom break to cool off

Except that when Ponce goes into the stalls, he notices that it looks as though there's somebody in the next stall, not moving. So he checks up on the guy, only to find that it's a young woman. And a very dead young woman, one of the football team's cheerleaders. Ponce is unsurprisingly shocked, and goes to get help.

Meanwhile, the assistant principal, Tiger McDrew (Rock Hudson) is administering an aptitude test in his office. Well, not really; he's got a "testing" sign and is a psychologist in addition to being the assistant principal, so he could administer psychological evaluation tests to students. It's just that a lot of time, the "testing" is an excuse for Tiger to get it on with one of the female students.

But Tiger has sympathy for sexless Ponce. Ponce is one of the student managers of the football team, and Tiger is the head coach in addition to all his other duties. So Tiger gets Miss Smith to agree to give Ponce some private "lessons", which is really supposed to be teaching Ponce all about sex and helping him finally get laid, or something.

Ponce's sexual quest is half of the movie's story, but of course, there's also been a murder at Ponce's school, and that's the other half of the story. Capt. Surcher (Telly Savalas) comes from the state police together with his colleague Follo (James Doohan) to investigate, after the local police chief, Poldaski (Keenan Wynn) completely screws things up. As Surcher investigates, he gets the distinct feeling that Tiger killed the cheerleader, but isn't able to prove it. To make matters worse, there's another murder, and then a third.

Pretty Maids All in a Row is a really odd little movie, since it spans a bunch of different genres. In some ways, you could imagine this having been written by somebody like Paddy Chayefsky; after all, the movie came out the same year as The Hospital, which also has murder and extremely dark comedy. In fact, however, the screenplay was written by Gene Roddenberry!

The oddness makes Pretty Maids All in a Row interesting and memorable, and in the end also enough to overcome the film's weaknesses. It really shouldn't work, but there's so much nuts going on here that you don't necessarily notice the problems until thinking about it well after the movie has ended.

Toeing the party line

Back in August when Rock Hudson was one of the stars in TCM's Summer Under the Stars, I had the chance to record a movie I hadn't blogged about here before: Pillow Talk. Recently, I finally got around to watching it.

Er, not that Pillow Talk

Doris Day plays Jan Morrow, an interior decorator for wealthy clients who does a lot of work out of her well-appointed Manhattan apartment. One of her clients, Jonathan Forbes (Tony Randall), is romantically interested in her, but he's already been married three times and in psychoanalysis for it, so Jan politely declines his advances and would be perfectly happy remaining friends with him.

However, she's got a problem. As an interior decorator, it would be easy for her to do a fair amount of work from her apartment. Except, she needs to make a whole bunch of phone calls to clients, furniture stores, and her nominal boss, and her line is always busy. That's because she's only able to get a party line, meaning multiple customers sharing one telephone line (with each one getting a different ring pattern to know calls are for them). The other party on her party line is one Brad Allen (Rock Hudson), a composer who also lives in a swanky apartment, and composes one song that he sings to every woman he tries to seduce, which is a whole bunch of them.

As a result, Jan intensely dislikes Brad despite never having seen him, since he's always hogging the line, and making snarky comments to Jan when she complains about it. Jan also comments about it to her maid Alma (Thelma Ritter), but what's Alma going to be able to do about it? Of course, this being a romantic comedy, and Day and Hudson being the two stars, you can probably guess what's going to happen in the rest of the movie.

One of Jan's clients lives out in Westchester County, and at a party to show off Jan's new designs, the lady's drunk son (Nick Adams) offers to drive Jan home. They end up at a nightclub somewhere in Manhattan, and who just happens to be in the next booth but Brad, with the latest of his girlfriends. He's taken by Jan, and wants to rescue her from her bad date. But he also realizes that if he opens his mouth, she's going to recognize the voice. So Brad puts on an incredibly stereotyped Texas accent and persona, calling himself Rex Stetson. As you can probably figure, Jan falls in love with "Rex".

Meanwhile, Brad is supposed to be working on songs for a new show, and who happens to be putting up the money for the show? Jonathan Forbes, who has apparently been Brad's friend for a while. Jonathan doesn't know yet that Brad and Jan have met in person, and certainly doesn't realize that Brad is passing himself off as Rex. But that's going to come and drive the plot. And then Jan is also going to learn the truth about Rex. Can love conquer that?

