Cry For Happy

Another of the stars who was honored in the 2025 Summer Under the Stars was Donald O'Connor, as it was his 100th anniversary of his birth. Once again, I recorded several of his movies that I hadn't seen before, one of which was the service comedy Cry for Happy.

O'Connor is the second lead here, behind Glenn Ford. Ford plays CPO Andy Cyphers, who as the movie beings is in US-occupied Japan in 1952. Cyphers officially works for the Navy's publicity office, developing the photographs and film reels that will be distributed to press outlets back in the States. It's not glamorous work, and with the housing situation in Japan Cyphers works out of a disused bank vault. He also engages in other unauthorized work, such as leasing cameras to a Japanese producer Endo in exchange for other services.

One day Cyphers gets new staff in the form of junior officers Murray Prince (Donald O'Connor), Suzuki (James Shigeta), and Lank (Chet Douglas). They get an assignment to go over to Korea, which is something they really want since the movie is set while the Korean War is still a hot war, and cover the military's propaganda of having low-ranked servicemen speak to the people back home about why they're fighting. Somehow, the military press liaisons not only didn't include any members of the Navy to talk to, but the people who do talk actively make fun of the military. To counter this, Cyphers wants to talk about why the navy is fighting, and makes up a story about them helping out an orphanage back in Japan. Cyphers is, of course, enough of a grifter that this is a completely made up story. So to keep everyone from putting too much of a spotlight on them, he doesn't reveal the location of the fake orphanage and says they've wanted to do it with no publicity.

Now, this is where Endo comes back in. He has a way of doing favors for Cyphers in exchange for getting those movie cameras he needs to make the movie he wants (which turns out to be a Hollywood-style western only with an all-Japanese cast). So now Cyphers needs an orphanage and his staff need a place to stay. Endo finds a place where one of his cousins is living that's a geisha house, with four geishas still paying off their apprenticeships. It might be a good place to turn into a pretend orphanage, if only they had children. There's also the fact that there are four women there and of course the Navy men begin to fall in love with the geishas, notably Murray with Chiyoko (Miyoshi Umeki, who had portrayed a similar character in Sayonara).

Worse for Cyphers is that the orphanage becomes such a story that there's no way they can keep things under wraps. Besides, folks back in the States were so touched by the story that they've been donating money without even being hectored by Sally Stuthers. But this is the sort of romantic service comedy that really has to have a happy ending, so the question is how the story gets to that requisite happy ending.

I didn't particularly care for Cry for Happy, and if you've read this blog long enough you can probably guess some of the reasons why. The big one is CPO Cyphers. He's the sort of con artist whom I tend not to find a very sympathetic character. Worse, it's the sort of thing I've called a "comedy of lies" before, where the Cyphers character starts off with one lie, and then has to make up bigger and bigger lies to keep the original lie going. It's the sort of thing that's supposed to be funny, but that I've always just found grating. I have a feeling that viewers 65 years on will probably also have some issues with the portrayal of Japan here. There's quite a fair bit of what Americans would have thought the Japan of the era was like, with probably little of what the actual Japan was like. The cultural difference is supposed to be funny but once again feels more uncomfortable and a bit degrading than funny.

Nine years on

Another of the movies that was sitting on my DVR for quite some time and nearly about to expire before I finally watched it was 2010: The Year We Make Contact. It's another one of those movies where I'm old enough to remember it having come out in theaters, but not old enough to have actually seen it in the theater. So when it showed up on TCM again I made a point of recording it to be able to do this review.

