Another Two for One repeat

I mentioned last week how TCM is re-running the spring season of Two for One in the fall, and how this is giving me the opportunity to put up a couple of posts on films that I recorded the first time around and am now able to watch to do these posts. The guest for tonight, Sept. 19, is actress Sheryl Lee Ralph, and one of her selections is one of her first movie roles, in support of Sidney Poitier in A Piece of the Action at 10:00 PM.

An introductory sequence shows Dave Anderson (Bill Cosby), master safe-cracker, getting into the Chicago headquarters of a loan corporation where they keep the safe full of cash. Dave gets into the safe, steals a large sum of money, and is able to get away by jumping out a window into a truck below and driving off.

Cut to a completely unrelated crook, Manny Durrell (Sidney Poitier). He's studied the movements of illegal bookmker Mr. Bruno (Titos Vandis), and uses that to set up what looks like a police raid of Bruno's upscale home where the books and a lot of cash are kept. Bruno fills a briefcase full of cash and gives it to the maid to take to a trusted source. In fact, the maid is working for Manny and she's the one with the cash that Manny is bilking out of Bruno, which would also explain why she didn't get pinched while leaving the house when the police were surrounding it. Those fake police were also working for Burrell.

Meanwhile, during the raid, Bruno calls his mole in the police department to find out what's going on. That mole talks to Det. Joshua Burke (James Earl Jones), which is how Bruno learns it's a fake raid and is going to get whoever is responsible. Meanwhile, Burke is set to retire in a few months. When he does, the first thing he does is write a couple of anonymous letters, to Manny and Dave, as well as a third. Manny and Dave's notes inform them that somebody knows about those jobs we saw at the opening, with a threat to send the two of them to prison if they don't meet the writer at a certain hotel suite. The two men are then directed the next day to a restaurant where they'll learn what their "punishment" entails.

In fact, they don't meet the letter writer, but the recipient of the third letter, Lila French (Denise Nicholas). She runs a community center that is trying to help inner-city youth by doing things such as finding them jobs, even though these are clearly embittered youths. (Sheryl Lee Ralph plays one of the youths.) The letter writer has put Dave's name to the letter, saying that Dave and Manny would be happy to "volunteer" an extremely generous amount of time to the center, which they're forced into doing although Lila doesn't seem bright enough to figure out there's some sort of blackmail going on here.

At this point, the movie really starts to sag as the inner-city youths seem like a bunch of stock character types; I will admit however, that I have no idea whether inner-city adolescents would in fact have acted like that. They come across as being as much of a stereotype as the Sweathogs on Welcome Back, Kotter. But Dave and Manny have an obligation to help them get jobs since that will keep them out of jail. They also use their in at the improvement center to try to figure out who exactly is blackmailing them. Meanwhile, Bruno is busy looking for the people who robbed him out of all that money, and he's going to figure it out in time for the movie's climax....

A Piece of the Action is another of those movies that sounds like a good idea on paper, but doesn't quite work in practice. One is that I've already mentioned how the young people don't quite seem real here. There's also the fact that it's trying to be a drama with some comedy when it should really be a comedy with some drama. I have a feeling that Sidney Poitier, who also directed, wanted to have the movie serve as social commentary on the issues of the inner city. But the biggest flaw is that the film sags at a massive 135 minutes, which is really much too long for the material. It's the sort of film that should really be clocking in at an hour and a half or so.

Still, I'm sure there are people who will enjoy A Piece of the Action more than I did, since it's one of those movies that has its heart in the right place.

Over the Moon

Merle Oberon was TCM's Star of the Month some time back, which gave me the opportunity to record a couple of movies that I hadn't seen before. One of them was Over the Moon, an early Technicolor movie out of Britain.

Oberon stars as Jane Benson, a young woman living in Yorkshire at a time when Yorkshire was a bit of a backwater. She's helping take care of a rich distant relative since she doesn't have all that much money of her own. She's got a local doctor, Freddie Jarvis (Rex Harrison), interested in her to the point that he's about to sell his local practice for £5,000 in part so he can pay for a honeymoon in Monte Carlo before trying to get a practice in London after the wedding.

