Not the champ

Tomorrow's lineup in 31 Days of Oscar is movies set in Mexico. Among the movies being shown is the 1931 version of The Champ at 10:30 AM, which I blogged about back in 2010. There was a remake of The Champ in 1979, which will be airing at 3:45 AM on March 11 as part of a prime-time lineup (starting on the evening of March 10) of movies with people who have drinking problems. In between those two there was another version which isn't being shown because it didn't get any Oscar nominations. That movie is titled The Clown.

Red Skelton plays the titular clown, a man named Dodo Delwyn. He used to be big, but as you can guess he has a drinking problem and can no longer get good jobs as a result. He's reduced to a job on Coney Island as a clown making the guests getting off amusement park rides part of his act. He ticks off one such person to the point that man fights back, and Dodo's boss not only blames Dodo, but gives Dodo reason to believe he's accusing Dodo of having gone back to the drink. There goes your job.

Dodo, meanwhile, has a son who admires him in the form of Dink (Tim Considine) and basically takes care of Dodo every time Dodo goes on another drunk, which is about to happen soon now that Dodo is once again out of a job. Now, in a lot of movies this single dad with a son relationship would be down to Mom having died, thank you Production Code. That's also the lie Dodo has been telling Dink. But here, the reality is that Dodo's wife Paula (Jane Greer) couldn't handle her husband's alcoholism and more or less abandoned his fate, divorcing him and marrying another man and having a daughter by that man. How she didn't get custody of Dink is never well explained.

It doesn't take much to guess that Paula is about to meet Dodo again. That happens when Dink goes to one of Dodo's old agents from the talent agencies who gets Dodo a temporary job that Dodo considers do degrading that he doesn't want Dink to see the act. Among the people in the audience is Paula, who wants to see Dink again. She knows that she and her second husband can offer Dink so much more than Dodo can, and tell Dink they'd be more than happy to bring him into their new family, although for obvious reasons Dink is none too happy about this because he still loves his father and considers Dad his hero.

It's going to take a lot for for Dad to hit bottom, which even includes smacking poor Dink. But just as Dodo hits bottom, his old agent realizes there's a new technology out there: television! This would be a great chance to show Dodo to a new audience and possibly get Dodo a stable job if only Dodo can remain sober. The worst that could happen, one supposes, is that the show flops on its opening episode and gets treated as a one-off special rather than a series. But Dodo seizes the lifeline. If you've seen either version of The Champ, however, you know how this movie is going to end....

The most surprising thing about The Clown is the opportunity it offered Red Skelton to do straight drama, since he was mostly known for his physical comedy. Of course, as a clown, that also provides lots of chances to put that physical comedy into the movie in a way that integrates seamlessly into the plot. Skelton shows that he really did have the acting chops necessary to do at least melodrama; I don't know if anybody would have ever taken him seriously if MGM had put him in a straight drama like The Bad and the Beautiful the year before, or Executive Suite a year later. But in The Clown Skelton is by far the highlight in what feels like another of those movies MGM was churning out while trying to fund the Freed Unit musicals.

Sadly not a drama

Another of the movies that I recorded and was getting close to expiring from the DVR was the later Gene Kelly musical It's Always Fair Weather. It's on TCM tomorrow, Mar. 3, at 10:00 AM, so I've watched it in order to be able to put up this review.

The movie starts off with an introductory sequence set at the end of World War II. Soldiers are being demobbed, and three of them are spending their first day back on American soil at a bar in New York: Ted Riley (Gene Kelly), would-be artist Doug Hallerton (Dan Dailey), and Angelo Valentine (Michael Kidd). They have way too much to drink and go on a drunken dance sequence, this being a Gene Kelly musical after all. At the end of the day, the three "best friends" who made their way through Europe together vow that they'll meet at the same bar ten years from now, or October 11, 1955.

To remember this vow, each of them takes a third of a one-dollar bill and writes the date one it, so sure enough, when the main action of the film opens up on October 11, 1955 (oddly enough about a month after the film was released), they all see that they have a reminder of the day. Doug wanted to go back to Europe to become the great American artist, but wound up using his art skills to go into the more lucrative field of advertising. He's based out of Chicago, where he's in an unhappy marriage, but created the ad campaign for a New York-based slice-of-life show hosted by Madline Bradville (Dolores Gray), so he was going to be in New York anyway and shows up at the bar.

