Private Secretary

I'm always interested in a new-to-me pre-Code, so when TCM ran Behind Office Doors some months back, I decided to record it to be able to watch later and do a post on it. Recently, I finally got around to watching it, so now we get the post on it.

Mary Astor plays Mary Linden, and as the movie opens she's walking up to her apartment where she lives with a co-worker roommate Delores (Kitty Kelly) who is hosting a party. One of the guests suggests they play a truth or dare-like game, which introduces Mary to Ronnie Wales (Ricardo Cortez) even though what we learn about his character makes us wonder how he learned about the party. Ronnie seems interested in Mary, but he's trapped in a loveless marriage, one of the tropes of movies of the day. Mary isn't interested in him beyond friendship, however.

Mary works for the Ritter Paper Company as the personal secretary to the president, John Ritter (Charles Sellon), and she's really the one who runs the place, as she knows everything before the boss knows it. Mary wasn't interested in Ronnie the previous night because she actually has the hots for one of the young salesmen there, James Duneen (Robert Ames). This, even though he doesn't realize it and it's an era where she can't be direct with him. Mary uses confidential information to help James get ahead, which seems highly unethical, but there you are.

Ritter, having built the company up from nothing over the past 40 years, has reached the age where the doctors tell him he has to retire, but what to do with the business? There's a depression on, the movie hiavng been released in 1931, and finding someone willing to buy the place might be tough. Mary is forward-thinking, however, and suggests that Ritter sell the company to the employees, who will pay back Ritter from the firm's profits. This would allow for promoting someone from the inside to the position of president, and we know who Mary has in mind.

But James doesn't get that Mary is interested in him, and has a string of girlfriends. He even hires his latest girlfriend to be secretary to the president once he gets that job, despite the fact that said girlfriend is utterly unsuited to the job. Things get even worse when Mary sets James up with a business connection with a prominent banker, and James winds up getting engaged to the banker's daughter! It's all too much for Mary, but what's she going to do? Will she end up with the right man and be able to find true happiness?

Despite the fact that Behind Office Doors is a pre-Code and certainly touches on any number of subjects that wouldn't be discussed a few years later, the ending becomes surprisingly conventional and doesn't quite hold up to the promise the first half. Mary Astor does well, but Robert Ames wasn't really leading man material here and Cortez isn't given enough to do. Still, Behind Office Doors offers an interesting enough look at the way Hollywood viewed business back in the early 1930s.

Shades of Grandma's Boy

It wasn't all that long ago that I did a post on the Harold Lloyd silent Grandma's Boy. I've got a bunch of silents sitting on my DVR, and one that I wanted to get to before it expired was The Boob. For reasons that will become clear, I couldn't help but think of Grandma's Boy as I was watching.

The star here is a man who's not well known to me, George K. Arthur, and that's because his career didn't really survive the coming of talking pictures. Arthur plays Peter Good, who supposedly works as a farmhand on a farm somewhere in small-town USA. He's got a girl he pines for in Amy (Gertrude Olmsted), but Amy wants better things in live, so when big-city Harry showed up, she immediately took to him to the point of accepting his marriage proposal after just a week.

Peter wants to win Amy back, and his friend Cactus Jim, a stereotype of the drunkard cowboy, suggests dressing up as a real cowboy, which needless to say doesn't impress Amy one bit. However, since Harry is from the big city, the belief is that he must be involved in bootlegging, this being Prohibition and there being no other reason for city slickers to show up here besides going to the roadhouses that supplied city folk with alcohol.

Peter vows that he's going to find some of these bootleggers and take them down, and that by doing so he's bound to win Amy's heart. He learns that Amy and Hary are going to go to a roadhouse called the Booklovers which, as it turns out, is indeed a place flouting Prohibition. It also has a floor show that needs to be seen to be believed. Also at the Booklovers is Jane (a young Joan Crawford on her way up the ladder to stardom). She's actually working for the feds in fighting the people making and selling illegal liquor. When Peter shows up and makes a mess of things, Jane gives him a second chance because he's just an amateur with an interest in going after bootleggers too. They need the help of the people after all when a large section of the country hates Prohibition.

