TCM Star of the Month May 2026: Gregory Peck

Gregory Peck (r.) and Dean Stockwell in Gentleman's Agreement (May 2, 12:15 AM)

Today is the first day of a new month, and that means it's time for new programming features on TCM. This includes a new Star of the month, that being Gregory Peck. His movies will be airing on all five Fridays in prime time, starting tonight at 8:00 PM with his Oscar-winning performance in To Kill a Mockingbird. Note that the running times for tonight's movies may cause a bit of a problem with the starting time for following movies: Spellbound starts at 10:15 PM in a two-hour slot, but is 118 minutes plus presumably an intro and outro. The fourth movie, which may or may not have an intro, is The Yearling at 2:30 AM, which is listed as 134 minuts and is in a slot that's two hours and 15 minutes. So it would fit without the intro and outro, but since it's often been the case to have four movies in prime time with host intros....

Gregory Peck and Dean Jagger in Twelve O'Clock High

It looks as though two of the nights of the salue are more genre-specific. The May 8 schedule has Peck in several westerns, while May 22 is the start of TCM's annual Memorial Day marathon of war movies. As such, it's appropriate that that night of the Peck salute includes a bunch of the war movies he made, although not among them this year is Twelve O'Clock High.

Audrey Hepburn, Gregory Peck, and Eddie Albert in Roman Holiday

In fact, looking at the TCM schedule, it's a bit surprising what movies aren't airing this month. In addition to Twelve O'Clock High, you also can't see Roman Holiday on TCM this month. There is, however, a showing of The Boys from Brazil (May 29, 10:00 PM) that I've wanted to see for a while, as well as Peck in the 1950s version of Moby Dick (May 30, 5:00 AM).

Not home in Indiana

Another of the people honored in TCM's Summer Under the Stars in August 2025 was Shirley Jones. This gave me the chance to record a pair of her films. One is a supporting role in the horrendously bad The Happy Ending, which I gave up on halfway through and may or may not get to before it expires off the DVR, that's how bad it is. And it's not even bad in a good way. The other film was one from early in her career, April Love.

Pat Boone is the star here, and he does sing the title song "April Love", although not over the opening credits; instead, the opening credits are over establishing shots of what is supposed to be bluegrass horse country in Kentucky. We then get Boon, who plays young Nick Conover, in a mail truck looking for the Bruce farm. It seems Mr. and Mrs. Bruce are his uncle and aunt, and he's going to be spending some time working on their farm. Not that it's much of a farm anymore, not since Jed Bruce's (Arthur O'Connell) son Jed Jr. died in Korea and Dad lost his zest for living and raising harness racing horses.

It was also Aunt Henrietta's (Jeanette Nolan) idea to bring Nick to the farm. Nick's father presumably died; Nick's unseen mom has to work to support Nick and can't be the necessary presence in the kid's life. As a result, Nick fell in with the wrong crowd, went joyriding in a stolen car in Chicago, and got probation. As part of the plea deal, Nick lost his driver's license and is getting sent away to this farm. So you can understand why uncle Jed isn't exactly thrilled. If Nick were played by someone other than clean-cut Pat Boone, you might wonder whether the plot would have Nick engaging in predations on his aunt and uncle.

While Jed is showing Nick the work he's going to have to do, including some obvious foreshadowing involving a horse that won't let anybody ride him now that Jed Jr. is dead, one of the neighbors shows up: young Liz Templeton (Shirley Jones), whose father still raises harness horses. Liz is good with horses, too, and can even ride a sulky. She falls for Nick and invites him over, although she and the rest of the Templeton's don't know just why Nick is here. And why he doesn't want to get behind the wheel of a car. Liz has a big sister Fran who interests Nick's eye, although she already has a boyfriend in college kid Al.

Part of the plot involves the good influence that Nick and Uncle Jed wind up having on each other. Nick fixes up Jed's broken-down old tractor, while Nick rescues the horse when it falls during an escape. The horse starts letting Nick get in the sulky to race him. There's also the Nick/Liz romance. And then there's the plot about Nick's probation. After fixing another old car on the farm, Liz and Fran make comments that lead to a drag race between Fran's sports car and Nick's old jalopy. Fran gets some dents in her car, and the insurance claim reveals that Nick has been violating his probation. Oh dear, he might be hauled off to prison instead of being allowed to race in the grand prize race.

April Love is harmless stuff, being a remake of a World War II-era movie Home in Indiana. The update brings nice color photography and Cinemascope, along with the songs for both Boone and Jones to sing. Other than that, the movie is old-fashioned and totally inoffensive. Nick is technically a criminal, but at heart he's really got a good heart. There's no antagonist here, and the Templetons don't seem to care when they learn about Nick's past, that's how clean-cut the movie is.