Angie had been hoping to become a quality chef, but life didn't work out that way for him either. Instead, he got married (and as far as we can tell is happily married) running the sort of hamburger joint up in Schenectady that Thelma Ritter ran in The Mating Season. And as for Ted, he's a native New York who had been hoping to become a lawyer and marry his sweetheart. However, in the opening scene on October 11, 1945, he's learned that that sweetheart couldn't wait for Ted to come home and married another man, leaving Ted embittered. Instead of becoming a lawyer, he got into the fight game, training a second-class boxer who probably had pretentions of greatness at one point but is now being asked to take a dive.

Doug has an expense account, so he offers to take his two old friends to a swanky restaurant where the three find out that they really have nothing in common other than their service in the war. Ted and Doug think Angie is a hick; Ted and Angie find Doug snobbis; and Doug and Angie see Ted's act as kind of scammy, which in many ways it is. Especially when they run into some of the staff from the show who are having a business meeting in the same restaurant. This includes segment producer Jackie Leighton (Cyd Charisse), on whom Ted immediately starts putting the moves, only to discover she's much too smart for that stuff.

Except that there's a bit of a problem, which is that the show goes live, and the subject for the show's "surprise" segment won't be able to do it. So Jackie figures a surprise segment of having the three soldiers appear together on live TV for their 10th anniversary reunion would be a great thing. Except that she doesn't quite realize that the three men, having met each other, don't really want to see each other any more. So they're going to have to engage in some minor deception to make the reunion work. Meanwhile, Jacke and Ted learn about the fixed fight, which gives some extra motivation to what goes on later that evening.

It's Always Fair Weather is another of those movies with a really good premise, that unfortunately doesn't quite work in the execution. For me, I think that's for a different reason than a lot of the other reviewers I've read. Everybody else loves the Gene Kelly dance numbers, but I found myself thinking that this is the sort of plot that shouldn't have been set to the genre constraints of a musical. It's the sort of thing that could be a drama, either serious or somewhat lighter considering the finale is clearly being played for its comic effect.

I missed Georges Méliès' birthday back in December

One thing that mildly irritates me about YouTube TV is the way the DVR takes some of the documentaries about the movies, as well as the collections of shorts packaged together, and doesn't show them when I look for movies to watch. To be fair, the "documentaries" weren't necessarily made for original theatrical showing so they wouldn't be movies. In any case, I only see them when I search for stuff about to expire from the DVR. TCM ran a documentary called The Méliès Mystery back in May of 2025, but I only finally got around to watching it just before it expired.

Now, I assume most people reading a blog like this are aware of Méliès' film A Trip to the Moon from 1902, which is considered one of the more famous very early movies. Méliès was one of the pioneers of cinema, making movies from about 1896 to 1913, just before tastes changed and then the Great War made Méliès' type of movies passé. He fell into obscurity and dire financial straits, which led him in a fit of desperation to burn the negatives of his films that he possessed. This was a move that he would quickly come to regret.

However, it turned out that prints of some of the films survived, and only much later it was rediscovered that for a surprising reason there were negatives in the Library of Congress that over the past several years have been undergoing a painstaking restoration process back in Méliès' native France. Today, roughly half of the 520 or so films that Méliès made in his career are known to survive, which is actually pretty good compared to the percentage of a lot of other's people's work that has been lost.

The Méliès Mystery is part biography, looking at the filmmaker's life starting as the son of a man who owned a shoe factory and expected his sons to follow in the family business, to learning magic in London, through to discovering film with the Lumière brothers, at least if you believe this version of the life story. From what I've read, some of it is legend that has been reprinted as fact like in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. As for the negatives that ended up in America, Méliès sent prints to the US in the early days of movie exhibition, but thanks to poor copyright protection everybody basically pirated everybody else's movies. I think I've mentioned in conjunction with the Griffith shorts box set that I have that companies would include their logo somewhere on the set as a sort of anti-piracy watermark, but the duplicators simply scratched those logos out! So Georges sent one of his brothers over to America and used a two-camera system to make multiple negatives, so that his company would have original prints of his own films to distribute. Those negatives went through a life of their own.

