In which Paul Henreid buckles swashes

It's been longer than I thought since I had a post on a pirate movie. With one of them about to expire fro the DVR -- The Spanish Main, I watched it so that I could write up a post on it and schedule it here. And then after writing up this post, I saw that TCM scheduled it for early tomorrow (Sept. 9) at 3:15 AM as part of the TCM spotlight of swashbuckling movies, so now is when it finally gets scheduled.

Paul Henreid stars as Laurent van Horn, a Dutch ship's captain who is taking a bunch of Dutch to the Carolinas circa 1720 to settle. A storm blows them wildly off course, since they're rescued in the Caribbean and taken to the colony at Cartagena, which is modern-day Colombia. That also happens to be part of a ring of colonies that control much of the Caribbean coast all the way up to the Gulf of Mexico. Non-Spanish ships are in decided danger there, even if they're blown off course. The local colonial viceroy, Don Juan Alvarado (Walter Slezak), takes van Horn and puts him in prison with plans to hang him. But several of the prisoners are able to effect an escape.

Fast-forward five years. There's a ship predating what the Spanish think should be their sea, one called the Barracuda, and the captain of that ship has been given that name by the Spanish since they don't know his real identity. As for van Horn, he's working as a navigator that's taking Francisca (Maureen O'Hara) to be married off to a man she's never seen before in what is clearly a political marriage. Her father is the viceroy of Mexico, while her husband-to-be is... Don Juan Alvarado, still viceroy of Cartagena. The Barracuda shows up to pirate the Spanish ship, and it turns out that the captain of the Barracuda is actually van Horn! Francisca decides to do a noble thing, which is to surrender herself to van Horn and let him marry her with the proviso that he'll not kill the people on the ship she was on or its escort. Of course, the other reason she had is that she finds van Horn so damn handsome.

The Barracuda puts in at Tortuga, where we learn that among the pirates is Anne Bonny (Binnie Barnes), whom you get the impression has really been pining after van Horn. It's not all a bed of roses for van Horn, as there are a bunch of pirates there, and not all of them get along so well with each other. There's a bigger problem, however, considering that Don Juan Alvarado is understandably displeased about having lost his betrothed and will stop at nothing to get Francisca for himself. The fact that she's actually married to van Horn, and the marriage is as far as we can tell licit under Catholic canon law, complicates things.

Don Juan is no dummy, and uses those pirates who don't care for van Horn to go after him. Francisca, you might think, would be just the wedge to get van Horn, but remember that she's never seen Don Juan so she has no allegiance to him. And as is unsurprising for a film like this, Francisca has also been falling in love for real with van Horn. All of this leads up to the climactic swashbuckling fight as Francisca and Anne try to break van Horn and his fellow prisoners out of jail before they can be executed.

There's nothing particularly new to the plot of The Spanish Main, but it's a movie that succeeds largely because it's not trying to do anything serious in a genre that's more about entertainment value than making big statements. Paul Henreid actually does OK as a pirate even though that's not the sort of character you'd expect him to be playing. Maureen O'Hara is as gorgeous as ever in Technicolor, Walter Slezak is suitably villainous, and Binnie Barnes hits the right slightly saucy notes as Anne Bonny.

Sit back, watch The Spanish Main, and be entertained.

Buzzin' Around

A short that I recorded from the Saturday matinee block on TCM as opposed to it randomly showing up after some movie to fill out a time slot was one from the end of Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle's life when he signed a contract to make shorts at Vitaphone to be distributed by Warner Bros. That movie is Buzzin' Around.

Arbuckle plays Cornelius, a rural inventor who has been working on a formula for a coating that, if applied to china, will render it shatter-resistant, as shown in a sight gag of dropping a pitcher and having it bounce, not just land without breaking. He's just received a letter from a china-shop owner who seems interested in the idea, and would like him to come and give a demonstration. However, in a mix-up, Cornelius takes a jug of moonshine that his friend Al (Al St. John) likes to drink from.