Peter goes to a mill in the middle of nowhere where a couple of guys are digging up a coffin that is filled not with a human body but with a bunch of booze. Harry is supposed to meet these men there on his way to getting married to Amy. But Peter shows up first, leading to a climactic fight in -- or should I say on -- a speeding automobile.

Jacqueline Stewart presented this as part of Silent Sunday Nights, and she mentioned that the movie got scathing reviews at the time of its release, as well as mentioning director William Wellman's comments that at least he could take pride in having directed Joan Crawford in her worst movie. To be honest, I think I have to come down more or less on the side of the contemporary critics, although I don't think I'd go quite that far. The movie doesn't really work, for a bunch of reasons, including Arthur not being right for the role. It also feels more like a series of scenes than a coherent plot, and Cactus Jim is just terribly unfunny. Stewart made mention of Peter's black juvenile companion, Ham Bunn, as a stereotype. I think I'd have to disagree with her, as Cactus Jim is far more offensive than Ham Bunn.

The Boob has received a Warner Archive release, and it's in the public domain, although the print TCM ran had a "new" score, in the sense of it having been composed for the film's resurrection from obscurity 20 or so years ago.

Let's take these blocked funds and set a remake of The Asphalt Jungle in Egypt!

A lot of times I record old movies off of TCM without knowing much beyond the synopsis. Such was the case when I saw the new-to-me movie Cairo show up on TCM some months back.

The movie starts off with a pre-credits scene of a plane landing in Cairo, with a Maj. Pickering (George Sanders) getting off the plane. In his conversation with the customs officials, he says he does "design" and that he's come to Egypt to do "research" on Egyptian antiquities, presumably to get ideas for his "design". He then goes to one of the museums, and while a lady is leading a guided tour, the Major makes eye contact with anothr man. Clearly the Major has other ideas.

After the credits, which serve in part as an opportunity to show some scenery of Cairo that would be nicer if it were in widescreen and in color, the Major meets Willy, who unbeknownst to the Major now has a wife and a young child. The Major has an offer for Willy that could make Willy $25,000, but of course that can't possibly be a legitimate offer. Indeed, as part of the conversation, the Major reveals that he was in prison in Germany and his cellmate was a master forger of passports. Willy's wife hasn't heard the conversation, but she's no dummy, realizing that the Major is bad news.

The Major is also looking for a man named Nicodemos (Eric Pohlmann), who is the cousin of the Major's old cellmate back in Germany although he's never met the Major until now. Nicodemos knew from his cousin that the Major had some sort of plan that was big, but figured that, not having heard from the Major, the plan was off. But now the Major has shown up, and is trying to get together a bunch of people to help him carry out his plan, which could net them a cool $250,000.

That plan involves stealing a bunch of antiquities and then smuggling them out of the country. The Major obviously needs money to get everything together, but he also needs expert people. One is an import-export man; Nicodemos is the money man; there's also Ali (Richard Johnson) as the gunman should anything go wrong. Ali decides to take the deal in part because he had a small farm somehwere up the Nile that he'd like to get back. If that sounds familiar, think Sterling Hayden and the horse farm in The Asphalt Jungle.

Indeed, you'd be right. Of course, if you had watched the opening credits closely you would also have noticed that the movie is "based on a novel by W.R. Burnett". So it's not too difficult to figure out where the movie is going to go. The heist isn't quite going to go to plan, and then, to make matters worse, there's going to be a double cross. Never mind the Hollywood Production Code; the Egyptian authorities would never have condoned a movie in which the characters successfull steal antiquities, led by a westerner.

Unsurprisingly, this is a fairly weak imitation of The Asphalt Jungle, since George Sanders is the only star power here and the script is rather weaker. Having Egyptian settings can't save the movie either, especially since they're in black and white. When TCM ran Cairo, they put it in a slot long enough to have time left over to run one of James FitzPatrick's Traveltalks shorts where he visits Egypt. That is in color, and more spectacular despite being 25 years older.

Ayn Rand does Cyrano de Bergerac

One of those old movies I'd seen show up several times on the TCM schedule but never got around to recording or watching was the 1945 film Love Letters. With that in mind, the last time it ran on TCM, I made a point to put it on my DVR to get around to watch later. I've finally watched it, so now you get the review.

