Ann-Margret is 85!

Today marks the 85th birthday of actress Ann-Margret, who was born in Sweden but became an American citizen before the age of 10. TCM is honoring the occasion with four of her movies:

8:00 PM Bye Bye Birdie
10:00 PM The Cincinnati Kid
midnight Once a Thief
2:00 AM Made in Paris

I haven't seen Made in Paris, so I'm planning to record that. However, I had Bye Bye Birdie on my DVR, so I watched that in order to write up a post on it for tonight's airing. Bye Bye Birdie is, of course, based on a musical, and before that, derived from an idea that a Brodway writer had when popular singer Elvis Presley was drafted into the Army.

Jesse Pearson plays Conrad Birdie, a singer popular with the teenaged girls because of his sex appeal who gets drafted into the army, causing an uproar amongst the girls of America. Songwriter Albert Pearson (Dick Van Dyke), hearing about the story, hopes he can write up a song quickly for Conrad to sing before Birdie goes off to the Army. Meanwhile, Albert has a complicated personal life. He's got a girlfriend Rosie (Janet Leigh) who should be his fiancée by now. But Albert's mother Mae (Maureen Stapleton) helped found the family music publishing business and consistently guilts the devoted Albert into not leaving. Rosie unsurprisingly wants Albert to choose between her and his mother, and it seems he's choosing his mother.

Meanwhile, The Ed Sullivan Show (with Sullivan playing himself) has the idea of putting Birdie on the show before he enlists, and even have Birdie kiss one of his legion of fans. Rosie has the membership rolls of the Conrad Birdie fan club somehow, and randomly picks a girl from the small town of Sweet Apple, Ohio. That girl is Kim MacAfee (Ann-Margret), who has a happy life with her kid brother, her parents (Paul Lynde and Mary LaRoche), and a boyfriend in Hugo Peabody (Bobby Rydell). Kim gets the call from New York, and she's naturally thrilled about having been chosen to represent the town of Sweet Apple to America, and get a kiss from Birdie.

Not everyone is thrilled, however. Hugo is ticked, fearing that he's going to lose Kim to Birdie. Dad also doesn't like it so much. He's still responsible for Kim, of course, and doesn't care for Birdie's music or the way in which Birdie drives everybody wild. But he warms to the idea when Albert suggests that perhaps Mr. MacAfee could get on TV too. Meanwhile, the subplot involving the long-simmering relationship between Albert and Rosie keeps rearing its head although one would think in a musical like this that Rosie and Albert are going to have a happy ending.

And then there's a twist. TV production is a complicated thing, and in the case of the Ed Sullivan Show part of that includes making certain everything times out properly considering that it's live TV. There's time planned for Birdie and Kim, although that gets cut into by Mr. MacAfee's desire to speak as well as MacAfee trying to promote the mayor, too. Worse is that the Russian Ballet which is also scheduled to appear that night decides it's going to do a number that would take up almost all the time allotted to the Birdie segment.

Bye Bye Birdie is the sort of movie that fans of musicals are going to like. If you're not that much of a fan of the artificiality of musicals, and I include myself in that genre, then it may not be quite as appealing. For the most part, everybody does well, although the material is such that at times it felt much too forced for me. Still, as I said, I can understand why some people are going to love Bye Bye Birdie.

A century before noir

Hedy Lamarr was honored in last year's edition of Summer Under the Stars, which allowed me to record a movie that I hadn't seen before, largely because it was an independent production that has fallen into the public domain: The Strange Woman.

We don't see Hedy Lamarr for a bit, because the movie opens up when her character is a kid in 1820s Bangor, Maine. Jenny Hager is the daughter of alcoholic widower Tim Hager, who is a scandal in town as he tries to get drinks off of shopkeeper Isaiah Poster (Gene Lockhart). Isaiah, for his part, is a widower himself with a son Ephraim. Out at the river, a bunch of kids are standing on the bridge when Jenny dares Ephraim to jump into the river, even though Ephraim can't swim and is afraid of the water. So Jenny pushes him in. When an adult, Judge Saladine (Alan Napier), shows up, Jenny drags Ephraim out of the water and claims she saved Jenny.

