Flight Test Center

I'm always surprised at how many new-to-me movies there still are on TCM, even from the studio era. I don't just mean movies that I'd already heard of the title but have never gotten around to watching; I mean things that I didn't know existed until they showed up on the TCM schedule. Another such movie that I recorded some months back is Toward the Unknown.

The opening credits as well as a card on screen thanking the US Air Force clearly give away, if you will, that this is going to be a movie about avaiation, and specifically test piloting. After all those credits, a man drives up to Edwards Air Force base, getting waved through the guard house, where the two men on duty identify the man as Maj. Lincoln Bond (William Holden) and wondering what he's up to know, which implies that he has a past.

We then hear radio chatter from the pilot to the ground about the difficulties one of the planes is having; that plane eventually crashes and burns, while Maj. Bond watches from the ground. At the officers' club, Maj. Bond hears from a fellow officer, Maj. Lee (Murray Hamilton), that the plan was being flown by Gen. Banner (Lloyd Nolan), who still likes to do test piloting even though you'd think as a general he's far too important for that as well a far too old. But this is also foreshadowing for what's to come later in the movie.

Maj. Bond then meets with Col. McKee (Charles McGraw), in a scene to provide character exposition and plot advancement. Bond has returned from Washington, and would like to start test flights. He had piloted planes in the past, but then the Korean War came. Bond was shot down and taken POW by the North Koreans, who tortured him until he broke. As a result, nobody really wants to trust him or let him fly planes again.

But one of the defense contractors is trying to sell the Air Force on a new plane, and that means lots of test flights as well as people to fly support behind the plane being tested. Maj. Bond does a test flight of the plane being marketed, and comes to the conclusion that the plane has fundamental engineering flaws that are going to make it unfit for purpose. Nobody wants to believe him thanks to his past in North Korea, and because other, lesser pilots don't spot any flaws.

Further complicating matters are two other subplots. One has been referenced before, which is Gen. Banner's advancing age. Maj. Bond sees him come close to collapse after a flight, but Banner still wants to conduct test flights. Worse is that Gen. Banner has as a secrtary and love interest Connie Mitchell (Virginia Leith). Connie is also the ex-girlfriend of Maj. Bond, from the days before he was taken prisoner in Korea.

Toward the Unknown doesn't tread any new ground -- or should I say airspace since this is an aviation moive. But what it does it does competently enough. And for the people into aviation is has a lot of footage that they'll like. It also has a fair number of good supporting performances. In addition to the aforementioned Nolan and McGraw, Paul Fix shows up as another general, while James Garner has one of his earliest roles as another test pilot. Toward the Unkown is certainly worth a watch for aviation buffs.

The Country Girl

I think I might have mentioned at the beginning of the month in conjunction with my post on Summer Under the Stars that I had two Grace Kelly films on my DVR that I hadn't done posts on, and that both are showing up on her day. That day is tomorrow, August 24, but thankfully one of the films is airing overnight. So we'll start with the first of the two movies, The Country Girl, which TCM is showing at noon on August 24.

Kelly is, somewhat surprisingly the titular country girl, although we don't see her for a few minutes. Instead, we see the two male stars of the movie. One is William Holden, who plays Bernie Dodd. Bernie is a theater director, and in a big blow-up with producer Philip Cook (Anthony Ross). They're arguing over a faded star, Frank Elgin (Bing Crosby). They need someone for their new musical drama The Land Around Us who can both sing and act, which Elgin can do. The only thing is, in the intervening years, Frank has gained a reputation for becoming a raging alcoholic.

Frank comes in to audition for the lead role, not realizing at first that that's what they want him for, and when Bernie tells Frank this, Frank seems a bit nonplussed, as though he's not certain he's ready to take on such a big part after all those years of drinking. By the time Bernie and Philip are finished bickering, Frank has already left the theater, presumably thinking he's lost the part or just desperate for another drink.

Bernie goes looking for Frank, eventually going to his current address, which is an apartment in a crappy part of town. Opening the door is Frank's wife Georgie (Grace Kelly), looking decidedly frumpy since the studio obviously thought casting Grace Kelly against type would be exceedingly daring. Frank and Georgie talk, and it's a decidedly standoffish conversation. Frank comes home, and things get even more volatile.

Part of the reason for this is, that, as the movie goes on, Bernie finds himself wondering whether Georgie might be part of the reason why Frank turned to drink. Still, he takes a huge risk on giving Frank the role. The production goes into rehearsals, for the eventual road preview in Boston before opening in New York at some point in the future. Georgie is there, which she may think is for Frank's benefit. Bernie, for his part, thinks her presence is a huge problem. Frank has to deal with that conflict in addition to trying to stay sober.

The Country Girl is based on a play by Clifford Odets, who may not be to everybody's tastes. William Holden had gotten his big break in the movie version of Odets' Golden Boy, which is one of those plays that is a bit strident in trying to get its point across. This movie feels stagey, although to be fair to the movie a lot of that has to do with the fact that it's a play about the theater. It would be hard not to have a movie like this be stagey.

The acting is mostly good; Grace Kelly won the Best Actress Oscar which I think must have been down to the Academy voters being impressed by her playing against type. Frankly I still think I'd have voted for Dorothy Dandridge in Carmen Jones. The best acting here is really done by William Holden.

The Country Girl is one of those Oscar-winning movies that shows up surprisingly infrequently considering the fact that it's an Oscar-winner with multiple big stars. I'd guess that has something to do with being a relatively "little" picture and from Paramount, which is not one of the studios TCM has the easiest access to. Still, it's decidedly worth a watch.

Tame Rovers

When TCM had its programming tribute to actor Ryan O'Neal a few months back, one of the movies I hadn't seen before was Wild Rovers. It's airing again tomorrow, May 31, at 8:00 AM, so I made a point of watching it before the upcoming airing to do a report on it.

Out in Montana in the days of the Old West, Walter Buckman (Karl Malden) runs a large cattle ranch together with his two sons (played by Tom Skerritt and Joe Don Baker), and a bunch of ranch hands. A ridiculously large number of ranch hands, I'd think, but that's not the point of the movie. One somewhat minor subplot is a conflict between Buckman and the neighboring sheep farmer over who can graze where. The bigger plot, however, is going to involve two of the ranch hands, the young Frank Post (Ryan O'Neal) and the too old to be doing this anymore hand, Ross Bodine (William Holden).

