Grandma's Boy

I mentioned a month or so an early Harold Lloyd feature that I had on my DVR when TCM aired two one-hour features in a Silent Sunday Night's Block. After blogging about For Heaven's Sake, the other movie in that block was Grandma's Boy.

Harold Lloyd once again plays The Boy, although there's an establishing sequence before we see Lloyd. The Boy lives in a small town called Blossom Bend, one of those towns that John Nesbitt would have talked about in his Passing Parade shorts, as it really is the sort of place that's been passed over. The Boy would be a mama's boy, except that he lives with Grandma (an actress named Anna Townsend whom I hadn't heard of before). And he's been that sort of boy his whole life, incredibly timid and finding everybody walking over him. (The shot of a one-year-old Boy already wearing the Harold Lloyd glasses is a fun little sight gag.)

Cut to the present day, when The Boy is 19 years old (Lloyd, who plays him, was 28 at the time) and all grown up, at least physically. Emotionally, he's just as much a coward as he always was. But he's interested in The Girl (Mildred Davis, who would marry Lloyd the following year and remain married for 45 years until her death). Mildred isn't uninterested in him, but he's not the only Boy in town. Also interested in The Girl is The Rival (Charles Stevenson, who was 35 at the time and looks it). The Rival is a bully, and treats The Boy like dirt, largely because he knows he can get away with it.

The night of the big dance comes up, and the Boy, having had his one suit destroyed by The Bully, is given Grandpa's old suit, which is in mothballs since it dates back to the Civil War (remember, that would only have been 60 years prior to the movie, and had Grandpa been alive he probably would have been in his early-to-mid 80s). Grandma's trying to help her grandson because she knows he's going to have to strike out on his own someday and the world is going to be way too cruel to a coward such as the Boy currently is.

That night, the police discover that a tramp who has been through the town several times before and been a problem for the police every other time is back in town and causing all sorts of criminal mayhem. The police deputize all the adult men in town, except for The Boy, having run out of badges. Grandma realizes he needs serious help. But how? She decides to tell her grandson about Grandpa's (Lloyd again, this time with ridiculous sideburns) exploits in the Civil War, aided by a special magic charm that she then gives to The Boy.

You can probably guess where the movie is going to go from here, but then a movie like Grandma's Boy isn't so much about suspense as to what the destination is going to be as much as it is about how they get to that destination. Harold Lloyd, despite being relatively early in his career and not having worked much with features, still does so expertly, providing a good mix of both sight gags and suspense.

There's a reason I like Harold Lloyd a whole lot more than Chaplin, and films like Grandma's Boy are part of that reason.

TCM Star of the Month November 2024: Ruth Roman

Unfortunately, as of this writing, The Baby is not part of the Roman tribute

We're into a new month, which as always means new programming features on TCM, including a new Star of the Month. This month, that star is Ruth Roman, and her movies will be airing every Tuesday in prime time. I currently have one of her films on my DVR, and that one is airing overnight tonight at 1:15 AM (so still Tuesday in the Pacific time zone): Invitation.

Roman is not the star here; that honor goes to Dorothy McGuire. McGuire plays Ellen Pierce, recently married to architect Dan Pierce (Van Johnson) and having a father Simon (Louis Calhern) who spoils her rotten; as the movie opens he's just bought her another fur coat. However, Dad has a reason for spoiling his daughter. She's sickly, subject to bouts of shortness of breath. In fact, that goes back to a case of rheumatic fever Ellen had as a kid. Normally, resting for a few minutes helps, but in her last episode, Ellen actually passes out!

Ellen get picked up by Dad's chauffeur to go to his palatial estate on Long Island wher eshe also meets with family doctor Pritchard (Ray Collins). They insist that she's going to get better, and in fact, they've just heard about a possible new treatment for her condition. On the way home, she stops off to see another doctor who is a friend of the family, Dr. Redwick. This visit is a bit tougher thanks to Redwick's daughter Maud (Ruth Roman). Maud was Dan's girlfriend, or at least she thought she was. She loved Dan and he only considered her a friend. Maud expected Dan to marry her until Dan decided to marry Ellen in what was seen as a big surprise to everybody, as we learn in a flashback. Maud hasn't forgiven Ellen, and tells Ellen that she's only got a year with Dan, after which Maud is going to win him back forever.

