The Jerk

TCM ran a two-night salute to actor Steve Martin back in May, which gave me the chance to watch one of his movies that, somewhat surprisingly, I had never seen before. That movie is the one which made him a movie star in addition to his TV and stand-up comedy work: The Jerk.

Steve Martin unsurprisingly plays the titular jerk, although his character isn't so much a jerk as a man named Navin Johnson who's just so profoundly naïve that you wonder how such a person could ever survive in the real world. As the movie opens, in fact, he's a bum with little to his name except the clothes he's wearing and a thermos, and he tells the other assembled bums how he wound up in this condition.

Navin was a foundling left on the porch of a family of very poor black sharecroppers in Mississippi (although, as a shot just before the closing credits reveals, it's the Universal backlot as we can see the Magnificent Mountains of Mississippi in the background). His adoptive family are good people, except that they haven't been able to bring themselves to tell him before now that he's not their biological child, let alone not black. When they do tell him, he feels he has to make his way to St. Louis to find his true purpose in life.

Navin gets hired as a gas station attendant at a station run by Harry Hartounian (Jackie Mason), where he deals with robbers before meeting inventor Stan Fox (Bill Macy, not to be confused with William H. Macy). Navin has come up with an idea for a device that will prevent eyeglasses from slipping down your nose, and Stan offers to find a buyer for the idea. But Navin has to leave the gas station when a crazy sniper (M. Emmet Walsh) tries to kill him.

Navin next makes his way to a traveling carnival where he's seduced by fellow carny Patty (Catlin Adams) before meeting fairgoer Marie (Bernadette Peters), who is sweet and just the right person for Navin, although they can't get married yet because Marie wants someone who can provide for her, which Navin can't do yet. At least, not until Stan finds him to let him know that his invention has paid off and boy is Navin going to be rich. Not that Navin has any idea what to do with the money: you'd think he goes bankrupt through overspending. And yet, that's not really what happens. He loses his fortune in a different way, and here I'm not exactly spoiling things considering that the movie opens with Navin as a bum telling us how he ended up that way. So you know things are going to go wrong somewhere.

A lot of people love The Jerk, and it's easy to see why. At the same time, the movie opened to mixed reviews, and I think that's easy to see why too. Not that this is so much a movie that divides critics and audiences the way movies do today depending on the political or culture war message the movie is trying to make. Instead, The Jerk is more of a showcase for Steve Martin's comic stylings than it is a movie with a fully fleshed-out plot. At times it feels like more of a series of episodes than a coherent whole. And Martin hadn't learned to tone things down the way he would in later movies, especially where he had a better script. So I definitely have some issues with The Jerk.

The Lovesick Maidens of Cuddleton

Going back to another of the box sets I've got, there are still two and a half discs worth of shorts on the Vitagraph Comedies collection. This time, it's the 1912 short The Lovesick Maidens of Cuddleton.

Once again, the short is only about 12 minutes, so there's not a bunch of plot. Charles Eldridge plays the venerable doctor in the town of Cuddleton, IN, with some sort of advisor who's constantly in his office. Apparently, they need a way to drum up business, and the idea is to bring in a younger doctor to his practice, that being Dr. Baldwin (Earle Williams).

Baldwin is, so we're supposed to figure, considered young and handsome by the standards of 1912, so suddenly, all the young unmarried women in town become hypochondriacs who want Dr. Baldwin to treat them. It's reminiscent, I guess, of the the relationship the Jean Harlow and Edumnd Lowe characters were having in Dinner at Eight. If it's funny how these young women all want to see Dr. Baldwin, it's even funnier when one of the women feigns illness, but it's th old doctor who comes to see her!

Unfortunately, the movie loses steam in the second half. Dr. Baldwin is married, and his wife has finally decided to follow him to town. Only she's supposed to pretend for some reason that she's his sister instead of his wife. Whatever the reason they give, it's not something that makes much sense, and not anything I can imagine the doctor's wife wanting to go along with.

The Lovesick Maidens of Cuddleton isn't bad by the standards of 1912, but it's also as technically limited as most of the shorts I've seen that were being churned out in the early 1910s when new theaters needed new content to show their patrons. I'd also say that there are better shorts from the era, too.