One day, a bunch of the hands are breaking horses, and one of the hands gets thrown off a horse to his death, necessitating the shooting of the horse. Frank and Ross go into town, presumably to deal with some of the necessities for the funeral, and get to talking. Frank is a bit surprised that Ross doesn't seem to have much money saved up, while Ross points out that pretty much every ranch hand lives his life in such a way that it's pretty much impossible to save up money. That is a bit of a shame, as Ross has always dreamed of going to Mexico where the American dollar goes much farther and it would be easier to start a ranch. With that in mind, Frank suggests that perhaps the only way to get the money to start one's own spread would be to rob a bank. It's just a joke, right?

While in town, Ross and Frank stop at the saloon to waste some of the money that they could be saving toward that ranch in Mexico, getting good and drunk on overpriced whiskey. The run into some of the men who work the sheepman's ranch, which results in a fight that causes a heck of a lot of damage to the saloon. This leaves Buckman mighty ticked off, and he plans to dock Ross and Frank their pay in order to pay off the damage on the saloon. So now perhaps the only way the two can get enough money to survive is to actually rob that bank.

The two do rob the bank, although they leave enough money behind for Buckman to make payroll in an attempt to get the bank owner not to aleart the authorities. They then set off for Mexico. It goes without saying, however, that Buckman learns about the robbery (and well, Frank and Ross would have stopped showing up for work, which would have been a huge red flag), so he sends a posse after them including his two sons. Bring Frank and Ross back, dead or alive. One son wants them back alive, the other seems itching to shoot them.

The movie was released after the demise of the Production Code, so at least it's not an absolute requirement that Frank and Ross get what's coming to them for breaking the law. It's possible they might actually get away with it. But they've got a long way to go, and they are going to have to deal with civilization along the way. That's where things go wrong, when Frank decides he's going to play poker with the locals one night and causes a gunfight....

The plot of Wild Rovers is serviceable, and the acting is certainly professional. And yet there's something seriously wrong with the movie. Well, two things. The first, which was quite evident, was the direction, by Blake Edwards, a director who was thoroughly out of his element making a western. Edwards decided to go for a whole bunch of early 1970s touches in his camerawork. Since there are gunfights, some people die, but the death scenes are done in a sort of slow-motion that some say is an homage to Sam Peckinpah, but to me seemed almost as amateurish as the deaths from bee sting in The Swarm. There's also a wild horses scene halfway through the movie that's handled with a whole bunch of double exposures and kills the movie harder than the bicycle scene set to "Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head" in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

It wasn't until after I watched Wild Rovers and read up on it that I learned that the movie was heavily edited, against Edwards' wishes. Supposedly, his vision would have had the movie run three hours, while the movie we have here, with overture, intermission, and exit music, is 136 minutes. Perhaps the subplot with the sheep rancher was more important in Edwards' original vision, but here it feels like an afterthought.

I could see what Blake Edwards was going for when he wrote the screenplay, but the Wild Rovers we get on the screen is sadly, an absolute mess.

I'm not the only person who thought of From Here to Eternity

Last year on Veteran's Day, TCM ran a lineup of war movies, with prime time being a special look at the role of the American Red Cross during various wars, with Ben co-presenting together with a bigwig from the American Red Cross. One of the movies presented was new to me, The Proud and Profane. Not having heard of it and with the movie having an interesting-sounding plot, I decided to record it and eventually watch it.

The movie opens in 1943, in Nouméa, which is the capital of French New Caledonia. This is the height of World War II in the Pacific, and since France itself had been occupied by the Nazis, overseas territories the Nazis couldn't get to might be used by the allies for their own war-staging efforts, at least when such islands weren't taken by the Japanese. Coming to New Caledonia on the latest transport is new Red Cross worker Lee Ashley (Deborah Kerr).

Lee is met at the airport by the head of the Red Cross mission, sympathetic but no-nonsense Kate Connors (Thelma Ritter), who also knows a thing or two about operating with the limited supplies that the various military and adjunct groups have to deal with. The Red Cross' role here is partly like the USO on the home front, to entertain the men who get rotated out of theater here, as well as to do what they can to minister to those who are brought here injured. It's tough work, and Kate isn't so certain Lee is up to it in part because her husband died some time back on Guadalcanal.

Coming into all of this is a platoon of marines commanded by Lt. Col. Black (William Holden, with a ridiculous mustache that I'd have thought wouldn't conform to USMC regulations). He demands perfection out of his men, in part because there's a war on out there and he has to keep his man alive; at the same time, it's also the Marine way and that's the only like Black knows. Lee is a bit put off by this at first, as is Kate, and the platoon's chaplain Holmes.

Also in the platoon is Pvt. Eddie Wlodcik (Dewey Martin). He and Kate have a relationship together, but it's not a romantic one. Kate was Eddie's foster mother stateside and before the war, and they still have the sort of relationship that a mother and son have, at least among families that aren't dysfunctional.

As for romantic relationships, there's about to be one between Lt. Col. Black and Lee. He starts taking her around the island, and it begins to grow into something as Lee begins to realize that there's more to him than just the taskmaster. It also grows into more, once Lee realizes she's gotten knocked up by the lieutenant colonel. She's thinking of marrying him, the Code really requiring that, but that would also mean her getting sent back to the States.

In the opening that Ben and the Red Cross executive recorded, it was mentioned that the movie is a lot soap opera. And to be honest, once we learn of Lee's pregnancy, the movie really does veer into soap opera territory. We learn more about Black, as well as Lee's journey to find her husband's grave on Guadalcanal, which also leads to more revelations. The movie becomes faintly ridiculous.

As I said in the title, I couldn't help but think of From Here to Eternity as I was watching The Proud and Profane. Part of that is the presence of Deborah Kerr. That, and a scene she and Holden have on the beach were I almost expected them to do the Kerr/Lancaster thing. And of course, there's Kerr in the earlier movie mentioning her now infertility. This is also a movie that, although it's theoretically a war movie, is a lot less about the war itself much like From Here to Eternity isn't really a war movie.

All that said, The Proud and Profane is an inferior movie in every way, although that's not terribly surprising considering how good From Here to Eternity is. The Proud and Profane isn't terribly by any standard, however. It's just that it's the sort of movie that really could have been a good deal better.

Invisible Stripes

I mentioned at the beginning of the month when I discussed the selection of Humphrey Bogart as Star of the Month that I had one of his supporting roles on my DVR that I hadn't blogged about before. That movie, Invisible Stripes, is finally coming up on the TCM schedule, tomorrow morning at 5:00, or overnight tonight if you want to think about it that way, especially if you're on the west coast.