I'm assuming most people will be aware that this is a sequel to 2001: A Space Odyssey, along with knowing what 2001 is about. As the sequel opens, Dr. Heywood Floyd (Roy Scheider) is a college administrator working in radioastronomy and tending to one of those radio telescope arrays. He's approached by a Soviet scientist who informs him that the Soviets have been preparing a mission to Jupiter to find out what happened to the Discovery, the ship that Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea) and crew were on when the HAL 9000 computer (voiced again by Douglas Rain) malfunctioned, dooming the mission. The Soviets are going to get there first, but don't have the expertise to deal with the American computer systems. The Americans, of course, aren't going to get there first, so the scientist, knowing that Floyd was the Earth-bound commander of the failed Discovery mission, wants Floyd and the Americans to cooperate on the Soviet mission to Jupiter.

Now, in the real world, we know that the Soviet Union was dissolved in 1991 and had somewhat less bad relations in the years following. Understandably, there's no way people in 1984 when this movie was made could have known all this was going to happen, so the Soviets are still portrayed as a rival to the United States. More specifically, and coloring the plot of the movie, is a story about the US trying to blockade Central American countries -- that whole Monroe Doctrine and all -- and the Soviets trying to break the blockade, which is going to have repercussions even in outer space. But Dr. Floyd agrees to go on the mission. Also on the mission for the Americans are Walter Curnow (John Lithgow), who designed the Discovery, and R. Chandra (Bob Balaban), who designed the HAL 9000.

The Soviet ship Alexei Leonov (named after the first cosmonaut to do a spacewalk) approaches Jupiter, and finds something alarming: it seems as though there might be chlorophyll on Europa, the moon of Jupiter where the monolith that was the point of the original Discovery is located. Perhaps the monolith has something to do with that. In any case, the Soviets running the Alexei Leonov, led by Tanya Kirbuk (Helen Mirren), need Dr. Floyd to help figure out what's going on. He sees this as a warning sign.

But there's still that mission to get on the Discovery and figure out what might have happened to Dave and why the HAL 9000 malfunctioned. As for the HAL, it turns out that the politicians interfered with the mission, and gave HAL direct orders to keep certain information secret from the astronauts on board the Discovery, which led to HAL becoming paranoid and going on the blink. However, things get much more alarming when Dave Bowman himself, or maybe the ghost of Dave Bowan, shows up on the Discovery, to tell Dr. Floyd that they have to leave immediately for reasons Dave can't really explain.

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This is a problem for reasons of orbital mechanics. The mission was designed with the planets being in certain positions at set times, and the fuel on the Alexei Leonov to be used at just the right time to be able to get back to earth. However, if Dave's comments are correct, the early forced departure would result in the crew going to interstellar space rather than being able to get back to earth. And political conditions back on earth are at the point where international cooperation on board the spaceship may have to be suspended.

2010 is certainly an interesting enough idea, and one that's reasonably well executed. But of course anybody who watches this is going to compare it to 2001, and probably not so favorably. For me, the big issue is that the ending is one that I think would violate a whole bunch of scientific principles, although I can't really go into detail about that without giving away the ending of the movie. Somewhat more humorously is the fact that the production design clearly took the Russian language into account -- but somewhere along the way like a game of "telephone" things got just screwed up enough to have all sorts of typos. What it's supposed to say is obvious to anybody who speaks Russian (I studied Russian in college), but is often a bit off.

More teens in trouble

I somehow wound up with a handful of disparate movies about teens who are not exactly model citizens on my DVR. I think the last of them is Bronco Bullfrog, a little-known British film.

This one was made in 1969, on location in an East London that no longer exists, something that made me think of the movie 10 Rillington Place where the row houses that made up that street were soon to be torn down as part of Notting Hill's urbn renewal. Anyhow, Del (Del Quant, although these are all non-professionals doing the acting) is a young man in this run-down part of London who is doing an apprenticeship to become a welder, which at least would pay the bills even if it's not an exciting life. He lives with his dad in a crappy block of flats, and wanders the streets half the time with his group of friends, engaging in petty crime from larceny to beating up unwanted people.

