Woman Chases Man

Recently, while browsing through the Roku Channel (I really hate that name, since there's a bunch of channels in addition to all the streaming stuff) app, I was alerted to a new-to-me movie that sounded interesting, with a cast including several old stars whose movies I tend to enjoy, so I watched it. That movie was Woman Chases Man.

Kenneth Nolan (Joel McCrea) is a wealthy young man on a transatlantic liner coming home from Europe, about to surprise his fahter B.J. (Charles Winninger) when he gets home with the news that he's about to pop the question to Nina (Leona Maricle, and if you haven't heard that name before that might be a sign as to which character Kenneth will wind up with in the final reel) Tennyson. However, Dad surprises him first, with a collect radio call to the liner (in the days when this sort of thing would have been monstrously expensive) asking for money. However, Kenneth has heard it before.

Meanwhile, waiting outside B.J.'s office are a bunch of process servers. B.J. is no longer rich; his late wife had half of the couple's money, and when she died, she made certain the son got half of it so he'd have something to start on and so that B.J. wouldn't spend it all. B.J. isn't a bad guy; it's just that he has a habit of picking hare-brained inventions that won't work in real life and wind up costing him a bunch of money. The latest scheme, at least, doesn't sound so bad: a property development of planned houses for the lower social classes, to be called Nolan Heights. But he needs $100,000 to keep the creditors at bay.

Not knowing this is Virginia Travis (Miriam Hopkins). She goes to the building here B.J.'s office is along with a letter of introduction telling Nolan that she's an architect who would be good for the Nolan Heights project. Not that she has any clue that Nolan doesn't have the money to hire her, or anybody else, on. However, her moxie is able to drive the process servers away so the elder Nolan is going to see her. She faints, being in as bad a financial state as B.J. is and not having eaten in two days.

All this gives Dad an idea. Virginia should use her feminine wiles on Kenneth to get him to propose to her, or at least to sign a check for that $100,000 that Dad needs. That latter isn't going to be so easy, since as I said earlier Kenneth has seen all of the schemes up close and seen his father fritter away his money. Kenneth isn't about to let him blow the other half of the money that Mom had when she died. The former -- getting Kenneth to fall in love -- isn't going to be easy either, since as we know Kenneth is bring his girlfriend home with him.

Except that we eventually learn Nina isn't wealthy, and the "Uncle" Henri she's traveling with is really her boyfriend. She's just a gold-digger. And, since we know who the two leads are, we know where it's all going to go. As is so often the case with a movie like Woman Chases Man, the movie is more about how the characters get where we all know they're going.

Unfortunately, Woman Chases Man is one of the weaker screwball comedies I've seen. The situations are even phonier than in most screwball comedies, and the characters are almost all people it's hard to have sympathy with, the possible exception being Kenneth. But even he does a 180 just in time for the final reel. Of note, as a friend of Virginia's pressed into service as a butler, is a young Broderick Crawford.

Woman Chases Man isn't a particularly good movie. But at least it's mercifully short. And the print Roku showed had relatively few commercials -- I think 8½ minutes for a 70-minute movie. Traditional cable channels would probably have had 20 minutes.

Life joy

Another movie that I watched off of the Watch TCM app was the 1938 romantic comedy Joy of Living.

Irene Dunne stars as Maggie Garret, the elder daughter in a family of actors. Mom and Dad (Alice Brady and Guy Kibbee respectively) spent years toiling in vaudeville, while Maggie's kid sister Selina (Lucille Ball) unfortunately doesn't have quite as much talent as Maggie, although the parents would like her to go into showbiz too. Maggie's the one who's successful, having made it into the starring role of a musical. (Irene Dunne being a singer, it's unsurprising the script would give her a bunch of opportunities to sing.)

Maggie is so successful, in fact, that she routinely has throngs of adoring fans waiting for her outside the theater every night. In that crowd is Dan Webster (Douglas Fairbanks Jr. doing is best Melvyn Douglas impersonation), who is frankly forward enough that it frightens Maggie into thinking he might be a stalker, although apparently in the late 1930s they used the word "masher" instead. But we're getting ahead of ourselves here, as there's one other issue. Despite the fact that Maggie is successful, everybody else in the family has been preying upon her success, to the point that her large even for 2023 salary is about to get attached to pay off all the debts that the family has accrued.

And boy are they an annoying family, in the mold of any number of screwball comedies like My Man Godfrey. That obnoxiousness makes Maggie's next actions nearly plausible. Dan keeps showing up and making life a bit of a pain for Maggie, to the point that she finally decides to press charges. She figures that he's going to get a nominal fine and maybe a restraining order. But the judge shows no mercy and gives Dan a six-month sentence, horrifying poor Maggie. She pleads with the judge, who comes up with the only-in-the-movies scheme to have Maggie serve as a sort of probation officer, keeping Dan responsible in exchange for Dan getting a suspended sentence.

It's fairly obvious where the movie is going to go from here, as Dan and Maggie fall in love, and the movie reaches the climax in which Maggie's relationship with Dan is going to come in conflict with the relationship she has with the rest of her family. It's also fairly obvious which relationship she's going to put first in the finale.

And that's the big problem I had with Joy of Living. The cast is all appealing enough and certainly talented, but they're let down by material that's been done too many times. That, and the script felt like it had scenes that went on much too long so there was even less there than the programmer-length running time would have you believe.

Ultimately, Joy of Living isn't a bad movie; it's just that it's well down the list for all the main players as well as being down the list of screwball comedies. There's just so much better out that that you could show to introduce people to any of the stars or genre.

Hal Roach remakes My Man Godfrey

Another of the movies that I recently watched off my DVR is Merrily We Live, which I think got a TCM airing during a Constance Bennett day in Summer Under the Stars. I'd never blogged about it before, which is why I made the point of recording it so I could do a post on it here.