Bogart isn't the star here, and the last time TCM ran it, it wasn't for Bogart, but for another future star who was even earlier in his career, a very young William Holden. Holden plays Tim Taylor, younger brother of Cliff, who is played by the film's real star, George Raft. Cliff has recently gotten out of prison, and has found that as a man on probation, it's very difficult to get a good job, because a lot of employers don't want to take a chance on somebody on probation. And when he does get a job, he always seems to have co-workers who find out about his stint in prison and make life hell for him because of it.

Meanwhile, back at home, young Tim has always been the good brother, and Cliff doesn't want to see Tim go the wrong way. Tim has a girlfriend in Peggy (Jane Bryan), and has dreams of becoming an auto mechanic and eventually even opening up his own shop. Of course, this being the late 1930s with the lingering effects of the Depression, those dreams seem an awfully long way away. Tim sees the treatment that Cliff is getting, and this really bugs Tim, who would like to defend his big brother.

As for Bogart, he plays Charles Martin, a guy that Cliff met in prison. Charles has gotten out of prison, too. But unlike Cliff, he doesn't have a younger brother, and indeed has a gang that he was the leader of back in the day. So for him it's a lot easier to return to crime, especially because it gives him the high life that honest chumps like Cliff and Tim aren't able to achieve.

Cliff decides he's going to sacrifice himself, more or less. He joins in with Martin's gang, with the plan of using his take of the haul to help Tim open up that garage. Obviously, Tim isn't about to take any money earned illicitly, so Cliff leaves the rest of the family behind, claiming that he's a salesman on the road, which is how he's earning good money, when in fact he's just in a different part of the same big city they've always lived in. That's important because of what happens when Cliff decides he wants out of the gang. The dissension with in the ranks leads to a botched job, and Martin trying to use Tim's garage as a place to escape to and then out the back. And he's got the knowledge of how Tim really got that money as a weapon he can hold over Tim's head.

If there's one problem with Invisible Stripes, it's that the movie has to hew to the Production Code, which makes the ending a bit of a mess. Other than that, it's a fine example of the B movies that Warner Bros. was putting out in the 1930s. While I've always suggested my view that Warner Bros. had the best B movies, Invisible Stripes is helped by an even better cast than usual. Bogart was pretty clearly on his way to stardom, even if he still wasn't being given leading roles in A movies. I don't think the studio had any idea how much of a star Holden would become. Raft, I think, was already on the way down, which is why he was reduced to leading lower-budget stuff like this.

Still, thanks to the level of talent here, Invisible Stripes is a cut above some of those other B movies. One interesting bit of trivia that I think I mentioned at the beginning of the month. Early in the movie, the characters are outside a movie theater showing a movie called You Can't Get Away With Murder. It turns out this is a real movie, and one that stars Humphrey Bogart, having been released a few months before Invisible Stripes. You'll have a chance to see You Can't Get Away With Murder at 7:15 AM tomorrow.

Father Is a Bachelor

I had recorded the movie Father Is a Bachelor quite some time back, but never got around to it thinking it wasn't available on DVD. A recent search of the TCM shop said that it does in fact seem to be available courtesy of Columbia's MOD scheme, so I watched it to do a review on here.

William Holden plays Johnny Rutledge, who works in the traveling medicine show of "Professor" Mordecai Ford (Charles Winninger). The Professor is one of those con-artist types who make you wonder why anybody would buy the crap that he's selling. In fact, it seems as though Ford has been through this particular town somewhere in the Ohio River valley circa 1900 before as the townsfolk recognize Ford. Johnny was fortunate enough to be performing a song in blackface so that people don't recognize him; with the Professor getting arrested in put in jail there's no more work for Johnny.

Hanging around the area as a sort of vagabond and waiting for the Professor to be released, Johnny comes across a group of children for whom something seems to be not quite right. These are the Chalottes, named for the months of January through May. Their parents died some time back, but only the two oldest know the truth, telling the three younger ones that their parents are away. Johnny, feeling bad for them, decides to stay with them for a while, telling them that he's their long lost uncle, which of course is baloney.

Now, it should be easy enough to figure out where this movie is going, so it's the gettin there that's the more interesting part of the movie. Johnny needs a job to help support the children. Judge Millett (Lloyd Corrigan) has a farm and is fairly well-off, and his daughter Prudence (Coleen Gray) takes a liking to Johnny, so she gets him a job at Dad's farm. Meanwhile, Plato Cassin (Clinton Sundberg) gets in a fight with Johnny having claimed that Johnny isn't really the kids' uncle at all, which leaves a legal cloud hanging over Johnny.

It also turns out that one of the Chalottes has a great musical talent, to the point that perhaps he would to well to study at a conservatory in Cincinnati. But the only suitable music teachers in town are Plato's spinster sisters. It would be easier to get the kid into conservatory if all of the Chalottes were the legal wards of the Cassins, but to adopt them requires one of the sisters to be married, so Plato tries to blackmail Johnny into marrying one of them. Plato also tries to put a bug in Prudence's ear that Johnny only wants the Millett money.

Eventually, the Professor gets out of jail and moves in with Johnny and the Chalottes, having nowhere else to go, but Johnny, not really wnting to marry either of the spinster sisters and not being able to get married to Prudence, decides to become a vagabond again, leading to the movie's climax.

Father Is a Bachelor is an amiable enough little movie. William Holden apparently didn't like doing such roles, and it's easy enough to see why, although somebody has to make this sort of movie to appeal to the family market. Holden does a satisfactory job, while I found Winninger a bit more annoying than a lot of the other con-artist types. The kids are also adequate, although the situation seems a bit far-fetched. Certainly everybody in town would have known what happened to the parents and banded together to help the kids?

In which yours truly takes a decidedly minority opinion

I've never taken part in the "Blind Spot" blogathon where people take up the challenge of seeing a bunch of well-known and highly-rated movie that they've never seen before. If I did, one of the movies I could have used this year would have been Sam Peckinpah's 1969 western The Wild Bunch. However, I have to say I was decidedly underwhelmed by it.

There's really nothing wrong with the story. William Holden plays Pike Bishop, an outlaw at the end of the old west era who's looking to score one last haul with his gang so he can go into retirement. The gang includes Dutch (Ernest Borgnine); bothers Lyle (Warren Oates) and Tector (Ben Johnson); and Mexican Angel (Jaime Sanchez). Pike and the gang are planning to rob a railroad payroll in south Texas.

Waiting for Pike's gang is bounty hunter Deke (Robert Ryan). He's able to disrupt the robbery enough to kill a couple of minor members of Pike's gang, but Pike and the big names escape with at least some of the loot. Except that when they get to Mexico they find that it's not loot at all, but steel washers instead of silver coins. They're going to have to do yet another robbery if they want to retire.