Jenny is already a wanton kid, and she's going to be a wanton woman, looking to marry rich. Matters come to a head one night when the now adult Jenny (that's Hedy Lamarr) pursues the sort of man Dad doesn't like. Dad tries to beat Jenny, so she beats him to death and runs off to Isaiah's house looking for help, in part because he's the richest man in town, and in part because this is a scheme. She claims Dad has suffered some sort of attack while trying to beat her, winning the sympathy of Isaiah and the Reverend Thatcher (Moroni Olsen) who both know Jenny needs to be married off. The only man around seems to be Isaiah, now that Ephraim is off to college, so Jenny marries Isaiah, which was sort of her plan all along because she wants that money.

Of course, Ephraim returns, and things get awkward because Jenny also has feelings for Ephraim that are mutual, not that Dad knows any of this. Dad by now owns not just a bunch of ships, but also forest inland, and has to deal with the lumberjacks who get rowdy when they come to town because they're in need of women. Isaiah is so concerned with the running of the town that he basically works himself to a heart attack, although this doesn't kill him as much as Jenny would be happy that it does. Jenny is looking for a way to inherit Isaiah's property, so when Isaiah decides to go up to the lumber camps, Jenny manipulates Ephraim into doing the same sort of thing Montgomery Clift may or may not have done to Shelley Winters in A Place in the Sun. And then Jenny, having inherited Isaiah's property, throws Ephraim out of the house!

Jenny then starts to seduce her business manager John Evered (George Sanders), who is also in love with Jenny's best friend Meg. Meanwhile, Ephraim has become a terrible drunk and confesses to Evered what he did to his father. Whether or not Evered truly believes this is a good question, considering how completely drunk Ephraim is.

Now, the movie was made in 1946, which means there's the little matter of the Production Code. Jenny isn't going to be able to get away with what she's done up to this point, so there's the question of how she's going to expiate her sins and how the rest of the movie is resolved. The screenwriters have sort of painted themselves into a corner by this point, and there's not really a good way to get out of it.

I knew The Strange Woman was going to be interesting when I saw in the opening credits that it was based on a book by Ben Ames Williams, who might be best known for Leave Her to Heaven. Sure enough, the movie is never less than interesting, although the plot is wildly implausible at times. There's also the question of whether the movie is truly noir. Hedy Lamarr's Jenny certainly is the sort of femme fatale who would appear in a noir, although I don't quite think the historical setting is a noir setting. It's perhaps closer to the historic melodrama of a movie like Forever Amber. In any case, it's definitely worth watching.

Cynthia

Somehow I also wound up with a whole bunch of movies that starred the reliably bland actor George Murphy on my DVR, and it's not as if he was ever TCM's Star of the month. One of those movies is Cynthia, a light family drama trying to restore some sense of normalcy following World War II.

Cynthia is played by an adolescent Elizabeth Taylor, although we don't see her at first. Instead, we meet her parents, Larry Bishop (Goerge Murphy) and Louise (Mary Astor) when they were college students before they got married and Cynthia was born. Louise was a musician and Larry a med student in 1930 both hoping they'd be able to go to Vienna to study their respective fields, with Larry making money in the summer by working at the hardware store back in his home town of Napoleon, Ill., one of those small midwestern towns that consistently shows up in movies like this. But the two fall in love and get married, which in and of itself is not a big deal. However, Larry knocks up Louise, and the two need to support themselves somehow, which necessitates moving back to Napoleon.

Worse, Cynthia has been a sickly child, with the result being that she's been sheltered her whole life, and her parents feeing trapped in Napoleon. Indeed, stupid Larry, despite having three years of college education, hasn't even bothered to get any better job than still working at the hardware store, and the family have been living in the same rented house for the past 16 years or so.

