Gallant Lucy

TCM had a spotlight some months back on working women. One of the movies they picked that was new to me in spite of the big-name cast was Lucy Gallant. Since the cast sounded interesting, I decided to record the movie and recently got around to watching it.

The movie, which was released in 1955, opens up after the opening credits with a title card reading "Texas, 1941". Now, you might guess that this means the US is about to be pushed into World War II with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and that this is important for the plot of the movie. You'll be half right. War does come and a main male character does fight, but the movie isn't really a war movie, which you also might have guessed considering the movie was on TCM for a "women at work" spotlight.

Specifically, the movie takes place in a place called White Sage Junction, TX, the sort of place that in a western would be a cattle town. And it was at one time. But showing up at the whistle-stop train station is cattleman Casey Cole (Charlton Heston). He's there mostly to complain to the stationmaster (Jay Adler in a bit part) about how oil has been discovered and that with this, everybody else has switched from ranching to drilling for oil or otherwise servicing the people who drill for oil. They are, however, interrupted by an emergency dispatch over the telegraph informing the stationmaster that the bridge ahead is out due to a rainstorm.

Of course, there's a train coming that has to stop suddenly. On that train is the titular Lucy Gallant (Jane Wyman). She was on her way to Mexico after her wedding was called off, and she's got her entire trousseau with her. Casey helps her off the train, and eventually takes her to a house in town where Casey stays from time to time, owned by his friend Mrs. Basserman (Thelma Ritter). It doesn't take much to figure out the two are going to fall in love.

Meanwhile, Lucy being a jilted bride (there's a back story about her dad's financial issues leading to his suicide and her unseen fiancé not wanting any part of Lucy thereafter) from New York, she's got a lot of fancy clothes with her. And when she wears them in town, all the wives of the men who have suddenly gotten money hitting oil wish they could wear something like what Lucy is wearing. So she gets the brilliant idea to stay in town and open a couturier selling the finest of big-city fashion to the other women. She's going to need capital however, so she takes out a loan from banker Charles Madden (William Demarest), and runs the store out of the building that used to house the house of ill repute, run by a Lady MacBeth (Claire Trevor).

The store becomes a success, but Casey wants to marry Lucy and raise a family, and being nine months pregnant isn't really going to do for a businesswoman. So in Casey's mind, Lucy should sell up shop. Fortunately, however, World War II intervenes. Casey goes off to fight, and after the war gives up cattle for the oil business himself. But the store is still there, and despite Casey's having been engaged during the war, you know that the two still carry torches for one another. Casey just might be able to come to the rescue when Lucy's business winds up in danger....

Lucy Gallant is one of those competently-made movies the studio system churned out one after another back in the day, but to be honest it's not exactly a great movie. I think part of that is that despite having been released in 1955, it really feels stuck in the 1930s with a very antiquated attitude toward married women working. And Casey is a bit of a jerk toward Lucy. Plus, romance isn't exactly Charlton Heston's strong point. There's also the odd presence of an ex-governor of Texas playing himself. On the bright side, Lucy hosts a fashion show and present at that show is Edith Head, playing herself as the host of the show.

So Lucy Gallant is an interesting movie, even if it is a bit of a misfire.

Cleopatra (1912)

Quite some time back, TCM's Silent Sunday Nights selection was a 1912 version of Cleopatra. I'm always curious about very early movies, so naturally I recorded it to be able to see it and do a post on it.

The movie was made by one Helen Gardner, a stage actress who also was a teacher of "pantomime", which I would guess in this context means learning how to do the right gestures to try to display what action you mean in the context of silent cinema, where there's so much that you can't express with sound or dialogue. Gardner plays Cleopatra and the movie is based on a French stage play from about 1890. Obviously, being a silent film, one didn't need to worry about translating a stage play if the action could be followed; just the title cards would be necessary.

When I did my review of the movie Florence Foster Jenkins, I mentioned that the movie opens with her theatrical work presenting what were known as tableaux vivants, and much of the photography of this version of Cleopatra, being a pretty early silent, uses the same sort of staging. A fairly static camera films tableaux in medium-to-long shots, with a substantial use of title cards to add dialogue and action. (One IMDb reviewer mentions exactly 106 title cards; that number is probably right because in the print TCM showed the title cards seemed to be sequentially numbered.)

