TCM Star of the Month June 2026: Marilyn Monroe

Marilyn Monroe, remembered for a scene in The Seven Year Itch (June 15, 10:00 PM)

We're into the month of June now, and that means it's time for a new Star of the Month on TCM. This time around, that's Marilyn Monroe, as today is her 100th birth anniversary. Monroe's films will be airing on the first four Monday nights in June, with the final Monday, June 29, being given over the a "Pride" film festival (and I've got a film for that day already).

Marilyn Monroe and Cary Grant in Monkey Business (June 1, 11:30 PM)

Now, Monroe famously died young, so she didn't make all that many movies, which means that unlke some other Stars of the Month, the films only take up part of the evening/overnight lineup. Tonight, for example, sees Armored Car Robbery at 2:45 AM after the final Monroe film, her debut performance in Ladies of the Chorus. And, she did a lot of her work at Fox, which probably also limited how many movies TCM was able to get the rights to, as River of No Return and All About Eve are not here along with some of the other stuff she did early in her career at Fox before How to Marry a Millionaire and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes really made her a big star by 1953.

It's not a big role, but Marilyn Monroe was clearly in The Asphalt Jungle (June 8, 11:30 PM)

After tonight's first night, the movies are relatively chronological, in that June 8 is from the early 1950s; June 15 is the middle of the decade, and June 22 the end of the 1950s and, well, Monroe's final film, The Misfits from 1961. But at only 13 films, it's not a whole lot.

At least they included Some Like It Hot (June 22, 8:00 PM)

For some values of good, and 20 years after the news

One of those movies that shows up often enough on TCM but that I'd never really gotten around to watching is the 1947 version of Good News, which I think I'd generally avoided because it's a musical and because the male lead is played by Peter Lawford, who is not one of my favorite actors. But in any case, the last time it showed up on TCM I finally recorded it so that I could watch it before the next showing. That next showing will be tomorrow, June 1, at 9:30 AM.

The movie is based on a 1927 Broadway musical that had already been filmed once before, in 1930, and unsurprisingly set in 1927. As the opening informs us, it's the time of flappers and the Charleston, with college football being a much bigger sport than professional football in those days. Tait College, clearly on the MGM backlot, is one of those movie colleges that look like the smaller schools that dotted the midwest and where football was in fact a big deal. Tommy Marlowe (Peter Lawford) is the quarterback and captain of the football team, and as such all of the girls are interested in him.

One girl, however, who does not show interest in Tommy at first is transfer student Pat McClellan (Patricia Marshall). That's because she's come from the sort of boarding school where one learns French and where one learns to look for a man who's got a lot of money to marry. Tommy isn't loaded, while non-football player Peter Van Dyne III (Robert Strickland) is. You can tell just by the name. Worse, Pat insults Tommy in French, so that he can't understand just how she's insulting him.

Connie (June Allyson), meanwhile, is a more bookish student, working her way through Tati with a job in the school library, but also the sort of student who's just right to tutor the jocks if you're OK with having the jocks tutored by women and aren't worried about the risk that tutor and tutee might become romantically involved. Peter falls for Connie, and in many ways the feeling is mutual.

There's a problem, however, in that everybody cares about the big game, which means one, that Tommy has to be in the right frame of mind and not worried about romantic complications; and, two, that he be in good academic standing. Both of these get complicated. One is by Connie's roommate Babe thinking she's doing a good thing for Tommy by telling Pat that Tommy comes from money so that she'll be interested in him again, never mind what this does to poor Connie. Second is that Tommy fails one of his exams so that there's the question of academic eligibility. The big game comes, and it looks like Tait may lose to their rival, so everybody has to re-arrange things so that the right people can wind up together.

Along the way, there are any number of subplots about various teammates of Tommy's and their romantic issues, as well as the romantic isues of Connie's sorority sisters. Notably among the supporting cast is a young Mel Tormé. Also, this having been based on a musical, there's also a lot of musical numbers in the MGM style, with vibrant Technicolor and energetic dancing.

Having said all that, whether or not you like Good News is going to be dependent upon whether you like Peter Lawford and June Allyson on the one hand, and on the other whether the MGM musical style is your thing. I'm not the biggest fan of a lot of the MGM musicals, and Good News hasn't changed my opinion on Peter Lawford either. It's not that Good News is a bad movie by any stretch of the imagination; it's just that I'm not the sort of person MGM was trying to appeal to. If you like musicals you'll probably enjoy Good News.