Well, this being a romantic comedy, you know the answer is going to be yes, the two stars wind up together in the last reel. But the fun in watching a movie like Pillow Talk is seeing how they get there. Pillow Talk is the first of the Doris Day/Rock Hudson comedies, so it's technically more original than the later movies, even though if you've seen one you'll get the generic gist of the others going into them.

Day and Hudson are appealing as a couple, and Randall is as good as always in support. Thelma Ritter has fun as the wise-cracking maid; she has an important scene with Hudson that moves the plot along which involves her drinking Hudson under the table. She also gets a running gag involving the elevator, operated by Allen Jenkins in a small role.

I couldn't help but think of some plot holes, however. I couldn't help but wonder whether Jan would have recognized Brad by voice even with the phony accent. But I also couldn't figure out why they never met in the apartment building, which was implied at the end by suggesting Brad's and Jan's apartment were several blocks apart. This made no sense to me as I would have thought the parties on a party line would have to be in close proximity. Several blocks apart in Manhattan would be separate lines and almost definitely a separate exchange. So they might still be on party lines, but not with each other. That, and I would have expected party lines to be a rural thing or for people of lower socioeconomic class.

But I guess you just have to suspend disbelief, since it's not like any of these late 50s/early 60s sex comedies have any grounding in reality to begin with. In that regard, it's perfectly frothy light comedy that certainly works. It's also lovely to look at.

For some values of magnificent

Another of the movies that I recently watched is the 1954 version of Magnificent Obsession.

Rock Hudson plays Bob Merrick, a playboy who's Clearly Bad. He went through about a year of med school but dropped out to do things like go out on his high-speed boat on a lake in some small town in the Northeast. He gets in an accident, and is injured enough that he needs a "resuscitator", some sort of device normally used on heart attack patients.

The only resuscitator was owned by one Dr. Phillips, a man of Pure Virtue as the movie would have you believe, although fans of socialized medicine would point out that he kept that damn resuscitator for his personal use. That and, as we'll learn, he spent all his money giving other people free shit at his medical clinic, to the point that he's heavily in debt. As it turns out, Dr. Phillips had another heart attack just at the time that Bob had his accident, and obviously would have been saved if that resuscitator had been there.

Bob tries to express his contrition to the doctor's wife Helen (Jane Wyman) and daughter Joyce (Barbara Rush), but he seems to think he can buy his way out of any situation with money, and the two women are having none of that, showing none of the doctor's presumed capacity for forgiveness that he must have had since he was such a Perfect Person if you believe the way everybody else in the movie talks about him.

Things get even worse when Bob, trying to make it up to Mrs. Phillips, follows her into a taxi. She tries to get out the other side, getting run down in traffic and suffering a brain injury that probably should have killed her like Natasha Richardson but, since we wouldn't have a second half of the movie then, only blinds her. Bob runs into her on the beach one day and realizes she doesn't recognize his voice! So now he can put the moves on her while trying to expiate his sins by paying to send her to Europe to get an operation that might restore his sight.

Bob eventually follows her to Europe and Joyce eventually forgives him. But when Helen learns who Bob really is, she's not certain how to react, and when he proposes marriage to her, she runs off to the middle of nowhere, not telling anybody!

Magnificent Obsession is a bunch of nonsensical moral twaddle, which shouldn't be surprising since it's based on the novel by Lloyd C. Douglas, a Christian apologist who gave us other books turned into movies like Green Light and The Robe. Those other movies aren't bad even though they lay on the Christian morality a little thick at times. Magnificent Obsession, on the other hand, is even more black-and white in its portrayal of morality than the others, and has overblown direction from Douglas Sirk to boot.

I'm glad I watched Magnificent Obsession to get it off the list of movies I hadn't blogged about here before. But it's not a movie I'm looking to watch a second time. You can get it on a pricey two-DVD set from the Criterion Collection if you want to watch for yourself or like this sort of movie.

All That Heaven Allows

Douglas Sirk was one of the great comedy directors of the 1950s. Recently, I had the chance to rewatch his 1955 movie All That Heaven Allows.

Jane Wyman plays Cary Scott, a widow with two college-aged children who was obviously left financially secure when her husband died, as she's still able to live in their big house, and have her best friend Sara (Agnes Moorehead) invite her out to the country club for parties. That, and have the landscaper her husband always hired, Ron Kirby (Rock Hudson) show up unannounced to prune the trees. One day when Sara can't stay for lunch, Cary asks Ron if he'd like anything.

