Captain Applejack

I'm always up for a pre-code movie I haven't seen before. So when Captain Applejack showed up on the TCM schedule quite some time back, I recored it. Having watched it, it's more of an early talkie than a pre-code, but there's still a lot about it that makes it interesting.

Ambrose Applejohn (John Halliday) is the latest -- and last -- of a long line of Applejohns, living in a manor-type house in southwest England along the English Channel. It's the type of place that is isolated and subject to bad weather, reminiscent of the place in Jamaica Inn. Ambrose has an elderly aunt Agatha (Louise Closser Hale) and a ward Poppy (Mary Brian) who pines for him although he doesn't realize it. Ambrose considers this a boring life, and has been thinking about putting the house on the market so that he can use the money to travel and lead a life of adventure.

This being a place subject to bad weather, sure enough we get a storm and a bunch of people looking for help getting out of the storm because reasons. First up are the Pengards, with Mr. Pengard claiming to be a clairvoyant, although of cource clairvoyancy is a bunch of nonsense. After that is Madame Valeska (Kay Strozzi). She's a woman of mystery, and she tells Ambrose that she's being pursued by a guy and needs to be kept safe. Sure enough, a man named Borolsky (Arthur Edmund Carew) shows up looking for Valeska, and threatening to kill Ambrose if he doesn't give up Valeska.

After dealing with Borolsky, Ambrose plans to retire for the night, although Poppy thinks she hears something. In the investigation, they notice that a window latch has been jimmied, and that somebody seems to have found a secret hidden panel that nobody in the Applejohn family ever knew about, which is the sort of plot point that makes no sense. Making even more lack of sense is the fact that the panel contains a parchment that whoever came in through the window didn't find. The parchment says that the Applejohns are really the Applejacks, descended from the pirat Captain Applejack who absconded with a bunch of treasure and hid it somewhere in the house. So clearly we're in the realm of nonsense plot.

After a dream sequence, the various visitors show up again. As it turns out, they were all imposters, and are actually thieves looking for the treasure that's supposedly in the house. This leads to a madcap climax, and a happy ending for our protagonists.

Captain Applejack was based on a play, and most of the movie apart from the pirate dream sequence is set in about two rooms. Indeed, the movie starts off slowly enough that I was thinking it wasn't all that good. But then the parchment shows up and things start to get really weird, especially with the pirate sequence and then the finale which seems to be trying to change the movie from drama to comedy. It ended up coming across to me as one of those early talkies where the filmmakers didn't quite know what to do and decided to through anything they could think of at the audience. The result isn't always successful, but that finale is certainly different, making the movie more fun that it probably ought to be.

What if The Exorcist were a comic heist movie?

I found myself with a couple of Zero Mostel movies unwatched on my DVR and getting to the point where both of them were getting close to expiring. I've watched both of them now and am writing up the reviews, as usual spacing them out because I try to avoid posting about movies with the same star in close proximity unless they're both showing up on TV soon. In any case, the first of the two Zero Mostel movies is The Great Bank Robbery.

A train is heading for the town of Friendly, TX, and we see several people watching the train from afar, with the implication being that they're casing the train for a possible robbery. One group is led by Papa (Akim Tamiroff), father of Juan (Larry Storch); these are Mexicans who have come across the border and, one would guess, are planning to abscond with the presumed gold on the train back to Mexico. There's also Slade (Claude Akins), a gunman who knows a bit more about the bank in Friendly which is part of why he's scouting out the train.

Riding on the train is the Rev. Pious Blue (Zero Mostel), leader of a Salvation Army-style itinerant missionary group. His companion and second-in-command is sister Lyda (Kim Novak), and they're accompanied by a bunch of older character actor types, including Peter Whitney, Sam Jaffe, and John Fiedler. They, as it will be seen, have ulterior motives for making their way to Friendly.

We then learn that the bank in Friendly has two sets of books. One is the official set, although there's a second set and extra vaults because the bank supposedly holds the loot of a bunch of famous bank-robbing outlaws. Why, however, gangs like the James brothers would rob one bank and then trust the proceeds with another, is not answered. Texas Ranger Ben Quick (Clint Walker) has a feeling something is up in Friendly and is there to investigate.