Somewhere along the way, Del meets Irene, a girl of 16 who has about a year or so more to go in school before she's expected to make some sort of decision of what she wants to do in life, which for a young woman like her is going to mean at best a secretarial job before she gets married. These are the working class people who were already being overlooked by society in favor of people who could be more "properly" educated along with a more vibrant population. Irene, for her part, lives with her mother, seemingly no father around. Neither Del's father nor Irene's mother seems all that enthusiastic about the prospect of the two dating.

Del and his friend group learn about the fate of a guy they know named Jo, nicknamed the titular Bronco Bullfrog for reasons that aren't really made clear and aren't important anyhow. He's been in "borstal", which as I understand it is a rough British equivalent to reform school. But he's finished his sentence and is about to be released despite that the fact that he hasn't reformed one bit. He's got some ideas about crimes to commit and wants to bring Del in on them. Del eventually introduces Irene to Jo, mostly because the young couple can't be alone together in either of their own flats. But this gets the two of them in trouble since Irene is underage.

Del has an uncle living outside of London, but the uncle informs Del that this isn't really a good place for him either, as the only work available is farm work, and Del would be better off sticking with the welding apprenticeship since that at least is rather more lucrative work. And there's still the specter of the police nicking Del because of the relationshp with an underage girl even if she's clearly consenting and nowadays this likely wouldn't be seen as statutory rape under the "Romeo and Juliet" exemptions.

Bronco Bullfrog was made on an extremely low budget, which is part of the reason why it's become nearly forgotten. To be honest, that low budget means it's not exactly a great movie as there's not a truly coherent story here. However, what it is quite good for is the look at a London that no longer exists. Like any number of other movies of the era such as the aforementioned 10 Rillington Place or the produce markets in Frenzy, there's a bit of a documentary nature in the cinematography that makes Bronco Bullfrog well worth watching.

When Bronco Bullfrog was originally released, there was what to me seems like a bit of a gimmick in treating these authentic teens as speaking an exotic accent of English that for some audiences might need subtitling. There were apparently some prints that didn't use subtitles. The one TCM ran did, although I didn't find the accent particularly impenetrable.

Wanda

Last September, TCM ran a night of movies dedicated to the UCLA Film and TV Archive. If you've watched enough TCM, you'll probably have seen the title cards before any number of the movies that show they've been restored in part by the archive, as well as the people who helped donate toward the restorations. One of the movies that TCM ran on that particular night was the independent drama Wanda. As always, not having seen it, I recorded it to be able to watch later.

Barbara Loden, who co-wrote the movie and directed it, plays Wanda, a woman living in one of those decaying Rust Belt towns. Or, should I say, just outside of town, as the ramshackle place she lives in together with her sister and her sister's family that's located next to a waste heap from a coal mine where poor people like her father pick through it to find bits of coal. Wanda has a husband and kids, but he's up and left her with the kids and filed for divorce because she's basically the sort of mother who would abandon the kids. In fact, Wanda can't get herself to court on time for the hearing and willingly grants the divorce and gives up custody.

She tries to get a job and, being pretty much out of money, goes to a bar where a man picks her up and pays for her beer pretty much in exchange for sex at one of the local motels before leaving her to who knows what. Poor Wanda has pretty much no money, with things about to get even worse for her as she gets her purse and wallet stolen in a movie theater. Can't she just go home to her sister to try to get some sort of help? Well, not yet at least. She goes to a bar looking for a place where she can use a bathroom.

What Wanda doesn't realize however, is that the man, Mr. Dennis (Michael Higgins), has just robbed the bar and killed the bartender who is lying quite dead behind the bar. Dennis takes Wanda with him to another motel, where he treates Wanda like absolute dirt first for screwing up his hamburger order by getting onions on the burger, and later by complaining that she's wearing slacks when he pays for her to get some new clothes. In any case, the two go on the road in no small part because it was seen that a couple was leaving the bar where the dead bartender was found, making them the obvious suspects.