Of course, Maud has reason for making this comment. We eventually learn, again in part through flashbacks, that Ellen's childhood rheumatic fever has left her with a damaged mitral valve. Nowadays, it's the sort of thing that could be cured with routine surgery, but in those days such a surgery would have been considered a dangerous experiment. Indeed, such a surgery is the "possible new treatment" everyone else is discussing, but so far it hasn't had anything close to a 100% success rate. As things stand right now, but nobody has been telling Ellen, her mitral valve is deteriorating and will probably kill her in a year or so, hence Maud's nasty comment.

As for Dan, business hadn't been going well for him, until Ellen's father contacted him. Dan always liked Ellen as a friend although as with Maud he didn't honestly love her. When Ellen's father learns that Dan doesn't have any love interest, he suggests that perhaps Dan could marry Ellen and make her last year of life happy. In exchange, Dad would use his extensive contacts to get good jobs for Dan. Of course, all of this is to be kept a secret from Ellen. And, of course, as in Dark Victory, the doomed patient is going to find this out. At least in the case of Invitation, however, there's the possibility of that new treatment.

Invitation was made at MGM, and to be honest, it comes across as one of those MGM movies where they still had all the gloss in the world but couldn't use it to make a mess of a plot come out any better. Ruth Roman's character is way too mental; Ellen similarly goes off the deep end when she discovers the deception; and Calhern doesn't come across as particularly fatherly here. It's once again a script problem and not the fault of the actors.

TCM's Gena Rowlands tribute

Gena Rowlands in Gloria (10:45 PM)

Actress Gena Rowlands dies in August at the 94. TCM is now getting to a programming tribute to her, with five of her movies:

8:00 PM A Woman Under the Influence;
10:45 PM Gloria;
1:00 AM Lonely Are the Brave;
3:00 AM The High Cost of Loving; and
4:45 AM Night on Earth

I had The High Cost of Loving on my DVR from when José Ferrer was honored in Summer Under the Stars, so now is the perfect time to watch it and do a post on it.

Ferrer plays Jim Fry, a mid-level purchasing manager in one of those industrial companies that dominated the American economic scene -- or at least Hollywood's depiction of it -- in the years following World War II. Think of the sort of business in Executive Suite. Jim has been married to Ginny (Rowlands, in her first role, getting an "introducing" credit for it) for nine years now, and they live a solidly middle-class life.

One morning at the breakfast table, Jim reads a story about a bunch of executives from a big conglomerate having bought the company where he works, and sending their executives to examine their acquisition, as though this were the most important thing in the world. Ginny responds by wording something as a news story, but really breaking the news to her husband that she may finally be pregnant after years of trying! This being 1958, the cast still can't use the word "pregnant", leading to scenes with Ginny's obstetrician (Richard Deacon) that are supposed to be funny but come across as stilted.

In the parking lot at work, Jim starts talking to his best friend Steve Hayward (Bobby Troup). Like Jim, Steve is in middle management, and hoping for a promotion as a result of the merger. Indeed, that morning, the new bosses send out a series of memos about an important luncheon in a week's time, which everybody assumes, being invitation-only, is for the people who are going to be staying on and getting promotions. The only thing is, Jim doesn't get one of these memos!

So Jim starts going to various other people in the company trying to figure out what's going on, only without being direct about it because he doesn't want to give away that he hasn't received the memo. Eventually, the audience learns that Jim's not getting an invitation was a clerical oversight to be corrected the following morning. But Jim doesn't know that, and everybody he talks to results in the sort of conversation where he thinks his position as the company is worse than it was before he started the conversation!

I suppose in the business culture of the 1950s, all of this might have seemed funny. Today, however, it comes across as dated and stale. But there's an even bigger problem, which is the screenplay. It's written so as to have everybody talk in metaphors rather than trying to be direct with each other, and that just doesn't work. The characters come across as artificial and not particularly likeable.