Little does he know how much is up. Rev. Blue's group is, of course, there to rob the bank as well, with their plan being to tunnel under and blow their way into the vault during the Independence Day celebration and then get away with the gold somehow. Of course, they're going to have to stay one step ahead of the law but also one step ahead of the other robbers, who are going to feel aggrieved at having what they think should be "their" money stolen right out from under their noses.

The Great Bank Robbery is played for laughs, so there's a lot of comic styling in the reverend's plans to rob the bank as well as in their planned getaway, including using Sister Lyda to seduce Ben Quick. Complicating matters is the fact that Lyda finds herself legitimately falling in love with Ben.

It's fairly easy to surmise that The Great Bank Robbery was produced in part because there had been a spate of comic westerns in the 1960s as well as a spate of comic heist movies. Unfortunately, The Great Bank Robbery, coming at the end of both of these cycles, suffers greatly from being derivative. I'm also not the biggest fan of Zero Mostel, finding his humor much too broad, which is also a weakness of this movie. Instead of being genuinely funny, the whole thing comes across as the tiresome brand of zany. Ooh, let's have the climax be a hot-air balloon trying to flee the area! The movie is directed by Hy Averbaack, who worked mostly in television, and that shows, too.

Surprisingly, the screenplay is by William Peter Blatty of The Exorcist fame. The Great Bank Robbery does not rise to that level.

Several months before Black Sunday

Today's (August 28) star in TCM's Summer Under the Stars is Brock Peters. This gives me the chance to do a post on a movie that's been sitting on my DVR and I hadn't seen before. That movie, Two-Minute Warning, comes up in the wee hours of the overnight at 2:15 AM, which is technically August 29 on the east coast although technically very late on August 28 if you're in the Pacific time zone and only have the east coast feed.

The movie starts off by sort of giving away something that's going to be the main plot point later in the movie. A man with a rifle and telescopic sight looks out a high window and sees a couple of bicyclists in what looks like a typical Southern California suburb. The man with the rifle then proceeds to shoot one of the cyclists dead. We don't see the shooter, which is a good thing as it adds suspense to the movie.

Cut to the Los Angeles Coliseum. "Championship X", the big football game is going to be held there the coming weekend. We do get Howard Cosell and Frank Gifford, although nothing closer than that to the NFL because they didn't permit the use of any of their properties for Two-Minute Warning the way they would for Black Sunday which was released a few months later. (I don't know the full production schedule for both movies. It's possible the NFL had agreed with pre-production on Black Sunday and didn't want to be involved in two movies with similar themes.) Brock Peters works at the Coliseum in maintenance and security, looking after the Dobermans who are partly responsible for security.

But, before the game, we have to be introduced to the requisite character types, much like any other disaster movie. Among them are a family man, Mike Ramsay (Beau Bridges) and his wife and kid; a husband and wife (David Janssen and Gena Rowlands); a pickpocket (a very elderly Walter Pidgeon a few years after Harry in Your Pocket); and Stu (Jack Klugman), a gambler who's heavily in debt but thinks he can make it back by betting on the big game. Oh, Stu also winds sitting next to a Catholic priest (Mitchell Ryan) at the game because the priest knows one of the quarterbacks.

The big football game has always had security although back in the 1970s it wasn't quite as tight as it is today. Sam McKeever (Martin Balsam) manages the Coliseum, and has the local police precinct run by Capt. Holly (Charlton Heston). Meawhile, since the sniper already killed that cyclist, we've got the SWAT team out looking for the sniper. They're headed up by Sgt. Button (John Cassavetes), and for obvious reasons wind up at the Coliseum too.

That's because the sniper, seen only in long shots until the very end of the movie, has holed up behind the scoreboard at the top of the Coliseum tower where the Olympic flame would have been in 1932 and 1984. Eventually Mike Ramsay looks through his binoculars and spots the sniper, who has also already been spotted by people in the control booth since they've got shots from the Goodyear blimp above. At this point, it's not known if the sniper has a particular target, which isn't entirely unlikely since there was talk of some elected officials showing up; or whether the sniper just wants to kill random people the way he did with the cyclist. And when is the guy going to start shooting?

Two-Minute Warning is a movie which has some decided problems, in large part down to the lack of character development. Nobody gets to be much more than a stock character, and we have no real reason to care about any of the fans. On the other hand, the main idea of the story is a good one, and fairly well executed. The plot device of not giving the sniper any discernable motive, and not showing him until the very end, is an inspired move that I thought heightened the suspense.

