Bang the Drum Slowly

Tonight's prime-time lineup on TCM is baseball movies that were nominated for at least one Oscar. Wouldn't you know it, but one of the movies in the lineup has been sitting on my DVR. That movie is Bang the Drum Slowly, tonight at midnight. So as is always the case, I watched it in order to be able to do this review on it.

Michael Moriarty stars as Henry Wiggen, star pitcher for the New York Monarchs baseball team. Some pitchers, especially left-handed starters and knuckleballers, seem to wind up with "personal" catchers in that the combination of the two players works better than putting the pitcher with the nominally "better" catcher. Henry has a catcher who also happens to be his best friend, Bruce Pearson (Robert De Niro). However, as the movie opens, we learn that Henry is picking Bruce up from the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN: Bruce is terminally ill with Hodgkin's disease. Henry takes Bruce back to Bruce's family home in the South, although it's not to die, just to meet Bruce's family and introduce us to a made-up card game some of the ballplayers like to play that's really just an excuse to find a mark to take that guy's money from.

Henry is in a contract dispute with his team, so he gives his manager, Dutch Schnell (Vincent Gardenia), an ultimatum: I want my best friend Bruce to be signed to the team along with me, and I want the contracts to be structured in such a way that if you get rid of him or send him to the minors, you have to do the same with me. Now, this presents a serious problem in that at this point of the movie Bruce isn't really presented as Henry's personal catcher in the sense that Bruce could play every fifth day when Henry starts, allowing the regular catcher to take a breather since catcher is one of the more demanding positions physically. Bruce, in fact, is the sort of ballplayer who in a normal world would have topped out in the minors, and rarely gets to start.

And then never mind the fact that Bruce is dying, and that neither Henry nor Bruce are about to tell the team this. Also never mind the fact that the intake physical that certainly every player gets before being signed doesn't seem to have found anything wrong with Bruce. Indeed, Bruce is terrified that the team is going to find out he's terminally ill, since one of the symptoms is going to be some sort of attack reminiscent what poor Bette Davis got in Dark Victory, although not one attack like that. Cancer doesn't work that way. In any case, Bruce does get one of these episodes in the hotel room, and Henry has to call for a doctor, at which point it becomes pretty damn clear that there's something wrong with Bruce although the few people who do figure out something is seriously off are going to keep it a secret as much as they can.

The season goes on, and Bruce still doesn't seem to be getting that much worse, although the movie has a bizarre ending in that Bruce goes missing (well, back home) for the postseason, asking Henry to send him a box score. Wouldn't Bruce stay with the team? If they make the playoffs, wouldn't the contracts require Bruce to be on the playoff roster as well as Henry?

But, then, Bang the Drum Slowly isn't really about baseball per se. Instead, it's one of those movies that uses baseball as a backdrop to be more of a character study of the relationship between Henry and Bruce. Reviewers who can focus on that have generally tended to find Bang the Drum Slowly quite a good movie. I'm sorry to say I don't quite agree with that, as the movie is interminably slow and for me rather full of plot holes. Still, enough people like it that this is one you're definitely going to want to watch and judge for yourself.

If you liked Son of Lassie

Another movie that I watched off my DVR before it expired is Gallant Bess. Having watched it, now I can do the obligatory post on it here.

Marshall Thompson, who was being groomed for stardom by MGM but never quite achieved it, plays Tex Barton. Tex runs a horse ranch in California, although he seems rather young to do it since it's implied later in the movie that he's 16 going on 17 and an orphan. He's got one particular horse, Bess, that he absolutely loves, since that horse more than any other is a link to his late father. So when Bess gets knocked up he's aboslutely thrilled and goes to the nearest "town" to the ag supply place to get stuff for a pregnant mare.

While he's at the store talking with proprietor Smitty (Clem Bevans), a couple of navy recruiters show up needing one more person to fill their recruitment quota. Why, I don't know, since World War II already seems to be on and you'd think they'd just draft people. And Tex should be exempt anyway since he's all alone on that ranch and involved in agriculture. He's more important to the war effort on the home front. Yet Tex rather stupidly signs on even though it's going to mean leaving that pregnant foal that he loves behind, leaving Smitty to run the ranch.

