Your wacky family turns me on

A sub-genre, or maybe a plot trope, of a surprising number of movies is one where a person, usually a rich and hitherto proper man, falls in love with a woman who is either "free-spirited" or else has an entire family of unorthodox relatives. A minor entry into that field is the Lucille Ball comedy A Girl, a Guy, and a Gob.

Now, as you might imagine, Lucille Ball is The Girl, although considering how she'd later be known for her zaniness she's actually the one normal member of her family. She plays Dot Duncan, a working girl who does want to be more cultured. To that end, Dot's shiftless brother Pigeon (Lloyd Corrigan) found some opera tickets, for an entire box no less. Of course, the box has been taken out on subscription by the Herrick family, including Stephen (a young Edmond O'Brien) and his fiancée Cecilia (Marguerite Chapman), who if anything might be even more strait-laced than Stephen.

Dot gets the impression Pigeon came across the tickets by less than honest means, so she goes to Herrick's business, the shipping firm he runs together with Abel Martin (Henry Travers) to sort of apologize, and winds up getting herself hired as a secretary in the process. Of course with a young woman like this there's always the question of how long she'll be keeping the job since women generally quit to become housewives when they got married. And, as for Dot, she's got a fiancé of her own, of sorts, in the form of "Coffee Cup" (George Murphy). Coffee Cup is a would be professional wrestler, but that doesn't pay the bills in general, and certainly not enough to get married to Dot. So he did a hitch with the Navy that he's about to finish up.

Now, Coffee Cup is looking for ways to get that money to marry Dot, and Stephen isn't really doing anything to stop this since he wants Dot to be happy and has a fiancée of his own. But you know that the two are going to wind up together in the final reel. Things start going bad when Coffee Cup and Pigeon kinda-sorta cause a right in which Stephen gets knocked unconscious, so they take Stephen to the Duncan home to recover for the night. That's bad enough for Stephen, since it means he's neglecting Cecilia. And then there's the way Pigeon keeps blowing the money that Coffee Cup would use to try to get married to Dot.

More complications arise when Abel is the one person who thinks that Stephen and Dot would probably be more right for each other, so tries to push Stephen to pursue Dot even though both of them are already in relationships with other people. But again, this is the sort of movie where you known who's going to wind up with whom in the end.

I've mentioned several times how, when Lucille Ball was TCM's Star of the Month ages ago, Carol Burnett did a piece for the spotlight talking about her great friend. One of the things Burnett mentioned is how the studios, especially RKO to whom Ball was under contract, didn't quite know how to use her. This sort of comedy should have been more up Ball's alley, but then she's not really the one being asked to be zany. Also, some of the characters, especially Pigeon, are so unlikable that you just want Dot and Stephen to abandon their respective families.

But maybe you'll like A Girl, a Guy, and a Gob more than I did. Apparently the critics seemed to like it.

Briefs for Palm Sunday weekend

For those of you who belong to any of the western branches of Christianity, we're still a week and a day away from Easter. None of the Easter stuff yet on any of the movie channels; ABC's annual airing of The Ten Commandments is not until Saturday, Apr. 4. For some reason, I thought they always aired it the weekend of Palm Sunday. I've got it on DVD or Blu-ray somewhere, but I'd have to dig through my boxes of DVDs. Most of the stuff is still boxed up from when I moved three years ago with a few exceptions or stuff I've bought since the move. I've been meaning to watch more of it, mind you, but then there's that backlog of stuff on my DVR that actually expires....

And then there's the stuff on the streaming services. Someplace else somebody mentioned a young Rebecca De Mornay as a hottie, which prompted me to look up The Trip to Bountiful to recommend that, and find out that it is in fact for the time being available on Tubi, albeit as always with ads. However, there was another Oscar-nominated movie that I've been wanting to get off my list of Oscar-nominated stuff to watch that was recommended, albeit not with De Mornay. That film is Cross Creek, about Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, the author of The Yearling. This also made me think of another Mary Steenburgen movie, Melvin and Howard, which is not currently available on any of the streaming platforms.

TCM's full April schedule appears to be out now, which necessitated my going through t to see which movies are on my DVR that I haven't done posts on yet. I've already scheduled a couple of them, but I've got a couple more to watch and then put up posts about. Since my scheduling of draft posts is already four weeks out, that means posts are going to get moved around. So once again there's my caveat of checking the box guide listings to make certain the airdate and time I've put up for a post in conjuction with a movie airing soon.