The movie starts off in Italy in World War II. Serving near enough to the front to hear the bombs are Alan Quinton (Joseph Cotten) and his friend Roger Morland. Roger has a girlfriend back in England named Victoria (Jennifer Jones), but Roger isn't much of a romantic, so he has Alan write the love letters to Victoria on behalf, which seems like nonsense since surely Victoria would recognize this as not her fiancé's writing. Worse, however, is that Alan realizes he's falling in love with Victoria even though he's never met her, while Victoria is in love with the letters, not with Roger.

At any rate, the letters are about to stop in part because Alan doesn't want to write any more, while Roger is going to be going back to England anyhow to train as a paratrooper. And on top of that, Alan gets injured in combat too and faces a lengthy recuperation before going back to England, no longer having to fight in the war. Roger visits Alan's parents, and has them tell Alan that he's married Victoria.

Some months later, Alan finally returns to England and visits his parents. He's had an aunt die in the meantime and bequeath him a place in County Essex, which is good because he knows that's near Longreach, which is the place where Victoria lived. However, Victoria isn't going to be around since Roger died in an accident before Alan got back to England. Meanwhile, Alan also has a fiancée himself, except that he's come to learn that since writing all those letters to Victoria, he's no longer in love with his fiancée.

Unfortunately, by this time Roger has died in an accident. Alan's brother tries to cheer him up by taking him to a party, wher he meets a woman named Dilly who happens to know Victoria and realizes that a drunken Alan is talking about Victoria when he talks about having written those letters for Roger in Italy. Alan finally goes to Longreach, only to learn that Victoria is dead too, which is not actually the case. The real truth is that Dilly is Victoria's cargiver, and that Victoria stabbed Roger to death, only to immediately develop a case of amnesia, taking the name Singleton. Dilly is terrified of what's going to happen should Singleton remember that she's really Victoria and especially if Victoria figures out she's talking to the guy who actually wrote those love letters for Roger.

Love Letters has what to me is a fairly ridiculous premise, but one that I suppose will appeal to people who like a certain type of romantic movie, such as Random Harvest. Not that I liked Random Harvest, although for me Love Letters didn't sink to being quite as mawkish as Random Harvest. Still, Love Letters is definitely another of those movies where you're going to need to watch and draw your own conclusions.

Sweet November (1968)

One of the movies that's on my DVR and is coming up on TCM in the near future is Sweet November, which gets its next TCM showing tomorrow (Nov. 17) at 6:00 PM. So I watched it in order to be able to do a post on it.

Anthony Newley plays Charlie Blake, a British-born businessman trying to bring the family's box-manufacturing business to America. As the movie begins, he's been in the States for three years, but never got a New York driver's license, which is why he's at the DMV in Manhattan to take his written driver's test now that the old license expired. The DMV administers the test a bunch of times a day to a room full of people, and sitting behind Charlie is the frankly obnoxious Sara Deever (Sandy Dennis). Sara keeps asking Charlie if he knows the answers to the questions on the test, and the proctor dings Charlie for cheating, throwing him out of the exam room!

In real life, this would be enough for a normal person to want to be rid of a malign presences like Sara. But Sweet November is a movie, so Sara bumps into Charlie after the test and takes him to a hot dog stand for lunch despite his just wanting her to give him directions so he can eat alone in peace. Sara takes Charlie to a park bench so they can eat their lunch, and starts asking him questions that are way too personal. Sara gave me vibes of the Liza Minnelli character in The Sterile Cuckoo, although I think Sweet November was released first.

Sara eventually invites Charlie over to her apartment in Brooklyn, and it's there that she has an odd proposition for him. Sara is a bohemian who finds a different man every month who she thinks is in need of some sort of TLC, and offers each of the men the chance to have a one-month relationship with her before going on to the next man to "fix". Charlie is in Sara's eyes obviously way too conventional and strait-laced, so she'd like him to live with her for November and maybe get a different view of life.