Two-Minute Warning is an overlooked and underrated movie in the disaster film genre of the 1970s, but one that works well despite the one-dimensional characters.

James Barton

I've mentioned a lot how I think Warner Bros. made some really fun B movies, while B movies from other studios aren't quite as good. This is a bit true of MGM which has the whole MGM gloss that makes the B movies look a bit artificual. In the case of RKO, it feels more like the ideas are lacking. I couldn't help but think of that as I watched His Family Tree.

James Barton, who was apparently a vaudeville dancer, stars as Patrick Murphy, a former boatswain who now runs a pub of that name in Ireland. His son emigrated to the States, and is living in the sort of small city -- this time in Iowa -- that features a lot in movies of the 1930s. Supposedly they're small, but they've got so much of everything that you wonder how the US could have so many such cities with a population about 40% what it is today. But the bigger point is that Patrick's son Charles (William Harrigan) hasn't written to Dad in a while, so Dad decides that he's going to go over to Iowa to look up his son and see what the deal is.

Charles seems to have done reasonably well for himself, with a wife Maggie and daughter Elinor who is engaged to be married to one of the wealthier guys in town. The good government types even want Charles to run for mayor against long-time mayor Holtsapple (Ferdinand Munier), who isn't quite as corrupt as the local politicians in other movies, but is definitely the villain of the piece if there is one. Apparently the election is set to come down to which candidate the fourth ward comes down to, led by Irish-American community leader Nellie Oulihan (Maureen Delaney).

And herein lies part of the rub. Charles, when he came to Iowa, changed his name the way a lot of immigrants did. Except that he made up a bogus story to go along with the name change to Murfree (not much disguise there) that involves having a family in Murfreesboro, Tennessee that goes back generations. Now this was only seven years or so after Al Smith lost the presidential election, so maybe small cities in the midwest still weren't ready for an Irish Catholic mayor. But for whatever reason, it's decided that the idea that Murfree isn't Charles' original name is something that's totally going to sink his election chances, which you'd think he would have told his backers before running. And having one's Irish father come over certainly wouldn't help in that regard.

But Patrick is Movie Stereotype Irish, the guy who's got a charming brogue and Irish jig and all that goes with that, along with being able to bring everybody over to his son's side regardless of whether the thing about Charles having changed his name is true. Mayor Holtsapple and his campaign managers see this, and realize that the only way they're going to win is to stop Patrick from campaigning for his son, using force if necessary.

I've also stated before on a couple of occasions that I find Hollywood's doe-eyed view of Ireland to be detrimental to films because of the treacly attitude it induces, but that's not the big problem with His Family Tree. Instead, it's that the script is so unintelligent and unoriginal that I found myself rolling my eyes at it all. People who are interested in seeing what James Barton was all about may enjoy the couple of scenes where he gets to do his dance routine, but the movie as a whole doesn't quite hold up.

Ivan the Terrible, Part I

Two of the foreign films sitting on my DVR are the two parts of Sergei Eisenstein's proposed three-part film on the first Tsar of All Russia, Ivan the Terrible. Only two parts were completed in part because Eisenstein died and in part because of the political reaction to the second part. Recently, I watched Ivan the Terrible, Part I.

To understand this film requires a bit of an understanding of Russian history. Before about the middle of the 16th century, Russia was rulled by a bunch of local princes along with noblemen called boyars. This internal conflict left Russia weak and subject to predation by various forces on its borders including Poland, Baltic Sea kingdoms, and the Muslim khanate of Kazan in what is now central Russia. In 1547, the teenaged Ivan rises to the throne of the principality of Moscow and pretty much crowns himself Tsar of All Russia, a move that understandably creates a whole bunch of political enemies. Russia was also, at this time, despite being Christian, very much not western compared to the rest of Europe; it wasn't really until Peter the Great went to Holland to study shipbuilding that Russia really began to become more westernized.

To deal with all of this, Ivan needs to do a bunch of things. One is to try to ally himself with the Orthodox Church and the common peasants against the boyars and competing princes. Another is to get himself married and set about creating an heir to the throne. The third is to try to unite Russia, for which a common enemy would do nicely. Thankfully for him, the wedding celebration is interrupted by envoys from Kazan. It seems that Kazan is planning to attack Moscow again, and this is the declaration of war.