Tex goes to a naval base where he's going to learn to become a Seabee, and becomes friends with Lug (George Tobias). One day, however, he gets a letter from Smitty informing him that Bess is sick with pneumonia. So Tex utterly stupidly tries everything he can to get leave, literally busting in to the CO's office, and then trying to go AWOL when he can't get leave. He's put in the brig, until he's informed that his unit is shipping out so everyone in the unit gets 24 hours liberty. This enables him to go home just in time for Bess to die and Tex to bury her. At this point, the audience should have lived happily ever after, but that's not what happens in the movie.

Tex has an illogical resentment towards his commander, Lt. Bridgman (Donald Curtis), to the point that he makes life difficult for everyone around him, with only Lug trying to keep Tex from doing something that will really get him court-martialled. On the island where they're building an airstrip as part of the island hopping campaign in the Pacific, Tex starts having dreams about Bess and waking up in the middle of the night, although he's also waking up everybody else in the tent so they all absolutely despise him, and with good reason. And then he thinks he hears a horse and disturbs everyone else's peace even more.

Except this time, when he goes out into the jungle, he finds that there actually is a horse, and tends to the horse, which is something that saves his life when a Japanese air raid hits the tent in which he would have been sleeping. The horse beomes the unit's mascot and even saves Tex's life when Tex gets injured in another Japanese attack. Will Tex be separated from the horse again?

Gallant Bess, at least the second half of the story set on the Pacific island, is based on a true story, although the man who wound up with the horse was a career Navy man who was in his 40s by the time of World War II. The part before the character gets sent to war is wholly made up, and frankly to the detriment of the movie since it makes the main character terribly unsympathetic. When he started waking everybody else up talking in his sleep I really wanted them to beat the crap out of him. Instead, we get all the syrup MGM could bring to a project like this.

Well, not quite all the syrup. MGM for whatever reason didn't film this in Technicolor, but instead in Cinecolor. The result is the print TCM ran does the movie no favors either as the colors are both flat and inconsistent. When the horses are crossing either green pastures or reddish dusty ground, the tone of the red or green changes from one second to the next, and not because the camera is panning ground that's changing color -- many of these are medium-to-long shots.

Gallant Bess had potential, but I don't think it quite lives up to that potential.

A fool is thanked

It wasn't uncommon for producers in the UK in the 1950s and 1960s to want to bring over an American star to make it easier to get one of the American studios to distribute the movie in the US. The latest such film I watched is I Thank a Fool.

The American star in question was Susan Hayward. She's playing Christine Allison, a Canadian who moved to the UK in part to become a doctor, and in part to follow her boyfriend. Said boyfriend is, as the movie opens, terminally ill in hospital, and Dr. Allison hastens his entrance into the next world by giving him an overdose of something when the duty nurse could easily have given him the proper dose and let him die "naturally". Even though it's a mercy killing, it's still technically medical malpractice, which means that a trial is necessary. Stephen Dane (Peter Finch) prosecutes the trial, with Allison being found guilty of manslaughter, sentenced to prison, and stricken from the doctors' register.

Fast forward 18 months. Christine is released from prison, but in need of a job, since she can't legally go back to being a doctor. But wouldn't you know it, there's somebody who could use a person with a physician's skills, and that person just happens to be... Stephen Dane! He's got a wife who might be suffering from a mental illness, and he needs somebody with medical skills to be a companion for the wife. Why am I thinking of The Chalk Garden here?

In any case, Christine takes the job and meets Stephen's wife Liane (Diane Cilento), who certainly seems to have some problems. One of those problems involves anything that spins like a circle, which is played up at several points during the movie. Liane's mental problems started back in her native Ireland, when she and her father, Capt. Ferris, were in a car accident in which her father died. Dane rescued her, at least metaphorically, and brought her over to the north of England to live. But she has those apparent mental problems, and Stephen doesn't want to have her committed to an asylum, which is also where Christine is convenient. A regular doctor would have the power to have Liane committed -- but of course Christine is no longer legally a doctor.