Norman Jewison centenary

According to Wikipedia and IMDb, yesterday, July 21, was the centenary of director Norman Jewison. However, Tuesday nights in July on TCM have been given over to American independent directors, I'm\ guessing because that and the "singers acting in movies" Star of the Month were both things TCM wanted to spend four nights on, and the calendar worked out such that Monday and Tuesday were the weeknights in July that had only four nights.

What that means is that TCM's centenary salute to Norman Jewison is being held tonight in prime time. Now, it looks as though TCM has run enough of Jewison's movies over the years that perhaps they could have done a 24-hour salute, but as it stands we get four of Jewison's movies in prime time:

8:00 PM The Thomas Crown Affair
10:00 PM In the Heat of the Night
Midnight A Soldier's Story
2:00 AM Fiddler on the Roof

The very end of the overnight is an episode of the MGM Parade, at 5:15 AM, which mean there will be filler before the start of tomorrow morning's schedule.

Now, I didn't notice it until I looked up Jewison's filmography, but he directed Only You, which ran I think on New Year's night. If I had known that was a Jewison movie, I would probably have watched it in conjunction with his centenary.

Daddy's Dipsomania

Another of the movies that had been sitting on my DVR for a while that I needed to watch before it expired was Papa's Delicate Condition. Once again, having finally gotten around to watching it, it's time to write up a review and schedule it on the blog.

Jackie Gleason stars as Jack Griffith, who works as a railroad superintendent in a small town in northeast Texas in the early part of the 20th century. (The movie is based on the memoirs of silent screen star Corinne Griffith, born in 1894, but the sets look closer to a pastiche of small-town American between about 1900 and 1915.) Jack has a wife Ambolyn (Glynis Johns), and two daughters: younger daughter Corinne (Linda Bruhl) and Augusta (Laurel Goodwin). Corinne is a bit of a mischief-maker, but also unfailingly honest. Dad, for his part, eschews church, which is mildly scandalous for the early 1900s. But that's not the real focus of the movie.

Instead, the main plot driver is what's referred to as the titular "delicate condition". Dad has a tendency to drink "medicinal" alcohol, which is of course not medicinal but just to get Dad good and sloshed. And when Dad does drink, he also gets rather irresponsible with the family's money. Now, he's trying to do good-hearted things with the money, but what he does is still not fiscally imprudent, to the point that you wonder how the family can afford to live in the nice house they have. One would think Dad's spendthrift ways had been going on for years and that Mom would have taken the kids home to her father. After all, her father Mr. Ghio (Charlie Ruggles) is the mayor of Texarkana.

The first time we see Dad spending the family money unwisely, it's to "help" a man who's painted his house in a garish color that Ambolyn doesn't like get the house repainted in white. Sure, it's dumb to see Jack do this, but you can understand him wanting to make his wife happy. Next up, however, Jack stops by a drug store where the guy behind the counter has a wife who's going into labor and can't get the time off bcause of nasty boss Mr. Cosgrove (Charles Lane). Jack takes over for an hour and gets into big trouble by service a kid a banana split. To get out of his trouble, Jack comes up with a plan to have a "syndicate" of his friends buy the place. He then blackmails his friends into co-funding the scheme!

And then the circus comes to town. Corinne like the pony and wishes she could have one. Unfortunately, the only way Jack can buy the pony is if he buys the whole damn circus. And, of course, he's stupid enough to pay the two crooked proprietors cash. They run off, leaving Jack owning a circus that's heavily in debt and has lots of process servers chasing them. Yeah, he really is that dumb. It's here that Ambolyn finally has the good sense to go off to Texarkana to be with her father. Jack, having screwed things up badly, realizes that he has to go where they can't find him, and takes a job as a railroad superintendent with a railroad in Louisiana. But this is also the sort of movie that you know is going to have a happy ending. So how is it going to get there?

I can see why people think a movie like Papa's Delicate Condition has its charms. For me, however, it had a bunch of problems, which are mostly down to the script. Jack Griffiths is, if not a nasty character, one for whom it's hard to have sympathy. He's causing all his own problems, and you keep wanting Ambolyn or perhaps her father to knock some sense into Jack. The other big issue is that Jackie Gleason is miscast for a period piece like this. It's as though he's still playing Ralph Kramden and not Jack Griffith.