We start off with the hired help, led by Grosvenor the butler (Alan Mowbray), being irritated because all the good silver is missing. That's because the lady of the house, Mrs. Kilbourne (Billie Burke), has had a bad habit of bringing in "forgotten men", not that this movie uses that term the way My Man Godfrey did, and trying to reform them. One of those tramps decided to walk off with as much of the silver as he could carry. So it's going to be a nice surprise for the family when they have their breakfast this morning and have to use whatever utensils are at hand.

In addition to Mom, there's the father (Clarence Kolb) who's big in business and trying to get in with the politicians who hold sway; an adult daughter Geraldine "Jerry" (that's Constance Bennett if you couldn't tell) who is as close to a rational person as you'll find in this family; adult son Kane (Tom Brown) who looks like he's never worked a day in his life; and the stereotypical bratty teenage kid Marion (Bonita Granville), a few years older than the Virginia Weidler character in The Philadelphia Story and not nearly as charming. At least they're all able to convince Mom not to bring in another tramp.

Cut to a winding mountain road that seems to be much too far away from the house where the Kilbournes live for the story to work. Wade Rawlins (Brian Aherne) is driving a jalopy up the road, and stops to get water for the car's radiator, at which point the car rolls backward off a cliff. Rawlins walks down the hill to call for help, and apparently the first house he finds is the Kilbourne place. He tries to ask if he can make a phone call, but Mom is so ditzy that she winds up hiring Rawlins on as a chauffeur before he can explain who he is and what he wants.

Jerry already has a guy pursuing her in the form of Herbert wheeler, but we see that he's pursuing her too fast and how Rawlins has to save her from Wheeler's advances. It's obvious that Jerry is going to fall in love with Rawlins by the end of the movie, although she doesn't know it yet. Meanwhile, Dad is going to be hosting an important dinner, but Marion decides she's going to be a jerk and bollix things by having Rawlins get invited to the dinner when everybody in the family thinks he's a tramp.

Merrily We Live is the sort of screwball comedy that wouldn't have been so bad if it came out two years earlier, before the release of My Man Godfrey, in which case it would be the sort of movie you could look at and see why My Man Godfrey was the better movie. Unfortunately, it came later, so it's hard not to think of producer Hal Roach as ripping off My Man Godfrey. The other problem Hal Roach had is that I don't think he ever really had a particularly big budget to work with. Everything here feels slightly threadbare.

Still, Merrily We Live isn't exactly a bad movie, it's just that there are so many classics of the genre, a standard which Merrily We Live doesn't quite reach.

Midnight (1939)

A search of the blog reveals that I've never blogged about the Claudette Colbert film Midnight before. It was on TCM not too long ago, so I recorded it in order that I could do a review of it, not having seen it in ages.

Colbert plays Eve Peabody, who at the start of the movie shows up in Paris on a train from Monte Carlo and Nice. She's asleep in third class when the train stops, and the railyard worker who checks to make certain all the passengers have gotten off has to roust her to get her off the train. She also doesn't have any luggage with her, just the very fine gown on her back. Eve, you see, is a chorus girl who likes to gamble, and lost everything she had in Monte Carlo, to the point that she had to pawn her belongings to get to Paris.

Tibor Czerny (Don Ameche) is a Hungarian émigré living in Paris and working as a taxi driver. Eve sees him, and makes him an offer. He'll drive her around to all the nightclubs listed in the want ads as looking for singers, and if she gets a job, she'll pay him double the fare; otherwise, he'll have to eat the fare since she doesn't have any money. We get a montage of nighclub neon signs, as Eve finds herself unable to procure employment. But Tibor is already smitten with her, as he buys her dinner and offers her a place to crash for the night as he works the night shift.

Eve has other plans. She escapes to a hoity-toity classical music recital that's by invitation only. Well, she escapes to the outside of it, as she doesn't have an invitation, of course. So when she gets in line to enter, she presents her ticket from the pawn shop, since the guy handling admittance isn't checking the invitations so quickly. They check after everybody is in, and Stephanie, the woman running the concert (Hedda Hopper in a small role) spots the deception, asking if anybody is Eve Peabody, or knows her. The real Eve, of course, says nothing, but another man spots her trying to leave, and takes her into another room.

These are actually several people who would prefer to play bridge than listen to this classical music, among them Marcel, who brought Eve into the room; Georges Flammarion (John Barrymore); Georges' husband Helene (Mary Astor); and Helene's lover Jacques Picot (Francis Lederer). George knows fully well that Helene and Jacques are lovers, but he's not going to grant his wife a divorce, instead looking for a way to break up the relationship. Meanwhile, Eve loses 4000 francs playing bridge, money she doesn't have. Eve, of course, hasn't told these people she's Eve Peabody; instead she claims to be the Baroness Czerny, taking Tibor's name.

Georges, however, does have many, and slips some into Eve's pocketbook. He even books a suite for her at the Ritz so that Jacques won't discover the deception. Of course, he's got a plan for her, and my synopsis giving a bit too much away, you might have figured it out, which is that Georges wants Eve to get Jacques to fall in love with her so that Georges will be able to get Helene back for himself. Eve accepts the offer, because she doesn't really have much choice.

Complicating things is that Tibor would like to find Eve. And he's got the power of thousands of Parisian taxicab drivers on his side, having put up a pool wherein everybody who antes up can get the whole pool by finding Eve. Eventually, he learns that Eve has gone to the Flammarion place out in the country for one of those weekend-long parties in a movie like Gosford Park. And when he goes out there, and finds that Eve is using his name....

If Midnight suffers from one problem, it's one that's not of its own making, but of having been released in 1939. Old movie buffs tend to consider 1939 Hollywood's greatest year, and there are a lot of movies from that year that are better remembered than Midnight, with probably the most notable one for the purposes of this blog post being another Paris-set movie, Ninotchka. It's a bit of a shame, because Midnight is generally a fine movie, although at times the production values feel just slightly less glittering than Ninotchka.