And then the relative dies. He had owned coal mines and, unbenknownst to anybody, bequeaths his entire estate to Jane, a sum of £18 million, which was vast for about 1938 when the movie started production. (Despite the political situation in Europe at the time, especially considering the movie didn't get released in the UK until after World War II started, there's no mention of politics in the movie.) This new-found wealth causes problems. Jane has never had any wealth, and would like to live a little, if not a lot. After all, being worth eight figures in 1938 pounds sterling is nothing to sneeze at. But Freddie is displeased with it, because he's got the good sense to realize that this sudden wealth is going to cause issues in their relationship.

Meanwhile, a couple of grifters show up in Yorkshire claiming to be distant relatives of Jane's from London. They claim they're going to look out for her interests, but it should be clear to any normal human being that these are not people to be trusted. But they plan to take Jane down to Monte Carlo in search of that wealthy husband and have just the man for her. As for Freddie, he goes off to Switzerland to work at one of those alpine private clinics for the wealthy that were a thing in the pre-war years. He becomes quite the hit with the ladies, although he's oblivious to the extent to which they moon over him.

When Jane gets to Monte Carlo, she has not two, but three men pursuing her. Two of them are the con-artist partners of the women claiming they're trying to "help" Jane, while the third is man with a phony name (Robert Douglas) who is in fact the son of one of Britain's wealthiest men and worth even more than Jane. He knows that wealth brings as many problems as it solves and is there to warn her. Surprisingly, nobody recognizes him as the son of an extremely wealthy man.

The Strange World of Planet X

Some time back, I did a post on a British sci-fi movie that got picked up by Warner Bros. for distribtuion in the US, Satellite in the Sky. Another movie with a similar provenance, albeit with a much smaller budget, was Cosmic Monsters, also known as The Strange World of Planet X.

Alec Mango plays Dr. Laird, who is doing experiments for the British Ministry of Defense in one of those old manor houses in a small countryside village where the basement has been converted into a laboratory with suitably photogenic equipment. However, something goes wrong with the experiment, leading to an explosion, which really gets the attention of the military types in London. To that end, they send a computer expert, although this is the primitive sort of computing since it's the 1950s, named Michele Dupont (Gaby André). The problem, at least in Dr. Laird's estimateion, is that Dupont is... a woman! Shock! Horror!

Anyhow, also in the group of scientists is an American Gil Graham (Forrest Tucker), who is probably there to make distribution of the movie in America more palatable for American audiences. Anyhow, the merry band of scientists -- or not so merry band because the next experiment also goes wrong and has the scientists bickering at each other -- continues the experiments in electromagnetic fields. As I said, the experiment goes wrong, causing a briefcase to go flying across the lab and nearly clocking Michele. Gil saves her. If the experiment that caused London to send Michele to the lab got the attention of the folks in London, this one really does, because it gives them the impression that something about the apparatus could be weaponized.

Not that anyone in the general public knows what's going on in that laboratory, but this second failed experiment also gets their attention, since it caused lightning storms, a seeming meteorite, and other such fun stuff. Graham also determines there's something not a part of their experiment that may still be providing power to the apparatus.

And then a "Mr. Smith" (Martin Benson) shows up in the village. He's clearly an outsider, since there's so much about local life that he doesn't know, although he knows enough about electromagnetism that it's obvious to anybody who knows about the experiment why he's shown up in town. But what does he really want?

As I said, Cosmic Monsters is a fairly low-budget affair, and has a lot of the tropes of American B sci-fi of the era. The exception is that, having been made in Britain, there's something just slightly enough different as to make it noticeable. It's interesting, but not nearly as good as another country life sci-fi from the Britain of the era, Village of the Damned.

The Last of the Mohicans (1936)

One of those books that's relatively well-known as a book, and which has had multiple adaptations to film, is James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans. Surprisingly, I had never read the book or seen any of the film adaptations until TCM ran the 1936 version of The Last of the Mohicans. With that in mind, I recorded it and finally sat down to watch it.