Ivan is no dummy, and decides that the best defense is to attack himself, so he besieges Kazan and blows up the fortress from below, earning him a major military and political victory as well as gaining some key allies among the people who served under him. However, there's still quite a bit of opposition from the boyars, as they're going to be throughout Ivan's life. Ivan nearly dies but miraculously recovers, earning himself more allies.

But there's still opposition, including quite close to him in the form of his aunt who is plotting to poison his wife. And she actually succeeds. This emboldens the boyars, and Ivan eventually announces that he's going to go away from Moscow for a while to regroup, gather his strength with the peasants and other people allied to him, and return to Moscow triumphant. Since there's a second movie in the Ivan the Terrible story, the first one ends on a rather uncertain note.

As I watched Ivan the Terrible, Part I, released in early 1945 and filmed in 1943 and 1944, I couldn't help but think of how the movie mirrors the situation Russia was facing against Germany at the height of World War II. Indeed, Eisenstein had to decamp to Central Asia to film much of this. But more relevant here is how Eisenstein was able to make a hagiographic movie about the first Tsar against the repressive dictatorship of Joseph Stalin. Indeed, it's quite easy to look at this and argue that a case is being made for the idea of a present-day leader with an iron fist. The need to unite all the principalities is also a natural parallell to the need to unite the Soviet people against Germany.

Although I have mostly positives for this movie, there are some negatives to note, which is notably in the stilted dialogue. Eisenstein was moving away from the sort of realistic storytelling which was common in Hollywood and commercial films, instead focusing on a style that has a lot of closeups. I wonder whether part of the dialog issue is also because of the backdrop of medieval Russia and also liturgical Russian.

Holiday (1930)

I mentioned earlier in August the birth anniversary of actress Ann Harding, and how I'd come across the 1930 version of Holiday on Tubi. As it turns out, it was still there, so I finally watched it.

Now you may know the more famous 1938 version of Holiday, which I blogged about back in 2015. This earlier version has pretty much the same plot, which I suppose is unsurprising. As the movie opens, Johnny Case (Robert Ames) is being brought home to the house of Julia Seton (Mary Astor). The two of them had met on a ski vacation up in Lake Placid, and Johnny proposed to Julia knowing little about her background. Now, it turns out that Julia is fabulously wealthy, as the older daughter of banker Edward Seton (the original William Holden, not the one from films like Stalag 17). Julia has a younger daughter Linda (Ann Harding), and a cynical alcoholic brother Ned (Monroe Owsley). Julia isn't quite so certain how to break the news of her engagement to Dad, since he's morally traditional, and this sort of quick engagement is anything but.

Linda offers to help, largely because she's the one person in the family who is decidedly not stuffy, and resents the sort of buttoned-down upbringing that Dad and his social class represent. To Linda it's stultifying and takes away one's individuality. So she sees Johnny as a breath of fresh air, especially because considering taking a sort of sabbatical before finally settling down to life, again the sort of thing that Mr. Seton would find shocking.

We can see just how square Dad is when Linda announces she wants to hold a small party up in what had been the children's play-room, with an intimate dinner for a few of Linda and Julia's friends, just calling them up. She specifically mentions not having engraved invitations, so what do we see in the next shot? You guessed it, an egraved invitation. Linda brings the few bohemian friends she has, Prof. Potter (Edward Everet Horton) and his wife (Hedda Hopper), and sulks up in the play-room, for good reason.

Now, at this point, it starts to become clear that Mr. Seton isn't going to be such a good influence on Johnny, either. Where Johnny wants to take a sabbatical, having worked hard in regular work to get to where he is, Dad wants him to join the family business and use the honeymoon to go to Europe to network with some of Dad's influential friends in the worlds of politics and high finance. Johnny begins to chafe, and you get the feeling that he might be better suited going off with Linda. Not that Linda would do such a thing to Julia. She genuinely likes her sister.

The Linda character is at the heart of the biggest differences between the two versions of the movie. In the remake, Linda was played by Katharine Hepburn, who was exactly the right person for the role. Hepburn could be obnoxious in a movie like Bringing Up Baby or getting her comeuppance in The Philadelphia Story, but since the character is supposed to be a rebellious free spirit, that sort of acting from Hepburn works. Ann Harding's Linda is much more the sort of person who's suffered in silence and is only now finally going to stand up for herself, even if she doesn't quite know how to do it. It's a different portrayal, and Harding does a good job, but the way Hepburn played it makes the movie much more lively.