Meanwhile, the gang has temporary sanctuary in Angel's home village where a brutal revolutionary officer has taken over. Pike offers to steal a bunch of guns from a US military transport in exchange for a substantial sum that will allow everybody to retire. But he's worried that the general is going to try to fleece him, and he still has to worry about Deke and his gang, who probably don't have any qualms about crossing the border to get him.

In addition to a reasonably conceived story, I also have no issue with the actors. I enjoy all of them, and nobody here is noticeably obnoxious. The Mexican general is a clear bad guy, but that's the way the character is written and not a problem with the actor (Emilio Fernandez).

So what did I dislike about The Wild Bunch? I think it all comes down to Sam Peckinpah's direction. The movie is known for its violence, which was fairly extreme at the time. Now, I don't have any particular problem with gratuitous violence -- I happen to love Bonnie and Clyde, for example, which to me seemed just as violent as The Wild Bunch. And frankly I'd much rather watch gratuitous violence than gratuitous sex. The problem I had was the way Peckinpah filmed it. People get shot and fall off rooftops. No big deal there. But almost invariably, Peckinpah has them fall off in slow motion. Other people who get shot standing (or sitting) on solid ground also die in rather florid mannerisms.

Peckinpah also drew the story out with some flashback scenes that reminded me of one of the problems I had with Marathon Man. Also, the movie is quite languid for much of the running time, telling what is probably a 100-minute story or so in an excruciating 144 minutes. Finally, this being the late 1960s, there are a bunch of those pointless zooms that I like to rail about in movies of the late 60s and early 70s. Here they were really noticeable and served no discernible artistic purpose.

Still, almost everybody else loves The Wild Bunch, so this even more than most other movies is one I'd suggest you watch and make your own decisions about. It's available on Blu-ray at a fairly moderate price.

The Horse Soldiers

Today is Memorial Day, a holiday which was originally about remembering the dead of the US Civil War. So rather than watching all those World War II movies on TCM, I decided to watch a Civil War movie off my DVR, one that's also available on DVD and Blu-ray: The Horse Soldiers.

The time is sometime early in 1863. The Union has wrested control of much of the Mississippi River from the Confederates, but there's one stronghold on the river still: Vicksburg, MS. The Union has been trying to besiege the city, but there's a problem in that there's still a rail line open to the city. That line leads to an important railway junction at Newton Station, so the plan is for a small Union expeditionary force to go to Newton Station and destroy as much of the rails and rolling stock as possible.

There is a big problem, of course, which is that Newton Station is a couple hundred miles inside Confederate territory, so when Col. Marlowe (John Wayne) is asked to lead the force, he knows it's not going to be easy. He also knows that the men are going to hate the mission since it's dangerous and there's a good possibility that they'll be captured and sent to the notorious POW camp at Andersonville. Marlowe gets an even bigger problem thrown in his lap, in the form of Maj. Kendall (William Holden) from the medical corps. Marlowe thinks having a doctor in his ranks is only goin to slow all of them down, and he doesn't like doctors anyway. Kendall doesn't like war and feels his first duty is to sick people period, not to sick Union soldiers.

With all the preparations taken care of, it's time for the forces to set off. They quickly wind up on a farm run by Hannah Hunter (Constance Towers); all the men are either dead or of fighting the war. The Union soldiers commandeer the place to spend the night, but they discover that Hannah and her slave Lukey (Althea Gibson the tennis player in her only acting role) are eavesdropping, so the two women have to be taken along as prisoners since they'll certainly notify the authorities otherwise.

The soldiers continue south facing the possibility of detection by Confederate patrols, and also from time to time having to deal with medical issues. Eventually they make it to Newton Station, and achieve their objective after a short skirmish with tha Confederates stationed in the town. And they all lived happily ever after, or at least the Union folks did.

No, that's not it; they couldn't just stay in Newton Station of course. They have to get back to Union lines, and Marlowe comes up with the daring idea of continuing south to Baton Rouge on the Mississippi. After all, if they turn around and head back north, the Confederates are going to be waiting for them. Nobody expects them to keep going south.

The Horse Soldiers is one of those movies that I found to be solid entertainment, but nothing spectacular. It felt to me as if it was covering ground that had been done in other movies. There was also the problem that much of the soldiers' mission seemed to come a bit too easy for them. The conflict between Marlowe and Kendall isn't fleshed out as much as I thought it could have been. And poor Althea Gibson was given a stereotyped role, never mind her lack of acting ability.

Still, the flaws in The Horse Soldiers don't amount to enough for me not to recommend it. Fans of John Wayne will probably already have seen it, but if not, I can't see why they wouldn't like it. William Holden also does well. And the story is entertaining enough.

TCM Star of the Month April 2018: William Holden

This month marks 100 years since the birth of actor William Holden, who won a Best Actor Oscar for Stalag 17. So it's not surprising that TCM has selected Holden to be Star of the Month this April. Holden's movies will be airing every Monday in prime time, which I'll assume was selected so that they could have five nights of Holden's movies. The actual Holden centenary is April 17. The only Holden we get that day is the overnight stuff that continues prime time from Monday, April 16.

The Holden movies are grouped in somewhat chronological order, with mostly earlier stuff tonight, such as Golden Boy kicking the night off at 8:00 PM. However, the night also includes Executive Suite from 1954 at 10:00 PM. And there's 40s stuff on the 16th in the form of Apartment for Peggy. As for Stalag 13, that will be on at 10:00 PM April 9.

Sorry I don't have any Holden pictures at hand; I still haven't gotten around to dealing with all the Photobucket stuff and trying to post first thing in the morning on weekdays isn't the most conducive for posting photos.

Mary Poppins bares her breasts!

I mentioned the other day after Robert Vaughn died that he was in S.O.B., which I have on my DVR. So I made a point of watching it over the weekend. It's available from the TCM Shop, so I'm comfortable doing a full-length post about it.

The movie starts off rather creepily, with Sally Miles (Julie Andrews) doing a rendition of "Polly Wolly Doodle" on a movie set; obviously, this is a scene in a movie-within-the-movie, as intertitles helpfully tells us after the opening credits. Producer/director Felix Farmer (Robert Mulligan) has just directed his wife Sally in "Night Wind", and the movie has been not just his first flop, but a spectacular flop. Meanwhile, Sally is preparing to divorce Felix. The result is that Felix goes nuts and decides to try to kill himself.

The suicide attempt fails when the gardener, trying to shut off the ignition in Felix' car, accidentally shifts it into gear, sending the car through the garage and ultimately into the ocean. This brings a whole lot of attention in the form of gossip columnist Polly Reed (Loretta Swit), as well as getting Felix' bosses at the studio to try to find him.