In 1757, it was the second year of the Seven Years' War, which was fought on multiple continents among all the great European powers. The North American portion of that conflict is generally called the French and Indian War, fought because France and Britain disputed the boundary in the Mississippi River watershed among other things. France used its allies among the various native groups to harass British settlers, especially in the more northerly colonies since native tribes could come down from French Canada as well. The British have set up Fort William Henry at what is now the southern end of Lake George in New York, with Albany being the gateway to the Adirondacks as well as the Mohawk valley. The British want the settlers to help them fight against the French, but the settlers understand that their real conflict is not with the French but the Indians and want British help to go after the Indians.

Alice (Binnie Barnes) and Cora (Heather Angel) Munro are the two adult daughters of Col. Munro who is stationed at Fort William Henry. The want to go from Albany to the fort to be with him, and set out with British officer Maj. Heyward (Henry Wilcoxon) to get to Lake George. It's a dangerous overland trip, and sure enough Magua (Bruce Cabot), a Huron Indian guiding the British, turns on them. The British are saved by Natty Bumppo (Randolph Scott), better known as Hawkeye. Hawkeye is working with a rival but dying tribe, the Mohicans, and he's traveling with the Mohicans Uncas and Chingachgook.

When everybody gets to Fort William Henry, it's soon besieged by the French, with Magua planning to take the Hurons and murder the defenseless settlers. Hawkeye learns of this, and defies direct orders from the British and removes the settler militia to go defend the other settlers. This can be seen as insubordination, or worse, desertion, and is an act that could carry the death penalty. Except that there are more pressing matters to deal with before there can be any court-martial.

Magua has fallen for Cora, although she and Uncas of the Mohicans also have a thing. Meanwhile, Alice and Hawkeye are in love with each other. So Magua kidnaps the two women in order that he can have the bride he wants on one hand and an important hostage on the other hand. News comes that the Huron are planning to burn Alice alive at the stake. Hawkeye and Maj. Heyward both know that the one real way to save Alice is for one of them to sacrifice himself and take Alice's place at the stake, leading to a climax that certainly would have excited audiences of 1936.

The one big weakness of this version of The Last of the Mohicans is that it's the sort of movie that hasn't aged terribly well. It's got Hollywood's inaccurate view of the native tribes, something that's probably going to bother at least a certain portion of audiences in 2026. The "location" shooting, in various parts of California away from Hollywood, is about the best Hollywood could do in those days since location shooting someplace more distant would probably have been a logistical nightmare. On the plus side, Randolph Scott gives another fine performance showing that he was a pretty versatile actor before he decamped to westerns in the last 15 or 20 years of his career.

I still haven't read the book, and also haven't seen the Daniel Day-Lewis version of the movie, so I can't compare. But this version of The Last of the Mohicans stands on its own as a pretty good movie with some flaws.

Teenage Doll

Tomorrow afternoon, Sept. 16, sees a lineup of movies starring actresses who were discovered young. One of them who didn't exactly go on to big things was June Kenney. She appears in the trashy Teenage Doll, which concludes the afternoon at 6:45 PM.

The movie opens with credits of a woman falling from the roof of a building to her death, much like Eva Marie Saint's brother in On the Waterfront. The young woman is a member of a girls' gang called the Black Widows, led by Helen (Fay Spain). She suspects that the dead woman was pushed by one of her fellow gang members. Or at least, that's a convenient excuse, since what would any normal person be doing in this sort of place at this time of night. And with the police coming, Helen needs to think fast. Thankfully, she's got just the idea of how to deal with this.

The Black Widows are sort of the women's arm of a fellow gang called the Tarantulas. The one exception is Barbara Bonney (June Kenney). She's closer to a "good girl" who's new to the area and somehow fell in with the wrong gang, pun intended. But she also had a relationship with Eddie Rand (John Brinkley), which is more of a problem. Eddie isn't a member of the Tarantulas, but a rival gang called the Vandals. As such, it would be convenient for Helen and the rest of the Black Widows to turn Barbara in to the police and make her the scapegoat. And Helen is none too circumspect about it, telling Barbara right out that this is what she plans to do, so Barbara should just give up right now.

