Not for love or money

Debbie Reynolds was TCM's Star of the Month back in March, and this gave me the opportunity to record several of her movies that I hadn't seen before. Back in September I mentioned Mary, Mary when TCM aired it, pointing out how it didn't really escape its stage origins. Another Reynolds film based on a stage play was This Happy Feeling.

We actually don't see Reynolds for a while. Instead we see Curt Jurgens. He plays Preston Mitchell, commonly called Mitch. Mitch is one of those stage stars in an era when everybody, at least of a certain demographic and residency, knew the stage stars. But he'd like to retire from the stage to a farm in Connecticut, much to the consternation of friend Nita Holloway (Alexis Smith) and a producer. They want him to play the father of a character to be played by the big new star of the stage, Tony Manza (Troy Donahue). Mitch politely turns them down, and goes home.

Storming into Mitch's house is neighbor Bill Tremayne (John Saxon). He, like everybody else in the area, has been invited to a housewarming party for a couple who recently moved to the area, the Dovers. Bill comes over to tell Mitch about it, and if Mitch doesn't want to come, at least perhaps Mitch can lend Bill his car so Bill doesn't have to walk over in the rain. It's at the party where we finally see the Debbie Reynolds character. She plays one Janet Blake, a secretary who went to the party with her boss. But she'd like to get away from her boss, because he's doing things that today would be considered sexual harassment.

Janet buttonholes Bill, trying to get him to take her home, or at least to to nearest commuter train station. Bill, seeing Janet and already having been revealed to be a ladies' man, starts showing the sort of interest in Janet that her boss had been showing her. Janet, being terribly ticked, gets out of the car and starts running -- anywhere -- to get the heck away from poor Bill. She winds up at Mitch's house, and Mitch is kind enough to offer her a room so she can dry off and have a place to spend the night.

Mitch decides to give her a job as his secretary, mostly out of convenience so that Nita won't think Mitch had any bad intentions having a lovely young thing like Janet in his house overnight. Bill shows up, and also suspects the motives of Janet and Mitch. More complications ensue, leading to the predictable ending.

This Happy Feeling is supposed to be a comedy, but for me, it wasn't all that funny, largely because none of the characters are particularly likeable or nice to each other. There's also a subplot involving Mitch's maid (Estelle Winwood) and a seagull she shot by mistake but did not kill. That subplot is equally grating. Also not helping is the fact that while the opening says the movie was filmed in Cinemascope, we only get a panned-and-scanned release in 4:3.

Fans of stage plays may like This Happy Feeling, but I'm sorry to say I didn't really care for it.

Scenery vs. Story

Tomorrow (July 18) on TCM is a morning and afternoon of the movies of Constance Ford. One of the movies airing happens to be on my DVR from a recent showing, so I watched that movie: Rome Adventure, which will be on at 4:30 PM.

Ford is in a supporting role, as the real star is a woman who gets an "Introducing" credit, a young Suzanne Pleshette. She plays Prudence Bell, who at the start of the movie is an assistant librarian at a conservative women's college in New England. So conservative, in fact, that they ban books like Lovers Must Learn, which is a bit of an in-joke since that's the book on which the movie is based. Prudence has suggested to one of the students that the student read it, and this ticks off the faculty council enough that they're going to fire her. Prudence, however, knowing that, quits before they can fire her.

Prudence's plan is to go off to Italy to learn about love, which seems a bit nuts because who knows where she's getting her money from, and it's not as if she's got a place to live once she gets to Rome. Well, I suppose she's getting her money from her wealthy parents. At the pier, the Bell parents run into a Mrs. Stilwell, whom they met at a charity function and whose son is also heading off to Rome to study the ancient Etruscans. The younger Albert Stilwell (Hampton Fancher; for some reason I was thinking this was Chad Everett whose name appears down the credits) is actually standing right next to Prudence on the boat, so Mrs. Bell tries to hook the two young Americans up. However, Prudence misreads the signals and turns to the passenger on the other side of her, an Italian named Roberto Orlandi (Rossano Brazzi).