Cynthia too is getting to the age where she sees all the nice experiences that the other kids her age have had the chance to do, like going to school dances or performing in the school play. This latter even though Cynthia seems to have some musical talent that she inherited from Mom and takes lessons from a local music professor Rosenkrants (S.Z. Sakall). Matters reach a head for the family when the guy who owns the house decides he needs to sell, which may necessitate the Bishops having to move out if they can't come up with the down payment.

And then one day Ricky Latham (Jimmy Lydon), who dropped out of school to join the navy and presumably fight World War II, returns to town in the hope of finishing up his high school, which is another plot point that makes no sense. The guy would have to be at least 20 now, much too old for Cynthia or high school in general. But he takes a shine to Cynthia, and she might get to go on her first date to the big high school prom. That is, if she's healthy enough to do so. She hasn't really been sick for a year now, but suddenly, with all this activity, she might be coming down with another flu....

Cynthia is one of those MGM movies that you can see fitting in with what Louis B. Mayer wanted to do: good family values in a wholesome package, with some added post-World War II escapism. If these are the worst problems a family has, things can't be too bad, much like the Andy Hardy series that was by this time winding down. Unfortunately, for me the whole thing strained credulity. Cynthia really couldn't be that sickly, and the people around the Bishops, especially Larry's sister (Spring Byington) and her doctor husband (Gene Lockhart), couldn't be that impolite. Everybody tries, but Cynthia is another of those movies that ultimately falls under the weight of a saccharine script.

Were the first 58 psyches any better?

British actress Samanta Eggar died last year, and when she died, I mentioned a couple of her movies that were coming up on TCM over the following few weeks. I didn't realize at the time that I had a lesser known movie of hers on my DVR, in part because she's technically the supporting actress here. That movie is Psyche 59.

The star here is Patricia Neal playing Alison Crawford, and as the movie is opening she's on a horse ride through the parks of London with family friend Paul (Ian Bannen). You could be forgiven for thinking the two of them are married, since Paul is around enough and Alison's two kids treat Paul like a second father. In fact, Alion is married to Eric (Curd Jürgens credited once again as Curt). Alison is also wearing the sort of sunglasses that lead the viewer to believe that she's blind. In fact, she is.

But, this is that weird sort of movie blindness that occurred in some sort of accident and isn't a real physical blindness but the sort of pyschological issue where her brain just won't process the images the optic nerve is sending it because reasons that make no sense with our more modern understanding of science, but bear with it because we wouldn't have a movie otherwise. As to what the accident is, Alison has blocked it from her mind and nobody else bothers to tell her what happened to see if anything will jog her memory because, again, if any of them did that, we'd have a lot less of a movie.

Alison and Eric's marriage seems to be reasonbly OK, although there is a bit of a strain in the family relationshpi in the form of Alison's younger sister Robin (Samantha Eggar). She for whatever reason hasn't been able to have a successful long-term relationship, and with her current marriage breaking up, she's hoping to stay with Alison and Eric for a while. Eric's reaction to all of this is to treat Robin as though he might be up for an affair with her, or that he might have had an affair with her at some point in the past. Alison can't see any of this, but she's no dummy just because she's blind.

To get away from all of this, Alison and Robin decide to go visit their elderly mother, who lives in what would be a nice old house by the sea if only she could keep the house up at her age. Another thing that isn't so nice about it is the fact that it rekindles old negative feelings that Alison and Robin had for each other, and that they had toward their mother. Well, Alison and Mom especially; Robin seems a bit oblivious to this. The two men stay behind in London for a few days, which gives them the chance to have a conversation in which Eric reveals that yes, he really did have an affair with Robin when she was about 17 or so, and that it wasn't the only woman other than Alison that he's had.