At this point, the movie develops by going to the back-stories of several of the girls and how their lives probably made them want to join a gang. Helen has a mother who works all night because Dad is supposedly on disability, but he's seeing other women on the side. Another lives with her kid sister, and has decided to go out on a date with her boss because she knows it will be financially remunerative. A third, a girl of Mexican heritage, is supposed to be working at the family business but steals money from the cash register. Barbara has "good" parents, although Barbara's mom had a boyfriend during Prohibition who got killed in one of the gangland killings of the 1920s and doesn't want Barbara to end up like that. Barbara's father is at heart not bad, but it stupidly strict and ignorant of what his daughter does.

Barbara, being in danger, runs out to the Vandals' headquarters in the hopes that Eddie can help her, although if anything her actions are simply putting herself and the Vandals in greater danger because it's obvious that the Black Widows and Tarantulas are going to find them. It all leads up to a finale that I suppose satisfies the Production Code while at the same time being suitably lurid for the teen audience.

Teenage Doll was produced and directed by Roger Corman early in his career. Objectively, it's another of those movies that's not very good. But Roger Corman knew what to do even on a limited budget, and he's able to take material like this and turn it into something entertaining because of just how trashy it is. June Kenney never became a big star, and frankly it's not that hard to see why. Still, Teenage Doll is dumb fun, and definitely worth a watch.

Latin Lovers

Tonight's second night of Ricardo Montalbán's turn as TCM's Star of the Month kicks off with a movie of his that I had never gotten around to watching before, but was on my DVR: Latin Lovers, tonight at 8:00 PM.

Although Montalbán is Star of the Month and the male lead here, we don't actually see him for a good half hour or so. Instead, the movie kicks off with female lead Lana Turner. She plays Nora Taylor, a woman who went from rags to riches when he struck oil during Nora's childhood, before dying fairly young. Nora manages the money -- all $37 million of it -- by figuring the best way to keep your money from drying up is work and investment. Deep down inside, however, she's worried that men are only going to be interested in her for her money, and is seeing a psychologist about it (Eduard Franz, whose scenes with the character's wife are the comic relief in the film). This, even though he current boyfriend Paul Chevron (John Lund) is also worth eight figures.

Paul is planning to tell Nora he's going to marry her, but his hangup is being too forward, so after going to an analyst of his own (Beulah Bondi in a cameo), he decides instead that he's going to give Nora time to consider the proposal while he goes down to Brazil to look at polo ponies, since that's what rich people do. Now, all of this happens before we meet the Montalbán character, so we know that Paul isn't going to return from Brazil to a Nora who says yes and they live happily ever after.

Instead, Nora hears that it's apparently a thing for rich guys to go to Latin America and fall in love with the beautiful Latin ladies, a fate that Nora doesn't want to have happen. So she decides she's going to take her secretary Anne (Jean Hagen) and go down to Rio and get a suite of rooms on the same floor as Paul, who has no idea about any of this. The other question of who's running their respective businesses also never gets adequately answered.

Here is where Ricardo Montalbán comes in. He plays a rancher named Roberto Santos, living on the old family ranch with his impossibly young grandfather (Louis Calhern). Paul goes out to the ranch for business; Nora goes with him; she meets Roberto and immediately falls head over heels for his Latin good looks. Since Montalbán is billed above John Lund and he's not a wooden drip like John Lund, we know who's going to end up with whom at the end of the movie. The question, of course, is how we get there.

And there are a lot of complications considering that Nora is this close to being engaged to Paul. She's also worried about what's going to happen when Roberto finds out about her wealth. Then there's his stereotypical Latin attitude toward gender roles. At least in this case, part of his defense is that Nora was stupid enough to show up way late to a meeting at the Santos ranch and then expect him to drop everything for her. She deserved some of the treatment she got.