Christine quickly gets the impression that things are not quite what they seem, in no small part because Stephen seems to be terribly controlling and doesn't want Liane to go out on her own. All sorts of little things happen, and there's also the impression that one of the workers in the stables, Roscoe (Kieron Moore), might be trying to get involved with Liane. But things really take a turn when a man shows up claiming to be... Capt. Ferris (Cyril Cusack)! Now Christine really believes that Stephen has sinister motives, to the point that she's willing to help Liane run away to Ireland to see her father. This isn't quite the reunion you might thing, and Stephen is close behind, leading to shocking complications.

I Thank a Fool is a melodrama that starts off with the interesting premise of euthanasia, which would have been an even more controversial topic back in the early 1960s than it is today. But it devolves into something that at times is ridiculous and implausible. I'm guessing Susan Hayward took the role in part for the chance to take a working vacation in Ireland (the Ireland-set scenes were filmed at least in part in Ireland). She does the best she can with the material, and she's not bad. Peter Finch is reasonbaly good as the morally ambiguous man, and Cusack is professional too. But the script. Oh boy are the plot twists a mess.

So watch I Thank a Fool for some acting performances, or for the location shooting. But don't expect the best of plots.

TCM's Robert Duvall tribute

Robert Duvall died last month, and TCM altered its schedule slightly to include three of Duvall's Oscar-nominated roles tonight. Those films are:
8:00 PM Tender Mercies, in which Duvall plays an alcoholic country singer; (the night's original lineup was movies with alcoholics)
10:00 PM The Great Santini, with Duvall as a martinet of a father in an Air Force family; and
12:15 AM Apocalypse Now, which saw Duvall pick up a Supporting Actor nomination.

As I happened to have Apocalypse Now on my DVR, I decided that I was going to watch this one to put up the post on it in conjunction with the tribute, instead of doing it fairly quickly after the announcement of Duvall's death as had been my original intention.

Duvall having picked up a Supporting Actor nomination, the star of the movie is actually Martin Sheen. He plays Ben Willard, a captain in the US Army who, as the movie opens, is in Saigon in late 1969/early 1970 during the Vietnam War where he's spending leave drinking heavily in his hotel room and trying to forget nightmares. Voiceover has Willard speaking after the fact, but the action on screen is actually the beginning. His sojourn in Saigon is interrupted by a couple of men who have orders to take Willard to see Lt. Gen. Corman (G.D. Spradlin). Spradlin tells Willard about a colonel named Kurtz (Marlon Brando). Kurtz had a rising career in the army, but it seems that in about 1964 he did an intelligence mission to Vietnam that soured him on the whole thing. He went to Fort Benning and paratroopers' school, returned to Vietnam, and then went native, basically deserting to fight his own war, or at least that's what the official US channels think. Kurtz is a danger to them, and somewhere in the jungle in the borderland between South Vietnam and Cambodia, and it's Willard's mission to find Kurtz, and terminate him with extreme prejudice. It's a top secret mission, and nobody is actually supposed to know why Willard is headed where he is.

Willard heads out to the river system where a small patrol boat is going to take him as close as they can safely get to where Kurtz is suspected to be. For part of the journey, they're supposed to have air support, commanded by Lt. Col. Kilgore (that's Duvall). The boat on which Willard is traveling has a motley crew of men who seem to have been deeply affected by their experiences in the war, although they're not all going to show the effects at the same rate. It's obvious, however, when they intercept a Vietnamese boat carrying goods to a farmers' market.

Willard sees more and more surreal things on his way up to the edge of where the US has any control, such as a USO-type show with Playboy playmates, but eventually gets to people who know where Kurtz are. Along the way, he's been reading up on Kurtz from the classified material the general gave him, and begins to gain some sympathy. He also learns that his is not the first mission to try to assassinate Kurtz. The other guy, Colby (Scott Glenn), is officially MIA, but the classified information suggests he may have joined Kurtz. There's also a photojournalist (Dennis Hopper) who has also turned to Kurtz' side.

As I said, they do eventually find Kurtz, but as to what happens when they do, you're going to have to watch the movie yourself for that.