The Méliès Mystery is a well-made movie that I think would serve as a good basic introduction for anybody who doesn't know much about Méliès or about filmmaking as it was in those very early days. For people who are more knowledgeable, there may not be that much new here. But the footage from the original movies is definitely worth watching again.

Somewhere in Time

Another of the movies that's been sitting on my DVR for quite some time that I only recently got around to watching is Somewhere in Time.

Christopher Reeve, fresh off Superman, plays Richard Collier. As the movie starts, it's 1972, and Collier is a college senior drama major who has just written a play and is getting it presented on stage. Sitting in the audience is a mysterious old lady, who approaches Collier and gives him an expensive pocket watch and makes a comment that implies they've met before or will meet again.

Fast forward to the present day, in 1980. Collier has moved from the small college town to Chicago, where he's become a published playwright who has had several of his plays staged. But his personal life remains unfulfilled, and that's beginning to screw up his professional life too. So Richard decides what he needs is a break from Chicago, going back to his old college town. He's also earned enough that he can finally stay in the Grand Hotel that served wealthy tourists in the summer and, one might guess, wealthy alumni in the other three seasons.

A small museum in the hotel celebrates actress Elise McKenna (Jane Seymour), who gave her final performance at the hotel's summer theater back in 1912 before retiring like Greta Garbo. But for whatever reason, Richard is intrigued, and decides to study up on her career, leading to the startling conclusion that this must have been the woman who gave him the pocket watch several years ago. Laura Roberts (Teresa Wright) worked for Elise in her later years and literally wrote the book on her, and still lives in town, rather conveniently. Richard goes to see her, showing her the pocket watch which is a pretty good way of showing he really does have a connection. Richard also learns that Elise had an interest in time travel, and had a book by one of Richard's old college professors.

Richard talks from the old professor and learns the professor's theory that through the power of self-hypnosis, time travel just may be possible. Richard gets obsessed with doing the same sort of self-hypnosis experiment that his college professor did, but with the difference that he's going to wake up on that day in the summer of 1912 when Elise retired from the stage, as Richard now believes he's fated to meet Elise again even though in the real world she's been dead for eight years already.

After the first experiment goes wrong, Richard wakes up from a second experiment to discover that it seeming is 1912! And young Elise is there, looking just like she did in the photos at the Grand Hotel. However, meeting her is going to be a bit difficult, as the 1912 version of Richard doesn't have any relations or good excuse for seeing Elise. She's also got a somewhat complicated personal life. Her manager William (Christopher Plummer) holds a fairly tight rein over her career, as he's grooming her for stardom. When he finds that Richard is in his view harassing Elise, he's none too happy.

Needless to say, Richard continues to pursue Elise, and perhaps it really is because of Richard that Elise retired from acting, staying here to look for him. But then how did young Richard wind up being reborn in time to graduate from college in 1972?

Upon its original release, Somewhere in Time got fairly poor reviews, although in the intervening years it's developed a cult following for various reasons. The good reason for that is the location shooting on Mackinac Island, a resort located on an island between Lake Michigan and Lake Huron. James FitzPatrick did a Traveltalks short on the island, since even in the early 1940s it was known for not allowing motorized vehicles. The location shooting is lovely, and it's easy to see why people with a love for Mackinac Island would have a soft spot for the film. As for other people, I'm not quite certain why. I don't think Somewhere in Time is as bad as the critics of 1980 thought, but it's still a movie with a ridiculous premise and for me a ton of plot holes that aren't well explained. But it's definitely another of those movies you'll want to watch for yourself and draw your own conclusions.

Western Man

Gary Cooper was another of TCM's selections for Star of the Month in 2025, and once again I've got a couple of his films that I had to get through before they expired from the DVR, and then write up the posts on them to put up at a later date. Since it's been a while from the last time I scheduled a post on a western, I decided to watch Man of the West, it having turned out that I had not in fact seen the movie before.