But, in general, the actors all do quite well for themselves, including Monty Woolley as a judge in a divorce-court finale, and the script is excellent too. This later even though the screenwriters, the pair of Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett, apparently had some problems with Mitchell Leisen's direction -- not that I found anyhing notably wrong with it.

In short, Midnight is one of the underrated films of 1939, and if you haven't seen it, definitely do yourself a favor and watch it.

After "Love Before Breakfast" comes....

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What's Up, Doc?

Back in April, TCM put out a podcast of interviews between Ben Mankiewicz and director Peter Bogdanovich called The Plot Thickens. In conjunction with this, they ran a couple of Saturday night doubleheaders of movies directed by Bogdanovich, backended with short interviews with the director. One of the movies that I haven't blogged about before is What's Up, Doc?, so I recently sat down to watch it again to do a blog post on here.

At the airport in San Francisco, a man named Smith (Michael Murphy) opens up a red plaid overnight bag, revealing a bunch of documents marked "Top Secret". The government is on to Smith, sending a man after him. Meanwhile, elsehwere in the airport, Howard Bannister (Ryan O'Neal) and his fiancée Eunice (Madeline Kahn) have deplaned, on their way to a conference of musicologists. Howard is a professor who has come up with a theory of early man banging on igneous rocks to create the first music, and is hoping to win a grant from Larrabee (Austin Pendleton), whose organization is hosting the conference. Howard has his rocks in an overnight bag that looks suspiciously like Smith's, although neither has ever met the other.

Checking in to the same hotel as Howard and Smith is wealthy Mrs. Van Hoskins (Mabel Albertson). She's traveling with a bunch of jewels that she should probably put in the hotel safe if you think the hotel safe is a safe place for such stuff. But for now, she's got her jewels in an overnight bag that -- you guessed it -- has the same red plaid pattern as the ones Smith and Bannister have.

Rounding out the cast of characters is Judy Maxwell (Barbra Streisand), a young woman who is aimless in life, having been kicked out of one college after another. She's wound up in San Francisco and it seems as though wherever she goes, she has a stream of chaos in her wake much like Mr. Magoo, not realizing what she's doing. And she too has an overnight bag like the other three, only hers is actually filled with stuff for an overnight stay.

Judy runs into Howard in a moment when he's away from Eunice, and immediately begins to make his life a living hell. She falls in love with him, and tells all the people she runs into that Howard is her husband, which is of course a lie. Howard is a bit of a milquetoast, and the absent-minded professor type, so everything he does is completely ineffective in getting people to believe the truth about Judy, or in getting Judy to stop harassing him.

Everybody but Judy (who doesn't have a reservation) is staying on the same floor of the same hotel, which leads to the next complication that you can guess: the overnight bags are going to be mixed up. This too causes all sorts of problems and chaos, as Howard needs his rocks; Smith and the people pursuing him want those government secrets; and Van Hoskins wants her jewels. Eventually all of the subplots come together in a wild chase throughout San Francisco.

There's a lot to recommend about What's Up, Doc?, which for the most part is incredibly funny. Bogdanovich and the screenwriters (including himself and Buck Henry) were clearly channeling Howard Hawks, especially Bringing Up Baby. But there's one thing I disliked about Bringing Up Baby that's also a problem in spades in What's Up, Doc?, and that's the female lead.

Katharine Hepburn is obnoxious in Bringing Up Baby, clearly only caring about herself and frankly being maliciously happy to cause all sorts of chaos for Cary Grant. Surprisingly, where Hepburn's character is bad in that regard, Streisand's might be even worse if that's possible. She deserved on multiple occasions to have Howard and/or Eunice march her right down to hotel security and have her booted out of the hotel, and possible even arrested if that were legally appropriate.

Still, despite the completely irritating character Streisand plays, What's Up, Doc? is an incredibly funny winner on all levels and one that definitely deserves a watch.

It's Love I'm After

One of the movies that TCM ran during Bette Davis' turn as Star of the Month that I had not seen before is It's Love I'm After. Since it's available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive, I sat down to watch it and do a review here.

Bette Davis is nominally the female lead here, but the story is really about the male lead, Leslie Howard. He plays Basil Underwood, a Shakespearean actor who has had a long love-hate relationship, both personally and professionally, with Joyce Arden (that's Bette Davis). She plays the female leads in Basil's stage productions, and shares a hotel suite with him as they travel on the road. She's a bit tired of this in that she wants him finally to propose marriage to her.

But before that can happen, another woman shows up. That's young Marcia West (Olivia de Havilland), a star-struck young woman who for whatever reason thinks the world of Basil and shows up at his dressing room one night after a performance and carries on a conversation with him while Basil and Joyce are zinging insults at each other through the wall that separates their dressing rooms. Never mind that Marcia is already engaged to be married. Unsurprisingly, Joyce catches a glimpse of Marcia as she's leaving the theater, although she can't be certain Marcia was in Basil's dressing room.

The one person (well, other than Basil and Marcia themselves) who is certain of it is Marcia's fiancé Henry (Patric Knowles). He loves Marcia and doesn't want to lose her to Marcia's fantasy view of Basil, so he goes to Basil's hotel suite to see him after Marcia goes home. By this time, Basil has finally proposed to Joyce, but Henry has a big favor to ask: could Basil show up at Marcia's mansion and show himself to be such a jerk that Marcia's image of him will change? Joyce is certain to be unhappy about it, but Basil knew Henry's father and is certain this is only going to take a couple of hours, so he reluctantly accepts.

Of course, things don't go as planned. No matter what Basil tries, it only seems to solidify Marcia's image of him. And she's also got a batty screwball comedy family, notably bratty eavesdropping kid sister Gracie (Bonita Granville). Further complicating matters is that Joyce shows up at the house, alternatively claiming to be married to Basil already, and being totally willing to give him up to Marcia.