Surprisingly, I'd never actually seen Apocalypse Now in its entirety before this. I think that's a lot to do with my not being of the generation to be terribly interested in the Vietnam War and movies about it. I'm much too young for the 1960s protest era, and by the time I got old enough to appreciate classic cinema, there would be other Vietnam movies like Platoon that were the big ones.

I have to say that for me, Apocalypse Now is another of those movies that's very well made, albeit a difficult watch. However, I think I'd put it with movies like Raging Bull, Lawrence of Arabia, or Au hasard Balthasar where I see why they're good, but for me not good enough to put all the way at the top of all-time great film lists the way a lot of critics do.

Prosperity

MGM had a big star in the early sound era with the presence of Marie Dressler. As was often the case in those early sound days, studios would put their players in all sorts of movies to keep them in the public eye. In this case, that meant a series of comedies with Polly Moran. One that I haven't blogged about before is Prosperity.

One thing belying the movie's early sound provenance is the use of title cards to introduce a couple of scenes, with the opening here telling us the movie starts in 1925, "when money talked and was on speaking terms with everybody". Dressler plays Maggie Warren, who owns the family bank in one of those small cities that populated Hollywood movies of the era. She's got an adult son John (Norman Foster), who is being groomed to take over the bank when Mom retires. John, for his part, is about to get married to his girlfriend Helen Praskins (Anita Page). She just happens to be the daughter of Lizzie Praskins (Polly Moran), who is the largest depositor of the Warren bank.

Maggie and Lizzie are constantly at odds with each other for whatever reason, starting with the preparations for their children's wedding, a scene which goes on rather too long. But the two kids get married and have a coupld of kids, and would be ready to live happily ever after, if only it weren't for that damn crash of 1929 which led to the Great Depression, and money not talking to as many people. A lot of banks failed, but Maggie's prudence has kept the Warren bank open.

That is, until Lizzie gets all panicky at the idea of her money not being safe in the bank. She not only wants to withdraw it, but makes the request in a way that everybody else knows what she's doing, leading to a run on the bank which renders the bank illiquid because the money is in Mr. Jones' business and the Smith family house, and all that other stuff Jimmy Stewart reminded us of in It's a Wonderful Life. The bank is forced to close, although Mom is able to hold on to some bonds in the hope of re-opening the bank if enough people can pay back those loans.

As part of Maggie's prudence and sense of honor, she liquidates her house and a lot of her personal belongings to make her customers whole. This forces her to move in with her son and daughter-in-law. As in The Mating Season, the young couple has both mothers-in-law living with them, which causes a lot of tension as Lizzie treats Maggie like dirt. In one scene of obvious foreshadowing, Maggie keeps rat poison around and Lizzie, worried about her grandkids getting into it as well as wanting to spite Maggie, dumps the poison and puts her "Prune-o-Lax" laxative into the bottle to keep anybody else from stealing it.

John Warren isn't as prudent as his mother, and gets swindled out of the bonds by a Mr. Holland, played by ubiquitous MGM villian John Miljan. This leads to the climax where John has to get the bonds back, while Maggie has finally drunk the rat poison in an attempt to commit suicide. It also leads to a happy ending and Lizzie realizing the error of her ways.

Prosperity was a hit, in no small part because of the pairing of Dressler and Moran, who are quite good at playing off of one another. However, modern audiences may have some issues with the movie since it's very much a product of the early 1930s (and the technical issues from movies of that era). That, and the fact that Polly Moran's character is just so nasty to everybody around her. If I were introducing people to Marie Dressler, I'd pick some of her other movies first.

Paris, Texas

Another of those movies that would probably have been on my "Blind Spot" list if I took part in the "Blind Spot" blogathon is Paris, Texas. I've stated before that I don't take part mostly because it requires me coming up with a series of movies that I'm going to be watching over a full year. Since I generally don't know what's going to be showing up to watch that far in advance, I don't take part and just get around to watching the movies I haven't seen before when they do show up. In the case of Paris, Texas, that was quite some time back that TCM ran it and I recorded it. Once again, I watched it before it expired, and then wrote and scheduled this post.