Amazingly, Charlie says "yes" to all this and acts like he's just going to take a month out of life even though he's got a business to run and is supposed to go up to Toronto for a big business meeting that he just blows off. And he doesn't tell any of his underlings where he really is. None of this makes any sense, but as I said a few paragraphs back, this is a movie, not real life.

Charlie also doesn't seem to have any friends in his personal life despite having been in the States for three years while Sara only seems to have neighbor Alonzo (Theodore Bikel). But despite all this, Charlie falls in love with Sara, and would like to stay with her past the end of November! He senses there's something wrong, however, and Alonzo tells him the secret as to why Sara is the way she is and why Charlie shouldn't want to stay after the end of the month. Will the couple stay together?

The big problem I had with Sweet November is, well, twofold. One is that Sara is just such an irritating character (not Sandy Dennis' fault, of course). In addition to The Sterile Cuckoo I mentioned above, I was also thinking of Barbra Streisand in The Owl and the Pussycat, a movie I hated mostly because of the sociopathic nature of the Streisand character. The other problem is that the script has no bearing in reality. Charlie is just going to drop his business for an entire month? And none of these people really know anyone in spite of having been in New York all this time?

Some people obviously liked Sweet November, however. It had enough fans that somebody thought at the beginning of the current century that a remake would be in order. I haven't seen the remake. But give the original a try and judge for yourself; you may be one of the people who likes it too.

The Notorious Landlady

A few weeks ago, I did a post on The Velvet Touch. I was thinking about that movie a I watched another movie that for some reason I though was coming up on the TCM schedule soon, The Notorious Landlady.

The movie starts off with a bit of a prologue in a fashionable part of London where the residents include elderly Mrs. Dunhill (Estelle Winwood). On her travels in and out of the neighborhood, she has to deal with one of those bratty kids who keeps popping up to be bratty whenever that's what's needed for the plot. As the movie opens he likes to terrorize people by pointing his cap gun at them. Everybody hears a shot, except that this time it's not from the cap gun but from one of the other houses on the square.

Fast forward several months. Carly Hardwicke (Kim Novak) lives in one of the houses on the square, and has offered a flat to let, preferably to a couple. One family does show up, but they realize that this is Carly Hardwicke, and walk away, which means that she has a past. It doesn't take much to guess what that past is, since we saw the prologue. So we know what the "notorious" in the title is referring to.

Not knowing is Bill Gridley (Jack Lemmon). Bill is an American, working in the Foreign Service and having just been transferred to London from Saudi Arabia. So of course he wouldn't know what happened six months previously. He cottons on fairly quickly that Carly, dressed as the maid of the house, is in fact not a maid but the lady of the house, and that she's alone. Carly had wanted a couple to rent, but she's hard up for money, so she relents and rents the entire second story to Bill.

The next day at work, Bill mentions where he found a place to rent, and the name sounds very familiar to Bill's boss, Franklyn Ambruster (Fred Astaire). Ambruster does a bit of research, and realizes that Hardwicke is presumed to be the one who fired that shot that everybody heard in the prologue. The belief is that it killed her husband, who has been missing ever since that shot, and that Carly is therefore the obvious suspect in a murder case. The only thing is, nobody's been able to find Mr. Hardwicke's body, which is kind of important if you're going to try someone for murder.

Having an officer in the foreign service be involved in a case like this wouldn't do for the Americans, but they don't have much choice since Bill is renting that flat. So Ambruster brings in Scotland Yard and they impress on Bill the idea that he should help them in getting information by more or less spying on his landlady and getting whatever information he can that will either help prove her guilt or exonerate her.

It's not too hard to guess where things are going to go for much of the rest of the movie, since this is a more comedic mystery. Bill is going to fall in love with Carly, but there's going to be one misunderstanding after another that makes Bill think perhaps Carly really is a murderess. However, since it's a lighter movie, the viewer can presume that she is in fact not the killer. And indeed, Mr. Hardwicke does eventually show up.