Surprisingly, there are still some Fox movies I haven't blogged about before that are showing up on the FXM schedule, which means I get to record them and do a post about them again sometime in the future. The next such example is Ingrid Bergman's second Oscar-winning role in Anastasia, which will be on in the wee hours of tomorrow at 3:00 AM. I think I've done posts on both of the following two movies, but starting off the Retro block on Monday, March 31 will be A Letter to Three Wives, with The Ox-Bow Incident on at 6:00 AM.

Obviously I should have mentioned the passing of Chuck Norris last week at 86, even if he wasn't exactly the biggest movie star out there. Instead, he got cast into a lot of low-budget stuff especially at Cannon, as mentioned in the wonderful Electric Boogaloo documentary on Cannon.

There's also Valerie Perrine, who died on Monday at the age of 82 after a long battle with Parkinson's disease. TCM ran a documentary on her a few years back that was interesting. Slaughterhouse-Five is available on some of the subscription streaming services, but I don't actually have subscriptions to any of them.

The Wild Party

Back in the spring of 2025, TCM did a spotlight on Merchant-Ivory productions, although this time there weren't any of the 1960s films from India where the team got its start. I did a post on the late 1970s movie Roseland a few months ago, but even before that there was The Wild Party.

The Wild Party was, somewhat surprisingly, distributed by American International, and one of the interesting results is that there's something in the cinematography that seems reminiscent of the flatness of some of AIP's other 1970s stuff and not the richness that Merchant-Ivory would have with its period pieces of later years. The movie starts off with a man in a hospital recovering from a gunshot wound and writing a story which, he claims, is based on his real life experience. That man is James Morrison (David Dukes), and as you might guess, most of the rest of the movie is a flashback or depiction of that story that Morrison was writing.

It's late 1920s Hollywood (and I should point out that the hospital scene is also set in the late 1920s), during the transition from silent pictures to sound. Jolly Grimm (James Coco) is a successful silent film comedian who lives in one of those great Spanish-themed mansions, with a mistress Queenie (Raquel Welch) and a servant Tex (Royal Dano). However, as the silent era is fading, so too is Jolly's star beginning to fade. He's been working on a new, more ambitious silent movie that's part comedy and part melodrama, and has decided that the best way to get the distributors interested in it is to host a party where he'll give the assembled Hollywood royalty a screening of the new feature.

However, as you might guess, there are some complications. One is that Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks have also scheduled a party for the same night, meaning both that some people Jolly would have invited might not show up at all, while others may or may not be able to stay for the showing of the movie. There's also the fact that a lot of the guests seem more interested in the debauchery of the party, which was part of the reason people went to parties like this in the first place, especially during the Prohibition era.

One of the guests at the party is the sort of new star that Hollywood was looking for at the beginning of the sound era, Dale Sword (Perry King). He's young and handsome, and it's no surprise that he and Queenie wind up somewhat interested in each other, which is bound to get Jolly ticked off if he finds out. For Jolly's part, there's also the arrival of the young ingenue Nadine who is hoping to break into Hollywood by auditioning for Jolly. She's much too young to be involved with a party like this, especially as the night goes on and everybody seems to get drunker and drunker. That much alcohol is bound to cause somebody to lose their temper and tragedy to strike. Not that we didn't know this was going to happen considering how the movie starts.

I have to admit that I recorded The Wild Party not realizing that it was part of the TCM spotlight on Merchant-Ivory, and was surprised to see their name show up on something with James Coco as the star. Coco was the sort of zany comic who I think worked best in smaller doses. As the star of something like this, he's a bit too much. It's not so much that he's bad as he's just misused. The script doesn't seem to know whether it wants to be a straight-up comedy or something more tragic, and the attempt to combine the two winds up in a misfire.

Thankfully, The Wild Party didn't hurt the careers of Merchant and Ivory, and they were able to go on to much bigger and better things.

A quarter century before Oh, God!

Another of the movies that's been sitting on my DVR for a bit is the 1951 MGM version of Angels in the Outfield. It's getting another airing on TCM, somewhat surprisingly not as part of a day of baseball movies considering that baseball season is right about here. That airing is tomorrow, March 28, at 1:45 PM.

