Better than only being inhuman

There was a movie I saw many years ago that involved a particular plot point and, if memory served, starred Jane Wyatt. Not too long ago, the movie We're Only Human showed up on TCM, and the plot synopsis and presence of Jane Wyatt made it sound familiar. Sure enough, I had seen it an age ago and never blogged about it. So now that I've watched it again and it's fresh in my mind, I can give you a post on it.

Jane Wyatt plays lady reporter Sally Rogers, who would not go on to work on the Alan Brady Show, but that's another story. Rogers shows up outside a joint where policeman Pete McCaffrey (Preston Foster) is casing the joint across the street. A hearse shows up and carries up a wicker body bag, but McCaffrey knows this is a ruse, so when they come back out, he confronts them, finding out that Lefty Berger is in the not-a-coffin. Burger is a wanted gangster, so McCaffrey thinks he's done a great job. Sally is naïve, so she thinks Pete has done a great job, too, writing a glowing story about what she saw and even falling in love with Pete.

However, Pete's boss is ticked off, because the rest of the gang is going to be spooked, and the police department was doing a bigger investigation that was hopefully going to bring down the whole gang. Worse, Pete is the sort of police detective who insists on doing things his own way, because he just knows the rules as they currently stand aren't always right and need to be broken. Worse for him, however, is when he is given the assignment to take Lefty up to prison on the train, Lefty escapes! That, and Lefty starts taunting McCaffrey about his inability to bring Lefty back to justice.

Things get even worse for McCaffrey when his regular detective partner and housemate, Det. Walsh (James Gleason), radios for backup outside a bank. A subplot involves the fact that McCaffrey lives with Walsh and his wife (Jane Darwell), and Mrs. Walsh keeps trying to see that McCaffrey gets a suitable wife. Anyhow, when McCaffrey winds up at the bank, he and Walsh go in to try to catch the gangsters who go in, only for Walsh to be fatally shot. It's getting harder and harder to find Lefty.

Meanwhile, there's a lawyer inside Lefty's organization, Martin (Arthur Hohl), who is terribly displeased with the fact that Lefty has been escaped, the reasoning being that Lefty has to know somebody tipped off the police to the fact he was going to be in that coffin escorted out by the fake funeral workers. Martin not illogically expects that Berger will conclude it was he who fed information to the cops, and will want revenge. Sure enough, Martin gets shot in a drive-by shooting. But then, and this is the plot point I remember because of how unbelievably stupid it was, Sally is with McCaffrey at the shooting and, in getting the story, prints the address of a couple of eyewitnesses along with their picture.

So, of course, the eyewitnesses get harassed by Berger's men, and McCaffrey seems to be back to square one with Berger arrogantly taunting him. But, since this is a Code-era movie, you know that Berger is going to be caught, and that the cop and reporter are going to live happily ever after, more or less.

The big problem with We're Only Human is that the plot has the main characters be inordinately stupid, climaxing in that scene where Sally interviews the eyewitnesses. Indeed, none of this bears much resemblance to reality. To be fair, however, the movie was only intended to be a B movie, and another of those films where probably nobody expected viewers 90 years later to be watching and giving their critique. So sit back and watch just to see where all the faults are. And thankfully, it'll all be over fairly quickly.

Lovely views of Italy

A movie that I'd seen show up on TCM several times in the past but had never watched was The Battle of the Villa Fiorita. So as with a bunch of other movies, the last time it showed up on TCM, I decided I'd record it in order to be able to watch it and finally get it off my list of movies I hadn't seen before.

Maureen O'Hara stars as Moira, an upper-class British woman married to Darrell (Richard Todd) and with two youngish children Debbie and Michael who can afford to go to boarding school and even have a horse! But life for Moira is boring since Darrell isn't the most exciting person. So when the two go to a concert and Moira is introduced to to pianist Lorenzo (Rossanno Brazzi), she immediately falls for him and the two start an affair that results in Darrell basically kicking Moira out of the house and sending her to live with Lorenzo at his palatial estate near Lake Garda in northern Italy.