If you want something clean cut and to be transported to a past that doesn't exist any more, you could do a lot worse than to watch April Love.

End of April 2026 briefs

It's hard to believe that it's already the end of April. Then again, my current pattern of writing posts well ahead of time leads to not paying quite so close attention to how far ahead I'm scheduled, or to writing up other administrative posts like this. So once again I'll mention with the full TCM May schedule out that I've seen several movies on it that are on my DVR and will require my juggling other movies around to do the posts in conjunction with the upcoming TCM airing. As always, check your local schedule.

I learned something disappointing about YouTube TV's "DVR" (technically the cloud library) recently. While it in theory adds every showing of a title you've added to the library, the "select a version" option only shows the most recent half-dozen showings. What this means is that when TCM shows something that's popular enough (and usually more recent) to be in rotation on one of the commercial channels, all those commercial channel airings are going to wind up in the six most recent showings, crowding out the TCM showing which there doesn't seem to be a way to access. No; I specifically added the TCM showing to my library precisely because it's less likely to be edited, and certainly not larded up with commercials and pop-ups. I don't know if the metadata encoded with the programs would allow for a chance to only record the TCM showing.

Apparently the TCM Film Festival starts today and runs through Sunday, April 3. Not that I'd had any plans of going since I can't really afford it and have my elderly father to look after anyway. I don't think TCM on-air really does all that much any more either in terms of being "live" from the festival between movies, but then I've been watching a lot less live TCM. Now, the FAST services, I have to admit I've been watching a lot of stuff live that way.

Sissy Spacek, Beatnik

If you've watched enough Hollywood movies from the late 1950s and early 1960s, you may know that Hollywood had what feels like a rather stereotypical view of the beatnik. And then many years later they had the chance to show the original beatniks, only to come up with something that feels rather tepid. That movie is Heart Beat, which I recently got the chance to watch.

Sissy Spacek provides the narration, giving a stereotypical talk about 1950s suburbia and introducing us to a pair of men. One is the well-known writer Jack Kerouac, who would go on to write On the Road and get it published in the late 1950s, although as the movie opens it's the late 1940s and Kerouac (John Heard) is still living with his mother in a New York City apartment. The second man is Neal Cassady (Nick Nolte), who came from Denver where he spent a lot of his adolescence in reform school since his alcoholic father abandond him. Indeed, in this telling of the story when Cassady gets out of prison he immediately steals another car and heads to New York, which is where he meets Kerouac. The two then head west for San Franciso together with a girl.

In San Francisco, the pair meet Carolyn Robinson (that's Sissy Spacek), who's studying art at the art institute and is engaged to a guy named Dick who doesn't play all that much part in the rest of the story. Jack, Neal, and Carolyn become an inseparable threesome living in a tenement apartment and working what odd jobs they can to make the rent, although Neal ultimate gets a better job with the railroad. Eventually Jack decides to head back to New York to try to sell his manuscript to On the Road which he keeps rolled up in what looks like a grocery bag. Neal has by this time knocked up Carolyn, and Jack suggests to Carolyn that she probably shouldn't marry Neal because she's not going to be happy.

With kids and responsibility, Neal and Carolyn move out to the sort of early-1950s tract housing that was being builty to accommodate the families creating the Baby Boom, and Neal has a tendency to shock the neighbors. After several years, Jack shows up again, and takes a "room" in the attic of the Cassady house with the three living in what again seems like somewhat of an open relationship, something that really shocks the neighbors. Jack heads back to New York again, and with help from Ira (Ray Sharkey), someone supposedly based in part on Allen Ginsberg who wanted nothing to do with this movie, gets On the Road published and becomes a sensation. The fact that the main character is rather based on Neal, however, causes problems for Neal, who eventually gets busted for marijuana possession.

The last act of the movie involves Cassady's itinerance, driving a converted school bus with a bunch of hippie-like characters; Cassady would die fairly young not having published much in his lifetime, although the movie doesn't mention Neal's death.

Once again, I can see why any number of people would have felt influenced by works like On the Road and would want to make a movie based on Kerouac. (I, to be honest, have not read On the Road and have never been terribly interested in the counterculture.) The movie we get in Heart Beat, however, feels rather anodyne. These people lived what in many ways turned out to be wild lives, yet everything feels rather sanitized. I think the actors do the best they can with the material, but it doesn't work as well as one might hope.

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.