For some values of luck

TCM's schedule for most of the morning and afternoon tomorrow, July 21, is films with have the word "lucky" or a variation thereof in the title. One that's been sitting on my DVR is Lucky Me; not having seen it before, I once again wanted to watch a movie in order to be able to do a full-length post on it. The movie comes up at 2:15 PM tomorrow, so now is your chance to watch it, too.

Doris Day stars as Candy Williams, opening with a well-choreographed musical number singing a song about superstition, before winding up backstage at a theater in Miami. She's part of a troupe called the Parisian Pretties managed by Hap Schneider (Phil Silvers), who also appears in the troupe. They put on a sort of vaudeville revival show with song and dance acts but no overarching plot. It's a nostalgic sort of show that time has passed by. Audiences have passed it by, too, causing the show to be canceled and leaving Hap and Candy stranded in Miami together with two other members of the troup, Duke (Eddie Foy, Jr.) and Flo (Nancy Walker).

Hap, playing fast and loose with the truth, comes up with a scheme to get a free dinner at the hotel across the street involving a cop friend of theirs "arresting" them just before the check comes; however, the scheme fails when the cop in question gets rotated out on his shift so is no longer there to arrest them. Since this was a fancy hotel, they're going to have to pay their way out of the bill by doing various forms of work for the hotel. This is how we get to the male lead. One of the guests in the hotel is Dick Carson (Robert Cummings). He's a Tin Pan Alley songwriter who's had a fair deal of success writing for other people. But he wants to strike out on his own and write a complete show of his own. To that end, he also needs a backer, and thinks he might have one in Texas oilman Otis Thayer (Bill Goodwin). Otis has a daughter Lorraie (Martha Hyer) who is kinda-sort Dick's girlfriend, with the obvious implied threat that if she's not his girlfriend, he's not getting her daddy's money.

One evening at a gas station, Candy runs into Dick but doesn't know him. For various reasons, especially involving the fact that he doesn't want more people trying to audition themselves for him since he already had to deal with Flo doing just that, Dick passes himself off as a mechanic at the station named Eddie. From here, it's not too difficult to guess what happens the rest of the way. First, Dick and Candy fall in love although Dick has to keep up the ruse. Then, Candy learns the truth from a meeting between Dick and Hap, who does recognize Dick. This causes Candy to believe Dick is just trying to take advantage of her. Worse is that when they patch things up and Candy sings for Dick, Lorraine finds out. Lorraine decides that if she can't have Dick, she won't let her father back the show.

This leads to a finale at a birthday party for Otis where Dick was planning to play some of the songs for Otis. Dick decides to abandon the show, and Candy and her friends come up with an idea to put everything right. This involves crashing the party and coming up with a ruse to get Lorraine away from the party just long enough for Candy to sing some of the songs Dick was writing. Unfortunately, they can't keep Lorraine away long enough, although as you'll have figured out the film is bound to have a happy ending. You'll also know who ends up together in the last reel.

Lucky Me is, like the show the Parisian Pretties put on, a hoary old chestnut of a story. The story idea might not have been a bad one in the early 1930s, although it's decidedly dated here. It also doesn't help that Doris Day gets a subpar set of songs to sing. Day tries, and the film's weaknesses are definitely not her fault. But there's a reason Lucky Me got lukewarm reviews when it was released. Doris Day fans will probably still enjoy it, but anybody else watching it will see fairly quickly why it got those tepid reviews.

The face don't care

TCM had a night of body horror movies some months back. One of the movies that I hadn't seen was The Hand, which I recorded in part because of its star, Michael Caine. I finally got around to watching it and, as always, that means that now you get the review.

Michael Caine plays Jonathan Landsale, a cartoonist living in Vermont with his wife Anne and daughter Lizzie. However, it's become a bit of a strained marriage. Anne has an offer for a job at some new age institute down in New York City, and she thinks having their daughter studying in New York instead of middle-of-nowhere Vermont might be better. Jonathan doesn't want that, and besides, there's more space to do cartooning in Vermont and it's cheaper, too.