Both of these men are decent people, but since neither of them are at the top of the credits, we can guess that they're not going to wind up with Prudence in the final reel. But Roberto is so good that he directs the two Americans to the villa where he rents a room from a contessa, and both of them take him up on the offer to take rooms. (How many bathrooms did those old villas have?) Among the younger set of Americans living in the villa is Don Porter (Troy Donahue), who is finishing up his graduate degree in Rome. We first meet him as he's leaving the villa in a huff, having learned that his girlfriend Lyda (Angie Dickinson) is dumping him to spend time in Switzerland.

Now, Troy Donahue is top-billed, with Angie Dickinson second, but because of Pleshette's "introducing" credit and the fact that she's clearly the lead here, you know who is going to wind up with whom. Don falls for Prudence, and the feeling is mutual, and he starts showing her around Italy, even though by this time Prudence has gotten a job at the American bookstore run by Daisy Bronson (that's Constance Ford). How Prudence can just take the time to go traipsing around Italy and blow off her job is another unanswered question.

But Rome Adventure is one of those movies where you don't really care about the plot. It was released in 1962, at a time when travel to Europe still wasn't such a common thing, so movies like this set in "exotic" locations in lovely color were still a bit of a big deal in allowing American moviegoers to see these places as glamorous. I think I said in my post about Three Coins in the Fountain that somebody must have seen Roman Holiday and thought that what was needed was Technicolor and widescreen. It's a thought that's not wrong, but a movie still needs a good plot, or else you just have a Traveltalks short. Rome Adventure, I'm sorry to say, doesn't have that plot.

So watch Rome Adventure for a look at Italy as Americans might have wanted to see it back in the early 1960s. Just don't expect a good story.

Cry-Baby

TCM is running a triple feture of John Waters movies tonight (November 9), and that includes one that I recorded some months back when it showed up in the Saturday afternoon musical matinee: Cry-Baby, at 10:00 PM. Seeing it on the upcoming schedule tonight at 10:00 PM, I made a point of watching it in order to be able to do a review on it here.

The movie is set in director Waters' hometown of Baltimore, in 1954, as we see when, over the opening credits, a bunch of members of the Class of 1954 at one of the high schools is receiving their polio shots, since that was a new thing back in 1954. Obviously, the needles hurt a bit, and one of the students, Wade Walker (Johnny Depp), nicknamed "Cry-Baby", sheds a single manly tear.

Getting a shot at the same time as Wade is Allison Vernon-Williams (Amy Locane), and her seeing that one solitary tear makes Allison swoon. There's only one problem, which is that the two come from completely different social strata. Cry-Baby is from a group calling itself the "Drapes", the sort of fake wanna-be tough guys who dress the part of the Marlon Brando biker gang from The Wild One, or John Travolta in Grease, the latter movie being a big influence on Cry-Baby. Allison, on the other hand, is one of the "squares", and the granddaughter of the grande dame of the local community (Polly Bergen). So naturally when Grandma hears that her granddaughter might like one of the Drapes, she's horrified.

While the squares look like the normal upper-middle-class stereotype of 1950s probity, dressing the part and going to charm schol and all that, the Drapes are totally different, and not just in dress. They also listen to the new sounds of rockabilly, the predecesor to rock and roll, and live a more bohemian life in the Turkey Point area where they all congregate. But the feeling between Allison and Cry-Baby is mutual, so he invites her to come out to Turkey Point, where some of the female Drapes give Allison a makeover and she gets to see Cry-Baby perform with his band.

This leads to disaster, however, as Allison's nominal boyfriend Baldwin (Stephen Mailer) finds out and brings his square friend to Turkey Point, where they harass the Drapes to the point that a riot breaks out. Because of the class differences, it's Cry-Baby who gets punished with a sentence to reform school until he turns 21. Cry-Baby hopes to break out, while the girl who thought she was Cry-Baby's girlfriend until Allison showed up, tries to drive a wedge between Cry-Baby and Allison.