The two kids get back from school and find out that Mom has left them, and they're not very happy about it. So, like any good kids, the decide that they'd like to see Mom and convince her to come back home. Of course, there's the difficulty of just getting there, since this is the mid-1960s and they're young enough that independent international travel is a big deal, never mind the expense that results in them selling Debbie's horse which becomes a plot point later in the story.

But, the two kids are able to run away from home and somehow Dad never really seems to worry where they are since the trip is an overnight one. But in any case, the two kids are able to find the Villa Fiorita and see their mother again. Mom and her paramour put the kids up since it's not as if they can do anything else, at least not until they can contact Darrell who might be able to come and get the kids. In the meantime, the two British kids get to meet Lorenzo's daughter Donna (a young Olivia Hussey), and the kids all become friends of a sort.

Meanwhile, the kids have a plan to bring Debbie and Michael's parents back together, which basically involves going on a hunger strike, or at least not eating this newfangled Italian food that's totally alien to the two British kids. Debbie is too young to realize that this isn't a complete hunger strike in that the kids are supposed to be sneaking food in from elsewhere, and rather stupidly gets pissed when she catches Michael and Donna eating. Oh, and kissing, too. Debbie does get a local priest involved in things, though, even though the family is Protestant (a bit humorous, I found, considering Maureen O'Hara was fairly prominently Irish).

Things continue to escalate until Michael and Donna decide to run off and get in a small sailboat on Lake Garda just as a storm is about to come up. Michael may have learned the basics of sailing, but he's not that good a sailor.

For some reason, I went into The Battle of the Villa Fiorita expecting something like one of those light comedies of the 1930s where the kids of a widow(er) or divorced parent find another person who would make just the right partner for their parent, and work to bring the two leads together in the final reel. The only difference being that in this case the two right partners are supposed to be the original mother and father. However, The Battle of the Villa Fiorita is a straight-up drama, with some melodramatic elements in it. That drama doesn't really work for me, and the kids aren't all that appealing. Italy is lovely, however, even though the print TCM ran doesn't do it justice.

But maybe The Battle of the Villa Fiorita will work better for some of you than it did for me.

King and Country

Another of the people who was honored in the 2025 edition of Summer Under the Stars is British actor Tom Courtenay. A couple of British movies that I hadn't seen before got airings, giving me a good chance to record some new-to-me stuff. One of those movies is King and Country.

The movie opens with Courtenay, as Pvt. Arthur Hamp, lying on a bed playing his harmonica, with a man just outside the room. The scene switches to reveal all of this is taking place in one of the World War I trenches, which are a profoundly brutal and uncomfortable place to be stuck: there's no place for the water to drain, and there are rats and lice everywhere. Then we see a Captain Hargreaves (Dirk Bogarde) talking to another officer about Hamp. Apparently he's on trial for his life, and at the court-martial it's going to be Hargreaves defending him.

Hargreaves is in these trenches in order to meet Hamp and talk to him, in the hopes of getting evidence to mitigate the sentence if it's not possible to get Hamp declared not guilty. This is also an excellent chance to provide some exposition and the back story to Hamp's character. Before enlisting for the war, he didn't have much of a home life, either growing up, or then once he got married. His wife having left him, that might be part of the reason Hamp enlisted. But all of the men Hamp first met at the same time he enlisted and whom fhe first served with are all long since killed in action in the war.

So maybe that's why Hamp just got up one day and started walking, possibly with the hope of getting back to London to see his mother. But it's also fairly obvious to anybody higher up that you can't just having the enlisted men doing this willy-nilly of their own volition. That's no way to run an army, especially not during a time of war. The higher brass understandably see this as desertion, and the penalty for desertion has to be death in order to discourage everybody else from trying to pursue the same course Hamp is stands accused of having done.

Hargreaves is defending Hamp, but a lot of the other enlisted men rather cynically believe that the point of a man like Hargreaves is less to give Hamp the best defense possible, but more to make everything look like it's all been done legitimately and on the up-and-up, even though in their minds the verdict and sentence have already been decided.