The movie was filmed in part on location in Pittsburgh, at the old Forbes Field which I think went away in 1970 for Three Rivers Stadium, one of those dual-use monstrosities which has since been demolished itself and replaced with purpose-built stadia for baseball and football. The Pirates were a perennially poor team, and the version here is even worse, with a good portion of the blame being given to manager Guffy McGovern (Paul Douglas). They're so bad that the newspaper is putting a bunch of its writers, including the women's editor Jennifer Paige (Janet Leigh) on the story to try to figure out what's ailing the team. This, even though she doesn't know anything about baseball.

Jennifer goes to a game and discovers that Guffy is incredibly irascible and prone to harsh language, which we of course don't hear since there was a Production Code. (Instead, special effects are used to obscure whatever dialogue is used when Guffy is chewing out his players or the umpires. Also blaming the manager is the sports reporter who handles the radio broadcasts of the games, Fred Bayles (Keenan Wynn). For this, Fred gets fired and becomes an even more ardent opponent of Guffy's.

One day after a game, Guffy is alone out on the field when he hears a voice coming out of nowhere. That voice (voiced by James Whitmore), claims to be an angel, chiding Guffy for his bad language among other things. Indeed, heaven has decided that the Pirates are going to continue to be lousy cellar dwellers until Guffy changes his ways. Unsurprisingly, Guffy doesn't believe that this voice is that of an angel, so the angel responds by sending a bolt of lightning down even though there's only like one cloud in the sky. So Guffy does believe it's an angel, not that he's going to tell anybody considering the obvious fact that nobody's going to believe him.

Amazingly, the team does start doing better. And then one day the nuns from the girls' orphanage (played by Spring Byington and Ellen Corby) take a group of girls to the ball game. One of them, Bridget, excitedly declares that she can see angels! The nuns don't believe her since they can't see the angels. But Jennifer overhears the story from an attendant at the field, and writes it since it's an obvious human interest story. That makes the whole angels thing a national story, although again nobody really believes that there are angels guiding the team, do they? Except maybe Guffy and Bridget. Jennifer, by this time, starts becoming a bit of friends with Guffy as he's been reforming himself in rather strange ways like reading Shakespeare so he can chew the umpires out in Shakespearean language. He even thinks about adopting Bridget, although he realizes that's not really going to happen since they don't normally let single men adopt orphaned girls. You can guess where that part of the story is going, of course.

Matters hit a head when Guffy gets hit in the forehead by a line drive during a game. Concussed, he confesses after the game that there really have been angels helping him. Obviously, nobody believes this any more than they believed Bridget. In the case of a little girl, it's harmless, but when it's the team manager, there's a rather more pressing issue. It leads to an investigation, with Commissioner Hapgood (Lewis Stone) brought in. Guffy causes a ruckus, and that leads the angels to decide jsut before the big game that they're no longer going to help Guffy and the Pirates.

Angels in the Outfield has a lot of the tropes that are common to the more family-friendly sports movies, so it's not to difficult to see what's going to be happening. But it's done with the sort of earnest charm that old Hollywood had, and, thanks to the professionalism of stars like Paul Douglas, Angels in the Outfield actually works.

Fugitive in the Sky

I've mentioned quite a few times how I almost always enjoy the Warner Bros. B movies, even when they're objectively nothing more than pedestrian. Another such movie that certainly fits the "fun if not great" category is Fugitive in the Sky.

Before airline deregulation in the late 1970s, but even more so before World War II, flying was one of those luxuries that average people couldn't afford and was considered glamorous. Jean Muir plays Rita Moore, a stewardess on the sort of cross-country flight that stops at a bunch of places on its way from Los Angeles to New York. She's got a boyfriend in reporter Terry Brewer (Warren Hull), although the pilot Bob White (Gordon Oliver) also has a thing for Rita and as a result doesn't really care for Brewer.

Brewer has been covering the case of missing and wanted criminal Killer Madsen, and when Brewer sees an FBI agent board the plane, he figures that the agent must be after Madsen, and wangles the final seat on the plane for himself, which seems to make a bunch of people unhappy. Never mind that the flight is about to make a lot of people even more unhappy. The plane makes a scheduled stop in Albuquerque, where an obnoxious female passenger who keeps wittering on about astrology buys an Indian knife from the sort of souvenir stand that's set up to serve the passengers who are passing through. And wouldn't you know it, but that knife gets used to kill one of the passengers while everybody is ostensibly asleep.