Mr. Dennis is a no good man at all, and even his father knows this. But Dennis doesn't seem to know anything else, while Wanda doesn't have any money or any place to go so she stays with Dennis. Dennis, for his part, is planning his next crime, which is a rather bigger one, robbing a bank by kidnapping the bank president to force him to open the vault while the president's family is being held hostage. But Wanda gets pulled over on a traffic violation and doesn't have her driver's license, threatening to make the entire operation go awry....

I didn't realize at the time I watched Wanda that Barbara Loden was actually the wife of director Elia Kazan, as well as the actress playing Warren Beatty's older sister in Splendor in the Grass. So it's slightly odd that she ended up directing what was such an utterly low-budget affair her. Although, to be fair to the people who might have funded it, she wasn't that prominent an actress, and had never directed anything before. As for the direction, Loden did a very good job finding locations that show a side of society that wasn't normally shown in Hollywood movies before this time. Even a studio like Warner Bros. with its social movies of the 1930s couldn't have created an atmosphere as depressing as the locations and interiors in Wanda. (The climax was filmed in Scranton, PA.) The script to Wanda is also promising. But, unfortunately, Barbara Loden couldn't get good actors on the budget she had, so the acting is mostly amateurish at best, making the movie a bit of a tough go at times.

It's a shame that Barbara Loden never got the chance to have a bigger budget and direct again, because perhaps she might have been able to do something with a better cast. So all we have is the potential of Wanda.

Dulcy

I've mentioned when I reviewed a movie like The Owl and the Pussycat how there are certain characters who are just so obnoxious that the character would be better as the victim in a murder mystery. I couldn't help but have the same thoughts as I was watching the movie Dulcy.

Dulcy, played by Ann Sothern, is Dulcy Ward, the kid sister of Bill Ward (Dan Dailey, credited here as Dan Dailey Jr.). We don't see their parents, but presumably the parents left them loaded since they've got a big New York place, servants, and a place on a lakeside island up in the mountains. In any case, it's Bill we see first, trying to take a shower in the morning but being foiled by Dulcy's having tried to "fix" the boiler, a fix that only makes things worse. And, as we'll see over the course of the movie, it's not the only thing Dulcy makes worse.

Bill works in advertising, seemingly running his own agency. This has enabled him to meet lovely young Angela Forbes (Lynne Carver), daughter of an aircraft executive Roger (Roland). Indeed, Bill is engaged to Angela and is about to meet the family as they (Mrs. Forbes is played by Billie Burke) return from a transatlantic cruise. (The movie was released in 1940, by which time Europe was already at war again, but is based on a play by George S. Kaufman from before he met either Edna Ferber or Moss Hart.) Also on the boat is inventor Gordon Daly (Ian Hunter).

Gordon is working on a new sort of aircraft engins that probably violated the laws of physics, but is in some ways just a macguffin for Gordon to be able to meet the Forbes family as part of Dulcy's creating all sorts of complications. As you might guess, Dulcy sees Gordon's invention and thinks that Mr. Forbes would be the perfect person to talk to since Gordon needs venture capital. You might also guess that Dulcy is going to fall in love with Gordon along the way.

Now, that island vacation home I mentioned earlier comes into play. Bill is hoping to win Roger's approval for the marriage by inviting the Forbes family for a vacation there. Dulcy, of course, screws things up first by driving the boat to the island like a maniac. Then, she schemes to get Gordon onto the island with his invention so that he can have a chat with Forbes to try to get him to back the new engine. This, unsurprisingly, doesn't go well at first.

Further complicating matters is one Schuyler van Dyke (Reginald Patterson). He's the not-quite-sane brother of a wealthy man, taking his brother's plane for a flight and crashing it into the lake thinking it's a sea-plane and not a land plane. He also claims to be rich, so when he hears about the new engine he starts acting like a big shot investor and offers to get in on the plan in a way that would screw up what Forbes could do if he wanted.