So the husband and wife drive down to New York to see the apartment, but get in an argument along the way while also having to deal with lousy drivers. Anne tries to pass a truck when a car comes in the opposite direction, and in the ensuing accident Jonathan's right hand is severed at the wrist. Obviously nobody wants to lose a hand, but it's even worse when you're a cartoonist and you make a living using that hand to draw things. Anne and the police stay behind to look for the hand in the hopes it can be re-attahed, but since they're in a field with thick grass, they can't find it.

Jonathan does get a prosthetic and and learns how to use it, as well as dealing with the residual nervous system sensations that amputees apparently film. Jonathan's agent suggest somebody else take over the strip, but Jonathan hates the direction the other guy wants to take it. Worse, Anne seems to be having a romantic relationship with a yoga instructor at the institute.

Oh, but that's not the worst thing at all. Jonathan starts having something that might be nightmares, or might be some sort of dark hallucinatory premonition, in which he has visions of the severed hand doing really nasty things like strangling people to death. To deal with that, Jonathan decides a change is in order, and takes a job as an adjunct professor at an unorthodox college in rural northern California, where he's going to teach cartoon drawing to people who are about as talented as Billy Crystal's students in Throw Momma From the Train.

Unfortunately, Jonathan continues to have those horrible visions. He makes a friend in the form of fellow instructor Brian Ferguson (Bruce McGill), and then suddenly, one of his students shows up at his house in the woods. That student, Stella, doesn't know what she wants to do in life, but is more than comfortable having sex with Jonathan which ought to be a big no-no not just because Jonathan is married but because sex between teacher and student is way wrong. Then again, it also turns out that Stella had been thinking of going down to Los Angeles with Brian for the Christmas holidays, which leads to the movie's climactic finale.

The Hand received poor reviews at the time of its release, and having watched it it's not hard to see why. The movie has a glacial pace, and a lot of the time it feels like there's not a lot going on. And for what is supposed to be a horror movie, it's not as if there's that much horror, not even of the sort in a Val Lewton movie where the horror is not explicit but desiged to be in the viewer's mind. Michael Caine tries, but even he can't save this one.

However, The Hand has apparently become a bit of a cult film in the intervening years, so watch and judge for yourself.

High Aces

Another movie that TCM ran during their Summer Under the Stars salute to Christoper Plummer was a World War I aviation drama called Aces High. I'd never heard of it before and, as it turns out, this was a TCM premiere, which might explain why I hadn't heard of it. Well, that and, after having seen the movie, I understood why it doesn't get shown all that often.

Plummer plays Capt. Sinclair, a pilot during World War I, although we don't see him at first. Instead, the action opens at Eton in 1916, where the next group of students is about to be graduated. John Gielgud, in a cameo role as the headmaster, leads the students in prayer before introducing them to a former student of theirs now serving with distinction, Maj. John Gresham (Malcolm McDowell). One of the students he speaks to, Stephem Croft (Peter Firth), is the kid brother of Gresham's girlfriend.

A year passes, and Croft is now a lieutenant who is serving with the air corps precisely because he looked up to Gresham and wanted to serve under Gresham. However, what he finds isn't all that it's cracked up to be as the air base is a bunch of bombed-out houses in some god-forsaken French village not far from the front lines. Croft doesn't yet realize how stressful and difficult aerial combat is, or the high attrition rate that it leads to, with the concomitant fatalism. Sinclair is Gresham's second-in-command, and warns Croft not to look up too highly to Gresham because of what war does to people.

The pilots go up and engage in dogfighting -- this is, after all, a World War I movie -- and in one of the first dogfights Gresham saves Croft's life, which is only going to make things more difficult for Gresham who doesn't want Croft to look up to him. There's a German pilot shot down and the alleged custom that a pilot shot down is for 24 hours the personal prisoner of the pilot who did the shooting. And then there are also unsuccessful missions that result in English pilots getting shot, which greatly darkens the mood in the British camp.