Latin Lovers is a competently made film that's not exactly bad so much as it is predictable and modest in its aims. It's the sort of thing that would have entertained audiences in the days before television, although by 1953 when this one was made I can't help but think audiences might have been interested in authentic location shooting. Think Three Coins in the Fountain from a year later. Latin Lovers is OK, but ultimately unmemorable.

Rogue's March

I think I've stated on several occasions that I'm not the biggest fan of Peter Lawford, as his performances are generally fairly wooden. However, I had another of his films on my DVR, Rogue's March, so I watched it to put up another post here.

The movie is set in the late Victorian era, when Britain has control over India although the Russians would like to have access to a warm-water port. To that end the Russians have been supporting the Afghans who are on the border of the British possessions just across the Khyber Pass. Lawford plays Dion Lenbridge, a captain in the Royal Midland Fusiliers, who has a family tradition of serving in the regiment as his father Henry (Leo G. Carroll) is a colonel in the regiment. Dion also has a girlfriend Jane (Janice Rule) he's planning to marry.

Except that the Russians bugger things up. The Russian embassy in London has one of Dion's underlings as a spy, and that underling has absconded with some documents that the Russians are supposed to copy before returning them to where they're kept under lock and key and for which Dion is responsible. This being the days before tiny cameras that could take photographs of the documents, they have to be taken for a substantial amount of time to be copied. Unfortunately, the Russians don't have enough time as the Fusiliers are called to service on the restive frontier between British India and Afghanistan.

That call-up screws up Dion's plans for marriage, but far worse is that the missing documents get Dion arrested and court-martialled for the missing documents. Not helping is the fact that the Russians kill the real culprit, leaving Dion with no defense. He's tried and convicted, but for whatever reason not sentenced to death. Now, of course, since this all happens within the first 15 minutes or so, we know this isn't going to be the end of the movie. Indeed, Dion escapes from prison somehow (not enough detail is paid to the how here). He also has the brilliant idea of reenlisting in the army, albeit it in a different regiment under a different identity and starting off as a private. He figures this is the last place the authorities will ever look for him, and besides, the regiment he joins up with is likely to be sent to Singapore, far away from where his old regiment is and even farther away from Britain.

But, woudln't you know it, things heat up in India, and while Dion's new regiment is on its way to Singapore, they get orders that they actually have to go to India. Dion is for understandable reasons worried that he's going to be found out, but there's not much he can do. At least, not until the Afghans actually attack and Dion sees his chance to serve with distinction. Worse, this Afghan attack is engineered by one of the Russians who was at the embassy in London and responsible for ordering the taking of those documents for which Dion was court-martialled in the first place. That Russians' confession allows us to have the requisite happy ending.

Rogue's March is very much a programmer, and definitely not nearly as good as it could have been. This is a movie that cries out for color cinematography, but we get flat black and white, allegedly filmed partly at the real Khyber Pass. It also doesn't help that we have Peter Lawford again, who doesn't exactly impress, in a by-the-numbers story that has an implausible set-up and ending. There's a reason I hadn't hear of Rogue's March before, and a reason why it's not very memorable.

Kanał

Having finished with Summer Under the Stars, we get to that part of the year on TCM where Saturday nights see a repeat of the Two for One interviews that ran during the spring. That also means the chance for stuff I recorded during the spring airings to get a mention new since the movies will be airing again. The guest presenter for tonight is Bill Hader, whom you may recall having done Essentials Jr. for a couple of years back in the 2010s. He selected two foreign films, both of which I recorded, so we'll start off with the first one, Kanał at 8:00 PM.

Kanał is the Polish word for "sewer", and the movie tells us about an episode from the Warsaw Uprising that is in part set in the sewers under the streets of Warsaw. For those who don't know the precise history, Nazi Germany attacked Poland from the west on September 1, 1939, and conquered the western half of the country including Warsaw by the end of the month, while the Soviets overran the eastern half and annexed it. Recall that the Soviets and Germans were allies under the Molotov von-Ribbentrop Pact until June 1941 when Germany invaded the Soviet Union. By the summer of 1944 with the D-Day invasion it was clear that Germany was going to lose the war, so on August 1, 1944, the Polish Underground started an uprising called the Warsaw Uprising.

