Another movie with 1960s views of Italy

Back in the 1960s, international travel was nowhere near as easy as it is today, so one of the drawing cards of certain Hollywood movies was to film in "exotic" locations in Europe that the viewers in America would enjoy seeing, especially if people could look glamorous in such locations. The movies are of varying quality, with an example of one of the lesser movies being Three Bites of the Apple.

Chelsey Tours is one of those British companies that ran guided bus tours of Europe, making it easier for people to see a checklist of the important sites for a modest amount of money. Not that I'd want to be stuck with such touriss for a week or more. Working for the company as one of their guides is Stanley Thrumm (David McCallum). As the movie opens, the tour bus is arriving in France, on its way to Italy. They get stuck in a small town in Italy when Mrs. Tomlinson (Avril Angers) gets sick and her husband (Harvey Korman) buys her some medicine. So they have to stay in a small town for a few days longer than expected.

This gives Stanley the opportunity to walk into a building that happens to be a casino. Due to a comedy of errors a chip gets put on a number and, wouldn't you know it, that's the number that hits. Stanley feels that, being honest, he didn't intend to make the bet, so he's OK letting it ride in the hopes that it will lose and he'll be even. Instead, the number hits two more times, leaving Stanley with gambling winnings just shy of £12,000, which was a huge sum for the mid-1960s. At the casino, Stanely meets a glamorous young fellow gambler, Carla (Sylva Koscina, obviously being groomed for American stardom that never came.

Stanley likes Carla, although that's going to be complicated by the fact that another of the tourists, Miss Sparrow (Tammy Grimes), is interested in Stanley to an extent that would really be unprofessional for Stanley to get involved with. More pressing is the thought that it's going to be tough to get those gambling winnings out of Italy because of capital controls and the thought that the money might be taxed to a substantial extent. Stanley comes up with a plan that perhaps Carla can help him get the cash out of Italy.

Carla starts thinking about a way to get the money for herself. She's got an ex-husband, Remo (Domenico Modugno), who might be able to help, although he's also going to get in on the deal for his own interests and not so much Carla's. Stanley seems to be oblivious to all this as he brings Carla on the tour. Miss Sparrow gets jealous of Carla and threatens to bollix everything as the tour goes through various scenic spots in Italy and into Switzerland.

The plot of Three Bites of the Apple doesn't really work, and it's remarkable that a guy like Stanley could seem so stupid. The movie also tries to inject comedy into the proceedings, which also doesn't really work. I couldn't help but wonder whether the studio and second-tier director cared more about showing scenery than moving the plot along and making the story work.

Harry and Walter Go to New York

One of the movies that TCM ran on Diane Keaton's day in Summer Under the Stars was Harry and Walter Go to New York. As is my wont, a made a point to watch it since I had never seen it before, which would give me the opportunity to put up a post on it.

The movie opens up in Sudbury, MA, in 1892. Harry Digby (James Caan) and Walter Hill (Elliott Gould) are a vaudeville double act doing a musical number, although they also do other stuff like a phony clairvoyant bit. In between the two acts, the action shifts to New York. Adam Worth (Michael Caine) is a gentleman thief who likes to rob banks, keep the cash, and then sell back the bonds. Indeed, he's about to sell the bonds back that he robbed from a bank in Massachusetts. Unfortunately, the bank president brought some police with a Massachusetts bench warrant.

As for Harry and Walter, their clairvoyant act is an excuse to pilfer cash out of the paying customers' wallets. Multiple men figure out that they've been robbed, and they too bring in the police. So as you can guess, Harry and Walter also get sent to prison, and it's the same prison where Adam is sent. Why else would the characters be introduced in this way? Anyhow, Adam has the sort of pull that Noël Coward's character in The Italian Job does, and is able to get the plans to a bank in Lowell, MA, that he's planning to rob just to show that any bank can be robbed.