The two run into each other a few more times on a professional basis, until one day when Ron lets on that he's looking to sell the old family business and go into tree farming that supplies nurseries like his with their trees. So the two go out to his place in the country, and meet some other similarly bohemian people who have decided to drop out of the rat race and take on jobs they have a passion for. As you can probably guess, Cary and Ron begin to fall in love.

However, Cary was from a nice upper-middle-class family, while Ron's background is decidedly working class. What are people going to say about this? And God knows people are going to say something about it, because there's a notorious gossip in town in the form of Mona (Jacqueline de Wit. She sees Ron and Cary return after one of their trysts in the country, and starts spreading rumors. When Cary decides to introduce Ron to the country club set, everybody treats him like dirt, almost one-upping each other to see who can treat him the worst. And Cary's kids can't understand why she'd be in love with a working-class guy. It goes on like this.

All That Heaven Allows was conceived as a melodrama and social commentary, but as with a lot of Douglas Sirk's works, it works better if you look at it as a comedy. Everything is over the top, starting with the aforementioned reactions of Cary's friends. Then there's the score, which swells up constantly, using over-obvious cues to try to elicit certain emotions. And then there's the foreshadowing, notably involving a Wedgwood teapot and talk about a television set, which is handled in a heavy-handed manner. Finally, there's the set design, which is noticeable in the form of Cary's daughter's bedroom which has an impractical round window that lets in a spectrum of light rather than the practical white light that you'd need to actually do anything in the room.

Wyman and Hudson try hard but are brought low by the script. Poor Rock Hudson in particular, when you start thinking about some of the lines in terms of the fact that he'd come out at the end of his life as a homosexual. At one point, he tells Cary that his bohemian friend had to learn to be a man, to which Cary replies, "And you want me to be a man?"

It's funny to read the reviews which praise All That Heaven Allows pretty much solely for having the virtuous views of criticizing 1950s middle-class America. Almost as funny as the movie itself. But watch and judge for yourself.

Where the River Bends

Another of my recent DVD purchases was a six-DVD James Stewart western collection. First up out of that set is Bend of the River.

James Stewart plays Glyn McLyntock, who is leading a group of settlers west to new farmland in the Oregon side of the Columbia River. While looking for the trail ahead, Glyn comes across a group of vigilantes hanging a man for stealing a horse, and is able to prevent them from carrying out the hanging. The man whose life was saved, Emerson Cole (Arthur Kennedy), is grateful, and as the two head back to the settlers, it's revealed that both of them had pasts as border raiders somwhere along the Missouri/Kansas border. (The movie implies that the action was taking place before statehood, which would place it before 1859. I would have thought the border raiders were from the "Bloody Kansas" slavery dispute in the mid-to-late 1850s, but the plot implies both McLyntock and Cole were both real criminals escaping west.)

After some more difficulties with the Shoshone Indians, the settlers make it to Portland, from where they're going to go upriver to get to the land they're homesteading. While in Portland, McLyntock and the leader of the settlers, Jeremy Baile (Jay C. Flippen), contract to have a bunch of supplies delivered to the settlement in early September. This is important because winter comes early, and while they're building the houses and clearing the land, they're going to need foor for the first winter. The settlers head on up the Columbia, while Cole stays behind along with Jeremy's daughter Laura (Julie Adams), who had to stay in Portland to recuperate from getting an arrow near the collarbone in that Indian attack.

Time passes at the settlement, and no supplies come. Eventually it's October, and the womenfolk point out that they're almost out of the stuff they brought west with them, so they damn well better get those supplies soon. McLyntock and Jeremy head out to Portland to see what happened. What happened is that there's been a gold rush, and with all the miners wanting supplies, the man who was provisioning them, Hendricks (Howard Petrie), was able to bump up the price. This even though the settlers had a contract. The law has obviously broken down, what with no statehood. The settlers' supplies are on the dock in Portland, unshipped because Hendricks won't let anybody ship them anywhere. Also in Portland, they run into Laura, who's working as a gold assayer and engaged to Cole.

Jeremy and McLyntock decide that they're going to take the supplies that they already paid for and load them on the boat. In the ensuing scuffle, Cole and Laura also have to flee, along with professional gambler Trey (Rock Hudson). They're on the steamboat, pursued by Hendricks and his men, which means that McLyntock is going to have to disembark everybody well before the normal point and then go overland the rest of the way. McLyntock also has a couple of town drunks on board whom he hired to load the goods, and they given a choice would be just as happy to see the stuff go to the gold camp since they'd rather be miners themselves. And whose side is Cole on, anyway. As Cole reminds McLyntock, once Jeremy finds out about their pasts, he and the settlers are going to reject both of them.