As for the plot, there are two plots. One is the relatively standard story line of Cleopatra falling in love with Marc Antony and getting him to fight the Battle of Actium against Octavian and his navy, with Antony and Cleopatra ultimately losing. This, of course, is what leads to Cleopatra retreating to her palace in Alexandria and having the venomous asp give her the fatal bite. The other plot, which takes up most of the first half or so of the movie, is about a fictitious Greek fisherman/slave named Pharon who is taken by Cleopatra's beauty and has a brief affair with her, even willing to kill himself just for the opportunity to have that affair!

One other interesting point about the movie is how many of the cast members are credited not by their full names, but as Mr./Mrs./Miss and their surnames. I know that some wives of prominent male actors would sometimes be credited as Mrs. and their husband's full name; I distinctly recall seeing Where Are My Children crediting Mrs. Tyrone Power (Sr.).

By the standards of 2024, this version of Cleopatra is an extreme antique, and notable by the fact that it does have a true feature-length running time of just under 90 minutes, which was astonishing for 1912. For anyone not interested in cinematic history, it's going to be difficult to watch thanks to Gardner not using much in the way of intercutting that other directors were already beginning to experiment with. She does use a lot of tinting, however.

Many of the IMDb reviewers also comment on the modern-day score that TCM apparently commissioned for this print some 20 year ago. That too isn't going to be to everybody's taste, but at least since it's a silent movie you can turn the volume off and imagine your own music.

The 1912 version of Cleopatra is a decided museum piece, but one that should probably be seen. As of this writing there are several copies available on YouTube.

Hair

Treat Williams died in 2023, and when TCM had its night in December honoring people who died, they selected him by showing the 1979 movie version of the musical Hair. Not having seen the movie (or, unsurprisingly since I don't do stage musicals for the most part), I decided to record the TCM showing in order to be able to do a post on it here. I've finally gotten around to watching it, so now it's time for the post.

It's the late 1960s, when the Vietnam War was at its height in America. Rural Oklahoma kid Claude Bukowski (John Savage) gets his draft notice, but for some weird reason this requires him to go all the way to New York City. I'd think the draft board would send him to a closer military base; apparently this is a change from the stage musical in which Claude was a New York hippie. So Claude heads off to New York, and seems as full of pride and willingness to serve as the steel-town workers from The Deer Hunter.

But in New York he gets waylaid by a group of hippies led by Berger (that's Treat Williams). They're basically being a bunch of dicks, trying to con people into giving them some money, and even devolving into behaviors that are rather more illegal (which escalates as the movie goes on). In this first encounter, they interfere with a rich girl from New Jersey, Sheila (Beverly D'Angelo), who's trying to rent one of thos Central Park horses. Claude saves her, and is smitten by her despite the fact that he's never going to see her again.

Or so he thinks. Since Sheila is a debutante type, the society pages mention one of the coming-out type dinners she'll be at, and the hippies arrange to crash the dinner, bringing Claude along. And Sheila kinda-sorta likes the idea of the bad boy. Not that Claude is a bad boy at heart, but the idea of the hippies violating all sorts of norms to get Claude to see Sheila again. And despite her supposed to be engaged to someone from her own class, Sheila is smitten with Claude, too.

Sheila's parents don't like any of this, so they understandably have the hippies arrested. Claude is so dumb that he uses up what little money he has left to bail out his "friends", who are inveterate moochers. To make matters worse, Berger and his merry band of hippies start carjacking Sheila and her boyfriend to get more money and access to a car.

Eventually, Claude does do his required enlistment, Berger is none to pleased about this, and decides to go out to the base where Claude has been stationed to try to get him to reconsider. Eventually, they even steal a car and commit much bigger crimes just to give Claude one more shot to see Sheila before going off to Vietnam. But there's a twist in all this....