Neither to have nor not to have

Warner Bros. made the movie To Have and Have Not back in 1944, which rather famously brought together Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. Some years later, the studio heavily reworked the script for a remake, called The Breaking Point. That remake shows up on TCM tomorrow, May 31, at 3:00 PM.

The action is moved from the Caribbean to the Pacific coast. John Garfield plays Harry Morgan, the captain of a charter boat working out of Newport Beach and taking rich people on fishing trips, at least when he can drum up business. That hasn't been as much as he'd like, leading him to have trouble supporting his loving wife Lucy (Phyllis Thaxter) and kids. He's even having trouble keeping the boat, as he's got payments on the boat as well as all the dock fees.

So he and his assistant Wesley Park (Juano Hernández) are pleased when Leona Charles (Patricia Neal) and her husband charter the boat to go down to Baja California for some fishing. When they get down to their destination, however, things go sour. First is that there's an obnoxious lawyer Duncan (Wallace Ford) who tries to get Morgan to smuggle stuff back to America. Worse is that Leona seems to be hitting on Harry; she is a sort of femme fatale, after all. And it turns out that not only is she not married, but the man she was with snubbed both her and Harry and Wesley by blowing all his ready cash betting on cockfighting and then drawing on his bank account to buy one plane ticket for himself back to California!

So now Harry has to go back to Duncan because he neeeds to make money. Worse is that he finds out that what he's asked to smuggle is actually humans, not any sort of inanimate contraband. And of course, both Duncan and Sing (Victor Sen Yung), the Chinese underworld boss who wants the Chinese illegal immigrants smuggled into the States, try to stiff Harry. This leads to Sing getting killed, the immigrants having to wade back to shore, and all sorts of legal complications when Harry gets back to California.

And then there's the fact that Duncan survived all of this. Leona did too, and she's still hanging around for some reason, leading Lucy to get the impression that perhaps Harry isn't being faithful with her. No wonder she's been begging him to give up the idea of being a sea captain and go into her father's lettuce farm business up in the agricultural part of California.

Finally, as if Harry doesn't have enough problems, Duncan returns, this time wantng Harry to smuggle some gangsters and their ill-gotten loot from a racetrack heist out to sea for the pick-up. Harry doesn't want to do it, but doesn't exactly have much choice considering the extent to which Duncan has been blackmailing him to this point.

I'm not the biggest fan of either Lauren Bacall or Ernest Hemingway, so To Have and Have Not isn't exactly a favorite of mine. The Breaking Point, on the other hand, feels like a more modest remake of the movie. John Garfield is just the sort of actor for this sort of role. Patricia Neal has hair dyed blonde, and frankly, it doesn't suit her. That having been said, it does enhance the sort of trashiness of the character and she also pulls her role off well. Also of note is the complete lack of mention of any "race issues" despite the Wesley Parks character being played by Juano Hernández. He's the copilot, not the man bravely confronting the racism and segregation of the day that poor Sidney Poitier had to do over and over. Everybody treats the Wesley character in what feels the same way they'd treat any ship's second officer.

The Breaking Point is definitely a movie to watch, and tomorrow is your chance.

Briefs for the end of May 2026

As I write this early on the morning of May 30, the full TCM schedule for June hasn't been released, missing the last three days. The TCM site only lets me go out through June 19. I know most channels don't go even that far out, but for TCM fans, loyal bunch that we are, it's somewhat distressing to see the deterioration in what I'd class as the customer service that people at TCM performed for the fans. I mean, these fans are the sort of people who will drop thousands to go to a TCM Film Festival or the TCM Cruise. Not that I can afford either in terms of money or time away from my elderly father who wouldn't be interested in doing such things (and, to be honest, I'm not interested in that sort of giant cruise ship either). But there are a lot of people who are, and who have looked forward to planning out the month's viewing weeks in advance.

Also, again, I'll repeat my mention that from the first 27 days of the month, there are several movies coming up that are on my DVR and where I had to reschedule other posts since I'm somewhere between three and four days ahead in terms of how far I've got posts scheduled here. So, as always, check the listings for the time that a movie is scheduled in case I've put up the post on the wrong day.

As for FXM, I've still got a couple of movies on the DVR that are in common rotation in the Retro block, notably the 1940s version of The Lodger and the surprisingly recent for the Retro block Lincoln. I also recorded Anastasia since a search of the blog suggests I hadn't done a post on it even though I watched it once ages ago. That one, somewhat surprisingly, doesn't seem to have gotten a second airing since I recorded it.