Not that Cornelius is going to be able to get to the china shop anyway. The title of the short comes from a scene early in the film when a beehive falls into the back of Cornelius' car as he's about to set off for the city and the china shop, with Cornelius swallowing one of the bees. But that's by far not the only issue Cornelius faces. There's a sight gag involving parallel parking, along with Cornelius' fender getting caught up with the fender of a much nicer car. This latter incident leads to a dispute that continually escalates until a policeman gets involved, with Cornelius finding a way out of it.

Eventually, Cornelius does make it to the shop, and of course his formula doesn't work considering that he doesn't have the formula with him and his friend Al is trying to get it to the shop before Cornelius can do any damage. And then the owner of the shop who was the one who wrote the letter shows up, revealing one last joke....

Fatty Arbuckle's career had, of couse, been destroyed a decade earlier by the incident where actress Virginia Rappe died in a hotel room he was renting, and his subsequent trials for his responsibility in her death. What a short like Buzzin' Around reveals is that Arbuckle's style of comedy had clearly gone out of fashion in the intervening decade. The comedy is way too broad and not particularly funny. This short was released in early 1933 and later in the year Arbuckly would suffer a fatal heart attack. But in any case, I don't know that he would have had a successful revival if he kept making shorts like this one.

TCM Star of the Month September 2026: Ricardo Montalbán

Ricardo Montalbán in Mystery Street (Sept. 7, 10:00 PM)

We've been into a new month for some time now, but it's finally time to get to the new Star of the Month. This time around, it's Ricardo Montalbán, since the second half of September sees the start of Hispanic heritage month and Mexican-born Montalbán certainly fits that bill. Montalbán's movies will be airing every Monday in prime time.

Unfortunately, I did not notice until too late that only on this first Monday in September, Montalbán's movies would actually start on Monday morning, meaning that by the time you see this post you'll probably have missed some of the movies, especially the ones I was thinking about putting up pictures of. For some weird reason, TCM decided to run one of Montalbán's later movies, The Singing Nun, this morning at 10:00 AM in and among a bunch of stuff from the late 1940s:

On the other hand, this month also sees what I think is the TCM premiere of a role that a lot of people who aren't so much movie fans think of when they think Montalbán: that of Khaaaaaaan! in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, at midnight on Sept. 29, so still on the 28th in more westerly time zones.

The Brighton Strangler

Another of the movies that had been sitting on my DVR for quite some time was The Brighton Strangler. Recently, I finally got around to watching it.

The movie was released in the US in May, 1945, just after the war in Europe ended, so was clearly filmed and set during the war. It's London on New Year's Eve, and a man is just about to strangle a woman to death before being shot by the police. The curtain comes down, which means not that it's the end of our movie, but the opening scene is actually of a play about a strangler in Brighton. That strangler, Edward Grey, is played by a man named Reginald Parker (John Loder). It's getting close to Christmas, and Parker has already decided he's tired of playing this character. So his fiancée Dorothy Kent (Rose Hobart) is writing a new play for him before she goes off to Canterbury for Christmas, with him to follow after closing night.

However, on closing night, after one final successful performance, there's another round of the Blitz. Parker isn't able to make it to a bomb shelter before the bombs start falling and, wouldn't you know it, but one of the bombs hits the theater. Now all of this is 15-20 minutes in, so we know he's not going to be killed. Instead, he's only concussed. On coming to, he sees that he has a baggage claim check in his overcoat pocket, since his baggage was sent ahead to the train station for him to pick up before getting his ticket to Canterbury.

Unfortunately, the concussion has screwed with his memory. He picks up the baggage, but before being able to get his ticket, he overhears a snippet of a conversation between a British WAC, April Manby (June Duprez), and the American flyboy she's eloped with, Bob Carson (Michael St. Angel). She's going home for leave without him because her parents aren't going to be excited about her marrying an aviator. More importantely, she mentions going home to Brighton, which jogs Parker's memory. Except that it jogs his memory of the play, so he buys a ticket to Brighton and gets in the same car as April.