The High Cost of Loving has a kernel of a good idea, but it doesn't work. If you haven't seen any of the Rowlands movies, I'd recommend the other four before this one.

Who is Annette Kellerman and why is she saying those horrible things about me?

I've got several movies on my DVR that are coming up on TCM. Two of them are in conjunction with prime-time programming, and I figured it would be better to do posts on those on the following two days. So my next post is on a movie that TCM isn't showing for a good three days yet: Million Dollar Mermaid, Nov. 6 at 2:15 PM.

After a brief title card sequence about the old Hippodrome in New York, the action switched to Australia in the 1890s. Frederick Kellerman (Walter Pidgeon) is a widowed musician who runs a conservatory in the Sydney area and lives with his young daughter Annette (Donna Corcoran playing her as a juvenile). Annette suffered a polio-like disease as a child that weakened her legs; since then she's taken to swimming as a form of physical therapy. Fast forward several years and Annette is all grown up (played by Esther Williams) and winning swimming competitions. Unfortunately, she only wins trophies because the sport is completely amateur.

The Kellermans could use the money as the conservatory can no longer support them. Dad gets a job in London, and Annette follows him. On board, they meet James Sullivan (Victor Mature), who is promoting some sort of act involving a kangaroo, which would have been really exotic in the first decade of the 20th century. James is taken with Annette, and this being a movie based on a real person, James and Annette married and would remain married until his death 60 years later, although his death was 20 years after the movie. At this point of the movie, James wants to manage Annette's career, having her dress up as a mermaid and doing aquatic acts, somthing of which Dad decidedly does not approve.

The Kellermans get to London and find that the man who had offered Dad a job has died in the meantime, so his conservatory is now closed. This gives Jimmy the idea to promote Annette in a marathon swim in the Thames. It doesn't exactly make a whole lot of money, although at this point the point is to get Annette's name in the news, which the stunt does in spades. Eventually, everybody goes over to America to try to make it big there. As you can guess from the opening, Kellerman will eventually perform at the Hippodrome, but not the first time she approaches the manager. She's going to have to go through more struggle to make it to the top. Part of that includes promoting a new line of swimwear, which is a scandalous for the early 1910s one-piece relatively tight-fitting ladies' swimming gown, a lot like the one-piece outfits of today. 110 years ago, it would get her arrested (in the movie and in the real-life Kellerman's claims; from what I've read there's no surviving record of the arrest).

Annette does of course get to be the star attraction at the Hippodrome, and this gives MGM a chance to stage some of those spectacular aquacades that were the point of an Esther Williams movie. Kellerman would try her luck in Hollywood as well.

Million Dollar Mermaid is a Hollywood biopic, so often playing fast and loose with the facts, but this time the story generally does fairly well dramatically. Victor Mature is a bit handicapped in that the script often asks him to be a bit of a cad, but then the movie was a vehicle for Williams and her swimming numbers, not Mature. In that regard, the swimming numbers are worth the price of admission.

Busby Berkeley clip show

I was watching something off my DVR recently, and there was enough time after the end of the movie for TCM to include a two-reeler in the rest of the time slot. That short was one new to me, Calling All Girls.

Now, the first thing I noticed is that there was no copyright date on the title card, which kind of surprised me:

The short opens with a narration introducing us to Hollywood and how lots of young women are hopefuls, wanting to make it in Hollywood. But none of them can get much of a job even as an extra, at least not until Warner Bros. decides to make another musical, at which point, they're "calling all girls". The movie then has severl clips from old musicals of the 1930s, starting with the "Don't Say Goodnight" number from 1934's Wonder Bar. There's also two of the Gold Diggers movies and Footlight Parade.

The interesting thing to me is that on looking it up, the short was apparently released in 1942, which is several years after all of the shorts in the musical. They're all Busby Berkeley numbers, and he's credited, although I don't think he was with Warner Bros. by 1942. And why wait this long to package a bunch of musical clips for an anodyne short like this?

I suppose the one worthwhile thing is the clip from Wonder Bar, as that's the musical that almost never gets run anywhere, in no small part for some of the other parts of the movie, notably Al Jolson's blackface number at the end. So this one little bit is about all you'll get.