Eventually Eric and Paul join the women out in the country, but things get worse in some ways and better than others. Robin starts riding a horse wildly, accidentally knocking Alison down. This, however, restores Alison's vision! She, however, decides not to tell anybody at first. Robin has a jumping accident and learns the truth about Robin and Eric as a result of what she sees. This leads to the climax that the screenwriter obviously hoped would be shocking to viewers of the time.

Psyche 59 is another of the movies where it feels like there's an interesting build-up but, once the movie gets to the climax, the writer can't quite figure out how to make everything that's come before work together, with the result that the finale is a slow fizzle. But, it's easy to see why the cast members would want to make the movie, as the original treatment must have sounded like it was better than the finished product turned out to be. One plus is the black-and-white cinematogrphy, although unfortunately, cinematography alone isn't enough to save a movie like Psyche 59.

There's a reason why I hadn't heard of Psyche 59 before, and after you watch it, you'll probably understand why you hadn't heard of it either.

For some values of "gangster"

One of the movies Eddie Muller selected for Noir Alley last summer that I hadn't heard of was The Gangster. Since I generally enjoy Noir Alley, and the synopsis sounded interesting enough, I decided to record it.

The reason I hadn't heard of this one, I guess, is because it was made by the King Brothers from Monogram, who in this case moved up a step or so when Monogram started Allied Artists to put out stuff that was intended to be more prestigious. Here the star is Barry Sullivan, playing a gangster named Shubunka. He wakes up in what looks like a pretty nice apartment, before he starts with a voiceover of the sort that sounds like we're about to get Yet Another Flashback. That at least would give him the opportunity to explain how he got that horrible scar on his face. And sure enough, the scene flashes back to some point in the past, although it's not quite mentioned how far....

Shubunka lives and works on Neptune Beach, which is one of the places New Yorkers go to get away from the big city in the summer when it gets hot. Now, there's a Neptune, New Jersey, but it's far enough away from the city that people wouldn't day trip there, and certainly wouldn't be taking public transportation in and out of Neptune to get to places in New York City. But that's the first of many things that utterly bend both reality and the coherence of the film's plot.

Shubunka works out of an ice cream parlor that seems to have only one soda jerk, Shorty (Harry Morgan when he was still being called Henry), one cashier Dorothy (Joan Lorring), and an owner Jammey (Akim Tamiroff) who is paying Shubunka some sort of protection money. A totally bizarre subplot involves Shorty's love life, or lack therof, and his attempt to woo another business owner in the area, the widow Ostroleng (Fifi D'Orsay). Shubunka has a girlfriend in the form of dancer Nancy Starr (Belita) who works out of the ballroom at the swanky hotel about a block away, which in real life wouldn't be near the sort of slums Shubunka works out of, or physically fit into the amount of space the set allows it.

Shubunka is jealous of Nancy, which is really only a plot point in that it allows him to accuse her of betraying him for what comes next, when bigger gangsters led by Cornell (Sheldon Leonard) show up. They want to horn in on Shubunka's territory, which shouldn't be so hard since Shubunka doesn't seem to have a gang at all! Cornell and one of his henchmen (Elisha Cook Jr. in another great small role) show up at an isolated part of the beach where Shubunka and Nancy are on a date to try to pressure him to leave town. They've already pressured Jammey, and Shubunka knows that they can kill Jammey and frame him.

Meanwhile, another subplot involves Karty (John Ireland). He's a bookkeeper for the garage his wife's brothers run, but he's embezzled from the company to gamble on the horses, having a scheme he's certain can win. (It's basically the Martingale, which in the real world is easily defeated by limiting the maximum wager along with payouts that offer a vigorish to the house.) He needs to pay back his loan or win more money with his wagering scheme, but Shubunka has no desire to lend him any money.

Objectively, The Gangster is an absolute mess of a movie with a bunch of disparate plot elements that shouldn't fit and all sorts of continuity issues. And yet, for some reason, The Gangster is an eminently interesting movie. Not in the "so bad it's good" sense, since it's not even bad. There's just something so off-kilter with the plot elements and the characters that you can't stop watching through to the end, as much of a mess as it is.