It's easy to see why a movie like Cry-Baby became a bit of a cult movie, and why some people rate it so highly. It's a musical and a parody of both musicals and 1950s teen movies, and it has an incredibly infectious enthusiasm. It also has John Waters playing with convention and casting all sorts of people in roles you might not think of them as being suited for the roles they're given, like David Nelson, Troy Donahue, and Patty Hearst.

On the other hand, there's an air of artificiality that goes beyond just plain musical movie artificiality. While watching the movie, I couldn't help but think of things like David Lynch and the colors and camera angles he used at the beginning of Blue Velvet, or Baz Luhrmann's Strictly Ballroom. There's almost an air of kabuki theater at times in Cry-Baby, and that doesn't always work in the movie's favor as it's distracting to the atmosphere John Waters was hoping to create.

Still, for the most part, the successes outweigh the failures, so Cry-Baby is definitely a movie you should give a try.

Parrish

Quite some time back I DVRed Parrish, and put off watching it because I wasn't ready to sit down for another 135-minute potboiler. I finally got around to watching it, however, and since it's available on DVD from the Warner Archive, it's time for a review on it.

Parrish is a young man, last name McLean, played by Troy Donahue. He's the son of widowed Ellen (Claudette Colbert in her final film). They're moving to Connecticut, where Ellen has gotten a job on the tobacco farm run by Sala Post (Dean Jagger). Actually, she's not working on the farm; she's going to be a sort of governess to Sala's wanton daughter Alison (Diane McBain), who is about to return from boarding school and whose mother died when Alison was young.

Putting Parrish in the same house as Alison is a no-go for Sala, so Parrish has to live with one of Sala's managers, Teet Howie (Dub Taylor), who himself has a daughter Parrish's age in the form of Lucy (Connie Stevens). They quickly fall in love, but she's got a secret boyfriend in one of the sons of rival tobacco grower Judd Raike (Karl Malden), who wouldn't be one bit happy with his son seeing a lower-class woman.

Anyhow, Parrish learns about the tobacco business from Sala and Teet, and finds that he's got a bit of a knack for it, even though he knew nothing about growing tobacco when he started. Mom, meanwhile, starts seeing Raike, trying to do it secretly despite the fact that everybody in the valley knows what's going on. Parrish has dalliances with both Alison and Paige (Sharon Hugueny), who is the daughter of Raike.

Eventually, Mom marries Judd Raike, who offers Parrish a job in his tobacco empire, which is ruthless. Judd won't stop at anything to ensure he gets his hands on the tobacco he needs, and by anything I also mean that he's perfectly willing to do illegal things. Parrish still has a lot to learn about the business, and anytime there's something he hasn't learned, his new stepfather gets really pissed, over-the-top jerk that he is. Raike's sons hate Parrish, but their daughter likes him. To make matters worse for Parrish, one of the Raike sons marries Alison!

Parrish decides to join the navy, and after his hitch (and not looking a day older, of course), he decides that he's going to take on Raike by going into business with Sala, who is now retired what with his daughter married off but likes Parrish enough and wants somebody to take on Raike enough that he's willing to let Parrish get what is essentially a zero-interest loan on the use of the land. However, Raike has bought up all the labor. Alison, now realizing she's in a loveless marriage, might be able to help.

It goes on like this, as I said at the beginning, for a good 138 minutes. Or a not-so-good, depending on your opinion. I called it a potboiler, and boy does it boil. Troy Donahue is as good as ever here, which of course means not particularly good but nice for the ladies to look at. Karl Malden is hissably nasty, although it's hard to believe anybody could be that much the stereotype of the evil businessman. Jagger is unsurprisingly quite good, and Colbert does the best she can with the material. None of the young ladies does much to distinguish herself, however. One plus is the nice cinematography and color; much of the filming was done on location in Connecticut.

Parrish is definitely a product of its time, and is I think the sort of movie you really need to be in the right mood to watch.