Now, in a movie like Dulcy, she's supposed to be a sympathetic character despite her screwing everything up; also, everything is supposed to come out right in the end. Now, that latter half is in fact the case. But I found Dulcy to be so obnoxious that it made the movie difficult to watch. Somebody should have smacked her upside the head, or at least done what Bette Davis does to Miriam Hopkins at the end of Old Acquaintance. But no, that doesn't happen here at all. Then again, the original play was first staged in 1921, and audiences of the early 1920s may have enjoyed such a character a lot more than I did.

Berlin: die Sinfonie der Großstadt

Some time back I did a post on the silent film Man With a Movie Camera. Jacqueline Stewart followed it up on Silent Sunday Nights with a movie that has a similar theme, but actually came a few years before: Berlin, Symphony of a Great City. I eventually watched it and left this post in the unscheduled drafts, since at the time I wrote it it was still a bit too close to having watched Man With a Movie Camera and I had not too far in the past done posts on a couple of other German movies.

Berlin, Symphonie of a Great City is similar to Man With a Movie Camera, but not quite as stylized. The movie looks at the city of Berlin as it was during the time of filming in 1927. This is noteworthy because it's smack dab in the middle of Weimar Germany, before the Nazis took over and completely changed German film culture (Karl Freund, who did the cinematography, was one of many people in the German-langauge film industry who fled Nazi Germany). It's obviously also well before World War II, which led to the bombings which destroyed a whole lot of Germany, so the movie can be seen as a bit of a document or time capsule of Berlin as it was in 1927.

There's no real plot to this movie, and also no characters or dialogue. The movie more or less looks at Berlin as it might have been over the course of a day, except that of course the action was not filmed in one day. That is to say, the movie is structured in five acts, with the only title cards announcing the beginning and end of each act, starting in the morning and going through the night. So, the opening act begins with a train coming in to one of Berlin's railroad stations early in the morning, at a time when most of the city is still asleep, although the early birds are just beginning to wake up. The movie then goes on with the start of the workday, lunch, mid-afternoon, and a final act set after dark.

It's a bit tough to say how much of the action is spontaneous and how much of it might have been set up, although I have a feeling at least some of it was not scripted. The homeless people who are depicted in one scene seem fairly real to me. It's also always possible that the cameramen stood in one spot for a while and only filmed when something interesting was happening, or else knew what interesting things were going to happen (eg. the funeral procession) and make a point to film that.

Since the movie was filmed a few years before Man With a Movie Camera, it's unsurprising that it's not quite as technically radical as the Soviet film. That, and the fact that Dziga Vertov was much more open about his desire to be experimental than Walter Ruttmann who directed Berlin, Symphony of a Great City was. As a result, this one can look a bit old-fashioned at times.

However, Berlin, Symphony of a Great City is still quite good technically, while as a piece of cinematic history it's even better.

Under the bluebirds

June Lockhart died last year at the age of 100. For some reason I thought I mentioned the programming tribute TCM gave to her a some months back, but a search of the blog says I didn't. In any case, I had a movie with her in it on my DVR which TCM ran before she died, but which I didn't get around to watching until rather more recently, largely because I didn't realize she had a role in it: The White Cliffs of Dover.

The star here is Irene Dunne, and as the movie opens she's working as a nurse in Britain named Susan Ashwood, tending to the soldiers who are returning home from wherever it is they were bravely fighting World War II. (The movie was released a few weeks before the D-Day invasion, so perhaps these were bomber crews or people evacuated from North Africa.) Once again, as you might guess, she's about to have a flashback as to how she wound up in the situation she's in....

Let's go back to the spring of 1914. Obviously, if you know your history, you'll know that this would be shortly before World War I began in Europe, although of course it would be a good three years before that piece of shit Woodrow Wilson got the US involved in the war. Susan, at the time Susan Dunn, is traveling on an ocean liner with her father Hiram Dunn (Frank Morgan) over to England to spend a couple of months on vacation where they'll be staying with Col. Forsythe (C. Aubrey Smith) and his family. While there, Forsythe introduces Susan to a nice youngish nobleman, Sir John Ashwood (Alan Marshal). The two have a bit of a romance, although there's the question of whether it can work out since Hiram expects his daughter to return to America with him.