Bend of the River is a very well-made western, one of a bunch that Stewart made with director Anthony Mann. These were from the more "adult" era of westerns when there wasn't just the preternaturally good guy and the over-the-top villain, but men who had rather murkier psychological motivations doing what they did. Stewart is excellent as a man trying to go straight; that time he spent in World War II gave him a much darker edge in his post-war movies. Kennedy was an antagonist in a whole bunch of movies, pulling it off well enough to get multiple Supporting Actor Oscar nominations. Bend of the River isn't one of the nominated roles, but he still does a great job. Rock Hudson has little to do, and Flippen gets a much bigger role than anything else I've seen him in. The cinematography is lovely.

Curiously, the DVD says that the movie has been formatted to fit the TV screen. I was pretty certain before watching that this was made before the advent of Cinemascope in 1953, and sure enough, the copyright says 1951 (although the actual release was in January 1952). At any rate, the movie was pillarboxed on my aging HDTV, which is as it should be. Each movie is on its own DVD in a slim case; the slim cases don't bother me but may bother some others. The only extra on this DVD was the theatrical trailer, but for the low price what can one expect? Overall, I can highly recommend both Bend of the River. Sadly the box set I got it on is out of stuck, but the TCM Shop has the same six movies available on a box set that has two movies per disc.

A not-so-fine pair

I was looking through my DVR to see which of the unwatched movies on it were avilable on DVD for me to write a post about. Among them was A Fine Pair, which has received a DVD release courtesy of the Warner Archive. I don't think I'd spend that kind of money on this movie, however.

The movie starts off with one of those obviously 1960s scores, this one courtesy of Ennio Morricone, and scenes of an airplane landing in New York. Italian woman Esmeralda Marini (Claudia Cardinale) goes through customs, and then gets in a cab and orders it to follow another car! She winds up at police headquarters. The man she was following is Capt. Mike Harmon (Rock Hudson), whom she had met in Italy a dozen years earlier when he was working with her late father, also a police detective.

It turns out that she has a reason for seeing Harmon again after all these years. She was stupid enough to become a crook, engaging in a jewel heist. Not just that, but a particularly daring jewel heist, robbing the villa of the Fairchild family in lovely Kitzbühel, Austria. The Fairchilds are back in New York for the time being, and Esmeralda has decided she's got remorse about being involved in the heist. So she figures that the best way to get out of it is to put the jewels back, Jack of Diamonds style. That way, when the Fairchilds return, nobody will be any the wiser. A good police detective like Harmon is the only person who could get around the alarm system, which, combined with their previous relationship, is why she's picked him. (He's married, now, of course, although we never see his wife.)

So Harmon goes off to Austria with Esmeralda, falling in love with her along the way. He learns about the alarm system, and eventually comes up with some ridiculous plot to defeat it, which involves heating the room to 194 degrees Fahrenheit (I think that's what he said; one of the IMDb reviewers lists it as 134 degrees), making it like a sauna. But if he had to heat the room up like that, why wouldn't the alarm go off at room temperature, or while it was being heated up? It's all an excuse to get Cardinale to strip down to her bra in a scene filmed through an orange filter.

But the plot to put the jewels back works, and we're not even an hour into the movie! What's going on here? Of course, this means we have a twist, which is that Esmeralda tells Mark that she committed another heist in Rome. So off to Rome we go. But we also learn that perhaps getting into the Fairchild villa was a ruse so that Esmeralda could actually rob it. It all gets needlessly complicated with a bunch of twists and turns that continue once the action leaves Austria.

It's those twists and turns that make the movie a huge mess and ultimately a flop. Well, that's the big reason, I think; there's actually a lot more wrong. Esmeralda is such an annoying compulsive liar that I can't imagine anybody liking her. Even though the scenes at the Fairchild villa are over by the hour mark of the movie, the movie already then feels a lot longer than it is. And then there's the TCM print I watched. IMDb lists a running time of 113 minutes, which is also what's mentioned for the DVD release. The print TCM showed only ran 89 minutes, so I have no idea what was in the 24 minutes that were cut. Also, the print was panned-and-scanned down from 1.85:1 to 1.33:1, so the cinematography that should be lovely looks terrible. Jack of Diamonds is stylish and charming, if a mess; A Fine Pair is just a mess.