The Naked Truth

Peter Sellers was TCM's Star of the Month last September. Some years back I bought a box set that had several of Sellers' early British movies, in part for I'm Alright Jack, and have done reviews on all of the movies in that set. TCM unsurprisingly ran a goodly amount of Sellers' British work as well, but included a movie that wasn't in that box set and that I hadn't heard before: Your Past Is Showing. (Note that the movie was originally titled The Naked Truth; the print TCM ran included a card from the British Board of Film Censors with that title, but with an actual title card of Your Past Is Showing.)

Back in the 1950s in the US, there were scandal sheet magazines like Confidential that raked up dirt on celebrities. Less ethical people in the business offered to spike stories in exchance for some sort of quid pro quo or cash, a practice which is effectively blackmail. In this movie, Nigel Dennis (Dennis Price) is the publisher of a magazine called The Naked Truth that prints similarly nasty gossip and who is also the sort of man who has no compunction about blackmailing the people he writes about. We then get introduced to four such people, and Dennis' attempts to blackmail each of them:

Melissa Right (Shirley Eaton of Goldfinger fame) is a model with an American boyfriend and a shady past;
Lord Mayley (Terry-Thomas) is a respected British peer with a wife (Georgina Cookson) who has the tendency to go out chasing younger women;
Flora Ransom (Peggy Mount) is a murder-mystery writer in the Agatha Christie sense with a daughter (Joan Sims) but who may have stolen the plot to one of her big-selling murder mysteries; and
Sonny Macgregor (Peter Sellers) hosts a show that seems somewhat like You Bet Your Life, only he's not really Scottish, and he also owns some apartment buildings that aren't in particularly good condition.

Dennis, having threatened each of them (and a whole host of unseen others), leaves them with the uncomfortable decision of whether to pay up or to let their secrets be revealed. Then again, there's a third option, which might be to use other means to get Dennis to lay off. Or to make him incapable of going ahead with his plans to publish that information -- even if their plans to do so are highly illegal. Flora, being a mystery writer, decides to come up with a way of killing Dennis that won't be detcted, while Macgregor, who is also a master of disguises, has his own plans to kill Dennis. Unfortunately, both of them are less competent than they think, and poor Lord Mayley, who doesn't know anything about the other two, rather haplessly walks into these schemes.

Eventually the four, having found things out, decide that they're better off teaming up to come up with a murder that nobody will be able to pin on any of them individually. Of course, this scheme doesn't quite work either, and in fact leads to a whole new set of complications.

Your Past Is Showing is the sort of British farce that a studio like Ealing was quite good at making. Here, however, with the presence of Sellers and Terry-Thomas, things get a bit more zany. However, this doesn't always work to the movie's benefit, especially when it coms to Flora and her daughter; these two characters are way overplayed.

Overall, though, the positives outweigh the negatives of Your Past Is Showing, and it's definitely a movie that's worth watching, even if there are more sparkling British comedies of the era out there.

Carter didn't go over there

Another person who was honored in Summer Under the Stars in 2025 was Glenda Farrell. I've seen a lot of her movies since I like 30s films and she worked at Warner Bros. to whose films TCM can more easily get the rights. One I hadn't seen was the B movie Here Comes Carter.

Glenda Farrell is nominally the female lead here although we don't see her about 10 minutes in to a movie that only runs an hour. Also, she's not the love interest for the lead male. The lead male is played the titular Kent Carter, played by Ross Alexander. Carter works in the promotions department for Premier Studios, and has a personal secretary Linda Warren (Anne Nagel, Alexander's real-life wife). She's an aspiring singer, but wants to get to the big time on her own and not have Carter push her.

One of the stars Carter is expected to promote is Rex Marchbanks (Craig Reynolds), a man Carter doesn't like for some reason. So when Carter is informed that waiting outside his office is Rex's ex-wife, accompanied by a policeman who is looking for the alimony payments Rex has stiffed her on, Carter doesn't do what is supposed to be his job of smoothing over scandals like this. Instead, he lets the case go to court, and for that the studio quite rightly fires him.

It takes a little while for Carter to find new work, until he's outside the studios of radio station KLA. Their Hollywood reporter Mel Winter (Hobart Cavanaugh) is a drunkard who doesn't exactly have a successful show, so Carter offers to make the show a success. Winter's secretary is Verna Kennedy (Glenda Farrell). Carter is able to make the show a success, but it's by getting Winter off the show and replaced by Carter himself, who has an extremely obnoxious delivery.