Susan eventually decides more or less to elope with Sir John instead of going back to America, but she has the great bad luck of marrying John just as war is being declared between Britain and Germany. Sir John comes from a long line of men who did military service, so of course he gets mobilized, and it's off to those horrid trenches of France for him to fight.

Lots of time passes, and Sir John gets brief leave as part of a program to reunite men in service with their wives, which brings Susan to Normandy for an all-too-brief weekend together. And wouldn't you know it, but a) Susan gets knocked up that weekend, and b) it's the same time that the US announces its entry into the Great War. Sadly, Sir John won't survive the war, leaving Susan a widow and mother, but a wealthy one.

Susan's son, John II (played by Roddy McDowall as a boy and Peter Lawford as an adult), grows up on the estate next to that of the Kenneys, who have a daughter his age named Betsy (played by Elizabeth Taylor as an adolescent and June Lockhart as an adult). They're going to fall in love but, as the 1930s go on Susan understands that there's another war coming and dammit, she doesn't want her son to be involved. She already gave up one man for Britain and she's not about to give up a second. Young John, however, intends to uphold the family tradition of going into military service. Since this movie was released in the spring of 1944, and since the story is told in flashback, you know whether mother or son is going to be the one to get their way.

To me The White Cliffs of Dover was one of those obvious message movies where the point of it is to show Americans at home why the US is fighting in Europe, and why they were making the sacrifices that they were. There's nothing subtle about this one at all, and that may affect your opinion on how good the movie is or isn't. It's almost as though Mrs. Miniver wasn't enough for MGM and they had to come up with more pro-Britain stuff.

Out west with Anita Ekberg

Another of the movies that TCM ran during their Summer Under the Stars day with Sterling Hayden was Valerie. Once again, not havng heard of it before, I decided to record it to be able to watch it later and write up what is not this post on the movie.

The movie opens up with the Sterling Hayden character, John Garth, and his ranch hand Jim Mingo (Jerry Barclay) riding up to a ranch house which they enter. We don't follow them inside the house, but hear several gun shots and the men exit the house. The next morning, the sheriff comes to Garth's house to arrest Garth on a charge of murder. It turns out that two people in the house were killed, although Garth thought that there were three dead. Indeed, Garth has just finished up writing what is a sort of confession -- or defense, depending on your view -- of what he did, which was to shoot his wife Valerie, née Horvat (Anita Ekberg), and her parents who had immigrated here from Europe. The parents died but Valerie is currently only severely injured although not expected to live.

Cut to a shot of the doctor's house where he and a nurse are treating Valerie, which is where we learn that there are a lot of people in town who might well take Garth's side of the dispute. In any case, with a couple of dead bodies, we've got a murder trial coming up. And here's where things get interesting: we get various witnesses giving accounts reminscent of the movie Rashomon, describing their view of what happened, and all trying to make themselves look good.

First is Rev. Blake (Anthony Steel, Ekberg's real-life husband at the time), who is new to this town and gets a message from Valerie to come and visit. Since this is one of those towns with only one church preaching some generic form of Protestantism where everybody goes to the same church, it's unsurprising that the Garths might want to see the reverend too, or at least Valerie. She's deeply unhappy about something, and she as well as her parents and possibly John's brother Herb (Peter Walker) seem to be taking Valerie's side. Rev. Blake starts ministering to Valerie enough that pretty much any man would be filled with jealousy.