As Kanał opens, it's late September, 1944, and equally clear that the uprising is doomed to failure. A narrator tells us that we're witnessing the last hours in the lives of several participants in the uprising. Lt. Zadra (meaning "Splinter", all of the characters have nicknames instead of real names) leads a platoon of soldiers to a house in a portion of Warsaw near the front line but not fully bombed out yet from where he's hoping to moiunt a defense. Among the soldiers are Korab; a record-keeper; a female guide (not uncommon in the uprising) named Stokrotka (Daisy); and others, with Vladek Sheybal playing a composer we presume wasn't intending to fight in the uprising but got caught up in it.

Unfortunately, the house is in a position that's quickly going to be indefensible too, so the decision is made to retreat, except that the only way to retreat is to go underground into the sewers and come out in a different section of Warsaw. This requires knowing where the various sewer lines lead, as they're not particularly well-mapped. Complicating matters is that Korab has picked up an injury and cannot keep pace with the rest of the soldiers. Stokrotka offers to stay behind and help Korab as everybody else can move faster and she knows the sewers like the back of her hand.

The sewers are, of course, dark and filthy, looming around the Poles almost like as much of the enemy as the Germans are. There's also always the possibility of the sound the Polish soldiers make with the movements carrying to the manholes where Germans might be able to hear them, while the darkness could lead them to get lost as well as inducing panic. It's unrelentingly grim, even if we didn't know that the uprising was dommed to failure.

Kanał is a movie that's very well made, although it's a bit tough to rate because of how uncomfortable it can be to watch. It's also complicated by the fact it was made under Communism back in 1957. One aspect of the uprising was the hope that they could hold off the Germans long enough to make a Soviet advance quicker and therefore liberate the city more quickly. However, the Soviets felt that it was more convenient to let the Poles be the ones losing forces to try to stop the Germans. The increased the enmity the Poles felt towards Soviets, but was something that couldn't be mentioned in 1957.

At least Mickey Rooney doesn't strip

A movie that Eddie Muller presented on Noir Alley some months back that I was surprised to see I hadn't blogged about before considering it's an MGM movie with Mickey Rooney is The Strip. It's schuled to air tomorrow, Sept. 12, at noon as part of TCM's Saturday Musical Matinee with Dave Karger, so I watched the movie so that I could put up a review here.

The Strip, of course, refers to the "Sunset Strip", that portion of Sunset Boulevard in what is now West Hollywood, not quite as far west as where Joe Gillis got the swimming pool he always wanted. At the time of the movie, it was in an unincorporated area of Los Angeles County, meaning that the only government was the county (and therefore the sheriff's department, not the LAPD) with no municipal government. After an opening narration informing us of all this, the police come to the apartment of one Jane Tafford (Sally Forrest). She's in very bad shape, but not as bad shape as Delwyn "Sonny" Johnson (James Craig). He's quite dead.

Stanley Maxton (Mickey Rooney) knew both of them, and he's known to have plans to leave the Los Angeles area, so that makes him a natural suspect in the murder and the attempted murder. He's brought in for questioning, and he tells us his story in that most original of all Hollywood plot devices, the flashback. Stanley was originally from Los Angeles before being drafted to fight in Korea, where he got injured enough to wind up in a series of Army hospitals before his last stop in Kansas City. His buddies at the hospital know he was a drummer in the before times, so now that he's getting discharged they spring to buy him a drum set to start life again in Los Angeles.

Unfortunately, on the way west, he gets in a car accident caused by the other driver, which also destroys his drums, which probably shouldn't have been on the passenger and back seats of a convertible anyway. That other man is the aforementioned Sonny Johson, who offers to pay for the drums as well as offering Stanley a good job out in Los Angeles.