The Gangster is definitely another movie to watch if you can find it, although "gangster" is a common enough word in movie titles that you'll want to make certain you're getting the correct movie.

The Godless Girl

I had a fair number of silent movies sitting on my DVR in addition to some of the other genres that are disproportionately represented on the DVR. One of the movies that I had somewhat surprisingly not heard of before it got an airing on Silent Sunday Nights: The Godless Girl. But with it being a Cecil B. DeMille movie with an interesting synopsis, I recorded it in order to be able to finally watch it and put up a post on it.

The movie starts off in a high school with some interesting clubs. 21-year-old Lina Basquette stars as Judy Craig, aka The Girl. She's one of the prime movers of the school's Atheist Club, which seems like a rather odd thing for what I'd guess is a public school to have. Also, this being the 1920s, it's unsurprising that there are a lot more believers in God, and specifically, the Christian God since this is after all a DeMille movie and he certainly promoted his perception of Christianity in his films. The Boy, actual name Bob Hathaway and played by 32-year-old Tom Keene (credited as George Duryea), is the head of the Christian students' group, and boy is he irritated that atheists not only don't believe in his God, but that they might want to advertise their belief that there is no God. So he and his friends disrupt the Atheist Club meeting, leading to a riot that causes a banister to break and a female student to fall to her death.

It's not quite clear who should get the lion's share of the blame for what happened, although nobody intended for this thing to result in a death. But it did, and legally that's probably involuntary manslaughter. In any case, it's convenient for the justice system to declare it manslaughter and send both of the protagonists off to reform school, which is sex-segregated although the two halves of the reform school are right next to each other. At the school, Judy is roomed with The Other Girl, Mame (Marie Prevost), who shows Judy the ropes, and eventually becomes friends with Judy. Over on the boys' side, Bob meets Bozo (Eddie Quillan), and those two become friends as well.

Bob tries to make up with Judy, probably because he feels it his Christian duty, and tries to figure out a way to protect her, having fallen in love with her along the way. It also doesn't help that this is the sort of "reform" school that figures physical violence is the best way to reform the kids in the school. You'd think the kids might riot at some point the way they will in The Mayor of Hell some years later. And indeed, the climax is going to be set against a riot.

But first, Bob decides the best way to help Judy is to get her out of this place, which means effecting an escape. The two break out by commandeering a truck and eventually wind up on an abandoned farm, where life is idyllic for just long enough for Judy to conclude that perhaps there really is a God. But since there's that climax against a prison riot, you can guess that the young lovers are going to be caught and sent back to the reform school, which is only going to get more brutal than it was before the two escaped.

This being a Cecil B. DeMille movie, it's not exactly subtle in presenting DeMille's views and the triumph of Christian good over evil. but DeMille was a talented director and showman, and he's more than able to come up with a good story and compelling visuals to get his obvious points across, especially in the climactic prison riot complete with a fire and collapsing cell block. The print on The Godless Girl is also quite good. Unfortunately, by the time DeMille finished production sound movies, or part-sound movies, were becoming big, and the movie wasn't very successful, also being re-edited to include partial dialogue sequences. The version TCM ran, however, was silent. I don't have a copy of Kino Lorber's restoration release, so I'm not certain if both versions are available on it.

South Pacific

Tonight's lineup on TCM is a night of films dedicated to director Joshua Logan. Once again, I've got one of the movies on the schedule already on my DVR. That film is South Pacific, which kicks off the night at 8:00 PM.

This is based on the popular Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, and I have to admit that I have not seen a stage version of the musical so I don't know how much was changed between the original stage show and this movie. It's 1943 or so in the south Pacific, which of course means the middle of the Pacific theater of World War II. Japan still holds a lot of the islands, although the action is mostly on an island the the US holds. There's a battalion of Seabees, headed by Luther Billis (Ray Walston) on the island. Being flown in to the island is marine Lt. Joseph Cable (John Kerr).