Eventually the court-martial itself begins, and it's clear that Hargreaves is going to go for a defense of shell shock. But the doctor, Capt. O'Sullivan (Leo McKern), does his best to dispute that, while there's a question of whether Pvt. Hamp even cares any more whether he lives or dies. The trial leads to the inevitable verdict....

King and Country is based on a novel turned into a stage play and looks a lot like it's based on a play. To be fair, however, it's not like the material needs to be opened up beyond the confines of a stage play. One thing director Joseph Losey does, however, is to use scene transitions that are photographs of the actual carnage from the Great War. This is very effective. But what is even more effective is the outstanding acting performances. This is some of Courtenay's best work, up there with The Dresser.

I'm glad I saw this one, even as brutal as it is. If you get the chance to see it, make it a point to do so.

The Straight Story

Director David Lynch died last year, and TCM eventually got around to doing a tribute him with a handful of his films. One that I hadn't seen before was The Straight Story, so I recorded it with a view to watching it eventually. Having finally seen it, I can now do the review for you and put it up here.

The Straight Story is based on a real story, although I'm not quite certain how much the real story was changed for the movie. If you're old enough you might remember the real story making the news, since it's one of those human interest stories that would have been ripe for turning into a movie. In Laurens, Iowa, a town in the northwest part of the state, Alvin Straight (Richard Farnsworth) lives with his adult daughter Rose (Sissy Spacek), who seems to have some sort of intellectual disability: she talks a bit strangely, and mentions later in the movie that she lost custody of her children because she was declared unfit. Alvin is getting up in years and has diabetes and poor eyesight, to the point that his doctor wants him to change his lifestyle or else he'll have to use a walker after he falls and can't get up.

One day, the phone rings. Apparently, Alvin has a brother Lyle (Harry Dean Stanton, who only gets one scene at the end of the movie), who lives several hundred miles away in the town of Mount Zion, Wisconsin. Alvin and Lyle haven't spoken to each other in years, for reasons that aren't quite fully explained. But with Lyle possibly dying, Alvin feels that he needs to see Lyle for what might possibly be the last time. There's a catch, however. Alvin doesn't have a driver's license due to his medical issues. Rose doesn't have one either, most likely due to those intellectual issues. And with the two of them living on disability, it's not like they have much money to get a bus ticket. (If you think about it, they do considering what Alvin is able to spend money on later in the movie, but at the same time getting a bus direct from Laurens to Mount Zion is thoroughly unlikely.)

What Alvin does have, however, is a riding lawn mower. So he decides that the only thing he can do is to get on that mower and start heading for Mount Zion, even though the mower probably isn't street legal. Alvin sets out on the sort of road trip reminiscent of a movie like Harry and Tonto, in which he's going to meet interesting people along with suffering all sorts of setbacks as he tries to get to Wisconsin to see his brother. Now, since we know that there's an actor playing his brother, we know that the brother survived the stroke (in fact, Lyle was several years older than Alvin but outlived Alvin) and that the two will meet in the end.

The Straight Story is one of those movies where there's not exactly a whole lot of plot to discuss beyond a man's desire to get from point A to point B. It's also one of the more easily accessible movies from David Lynch. And thanks to the performance of Richard Farnsworth, it's definitely worth the watch.

I bambini ci guardano

I've mentioned on several occasions over the past few years how I keeping winding up with a ton of foreign films that are just about to expire from the YouTube TV DVR that I need to watch before they expire. The latest example of that was The Children Are Watching Us.

Now, the first interesting thing is that this movie was made in Italy in 1943 which, as you may know, was the height of World War II. But there aren't any references to the war, which may be because it's based on a book that was released in the 1920s, never mind the political situation that might have prevented filmmakers from setting a story like this against the backdrop of the war.

Pricò is a boy of about 5 living in a fashionable part of a fashionable city, with a father rich enough that they have a maid as well as living in a co-op in a building where the big issue is the elevator being too subject to needing repairs. Pricò and his mother go to the park one afternoon and watch a puppet show, although the trip is really an excuse for Mom (Isa Pola) to go see her lover Roberto, not realizing that Pricò sees what's going on. Mom has reached the point where she can't take it any more, so that night she packs her bags to run off with Roberto.