Studio head Blackman (the aforementioned Vaughn) wants to take control of the picture, while Felix' lawyer Culley (William Holden, in his final film role) just wants Felix to live. Things get complicated at Felix' beach house, until they wind up holding a party there with a whole bunch of people who got invited heaven only knows how. Felix is still trying to kill himself, but when an attempt to shoot himself goes awry, he gets a sudden insight: the way to rescue "Night Wind" is to turn it into a softcore porn movie!

Remember that scene at the beginning of the movie of Julie Andrews doing "Polly Wolly Doodle"? Apparently it was a dream sequence from "Night Wind", and now it's going to be an erotic dream sequence detailing the sexual horrors Sally's character had to face. Or something like that. The result is that Sally is going to have to bare her breasts as part of the scene. Except that she's a pure and virtuous as Julie Andrews' image supposedly was. (Not that she's impure; it's just that she was, after all, willing to do whatever it took to make a movie work.) Sally isn't sure she wants to do it, but she owns half the movie since she's in a community propery state, and dammit she's going to protect that property.

This is the basic plot of the movie, but it really just serves as a hook on which to put Blake Edwards' satire of all things Hollywood. The plot actually goes all over the place, with only about a third of the movie going from the time Felix gets his idea to the resolution in which Sally actually does go topless. (And yes, we see it. The way it's handled makes Sally look rather less erotic than any of the other characters in the dream sequence.) And after the resolution of that plot strand, there's still another third of the movie to go.

The result is something that reminded me of the Norman Lear/Bud Yorkin movies, Divorce American Style and The Night They Raided Minsky's. All three movies have some good ideas, and some of those ideas are very well executed. But I found S.O.B, like the earlier movies, to be less than the sum of its parts. Among the things that work are a running joke about a man who's suffered a fatal heart attack while jogging on the beach with his dog just outside the Farmer beach house, and nobody noticing the poor dead man. Loretta Swit does well in her part, as does Shelley Winters as Sally's agent. Andrews is perfectly acceptable, although you have to wonder how she/Sally wound up with all these nutcases. I'd say the same for William Holden, except that he'd already done Network and probably drank prodigiously with enough people in Hollywood for him to fit in to Blake Edwards' satire.

As for what doesn't work, there's Sally's servant who wants to be an agent, and the Chinese cook; the attempt to satirize the way Hollywood treated Asian servants just falls flat and is grating. There's also the doctor who comes to treat Felix after the original suicide attempt (Robert Preston); he's obnoxious. And much of what happens in the final third of the movie just makes no sense, as though Edwards ran out of a coherent plot, but still had punchlines for how to satirize Hollywood.

Overall, I think people who like movies in the "Hollywood on Hollywood" genre will like this one, while people looking for an introduction to any of the actors in the movie, or even the "Hollywood on Hollywood" genre, would be better served with other movies.

Escape from Fort Bravo

A search of the blog claims that I haven't done a full-length post on Escape from Fort Bravo before. It's airing overnight at 3:15 AM as part of TCM's look at the western genre, and is worth a look.

William Holden plays Capt. Roper, an Army captain at Fort Bravo, somewhere in the Arizona Territory. It's the Civil War era, and Fort Bravo is being used as a POW camp for Confederates. Naturally, the Confederates want to escape, and it's Roper's job to make certain they don't. It's a job he can be fairly brutal in, as we see early on when he brings a would-be escapee back all lassoed up.

Part of the reason for having a POW camp out in the Arizona Territory is because it's far away from the front. The other part of it is that it serves the plot device of being in Indian territory, and having various native tribes who just hate the encroaching white man and want to go to war with the white man, which as you can imagine would be a reasonable plot point. Heaven knows enough movies have used it before. And so this one does too, as Roper and his men have to go out and find some stagecoaches that haven't made it to their appointed destination. It's in this search that he finds Carla (Eleanor Parker). She's come to the fort to be at the wedding of her friend Alice (Polly Bergen; Alice is also the daughter of the camp commander who is Roper's commanding officer), and she's survived an Indian attack. Roper takes her back to the fort, and the two immediately begin to fall in love.

Of course, it's all just a set-up. Not just so the plot will have romantic tension; but also because Carla isn't really in love with Roper. In fact, she's in love with Capt. Marsh (John Forsythe), a Confederate officer and POW at Fort Bravo who is technically in command of the Confederate prisoners. Carla is a spy and it's her job to help Marsh and some of his men escape!

This happens, and you can probably guess what happens for most of the rest of the movie. Roper goes after them and eventually catches up. Sparks fly between him and Carla, as she begins to realize she might really be in love with him and not Marsh. And those Indians decide now would be a good time to attack.

Escape from Fort Bravo is a competently-made western that I found had a lot familiar with it. There's nothing particularly bad about it, but I didn't feel it had anything particularly special. The fight with the Indians, which winds up in a siege, is reasonably well handled, however.

People who like westerns will find a lot to love here. People who are relatively new to westerns would probably find some new stuff here, although I'd start off recommending some other westerns first.

Escape from Fort Bravo does seem to be available on DVD if you miss tonight's airing on TCM.

Our Town

This month's TCM spotlight on production designer William Cameron Menzies continues tonight, starting at 8:00 PM with Gone With the Wind. The Menzies movie I'd like to mention, however, is Our Town, which you can catch overnight at 1:45 AM, or still late this evening out on the west coast.

This one is based on the classic stage play by Thornton Wilder which looks at life in the fictional town of Grovers Corners, NH, at the turn of the last century. More specifically, it looks at two people in that town, young George Gibbs (William Holden) and neighbor girl Emily Webb (Martha Scott). At the start of the film, they're high school students and, as you can guess, they begin to fall in love with each other, although we'l get to that more later in the movie. There's a life for people to live, and we first see what a wonderful place Grovers Corners is supposed to be for the rich panoply of people who live here, portrayed by some of the great character actors of the era: Thomas Mitchell and Guy Kibbee play Mr. Gibbs and Dr. Webb respectively; their wives are played respectively by Fay Bainter and Beulah Bondi. For all that Hollywood did in creating a stereotypical image of small-town America, Thornton Wilder may have topped them all.

Fast forward a couple of years. I mentioned that George was falling in love with Emily, and now that they're both fully-fledged adults, they're ready to get married. Of course, there are the worries about whether they'll be able to support themselves, and all the other other stereotypical worries about whether the wedding is going to go off, but since this is Grovers Corners, we know that the wedding is going to be beautiful and a show of love between our two young leads.