The only catch is that the job isn't exactly legal, since Sonny runs the numbers racket for a good portion of Los Angeles. It makes Stanley good money, but brings him to the attention of the police. It's in trying to escape the police that Stanley first runs into Jane, who works as a cigarette girl at Fluff's (William Demarest) nightclub on the Strip. Jane, however, has dreams of becoming a movie star. Part of the policy Fluff has is wanting to meet the prospective dates of his female employees, knowing that the wrong guy can be a bad influence and bring the police his way. Not that Stanley is a bad guy; Fluff, on learning that Stanley plays the drums, would like Stanley to give up his job and become a drummer in the house band which is a prestigious job considering the bandleader is Louis Armstrong.

Stanley and Jane start a romantic relationship, although Jane isn't ready to settle down since she still wants that chance at stardom. Stanley knows that Sonny has an in with any number of Hollywood types, so he introduces Jane to Sonny, telling Sonny in no uncertain terms that Jane is his girl, not Sonny's. Yeah, right. You know that Sonny is going to waste no time putting the moves on Jane while Stanley becomes incredibly jealous, leading to a shooting that we know is going to happen since all of this is in flashback and we were already informed of the shooting at the beginning of the movie.

There's nothing original to the plot of The Strip, although it holds up reasonably well thanks in part to Mickey Rooney's performance. That, and all the jazz music going on here, which is probably the real highlight of the film.

Baxter! (1973)

TCM did a spotlight on Hanna-Barbera a while back. They're best known for their cartoons, but the company actually helped produce a couple of live-action movies too. One example of this was Baxter!.

The movie opens on a plane that's flying from Los Angeles to London. Roger Baxter (Scott Jacoby) is an adolescent flying with his mother (Lynn Carlin) to what is going to be his new home, although how she was able to get a nice place in London isn't quite mentioned. Roger's parents are getting divorced, and Roger is none too happy with the move, in part because his mom doesn't really care about him, or at least that's the impression he gets -- she seems to be more concerned with her own appearance.

Compounding the problem is that Roger has a speech defect. Like Kay Francis (who was rather too dead to essay this role herself), Roger can't really pronounce the letter R, which is a problem considering his name starts with one. That might have caused problems with the relationships within the family, but worse is that it's left him an introvert. How is he going to make new friends in London? And yet he does.

On the way up the elevator to their apartment, Roger and his mom meet the people who live one floor above them, Chris (Britt Ekland) and her French chef boyfriend, who just happens to be named Roger as well (Jean-Pierre Cassell), although his "Roger" is pronounced in the French way, "Ro-ZHAY". But it's enough of a connection for the boy to take to the couple, and since the elder Roger isn't a native English speaker, he has less of an issue with somebody having difficulty speaking the language properly. They even invite him for a weekend out in the country. There's also a girl about his age living across the street, who spies on him because he has a tendency to step out on the balcony wearing just his tighty-whiteys.

And then, at school, Roger gets sent to the speech therapist, Dr. Clemm (Patricia Neal). She's not just a speech therapist, but the sort of person who's seen enough children to know that the problems that show up in her office aren't always just physical problems. Considering how Roger's mom drinks too much and treats him like crap, while his dad is busy playing poker back in Beverly Hills, it's no wonder why young Roger is so badly adjusted.

He seems to be making progress, at least until he gets caught out in a cold rain and winds up with a case of pneumonia that sends him to the hospital. Dr. Clemm checks up on him, which is certainly understandable. But it leads to her understanding that Roger needs time away from his mom, who wants to bring him home as soon as possible, a sentiment that is also not unreasonable even if the movie paints Mrs. Baxter as being obviously in the wrong. This leads to things going even more badly for poor little Roger.

Apparently, Baxter! didn't do very well at the box office. Despite the small number of reviews on IMDb being almost entire positive, it's not hard to see why the movie wasn't very successful. It meanders, and while a lot of the characters are naturally unlikable, Roger came across as a bit too obnoxious for his own good at times. The production values also feel more like a 1970s TV movie of the week, ending with one of those nonsense freeze-frames that were in vogue in movies of the early 1970s.