How is everybody going to extricate themselves from the sticky situation? Well, you can probably guess that the movie is set up so that Basil and Joyce are together at the end, as are Henry and Marcia. So the fun is supposed to be in how the two get there. In that regard, however, It's Love I'm After seems slightly off, even moreso than the Warner Bros. screwball comedy I previously recommended, Four's a Crowd. I think that a lot of it comes down to the Marcia character, who is written as a bit of a jerk. (Well, OK, I found her more than a bit of a jerk.) Add to that that none of the four were normally screwball actors, and the problems mount.

Still, everybody tries, and the leads all being professionals, it not any of their faults that the movie has the problems it does. One standout is Eric Blore as Digges, Basil's valet, playing the sort of role he could play in his sleep.

Even though It's Love I'm After was definitely not one of my favorites, you might want to give it a try since it's definitely the sort of movie some people are going to like more than I did.

That time Warner Bros. remade Libeled Lady

Some weeks back TCM ran a day of movies starring Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland. One that I hadn't reviewed before was Four's a Crowd, so I watched it to do a post here.

The opening reminded me a bit of Libeled Lady, with the four main characters all walking down the street together. As for the real action, we don't see Flynn or de Havilland first. That honor goes to Rosalind Russell, playing reporter Jean Christy. She's got a great story, but it's not going to be printed, because her publisher, Patterson Buckley (Patric Knowles), is planning on shutting down the newspaper. Jean knows just the editor the paper needs to keep it going, but that's a former editor: Jean's on-again, off-again boyfriend Bob Lansford (Errol Flynn).

Bob, no longer at the paper, made the switch to public relations, handling the affairs of rich people and making them look better in the eyes of a public that didn't necessarily like them during the Depression. He's currently trying to get the biggest target of them all, John P. Dillingwell (Walter Connolly), but Dillingwell has the good sense not to get involved with PR firms.

Bob sees a chance to get a contract with Dillingwell once Jean informs him of what's going on at the paper. He'll have the paper publish a series of nasty stories about Dillingwell, which Bob can then use to get that contract, after which Bob will use the paper to make Dillingwell look good. Of course, that's if he can even get to see Dillingwell in the first place.

When he gets to the Dillingwell place, he mees John's granddaughter Lorri (Olivia de Havilland), and is immediately taken with her. There's only one minor problem: Lorri is currently in a relationship with Buckley! And God only knows what's going to happen if Lorri were to figure out that the PR campaign is solely for the purpose of enriching Bob.

I mentioned in the title of this post, and early on about the opening credits, that the movie kept reminding me of MGM's Libeled Lady from a few years earlier. Unfortunately, Four's a Crowd comes off like the poor cousin of Libeled Lady in any comparison. I can think of a couple of possible reasons for this.

First is that I think Rosalind Russell is really the only one of the four leads who was a natural for the screwball comedy. Everybody else tries, but seems better suited to other genres. Second is the fact that this was made at Warner Bros. Certainly there has to be at least one good screwball comedy to come out of Warner Bros. (maybe The Bride Came C.O.D.?), but Warner Bros. really seemed more adept at social dramas and action, while a glittering comedy like this was more in MGM's wheelhouse.

Still, everybody tries their hardest, and it's not as though Four's a Crowd is a bad movie by any stretch of the imagination. It's just that you get the feeling it could have been so much better. Four's a Crowd is available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive, so you can watch and judge for yourself any time you want.

There's Always a Woman

During Summer Under the Stars, TCM ran a day of films devoted to Melvyn Douglas, whose very broad range goes from dramas like Hud to screwball comedies. Something much closer to the lattter is There's Always a Woman.

Douglas plays Bill Reardon, a private detective who doesn't particularly like it. Part of that is because he preferred his old job as an investigator for the district attorney, while the other part is because the business is failing due to lack of clients. His wife Sally (Joan Blondell) got him to start his own detective agency in the first place, and wants him to keep at it.

Bill goes out to approach the district attorney about getting his old job back, and wonder of wonders, a woman walks in the door looking for a detective! Lola Fraser (Mary Astor, which made me think a bit of The Maltese Falcon) is worried that her husband is cheating on her with his old girlfriend Anne (Frances Drake). Lola would like a detective to tail the husband and see what's going on. Sally sees that there's good money in this, so she's willing to take the job, even though she doesn't know the first thing about being a detective. That, and the first night of surveillance involves going to an expensive club, and Bill definitely does not know that Sally has taken a client.

At the club, we see a complicated love triangle as Anne has a fiancé in former gambler Jerry Marlowe (Robert Paige), so there are all sorts of reasons for sparks to fly. Except that the sparks don't fly there, but at the Fraser apartment, where the husband gets shot to death. Sally has a feeling she knows who did it, and actually calls up one of the papers to give them her story.

This is a problem for Bill, since the district attorney assigns him to investigate the case. And Sally isn't about to stop doing her own investigating, since she still has Lola as a client. So you can imagine where the comedy is coming from for the rest of the movie as husband and wife both investigate, with Bill trying to stop Sally from investigating, and Sally's moves constantly but unintentinally making life difficult for Bill.

Don't think too much about the mystery in There's Always a Woman, because that's not really the point of the movie. It's more about the give and take between the dueling investigators, and in that it works quite well. Every time I've seen Douglas in light comedy, he's been quite good, and that's the case here. Blondell worked especially well with Cagney back in the early 30s, but here she's able to work off of Douglas well too. She's not quite ditzy in a Gracie Allen way, just well-meaning but having everything backfire.

There's Always a Woman is a fun little comedy from the late 1930s that really deserves to be better known. It's on DVD courtesy of Sony/Columbia's MOD scheme, but that means it's a little pricey.