But this is life, and it turns out that not everything goes according to plan. People live their lives, which means they grow up, get married, have children, and then die. And sure enough, death is going to come for poor young Emily in childbirth. When Emily dies, she goes off to Thornton Wilder's vision of the afterlife, which has all the other dead wives and mothers overlooking the cemetery in Grovers Corners, commenting on life there but no longer having any real emotional connection to the town. Emily is horrified by this....

I'm going to give a bit away by saying that the ending of the movie is not the same as the ending of the play, although from what I've read Thornton Wilder specifically approved the changes for the movie since it still kept his philosophical vision that life is to be lived and savored. As for the story, I have to admit that it's not particularly a favorite of mine, since it comes across as so syrupy, especially the third act when Emily dies. It's not the actors' faults, they do as well as can be expected with the material But since the movie is being shown tonight for William Cameron Menzies' production design, I have to say there that the movie succeeds in spades, being highly evocative of an idyllic small town that never really existed anywhere. The scenes of the afterlife are also handled interestingly, although I don't know if that's down more to Menzies or the cinematography.

Our Town is a movie that everybody should see once, although I don't have any strong desire to see it a second time.

The Lion

William Holden was an advocate of animal conservation, the the point that he had a large interest in an African game reserve. Holden discussed that to an extent in the interview he did with Johnny Carson that's popped up once in a while as part of the Carson on TCM series. It's probably that interest which is responsible for the making of The Lion, which is coming up tomorrow afternoon at 1:15 PM on the Fox Movie Channel.

William Holden stars as Robert Hayward, a lawyer whom we first see at the beginning of the movie being picked up by a woman at a game reserve somewhere in Kenya. That woman turns out to be Robert's ex-wife Christine (Capucine, no last name). They got divorced and she stayed in Africa to marry game warden John Bullit (Trevor Howard) and retain custody over daughter Tina (Pamela Franklin). Well, that was a few years back. Tina's grown, and Christine is worried that living in the middle of nowhere in Kenya isn't good for a growing girl like Tina. Christine is more specifically concerned that under Bullit's (everybody calls him by his surname) influence, Tina is "going native". Heck, Tina considers him her father, and barely recognizes Robert.

Robert gets a taste fairly early on of how "native" Tina has gone. A monkey of some sort comes into his hut through the window, and just outside the hut is a deer-like ungulate. These are animals that hang around the compound, and not out in the nature of the reserve, because apparently Tina has treated them well enough that they're practically tame. Of course, this isn't the only animal with which Tina has what she claims is a friendly relationship. She takes Robert through the forest to see the lion who is her friend. The lion seems perfectly gentle with Tina, but growls rather menacingly at Robert. It's obviously foreshadowing something, but what?

Now you can see why Christine is worried about Tina's development, especially when you consider that Bullit has had a native shadowing Tina without her knolwedge every time she goes out. Tina doesn't want to leave because she's identifed with Bullit as her dad, and Christine is claiming to be in love with him still. But as the movie progresses, we see more and more signs that there might still be a flame for Robert burning somewhere inside. And Robert, for his part, has a court order from the divorce settlement saying that he can come and take custody of Tina at any time he wants. Now might be a good time to do so....

Meanwhile, there are also the black African natives. They have special rights on the reserve because they more or less roamed the land nomadically before the Europeans closed it to any further development as a reserve. Bullit has a reasonably good working relationship with them, but of course Robert knows nothing about their ways. And sure enough, tribal customs are going to clash with western customs thanks to Robert's not understanding the tribe; this causes more problems for Tina as well.

The plot of The Lion is somewhat conventional, seeming vaguely reminiscent of parts of The Yearling or Old Yeller. It's also a bit muddled, what with combining the family drama with the native stuff. In some ways, this is too bad, because there's a lot of lovely location shooting of wildlife. On the other hand, that footage is combined with some very obvious rear-projection photography. Like everything else in the movie, it's symptomatic of the idea that everybody was really trying, but the movie is never quite successful. And that goes for the Fox Movie Channel too. The last time they showed this, the print seemed to be in the Cinemascope aspect ratio. But, it was not only letterboxed, but pillarboxed as well. Amazon suggests that The Lion is available on Amazon instant video, but there's no hard-copy DVD available.

Satan Never Sleeps

I've stated before how the Fox Movie Channel pulls movies out of the vault, shows them a bunch of times in a short period, and then puts them back in the vault. Another film that had been missing for years only to show up earlier this month is Satan Never Sleeps. It's getting another airing tomorrow afternoon at 12:50 PM, with a couple more airings in June.

William Holden stars as Father O'Banion, a Catholic missionary priest in China in 1949 making his way to his new assignment. He's being followed by Siu Lan (France Nuyen), whose life he saved and who now feels she's in his debt, and even wants him to marry her. Catholic priests of course can't get married, but it's not as if the Chinese could be expected to know this. Anyhow, O'Banion tries to get rid of her, with one of the results being that it makes him late getting to the mission that is his new assignment, something with greatly irritates the old mission priest, Father Bovard (Clifton Webb).

Bovard wants to leave the mission as soon as possible in part for a more comfortable life, but also in part because of the recently concluded civil war. The Communists have finally pushed the Nationalists out of mainland China and onto Taiwan, and the Communists are of course officially atheist. Being religious in a society that's de jure atheist is a problem, as I mentioned yesterday in my review of Rome, Open City. And Father Bovard is right to want to get out of the country: O'Banion's late arrival means that Bovard is unable to leave, as the Communists waylay him on his way out, forcing him to stay at the the mission, which is ostensibly still free to practice Catholicism. So, Bovard has good reason to be irritated with O'Banion. That, and the fact that in his eyes (and in no small part to Siu Lan's pursuing him), O'Banion comes across as unorthodox at best, and blasphemous at worst, in the eyes of Bovard.

I wrote in the last paragraph that the mission was still ostensibly allowed to practice Catholicism. In reality, it's just a reprieve, as the Communists are going to get around to expropriating the property eventually, if not imprisoning the clergy as well. The Communists are represented by local Party boss Ho San (Weaver Lee), who at one time was, along with his parents, a congregant at the mission. But he's a committed atheist now, and he leads the local forces on several raids of the mission, all with the ultimate goal of discrediting the Catholic Church by getting all the priests to sign forced confessions. Ho San, additionally, has his eyes on the lovely Siu Lan. Eventually, Ho San does O'Banion and Bovard put in prison and tortures them in an attempt to extract that confession, while raping and impregnating Siu Lan.