The Notorious Landlady is another of those movies that doesn't quite work, in large part because it has to hew to so many of the tropes of the genre that we know where it's going to be going. If it were a noir, we'd know Mrs. Hardwicke is bad news; here, we know that some coincidence is going to come to exonerate her. The script is also a bit unoriginal, making unnecessary homages to some classic films. The Notorious Landlady was filmed in 1961 and has one scene of Jack Lemmon tell Kim Novak he "adores" her that felt like it came straight out of the final scene of The Apartment. And there's a scene of a shower drain that looked like it could have been taken from the editing room of Psycho. The Notorious Landlady also runs 123 minutes, which is a good half hour too long for material like this.

So I'd say it's with reason that The Notorious Landlady is not the best-remembered movie for any of its stars.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Another of the more recent movies that I recorded during 31 Days of Oscar that I'm having to watch before they expire off my cloud DVR is one that's only 20 years old: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

Jim Carrey plays Joel Barish, who lives in one of those Long Island suburbs that's been turning more downmarket ove the past few decades, working some sort of office job that requires him to commute on the LIRR. One day, when he gets to the train station, he decides impulsively to get on a train going in the other direction, out to Montauk, even though it's the middle of winter. On the beach in Montauk, Joel sees a blue-haird young woman, but writes in his journal instead. The two wind up on the same train back, however, and the woman is outgoing enough to make the first move approaching Joel.

The woman is Clementine Kruczynski (Kate Winslet), and she seems to be one of those people who can be fun, but also way too outgoing and a bit too high-energy as a result. Still, the two start a relationship, albeit with strong hints that the relationship isn't going to work out and the two are going to break up eventually. Indeed, one day when Joel shows up at Clementine's place there's another man there, Patrick (Elijah Wood) wondering why Joel is there. A few days later, Joel goes to the bookstore where Clementine works retail, and she acts like she doesn't know Joel at all. And another guy shows up who is clearly Clementine's new boyfriend.

Joel talks to some of his friends about all of this, and they have a shock for him. They give him a business card from a company called Lacuna (Latin for "hole" and usually used in English with the sense of "gap"). They're a company that does the sort of thing that would be considered controversial. People come to them with uncomfortable memories, and ask the "good" doctors at Lacuna to erase those memories from their minds. When Joel finds out about this, he's pissed.

With that in mind, Joel goes to Lacuna and demands from Dr. Mierzwiak that Lacuna perform the same procedure on him so that he too can forget Clementine. The procedure involves bringing in a bunch of stuff associated with the memories in question, followed by the patient taking a pill to knock them out at which point the Lacuna employees come in to remove the memories. The patient will wake up feeling a bit hung over but with all the memories gone.

This time, however, Lacuna sends a couple of less-experienced employess. One is the aforementioned Patrick; the other is Stan (Mark Ruffalo). Complicating matters is that Stan's girlfriend Mary (Kirsten Dunst), another employee at Lacuna, shows up, and Mary and Stan act extremely unprofessionally. So much that the procedure begins to go wrong when one of the wires gets disconnected.

This disconnection causes Joel's memory to go haywire and his subconscious to decide that perhaps he didn't want to undergo the procedure at all. (Joel, being unconscious, can't reveal that he might like to withdraw consent.) So Joel starts trying to compartmentalize his memories with Clementine in places that wouldn't otherwise be identified with Clementine so that Lacuna can't find them.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is an intriguing movie that Wikipedia refers to as a "cult classic". I can understand why. For the most part I liked the movie, except that I found myself having some big ethical problems with the whole premise of wanting one's memory erased. Never mind the plot hole that there's way too much outside the patient's purview to erase all the memories. Star Trek: The Next Generation did an interesting episode on the same premise of an alien race erasing the crew's memory of the race, only for them to discover signs that there are all sorts of unexplained gaps.

Still, the story is told very well and the acting is quite good, with Carrey showing he can do drama as well as zany comedy. If you haven't seen Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind before, it's definitely worth watching.

The Swiss Conspiracy

I've got an acquaintance on one of the non-movie blogs I regularly read who works for a Swiss multinational and jokes that he "will work for raclette" and that he goes off to the fondue mines. So when I came across a new-to-me movie available to stream on Tubi called The Swiss Conspiracy, I knew I had to watch it.