The big problem I had with this version of Hair -- and again, I don't know how much the original Broadway musical has this problem, not having seen it -- is that the hippies are really selfish people here, not caring whom they inconvenience in order to get what they want. I mean, we're supposed to have sympathy for them despite the fact that they have no qualms about blocking drivers from going where they want and committing bigger carjackings, theft, and kidnappings. Regardless of your views on the Vietnam War, they're severely mean even to squares who did want to volunteer, and do it just so they can get their own way.

The musical version is also well known for having a nude scene in a draft board number. The movie, of course, couldn't go quite that far, and had to resort to "artistic nudity" in that scene. The actors are naked, but the camera work and placement of hands doesn't actually show the genitalia.

Still, I'm sure there are going to be people who enjoy this adaptation of Hair, even if I didn't.

Murder, but not my sweet

Robert Mitchum was TCM's Star of the Month back in January, and one of his movies I haven't gotten around to reviewing yet is Farewell, My Lovely. Recently, I finally watched it, so now I can do the review on it.

The movie is based Raymond Chandler's book of the same name, which had already been turned into a movie once before by a major studio, but under the title Murder, My Sweet. Mitchum stars as Chandler's detective Philip Marlowe, here in 1941 Los Angeles, with the passage of time marked by Joe DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak. Other than that, there's not much for Marlowe to look forward to, as he's stuck doing crappy cases finding runaway children or being harassed by the police who want information about one or another case they're investigating.

One night Marlowe finds a runaway teenaged girl working as a taxi dancer. Outside the joint just after getting his money, he's approached by a very large man, "Moose" Malloy (Jack O'Halloran). Moose has just been released from prison after serving a seven-year stretch, and the first thing he did was to go to the nightclub where his old girlfriend Velma worked, wanting to see her again. Seven years is a long time, and in the intervening years the place has changed to one serving a black clientele. So perhaps a private dick like Marlowe can help find Velma.

The new owners of the club, which had been named "Florian's" after the old owner, Jessie Halsted Florian (Sylvia Miles), suggest Marlowe go to the rooming house across the street since someone there might remember the old place. That is indeed the case, and the man suggests where to find Florian and to bring bourbon because she's a hopless drunk now. Jessie gives Marlowe a picture of Velma, and it looks like the case isn't going to be that difficult to solve.

Of course, we're only about a quarter of the way in to the movie, so it should be obvious that there's going to be a catch. The Velma in the photograph is not Velma at all, but a different woman who is now in a sanatorium. The real Velma is going to be much more elusive to find, and much more dangerous. Another guy calls up Marlowe for assistance, but that job goes bad, and the police pick up Marlowe telling him to stop looking for Velma, and that Malloy has gone to Mexico, which I'd think is a parole violation.

But Marlowe wants more information on the other man who hired him, since that guy got murdered on the job he hired Marlowe for while Marlowe was knocked out by unknown assailants. As he continues to poke around, he finds that things are complicated, as he's dealing with some very powerful people. No wonder one of them knocked him unconscious.

I have to admit that I haven't seen Murder, My Sweet in its entirety. But having The Big Sleep and Lady in the Lake, I should point out that at least Farewell, My Lovely isn't quite as convoluted as those other two, particularly The Big Sleep (which I find terribly overrated anyway). The movie has nice atmosphere, and Mitchum is good as the world-weary Marlowe who's getting too old to keep doin this job but doesn't know what else to do.

If you haven't seen Farewell, My Lovely before, it's definitely worth watching.

Kiss Me, Kill Me

TCM celebrated its 30th anniversary back in April, and one of their spotlights that month was to bring in some of the people who work(ed) behind the scenes at TCM to present a movie or two each. One of the production designers selected an early Stanley Kubrick movie, Killer's Kiss, although to be honest I recorded it more for the synopsis than realizing it was an early Kubrick film.

The opening credits are superimposed over a man in New York City's old Penn Station. After the credits, that man, Davey Gordon (Jamie Smith) delivers an opening monologue about how one can get oneself into a mess, just as he did starting a few days earlier.... Once again, this is a cue that makes it seem likely we're going to get another flashback, and sure enough we do. It also sounds as though Davey is on the run, although that turns out not to be quite true.