April sees that Parker has been injured, so tends to the injury and asks him his name... and he gives the name Edward Grey, going to Brighton because he used to have family there. April takes pity on him and offers to invite him for Christmas dinner which is also convenient for her since she can't really bring her husband. But Parker-as-Grey gets to Brighton, and the first thing he thinks of doing the next day is to find the barrister who screwed up Grey's trial, which is what led to Grey's becoming a strangler in the play Parker had starred in. Clearly a case of life imitating art.

To be honest, the premise in The Brighton Strangler is a bit contrived, but this is only a B movie. You're not supposed to take it that seriously. And for what it does, it succeeds fairly well once it gets past a slow section in the middle of the movie. One other minor issue that is has is that it has to deal with the Production Code, so you wonder how it's going to get to a satisfying ending considering that the Parker character has on the one hand clearly committed murder, while on the other hand not being of sound mind or body. It's not something you'll evrer consider great, but I think it would certainly have entertained audiences back in the day as the lower bill on a movie night.

The Young Runaways

MGM was always the wrong studio to do certain types of movies, and I would suggest that adolescent social issue stuff was not up their alley. Things got even worse for the studio after the Freed Unit musicals dried up. Trying to be socially relevant just wasn't going to cut it, as you can see if you watch the late 1960s movie The Young Runaways. It's showing up on TCM again tomorrow, Sept. 6, at 6:00 AM, so now's the time to put up a post on it.

Now, as you can guess from the title, there are indeed young runaways, and we're introduced to them in a pre-credits opening sequences. (Or, maybe, sequences, since each of them has his or her own reasons for running away.) First is Deanie Donford (Patty McCormack), who is hanging out with the wrong crowd and staying out too late and lying to her mother (Lynn Bari) about it. Mom is so clueless that she's terrified of her daughter even uttering the word "sex". Deanie says "sex"; Mom slaps her. Repeatedly. It's funny, but this isn't supposed to be a comedy. In any case, Deanie runs away that night.

Dewey Norson (Kevin Coughlin) is a fundamentally good kid who has let his hormones get the better of him. He's been having a lovers' lane type of relationship with Carol Mae who informs him that despite having taken "pills" (this isn't all that long after the birth-control pill was introduced), she's gotten pregnant. Dewey isn't ready to be a father and can't handle the shame of telling his parents he's knocked up a girl, so he too runs away.

Finally there's Shelly Allen (Brooke Bundy), daughter of widowed PR man Raymond Allen (Lloyd Bochner). Both of them are also fundamentally decent people, although Dad with his high-powered career has made the mistake of never really having listened to his daughter. Worse, he makes the mistake of telling a client that he's been using his PR techniques on his daughter and that they're clearly working. Shelly, being thoroughly unhappy about having been called a commodity, decides she's going to run off too. She hitchhikes, but when the guy who picks her up puts the moves on her, it results in a car crash where Shelly has to flee without her suitcase. All three adolescents wind up in Chicago.

Deanie's story is almost entirely separate from the other two. She winds up in an apartment that two guys, Loch and Curly, are sharing. Both of them have heretofore been open about willing to share girlfriends, but this time Loch wants to keep Deanie for himself. Curly drinks too much, and this leads to tragedy. It's also the less interesting story.

Dewey looks for a place to stay and spends a night with a "guru" (Dick Sargent of all people, playing another totally non-grifting person) before getting a job at a gas station and having to deal with a former resident of the guru's settlement house who's dishonest and expects Dewey to help him. (That's a very young Richard Dreyfuss who's name is relatively high up the credits but whom I didn't recognize.) Dewey gets a small apartment of his own and meets Shelly one night out in the rain.

Shelly was taken in by two other girls who are more or less being pimped out by the boyfriend of one of them. The two girls give Shelly a place to stay, and even some clothes to wear, but it's obvious they want her to get involved in being pimped. When Shelly doesn't want this, she runs away, and everybody else is worried she's going to squeal to the police, so they try to find her to prevent that, which forms the climactic finale.