One way to deal with all of this is to see the proverbial "girl in every port", which Croft is given the opportunity to do as well, although this leads to more disillusionment as well when Croft goes back to see the girl again and finds that she's seeing a French officer. Finally, the pilots are asked to take part in a more dangerous mission to deal with some German balloons that are being used for surveillance. The balloons are harder to get rid of, and defended to the point that going after them results in a lot of surface-to-air shooting.

I suppose that if you're an aviation buff, there's a good deal to like in Aces High, as there's a fair bit of aerial combat footage. But as for the movie as a whole, it didn't quite work for me. The plot feels really muddled, with too many cameos (Ray Milland and Trevor Howard also appear) leading to extraneous scenes. The various pilots at the base are also too alike that it's a bit difficult to keep track of everything that's going on.

Briefs for July 18-19, 2026

I have to admit that I haven't been watching as many movies recently with the soccer World Cup on. For a while, I was about four weeks ahead in my posts here, but it's gone down to a bit over two weeks. The tournament ends tomorrow, which I suppose is also a good time for me to hunt down my DVD of Victory and watch it again. Not a great movie by any means, but a lot of fun.

Where I've really been remiss is in not posting obituaries of people who have died, although to be fair that's become a bit of an issue ever since I started getting ahead in terms of my movie posts instead of having the discipline of writing up one new post and putting it up that day. I think the first one would be Louise Lasser, who appeared in several of Woody Allen's early films before reaching even greater fame on TV with Norman Lear's comic soap opera Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman. Lasser, who died on August 6, was 87.

British actress Joanna Pettet, who appeared in some 60s movies I've blogged about like Night of the Generals and The Group, died on August 7 at the age of 83. One of the movies that Wikipedia's deaths page mentions is the 1970s horror film The Evil, which is one of those films I kind of wonder whether I've seen since those 1970s horror films have a way of blending together. But a search of the blog doesn't bring it up. I guess I'll have to search it out and add it to the pile of movies I've got to get around to watching.

Sam Neill is probably the best-known of the current crop of obituaries, as he appeared in some highly underrated little 1980s movies like Dead Calm and A Cry in the Dark. Of course, those get a bit overlooked because in 1993 he starred in a movie you might have heard of called Jurassic Park. Neill died August 13 at 78, and apparently has a couple of posthumous releases currently scheduled for next year.

And there's Oscar-winning actress Brenda Fricker. Fricker won the Oscar for playing Christy Brown's mother in My Left Foot, although would probably be better known to casual film fans from bigger-budget Hollywood films like the second Home Alone movie or the remake of Angels in the Outfield. Fricker died on Thursday; she was 81.

Over the Edge

Teens in trouble have been a staple in movies, although during the studio era it was more an exploitation movie thing. With the end of the Production Code Hollywood started giving us somewhat less unrealistic fare. One of those more recent films showed up on one of the FAST channels, giving me the opportunity to catch the second half of it: Over the Edge. So when TCM ran it, I recorded it to be able to watch the whole thing commercial-free.

Opening narration about vandalism gives way to a new-build community called New Granada, CO, which is not fully built out yet, which seems like a bit of a problem because who would want to bring their family to a community that's still half under construction? And as such, you can understand why the teens are in such a state of discontent. One such teen, Mark (Vincent Spano) takes his BB gun out on an overpass and shoots at a police car, which is obviously a problem. Seeing this is Richie (Matt Dillin in his film debut), who races away, but gets found by the police Carl Willat (Michael Kramer), the "good kid". They're taken to the police station, and it's intimated that this isn't Richie's first go-round with the juvenile justice system.

Carl is shown as being from an upper-middle-class family where his father (Andy Romano) is a car salesman and one of the community leaders trying to bring new business to New Granada. It's community leadership that leaves him terribly out of touch about the state of the teens in town, and a sharp contrast from what Richie's family is like. Their one hangout isn't a mall like it would be in Southern California, but a youth rec center that's a construction site of its own, with a corrugated metal roof and the one do-gooder adult in the movie running it. When the Willetts drive by what was originally planned to be the sort of bowling alley/sports place that kids could hang out at and find that its use is changing to an industrial park, it's enough to hurt poor Carl.