The movi was released in 1976 and was based on the existence in those days, as an opening title card also read in voiceover tells us, that Swiss banks were highly valued for their absolute secrecy, with accounts being numbered and nobody revealing the names behind the numbers. Of course there are humans behind the banking system, so it's theoretically possible to get at the humans in some way. Cut to a shot of a man eating dinner in a restaurant, with a waiter coming in pushing a cart full of food, only to reveal he's got a gun, shooting the patron dead!

We then go to the Hurtil Bank in Zürich, run by the Hurtil family, with the current president being Johann Hurtil (Ray Milland). Somebody comes in wanting to see the president, and carrying a letter. That person has received a blackmail letter, saying that that blackmailer knows the recipient has an account at the Hurtil bank and that if the victim doesn't pay up SFr. 1 million, the account information will be made public. This is an obvious problem for the victim, but it's just as much of a problem for the bank, as they don't want to reveal that they've been compromised.

Hurtil and his vice-president, Benninger (Anton Diffring), feel like they can't really go to the police, at least not with the emphasis of handling things through the traditional legal system, since the result would be a trial which would reveal way too much information about the loss of banking secrecy to the general public. So instead, they bring in a former agent from the US Treasury department, David Christopher (David Janssen).

At the same time Christopher is at the bank, he's introduced to two people of note. One is Denise Abbott (Senta Berger), who is a blackmail victim, having blackmailed men herself as their mistress and then hiding the money with Hurtil. You'll notice I wrote "a" blackmail victim, not "the". In fact, there are five victims. One has already been killed as we saw at the beginning of the movie; Abbott is a second; and Christopher is about to meet a third, Hayes (John Saxon), who is a Chicago mobster and absolutely pissed to see Christopher since he things the bank has gone to the American authorities. There are more victims: Texas oilman McGowan (John Ireland), and Dutch businessman Kosta.

Christopher's job is to find the blackmailer and handle the matter with discretion. Hurtil himself would seem like a place to start, as would Benninger. But beyond that, who? And when some thugs go after first Christopher and then Hayes, you have to wonder whether Swiss bankers would know enough to be able to hire such hitmen. (I must admit I have zero experience with Swiss banking.)

The Swiss Conspiracy feels like the sort of movie that might have been made because the producer had funds that they had to use in Switzerland, and wanted to get some Hollywood names (or former names) who wanted a working vacation in lovely Switzerland. That, and the movie has the feel of a TV Movie of the Week with a bunch of formerly big stars, much the way that The Love Boat did except that the running time is twice that of a traditional TV episode. The Swiss Conspiracy is moderately entertaining, but ultimately forgettable.

Bunbury

I've mentioned a lot how I've got a bunch a movies on my DVR that need watching before they can expire. With that in mind, coming up next is the 1952 adaption of Oscar Wilde's play The Importance of Being Earnest. Having finally watched it, I can now do a review on it.

The movie opens up in London, at the apartment of one Ernest Worthing (Michael Redgrave). He's visited by an Algernon Moncrieff (Michael Denison), who claims among other things to have Ernest's cigarette case. This, however, is a ruse, as the cigarette case is one with a dedication from a Cecily that Ernest claims not to know anything about. And it's about to get a whole lot more complicated. Ernest theoretically does know Cecily, except that Ernest isn't Ernest. Ernest is really Jack Worthing, who lives at an estate out in the country where a much younger Cecily is his ward. Ernest is a fake identity, a made-up poor brother used by Jack as a ruse to be able to get away from his country home and go down to London.

And, to be fair, he's not the only faker out there. Algernon has created a fake identity, too, that of Bunbury, a friend who lives out in the country and is an excuse for Algernon to get away from London to go to the country. And once Algernon learns about Cecily, he'd like to go see her and put the moves on her. And Alergnon has a young female relative of marriageable age himself: his cousin Gwendolen (Joan Greenwood), still living with her mother, Jack's aunt Augusta, Lady Bracknell (Edith Evans).

Worthing and Algernon meet the two women, and Algernon comes up with a way to leave Jack and Gwendolen alone. Except that Gwendolen thinks this is Ernest Worthing, not Jack, a deception Algernon is perfectly willing to keep up. So when Aunt Augusta starts questioning Worthing, this being an era when the parents had to approve of marriages, Jack has to make up a pedigree about having been abandond as a child.