As I said at the beginning, this was made by MGM, who clearly didn't know how to handle such a topic. Imagine, if you will, that Jack Webb had been blacklisted and had somebody front for him while he wrote the sort stories you'd see on Dragnet. That's basically what you get here. It's terrible, but it's funny in an unintentional way. Oh, and there's terrible 60s music of the sort that's trying to be relevant but sounded old-fashioned even back in the 1960s. The other half of the fun is looking for all the the names in the credits. Norman Fell, with a mustache, plays Deanie's dad, James Edwards is the police detective, and Isabel Sanford gets one scene as the Allens' maid.

Oxford around a Yank

The past, wrote L.P. Hartley in The Go-Between, is a foreign country. I certainly couldn't help but think of the past as a very different place when I watched the late 1930s film A Yank at Oxford.

Lakedale College is another one of those small liberal-arts schools that dotted Hollywood pictures in the first half of the 20th century, located in one of those Hollywood-style small cities. Dan Sheridan (Lionel Barrymore) is the publisher of the local paper, but you wonder how the paper makes any money considering how it keeps missing the deadline while Dan waits for news about the latest athletic exploits of his son Lee (Robert Taylor), a star on the college's track team.

Lee's done well enough in athletics that it's giving him a swelled head, although the fawning headline press he gets from his father's paper isn't helping either. In part because of this and becaue he really is the biggest thing the town has going for it. So he's awarded a scholarship to one of the colleges at Oxford University, which you know he's going to accept because with a title like A Yank at Oxford, he kind of has to. So fairly quickly we get Lee sent over to Europe and then on a train to Oxford.

Except that Lee keeps being just as much an arrogant blankety-blank before he even gets to Oxford, pissing off his fellow train passengers Paul Beaumont (Griffith Jones), Ramsey (Peter Croft), and Wavertree (Robert Coote) without realising that these are going to be some of his fellow students. So they respond with a practical joke that gets Lee in trouble with the Dean of the college (Edmund Gwenn). And it's not the last bit of trouble that Lee gets himself into.

Lee more or less take's Paul's place on the track team, and then also starts dating Paul's sister Molly (Maureen O'Sullivan). As for Paul, he's busy seeing Elsa Craddock (Viven Leigh), who works at a local bookstore and often goes to London to hunt down rarer books for the customers. The only thing is, Elsa is Mrs. Craddock, wife of the bookstore owner. And as for Wavertree, he gets in even more ridiculous trouble. Apparently, he's got a rich uncle who got himself expelled from Oxford. If Wavertree can get himself expelled from Oxford, too, he'll be in line for a bigger inheritance.

More of the dew-eyed American look at olde England comes in the form of rowing. Not just small boats on ponds, but crew, as Lee gets himself on the team for the big Oxford v. Cambridge boat race. But things could go disastrous for everybody when Elsa decides to go see Paul on campus and Mr. Craddock gets suspicious. Having that sort of relationship is decidedly frowned upon and could get you expelled. Unfortunately the plot solution is not to pass of a relationship between Elsa and Wavertree, which would satisfy all of the students.

A Yank at Oxford might have been what audiences of 1938 wanted, but oh my goodness was this one full of The Quiet Man-style tropes for me, where everybody takes a sentimental look at a place as they think from far away it exists but in reality probably never was anything close to that. Normally I like that the past is different, and that's not really the problem here as the lazy stereotypes. Still, watch and judge for yourself.

Briefs for September 3-4, 2026

Dolly Parton of course died last week at the age of 80. I had seen 9 to 5 show up on the FXM schedule a couple of times recently, but I couldn't remember when the next showing would be. FXM put one showing in the commercial-laden portion of the schedule, but the next commercial-free showing is tomorrow, September 4, at 11:15 AM.

Tim Curry also died last week and was also 80 years old. Pluto TV in one of their emails put up Clue in their on-demand section in his honor, also putting up Steel Magnolias for Dolly Parton. Neither of those two movie seem to be getting a commercial-free showing anywhere in the near future that I could find, but then again, searching TV listings very far in the future seems to be getting more and more difficult, by design.