The Seabees are unsurprisingly frustrated, in the sense that there aren't many women around. A lot of them have been decamped to the neighboring island of Bali Hai, which is off limits to enlisted men, at leat unless they're accompanied by an officer, which Lt. Cable just so happens to be. This will give Billis the chance to get to the island. One Polynesian woman does show up on the island a lot, that being "Bloody Mary" Juanita Hall, who's the sort of opportunist businesswoman that Jane Russell's Mamie Stover was, minus the showgirl part. There's also a group of nurses, led by Ens. Nellie Forbush (Mitzi Gaynor), although they're rather off-limits too; no fraternization and all that.

Lt. Cable's real purpose in being parachuted onto the island is because there's another island not too far away that's held by the Japanese. The Americans want to know more about what's going on on that island because of how it controls shipping in the area. The only idea they have is to get someone to go behind enemy lines and radio from there, and Lt. Cable got the job. However, he doesn't know much about the island. The one person who might be able to help him is Emile de Becque (Rossano Brazzi), a Frenchman who moved to Polynesia decades ago because he had a past in France. Since then he wound up owning a plantation. Since he's a civilian, Nellie is able to start up a relationship with him.

Meanwhile, Lt. Cable is able to get over to Bali Hai, where he's introduced to the gorgeous Liat (France Nuyen), who happens to be Bloody Mary's daughter. He immediately falls in love with her, but isn't so certain he wants to marry her, because what will his family back in the States think? Far worse is Nellie's attitude. He finds out that Emile is actually a widower: he married a local Polynesian woman, and had two kids by her, whom he is raising. When Nellie learns he's got two mixed-race children, she's horrified for no particularly good reason, or at least no reason that anyone engaging in presentism would find acceptable. The movie, however (based on a work by Michener) is trying to make the point that this sort of blind prejudice is not particularly a good thing.

In and along the way, we get a whole bunch of songs. The songs themselves are of the Rodgers and Hammerstein sort that have in somce cases become standards, so lovers of musicals will certainly enjoy them. However, the way they're presented in the movie is something that might be a problem for a lot of viewers. All of the musical numbers are tinted much the way that old silent movies had scenes tinted in various colors. This is something that to me came across as stilted and artificial and didn't really work.

On the plus side, the movie was done if not quite on location at least in Hawaii, which isn't the south Pacific but close enough to substitute adequately as well as be physically beautiful, especially in wide-screen. I can only imagine how it would have looked back in 1958 on the big screen. Fans of musicals will probably like South Pacific; non-fans (and I'd include myself here) I think will at least not actively dislike it.

The Keyhole

George Brent was TCM's Star of the Month last month, and one of the movies that they ran is showing up on TCM again, although this time it's as part of a night of movies starring Brent's co-star in tonight's movie, that star being Kay Francis. The movie in question is The Keyhole, which comes up overnight tonight, or in the wee hours of tomorrow, at 3:15 AM.

Kay Francis plays Anne Brooks, née Vallee. As the movie opens up, she's reading a note from a man named Maurice (Monroe Owsley) that is a suicide letter. Anne is married to a wealthy man, so she has her chauffeur drive her over to the apartment where Maurice is staying. It turns out that Maurice and Anne danced together in Europe as one of those Vernon and Irene Castle-like couples who demonstrated new dances in the ballrooms of nightspots where the wealthy gathered. Anne was young and naïve, stupid enough to marry Maurice, and when she learned what a jerk he really was, she left for America leaving Maurice to complete the no-fault divorce proceedings since he was intending to marry another woman. However, Maurice never married that other woman and never got the divorce. Anne married her second husband Schuyler Brooks (Henry Kolker) thinking it was a valid marriage and that she'd never need to tell Schuyler about her past. But it's not a valid marriage, and Maurice is blackmailing Anne over it because she's got money, or at least assets that theoretically can be converted to money although Schuyler is bound to start noticing at some point.