Davey is a boxer, as the monologue makes clear, since the flashback starts just before his latest fight, against an up-and-coming young man named Kid Rodriguez. Davey is down-and-going, to the point that his uncle out in Washington State has been suggesting that he go back west for a visit. Davey gets knocked out by Rodriguez and that just might be the impetus for him to go west to see his uncle and aunt again.

Meanwhile, Davey lives in one of those apartment buildings with a courtyard. In the apartment directly opposite his lives a taxi dancer, Gloria Price (Irene Kane). As Burt Lancaster had a tendency to do with Susan Sarandon in Atlantic City, Davey looks across from time to time at Gloria, without knowing anything more about her. Tonight, however, he has a bad dream (cleverly portrayed by the use of negative photography), from which he wakes up to discover that Gloria is having a bad time of it in her apartment with a man, who turns out to be Vinnie (Frank Silvera), her boss at the dance hall (Frank Silvera).

Davey goes over there to save Gloria, and over breakfast, she tells him her sad life story. Davey by this time has planned on going back to Washington, and has also fallen in love with Gloria, so the plan will be to bring her along. But each of them will need to pick up their final paychecks, which presents the big dramatic conflict of the movie. Gloria needs to get it from that nasty boss, with Davey waiting at the entrance to the dance hall. Vinnie is extremely jealous, and sends some goons out to rough up Gloria's companion. But in the meantime, Davey gets waylaid by somebody stealing his scarf, and his manager shows up with Davey's check from the last bout. So the henchmen rough up and kill the manager, with Davey being an obvious suspect. Worse, Gloria witnessed it, and Vinnie can't have her as a witness.

Killer's Kiss being a very early film for Kubrick, it was done on an extremely limited budget. Hence the no-name cast and a running time of only 67 minutes. And, in fact, it does have the feel of the sort of thing that might have worked better as one of those episodes in a live play of the week type anthology show that were the rage in the 1950s. That having been said, Kubrick shows that he has a great deal of talent, and also comes up with a lot of nice vintage photography of midtown Manhattan as it really would have been in the mid-1950s, the sort of stark black-and-white photography that can't be recreated by any of today's doe-eyed nostalgic looks back at the Boomer era.

Killer's Kiss certainly isn't the world's greatest movie by any means. But it's a decidedly interesting movie.

What if Sam Peckinpah directed Smokey and the Bandit?

Not too long ago, I notice a movie that sounded like it might be bad in a fun way was available on multiple of the FAST services: Convoy. I knew it was based on the novelty song from the mid-1970s, so I think I might have vaguely heard the movie but never seen it before. With that in mind, I decided to watch it before it leaves the FAST services.

The song tells about a trucker nicknamed "Rubber Duck", or at least that's his CB handle; those of you old enough to remember the 1970s will recall CB radio. Rubber Duck is played by Kris Kristofferson, and as the movie opens he's driving through Arizona in his semi when he gets passed by a woman in a convertible sports car, Melissa (Ali McGraw). This results in all sorts of dangerous driving, and Rubber Duck getting pulled over by a a cop. He gets out of it, however, by making up a story about the woman driving pantsless, which of course gets the cop to go chasing after the women.

The truckers chat with each other over the CB, as there are a bunch of them out on the road. In addition to Rubber Duck, there's "Love Machine" (Burt Young), who also gets named Pig Pen because he's hauling pigs. There's also Spider Mike (Franklin Ajaye). Then a fourth trucker called Cottonmouth comes on talking about the lack of police. It's a ruse, however, as Cottonmouth is actually the local sheriff (Ernest Borgnine) setting up a speed trap.

Eventually, the truckers decamp to a truck stop where, it turns out, Melissa is there, now without her car, which she had to sell for money to get to a job offer in Dallas. She'll eventually take up Rubber Duck's offer to ride in his truck, but not after some other shenanigans. The sheriff shows up looking for the truckers. He taunts poor Spider Mike, which results in a barroom brawl, and the truckers' case becoming a cause celebre as a whole bunch of other drivers start following them in the hopes that Rubber Duck can make it to Texas where he'll presumably avoid extradtion.

Now, you'd thnk the authorities could simply set up road blocks, but then, we wouldn't have much of a movie. Instead, they decide to jail and torture poor Spider Mike to try to get Rubber Duck to out himself in an attempt to rescue Spider Mike. But a lot of people, including the governor, seem to be on Rubber Duck's side.