Gary Cooper plays Link Jones, a man who, as the movie opens is acting like he might have a bit of a past. He shows up in the not-quite-so west Texas town of Crosscut, from the farther west town of Good Hope. The citizens of Good Hope need a teacher, and deputized Link to go to Forth Worth to get a teacher to sign a contract, and even gave him money to pay the signing bonus, not that they would have called it that back in the day. Crosscut is the town where the train to Fort Worth is caught, so that's why Link has come here.

He gets on a train and find as a fellow passenger Sam Beasley (Arthur O'Connell). Sam seems partly like the Roscoe Karns character in It Happened One Night, with some of Jack Carson's smooth operator types mixed in. Sam introduces Link to Billie Ellis (Julie London), a saloon singer who wants to leave Crosscut to make a better life for herself, with Sam suggesting she could make a good teacher.

Along the way, the train stops to pick up firewood, since this is a steam engine and they need fuel to keep the train going. All the able-bodied men are asked to get out of the train to help load firewood. Billie, having been bothered by some of the men on board, also gets off for a bit of fresh air and to get away from the older men still on board. One of those "older" men is really a decoy, however, as some of the men are part of a gang trying to rob the train. They do and make a successful getaway, and while the train tries to make its own getaway from the robbers, it leaves Link, Sam, and Billie behind.

Link is bright enough to know that staying by the rails isn't a good idea, since no train is going to come by soon and it's miles to the nearest town as the track goes. Instead, he has the three of them set off on foot, eventually coming to an isolated farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. Link tells Sam and Billie to stay in the barn while he approaches the farm owner for assistance.

And that's where Link's past comes in. It just so happens that Link knew full well there ought to be a farmhouse here, because he used to live here. He was living with his uncle Dock (Lee J. Cobb), who was the leader of a gang of robbers of which Link was once a member. Also, wouldn't you know it, It's Dock's gang that robbed the train, including Coaley (Jack Lord) and Trout (Royal Dano). There's varying degrees of displeasure at seeing Link. Dock, for his part, would like Link to join the gang again since Link seems to have been the only other person who had a real aptitude for the work they were doing and the rest of the gang's proceeds haven't been so high.

The other gang members are rather more violent, as we see when Link is able to bring Billie and Sam to the house. If they were unhappy to see Link, they're really unhappy to see Sam. Billie on the other hand, is a woman which means someone for them to lust over even though Link has said she's his wife as a means of trying to protect her. Tensions rise until Dock announces he wants to use Link as part of his plan to rob the bank at Lassoo, which seems rather more west than where the farmhouse is based on the landscape and (lack of) vegetation. But don't worry about geography in a western like this.

Man of the West is a fairly good western of the late 1950s psychological western mold that was more in vogue than the older straightforward westerns. It was directed by Anthony Mann, who had had a fair bit of success in directing James Stewart in similarly psychological westerns. If there's a flaw, I think it's in the climax, as it seems unlikely the gang wouldn't have known what happened to Lassoo in the intervening years since Link left the gang. But that's a minor quiblle from what is an otherwise worthy movie.

No Kinks music here

Anouk Aimée is another of the people who left us in 2024 and whom TCM included in the late December "parade of the dead" night where they show one movie from each of several people who died in 2024. The movie they showed in her honor was one I have to admit I hadn't heard of before: Lola. But it sounded worth recording, so I did and eventually watched it to do the post on it here.

We don't see Lola for several minutes into the movie. The movie starts with opening credits and a man driving into Nantes, a port city on the Atlantic coast of France, looking like one of those stereotypical Hollywood movie rich guys, with a convertible and a white suit. This is a bit of foreshadowing. Another man, Roland (Marc Michel), is a man who hasn't been able to make much of his life because he's a dreamer. He wakes up late from his lunch break, and when he goes back to work is informed that he's being fired for chronic tardiness.