Schuyler has kinda-sorta noticed in that Anne comes home at odd hours, and doesn't seem to wear some of her jewelry any more. But the servants have no idea what's really going on. The one person who does know what's going on is Schuyler's sister Portia (Helen Ware), who is good at discreetly breaking up such unwanted relationships. She learns from Anne that Maurice is not an American citizen. So Anne should take a cruise somehwere to the Carribean, like Havana. Maurice is certain to follow her, and Portia can use her influence to get Maurice's visa cancelled. Voilà: Maurice won't be able to blackmail Anne in the US anymore, and Schuyler need not learn anything about what went on between Anne and Maurice.

However, since Schuyler knows nothing of this, he has some reason to worry that Anne might be up to no good when she suddenly declares that she'd like to go to Havana. So he goes to a detective agency to have one of their discreet, high-class private eyes get on the same boat and see if he can find out who Anne is seeing on the sly. That man is Neil Davis (George Brent), who is accompanied by a second detective, Hank (Allen Jenkins), who will be traveling under the guise of being Neil's valet.

Neil and Anne meet, and the two eventually become friends, although Neil notes that Anne seems to be a more or less perfect wife, never looking for another man and trying to get away from Maurice who, sure enough, has followed Anne on the boat. The things Neil and Anne do together are completely platonic, although eventually Neil finds himself beginning to fall in love with Anne. This presents problems when Schuyler learns the truth from his siter and goes down to Havana himself so that Anne should not find out that her husband has been spying on her.

The Keyhole is an entertaining enough movie, although I have to wonder how much bearing to reality it bears. One plus is that the conflict is set up in a good enough way that it makes Anne's reasoning for why she did the things she did believable. She was on a separate continent in the early 1930s, and expected the divorce was going to go through, so what resaon is there to tell any of this stuff to her second husband? And she's acting mysteriously enough, in part to protect her husband, so he has a logical reason to suspect something is wrong. I do have to say, on the other hand, that the resolution of the film's conflict doesn't quite work for me.

One other fun thing to mention is the subplot. Glenda Farrell is inserted into the movie as Dot, a gold-digger who is clearly looking for a rich guy to fleece. She falls for Hank, not realizing he's not what he's presenting himself as, while Hank is blowing through all the expense money to keep Dot in the lifestyle she's become accustomed to. They both handle their roles well and provide a bit of needed comic relief.

People who want a look at early 1930s values will probably enjoy The Keyhole, as will the fans of the movie's stars, although there are better films out there for all of them.

The supporting player witness

It wasn't uncommon for studios to remake their B movies back in the day. After all, since there wasn't yet television to show the movies again, the B stuff would likely have fallen out of the consciousness of most of the viewing public. So when I saw the plot synopsis for the 1939 movie The Man Who Dared, I was pretty certain -- correctly, as it turns out -- that this was a remake of a really entertaining little movie called The Star Witness. Still, I watched it anyway.

Once again, the backdrop for the movie is corruption in some unnamed medium-sized city, with newspaper headlines being a good way to have plot exposition. But fortunately, the DA has somebody who's willing to testify against the corrupt mayor. The bad news is that the mayor, being corrupt and powerful, is able to figure out who this witness is, and get some of his goons to put a bomb on the guy's car to kill him.

The dead witness lived in one of those middle class residential districts with detached garages and picket fences, and living in the next house over is the Carter family, led by patriarch Matthew (Henry O'Neill). They see the people who placed the car bomb acting furtively, and trying to escape before the bomb goes off. However, one of the bombers is dressed as a policeman, so when the Carters mention what happened to the police, the bad guys already know what happened.