Since Carl isn't going to have much else to do, he falls in with Richie and the rest of the teens in town. This isn't the sort of place that has the well-defined cliques of later teen movies in the 1980s, so they all go to the same house party and otherwise hang out together at an abandoned house, as well as doing target shooting with a gun that Carl's would-be girlfriend found.

Unfortunately, all this petty criminality goes wrong, leading to Richie "borrowing" his mom's car, picking up Carl, and going for a joyride that tresults in the police following the two and shooting Richie when the policeman sees Richie's gun. Richie dies, and poor Carl is really in trouble now, much too young to be off on his own but not really able to go home. The adults are increasingly alarmed. They already held one assembly that obviously didn't work, and now they're going to hold another. This time, however, the teens come up with a way that's bound to get the parents' attention. I don't want to say exactly what happens, but I will say I was quite surprised to see the climax that the movie had.Over the Edge is supposedly based on a real story, or perhaps inspired by a story about a new-build community where things went badly wrong with the teens. I'm not certain quite how realistic the movie is, but then I should admit that my childhood was quite a lot different from a lot of people's. That, and I'd be about 10 years younger, so a late 80s adolescence was probably also rather different from a late 70s adolescence. Over the Edge is interesting, although I do have to say that I found the acting rather variable in quality. And really, is every single adult in this town that stupid and clueless?

Still, Over the Edge is a movie that's absolutely worth watching.

Better than stepping on somebody else's toes

I've mentioned in a couple of other movies that I've blogged about here that both James Gleason and Donald O'Connor were selected to be part of TCM's Summer Under the Stars in August 2025. As it turns out, they also did a movie together, although the structure of the movie makes their common appearance rather brief: On Your Toes.

Gleason plays Phil Dolan Sr. the patriarch of a family still trying to make it in vaudeville even though it's a dying business. Queenie Smith plays Mom, while O'Connor plays a young Phil Dolan Jr. Dad wants him to keep going with vaudeville, while Mom insists he get an education. Another of the acts in the same troupe as the Dolans has a young ballet dancer of Russian descent, Vera Barnova, although her act leaves the troupe.

In any case, 15 years pass and Phil Jr. (played as an adult by Eddie Albert) has gotten something of an education, trying to make it as a songwriter and, if possible, a "serious" composer. In a hotel lobby he runs into grifting Ivan Boultonoff (Leonid Kinskey), a composer for a Russian emigre ballet company managed by equally grifting Sergei Alexandrovitch (Alan Hale). Ivan offers to give Phil music composition lessons, although it's as much a way for him to hear Phil's ideas, and liking them, get them to Sergei. That, and get the main credit for the music since the orchestrations are going to be his. Phil's recompense, as it were, is going to be dancing a minor role in the current show.

And wouldn't you know it, but the prima ballerina of the company is none other than... Vera Barnova, also all grown up (and played by Vera Zorina). The two meet again and rekindle a friendship, although it's expected that Vera is going to have a more serious relationship with one of the male dancers. But having a friend in the prima ballerina is a valuable thing to have. With that in mind, when things go south with a male lead, Phil's vaudeville dance experience comes in handy as he knows all the dance moves for what's going to be an experimental jazz ballet.

What Vera and Phil don't know is that, for various reasons, a group of Russian agents have been brought in to assassinate the original Russian lead dancer as part of the climax to the jazz ballet. Vera and Phil do eventually learn of this plot, but it's mid-performance, forcing them to try to keep dancing long enough for the authorities to stop the murder from going forward and catching the responsible guilty parties.

On Your Toes is based on a Rodgers and Hart musical that, to be honest, I hadn't heard of before seeing the movie. Having read the reviews of the movie, it seems that enough was changed from the original stage musical -- or at least enough of the traditional songs removed -- that fans of the stage musical aren't fans of this movie adaptation. At the same time, the ballet numbers we get in the movie are apparently faithful renditions from the original stage musical, and are considered highlights. For me, not having seen the stage musical, I don't have that issue. I do have other issues with it, however, such as the grifting nature of Ivan and Sergei that it makes them both more unsympathetic than humorous.

So, On Your Toes may not be for everybody, but some people are really going to like it.