One of TCM's spotlights for September is Stanley Kubrick, whose movies are going to be showing on Thursdays in prime time. Eyes Wide Shut, Kubrick's final film, will be showing overnight between September 24 and 25, and I even had that one on my DVR. But I didn't get around to watching it before it expired from the DVR, so sadly, I won't be doing a review of it here until sometime later. Maybe this time I'll actually get around to watching it before it expires.

Alibi Racket

One of the TCM offerings I had on my DVR had enough time left over in the time slot to run a short, as is the case from time to time. This time, there was enough space for a two-reeler, and the short I saw was a Crime Does Not Pay short that I had actually not seen before: Alibi Racket.

Once again, your "MGM crime reporter" is on hand to tell the viewers how crime does not in fact pay, and does so by going into a story about a certain type of crime. Well, in this case not a specific type of crime per se so much as trying to make it so that crime can in fact pay. There's a gang war going on in town, and one of the gangsters gets bumped off. Now, since there are competing gangs, the obvious thought is that the prime suspect should be Leo Rinelli (Edward Norris).

But, Leo has a brilliant alibi, which is that he was at the movies the night of the murder, and made it unmistakeably clear -- obviously much too clear by the flamboyant way he got everybody around him to note the time -- that he couldn't possibly have been anywhere near the killing when it actually took place. He was expecting a phone call and took it at a very precise time; he made certain somebody spotted and noted what time he entered and left the theater, and so on. Now, since the alibi is too perfect, and since this is a Crime Does Not Pay short, you know things are going to fall apart at the end.

So police inspector Wilmer (Al Bridge) decides to investigate people around him, such as the rest of the Rinelli family. And Leo's brother Joe also has a trememdous alibi. One is that he's known not to like his brother, while he also made it perfectly clear that he had a flat tire at just the right time so that he couldn't be involved in any case. Unsurprisingly, Wilmer doesn't buy any of this nonsense, and has a wild hunch that couldn't possibly pay off except in the movies where the guilty guy has a brilliant alibi but somehow inexplicably fails to corroborate one precise part of it. And that, my friends, is why crime does not pay.

To be fair, this is just a two-reeler, not a prestige movie. And everybody involved is professional. But darnit if the coincidence that makes things unravel isn't just a little too perfect, much like Lou Rinelli's alibi itself. I've seen some better movies in the series, more because they focus on a specific type of crime that makes them more interesting.

Susan Sarandon Night

TCM is running a night of Susan Sarandon movies tonight. The night kicks off with another showing of Atlantic City at 8:00 PM, a film I'm always looking forward to, although as it turns out I've already done a post on it back in 2020. It aired on TCM in the very early days of this blog, when TCM got the rights to some Paramount films from after the batch that were sold off to Universal, and then didn't air for ages. In any case, the second film tonight is Bull Durham at 10:00 PM, and since that one's been on my DVR since this year's 31 Days of Oscar, I watched it specifically to put up this post.

The movie takes its name from the baseball team in Durham, NC, a minor-league team at what was at the time the lowest level of the minors affiliated with Major League teams, known as Single A. (Thanks to a reorganization and reaffiliation in the late 1990s, the team is now in Triple-A, the level just below Major League.) Generally, this is the sort of place that would get high turnover as most of the players are young one who are either going to be moving up or who don't realize they're never going to make it to the majors and finally going to give up the dream after a couple of seasons bouncing around. One of the up-and-comers is pitcher Ebby LaLoosh (Tim Robbins). He's got a really fast pitch, but no control over location and no sense of how to deal strategically with hitters.

That strategy is something that catchers normally deal with in conjunction with pitchers, which is you see catchers signalling pitches with pitchers sometimes calling them up. The organization realizes it needs a catcher who can show LaLoosh, given the nickname "Nuke" by his manager Skip (Trey Wilson), and in that regard it's demoted journeyman catcher Crash Davis (Kevin Costner) to Durham. Crash made it to the majors once, and had a three-week stint there, but he's really never going to make it again and ought to know better. In fact, he's close to setting the record for most home runs by a player in the minor leagues, which is something one probably ought not want since it means you're spending a lot of time in the minors.