And then to make things more complicated, Algernon figures out where the Worthing country house is, and shows up unnanounced. Cecily and her governess, Miss Prism (Margaret Rutherford), immediately presume that this is the Ernest that Jack keeps talking about, something that displeases Jack to no end when he shows up. Algernon-as-Ernest proposes to Cecily. But then in a move that ups the complexity another level, Gwendolen also shows up, claiming that she too is engaged to Ernest, even though we all know there is no Ernest.

The Importance of Being Earnest is a movie that really demands a lot of attention while watching, as it's mostly in the dialog and there's a lot going on. It is, however, very well acted, and sure to be a delight for anyone who's a fan of the works of Oscar Wilde. I have to say that I haven't seen or read that much of Wilde's work, although obviously I think I did a review on the 1940s MGM adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Grey ages ago.

What if a bunch of amateurs tried to make Knute Rockne, All American?

Football season is firmly under way, and a little known movie that TCM ran during 31 Days of Oscar because it received an editing nomination is the biopic Crazylegs. It's getting an airing on TCM tomorrow (November 12) at 6:00 AM, so now is the time for the post on it.

Crazylegs is about early NFL star Elroy "Crazylegs" Hirsch (playing himself); as the movie opens he's on a football field in civilian clothes and it seems like he's about to retire. The movie was released in 1953 and in real life, Hirsch didn't retire until several years later. We then get some narration by Lloyd Nolan, who plays the part of Hirsch's high school coach, Win Brockmeyer. As you can guess, we're about to get the obligatory flashback to Hirsch's high school career....

Elroy Hirsch grew up in Wausau, WI, and got the nickname "Crazylegs" from his odd style of running, which he claimed came from running two miles to school every day and dodging various things in the sidewalks or on the side of the road. He finished high school in 1941, at a time when the college game was in some ways more corrupt, but in others didn't necessarily offer the money that's in it today. Hirsch's girlfriend and future wife Ruth (Joan Vohs) is accepted to the University of Wisconsin, so Elroy follows her there to play football.

But Elroy seems to care so much about football that he doesn't have time foor poor Joan. As a result, it's an on again, off again relationship although they do eventually get married (and in real life they were married 50-plus years until Elroy's death). World War II comes, but Elroy surprisingly doesn't get shipped off to fight. Instead, he enrolls in a Marine Corps program that allows him to do pilot training in conjunction with college, except that it's based out of the University of Michigan. So he goes there and becomes a several-sport star, eventually serving stateside after graduation.

Now, at this time, the NFL didn't exactly offer a lot of money, and there was a rival league, the All-American Football Conference. Hirsch had been drafted by the Los Angeles Rams of the NFL but decided to play for the Chicago Rockets of the AAFC. Unfortunately, he gets several injuries, ultimately getting hit in the head and a skull fracture that threatens to end his football career. But since he only knows football, he starts training like a maniac to try to get back to the professional game. Since this is a biopic, and the movie makes clear in the opening credits that it has several members of the world champion Rams of 1949 and 1951 playing themselves, we know that Hirsch is going to wind up on the Rams and then eventually be an integral part of their championship team.

The are a bunch of problems with Crazylegs. One is that Hirsch's story isn't as cinematic as you might think. There's just not enough conflict to sustain a truly interesting picture. (Contrast this with, say, I, Tonya, which is loaded with conflict.) The movie was made on a fairly low budget, and that shows. A lot of real footage from Hirsch's games is used (this is probably what got the editing nomination), but it's in old newsreel format while the staged action is all blocked for a 1.66:1 aspect ratio. Having to edit the newsreels for that really makes them look poor-quality.

Elroy Hirsch also wan't much of an actor, although at least he's only playing himself. He comes across as an appealing personality, and you can see why people would like him and why someone might want to do a biopic of him. Lloyd Nolan is professional as always, and elevates anything he's in, no matter how dire everything around him is.

So Crazylegs is a bit of a curiosity, and one that football fans might enjoy.