I'm sorry to say that I just didn't like A Fine Pair at all. I do like to say judge for yourself, and I suppose it would be nice if this had wound up in a box set of heist movies, or Rock Hudson movies, or something. But at the Warner Archive price?

Send Me No Flowers

I recently had the chance to watch Send Me No Flowers off of my DVR. It's available on a pretty low-cost DVD if you want to watch it yourself, so I have no qualms about doing a full-length post even though I don't think it's coming up on TV any time soon.

Rock Hudson plays George Kimball, happily married to Judy (Doris Day), and living the upper-middle-class suburban life of the early 1960s: they live in a big house; he commutes to work; she's a housewife and plays at the bridge club and country club, all the while gossiping with the other women about what's going on in their neighborhood. George, for his part, is a hypochondriac, as we see at the beginning since he takes a whole bunch of pills and worries about his health.

This idyllic life is about to come to a screeching halt. George, once again fearing that he's sick, decides to go see his doctor, Dr. Morrissey (Edward Andrews). Morrissey examines George and tells George that he's just fine. George, while he's putting his clothes back on after the examination, overhears Morrissey talking with his secretary. George hears Morrissey saying that a patient has a bad ticker and is therefore terminally ill, only having months to live. This still being the 1960s, however, it's best not to tell the patient. (See The Firemen's Ball.) George, unsurprisingly, assumes that what he's overheard is about him.

The first thing he does it tell his best friend and next-door neighbor Arnold (Tony Randall) that he's going to die. And then he has to come up with a plan for putting his affairs in order. Most importantly, this means making sure that Judy is going to be OK after he dies. There's not just the matter of finances -- after all, how is a housewife going to keep up the payments on that big house -- but the idea that she's going to need a new husband. But must importantly, George doesn't want Judy to know that he is, in fact, dying.

Arnold reacts to all of this by turning to the bottle; Judy doesn't get why her husband is acting like even more of a headcase than before. When Judy's old college flame Bert (Clint Walker) shows up at the country club and George seems more than happy for her to spend time with him, she doesn't get it. Until she sees George talking with another woman from the neighborhood who's getting a divorce. Obviously, George has been cheating on her! So now George has to tell her the truth about the fact that he's dying, only of course Judy finds out that it's not the truth.

All of this is supposed to be a comedy, mind you. But to be honest, I found all of it much too wacky. Rock Hudson is just too irritating as the hypochondriac; I wanted Judy or Arnold to smack the crap out of him. Doris Day is too perky; also, the script calls her to stop on a dime and do a 180 in her feelings toward her husband on multiple occasions. Those sudden changes of emotion are implausible and make Judy come across as almost mentally unstable. Tony Randall overplays the drunk and makes his character unappealing.

The one thing I did enjoy about Send Me No Flowers was the cinematography; I've always been a sucker for the set design that's actually of that time period (as opposed to latter-day stuff trying to be retro, which always looks phony). One thing I particularly liked were the brick-red appliances in Arnold's kitchen, the refrigerator and the oven built into the wall. But that's pretty thin gruel for actually watching a whole movie like this.

Still, there are a lot of people who really seem to like Send Me No Flowers. So I think this is definitely one where you'll want to watch and judge for yourself.

There must be one person out there who likes Magnificent Obsession

I don't know who that person would be, but for the one person who enjoys Magnificent Obsession, TCM is running it tonight at 8:00 PM as part of the salute to Star of the Month Rock Hudson.

Rock Hudson stars as Bob Merrick, a wealthy playboy who seems to be universally despised. To be fair, he doesn't make it very easy to like him, what with running his sppeboat at full throttle on the mountain resort lake where he's staying. Unsurprisingly, something goes wrong, and there's an accident. A serious accident, as it stops Merrick's heart and leaves him needing the 1950s equivalent of a defibrillator. (I don't think the exact device they need is named.) Where the hell are they going to get that technology in the mountains? Well, it turns out that there is one machine around, in the home of Dr. Phillips. He built the local hospital, but because he's got a bad heart, he has a defibrillator at home. So they borrow the good doctor's machine to revive Merrick, which works. The only thing is, the good doctor has a heart attack while they're reviving Merrick, and since there's no machine around to save him, poof! -- he's dead.

Needless to say, nobody's happy about the situation. The doctor left behind a wife Helen (Jane Wyman) and daughter Joyce (Barbara Rush), and while Helen is trying to handle her late husband's affairs at the hospital, we begin to learn more about the doctor. It turns out that he was impossibly virtuous, and so generous that no sane person could help but love this man. It's a complete contrast with Merrick. Everybody hated Merrick before because he was an idle rich selfish playboy, and now they hate him even more because his reckless actions have led to the death of somebody who probably deserves sainthood. Merrick, for his part, can at least tell that none of these people at the hospital like him, and wants to get out of the hospital even if it's against medical advice.