Meanwhile, there's a US Navy ship docked in Nantes, and the American men on the ship like to go into town to blow off some steam and enjoy themselves. One of the things they do is to go to a bar that looks like it would be a nightclub if only it were nighttime. The sailors dance with the girls working there as if the girls are taxi dancers. One of them is Lola (Anouk Aimée), who is being pursued by Frankie, and American sailor. But we know this isn't going to be a lasting relationship since Frankie's ship is going to be leaving port soon. Besides, we learn that Lola has a young child. It turns out that she was knocked up some years back by Michel, the one true love of her life. But he was too poor to raise a child, so he left town until he could make something of himself, at which point he vowed to come back a rich man.

Roland goes looking for a job and is told there's a hairdresser who has something possibly waiting for an obliging young man. Roland goes, and the manager of the salon tells him something that makes the job offer seem like it's clearly not quite legal. Well much more illegal than that. Roland's job would be to take a boat to Amsterdam, and then go from there to South Africa, where he'll meet somebody in Johannesburg. Roland is being given an attache case which he is expected to give the man in Johannesburg in exchange for another case that's going to look the same and which Roland is to bring back here. Now, it's obvious that Roland is being asked to smuggle something. But he needs the job and this will give him a sense of adventure as well as getting out of Nantes. On the way back to his apartment he bumps into Lola. It turns out that he knew Lola when both were younger, and he's still in love with her. Lola liked Roland as a friend, but her real love was, and still is, Michel.

The movie amiably wanders around Nantes, winding its way toward a resolution of everybody's stories, and does so in a pleasantly brief 90 minutes. Directed by Jacques Demy, Lola is a sort of precursor to Demy's later The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Personally, I prefer the later movie, since the plot feels more cohesive. Lola isn't bad by any means, and it's got lovely black-and-white cinematography of Nantes. Lola is definitely worth one watch if you haven't seen it before.

This Side of the Law

In addition to foreign films and silents, I have a tendency to record a lot of the entries in Eddie Muller's Noir Alley series, especially the ones I haven't seen before. I like Eddie's introductions, and the movies are usually interesting even when they're not very good. The latest movie that I've seen from Noir Alley is This Side of the Law.

Kent Smith is the lead here, and as the movie opens he is in true noir style bemoaning the situation he's gotten himself into at a great old estate called Sans Souci somewhere on the California coast with the sort of clifftop paths that you know are going to lead to danger. In his case, however, his problems stem not from a femme fatale so much as a lawyer.... Flash back to a week earlier. David Cummins (Kent Smith) is an unemployed something or other who has just been picked up on a vagrancy charge. Imagine, to his surprise when, at the trial, somebody he's never seen before offers to pay the fine and everything! That somebody, lawyer Philip Cagle (Robert Douglas), has a proposition for David that could make him a tidy sum of money. And when Cagle takes David to his office, the secretary thinks David is some guy named Malcom Taylor!

Now, David isn't completely stupid, so he holds out for more money until he can learn more about the proposition and what he's being asked to do for the money. It turns out that the real Malcom Taylor disappeared just shy of seven years ago, without so much as a trace. As you may know, in the US it was historically the case that being disappeared for seven years was the point at which you could be legally declared dead, with all that comes with. (See also a movie like Too Many Husbands.) Since David looks amazingly like Malcolm, Cagle would like David to play the part of Malcolm for a few days before "disappearing" again so that he can't be declared legally dead just yet. Eventually, David holds out for a cool $5,000.

Unfortunately, he gets to the house and finds that nobody seems to have really liked Malcolm. Malcolm had a wife, Evelyn (Viveca Lindfors), but for what ever reason the two of them had a falling out. That probably has to do with the relationship that Malcolm had with his sister-in-law Nadine (Janis Paige), about which David obviously knows nothing but which Nadine seems eager to resume. That's because she's in a loveless marriage with Malcolm's brother Calder (John Alvin), who resents Malcolm because Malcolm was for some reason the favorite son back in the days when the parents were still alive. Things get worse when Nadine notices that David doesn't have a scar in a specific location where the real Malcolm would have had a scar, so she figures out that this isn't Malcolm, which sets the denouemnt in action as we see how David ended up where he did at the start of the movie.

This Side of the Law is fairly implausible, but it's also entertaining enough in the same sense that Columbo episodes are. It's not too difficult to figure out who the villain of the piece is, but the fun is in seeing how we ultimately get there. If you go into This Side of the Law not expecting much, I think you'll enjoy it.