A man walks through a desert in west Texs with just a gallon jug of water in his hands. Stupidly, he discards the jug upon emptying it. He makes it to a building that has what looks like an honor bar: take a drink and pay for it. The man takes some ice, but eventually faints on the floor. Thankfully, there was another person in the bar who takes the man to the closest thing there is to a doctor. When said doctor goes through the man's things looking for some ID, he finds a card with the name and phone number of a Walt Henderson (Dean Stockwell).

Walt lives in the Los Angeles area, where he works as a graphic designer designing billboards and lives with his wife Anne (Aurore Clément). Walt isn't exactly pleased to get the phone call, since taking time off work is going to be a hassle although that's really the least of the issues. Walt knows that the man in Texas is actually his brother Travis (Harry Dean Stanton). Travis dropped out of life four years ago, and worse, put his kid in a taxi and sent the kid to Walt and Anne's place because Travis' wife Jane similarly dropped out of life. The kid was almost too young at the time to remember his biological parents, and Walt and Anne have raised the kid, Hunter, as their own, not having any biological children themselves. So how is the kid going to deal with having this stranger back in his life?

Of course, simply getting Travis to LA is going to be tough. Travis goes on about Paris, since his and Walt's parents joked about conceiving Travis in Paris. Travis has a photo of a plot of land that he claims to own, and Walt doesn't get what this has to do with Paris since Walt doesn't yet realize that there is a town in Texas also called Paris which is where the land is. Also, Travis keeps trying to run away and doesn't talk for the longest time.

Eventually, however, they do get back to Los Angeles, and Travis starts talking. At this point, you'd think Walt and Anne would start talking with Travis about whether he might try getting a job and reintegrating into normal human life. Instead, Anne tells Travis about a bank account that Hunter has, one which gets regular deposits by wire transfer in the days when there was no internet to do such electronic transfers. The money is presumably coming from Hunter's mother Jane, and those transfers are coming from a bank in Houston, so Travis takes Hunter and drives off toward Houston in the hopes of finding Jane since apparently not so many branches could do these transfers at the time.

Travis and Hunter basically set about stalking the bank, and find a woman who looks like she could be Jane (Nastassja Kinski) and start following her, eventually coming to a nondescript building in a crappy part of Houston that serves as the home for the sort of business you wouldn't want your mother to be working for. But is this woman really Jane? And if so, will Travis be able to make real contact with her?

Paris, Texas is a movie that certainly has an interesting premise, although it's another one that I found myself thinking is full of characters who certainly wouldn't be acting that way in real life. It's also one that definitely goes way too slowly at times. The running time is about 145 minutes, and is the sort of story that I think could easily have been edited to get down to under two hours. Still, I can understand why there are a lot of people who would find Paris, Texas to be interesting for how different it is from traditional Hollywood fare. Definitely watch and judge for yourself.

The Calico Dragon

One of the non-Popeye cartoons that TCM ran in the Saturday matinee block when they had cartoons was an old Hugh Harman-Rudolf Ising Happy Harmonies entry called The Calico Dragon.

As always, this being a one-reeler, it's not like there's a lot here. A little girl (I couldn't find the name of the actress voicing her) is in bed reading a fairy tale called "The Princess and the Dragon" to three of her stuffed animals: a human doll, a Scottish terrier dog, and a polka-do horse. After reading the story, the little girl goes to sleep.

At this point, the dolls come to life in what is presumably supposed to be a dream sequence, although it doesn't matter either way since this is a cartoon. The three characters head off to a mythical medieval-type land where there are still castles, and dragons for brave princes to fight. This particular dragon has three heads, and the main sight gag is how the three necks get knotted together, which is the way to kill the dragon. There's also the recurring theme of the cowardly dog.

One thing that will be immediately noticed is that, although The Calico Dragon is in color, it's not very vibrant color. That's because Disney had the exclusive contract to use the newer three-strip Technicolor in animation. Other animation had the choice of black-and-white (not uncommon through the late 1930s), two-strip Technicolor (as with this one), or other inferior color processes. Granted, it's not such a big deal in animation. After all, if the human and animal forms aren't supposed to be extremely lifelike, is it such a big deal if the color isn't either?