Merrick at least has the conscience to feel bad that the doctor died, so he tries to let Helen know that he feels bad. But every time he tries to see her, something goes awry. Ultimately, it leads to Merrick getting Helen involved in a car accident that leaves her blind! Yes, apparently Merrick is that evil. Ah, but things are about to change, as he meets the guy who was responsible for making Dr. Phillips a saint. Merrick hears some Christian mumbo-jumbo, and decides that he has to go back to medical school to try to save Mrs. Phillips, as a way to save his own soul. Or something nutty like that.

As you can tell, Magnificent Obsession is the sort of nonsensical drivel that I don't particularly like. It's didactic in the moral lessons it's trying to teach, and incredibly heavy-handed. We get ten minutes in that Rock Hudson's character is Evil Incarnate, while the doctor must have been The Best Person Ever to Walk the Face of the Earth, because of the influence he had not only on the people at the hospital, but the strangers who come to see the widow when they learn of his death. This version was directed by Douglas Sirk, and normally you can count on Sirk at least to be over the top and make the material fun in a guilty pleasure sort of way. I'd argue that's the case with Written on the Wind, which also stars Hudson and is on tomorrow morning at 8:00 AM. With Magnificent Obsession, however, the material is just so leaden that it brings even Douglas Sirk's considerable talents down.

Oooh, another hilariously overwrought film from Douglas Sirk!

TCM is showing the delightfully melodramatic Written on the Wind at midnight tonight. From the very start, you know that this is going to be a fun movie: Robert Stack rapidly and drunkenly drives his sports car to one of those lovely southern mansions, and runs in. Shots ring out, and we see Lauren Bacall shot and Stack staggering out of the house. And all of this is only over the opening credits....

Flash back, thanks to the help of the cinematic device of the pages of a page-a-day calendar flipping in reverse, about a year. Robert Stack plays Kyle Hadley, the scion of a Texas oilman (Robert Keith) who is expected to take over the firm in the future, but right now would rather just be a playboy, chasing every woman he meets. Looking after Kyle is the much more sensible Mitch (Rock Hudson), who has been Kyle's "best friend since childhood". (Personally, I wonder where there were supposed to be some homosexual overtones here. The film is rife with sexual overtones, as you'll soon see.) Mitch came from the wrong side of the tracks, but it seems as if the elder Hadley likes him more, something which causes more resentment by Kyle. (It probably leads to more of Kyle's sexual problems, too: he's got serious daddy issues.) Mitch's other job is to look after Kyle's sister Marylee (Dorothy Malone, who won an Oscar for this role). In continuation of the sexual tension, Marylee has just as high a sex drive as Kyle, and she's trying to woo every man in town, something which drives both male Hadleys nuts. Indeed, Kyle is constantly looking for a gun to deal with people who would go after Marylee, even if in fact it's she who is going after the guys. Did I mention there's a lot of sexual overtones here?

All that plot isn't enough. I mentoined that we see Lauren Bacall getting shot in the opening credits, and she eventually shows up as Lucy Moore, an advertising artist. Kyle being the playboy that he is, immediately falls or her and tries to bed her. Mitch likes her too and wouldn't mind being in love with her, except that Kyle comes first. Lucy is a bit wary of Kyle, but eventually decides to elope with him. Kyle tries to get her pregnant but finds out from the doctor that he's got a "problem" (we'd guess a low sperm count, although the Production Code wouldn't let the filmmakers be explicit) that makes it significantly less likely, but not impossible, that Kyle will ever knock up Lucy. Meanwhile, he's beginning to get jealous of Mitch. Fast forward a few months and, miracle of miracles, Lucy gets pregnant by Kyle. At least, Lucy swears up and down to Mitch that Kyle is the father. Lucy realizes that Kyle won't believe this, which I suppose is understandable, and that Kyle will accuse Mitch of infidelity. After all, Mitch does spend entirely too much time with the rest of the Hadleys.

Oh good lord is this whole film sexually charged. But it's this whole attitude of "Let's beat the viewer over the head with more nonsensical sexual innuendo!" that makes Written on the Wind so much fun. It's gotten a DVD release, although as part of the Criterion Collection, so it's a bit pricey.