Not that the Ann Harding version of Holiday is bad by any means. It's more that the remake is one of the all-time classics, while this version is a good movie that has the unfortunate luck of having been made at a time when movie makers were still figuring out sound along with having to compare to the remake.

Briefs for August 25-26, 2026

I apologize for the posting schedule last week that was a bit screwed up. As I've posted on a bunch of occasions, ever since moving house and getting high-speed internet that allowed me to do streaming stuff back in 2023, I've been getting ahead in terms of scheduling posts. Last week saw Marie Windsor's day in Summer Under the Stars, and I put up a post on one of her movies, Mail Order Bride, that was airing that day. However, as I wrote more posts, I started scheduling them after the post on Mail Order Bride, not realizing that I had a couple of days where I had no posts scheduled. I think as of right now I'm good for about the next three weeks, unless I come across something that I haven't noticed is airing and is on my DVR, in which case I might wind up juggling posts around.

The TCM September schedule is out in full, and I've already found several movies in the second half of September that are on my DVR. I think that's enough where I shouldn't be juggling stuff around. On the other hand, someone famous could die -- I actually have a couple of posts written up on movies related to some seriously old people whose death notices I haven't come across yet and have been saving them in draft for that morbid occasion. To be fair, legitimate news outlets have obituaries for famous people ready to go just in case.

Speaking of that Shelley Fabares died over the weekend at the age of 82. She was in multiple films with Elvis Presley, although she's better known for her TV work. I actually went to my YouTube TV cloud DVR because I thought I had Girl Happy on it. I haven't posted about Girl Happy, and as it turns out the Elvis movie sitting on my DVR is Girls! Girls! Girls! which was the subject of a post 2½ years ago. Oops.

The Paramount/WB saga is still going on; for some reason I thought the merger/buyout had been called off. Or maybe it was another of the proposed buyers backing out. The merger ideas have been going on long enough and there have been enough proposals that it's easy to mix them up. And it's not as if I'm paying particularly close attention to it. But the news now is that A bunch of state Attorneys-General want their pound of flesh and are grandstanding about it. I'd think the barriers to entry are lower than they've ever been, but then you have to remember that politicians find it easier to control a couple of large market players than a system with a whole bunch of small players. The big players also have less of a problem with regulation than you might think since they can handle the regulation for the most part while it's that barrier to entry for newcomers. So I'll sit back and largely not pay close attention to what's going on until it has a more direct impact on me.

And in more FXM programming notes, today's Retro block concludes with Alien at 1:00 PM, which in itself is not terribly interesting because it's been in the Retro lineup before and I blogged about it almost five years back. However, Alien is followed by the commercial half of the lineup which includes the rest of the movies in the Alien series, starting with Aliens at 3:00 PM and going through to Alien vs. Predator: Requiem at midnight. Or at least, that's the last one they're showing and it's nearly 20 years old; I can't recall whehter there have been any since as I don't go to the movie theater very often. The one thing I do find curious is that I can't recall Aliens being in the Retro block. It was released in 1986, and the Retro block has certainly had stuff more recent than that show up. It's also 40 years old, which is getting to be plenty old enough. For me, I think the first movie less than 40 years old I posted about was Yours, Mine, and Ours, subject of a February 2008 post, which would have made it about two months shy of 40. If not that, than the spelling bee documentary Spellbound. And consider that when TCM was launched, 40 years old would only have been 1954. On the Waterfront would have been less than 40 years old as it was released in July 1954.

Seven Miles from Alcatraz

The star for tomorrow, August 25 on TCM's Summer Under the Stars is Bonita Granville. Once again, I happen to have a movie of hers on my DVR that's showing up in the day and that I haven't blogged about before That movie is Seven Miles from Alcatraz, at 2:45 PM, so in order to be able to do a post on it before it airs, I watched it, which means that again you get a post on an upcoming movie.

Alcatraz, was, of course, famously used as a prison on an island in the middle of San Francisco Bay, a body of water with a lot of shipping traffic and difficult waters so they need a lighthouse too, although that's on a different island. Meanwhile, there's a war going on even though none of the prisoners are doing their part for America by fighting in it. Indeed, one of the prisoners, Champ Larkin (James Craig), is worried that San Francisco Bay is just the place for the Japanese to bomb, meaning there's a good chance a stray bomb or missile could his Alcatraz. Champ is having none of that, so he decides he's going to break out of the most secure prison in all of the United States.