This gives Harry and Walter an idea. When the reformer Lissa Chestnut (Diane Keaton) shows up with a newspaper photographer, Harry and Walter plan to get a picture of the plans, so that they can rob the bank themselves. Not that they know anything about how to carry out a bank robbery. And not that Adam is going to be happy with them if he finds out, which he is because in their attempts to get the photo they burn the plans. But they're able to escape prison with the help of some nitroglycerin, while Adam gets pardoned and goes back to New York. Unfortunately Harry and Walter have to go to New York themselves to get the picture they took of those plans, meaning they run into Adam again who is really pissed.

Eventually everybody gets to Lowell for the climactic bank robbery. The bank is next to a theater, and Harry and Walter plan to blow the door off the vault during the big musical number near the end of the show so that nobody will hear the explosives. Of course, the plans don't quite go off as planned, forcing Harry and Watler to take more drastic action while both Adam and the bank president Crisp (Charles Durning) are on their tails.

With a cast like this and a wacky heist plot, you'd think you're in for a fun little caper movie. Unfortunately, the movie totally fails. Caan and Gould are both irritating in their comic mugging, and the plot is full of incongruencies, with no good reason for Harry and Walter to wind up in the same cell as Adam as one example. It also goes on much too long, at 111 minutes.

The Man I Killed

Well, OK, I didn't kill a man. But The Man I Killed is the title of the play on which our next movie was based, as well as an alternate title for the movie itself: Broken Lullaby.

The Great War ended on November 11, 1918. As it was the so-called "war to end all wars", the first anniversary of the armistice was marked in a way that it's not marked today, at least not in the US. As the movie opens, a memorial Mass is being celebrated in Notre Dame cathedral in Paris, with a whole bunch of military men in attendance. One man remains after the Mass, on his knees in prayer and seemingly distraught, noticed by the priest who officiated the Mass.

The young man in question is Paul Renard (Phillips Holmes), a former music student who was drafted by the French. His confession is that he killed a German soldier and can't get the face of the soldier he killed out of his mind, which has greatly reduced his ability to function in life. Worse, he saw the soldier's last letter so he knows the soldier's name, Walter Holderlin, as well as the fact that Walter was a fellow musician who had actually studied in Paris before the war and didn't hate the French the way that most German people did.

Paul decides that the way to expiate his perceived sins is to go to Walter's grave since he knows where Walter lived, as well as meet with any of Walter's surviving family to apologize for what he did. When he gets to the town where Walter is buried, we learn that Walter's father is a physician (Lionel Barrymore), who hasn't gotten over the fact that his son died. Ditto Mom (Louise Carter). Worse, Walter left behind a fiancée, Elsa (Nancy Carroll), who happens to spot this strange man who has been attracting gossip and rumor in town as Paul is putting flowers on Walter's grave.

Paul eventually sees Dr. Holderlin, who understandably doesn't want to see any Frenchman since he considers all of France responsible for his son's death. But when Elsa mentions Paul's having left flowers on Walter's grave, that gives Paul the chance to explain himself. In the film's critical moment, Paul is unable to bring himself to tell the actual truth, since that would destroy Walter's parents. Instead, he lies that he knew Walter at the conservatory and that as a result he doesn't really harbor any ill feelings toward the Germans.

The Holderlin parents warm to Paul, with Elsa doing so even further. And yet, among the rest of the townsfolk the gossip only continues to grow. And certainly, at some point Paul isn't going to be able to keep up the lie. After all, if Paul and Walther had been at the conservatory together for that long, he'd know Walter well enough to answer some of the questions about the past that are bound to come up. So what's going to happen when the truth finally does come out?

Broken Lullaby answers that question in an interesting way, which I won't spoil beyond saying the solution is one that is a big reason why the movie wasn't a financial success. Phillips Holmes is also a bit too over the top at times, although Carroll and Barrymore do a good job with an intriguing presence and interesting script. Broken Lullaby is definitely an unconventional Hollywood movie.