Now, a lot of this sort of show, which I guess was in those days a sort of precursor to Entertainment Tonight, was to run puff pieces on celebrities based on what the studio press agents fed to the "gossip" columnists. Carter, having been a press agent himself, has no desire to do a show like that, and instead has that contratrian attitude, even talking about gangsters and seemingly trying to paint Marchbanks as having an in with the gangsters. Linda doesn't like Carter for this, even though she does get an audition not knowing Carter has arranged it for her.

Marchbanks goes to the gang leader, Moran, and gets Moran's henchmen to rough Carter up in an attempt to stop Carter. But Carter continues his potentially libellous broadcasts about Marchbanks. The stuff wouldn't be libellous if Carter can prove it to be the truth. But can he?

Well, of course he can, considering that he's the hero and this is one of those light Warner's B movies. Tragic Ross Alexander has no difficulty with the material here, and neither does Glenda Farrell. Anne Nagel, on the other hand, is rather bland. There's nothing particularly new going on here, just the sort of stuff you'd expect from the days when a studio had to keep churning out new stuff to keep supplying the theaters. It entertains well enough for what it is, however.

Quick Change

TCM did a prime time spotlight on actor Bill Murray on his 75th birthday last September. One of the movies that they ran was new to me: Quick Change. As always, the plot synopsis sounded interesting, so I put it on my DVR to watch it and write up a post on it.

As the movie opens, Bill Murray's character Grimm is on a subway in Manhattan, wearing a clown outfit and made up like a clown, complete with balloons and big clown shoes. But that's not all he has. He's got a bunch of explosives attached to an alarm clock wrapped around his torso, and is carrying a gun. He makes his way to the Intercity Bank, where the guard doesn't want to let him in because it's close enough to closing time to let in new customers. So of course Grimm forces his way in, considering that it's obvious what he's planning to do.

Grimm proceeds to pull out his gun and tell everyone in the branch that this is a robbery. One of the bank workers, however, presses the silent alarm, so the police come with a large contingent led by police chief Rotzinger (Jason Robards) and his second-in-command, along with a ton of cops setting up a cordon around the building and basically besieging the place. Grimm has planned for this, however, what with the explosives. He's also put everybody in the bank in the vault and locking it, setting up negotiations with the police outside that eventually result in Grimm releasing three of the hostages.

But we learn that this is a ruse. As the second and third hostages are outside while the police are planning to take them for debriefing, the woman, Phyllis (Geena Davis) sees that there's a bit of white paint on the third hostage's face. That's because the third "hostage" is actually Grimm, who was using this as a way of getting out of the bank branch despite it being otherwise surrounded. Phyllis, the woman with him, is actually an accomplice as well as Grimm's fiancée. The man who was let out as the first hostage, Loomis (Randy Quaid), is also in on the bank plot, and left the scene to get his car and pick up Grimm and Phyllis for the getaway.

Grimm's plan was to get the three of them on a plane to Tahiti, with the money taped to each of their bodies, getting away while Rotzinger would still be under the impression that Grimm was in the bank with his hostages. To keep up that ruse, Grimm goes to a pay phone to call Rotzinger, these being the days before caller ID, especially on the sort of oversized mobile phone that Rotzinger is using. However, this is where the first crack in Grimm's plan occurs. Loomis is a bit incompetent, and accidentally honks the car horn, a sound that Rotzinger can clearly hear and gives him the impression something is up. Rotzinger becomes more suspicious when the debriefing occurs, and the first three hostages released are not there. And how did Grimm get out anyway?

Meanwhile, everything that can go wrong for our three bank robbers does. Some of the road signs have been taken down, so they can't find the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway to get to Kennedy Airport and their flight to Tahiti. Then they get robbed by a con artist; their car gets towed for being illegally parked; and on, and on, and on in ways that are ever more absurd. Will they be able to escape, or will Rotzinger nab them? Fortunately, the movie was made well after the disintegration of the Production Code, so it's not a foregone conclusion that the robbers have to be caught.

Quick Change is a fun idea, and a movie that's mostly successful in being entertaining. However, it's a movie that I felt lost a bit of stem in the third act, mostly because things get too absurd and manic. We get it already. Then again, it's not a bad movie, just one that I felt could have been a bit better.