True Confession

I wanted to watch a relatively short movie the other night so that I could get to bed at a reasonable time, and decided to finish up the movies on the Carole Lombard box set I have by watching True Confession.

Lombard plays Helen Bartlett, a struggling writer married to equally struggling lawyer Kenneth (Fred MacMurray, with an odd mustache here). In the opening scene, we see that Helen is less than fully truthful, as she recommend her husband take up the defense of someone who is guilty as sin. Then she calls up her friend Daisy (Una Merkel) and gives her every lie in the book to blow off work and come visit her.

Helen decides to help make ends meet by taking a job as a secretary for the wealthy Krayler, even though she doesn't know how to take dictation and only hunts and pecks to type. It's obvious Krayler has other things in mind for her, but she takes the job anyway.

When she realizes what's up, she leaves and gets Daisy to go back to the apartment with her to get her purse and coat, but when they get back, they find that Krayler has been murdered! Even though we know Helen didn't do it, and she'd have an alibi in Daisy once the police and coroner determined Krayler's time of death, Helen decides she's going to confess to the crime so that her husband can defend her and get her off on a self-defense argument. (If the real truth came out, Helen could face perjury charges.) Once her husband wins the case, he'll be a successful lawyer and the money will come flowing in.

Sure enough, Helen is found not guilty, Kenneth becomes a successful lawyer, and Helen actually becomes a successful writer by writing about the case. But there's one small catch. A drunk turned self-styled "criminologist", Charley (John Barrymore), has a piece of evidence that would prove conclusively that Helen didn't kill Krayler. He's willing to blackmail the Bartletts to get a bunch of money so he can live high off the hog.

I found True Confession to be the weakest of the movies on the box set. The problem is in Lombard's character, who as one of those chronic liars who just keeps piling one lie on top of another, she's obnoxious and someone I wanted to see get her comeuppance. This is supposed to be a comedy, and that sort of obnoxiousness didn't really work here. Barrymore is also overacting shamelessly, and relatively irritating too. The deus ex machina that solves Helen and Kenneth's problems doesn't really work for me, either.

Still, I always like to suggest people just for themselves, and since this was on a very low-price box set, getting one dud in the set isn't that big a deal.

Christmas in July

Tonight's the last Friday in November, so we're reaching the end of the Friday Night Spotlight on screwball comedies. This week sees a couple of Preston Sturges movies from the end of the screwball era. Of them, the one I haven't recommended before is Christmas in July, which you can see at 9:45 PM.

Dick Powell stars as Jimmy McDonald, a good guy working in the accounting department of some big business, but not really getting ahead in the world. He's engaged to Betty (Ellen Drew), but still lives with Mother in an apartment building in the poorer part of town. Part of the problem is that Jimmy dreams of getting rich, in a way peculiar to the decade or so just before World War II: winning big money in a radio contest. (You'll remember a radio contest being a major part of the plot to The Magnificent Dope.) This particular contest has a grand prize of $25,000, which would have been several years' income back in 1940, and involves coming up with the best new slogan for Maxford Coffee. (Where's Mrs. Olsen when you need her?)

Meanwhile, we get to see the contest in action. Everbody's sent in their slogans, and now it's tim for the jury to select the winners, but there's a problem: the jury can't agree on which slogan ought to be the winner. One juror, Mr. Bidlocker (William Demarest) has one slogan in mind, while everybody else has a different one. With the contest at a deadlock, some of Jimmy's co-workers decide to play a cruel joke on him: they send him a bogus telegram claiming that his slogan has been selected the winner, and he should go see Mr. Maxford (Raymond Walbourn) to pick up his $25,000 check. Some co-workers. Jimmy goes, and because Maxford has been unable to get in touch with any of the jurors, he assumes that the incompentent jurors simply never informed him that they had finally selected a winner. So, Maxford actually cuts Jimmy a $25,000 check on the spot!

Being declared the winner of one of these big radio contests changes Jimmy in that it gives him more confidence, but it really changes other people's perception of Jimmy just as much. Jimmy's boss gives him a promotion, and retailers are more than happy to give Jimmy an advance on his check when he wants to buy an engagement ring for Betty and gifts for all of the people in his apartment building. It's only at this point that the other shoe drops, and Maxford discovers that the telegraph was a phony, and that the jury still hasn't selected a winner. Maxford understandably presumes that Jimmy is trying to con him, and stops payment on the check. What a PR nightmare.

Things look terrible for Jimmy, but this being a Preston Sturges comedy, you know it's going to have a reasonably happy ending for him and Betty. It's more a question of how the characters are going to reach the resolution that allows the viewers to be happy for Jimmy and Betty. In that regard, Christmas in July succeeds fairly well, although I'm not going to give away the ending.

Christmas in July was only Sturges' second movie as a director following The Great McGinty, so even though he had written quite a few screenplays, the full Preston Sturges style isn't quite here yet. Christmas in July isn't quite as zany as The Palm Beach Story or The Miracle of Morgan's Creek, and it isn't as pointed in its criticisms of people in power as Sullivan's Travels or Hail the Conquering Hero. It's fairly gentle, but a nice gentle. And it's still Preston Sturges. Even his mess The Great Moment was worth watching. And Christmas in July is much more successful than The Great Moment.

The TCM shop lists Christmas in July as being available as part of a Preston Sturges box set. It did get a standalone DVD release a couple of years ago, at least according to Amazon, but I don't know if that's still in print.

Yes, Virginia, there really is a DVD

TCM's Friday Night Spotlight returns this evening, with Matthew Broderick presenting four more movies, this night with a theme of divorces that turn out not necessarily to be the right move. That will be followed by two more screwball comedies to fill out the night. TCM's schedule page is claiming that four of the six films are available to purchase from the TCM Shop; in fact, the two that don't have the "Buy DVD" icon are also on DVD and can be found at the TCM Shop.