For better or worse, the end of this year's Daylight Saving Time, and other briefs

In the past, I've done posts in March and the beginning of November about the start of Daylight Saving Time here in the US and how it means there's one programming day where TV channels only have to program for 23 hours. Then, in November, we shift back, which means there's a day with 25 hours. Usually, I've been able to figure out how TCM is going to program either for the missing hour or for the extra hour, the latter seemingly disproportionately with one of the Some of the Best shorts.

Unfortunately, all of the "upgrades" to the TCM site have meant that their online schedule is more useless than before. I decided recently on a lark to try to figure out how that extra hour is going to get filled tonight, and was disappointed to see that TCM's daily schedule is even worse than before. (Surprisingly, it was already four years ago that I complained about anothre site change.) Now, the site not longer gives the running times of movies. Instead, it only gives the length of the time slot into which TCM has put a movie. So, as an example, Young Dr. Kildare, airing as part of the Saturday Matinee, starts at 10:08 AM and has a running time of 67 minutes. But the TCM schedule site simply gives 1 hour, 23 minutes, with the next part of the matinee starting at 11:30 AM (so this is off by one minute).

As far as DST goes, the clock switches back at 2:00 AM to a second 1:00 AM, which here on the east coast means 0600 UTC. That should be during the first showing of Noir Alley, which because of the Two For One lineup is listed as beginning at 12:30 AM instead of midnight. That movie, Nobody Lives Forever, runs 100 minutes. But Eddie Muller always has an extended intro and outro, so the movie is in a two hour slot. Or is it a three hour slot. It's followed on the official schedule by Soylent Green at 2:30 AM and another dystopic Charlton Heston film, The Omega Man at 4:15 AM. The logical thing to do is to fill up the extra hour between Noir Alley and Soylent Green.

But then I looked though some of the listing sites, and one of them suprisingly gets things wrong by putting Deep Valley into the Noir Alley slot. I haven't been able to find out much about other movie channels or the FAST streaming services, either. Why everybody seems to want to keep their medium-term schedules secret is a mystery to me.

The Velvet Touch

Some months back, TCM aired a couple of Rosalind Russell movies in quick succession. I'd heard about Mourning Becomes Electra before, but don't think I've ever watched it, so I'm hoping to get around to doing that at some point. The other film was a new to me movie called The Velvet Touch. Not having heard of it, I decided to watch that one first.

The movie opens with one of those panning shots of New York City from above which, as is so often the case, winds up focusing on midtown Manhattan. Also unsurprising is that the focus goes to the Great White Way, because studio-era Hollywood loved itself movies about the theater. The theater is the Dunning Theater, where producer Gordon Dunning (Leon Ames) has been putting on the latest in a series of comedies starring Valerie Stanton (Rosalind Russell).

After the performance, Valerie goes upstairs to Gordon's office to have a serious talk with him. Comedies have made Stanton a star, but she wants to prove that she can really act, and so is looking to do a drama like a revival of Hedda Gabler. So when the newspaper reports have come out saying that she's going to do another comedy, reports fed to the papers by Gordon, she's pissed. Not only that, but Valerie has fallen in love with one Michael Morrell (Leo Genn) and is planning to marry him. It turns out that Valerie and Gordon previously had a romantic relationship of their own, and that Gordon is extremely jealous over the idea of Valerie's breaking that off. So jealous, in fact, that he says he'll tell Michael all sorts of nasty gossip that will make Michael never want to see Valerie again. When she tries to leave and Gordon tries to restrain her, she picks up a statuette and hits Gordon over the head with it. He falls to the floor, very much dead.

Now, this is where The Velvet Touch has a big problem. The Production Code is out there, and this isn't one of those cases where there's a struggle for a gun and the victim shoots himself. Valerie could try to claim self-defense, but good luck getting a jury to believe that. More likely is a manslaughter conviction ruining her career, and the Production Code says the killer must be punished. Plus, we're only a couple of minutes into the film. But in any case, Valerie is able to get out of the theater undetected and get home. It's up to Valerie's estranged costar in the play, Marian Webster (Claire Trevor), to find the body.