The Carters are a pretty big family, with the parents (Mom being played by Elisabeth Risdon); adult daughter Madge (Jane Russell); three sons including football-playing Bill (Dickie Jones); and their grandfather, Ulysses (Charley Grapewin), who fought in the Spanish-American War. (The original had Grandpa as a Civil War veteran, but by now that would put Grandpa close to 90.) So there are a lot of people to testify. Except that the bad guys start threatening the Carters, and suddenly they clam up, suddenly doubting whether they really saw what they saw. Meanwhile, the poor family are pretty much prisoners in their own home what with the police protection they're getting

And just to drive the point home, the bad guys take Dad someplace where they can beat the crap out of him before bringing him back home, simply because they can and it will encourage the Carters to keep their mouths shut. Grandpa, as the old fart and war veteran, is the one person who doesn't seem to care what happens to him since he's going to be dead soon anyway. But his intransigence only results in little Bill getting kidnapped on the way to a football game. It's up to Grandpa to save him and, by extension, save the whole city from corruption....

The Man Who Dared is a competently made B movie, although it's still decidedly a B movie. I'd also say that it's not quite as good as The Star Witness, in part because it feels a bit more rushed, and in part because The Star Witness has a bit better of a crew: Walter Huston is the DA, Grant Mitchell the father, and William Wellman is the director.

Portrait in Black

A genre that's often fun even if the movies aren't necessarily very good is the potboiler of the 1950s and 1960s. Recently, I had the opportunity to see another of those movies: Portrait in Black.

Lana Turner is the star here, and she plays Sheila Cabot, the second wife of shipping magnate Matthew Cabot (Lloyd Nolan). Matthew is an extremely tough businessman, and that toughness is driving him to an early grave as he seems to need a series of injections from his doctor, Dr. David Rivera (Anthony Quinn). However, Matthew is tough in his personal life as well as his business life; as one example he seems quite ticked that Sheila has decided to get a learner's permit to be able to drive for herself. This, after, would mean she'd no longer be forced to use the chauffeur Cobb (Ray Walston) to go anywhere.

And goodness knows she's got places to go. She's secretly carrying on an affair with Dr. Rivera! Both of them have had the thought that they could hasten Matthew's death through an air-bubble induced embolism, although that would of course be unethical malpractice, and there's a reasonable chance somebody might figure things out since there are signs that Sheila is less than fully honest about where she's taking the car. Cathy (Sandra Dee), Matthew's adult daughter from his first marriage, notices that Sheila often goes "shopping" but comes home having bought nothing.

Of course, Cathy's relationship with her dad isn't much better. Cathy's boyfriend is Blake Richards (John Saxon), who runs one of the tugboat concessions in the San Francisco harbor. But, thanks in part to Dad, as well as Dad's second-in-commmand Howard Mason (Richard Basehart), Blake's dad was driven out of business, giving Blake good reason to hate Mr. Cabot. Worse, Mr. Cabot and Mason screw Blake over in awarding the new contract to deal with the Cabot Line.

And then Matthew dies suddenly, although it's not because of any untoward doings on anybody's part. However, a few days letter Sheila receives an hand-printed letter with no return address but a postmark from Carmel congratulating her on doing away with her husband! Sheila and David are convinced that somebody knows about their affair and is going to try to blackmail them. Suspicion eventually falls on Howard Mason's shoulders, and Dr. Rivera comes up with a ridiculous plan to bump off Howard in a shooting that could easily be blamed on a disgruntled longshoreman since there a labor dispute brewing. Except that the killing doesn't quite go to plan. Oh, Howard gets killed all right, but it takes two attempts and then Cathy starts trying to put two and two together....

Portrait in Black got scathing reviews at the time of its release in 1960, and it's not hard to see why. However, 65-plus years on, it's easier to sit back and have fun at how delightfully overwrought and bad this one is. It goes from one ridiculously over-the-top scene to the next, leading up the a climax where you know Anthony Quinn's character is going to get it if only because the Production Code was still in effect and demanded it. But the movie generally swims in a sea of hatred that's brewing just under the surface, with all the characters delivering bad dialogue.

Portrait in Black is definitely recommended, but not for the reasons the filmmakers at the time would have wanted you to see it.