At this point the FBI agent, Phelan (John Litel) reveals who he is; he kind of has to considering there's been a crime committed in the air. Madsen deduces as well as Brewer had before the flight that Phelan's original reason for getting on the flight was to follow him. So Madsen takes the passenger cabin hostage before going into the cockpit (this being well before 2001, there were no fortified doors) and turning the gun on the pilot and co-pilot and finding the spare guns that the two of them have just for a situation like this.

But wait, there's more. There's a dust storm going on even if it's ostensibly not over the part of the Plains that got the dust storms but in Missouri and points east. This means that the airports can't track the planes (never mind the fact that there was no radar yet) and want to ground all of the planes, while Madsen wants a detour to Evansville, IN where he was planning to make an escape. The radio's already been knocked out, and now the dust knocks out both engines, forcing the plane to land somewhere where nobody can quite deduce where they are. Except that there's a farmhouse in the area that Killer Madsen flees to. Since it's the only thing in the area, sure enough the passengers and crew of the stranded plane wind up there for the finale.

There's too much in Fugitive in the Sky that doesn't bear much relationship to reality. But audiences didn't always go to the movies for reality. Especially not when it came to the B movies. For audiences who wanted to be entertained, a movie like Fugitive in the Sky was going to give them that, all in just under an hour. Definitely worth watching the next time it shows up on TCM.

The Trap

I've got so many movies to get through on my DVR that it's not uncommon for me to watch multiple movies that have something in common, whether it be the same star, genre, or something thematically in common. One rarer case of the last phenomenon was a pair of movies that have mute women as prominent characters. The Spiral Staircase was scheduled because it was coming up on TCM, while the other movie necessitated my saving the post on it in drafts so that the posts on the two movies weren't scheduled so close together. That other movie is The Trap.

The opening credits mention that the movie was filmed on location in British Columbia, with the opening being a village near the sea since oceangoing vessels can approach. It's the sort of tiny place at the mouth of a river that serves the trappers and whatnot who eke out a meager living upstream and then come down to sell their goods once a year and buy the provisions they'll need to survive another year. One of the trader familes (none of the family members' names are given) has a father, mother, and bratty teenage daughter, who's thrilled that the family is getting a piano because the daughter really ought to learn cultured stuff like that. They've also got a maid, Eve (Rita Tushingham), whom they've fostered for the 10 years or so since an Indian raid killed Eve's parents and left Eve in such a state of shock that she hasn't been able to speak since. Meanwhile, one of the hunter/trapper types ordered a mail-order bride who is coming off the boat. But the man who ordered her died in the meantime, so she's being auctioned off.

One of the traders who's made his way down the river is Jean La Bête (Oliver Reed), who grew up in Quebec and lost both of his parents at a fairly young age, causing him to migrate west to British Columbia where the trapping is better. He goes to see the trader, as the trader has been holding some money for the Jean in escrow. Jean has come to claim that money, which really ticks off the trader's wife, as she'd been hoping to use that money to get the family to San Francisco and away from an uncultured shithole like this. Worse, she learns that her husband has gotten the family heavily into debt. He can't get any more credit.

Jean could use a wife, but somebody else bought the mail-order wife. The trader's wife, however, has an idea: offer Eve to Jean in exchange for that money that Jean had gotten back from the trader. Jean considers it a relatively fair deal, although Eve doesn't. Not that anybody asked her. But since she doesn't really have a choice, she's sent up the river with Jean. Needless to say, she tries to escape on several occasions, while Jean stops her. After all, it's going to be dangerous for the two of them at the cabin, what does Eve think it's going to be like if she tries to go off on her own?

Jean starts teaching Eve all he knows about how to hunt and trap and how not to get lost in the woods; this is important stuff for Eve to know if she wants to survive. Eve begrudginly starts doing her part to keep things running, if only just to survive and plot an escape later. Life out in the wilderness is harsh: nasty, brutish, and short as Thomas Hobbes would have said, and eventually that brutishness comes for Jean when he gets his foot caught in one of the traps that he'd set while trying to get away from one of the big cats that are predators out in that part of the world. Eve is going to have to take care of him as well as keep the cabin running and check the trap lines.