The papers have the reports of Dunning's death the next morning, and even though Valerie already knows about it, she acts hysterically (well, she is an actress) and has a flashback about everything that led up to the killing. And that's the second problem with the movie, that the flashback is an overused device and in this case only runs about a third of the movie before we catch up to the present.

Back on the morning after the killing, police detective Danbury (Sydney Greenstreet) shows up at the theater to interview everybody. In a group, not separately, which I'd think is a big mistake because this lets the suspects conspire to prevent Danbury from finding out the truth if that's what the suspects want to do. The only person who doesn't show up is Marian, and that's because she's gone into hysterics herself and has been hospitalized. She's also the obvious suspect to Danbury, but we know what really happened. The one bright spot here, I suppose, is that at the theater Danbury is given a very small wooden folding chair to sit in, and the joke is whether or not it's going to support his rather ample weight.

The Velvet Touch is another of those movies where you can see why the people involved in making it would have wanted to be involved, as the story has so much potential. But unfortunately, it winds up being a lot less than the sum of its parts.

Difficult to review: The Seventh Continent

As I've mentioned a few times, I've got a bunch of foreign films on my DVR waiting to be watched, some of which I may not get around to watching before they expire. Then again, they're all distributed by Criterion, since that seems to be about all TCM runs when it comes to foreign films, so TCM will get around to those movies again. Anyhow, a few months back TCM Imports was a double feature of films directed by Michael Haneke, and I've now watched the first of the two, The Seventh Continent.

The movie is divided into three parts, each of which is roughly one day in the lives of a middle-class Austrian family in 1987, 1988, and 1989. The main family has father Georg, who works at what looks like a power plant; wife Anna, who works as an optometrist; and daughter Evi, who is a bit of a problem child as, in the 1987 sequence, Evi feigns blindness!

Georg's parents are only briefly seen, but in both the 1987 and 1988 parts of the movie, Anna is heard narrating letters to them that give some of the family's back story. Anna's mother died sometime in 1986 and left Anna and her brother Alexander an inheritance of a family business, but the death also left Alexander in an obviously depressive state of the sort that required hospitalization. All of the dealing with the will and such also had an effect on Anna, but a rather more subtle one. At work, Georg seems to be doing fairly well, as he's up for a promotion when his boss eventually retires.

The first segment in 1987 involves Anna inviting her brother over for dinner, although it doesn't go quite so well as Alexander's depression seems to return rather suddenly in the form of a crying jag. Anna is also ticked at Evi's lying to her teacher, and even responds by smacking the poor girl, something that's a portent of events later in the movie. Georg, for his part, has been dreaming about selling everything and moving to Australia (hence, the title of the movie); if they sell their share of the inheritance they'd have the seed money to make a move.

The second segment, in 1988, shows how Georg is moving up in his job, but going into further detail about the family's life will begin to risk giving away the ending of the film. And that's part of why I found The Seventh Continent a difficult film to write a full-length post on. Not that it's a bad movie, by any stretch of the imagination. It's more that it's hard to describe without giving too much away, and more than a lot of other films you don't want to give a lot away.

Haneke's filmmaking style here is slightly unorthodox, consisting of short vignettes separated by fades to black that are longer than in most movies that transition between scenes (and I don't mean just the end of the 1987 and 1988 parts here). The movie also has long scenes without much in the way of dialog, which is a good thing for those of you who don't care much for reading subtitles. One quibble I had, however, was a plot hole of how it seemed as though Georg hadn't seen his parents in ages even though they presumably live someplace in Austria and it's not as if it would be overly difficult for them to visit each other -- Austria isn't that big a country. But that's a minor nitpick.

The Seventh Continent is an interesting movie, although it's another one I'm not certain is going to be for everyone.

Dracula (1931)

I mentioned in my original post on Bela Lugosi as TCM's Star of the Month for October that the 1931 version of Dracula was going to get two airings: one on the first night of the tribute, and a second on Halloween itself. So I recorded the first airing to be able to watch it and do a post for the second, which is tomorrow (October 31) at 3:45 PM.