When you have local leaders acting like dictators, there's always the possibility that somebody higher up the food chain will turn his eye to the local boss, something we recall from Man on a Tightrope. In this case, that somebody comes in the form of Soviet attaché Kuznetsky (Martin Benson), who officially doesn't have any power, but does have influence. He and the higher-ups have noticed that Ho San has been slow in obtaining those confessions, and also living in luxury. Granted the national Party bosses lived in luxury, but one could always use such a lifestyle against the locals if need be. Eventually, O'Banion and Bovard are told they're to be expelled from the country; Siu Lan wants to escape with them. It's all likely a trap, however....

Satan Never Sleeps has some problems in that it runs too long (at 126 minutes, it could probably stand to have had a script running about 20 minutes less); also, the ending makes no sense and might infuriate some viewers. Whether the script is fair to the Chinese Communists is a question that should probably be left to the individual viewer. I think the internal affairs of Communist China at that point would have been a pretty big question mark to the American public, even more than early Soviet Communism had been. Also, the excesses of the Cultural Revolution hadn't yet occurred. On the other hand, there was no way an American movie of that time could portray communists as having sincere revolutionary zeal. As for the acting, there's a good performance from Webb, whose character doesn't know the truth about Holden's priest, and a workmanlike performance from Holden. There's an obvious lack of location shooting, in that there's no way the filmmakers could have gotten into Communist China. Instead, England and Wales substitute for southern China.

All in all, Satan Never Sleeps isn't the worst movie ever made by any means, but it's also not particularly great or even novel, since something like The Left Hand of God had covered some of this material several years earlier. Satan Never Sleeps is, I think, better than The Left Hand of God, but not nearly as good as the aforementioned Man on a Tightrope. Satan Never Sleeps has gotten a DVD release, so if you don't have the Fox Movie Channel, you can still watch the movie.

Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing

It's not exactly my sort of film, but TCM is showing Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing tonight at 8:00 PM. Those of you who like the sort of romantic melodrama that today would probably be made for the Lifetime Channel instead of the big screen will probably love this stuff.

The scene is Hong Kong, during the latter stages of the Chinese Civil War, which would be won by the Communists in October 1949. Han Suyin (Jennifer Jones) is a doctor working at one of the hospitals. She's had a difficult life. She's of mixed Chinese and British descent, which causes problems, and her husband recently died in the war. So to deal with that she's thrown herself into her career Into this walks Mark Elliot (William Holden), an American newspaper correspondent. It's fairly obvious what's going to happen next: the two are going to fall in love! (Would that all doctors look as radiant as Jennifer Jones.) And you know that it's not going to be a bed of roses, either, because if it were there wouldn't be a movie! Ah, but it's not just because of Ms. Han's being a widow that there are problems. Nor is the racial and cultural difference al there is to it. Mark is trapped in a loveless marriage, and he's found that his wife just won't give him a divorce.

Still, the two try to carry on a love affair while having all sorts of realities intrude upon their lives. Ms. Han has to deal with matters involving the ancestral estate back on the mainland; the Communists have taken it over having won the civil war. And then there's Mark's job, which is about to involve events a bit further away. If you noticed the date above, we're not that far away from June, 1950, which is when the North Korean Communists would invade the South and start what would become the Korean War, something that clearly Mark was going to have to cover, which leads to our two romantic leads being separated. When will they get to see each other again, and will their love be able to survive the separation? And can I keep my dinner down while watching this treacle?

I'm sorry, but I just can't bring myself to like Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing. Sure, it's competently made, but this is a movie I would put in a class with Dark Victory or the even more irritating Random Harvest: It screams "Chick flick!", and won't shut the hell up. Even the music gets in on the obnoxious act, with the strings swelling up to play the title tune which was a big hit back in the day, but nowadays is as bad as elevator music. I know there was a market for this sort of stuff, or else it wouldn't have been made. (That, and it was based on a book which was apparently quite popular when it was published.) If you're part of what would have been that target demographic, I bet you'll love Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing.

Sunset Blvd. and polls

Gloria Swanson and William Holden in Sunset Blvd. (1950

TCM is showing Billy Wilder's classic Sunset Blvd. tonight at 8:00 PM ET. It's airing in conjunction with the sixth installment of the Moguls and Movie Stars documentary, which this week details the changes in Hollywood brought about by the rise of television.

Sunset Blvd. deals with an unsuccessful screenwriter (Holden) who gets roped into trying to help a former silent-screen star (Swanson) clean up her horribly amateurish screenplay, and is one of the best movies Hollywood made about itself. What, however is the best? This one? Singin' In the Rain (airing at 11:15 PM tonight)? One of the versions of A Star is Born? Or perhaps even the underrated The Bad and the Beautiful.

Holden's character meets Swanson when he's mistaken for an undertaker, in a sequence that involves one of the more interesting funerals you'll see on screen. Which leads me to a second question: What's the best funeral scene in a movie? There are strange one like this; over-the-top funerals, as in Too Many Crooks, and several movies that open up with funerals as a device to flash back to events in the dead person's life. A few of those that come to mind would be in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and Chariots of Fire. If I had to pick just one funeral scene, though, my decision today would probably be the one at the end of The Third Man, although that decision might well change if I had more time to think.

What are your favorite "Hollywood on Hollywood" or funeral movies?

Rachel and the Stranger

I'm somewhat surprised to see that I have not yet recommended the movie Rachel and the Stranger before. It's airing tomorrow morning at 6:30 AM ET on TCM, which is a good time to catch it.

William Holden plays David Harvey, a pioneer farmer who is widowed, and living with his young son. David's old hunter friend Jim (Robert Mitchum) comes along, and makes David realize that he could really use a woman around the house to raise the son right. So, David goes to the nearest fort town and finds Rachel (Loretta Young), a bondswoman working off her indentured servitude. David buys the contract, takes Rachel back to the wilderness, and marries her.

It's really just a marriage of convenience, though. Rachel tries to raise the son as best she can, but the son doesn't really respect her. Respect is all David and Rachel have for each other, as they haven't fallen in love at all. This causes big problems the next time Jim comes back. Rachel immediately falls for Jim, the way girls always fall for the "bad boy". Even though David hasn't really loved Rachel, he gets jealous, which leads to a lot of romantic tension.

What's the best way to deal with such tension in the old pioneer days? Have an Indian attack! All will be resolved as the three members of the love triangle, and the son, try to save the farm from the marauding Indians.

Reading over the plot, I see that the actors of the old days brought a lot to the movies they appeared in, and could often lift a movie just by their presence. Rachel and the Stranger is one such case. The plot is fairly standard stuff, and the Indians are foreshadowed; you know they're going to come back some day. Heck, you know when David and Rachel only have a businesslike relationship that Jim is going to be back, and that this would be the case even if he weren't being played by somebody with the stature of Robert Mitchum. Still, the three leads take what looks on the page like pedestrian, formulaic material, and turn it into something eminently entertaining.