The Happy Harmonies shorts are also fairly tame. It wasn't until things like Merrie Melodies over at Warner Bros. in the early 1940s, or the Tom and Jerry shorts MGM put out, that cartoons started to get the stereotypical cartoon violence that we all think of today. In the 1930s, most cartoons were a lot less cynical and had a lot more singing and dancing.

I looked it up on Amazon, and I didn't see any Happy Harmonies box sets for sale, which rather surprises me. Considering that many other series got Warner Archives-type box sets, one would think that Warner Home Video might have released such a set. But apparently they only got a laserdisc release back in the early 1990s.

Your semiannual Daylight Savings Time reminder

Tonight is the night where most of us in the US move our clocks one hour forward. The big thing if you will in terms of a movie blog like this is that it means our favorite channel TCM has a prime time lineup which needs to be one hour shorter than normal, even for the people in Arizona who don't move their clocks ahead.

My reading of tonight's TCM lineup is that TCM does have a set of movies that fit the nine hours between 8:00 PM and 6:00 AM, but, there's still an issue with the timing:

8:00 PM The Flight of the Phoenix (142 min), in which James Stewart and others try to fix their plane stranded in the Sahara;
10:30 PM the 1962 version of Mutiny on the Bounty (185 min), starring Marlon Brando as Fletcher Christian;
1:45 AM the 1936 version of The Last of the Mohicans (91 minutes); and
3:30 AM The Flame and the Arrow (88 min), a medieval Robin Hood-type story, and not the "Roman Rebels fight against barbarians" plot the TCM synopsis gives.

Now, there are several problems on the TCM page. Unfortunately, they switched their schedule some time back to not giving the actual running time of each movie, but the length of the time slot. And somehow the TCM schedule page still lists The Last of the Mohicans as "2 HRS" even though it's clearly in a shorter time slot. Worse, the TCM page does say "1:45 AM EST" and "3:30 AM EDT", when the latter would clearly be 4:30 AM. For some reason, the TCM schedule page still lists the 1951 The Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Story as coming on at 5:00 AM, which it seems to me is pretty clearly the movie that's not going to be shown tonight.

One other thing that might be an issue for some is the box guides. The last time I checked, the YouTube TV guide lists The Last of the Mohicans as running from 1:45 AM to 3:30 AM and The Flame and the Arrow as running from 3:30 AM to 6:00 AM. In a grid view, this means that The Last of the Mohicans is currently in a 45-minute slot.

For Keeps?

One of the "Stars of the Month" last summer on TCM was not a traditional star, but "Ladies of the 80s". One of the movies that I hadn't heard of before was For Keeps?. Since the synopsis sounded interesting, I recorded it and eventually got around to watching it.

In an aspirational-class part of Kenosha, WI, Darcy Elliot (Molly Ringwald) is a high-school student hoping to become a journalist and living with her single mom Donna (Miriam Flynn). Darcy is about to go off to the University of Wisconsin for a weekend to meet with people about her journalism work, but what Mom doesn't know is that she's being taken there by her boyfriend Stan Bobrucz (Randall Batinkoff).

Stan is a good kid who is hoping to get a scholarship he's applied for at Caltech, where he's going to study to become an architect. That's something his father (Kenneth Mars) has wanted for him. Dad owns a shoe store which has done a good enough business to provide a reasonably nice house although none of these people are wealthy. But Stan works part time at the family business and Dad wants better for Stan and the two younger kids, who are also stereotypically bratty and obnoxious).

Stan and Darcy being teenagers, they have all sorts of hormones flowing through them, which means they also have a desire to have sex. So on the way to Madison, the two stop and set up Stan's design for a tent with a sort of window in the roof, and make love there. Darcy has been taking birth control, not because any of the adults know she's sexually active, but because she has out-of-balance hormones that are being regulated through the Pill. If you watch any old movies, however, you know that it's only going to take the one time of having sex, and....