I mentioned Smokey and the Bandit in the title of this post, and it should be obvious why. The material here has the potential to be reasonably funny, although Smokey and the Bandit would still probably be better thanks to the starring turn from Burt Reynolds. He had the charm to make this sort of role work, in a way that Kristofferson is just there.

The bigger problem, however, is that the movie was directed by Sam Peckinpah, who was known for his boundary-pushing violent westerns, notably The Wild Bunch. Peckinpah seems unsure here whether he should be directing a comedy, or whether he should try to push the boundaries again. So in things like the big fight at the truck stop, we get a lot of Peckinpah-style slow-motion gore that just doesn't work for the sort of comedy that Convoy is supposed to be. And the treatment of Spider Mike in the third act takes Convoy down much too dark a road.

Then again, Convoy was also based on a song that was well past its sell-by date, so it should be no wonder that it doesn't work. 45-plus years on, the movie is little more than a curiosity.

The Fuller Brush Girl

Another movie that I've had on my DVR for several months is the Lucille Ball comedy The Fuller Brush Girl. I don't think it's coming up on TCM any time soon, but it does show up from time to time on Cinevault Classics, one of the FAST channels that's on both the Roku Channel and TubiTV, albeit with commercials. (Indeed, it's one of the movies regularly in the promos.)

The movie begins with a comedic credits sequence of Lucy trying to see cosmetics, which is what Fuller Brush girls do, although she's not actually working for Fuller immediately after the credits. Instead, she's Sally Elliot, a switchboard operator for the Maritime Steamship Company. She works there with her fiancé Humphrey, who's a filing clerk. The two together would like to buy a house in the sort of new development that appeared in Lucy's earlier movie Miss Grant Takes Richmond, but they don't make enough money.

There's a chance, however, when Sally learns that the previous inventory has been fired. There's a chance for Harvey to get a promotion. What they don't know, however, is that their boss, Harvey Simpson (Jerome Cowan), is actually using the company as a front for smuggling. He could use an inventory man who doesn't realize what's going on, and Harvey fits that role perfectly. He's surprised, however, when he gets the promotion, since not five minutes earlier he just had the boss yelling at him to get the hell out of the office.

Meanwhile, Sally being in need of a job, she tries to apply with the Fuller Brush company since her best friend also has a territory in town with them. But Sally is as incompetent as Lucill Ball's character in her previous Columbia film Miss Grant Takes Richmond, which is an opportunity to engage in some side humor of the sort at which Lucille Ball was always quite good. But there's also a plot point here.

Simpson and his wife have gotten into an argument over some of those Fuller cosmetics Sally's girlfriend had brought to Sally's old office, and wants Sally to explain to Mrs. Simpson (Lee Patrick) what really happened. In the meantime, however, Mrs. Simpson decides to oust her husband from the shipping company, which would really screw up that smuggling. So Mr. Simpson hires a burlesque girl to impersonate Sally for that explanation, and then has the burlesque girl murder Mrs. Simpson. Sally shows up as a Fuller Brush girl just as the burlesque girl has murdered Mrs. Simpson. Said burlesque performer knows Sally out and frames her for the killing. Sally and Humphrey have to solve the case while evading the police, leading to a comic finale aboard one of the steamship company's ships.

The Fuller Brush Girl was made not long before Lucille Ball decamped for TV to start I Love Lucy. Ball is in reasonably good -- and reasonably typical -- zany form here, although I will admit that I prefer Miss Grant Takes Richmond. I think that's in part because Lucy was better paired there with William Holden, and because Lucy was the only incompetent one in that movie. Here, both leads are supposed to be somewhat incompetent, and that doesn't really work as well. Still, The Fuller Brush Girl is more than pleasant enough, and definitely worth a watch.