Then John himself testifies, which seems a bit odd considering it wouldn't be the prosecution calling him. John was a major in the US Army during the recently-concluded Civil War, having dealt with getting information from Confederate prisoners, which probably gave him some dark cynicism and a propensity toward psychological manipulation and some outright torture-like violence. He only returned home when his father fell ill. The reason for the marriage isn't so happy, as Dad was an inveterate gambler who's left quite a bit of debt behind, and a marriage for John, the older brother, would be financially convenient.

Having heard those two views, we then get the fairly ridiculous premise of Valerie herself testifying, which is surprising since it was thought she was on her deathbed. But testify she does, and by the end of the movie we learn the truth.

Valerie is another of those movies where there's a good idea behind the movie, although in the telling it falls a bit flat. To be honest, it's always going to be tough to compare to a classic like Rashomon. And Valerie is like the old programmers of a previous generation, not necessarily a prestige movie. But still, Valerie is just there. There's no real excitement or tension to it. My guess would be that it's down to the director, Gerd Oswald, who had the great good luck of a debut film like A Kiss Before Dying but was mostly only good enough for B-level work and TV episodes.

Still, Valerie is one of those films you're going to want to watch and judge for yourself.

Nora Bayes

There's been a couple of days in the past year or two where the TCM lineup has been a bunch of musical biopics, of which there seem to be more than I realize. And here, by musical biopics I mean biographical movies of mostly composer/songwriter types; not movies about famous people that have for some reason been turned into musicals. Well, tomorrow, June 5, is another such day, and once again I've got one of the movies in the TCM lineup on my DVR just waiting more me to do a post on it. That movie is Shine on, Harvest Moon, which airs at 9:30 AM.

Shine on Harvest Moon is the purported story of the two people credited with writing it, Nora Bays (Ann Sheridan) and Jack Norworth (Dennis Morgan). They're certainly the ones who made the song a popular standard, although apparently in those days it was common practice for someone to buy all the rights to the song including being credited as the songwriters. As the movie opens, it's around 1905 in Milwaukee. Vaudeville is the big thing, and Jack is a single act in a traveling vaudeville show, as is Blanche (Irene Mallory), who is presented as someone you think is going to become romantically involved with Jack. Also in the show are the magician Georgetti (Jack Carson) and his ditzy assistant Margie (Marie Wilson) who eventually get married and become friends of Jack and Nora's, showing up several times throughout the movie.

Nora is only seen a bit later, when Jack sees her performing at a cabaret and realizes she'd be pefect for the sort of songs he's trying to get published. What he doesn't know is that Nora is being pursude by Dan Costello (Robert Shayne), who ones the place where Nora is performing. Nora resists Dan's advances, while Jack resists Blanche's, and Jack and Nora go off together, in part to do their own vaudeville act and in part for Jack to write songs for Nora to sing.

But what the two don't know is that they've made some powerful enemies. Costello becomes more and more successful as a producer and theater owner, while Blanche seems to become somewhat successful as a performer and wants to make certain that Jack sings with her. With that in mind, Dan pretty much blacklists Nora which effectively means blacklisting Jack too unless he wants to give in and do a double with Blanche or have her sing his songs. Even a good friend like "Poppa" Carl (S.Z. Sakall) can't help get them bookings. Oh, he does get them an audition, but Dan finds out before the scheduled time leaving Jack and Nora to audition for an empty theater.

Eventually Nora gives up and leaves Jack so that he can have some success, but we know the movie is going to have a happy ending, so Poppa Carl figures out a way to get Jack to bring Nora into the act that Dan and Blanche can't stop. They then perform the title song as well as another number, "Time Waits for No One", in a Technicolor finale (the rest of the movie is in black and white), before living happily ever after.

Or at least the movie Shine On, Harvest Moon would have you believe. Jack and Nora would get divorced and go on to have multiple spouses, while as mentioned above there's a question as to whether they even wrote the song. Indeed, the songs in the movie are mostly a pastiche of stuff from the first decade of the century. It's another of those movies that tries to bring turn-of-the-century nostalgia to audiences who were spending their time outside the theater worrying about the war raging over in Europe and the Pacific, having been released in the spring of 1944. Audiences of the day might have liked it, but it's one that, unlike Roughly Speaking, hasn't aged very well.