The first of these is Love Crazy, which I blogged about back in January 2009 on the first anniversary of the blog. William Powell and Myrna Loy try to celebrate their anniversary, things go wrong, and a series of misunderstandings leads to them nearly getting divorced and winding up in the nut hatch. It's airing at 11:30 PM, and is available as part of a William Powell and Myrna Loy collection that was released a year ago. I didn't see a stand-alone DVD available from the TCM Shop.

Rounding out the night is Vivacious Lady at 4:30 AM. Professor's son James Stewart falls in love with nightclub singer Ginger Rogers, and then has to keep the marriage a secret from his stuffy parents. This movie got a release courtesy of the Warner Archive collection about six weeks ago. (I had blogged back in August about it not being on DVD, which at the time was accurate.) I don't know how long it should take the various databases at TCM to talk to each other, but I'm surprised the schedule doesn't say anything about Vivacious Lady now being on DVD.

The other four movies are:

The Awful Truth at 8:00 PM; Cary Grant and Irene Dunne divorce, realize they shouldn't have, and then try to make each other's new relationships fail.
My Favorite Wife at 9:45 PM; Cary Grant's explorer wife is presumed lost at sea; on the day he's having her declared dead years later so he can get remarried, she shows up again with Randolph Scott in tow. Complications ensue.
Mr. and Mrs. Smith, at 1:15 AM, has a slightly different premise; the characters don't get divorced so much as their marriage is declared invalid. Trying to get back together, however, turns out not to be as easy as planned.
And Too Many Husbands at 3:00 AM has a similar theme to My Favorite Wife, except with the genders reversed. Jean Arthur was married to Fred MacMurray who died, so she married Melvyn Douglas. Except that MacMurray didn't really die, and he shows up again.

Three years before The Lady Eve

Now that we're in a new month, we get a new Friday Night Spotlight; with tnoight being the first Friday in November, that spotlight begins tonight: screwball comedies, presented by Matthew Broderick. This first week of the spotlight focuses on screwball comedies in which journalism plays a major role. I presume that Broderick is only introducing the first four movies each night, with TCM having added extra movies to round out the night's lineup. I've blogged about the first four movies before, but the fifth, surprise surprise, also happens to be a screwball comedy with a newspaperman as a main character: The Mad Miss Manton, overnight at 3:00 AM.

Barbata Stanwyck plays Melsa Manton, a ditzy socialite of the type who populated a whole bunch of these screwball comedies. She's got a bunch of ditzy socialite friends who, thankfully, don't so Sex and the City-type things, but instead call themselves the "Park Avenue Pranksters". Only this time, they're about to find out that when you pull pranks, people are going to stop believing you. This is a problem because, when they see that something untoward might have happened as the house of a married couple of acquaintances, they find a dead body and a diamond brooch! Ah, this is a case for the police, led by detective Brent (Sam Levene). He goes back to the house with the women -- but the body has disappeared! So, unsurprisingly, Brent thinks he's been pranked.

Sharing that belief is one Peter Ames (Henry Fonda), who works for the daily Clarion newspaper. He writes a story decrying people like Miss Manton and her pranking the good people of they city. Manton goes to Ames to complain, and even though at first they don't like each other, you know that by the end of the movie they're going to end up in love. It wouldn't be a screwball comedy if this didn't happen.

Meanwhile, there's still that dead body that Manton and her friends all know they've seen, but can't find. What is a bunch of ditzy socialites who aren't to be believed by the police and the press to do? Why, investigate the case themselves! They eventually find another dead body, and bringing that one to the Clarion gets people to believe that there may actually be something going on. Manton and Peter wind up investigating the case more or less together and solving it, more or less, before the police do.

You'll note that I haven't talked much about the murder case, at least not in any specifics. That's because it's really a Macguffin on which to hang the budding relationship between Manton and Ames. It could just as easily have been somebody running away to elope (It Happened One Night, kicking the night off at 8:00 PM), or a phony case of radiation poisoning (Nothing Sacred, up fourth at 1:30 AM), bringing out reporter and lady together. It's a formula, to be sure, and one that worked a lot in the 1930s. It does work here, but only because of the talents of Stanwyck and Fonda, who were good at playing their respective roles of comic center and aw-shucks foil in a a lot of movies together and apart.

Movie mavens will want to watch out for Vickie Lester playing Kay; Penny Singleton, the future Blondie to Arthur Lake's Dagwood, playing Frances; and John Qualen showing up in a subway scene toward the end. The Mad Miss Manton has received a DVD release from the Warner Archive Collection, too.

Wacky heiress comedy #75424527584328578432760

Heiresses were a staple o screwball comedies in the 1930s. Heiresses getting chased by reporters happened almost as often, it seems: It Happened One Night and Libeled Ladu are two of the great comedies of all time. Fox's entry into the heiress vs. reporter genre is Love Is News, which is airing tomorrow morning at 10:15 AM on the Fox Movie Channel, with half a dozen further airings in August.

Loretta Young, who was already a fairly big star by the time the movie was made in 1937, plays the heiress, Toni Gateson. She's just broken off an engagement with Count de Guyon (George Sanders, in a small role billed well down the credits), and that engagement -- as well of the rest of Toni's private life -- has become fodder for the tabloids of the day, something that Toni doesn't like. She really values her privacy. So, when reporter Steve Layton (Tyrone Power) is sent out by editor Martin Canavan (Don Ameche) to get Toni's story, he has to engage in a ruse to get it. He poses as a police detective escorting her from her plane to the city, asking her questions along the way. However, she learns that he's really a reporter, and he's not about to let her have some privacy by not publishing the story.