Not yet

I've mentioned on several occasions how I wound up with a substantial number of foreign films on my DVR that I don't always get around to watching before they expire. One that I did in fact watch is Akira Kurosawa's final film, Madadayo.

Tatsuo Matsumara plays Hyakken Uchida, a teacher of German at an all-boys school during the height of World War II. He's getting on in years a bit, but not yet so old that when he announces he's retiring to focus on his writing and the fact that he can live modestly off the proceeds of his writing, it's a shock to everybody. But retire he does, and he and his wife downsize.

Uchida is apparently one of those teachers who had an impact on his students, because all of those past students seem to admire him, to the point of coming to his house at the height of the war just to celebrate his birthday with a less-than-suitable feast because, well, you know there's a war on and the Japanese are inexorably losing. Part of that losing the the Americans' ability to carry out air raids on the Home Islands of Japan, and in one of those raids, the Uchidas' house is destroyed.

They're forced to move into a shack that's open to the elements, at least until the end of the war, when his still-admiring students look into finding a plot of land where they can move their professor and get him a better house. Also after the war, the students organize a better birthday party, which they call the "Not Yet" party (the film's title "Madadayo" means "not yet") because when they ask Uchida whether he's ready to die, he responds "Not yet!". The students are able to get a nice house built, as well as impressing on a neighboring landowner not to sell out to somebody who wants to build a house tall enough to block the sun from Uchida's house.

Madadayo is more a series of vignettes than a movie with a full plot, so the next portion of the film focuses on a stray cat that shows up at the Uchida place and basically adopts the professor and his wife. Uchida loves the cat, and is devastated when the cat goes missing in a rain storm, never to return. But everybody in the neighborhood drops everything to look for the cat in the hopes of finding it and bringing Uchida out of his depression.

Finally, we fast forward to when Uchida is about to celebrate his 77th birthday, in the early 1960s. He has one more "Not yet" party, although this one doesn't have quite the ending as the earlier parties. But then director Akira Kurosawa was in his early 80s when he made this movie, and obviously thinking himself about themes of growing old and looking back at life.

Madadayo has a fair bit to recommend it, but it's also not a perfect movie. The relative lack of a plot may not be suitable for everyone. More importantly, and I'm not the only person to have mentioned this in the reviews I read, but the segment with the missing cat goes on far too long. Indeed, the movie as a whole is 134 minutes, which is a bit too long. There's a resonance to a film like Goodbye Mr. Chips which is also about a teacher, but I also found myself thinking about Harry and Tonto which deals with the idea that the elderly still have something to offer us and a sense of dignity that needs to be preserved.

Eva Marie Saint, 1924-2026

Eva Marie Saint learning from Marlon Brando how he was involved in her brother's death in On the Waterfront

Oscar-winning actress Eva Marie Saint died on Tuesday at the age of 102. Saint didn't actually make as many movies as one might think, even though TCM ran a bunch of them when she was star of the month for her 100th birthday in July 2024. In addition to winning the Oscar for On the Waterfront, Saint is well known for appearing opposite Cary Grant in North by Northwest. A Hatful of Rain doesn't get as much attention as it should.

As of this writing, I haven't seen anything from TCM about a programming tribute. There's enough going on in October with all the Hollywood movies and Mario Cantone hogging the channel that I'd guess a tribute is being pushed back to November.

Sayonara Sinatra

Another of the movies that I recorded the last time it showed up on TCM that's getting another showing is The First Deadly Sin. That next airing is early tomorrow morning at 4:00 AM, or at the end of tonight's prime time lineup if you want to look at it that way.

The movie starts off with some interesting intercutting. On the one hand, we have a woman on the operating table getting surgery for some sort of kidney condition. On the other, it's the streets of New York City at night, and one man comes up with what looks like some sort of hammer, and bashes another man to death with it! The two turn out to be indirectly related, in that the woman on the operating table is Barbara Delaney (Faye Dunaway), the wife of New York police detective Edward Delaney (Frank Sinatra).