Despite the presence of three reasonably big stars, Rachel and the Stranger has never been released to DVD. So, you'll have to tune in to one of the infrequent TCM showings.

Sadie Hawkins Valentine's Day, Part 3

TCM is showing another of those military movies with no real war tonight: Stalag 17, at 10:00 PM ET. It's another of those movies that, because of its military setting and its lack of female characters makes it very much a stereotypical "man's movie", but because of the characterization and lack of violence also makes it pretty good for those who would like the stereotypical "women's movie".

The title Stalag 17 refers to a prisoner of war camp, namely one in Germany during World War II, with a bunch of American POWs. There's been an escape attempt which is to be expected; but, it's gone wrong, in that the escapees are caught by the Nazi guards, who conveniently know just where to look. It's clear that one of the POWs is a stool pigeon, and the POWs know just where to look, too: in the direction of William Holden. Holden is a fellow POW, but also the same sort of character Tony Curtis played in Operation Petticoat: the guy who can finagle almost anything out of anybody, by begging, borrowing, stealing, or wheedling people into giving him what he wants. He's the sort of guy who seems to profit on every deal, and that, combined with his naturally standoffish personality, makes him the obvious choice for the other Americans to suspect as being the informant. Holden, of course, knows that he's not the informant, and sets out to prove his innocence, which he can really only do by finding the real informant. And so, Stalag 17 turns from being a dark comedy about the war into more of a mystery/thriller.

Stalag 17 was directed by Billy Wilder, who was a master of making dark, cynical movies. Wilder was also excellent at getting great performances from his actors, and Stalag 17 is no exception. In addition to Holden, there's also Wilder's fellow director Otto Preminger, playing the German commander of the POW camp; and future director Don Murray as a new POW who is in danger because of how much he did to the Nazis before being captured, and whom Holden tries to help escape when Holden creates a diversion by exposing the informant.

Born Yesterday

I gave a very brief synopsis of Born Yesterday back in January, when I mentioned that its star, Judy Holliday, beat out Bette Davis and Gloria Swaonson for the Best Actress Oscar that year. Born Yesterday is playing tonight at 8:00 PM ET on TCM, and is a hugely underrated movie that's well worth watching.

Holliday plays chorus girl Billie Dawn, who's the kept woman of industrialist Harry Brock (played by previous Oscar winner Broderick Crawford). Brock is in Washington DC to do some lobbying, and he finds that his girlfriend is something of a liability: she has no social graces. So, when Brock is approached in their hotel suite by journalist Paul Verrall (William Holden) for an interview, he gets the idea to hire Paul to teach Billie how to act like an educated lady.

This being the movies, it should be pretty obvious what's really going to happen. Billie is going to learn quite a bit more than just etiquette and high culture; she's going to learn that perhaps her boyfriend isn't all that he's been cracked up to being. Indeed, Harry Brock is trying to game the system in ways that are against the law. (I would argue that this is natural: if you give a government more and more power to muck up people's lives, it's to be expected that people are going to try to influence the government to make certain that it's mucking up somebody else's life. Hollywood, though, takes the more common view that this is just another case of eternally corrupt businessmen trying to pollute our otherwise virtuous government. But politics should be a discussion for another place.) Secondly, you just know that Billie and Paul are going to fall in love. Still, despite these predictable plot elements, the story is quite good. Judy Holliday is outstanding, and was more than worthy of winning an Oscar, despite the fact that a lot of people would argue the award that year should have gone to either the aforementioned Bette Davis or Gloria Swanson. (In fact, all three gave Oscar-worthy performances.)

The two men are quite good too. Broderick Crawford seems almost as though he's reprising his role as Willie Stark from All the King's Men, but Harry is supposed to be loud, obnoxious, and used to getting his own way. Holden is also good as the reporter, although having done Sunset Blvd., you'd think that Holden would get something a bit more substantial than this, as he's really playing a foil to Holliday. Still, Born Yesterday is a wonderful film, and one that's also available on DVD.

William Holden does comedy, too

This afternoon at 3:00 PM ET, TCM is airing Miss Grant Takes Richmond. It may be hard to imagine William Holden doing comedy, even in spite of his performance in Born Yesterday: there, most of the comedy focusses on the other two stars, Judy Holliday and Broderick Crawford. Holden gets to do a bit more comedy in Miss Grant Takes Richmond, but even so, most of the comedy involves his female co-star, Lucille Ball.

Ball plays a student (Miss Grant) in secretarial school who seems bound to flunk out. She can't do anything right, and everything she does wrong is done for comedic effect. So, imagine everybody's surprise when William Holden (Mr. Richmond) comes to the school and picks the incompetent Miss Grant to be the receptionist at his real estate business. The people think he's crazy, but it turns out there's a method to his madness. The real estate business is just a front for the real operation: a numbers racket. Richmond obviously wants a receptionist who has no idea what's going on in the back rooms of the business, and Miss Grant is the perfect person for that job.

Unfortunately for him, however, she turns out to be too perfect. Miss Grant Takes Richmond was released in 1949, during the early part of the baby boom when there was a huge shortage of housing. Miss Grant and many of her friends are looking for places of their own, and when they find a section of town ripe for new tract housing, Grant unsurprisingly gets the idea that Richmond's real estate business would be the perfect one to develop it. And dammit, nothing ever stopped any of Lucille Ball's characters when they got an idea as daffy as this, as Holden learns to his chagrin. (One of the daffier parts of it comes when Grant and her friends are looking at the planned development, and decide that the houses are too small. They rectify the problem by moving the strings and stakes delimiting the planned houses, blithely unaware of the problem this is going to cause the builders the next morning.)

Miss Grant Takes Richmond is part comedy-of-lies (in which comedy is derived by one character having to go to elaborate schemes to hide the truth from another), part romantic comedy, and part screwball. Ball and Holden are both fine, although one gets the feeling that this is the sort of material Ball had done a lot of times before, and would continue to do once I Love Lucy came to television. The supporting cast is good enough too; Janis Carter plays the "other woman" in the romantic comedy half of the plot, and veteran character actors James Gleason and Frank McHugh play Holden's right-hand men in the numbers racket. While Miss Grant Takes Richmond isn't the greatest movie you'll ever see, it's a good, clean way to spend an hour and a half.

With well-known stars like Lucille Ball and William Holden, one would think that Miss Grant Takes Richmond is a good candidate for a DVD release. Unfortunately, that hasn't happened yet.