Meanwhile, there's Annie (Susan Sarandon), who has a connection with the team in part because of her family's having funded the stadium in part decades earlier. Annie also has a thing where she's going to take a player under her wing each year, although in her parlance that means sexually. We get the impresion that Crash would be right for her, but Nuke is just so much more exciting because he's young and studly and exciting with his craziness. Crash also doesn't really want to put up with this nonsense, which is why Annie eventually picks Nuke.

Thrown into all of this is the usual motley crew of off-beat tropes that populate baseball films: the Jesus freak, the Latin player with a crazy girlfriend, and so on. They all try to come together as a team, but the start of the season isn't very successful until Nuke's pitching picks up, at which point the team goes on a long winning streak. However, there's always the looming likelihood that Nuke is going to get good enough that the organization is going to move him up to a higher level, something that naturally does happen toward the end of the movie.

Bull Durham is generally considered a sports movie for obvious reasons, although it's just as much about the interpersonal relationships, with the team's on-field performance really being in the background compared to other sports movies. As such, the actors playing the three main characters do a good job with the love triangle material that just happens to be set against a baseball backdrop. The stock baseball player character part is something I found myself caring rather less about, to be honest.

A Lady of Chance

It's been a while since I've put up a post on a silent film. One that's been sitting on my DVR for a while that I recently finally got around to watching is A Lady of Chance, which probably ought to show up more often on TCM than I think it does since it was made at MGM. In any case, having finally watched it, now's the time for the obligatory post on it especially considering that today is the birth anniversary of star Johnny Mack Brown.

Norma Shearer stars as Dolly Morgan, and as the movie opens she's working in a big-city hotel as a switchboard operator, a job that puts her in contact with any number of people. One is a rich guy obviously looking for a woman to have a fling with while he's traveling and away from his wife. But then comes Bradley (Lowell Sherman) and his girlfriend Gwen (Gwen Lee). They recognize Dolly as "Angel Face", a con artist like them except that she got caught and spent time im prison and is supposed to be on parole although she seems to have skipped it, which gives Bradly and Gwen some power over her. They blackmail Dolly into putting the squeeze on the rich guy.

However, things don't go to plan, and while Bradley and Gwen plan to take the money and run, Dolly turns the tables on them and steals the cash herself, skipping town and going in pursuit of a suitable man far away from where Bradley and Gwen might be. Except that she's dumb enough to go to Atlantic City, just the sort of place where you can expect Bradley and Gwen to show up. There's also what seems to be a convention of people in the concrete business, including young Steve Crandall (Johnny Mack Brown), who's in town from his home town in Alabama hoping to consummate a business deal. Dolly starts the con by paying for his telegram home to Mother (Eugenie Besserer), and the two start a relationship that leads to his proposing rather quickly.

Except that just before they're going to get married, Bradley and Gwen show up in Atlantic City having found Dolly. They expect Dolly to con Steve, or else they're going to tell him about her past. Once again, though, Dolly is able to fool her partners in crime, being able to skip out on them and run off with Steve to get on a train back to his home town. The only problem is that, once the two of them get back to Alabama, Dolly discovers that Steve is not rich yet. He has an invention that could earn him a nice amount of money if he could get somebody to buy into it, but that hasn't happened yet. Dolly even considers leaving, but by this time she's so in love with Steve that she returns to him.

And then Bradley and Gwen show up again. They can't believe that Steve isn't a millionaire and lives in this modest house. But, complicating matters is the fact that on the day Bradly and Gwen come to Alabama, Steve gets a letter from a New York company saying that they want to buy the exclusive rights to his concrete. So Steve is in fact about to be rich, and Bradley and Gwen find this out, making them want to stay and force Dolly into conning Steve one last time.

A Lady of Chance is a lot of nonsense, but it's well-made nonsense coming from MGM. Norma Shearer does an unsurprisingly good job with a plot that is utterly unrealistic. Johnny Mack Brown is playing another of the naïve hick types, while Lowell Sherman and Gwen Lee do well as the villians. It's certainly not the first silent I'd recommend to people who are new to silent dramas, but it's certainly watchable enough.