Darcy has no period for a couple of months, which is how she's certain she's pregnant. She's not certain what to do, in part because Mr. Bobrucz is a devout Catholic for whom abortion is an absolute no-no. Darcy's mom has been thinking for a long time -- and saving up for -- a mother/daughter trip to France, and dammit, not even a pregnancy is going to stop that, who cares what Darcy thinks. And then there's the question of how the two of them are going to be able to finish high school, let alone go to college, a question which only gets worse when Stan's father wants to disown him.

So Stan and Darcy decide that they're going to show everybody that all of the stereotypes are wrong, and that a young couple like this can make it and keep the baby. They get married and take extra jobs as well as eating into their savings to get a place of their own, with Darcy eventually going to night school instead of regular high school so that somebody will always be there with the baby. However, there are still a ton of challenges for such a young couple, and everything works against the two of them, even threatening to destroy the marriage. However, the parents mostly soften their hard edges at least a bit. That may not be enough.

For Keeps? has a plot that sounds like it should be a serious drama, although the movie is intended to be closer to comedy than drama. Not that the subject matter can allow for a film like this to be straight comedy, of course. For the first two-thirds of the movie, it does a mostly good job of being mostly a comedy with some drama mixed in. But around the point where the marriage between Stan and Darcy starts failing, For Keeps? seems to lose its way a bit. It's as though the screenwriters had written themselves into a corner and didn't really know the best way to write themselves back out of it, making the last section of the movie somewhat of a mess. It's not that For Keeps? is a bad movie by any stretch of the imagination; it's more that it feels like something is missing at the end.

Still, For Keeps? is an interesting take on a tough topic, and the way people thought about it back in the 1980s.

Jeepers Creepers

Actor Dick Powell made Murder, My Sweet in no small part because he wanted to be able to show himself to be more than a light comic actor crooning away in pictures. Powell of course had that reputation going back to some of the great early musicals like 42nd Street, but watching a late 1930s musical like Going Places makes it so much easier to see why Powell wanted to do "serious" work.

Powell plays Peter Mason, who works as a clerk in a creaky old New York sporting-goods store under Franklin Dexter (Walter Catlett). It's one of those places that comes across as old-fashioned even by the standards of the 1930s, with one of the few customers being Col. Withering (Thurston Hall), who goes on fake safaris and buys stuff from the store to display as his catches to the society set who attend his lectures.

The store needs more business, but it's also the sort of store that finds advertising to be terribly gauche. They hit upon an idea, however, which is to have a famous horseman endorse their goods and mingle with the society set that would attend polo matches, the summer racing season at Saratoga, or in the case of this movie, a steeplechase in Maryland. And they even have just such a horseman under contract, Peter Randall. Unfortunately, Randall is currently racing down under, but since information traveled slowly in those days, they can just have Peter Mason impersonate Randall and none of the Maryland horse set will figure out the ruse. (Yeah, right.)

The first thing Peter and his boss find when they get to Maryland is a wild horse that only responds to the musical stylings of extremely musically talented groomsman Gabriel (Louis Armstrong) singing the standard "Jeepers Creepers" which here is the original. One of the next things the find is Col. Withering, who knows the ruse but has his own reasons for not revealing it: namely, that his sister-in-law who funds the safaris, has been threatening to cut him off. Another of the rich set is Ellen Parker (Anita Louise), and she and Peter immediately hit it off. But that's because Ellen thinks of Peter as the horseman, not as a lowly clerk there to imitate the horseman and advertise the store. Ellen is also pursued by Col. Withering's nephew Jack (Ronald Reagan).

Eventually the big race comes up, and there's going to be a lot of betting on who's going to win. Trying to influence the betting, albeit in a decidedly less-than-legal way, are the professional gamblers Maxie (Harold Huber) and Droopy (Allen Jenkins). Eventually Peter winds up having to ride the wild horse we saw at the beginning, even though he's barely able to ride a horse at all.

As I said at the beginning, watching a movie like Going Places, it's obvious why Powell had started to chafe having to make all these musicals with increasingly lesser music and even worse plots. Still, Warner Bros. had a lot of talented musical people, so the song and dance numbers mostly work for those who enjoy musical movies. Going Places is not a great movie by any means, but I suppose it could have been much worse considering some of the much more dire horse racing movies I've seen.