What's a scorned heiress to do? Why, turn the tables on the reporter by making him part of the story! Toni gets Steve in a hotel restaurant, where she can make certain all the other reporters hear about how the two of them are engaged to be married. It's a bogus story, of course, but it's tabloid fodder that all of the other reporters can get. She's tricked Steve out of a scoop, she's given all the other reporters something phony to try to ruin their credibility, and she's let Steve know what it's like to have reporters hounding your every move. Steve tries to set the record straight, and Toni tries to make his life more of a nightmare. Along the way, you can probably figure out that the two are going to begin to fall in love as well.

Love Is News is one of those many movies that I would rate as being in the range of successfully entertaining without being anything particularly special. But with a running time of just under 80 minutes, this solid professionalism is enough as the movie doesn't wear out its welcome. You don't normally think of Loretta Young and Tyrone Power doing comedy, and certainly not screwball comedy. Loretta Young is pretty good; Tyrone Power is the sort of actor who I think was better-suited to being the foil; letting everybody else around him being funny. Watch the scene where he has to deal with small-town judge Slim Summerville, for example. He doesn't bring down the proceedings here, but if you had tried to put him into something else from around the same time like My Man Godfrey or Bringing Up Baby, he would have failed spectacularly, I think. Ameche was adept at comedy, or at least Fox kept giving him comic material that worked to his strengths. He plays his role effortlessly, especially in a running joke about him firing and re-hiring Power.

Love Is News has received multiple DVD releases: one by the Fox Cinema Archive, one on a Tyrone Power box set, and one as part of a double bill with the remake, 1948's That Wonderful Urge (in which Power reprises his role, this time opposite Gene Tierney).

Nothing Sacred

It looks as though I have never blogged about the screwball comedy Nothing Sacred before. It's airing tonight at 8:00 PM, and is one of the funnier movies you'll see.

Carole Lombard stars alongside Fredric March, but more on her in a bit. March plays Wally, a bombastic newspaper reporter somewhat reminiscent of Clark Gable's character in It Happened One Night. He gets taken in by a story about some foreign potentate who is in fact a hoaxster, and gets in trouble with his editor (Walter Connolly, who happened to play Claudette Colbert's father in It Happened One Night) for it. To get out of the doghouse, Wally figures he needs the next big story, which he finds when he hears about Hazel (Lombard). Hazel is a small-town girl from Vermont who gets diagnosed with a rare case of radium poisoning and doesn't have long to live. She's never been to the big city, so she'd like to see it before she dies. This is perfect for Wally, who can get the story.

So Wally brings Hazel and her doctor (Charles Winninger) to New York, at which point a media frenzy erupts. Just like the circus surrounding somebody sympathetic (at least in the eyes of the media) like Amanda Knox, everybody begins to fall over themselves to show how much sympathey they have for her. You've got the high society of New York all the way down to the Girl Scouts, all impressed with Hazel's bravery in the face of death. And then Wally and Hazel learn the stunning news: she's really not sick with radium poisoning, and is not going to die. This presents a rather big problem, since everybody in the country has been following her story waiting for her to die. What to do? The other problem is that along the way, Wally and Hazel have begun to fall in love.

Nothing Sacred is a tremendously funny comedy which lives up to its title: the movie holds nothing in reverence. The small-town Vermonters are lampooned. But so are the allegedly sophisticated big-city people, who are shown to be just as gullible as they would argue the small-town folk are. The media's role in fomenting all of this frenzy -- something which clearly still goes on to this day -- is also lambasted. Viewers of today watching Nothing Sacred might find that some of the material veers into politically incorrect stereotyping. After all, back in the 1930s they didn't have quite the sensitivity towards black people that Hollywood would show today. But the movie is still amazingly funny.

Nothing Sacred is also in very good Technicolor, as you might have guessed from the photo above. (Indeed, it's nice to have the establishing shot of Rockefeller Center as it was back in 1937 in such nice color.) Tonight's TCM showing may or may not be that brilliant. In the past, all the prints have been fairly low-quality, as the movie fell into the public domain somewhere along the way. However, the movie has apparently been restored, and we may be getting the restoration print tonight.

Alfred Hitchcock does a screwball comedy

Really. As part of Carole Lombard's day in TCM's Summer Under the Stars, you can watch Mr. and Mrs. Smith overnight tonight at 1:00 AM.

Carole Lombard and Robert Montgomery star as Ann and David, an upper-class married couple in New York who like to throw the sort of barbs at each other that you could imagine William Powell and Myrna Loy doing. In one of their mock arguments, David tells Ann that, yes, if he had to do it all over again, he'd marry her again. Little does he know that he's going to have to. Into each of their lives that morning walks Mr. Deever, a justice of the peace from Ann's hometown out west. He has the sad news of telling each of them that, due to a technicality, their marriage is not actually legal, and that they're going to have to have another ceremony. David, having been apprised of this news at his office, decides to play a bit of a practical joke on Ann, but he doesn't realize that she's been told until it's too late. Ann knows they're not legally married, and that he's not trying to get her to marry him the way he said he would.

So Ann acts as though the two never even thought they were legally married, and threatens to go off with David's law partner Jeff (Gene Raymond). It's up to David to try to win Ann back. But this being a comedy, you know that all of the attempts are going to go wrong, such as when David takes Ann to the hole-in-the-wall restaurant where they went on their first date all those years ago, only to find that things have changed.

Alfred Hitchcock was great at black comedy. Mr. and Mrs. Smith isn't black comedy, but a straight-up screwball comedy. I don't think that screwball comedy best suited Hitchcock's abilities, although that doesn't mean that this is at all a bad movie. In fact, if you didn't know that this had been directed by Alfred Hitchcock, it would come across more as a perfectly good movie, and not one of a great director's lesser efforts. Carole Lombard and Robert Montgomery were both well-suited to this sort of elegant comedy, and it shows. So don't think about Hitchcock, sit back, and enjoy this good movie.

Stop calling us It Happened One Night!