Thoughts on James Earl Jones, and other obituaries

So James Earl Jones died yesterday at the age of 93. I was thinking about his most famous roles, and wondering what TCM could show for a programming tribute. It was a bit surprising to me that there's a relative paucity of movies, with a lot more TV and straight-to-video stuff. Jones provided the voice of Darth Vader, but I don't think there's any way TCM could possibly get Star Wars now, even if it did get aired once several years back when TCM did a salute to 20th Century-Fox. I recall being quite surprised at the showing, since it was after Disney acquired the Star Wars franchise. Jones also provided his voice to The Lion King, but Disney animation is going to be a giant no go for TCM any more. Even when they had Leonard Maltin doing the Treasures from the Disney Vault series, feature animation was mostly non-existent.

So what could TCM show? There's certainly The Comedians, which without looking it up I'm pretty certain is MGM; if my memory serves it's one of the movies mentioned in that hilarious Lionpower promotional short. He was also in Dr. Strangelove. I'd love to see TCM show Sneakers, in which he has a smallish but important role, as well.

It was a week ago that James Darren died. I didn't realize quite how many movies Darren was in as a young man, although he was under contract to Columbia. TCM seems to have some ability to get the rights to run those pictures, although it's not quite as easy as stuff from the old "Turner library". I haven't seen anything about a tribute to Darren, although it wouldn't surprise me if he's the sort of person that gets a movie in December when TCM has its night saluting people who died over the course of the past year.

And, finally, I should probably mention the pasing of Will Jennings, who died last Friday aged 80. If you don't recognize the name, it's because he worked behind the camera. Or at least, off-camera, since he was a songwriter so technically not quite so directly involved in the movies. Except that he won two Oscars, for writing "Up Where We Belong" from An Officer and a Gentleman and that horrid "My Heart Will Go On" from the equally horrid 1997 version of Titanic.

He Knows You're Alone

October is generally the month for horror on TCM, what with it being Halloween and all. But a horror movie that I recorded some months back is reaching the top of my queue of watched but not posted about movies and, since it doesn't seem to be on the October schedule, it's getting a post now, in September: He Knows You're Alone.

The movie opens up with a scene that made me think of The Town That Dreaded Sundown: two young lovers go off to a secluded Lover's Lane somewhere and, in the back seat of the car, proceed to try to make out. But the two think they hear something outside the car, so as a result, the boyfriend gets out of the car to investigate. The girlfriend gets nervous considering how long her boyfriend is outside the car, so she too gets out, and.... At this point, we see somebody get up, to be revealed that this is actually a movie-within-a-movie, and two female friends are watching together in a theater balcony. The one girl, being a bit too scared, goes down for a bathroom break. But in the bathroom, she thinks she hears somebody else! She gets back to her seat, at which point we see a man proceed to sit down behind the two girls, and stab one of them to death through the seat!

Fast forward to Staten Island. The murderer from the theater has gotten on a bus to get away from the murder location, and headed west from Long Island to Staten Island, where he presumably lived. A police detective, Gamble, investigating the murder on Long Island hears from the victim's friend that the victim was scheduled to be married soon, which horrifies Gamble. Apparently there was a serial killer some years back who killed brides-to-be, and one of those victims was Gamble's fiancée. So he's got a personal stake in this case, which is why he's at both that murder scene and trying to run the investigation in Staten Island once murders start happening there.

Oh, yeah, I suppose that's technically giving away a plot point, but it wasn't if if you didn't know there were going to be more murders. It's not as if the movie is trying to hide what it's going to be doing. On Staten Island, Amy is a college student studing psychology under Prof. Carl Mason (James Rebhorn, one of the few recognizable names in the cast) together with friends Joyce and Nancy. Amy is engaged to be married to Phil, although she's got an ex-boyfriend in Marvin who still likes her although she didn't like his working in a morgue.

The killer starts stalking Amy, while also killing a whole bunch of people around her. Gamble keeps investigating, taking the law into his own hands by stealing evidence from a crime scene (although to be fair, it's shocking the other police didn't find it on the murder victim's body). With He Knows You're Alone being an early 1980s slasher film, it's not surprising how this all plays out and leads to the finale.