The Trap has pretty good performances from Oliver Reed and Rita Tushingham, who form the bulk of the movie's action. However, the bigger problem with the movie is the relative lack of action. It's hard to make a story about surviving in a cabin in the wilderness exciting. If characters are trying to go from point A to point B as in any of the pioneer migration movies, that's one thing. But winter survival? And then, the movie resolves its conflict with an ending that doesn't really make much sense. I can see why actors would want to stretch themselves with a movie like this, but the plot doesn't serve them well, which is a bit of a shame.

From Headquarters

Tonight continues TCM's Star of the Month salute to actor George Brent with one of the movies where he's the star and there's not really much in the way of a big female star to eclipse him. That movie is From Headquarters, which comes on tonight at 8:00 PM.

We don't actually see Brent at first. Instead, we see the workings of a bug-city police department, where they're bringing in various people they've arrested. However, the big news of the day is going to be the discovery of the dead body of a famous playboy, Bates, whom we'll see briefly in a couple of flashbacks. It's obvious that somebody has shot him, and, as it turns out, there are going to be quite a few suspects. Multiple department members are assigned to the case, with Dr. Van de Water (Edward Ellis) doing the forensic work. Sgt. Boggs (Eugene Pallette) has definite ideas on what's happened, while Lt. Stevens (George Brent) is much more thorough in trying to figure out who killed Bates.

Part of Van de Water's analysis is to determine the time of death, which seems a bit strange since all of the suspects have conflicting views of when they might have seen him. Some claim they saw him after he died, while others may be able to have an alibi in that they saw him before the shooting, if at least that was the last time they saw him. One of the obvious suspects is Lou Winton (Margaret Lindsay), as she is his ex-girlfriend. She tried to break off the relationship and Bates might have been forcible in trying to prevent that, which might make the case self-defense. Except that Lous has a brother Jack who shows up and seems to be way too protective of his sister, which implies that he knows more than he's letting on and might have something to do with the shooting himself.

And then there's Bates' butler Horton who is less than fully honest. There's also Anderzian, a dealer in Oriental rugs who has been selling stuff to Bates and says there are letters in Bates' safe that Bates wanted him to have in case Bates were to die. But Anderzian also seems a bit too insistent that he gets those letters, which gives Stevens an idea. Meanwhile, that opening sequence comes full circle. One of the guys being booked in that scene has wanted to see Stevens when he hears of the killing of Bates. That guy is found out and gets murdered as well for his troubles. When the detectives discover the dead body, the building goes on lockdown, leading to the killer ultimately being found out.

From Headquarters is an interesting enough little programmer, although I have to say that the police procedural would get much better in later years. Brent does a competent job, even though he's not the sort of actor that you'd think of as playing a police detective. Margaret Lindsay as the nominal female lead is OK too, but she doesn't have much to do. Audiences watching this in 2026 won't find it anything special, but back in 1933 when moviegoers didn't have TV or much chance to see these movies after first-run, I think it would have entertained them.

The movie isn't exactly a comedy

In the latest of the musical biopics that I wanted to make certain I watched before it expired from my DVR, it's time for Funny Girl. It's finally coming up again on TCM, tomorrow, March 24, at 5:15 PM, as part of another day of musical biopics, so now's the time to put up this post.

Funny Girl is story of the earlier years of stage actress and singer Fanny Brice, played here by Barbara Streisand. As the movie opens, it's a bit before World War I, and although the second half of the movie covers events that are in Brice's real life after the war, I don't think the war itself is ever mentioned. Fanny was born to a Jewish immigrant family in New York, although the only family member we see is her mom, played by Kay Meford. Mom runs a pub/restaurant and plays poker with lady friends, while all the neighborhood cares about Fanny because that's the way this sort of neighborhood is.

Fanny, after the roadshow opening music, shows up at the New Amsterdam Theater that hosted the Ziegfeld Follies, where she hopes to get a job as a chorus girl in the follies run by Florenz Ziegfeld (Walter Pidgeon). But she's going to have to make her way up the ladder first, which includes doing a vaudeville act on roller skates, even though she can't really skate. However, she can sing, and the combination of singing that appeals to the audience combined with the comedic value of not being able to skate, makes her a hit. In the audience is Nicky Arnstein (Omar Sharif), who comes backstage and is so charmed by Fanny that he negotiates a salary increase for her right on the spot even though he has no real job in any theatrical production company.