Lugosi of course plays Dracula, the vampire living in Transylvania. But we have to meet him first, and this character establishment is done in the form of a British estate agent, Renfield (Dwight Frye), going to Romania to see Dracula. Dracula has decided to visit England, since the people in Transylvania seem to know what a monster Dracula is and the English won't know this. Renfield has found a place for Dracula to stay and is there with the contracts. Of course, Dracula has the ability to hypnotize victims just by holding up his hand and staring at the poor unsuspecting dupes. Dracula does this to Renfield, turns Renfield into a fellow blood-sucker, and sets off for England aboard a tramp steamer.

When the boat gets to England, Renfield is the only one alive, seemingly having gone made. Dracula turned into a bat as he has the ability to do and flew off, one assumes. Renfield is sent to a sanatorium run by Dr. Seward. Seward has a lovely daughter, Mina (Helen Chandler), who is engaged to nice young Harker (David Manners). Dracula meets Seward and realizes he's got the opportunity to get at some very lovely young women to turn into his slave-brides. But poor Dracula doesn't realize that Seward has a friend, Van Helsing (Edward Van Sloan), who knows a few things about vampires, and is able to deduce that Dracula is a vampire turning others into fellow vampires. Van Helsing also has a strong will and knows how not to fall into that hypnotism schtick.

To be honest, the story in this version of Dracula isn't the strongest. To me, a lot of it seemed to rely on the idea that the English were a bunch of ignoramuses. What is worth watching, however, is the acting from Lugosi, who takes the role (well, actually he'd done it on Broadway already as this movie is an adaptation of a stage play based on the book) and milks it for all it's worth and then some. Dwight Frye isn't bad either.

If you haven't seen the 1932 Dracula before, now's your chance.

Briefs for the end of October 2024

I was saddened yesterday to see news of the death of actress Teri Garr, who had a long battle with multiple sclerosis. Garr was 79. She started off as a dancer and was one of the backup dancers in the concert movie The T.A.M.I. Show, but I couldn't spot her in the YouTube clips I looked up. I seem to recall her wearing a bullseye shirt, but I didn't see that anywhere. As for her acting, she was memorable in several films of the 1970s and 1980s such as Young Frankenstein, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Tootsie. I'd guess that TCM will honor her in December with one of the latter two films since those seem to show up more often unlike Young Frankenstein which was done at Fox.

Halloween is tomorrow, and TCM is running programming today and tomorrow. The programming starts off with a handful of Hammer films, although thankfully those end before the end of the daytime block as Val Lewton's The Seventh Victim is on at 6:45 PM. The evening of the 30th brings movie that are more horrifying than horror movies, such as Psycho at 8:00 PM and Michael Powell's controversial Peeping Tom at 10:00 PM.

Halloween itself brings more "classic" horror; I mentioned at the beginning of the month when I did the post on Bela Lugosi that his 1931 version of Dracula would be getting a second airing on the afternoon of Halloween. I've got a standalone post for that which will appear later today. Also worth mentioning are Mystery of the Wax Museum at 7:30 AM, Freaks at 10:15 AM, and Frankenstein at 5:15 PM.

Very much of note on Halloween night on TCM is the 8:00 PM airing of The Other. This one is a Fox release, my having done a post on it some time back the last time it was in the FXM rotation. Somewhat surprisingly, it's on FXM tomorrow as well, at 1:15 PM. FXM isn't doing much for Halloween; their retro block has The Other preceded by Hand of Death at 12:10 PM. The ad-supported evening half of the schedule has some of the movies from the Alien and Predator franchises.

Finally, I'd like to continue to November 1. The TCM schedule for that morning and afternoon is a bunch of stuff based on the works of W. Somerset Maugham. He wrote a lot of stuff that's been turned into movies, and I've done posts on quite a few of those adaptations. Among the ones airing on Friday is the 1934 Greta Garbo The Painted Veil at 4:30 PM. It's been adapted for film at least two more times since, once about 20 years ago with the same title, and in the 1950s with the title The Seventh Sin. I've actually got that one on my DVR, but haven't gotten around to watching it yet since I've got so many other films I've done posts on.