Edward has a lot on his mind, because the surgery goes wrong, forcing the surgeon, Dr. Berardi, to remove one of Barbara's kidneys. Meanwhile, in the murder case, the coroner, Dr. Ferguson (James Whitmer), reveals to Edward that the wound from the weapon is circular, which is interesting in that it means the murder must have been committed with a weapon that's not all that common. It also turns out that there's a series of unsolved murders that seem to have involved similar wounds.

So Edward calls upon someone who doesn't work for the police, but is an expert in obscure weapons, Christopher Langley (Martin Gabel) at the Metropolitan Museum. He doesn't know of any weapons in his ambit that might have caused the death, but is intrigued by the case and decides to help investigate by going to hardware stores. They can't really help him, beyond suggesting that perhaps it might be the sort of ice axe that mountain climbers use. That's actually good information, since not many people use such an implement. And when Langley goes to the sporting goods store to investigate, he gets a list of people who have bought the sort of ice axe that was used in the murder.

So Edward starts doing some investigating of the sort that the police department wouldn't really approve of and would probably result in all the evidence gathered being thrown out of court. The first guy obviously couldn't have done it, since he was paralyzed in a mountain climbing accident. The second man, however, Daniel Blank (David Dukes), seems like a much more likely suspect. Then again, the way the movie is edited, it's already led us to believe that this is the killer. Meanwhile, another attempted killing goes wrong, and there's still the situation with Edward's wife, which is many ways is really extraneous to the plot.

The murder mystery part of The First Deadly Sin is reasonably well done, and the sort of movie where I can see why Frank Sinatra would want to do it. But there's that whole pointless subplot involving the Faye Dunaway character, who really has a thankless acting task here. So the movie as a whole feels like a bit of a mishmash that doesn't always work. Frank Sinatra was 64 at the time he made this, and it was pretty much his last real movie apart from some cameos. It's not a bad way to go out, although it could have been better.

Why not Anthropoid

One of the more daring operations in World War II was the plan to kill Reinhard Heydrich, the Nazi Reichsprotektor of the Czech lands. It was known enough to be the subject of two movies at the height of World War II, Hangmen Also Die and Hitler's Madman (airing today at 12:30 PM on TCM, hence scheduling this post today), as well as the much more recent Anthropoid. In between came a co-production between the west and Communist Czechoslovakia, Operation Daybreak.

One thing I didn't realize about Operation Anthropoid is that the Free Czech paratroopers who parachuted into the country from Britain in fact did so in December 1941, quite a few months before the actual assassination on May 27, 1942. The movie opens with three of the paratroopers: Kubiš (Timothy Bottoms), Gabčík (Anthony Andrews), and Čurda (Martin Shaw) being brought in to see a Czech General in exile who is telling them about the plan since Heydrich (Anton Diffring) is considered a second-in-command to Hitler who could take over the Nazi leadership were Hitler to die and is thought of as more intelligent than Hitler. The men all accept the assignment, and parachute in to ares near Prague, landing in the snow (which is what prompted me to look up more of the details of the operation).

Eventually, the paratroopers meet up in Prague with members of the Czech resistance, personified as members of General Moravec's extended family. The first plan is to shoot at Heydrich while his train is leaving the station in Prague, with Kubiš shooting from a control room at the station, but another train passes by just at the exact wrong moment, thwarting the plan. Of course, if you've seen any of the other movies, you'll know that Heydrick was really killed as a result of his car being attacked. This time is was Gabčík's job to shoot Heydrich, but when his gun jams, Kubiš throws a grenade into the car.