Eventually, the Ziegfeld Follies does come calling, putting Fanny in a musical finale that will have her dressed as a bride while singing to a bunch of men. Fanny isn't comfortable with the number, so she changes things by having the costume altered to imply that the bride is already pregnant. Once again, Nicky is in the audience. It turns out that he's a professional gambler, but he's so taken by Fanny that when he goes to her mom's place after the show, he lets the old ladies beat him at very low-stakes poker. Fanny and Nicky run into each other again in Maryland when he's buying a race horse that he eventually loses betting on a race. He has to go back to the ungentlemanly routine of playing the cruise ship trade, playing cards against the rich gentlement to earn more than his passage. Nicky wants Fanny to pursue her dream, but she loves him so much that she gets on the boat and accompanies him to Europe.

In the next scene, they've just gotten married, although in real life that didn't happen until 1918 so puts a major hole in the timeline considering World War I was raging. (The real life Fanny and Nicky were romantically involved for several years but couldn't get married until Nicky's divorce from a previous marriage went through.) Fanny is a big star, and the house they buy could just as easily have been purchased by either of them. But things start to go south for Nicky when his gambling stops paying off, and he starts racking up debt to everyone in town save Fanny, who is totally oblivious to it all. One of the people to whom Nicky is in debt offers a chance to pay it off by taking part in a "bond deal" that's clearly fraudulent, while Fanny secretly tries to use her husband's name to help open a new high-class casino with Nicky as promoter. Nicky figures out what's going on, doesn't want to be beholden to Fanny in that way, and goes for the bond deal, which is going to land him in prison eventually.

The movie ends when Nicky gets out of prison, which was in December 1925 in real life, although the movie seems to imply it's earlier. The movie doesn't mention the less-than-happy ending of Fanny and Nicky's marriage crumbling, although at least Fanny would go on to have a fairly successful third act playing a character named Baby Snooks on radio before her untimely death at the age of 59.

Somewhat surprisingly, despite the well-known musical talents of Barbra Streisand, the material is something that I think would have worked better as a non-musical, or limiting musical numbers to scenes from when Fanny was on stage. Yeah, I know this would mean ditching a song like "People" which Streisand sings just after the evening with Nicky at her mom's place, and that people went to the movie to see the songs from the Broadway show from which this is adapted. But keeping the songs from the musical turns this into an overlong slog lasting right around 150 minutes, which is a good half hour too long, I think.

Streisand, of course, does well, even though I'm not the biggest fan of her style of singing. She tied in the Best Actress Oscar race that year with Katharine Hepburn for The Lion in Winter, and was deserving of that Oscar win. But for me that wasn't quite enough to make Funny Girl as worth watching as some of the other musical biopics out there.

Well, Debbie Reynolds loves him

TCM is running a couple of Debbie Reynolds' movies tomorrow (March 23) morning. There's one that I hadn't blogged about before, but that I have on my DVR, so I watched it as I always do with an intention to writing up this review for the airing. That movie is I Love Melvin, which comes on at 7:45 AM.

Debbie Reynolds plays Judy LeRoy, a chorine who has dreams of making it on Broadway although she currently is only appearing in the chorus of one of those dumb college musicals. (This is not an indictment of the movie; it's that the college musical as a genre is disproportionately insipid in my view as musicals go.) Not having hit it yet, Judy still lives with her parents, real surname Schneider (Una Merkel and Allyn Joslyn) and an obnoxious kid sister Clarabelle (Noreen Corcoran).

However! Good news comes for Judy when she gets a call from the manager of the show that she's got the chance for a more substantial role, that of the football in a highly stylized dance scene that Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen might have come up with except that as far as I know they didn't have their fingerprints anywhere near this movie. So Judy heads off to the theater, walking and singing her way through Central Park.

Also in Central park is Melvin Hoover (Donald O'Connor). Melvin works for Look magazine as someone at the bottome of the ladder, a would-be photographer who is still just an assistant to Mergo (Jim Backus). He too is singing his way through the park in the sort of duet where the two aren't together until they literally bump into each other. Judy isn't pleased at first, although you know she's going to fall in love with Melvin by the end of the movie. Never mind that her parents have been trying to hook her up with a guy who's really got nothing wrong with him beyond being boring, Harry Flack (Richard Anderson).