And wouldn't you know it, but pretty much in the very next scene, Champ and his fellow prisoner Jimbo (Frank Jenks) are escaping and are able to evade all the patrol boats. They don't make it to the mainland, however, instead washing ashore on the island with the lighthouse. The lighthouse keeper, Captain Porter (George Cleveland), lives there with his daughter Anne (Bonita Granville). Also working at the lighthouse is a radioman, Brenner (Erford Gage), and the custodian Stormy (Cliff Edwards). Champ and Jimbo break in and immediately set about holding the four hostage, although there's the issue that Brenner is supposed to call in at a certain time as part of his duties. Not doing so would certainly be noticed by the authorities.

On the other hand, what the Porters and the two criminals have no idea of is that Brenner is actually working with Nazis to send and receive coded messages. There's a pair of Nazis aboard a U-boat, as well as a "baroness" on the mainland who has a whole group of fifth columnists around her, because of course there's always one ringleader with a bunch of supporters in movies like this. Anyhow, the message Brenner has been sending is that that ringleader has targeting information that will allow the Nazis to target the coast better, and needs to rendezvous with the Nazis on the U-boat to give them that information.

Now, this being a World War II movie from Hollywood, you know that the two prisoners are going to have a change of heart and be instrumental in foiling the Nazis' diaboloical scheme. But it's also an RKO B movie, which means that it's all done in a shade over an hour with RKO's lesser production values. Seven Miles from Alcatraz is a fun enough premise, if one that would be done dozens of times over the course of the war. The script is a bit of a mess to the point I was wondering whether the Porters would turn out to be part of the Nazi ring, too.

Daisy Kenyon

One of those movies that I had seen part of somewhere along the way but never got around to seeing all of -- probably on the old Fox Movie Channel since it's a Fox movie and I can't remember the last time they ran it -- is Daisy Kenyon. So when TCM showed it as part of a night dedicated to director Otto Preminger, I recorded it in order to be able finally to watch it and write up a review. Tomorrow being Dana Andrews day in Summer Under the Stars, and with my realizing that the movie in tomorrow's schedule I was going to do a post on is one that I actually blogged about four years ago (Brainstorm, Aug. 24 at 6:00 PM), I figure that now is a good time to put up this post on Daisy Kenyon even though it's not airing on TCM tomorrow.

Dan O'Mara (Dana Andrews) is a lawyer at a prestigious firm who takes a taxi to what is probably supposed to be Greenwich Village to see fashion artist Daisy Kenyon (Joan Crawford). It fairly quickly transpires that Dan is carrying on a romantic affair with Daisy. There is, however, a fairly serious issue with this in that Dan is married to Lucille (Ruth Warrick) with two kids about to become teenagers. Not only that, but Lucille is the daughter and granddaughter of the founders of the law firm. So, because of family obligations, Dan has to break off the date he had hoped to have with Daisy.

As Dan is leaving the apartment building, he runs into another man who is about to ring to be let in, Peter Lapham (Henry Fonda). Peter is also seeing Daisy, which is possibly a response from Daisy to the less-than-stellar treatment she's been getting from Dan, although to be fair, Daisy really ought to know she's going to get that sort of treatment from a man who's cheating on his wife. Peter isn't cheating on his wife, because his wife is already really quite dead, having died in a car accident some years back. That's one of the things that prompted Peter to leave his Cape Cod home and serve in the US Army during the recently concluded war. Peter is thinking of going back to Europe to serve in the occupation army. So, as we can see, Daisy is going to have to choose between two men.

But then things get more complicated. Dan is approached by a man who wants to hire O'Mara to represent a man in an important legal case: that of a Japanese-American man who served in the army in Europe with some distinction, only to return home and find he had been dispossessed of his farm Bad Day at Black Rock-style. It's important, but not exactly remunerative. It's going to take Dan away from the clients who are paying him the big money; it's going to take him away from his wife and kids; and it's going to take him away from Daisy.

So eventually Dan returns from doing some research work on this case and finds that Daisy has suddenly gotten married to Peter! Dan probably ought to admit defeat and go back to his wife and the kids he really does love despite the way he treats their mom (who, to be fair, does have enough issues where one can understand why Dan might start looking at other women). Instead, he continues to pursue Daisy, to the point that he stupidly calls Daisy from the house and Lucille listens in on the call. She decides to file for divorce and try to get custody of the kids. In theory, this would have left Dan free to marry Daisy if she hadn't already gotten married. It's also a lot more complicated because Daisy could be the co-respondent in the divorce case.