The Nazis are, understandably, pissed about one of their higher-ups being so brazenly assassinated. They also have that repuation of being brutal, so it's natural that their reprisal is going to be nasty. They destroy the village of Lidice, and set up a manhunt for the people involved in the plot to kill Heydrich. They're more than willing to commit torture and further reprisals, but Čurda eventually cracks and reveals details about who was in the group and where they were being kept. By this time, the rest of the members of the assassination plot had holed up in a church, but it was already too late. The Nazis were able to surround the church, and all of the plotters were killed (or killed themselves) in the church.

I found it interesting that Operation Daybreak was an international co-production, meaning that they were able to film on location in Prague. This gives the movie an air of authenticity. However, I also couldn't help but think about the fact that in real life, the Free Czechs who had been based in London were decidedly not considered heroes by the Communists who ran the country after 1948. There's little if anything in the way of Communist politics in the way of the movie, which is competent if a bit straightforward in its storytelling. The plotters don't get the time to be complex characters, for example.

Worse, though, is the print that TCM ran. It's only in 4:3, when the original aspect ratio was 1.85:1. Worse is that it had some sort of motion problem, as though there were visual frames missing but there's nothing wrong with the soundtrack. This gives large portions of the print a sort of jerky motion that for me was disconcerting to watch.

Ösz Badacsonyban

I mentioned a couple of years back that I bought a Kino Lorber box set of movies from Hungarian director Miklós Jancsó, although I haven't mentioned anything about it in over a year. So with that in mind, I put in another of the discs that has a couple of shorts, and watched the short Autumn in Badacsony.

I didn't know anything about Badacsony, but Wikipedia helpfully informs us that it is the name of both a region on the north shore of Lake Balaton, one of the biggest lakes in Central Europe, and a mountain that towers over the lake. This short starts off by mentioning some Hungarian poet I'd never heard of who lived in the region, and a romantic legend of how he met his wife by a famouse "rose stone".

But the region is better known for its wine production, and it is with that that the bulk of this 18-minute short deals. A certain Mr. Ihasz is part of a family that's been growing grapes in the region for five generations, and it's hard work because if you ever take a break from keeping the weeds at bay, they'll take over like, well, weeds. But now that the Communists are in power, everyone is able to work together and put a lot of manpower -- and womanpower on the case.

Well, Jancsó doesn't put it quite so bluntly, which is to the benefit of the short. But it's clear that Jancsó is constrained in what he can say and, whatever he might have thought about the Communists, he's not about to bad-mouth them. Ihasz goes to see the People's Committee to tell them that he has a lot to offer, and as we see, he does do a lot of work.

Badacson is mentioned to be a mountain of volcanic origin, and basaltic soils are a well-known factor in many terroirs in wine-making. That and the steep slopes seem very well fit for growing grapes, and the wines produced here are portrayed as excellent. This may or may not be true; I haven't drunk much Hungarian wine since little is available where I live. And certainly, the portrayal is partly the sort you'd see in a promotional ad from the tourist board. That's further emphasised by the final act of this short dealing with the harvest festival. This act also shows how everybody works together the way Communists like to say people do to harvest the grapes and start producing the wine.

I have no idea how much of the footage here is authentic and how much is staged -- indeed, a lot of this feels like a foreign version of a Traveltalks short -- but Jancsó shows he's got a good technical command of how to make a movie on a specific subject. Unfortunately, this being the early 1950s and being early in Jancó's career, Jancsó likely didn't have access to color film stock. That, and the Communist authorities who commissioned this weren't thinking in terms of art but simply documenting a wine harvest. In any case, the scenery really cries out for color.

Autumn in Badacsony is interesting enough, although in the end it is just a documentary short. I'm definitely glad I got the chance to see it despite any shortcomings it may have.