She Loved a Fireman

Another of the short B movies that I recorded during one of the Saturday matinee blocks some months back, was She Loved a Fireman, which runs a shade under an hour. As is once again the case, I eventually got around to watching it so that I could write this review and put it up here.

The main character is the fireman, not the she. And the fireman doesn't start off the movie as a fireman. Instead, the man in question, Red Tyler (Dick Foran) is a ward-heeler type who would be more comfortable making book and getting manicures than you'd think he'd be in a fire department. But for reasons that are vaguely suggested might be related to political corruption, he follows a fire captain, Smokey Shannon (Robert Armstrong), out of the salon where Smokey is getting a shave and Red is getting that manicure. Red thinks he's more masculine than the fire fighters, so he and his best friend Skillet (Eddie Acuff) decide to take the civil service exam to become firefighters.

The two both pass and go to the fire academy in one of the movie's better scenes showing some of the training the recruits go through. After graduation they both get assigned to Smokey's station. Red immediately makes everyone else hate him because Red thinks he's hot stuff. Meanwhile, he decides he's going to hook up with Margie (Ann Sheridan) who walks into the fire station one day. It's only later tht he finds out that this is Margie Shannon, the captain's sister. And boy is the captain none too pleased that Red is trying to pursue his sister.

Worse, Red decides he's going to cut corners so that he can get out of the station and go visit Margie. This includes some obvious foreshadowing of a shot of a hook that's supposed to keep the ladder connected to the fire truck. As you might guess, the station gets called out to a fire, Skillet is holding on to that ladder as the fire truck races to the fire, and then the ladder falls off, giving Skillet a lovely broken leg in the process.

Smokey gets Red transferred to the harbor fire station when Red should probably have been prosecuted for negligence and gone to jail for it, but then we'd have a lot less of a movie. As you might guess, there's a warehouse fire near the harbor, and both Red's new precinct and Smokey's get called to the scene. Smokey gets trapped on the roof, and this gives Red a chance to save Smokey and give the movie a happy ending.

There are a lot of problems with She Loved a Fireman, with most of the issues stemming from the fact that Red is just such a jerk of a character. You can't understand why anybody would like this guy, and then the obligatory redemption arc doesn't really work either There's some good footage of training as well as some good stock footage in the warehouse fire, but that's not enough to save the movie. Ann Sheridan was at the beginning of her career here, which is part of why Warner Bros. only put her in a trifle of a B movie like this. She's not enough to save the film either.

Scanners

Quite a few months back, TCM ran a night of movies on the theme of body horror. Unsurprisingly, if you're going to do body horror you would do well to include a David Cronenberg movie among the showings, and the movie TCM picked was Scanners.

The movie opens in what looks like a food court in a downmarket mall. A scruffy guy, Cameron Vale (Stephen Lack) sits down at one of the tables. At a nearby table, a copule of women are eating, and one of them makes derogatory remarks about bums like this Cameron seems to be. But there's more to Cameron than meets the eye, and he starts staring at the woman to the point that she has a seizure! This comes to the notice of a couple of men who act like plainclothes detectives, chasing Cameron through the mall until one of them shoots him... with a tranquilizer dart. Cameron is taken to a converted warehouse, where scientist Dr. Paul Ruth (Patrick McGoohan) informs him he's something known as a "scanner", a small group of people who have telepathic communities but have mental issues because they don't know how to deal with being able to hear everybody else's internal conversations. Dr. Ruth gives Cameron a drug called "Ephemerol" that dulls the other people's voices inside his head.

Meanwhile, at a company called ConSec which is obviously one of those evil defense contractor type companies that dotted conspiracy theory movies of the 1970s and 1980s, the executives also know about the scanners. But they have a rather more sinister plan, which is to use the scanners as weapons. They set up a demonstration event where they show what scanners can do, asking for someone to volunteer to be scanned. But what they don't know is that the man who volunteers, Darryl Revok (Michael Ironside), is himself a scanner. Worse, he's more powerful than the guy scanning him, so the end result is that the ComSec scanner's head explodes in what is one of the movies most memorable sequences.

Guards try to chase Revok, but they don't have any nice tranquilizer darts or the like, so he's able to kill several of them in an extended car chase sequence. Dr. Ruth learns of all this and is horrified. But he also knew this was coming, which was part of the reason he was looking for Cameron. Apparently the belief is that Revok is not only a renegade scanner, but that he's looking for other scanners to join him in a plot to take over the world from the normies. And woe betide anybody who's a scanner but doesn't want to be a pawn in Revok's evil plot. Anyhow, Cameron's job is to infiltrate Revok's inner circle and take down Revok.