Roughly Speaking

Tomorrow, June 4, is the birth anniversary of actress Rosalind Russell, so it's unsurprising that TCM is going to be spending a morning and afternoon with her films. One that I hadn't seen before but that was on my DVR was Roughly Speaking, so as is always the case, I watched it in order to be able to write up this post for the upcoming TCM showing.

The opening credits inform us that the movie is based on the then-popular autobiographical memoir of the same title, Roughly Speaking, but author Louise Randall Pierson, who also wrote the screenplay and was credited as a technical advisor on the movie. Fast backward to 1902. Louise Randall (to be played as an adult by Rosalind Russell) is the younger daughter of John Chase Randall (Ray Collins), who unfortunately has just up and died a few weeks after his 25th anniversary leaving behind a wife and two adolescent daughters. Worse, he also leaves behind a mountain of debt, which forces Mom to sell off most of the family's remaining assets and the family to downsize rather severely.

Dad wanted Louise to get an education and shoot for the stars, but this is New Englans in the early 1900s, so Louise goes off to "business school", the sort of place that taught young women to become typists and other secretarial work, something that Louise takes very well to. She gets a probationary job (Alan Hale in a one-scene cameo is her boss) which is a springboard to a nicer position in New Haven, the home of Yale University. There's the possibility of finding a nice Yalie to get married to!

Sure enough, Louise meets nice Rodney Crane (Donald Woods), who is hoping to go into a career in finance as his father was a bank officer. The two have a whirlwind romance and get married, with Louise rather progressively for the time keeping her name. The two live happily, although not ever after. The couple have four kids before World War I comes along. After that comes the family moving out to the suburbs, only for the kids to get polio to varying degrees. Louise remains impossibly perky through all of this. So perky, in fact, that when Rodney loses his job in the post-war recession, it's then that he's had it with Louise's optimism, leaving for another woman. Louise is the one to seek a divorce, which is on rather amiable terms, and Rodney is never to be seen again.

In any case, Louise is able to find another man in the form of Harold Pierson (Jack Carson). Harold is the playboy son of a horticultural magnate; technically he works as a vice-president for Dad's rose greenhouses but he's never going to advance any further. Harold and Louise are a perfect match in that they'll always love each other for richer or for poorer, but with their personalities leading to it always being for poorer. They have another kid (future Oscar-winning screenwriter Frank Pierson), and go through a series of ups and downs. Harold builds his own greenhouses just in time to flood the market to such an extent that they can't pay the mortgages. He then gets a job promoting a new airplane (character actor John Qualen is the designer), again just in time for the Depression to hit.

Still the couple perseveres, until the New York World's Fair of 1939 arrives and presents another opportunity. Except that in the middle of the fair, Germany attacks Poland, leading to the start of the European theater of World War II and the US getting involved a few years later. By this time there are three adult male children for Louise, and since the movie was released in 1945, you know the kids are all going to do their parts....

Roughly Speaking is another of those movies that is episodic in nature and relies much more on the strength of the actors than on the story itself. Unsurprisingly, with Roz Russell and Jack Carson you know that the stars will indeed pull it off. It also has the feel of something that was designed to be a morale-builder. It was released in January 1945, with World War II still raging. The story of a woman who suffered a whole bunch of personal setbacks and persevered is one that I can imagine would have resonated with audiences, capped with her making the sacrifice of seeing her kids go off to war.

Doing a bit of reading, it's interesting to see what liberties were taken with real life, but that's not such a big deal considering that's standard practice and for audiences 80 years on one can easily look at Roughly Speaking as though it weren't in fact about real people. It's a great example of the sort of entertainment Hollywood served up for the home front during World War II, and one you should take the chance to see.