Melvin, for his part, falls for Judy immediately. Knowing that she's a chorus girl, he comes up with an excuse to do a photo shoot on her. He makes a much bigger mistake, however, when he lies to her by telling her that he's going to get her photo on the cover of Look, something he has no power to do. His bosses don't seem to be particularly interested in his work, either. Melvin compounds the lie by getting Mergo to make a mock-up cover of Look that has one of Melvin's photos of Judy on it, which Melvin presents to Judy even though the editors have no plan to put Judy on the real cover of the magazine.

Judy and the rest of the Schneiders are dumb enough to start gossiping about Judy's being on the cover of Look, and as you might guess, everyone goes to buy copies only to find out that Judy is not in fact on the cover. This leads to the sort of complications you might expect from a light romantic comedy, although you also know they're going to get solved with a happy ending, since MGM wasn't about to put Donald O'Connor and Debbie Reynolds into something dark and twisted.

I Love Melvin is a competent enough vehicle for Donald O'Connor and Debbie Reynolds, but it never rises to anything great. Part of that is that it's only programmer length at 76 minutes, and part of that is that it was conceived more as a musical. The numbers take even more away from the story line, leading to a movie with a wafer-thin plot. It's inoffensive, but incredibly minor stuff.

Tribute to a Bad Man

Another movie that's coming up on TCM that was on my DVR for a while is Tribute to a Bad Man, which will be on this afternoon (March 21) at 4:15 PM. So, as always with that in mind, I sat down to watch the movie in order to be able to do the post on it here.

Don Dubbins provides the narration, as he plays Steve Millar, a young man originally from Pennsylvania who in 1875 moves west, making it out to Wyoming and the horse ranch owned by Jeremy Rodock (James Cagney). Although as the narration tells us, Steve at first knows nothing about Rodock or his reputation, or even much about horse ranching. Steve is a bit of a naïf, and has the good fortune -- or maybe the misfortune -- of running into Rodock just after Rodock was shot chasing horse rustlers. Steve removes the bullet from Rodock and brings Rodock home. Like Androcles and the lion, Rodock is grateful enough to offer Steve a job on the ranch.

The ranch has a bunch of men working for Rodock, led more or less by wrangler McNulty (Stephen McNalley). There's one woman on the ranch, Jocasta Considine (Irene Papas), whom Steve mistakes for Mrs. Rodock. In fact, there is no Mrs. Rodock. Jocasta escaped war in her native Greece, but had to do things she's not quite proud of to survive in America, which is why she's escaped to this isolated ranch in Wyoming. Jocasta understands that Steve is not right for this place, and in return, Steve develops a bit in the way of feelings for Jocasta. Since she's the only woman around, it's not just Steve who is going to develop feelings for her. But we're getting ahead of ourselves.

Somebody tries to steal some of Rodock's horses again, so Rodock sets up a posse to find out who did it, which offers Steve the opportunity to see just how hard a man Rodock can be. To be fair, horses are his lifeblood, and stealing the horses would be like rustling cattle. But still, Rodock can be quite harsh. Suspicion leads to the Petersons, a family who used to work for Rodock but had a falling out. Rodock has been trying to drive the Petersons off their land, without success. They've got a son Lars (Vic Morrow) who is an adult but who, like Steve, is a bit too young to be in such a range war.

McNulty is another of the men who's interested in Jocasta, and is more open about pursuing her than Steven is. This really pisses Rodock off, and Rodock gets in a fight with McNulty and gives Steven the responsibility of making certain McNulty leaves and doesn't come back. McNulty is unsurprisingly none too happy about this, and decides to get revenge on Rodock by stealing Rodock's foals and treating the horses worse than your average rustler might. This leads to a climax, although you might figure out how things go considering the narration at the beginning of the movie.

James Cagney did make a couple of westerns in his career, although the western is a genre with which he's not generally associated. That having been said, Cagney was of course a fine actor, so when he's given an intelligent script like this he has no difficulty handling it. In fact, Tribute to a Bad Man is as much of a character study that just happens to be placed in the context of an old western as it is a traditional western. Don Dubbins does well enough as does the rest of the supporting cast, although this is really Cagney's movie.