He Knows You're Alone was unsurprisingly savaged by the critics, which is unsurprising partly because of the divide between critical reception and the views of the general public. However, part of the poor critical perception is that the movie really is generally pedestrian. It was done on a very low budget; Tom Hanks (as a college student jogger Nancy keeps meeting) and Paul Gleason as a police detective are the other two recognizable names in the cast. That low budget shows. Also, He Knows You're Alone has a ton of plot holes. As an example, for the finale, Amy makes a 911 call before the finale, but Det. Gamble shows up before the regular police do and is there a long time before the police show up. There's also one exceedingly obvious bit of foreshadowing. Well, multiple involving musical cues, but one not doing so.

He Knows You're Alone is probably the sort of movie it's more fun to watch with a bunch of friends and have a laugh over than it is a movie with any real frights. But it's still worth a watch.

Till the Clouds Roll By

I had some more movies that were about to expire from YouTube TV's cloud DVR, so I had to make a point of watching them to do a review now. The latest is the musical "biopic" Till the Clouds Roll By.

The movie opens with one of those old-style forewords informing us that the action begins on December 27, 1927, the opening night of the musical Show Boat. The music was written by Jerome Kern (played here by Robert Walker), a composer who had already had a string of Brodway hits in the 1920s, although getting to the top wasn't easy. On his way back home after the show, he asks the cab driver to detour and look for a particular brownstone. Since the movie opens up at the height of Kern's career, we know that we're about to get an exceedingly original plot device... the flashback to the beginning of the subject's career.

This time, we go back around 20 years (the real-life Kern got his start fairly young, around age 20 in 1905). Young Jerome is a budding composer, but he doesn't know so much yet about lyrics or good arrangements. To that end, he's been sent to the brownstone that older Jerome asks the driver to stop by. There (in 1905) lives an arranger, James Hessler (Van Heflin). Now, this leads to why I put the word "biopic" in sneer quotes above. James Hessler is the other main character of the movie along with Kern, but Hessler is a completely made-up person! Hessler is an arranger who would like to be a symphonic composer. He's also a widower with a young daughter Sally (grown-up Sally is played by Lucile Bremer). In any case, Hessler becomes Kern's mentor.

Kern writes good music, and would like to write for Broadway, but when they try to get a foot in the door, they learn that it's still the fad on Broadway to import revue-type shows from the UK and that the music of London is more popular to the Broadway crownd than the new American sounds bubbling up. So it's off to London.

Kern eventually meets British producer Charles Frohman (a real-life person, and his death along with Kern's tangential relationship to that being more or less accurately portrayed), and is able to sell one of his songs to Frohmann's London Gaieties. This also leads to Kern getting hired to write more songs for a show that's going to open in New York. Also while in the UK, Kern met Eva (Dorothy Patrick), the woman who would become Mrs. Kern.

Kern goes back to America with the Hesslers and Frohman, and I'd guess it was the US being out of the Great War for a couple of years while the European powers were fighting it that really boosted the careers of composers like Kern. Sally, now grown up, has always considered Jerome like an uncle, and wants to follow Jerome into musical theater. To that end, Jerome even writes a song for a musical that would give Sally her first solo even though she's not going to be the star of the show. The producer, however, thinks the song would be a better fit for the show's star, Marilyn Miller (another real-life person, played by Judy Garland). Sally has a hissy fit and... runs away!? Dad, by now ill with heart problems, wants Jerome to find Sally, but Dad dies before father and daughter can be reunited.

Jerome, like a lot of other composers and lyricists, went off to Hollywood once sound comes to movies, and wrote more memorable songs for movies in addition to adapting some of the old musicals for Hollywood. The last 10 minutes or so is a montage of various MGM stars doing numbers of a bunch of different songs, giving MGM a chance to put those stars into a big-budget musical if they hadn't already been used in a production number earlier in the movie.

If you like the Great American Songbook, you'll love Till the Clouds Roll By. The songs are unsurprisingly quite good. There's a reason why things like Show Boat or the song "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" from Roberta endure. The production numbers MGM did, at least up until the finale which is a bit more bland, are also very well done. The dramatic story, however, is something best not discussed. To be fair to MGM, however, the real life Jerome Kern story was mostly something not cinematic or dramatic enough for a biopic. But that's part of why Till the Clouds Roll By is a bit of a mixed bag.

If you like the Freed Unit, then Till the Clouds Roll By is definitely for you.