Cameron find an artist named Pierce (Robert Silverman) who is also a scanner, just in time for Revok's men to murder Pierce because Revok has obviously learned about Cameron and his being the second most powerful scanner behind only Revok himself. This also leads Cameron to Kim Obrist (Jennifer O'Neill), who is actively opposed to Revok and obviously in substantial danger because of it. Cameron and Obrist try to stay one step ahead of Revok while also trying to figure out exactly what's going on, which is rather more than Dr. Ruth has been letting on.

The idea of people with telepathic abilities fighting each other is an interesting one; indeed, it's something that had already been done in The Fury a few years earlier. The overarching plot of Scanners is frankly a bit silly, but this is the sort of movie that you don't watch so much for the plot, instead just sitting back and enjoying a ride through a dark and twisted world. That, and the special effects.

That having been said, I suppose that if Scanners had a more airtight plot, like, say, Alien, it might be remembered as an all-time classic and not just the interesting cult movie that it is. Either way, it's definitely worth your time to sit down with it and decide for yourelf just how much fun it is.

The trees of size

There are different types of westerns out there, notably the cavalry/fort type movies on one hand and the marshall-in-town type. Western movie channels like to lump in a third type of movie that's definitely western-adjacent at times, which is the sort of period piece set in a frontier town. Think movies like Revolutionary War films set in the Indian theater of the war, or movies set against the backdrop of the Klondike gold rush. Something that's similarly adjacent to more traditional westerns is The Big Trees.

Kirk Douglas stars as Jim Fallon, who doesn't host a late-night TV show because the movie is set in 1900 when there was no TV. Instead, he runs a lumber camp in northern Wisconsin where he's a bit of a dreamer and a bit of a chancer. Fallon has trouble making payroll, to the point that his right-hand man Yukon (Edgar Buchanan) has to run interference for him. He's also got a long suffering girlfriend in Daisy (Patrice Wymore). Recently, however, Fallon has learned of a new federal law. Apparently, changes to the old Homestead act are going to change who has the logging rights to some of the land in the national forests of the western states. There's big money, and Fallon wants a piece of it, despite never having been to California.

So Fallon sends Yukon out west to size up the lay of the land, while Fallon himself follows not too much farther behind when he can get the money. What he finds is a bit of tension, as a lot of different people are laying claim to various bits of land. Some, who have apparently been living on the land for a goodly length of time, are at risk of being priced out of "their" land in favor of whomever can afford to file a claim. At least Yukon has gotten the current land office man to slow-roll the claims, although in his case it's so that Fallon and the men he's bringing from Wisconsin can make the claims.

The people at threat of being dispossessed are a group of Quakers, led by the Elder Bixby and young Alicia Chadwick (Eve Miller). They're proto-environmentalists in the John Muir mold who see these fabulous redwoods as a sign of God's majesty and providence, and really only want to take what they need for their own use and to make a modest living. Fallon, of course, sees dollar signs in those giant redwoods, and sets out to come up with a way to pull the forest out from under the Quakers even though he claims to be on their side (and even though Alicia is an obvious love interest for Fallon in the romantic conflict subplot of the movie).

Also trying to dispossess the Quakers, and there first, is Frenchy (John Archer), who has a bunch of men who have been trying to file claims and aren't about to let a little thing like Fallon's men stop them. The conflict gets much more severe when Yukon gets named the local sheriff and really starts to take Alicia's side. This he does even to a greater extent than being on Fallon's side, as his belief is growing that Fallon is letting hubris get in the way of morals.

There's also still the Production Code, meaning that the "good" characters are going to have to win more or less in the end, or at least the immoral characters get what's coming to them. And clearly the script has already been set up to have Frenchy and not Fallon be the true villain of the piece.

From what I've read, Kirk Douglas considered this to be one of the least worthy movies of his entire career. I can see why, although I also think that assessment is a bit unfair. It's not that The Big Trees is bad by any stretch of the imagination. It's more that the movie is a bit formulaic, and definitely a modest thing compared to the much more memorable movies with great performances that Douglas had in his long career. This one, for example, was made just before Douglas went over to MGM and made The Bad and the Beautiful. But The Big Trees I think successfull does what it set out to do as a programmer, which is to provide reasonable entertainment. It's just a shame that Cinemascope wasn't around yet, as widescreen Technicolor would have been a big enhancement for the movie.