Ben Mankiewicz, in his comments after the movie, commented that the movie didn't have much of a reputation for a long time, to the point that Otto Preminger claimed many years later not to have remembered much about it. Having watched it, I can see the reason for the lack of reputation. Everything about Daisy Kenyon is competent, and definitely not anything that the cast and crew should want to forget about having made. But, at the same time, the plot is a fairly ridiculous melodrama. It's not as extreme in having to jump through hoops to satisfy the Production Code as something like The Great Lie, but there's a lot here that strains credulity. That, and it feels competent, not an all-time great. Also to be fair, there are quite a few other 40s prestige movies that aren't that well-remembered 80 years on.

So definitely give Daisy Kenyon a watch. It's certainly interesting.

Adventure Girl

Another movie I recorded off of TCM knowing nothing about it beyond the synopsis was the 1934 release Adventure Girl. After watching it and looking it up, it turns out the movie has a very interesting provenance.

The movie is narrated by Joan Lowell, who plays herself and declares in opening title cards that she had made a voyage a year before the movie was released (so, 1933) and had adventures so incredible that she had to recreate them for the screen, or else nobody would believe her. This movie purports to be that retelling of true events which, for reasons that should become clear, should have everyone shaking their heads....

Joan Lowell's father Nicholas Wagner was a seaman, retired by the time of the events of the movie, and Lowell decided to give him a sort of present by fixing up an ocean-going schooner and taking Dad down to the Caribbean along with a crew of two men, Otto and former US Marine Bill. (Neither of them were professional actors, as far as I know.) On the way south, the boat gets caught up in a hurricane, this being the days when forecasting the weather in more remote parts of the world was next to impossible. The hurricane leaves them with a broken mast but in just the right place where there are a bunch of "shipwrecks" that are half above sea level that the motley crew can scavenve for supplies.

One such ship, allegedly a Spanish ship from 100 years earlier, has an intact logbook in a strongbox. The final entry purports to be the captain having found a ridiculously large emerald in a Mayan temple but being forced to leave it there because he would have been killed trying to take it at the time. In any case, despite Dad's belief that you shouldn't plunder other men's treasure, Joan is greedy enough that she plans to sail down to Guatemala to find that emerald and retrieve it for her father.

Now, this is part of where my disbelief really kicked in. Another title card at the beginning of the film thanks the then ruler of Guatemala, Jorge Ubico, for allowing them to film in Guatemala using native actors. Yet, if this portion of the story is to be believed, why would the natives want to film a re-telling of it and let Joan get away with it? In any case, this portion of the film deals with Joan and Bill heading up river to the Mayan (well, descendants of the Mayans) village from which they'd do the overland trek to the temple, guided by a Mayan princess and surreptitiously followed by a bunch of men. To get at that emerald would involve desecration of the temple, an act which the Mayan princess says carries the death penalty. And, a bit suprisingly, Joan Lowell says that she knows what she was doing was wrong, something that very few other explorer-type characters in that era would admit. Now, we know that Joan escapes, since the premise of the movie is that this is all a re-enactment of what happened the previous year.

After having watched Adventure Girl, my first thought was that perhaps if there were any incident with natives in a Central American country, it might have been a country other than Guatemala, and that Ubico would have been happy to use Guatemalans to insult another Central American country. The reality, of course, is that this whole thing is a complete fiction. But that's not the end of the story. What audiences of the day would have known, but would be largely unknown to anybody watching in 2026, is that Lowell had already written a completely fictitious "autobiography" back in 1929 that had been easily debunked. The best guess I read is that Lowell did in fact go on a schooner voyage with her father and the other two men in 1933, and filmed establishing material reminiscent of what Errol Flynn would later do in Cruise of the Zaca. This was then supplemented by staged footage that tells the narrative portions of the story. Since the cameras on the schooner wouldn't have been set up for sound, that requires the narration by Lowell. More interesting is that, after Adventure Girl was debunked as utter fiction, Lowell decamped to Brazil and spent the last 30 years of her life there, which from what I've read might make an interesting movie of its own.

As for Adventure Girl, it's ridiculous nonsense, but interesting because it's utter nonsense.