Briefs for Feb. 24-25, 2026

I think I mentioned last week when I posted the obituary for Robert Duvall that I had Apocalypse Now on my DVR and was planning to watch it probably over the weekend and write up a post on it. In the meantime, TCM altered their schedule for an evening toward the end of 31 Days of Oscar where Tender Mercies was scheduled to run and added two more of Duvall's Oscar-nominated roles, including the one in Apocalypse Now. So I watched the movie anyhow and wrote up the post, but scheduled it to run in conjunction with the upcoming airing instead of at an earlier date.

Also dying recently was actor Robert Carradine, brother of Keith and David as well as son of John and an actor himself. His roles included a debut performance in the John Wayne movie The Cowboys as well as 1980s comedy classic Revenge of the Nerds. Carradine, who was 71, had reportedly suffered from bipolar disorder for decades and decided to take his own life.

A movie I blogged about back in 2009 is going to be back on FXM after a fairly long absence: The Ox-Bow Incident, tomorrow, Feb. 25, at 8:05 AM. Actually, somewhat surprisingly to me, FXM seems to have decided to pull a fair bit more out of the vaults than they seemed to have done on the previous occasions when they refreshed their rotation. Looking through the schedules since the start of 2026, I've gotten the impression that there aren't nearly as many repeats, with a greater range of titles than I'm used to seeing. Of course, I'm also still surprised that the schedule isn't 24 hours a day of more recent stuff. I think it's been over 13 years now since the change to FXM, and I said at the time I didn't expect the Retro block to last more than about six months.

I'll also repeat the warning that I'm far enough ahead in scheduling movies that, as with Apocalypse Now, I have to make certain that I'm scheduling the posts on the proper date, so as always check your box guide to make certain I've got the date correct.

The Merry Widow (1952)

The TCM lineup for tonight in prime time going through to the start of tomorrow's prime time lineup is Oscar-nominated movies that are remakes of earlier films. One that's on my DVR that I hadn't seen before is the 1952 version of The Merry Widow, which you can see tomorrow (Feb. 25) at 7:00 AM. So once again, I made the point of sitting down to watch the movie in order to be able to write up this review.

Now, the first thing I have to say is that I have not seen the Franz Lehár operetta on which this movie is based, nor have I seen the 1934 movie, so I'm judging this one on its own merits. I of course knew the famous "Merry Widow Waltz" both from piano lessons when I was a kid as well as its use in the Alfred Hitchcock movie Shadow of a Doubt where the widows didn't exactly stay merry for long. This version opens literally at the turn of the 20th century in Washington DC where everybody is celebrating at the various countries' embassies. Well, every embassy but one, the embassy of the fictional central European monarchy of Marshovia. Marshovia is a nearly bankrupt country, and the ambassador can't even pay the embassy's rent.

But the ambassador gets a coded cable from the king (Thomas Gomez) that there are three Marshovians living in the US, and one of them died, having emigrated to America and become an exceedingly wealthy man, leaving his widow with $80 million, a hugh fortune by the standards of 1900. Perhaps she can be convinced to come to Marshovia to dedicate a statue to her husband, although this would really just be a ruse to get her to use her fortune to help pay off the national debt.

The ambassador and his aide, Popoff (Richard Haydn), visit the widow, Crystal Radek (Lana Turner), who has a very capable secretary in the form of Kitty Riley (Una Merkel). Eventually Crystal does agree, and the two women head off for Marshovia, where the King has planned a big reception at the train station, except for the fact that the train is late getting there so everybody has gone a block or two away to party when the train arrives, leaving Crystal and Kitty to hear the joyous singing and see the dancing only from a distance and make their way to the palace by themselves.

The king has a military officer, Count Danilo (Fernando Lamas), whom he knows to be quite the ladies' man, and Danilo's singing has already impressed the two women. So the king comes up with a detailed schedule of how Danilo should seduce Crystal so that she'll marry him, at which point Danilo can use the estate to pay off the national debt. Mind you, this is supposed to be a light comic operetta. And the king can order Danilo to do this. Some of the king's ladies-in-waiting aren't thrilled, so they put the copy of Danilo's agenda in the envelope that accompanies the flowers Danilo is going to give Crystal. The point is that Crystal will find this and understand that the wooing is a sham.