Tonight is the last night for Fredric March to get his place in the spotlight as TCM's Star of the Month. One of his lesser movies is There Goes My Heart, which airs at 10:15 PM ET.

Fredric March plays Bill Spencer, a newspaper reporter (sound familiar?) given the job of finding a runaway heiress and getting her story (sound even more familiar?). The heiress, Joan Butterfield (played by Virginia Bruce) has run off to New York City where, not having any money, she's taken in by a kindly woman (Patsy Kelly). She's a clerk at a department store, and gets Joan a job there, not knowing that the store is owned by Joan's grandfather! As for our intrepid reporter, he finds Joan and begins to write the story, but hits a snag: he finds himself beginning to fall in love with her. (I told you this all sounded familiar.)

As you could probably have guessed without reading the title of the post, this isn't a remake of It Happened One Night, but it sounds awfully close, which is to the movie's detriment. That's a bit of a shame, since the movie has a fairly good cast. Alan Mowbray plays Patsy Kelly's boyfriend living in the next apartment, who is studying to be a chiropractor. Eugene Pallette plays March's editor, and is the sort of actor who is well-suited to the role. And as March's photographer is Arthur Lake, who would go on to play Dagwood Bumstead in all those Blondie movies in the 1940s.

There Goes My Heart hasn't gotten a DVD release, probably in part because it was made by Hal Roach, which would also explain why the movie doesn't sparkle the way It Happened One Night does: he didn't quite have the resources a major studio would have, and was too busy making two-reelers. Still, There Goes My Heart is entertaining enough.

It's a wonderful what?

Tomorrow is the birth anniversary of Claudette Colbert, who is probably best known for her Oscar-winning performance in It Happened One Night. TCM is marking the day by showing a bunch of Colbert's work, starting with It Happened One Night at 6:15 AM ET. I've recommended it before, and so will mention the movie that follows, at 8:00 AM: It's a Wonderful World.

Colbert gets top billing, but the real lead is James Stewart. He plays Guy Johnson, a detective whose client (Ernest Truex) has been framed. Unfortunately, he's got some difficulty proving this, and for not turning over his client to police custody, he's arrested himself for being an accessory. On the train up to Sing Sing, Guy sees a newspaper article that has a clue which should lead to his client's exoneration, so Guy finagles a way to escape from the train. It's at this point that he runs into Claudette Colbert.

Colbert plays Edwina Corday, a famous poetess who is on the run herself. At first the two have an intense dislike for each other, but this is the sort of movie where you know they'll wind up falling in love. Before that can happen, though, they have to stay one step ahead of the police. Edwina isn't much help in this, but Guy knows he has to keep her around lest she go off to the police herself and reveal his location once she finds out who he really is. Ultimately, the two wind up working at a stock theater company where the presumed actual murderer is, and Edwina shows that she does have some resourcefulness.

It's a Wonderful World isn't the greatest movie made, although it's fun enough and a movie I'd call "comfortable". You'll recognize large portions of the derivative story line. Having to stay ahead of the cops, and the way they do it, is quite reminiscent of It Happened One Night, while the "couple tyring to solve a mystery" plot has shades of The Thin Man. Some of this may not be surprising, in part because It's a Wonderful World was directed by Woody Van Dyke, who also directed The Thin Man. Both movies were also made at MGM, so there is also the opportunity to use the same supporting characters. In this case, that means Nat Pendleton. He played the police detective around whom William Powell runs rings in The Thin Man, here, he plays a bumbling police sergeant who keeps losing custody of the James Stewart character. Much of the rest of the cast includes other familiar names, which is what makes the movie "comfortable": Edgar Kennedy, who had over 200 appearances in talkies (and spent good fifteen years making silent shorts as well) plays Pendelton's bumbling police partner; Guy Kibbee plays James Stewart's detective partner; and Frances Drake (Mad Love), Sidney Blackmer, and Hans Conried all get smaller roles. The execution isn't perfect, but the movie is nonetheless entertaining.

Despite its two bigger stars, It's a Wonderful World never got released to a DVD boxset, and has only seen a release as part of the Warner Archive collection. But at least it's gotten a DVD release.

Girls gone wild!

TCM is showing the fun romantic comedy Theodora Goes Wild tomorrow morning at 8:00 AM ET.

Irene Dunne stars as Theodora. She lives in a small town in Connecticut and, unbeknownst to the townsfolk -- or the spinster aunts she lives with (Spring Byington and Elizabeth Risdon) -- she's written a novel. The reason that nobody knows this is because it's a novel almost as steamy as Peyton Place. Having written the book, she has to go to New York City to deal with the publisher, although she's also got an uncle and cousin living there. At the publisher's, she meets the book's cover illustrator, Michael (Melvyn Douglas). He doesn't know anything about her real identity and she, not wanting to give away any hints, tries to portray herself as worldly.

However, things don't go according to plan, and Theodora leaves some ID at Michael's apartment, leading him to come out to Connecticut to figure out what's really going on. In order to buy off his silence, Theodora hires him as the family's gardener. But, it turns out that Michael has a secret too: he's estranged from his wife, and would divorce her if it weren't for the fact that his father is running for political office and the divorce would scupper his chances of election. Still, when Theodora's secret gets out, she decides to reveal Michael's....

Theodora Goes Wild is a pretty wild screwball comedy. Irene Dunne did quite a few of them, notably The Awful Truth, but Melvyn Douglas did slightly more urbane stuff like Ninotchka. Although the movie is a bit predictable in its attitudes toward the straitlaced small towns of the day, it's still quite enjoyable, thanks in no small part to excellent performances from the two leads. For whatever reason, though, Theodora Goes Wild isn't as well-remembered today as other screwball comedies of the era. Thankfully, however, it has been released to DVD, so despite its relative obscurity, you don't have to wait for TCM to show it again.