TCM Star of the Month October 2026: Myrna Loy

Myrna Loy (l.) with Clark Gable, Jean Harlow, and Spencer Tracy in Libeled Lady (October 5, 8:00 PM)

We're into the first full week of a new month, which means that it's time for a new Star of the Month. This time out, that star is Myrna Loy, who was also Star of the Month back in December 2016 meaning that I've already got a couple of photos that I used back then and I can use again. One thing that's different about this month's programming is that Myrna Loy made enough movies that her films start in the daytime on Monday rather than other times where TCM would schedule the movies to start in prime time and continue into the following day if there were that many movies.

The movies are scheduled somewhat in chronological order and somewhat thematically. The daytime scheduling is chronological, and I'm sorry to say that by the time you read this you'll probably have missed Loy's silent movies. I'm hoping they show up on Watch TCM. The daytime programming is almost entirely 1930s films; I didn't realize just how many 1930s films Loy made.

William Powell, Myrna Loy, and Asta in a publicity still from one of the Thin Man movies

The first two Mondays in prime time feature Loy with William Powell. October 12 is a marathon of all six Thin Man movies, which is going to give me the chance to do a blog post on one of the Thin Man movies that aired back on New Year's. Those movies are technically expired from my DVR now, but I watched one before they expired and already wrote up and scheduled a post on it.

Myrna Loy, Melvyn Douglas, and Cary Grant in Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (October 20, 12:45 AM)

The final two Mondays jump ahead, with Myrna Loy mostly in the second half of the 1940s on October 19, and in the 1950s and beyond on October 26. October 26 also brings a rare TCM showing for From the Terrace and one for Airport '75.

Not always a bride

Back in June 2025 I did a post on a movie called Always a Bride. Some months back I recorded a Ross Alexander movie called Brides Are Like That. Only after watching the movie did I realize that this one and Always a Bride came from the same source material, a play from the early 1920s.

Ross Alexander stars as Bill McAllister, a wastrel playboy living with his uncle Fred (Joseph Cawthorne) presumably because both of his parents are dead. Ross went to college not to get a good education and respectable job, but to play football. Indeed, he doesn't want to work at all, which makes him a rather unsympathetic character. He's even bought an engagement ring for his would-be fiancée, but charges it to Uncle Fred's account, uncle being rich from his shipping business.

Said girlfriend is Hazel Robinson (Anita Louise). She's the child of orchard owner John (Gene Lockhart) and his wife Ella (Gene's real-life wife Kathleen). They understandably wish their daughter to marry somebody respectable, and indeed Hazel does have just such a respectable person pursuing her, in the form of a doctor named Randolph Jenkins (Dick Purcell). However, Bill is just so charming that he's able to convince Hazel to break off her relationship with Dr. Jenkins in order to marry him.

Bill's uncle and Hazel's parents both have the good sense not to want to support Bill directly financially, although Hazel is able to get her father to agree to a somewhat reasonable compromise: he'll find a job for Bill, and Bill should agree to take it. Bill is just so obnoxious, though, that he basically refuses this, instead deciding to tinker around and work on some invention that will allow apples to last longer in transit. The only thing to his credit is that he really is working on this and has been talking to another distribution company about testing the device, which is a fancy thermos box, and something you'd think wouldn't work.

Meanwhile, Bill is facing increasing financial difficulty to the point that Hazel's parents have gotten her this close to agreeing to move back in with them, unless Bill agrees to take the job Dad is offering him. But we know this is a movie that's going to have a happy ending, and Bill is going to come out OK in the end.

One thing that Brides Are Like This doesn't have that Always a Bride added was the political corruption subplot. This one is more about whether Bill will get a real job. Unfortunately, it's still a subpar movie, in large part because Bill spends the entire movie up until the final reel being an obnoxious jerk of the sort that you can't understand why anybody would want to marry him. A woman would never be able to have a stable life with him, and it's not as if he's that good-looking to overcome such stuff.

Brides Are Like That is decided second-tier material, and even if Ross Alexander hadn't had the personal problems that drove him to commit suicide, it seems clear that he wasn't going to become a big star, but the sort of person whose star would have faded with the start of World War II.