Things get complicated when Danilo goes to see Crystal but Kitty answers, and Danilo gets the mistaken impression that Kitty is in fact Crystal. But when the two women see the agenda, they get fed up with Marshovia and leave for Paris, where Crystal gets a bunch of suitors. Danilo eventually follows, and Crystal is willing to let Kitty pretend to be her. Meanwhile, the real Crystal meets Danilo but hides her real identity and kinda-sorta falls in love with Danilo except for the fact that Danilo is on a mercenary mission. Crystal, calling herself Fifi, completely bowls over Danilo, who falls in love with her but can't go further because the King requires him to marry Crystal. And, of course, he can't find Fifi either, until the film's climax....

This version of The Merry Widow was made in Technicolor and is lovely to look at. It's not a surprise that the film's Oscar nominations were in the color technical categories, from the era when set and costume design had separate awards for color and black-and-white movies. Fernando Lamas does most of the singing here, and there's quite a bit of singing and dancing. This may slow the movie down for the sort of people who, like me, aren't the biggest fans of musicals or opera. I also have to admit that I find the plot of a mercenary marriage a bit mean, although the way the screenplay here gets around the Production Code more or less works.

Furious Island

I'm not certain if TCM ran a morning/afternoon salute to Margaret Lindsay some time back, but I inadvertently watched two of her movies in close succession. I put up a post on Broadway Musketeers some time back, so as is my wont now I'm writing up a post on Isle of Fury now and saving it in drafts to post at some point in the future.

The movie opens with one of those title card intros that were not uncommon through the 1930s, talking about the Pacific Islands being a good place to escape one's past. One one such island, Tankana, Val Stevens (Humphrey Bogart early in his career and with a ridiculous moustache) is about to get married to Lucille Gordon (Margaret Lindsay) against the backdrop of a raging storm. As with White Shadows in the South Seas, Val is part of the lucrative pearl trade, although he's rather kinder to the locals to the point that he offers to go down and do the work himself to show them there's not really any danger, although that's a plot point to be discussed later in this post.

More importantly is that the storm leaves one of the passing ships in distress, so the people on the boat have to be rescued: Tankana is one of those islands that doesn't have a harbor for the big ships; instead, a small tender has to go out to where the big ships anchor and pick up and drop off people. The two people who are worth mentioning among those brought to the island in the storm are young Eric Blake (Donald Woods), and Captain Deever (Paul Graetz), who it's not really discussed why he wasn't the last man off the boat. Deever looks like the sort of "this man has a shady past" trope you'd expect from an old Hollywood movie, while Blake is closer to leading man handsome. He, too, isn't entirely open about why he's on the island.

As you might guess, with Lucille tending to Blake, the two begin to develop feelings for each other. This, even though Lucille took those vows to be faithful to Val. Blake and Val also start to become friends in part because Blake helps save Val's life when Val goes under the sea to harvest pearls, only to have to face... a giant rubber octopus! So that's why the locals didn't want to do the work. They really were in danger.

There's more danger for Val because he has the pearls and the cash locked up in his warehouse, and that's a logical point for shady characters who would like the money themselves to attack. Captain Deever, meanwhile, is constantly in the background eavesdropping, with everything about Val's past and the reason for Blake and Deever being on the island revealed in the finale.

I didn't notice on watching the opening credits, but Isle of Fury is actually based on a novel by Somerset Maugham, which probably helps explain the inclusion of one character I didn't mention, alcoholic Dr. Hardy (E.E. Clive) who serves as a sounding board for the other characters. The material isn't bad, although this is decidedly a B movie from the time when Bogart was working his way up the ladder. Bogart supposedly didn't like it, which I'd guess would have had to do with the octopus scene. It is, also, a B movie so the plot feels rather rushed at just 60 minutes. If Warner Bros. could have come up with a script of a programmer length closer to 80 or 90 minutes they might have been able to get a pretty good movie rather than a B curiosity. But even as just a little B movie Isle of Fury is worth watching.