Dad, now a single father, doesn't know what to do, so he sends Pricò off to live with a series of relatives. None of them have much of an idea what to do with such a mischievous little boy, or don't really have the space to put him up for an extended period of time. In any case, Mom returns home after a short period of time claiming that she's gotten Roberto out of her system for good, and would like to return and try to start anew. You wonder how the family is going to be able to put itself back together, but it's not as if there's a whole lot Dad or the boy can do, so Mom gets to live with them again. Besides, it might not be bad to have a boy's mom living with him.

It's the summer, so Dad also decides that a good thing to do would be to get Mom out of the city and to one of those resorts that also populated Hollywood films of the era. The family can spend some quality time together, and Roberto won't be around. And the vacation seems to go well. Except that Dad, being a working man, eventually has to go back to his office job in the city. He tells Mom to stay at the resort for a few more days with Pricò as it will be good for the boy. But wouldn't you know it, Roberto shows up at the resort. Apparently there weren't that many places people in that Italian social class could go back in those days. Sure enough, Mom and Roberto start up their relationship again, although this time the results are much worse.

The Children Are Watching Us was directed by Vittorio De Sica, who would go on after the war to make several famous neo-realist movies. The Children Are Watching Us shows some foreshadowing of that style, but as a whole the movie is much closer to the sort of conventional Hollywood movie you might see from that era. I mean that, however, in a good way, as The Children Are Watching Us is very well made and the sort of foreign film that would be more easily accessible to people who think of foreign films from that era as the sort of arthouse stuff that was disproportionately what wound up in America. It's absolutely worth watching if you get the chance.

Twilight glory

Christopher Plummer was honored last year in TCM's Summer Under the Stars, with several of his pictures that I hadn't seen before. One of those was Stage Struck, which came early in Plummer's career.

Plummer isn't really the star here; that honor goes to Susan Strasberg, also early in her career. She plays Eva Lovelace, a young woman originally from Vermont who goes to New York City because she just knows she can make it on the stage. Indeed, she basically shows up unannounced at the office of theatrical producer Lewis Easton (Henry Fonda). Why not start out at the top, after all? Also waiting to see Easton are an actor on the glide path to the end of his career, Robert Hedges (Herbert Marshall), and an up-and-coming playwright, Joe Sheridan (Christopher Plummer). Nice people to meet if you're trying to make it on Broadway, I suppose.

Eva is so obnoxiously pushy that Easton, just to get her out of his hair, has Joe tell her to come for an audition for a suppoting role in Joe's new play where an aging diva of an actress is starring. Eva has her own ideas about how the role should be played which conflct with what the producer and playwright want, so of course the audition goes badly. Eva's pushiness causes even more problems when she runs into Joe outside the premiere of that new play and gets him to invite her to the afterparty at Easton's swanky apartment. She has too much to drink and, when she's stonking drunk, starts doing impromptu Shakespeare readings in front of the embarrassed guests!

Worse, she passes out drunk in the guest room and tells Lewis she loves him. Now, if all of this sounds familiar, that's because it's a remake of Morning Glory from 25 years earlier, in which Katharine Hepburn played the aspiring young actress. So you may know where the story is going. Eva has to suffer for her art before triumphing on the stage. Lewis is of two minds about her as she's really not right for such an older man. So he has his secretaries lie to her about his being out of town, and tries to get Joe to send her away from New York. But events conspire to bring us to the final act where Eva gets the leading role and makes a success of it.

I'm not the biggest fan of Katharine Hepburn, so Morning Glory isn't exactly a favorite of mine. Amazingly, Susan Strasberg takes the role and runs with it in what feels like a desperate attempt to be even more obnoxious than Katharine Hepburn ever was. Stage Struck feels artificial, like somebody who knows nothing about the Broadway stage writing about it, and Strasberg is so unlikeable here that it makes the rest of the movie hard to watch. Everybody else tries and is professional in their roles, so I suppose it's a good thing that this didn't sink Christopher Plummer. The movie does have some nice period photography, in color, of the way Broadway was in the late 1950s, but that's about the only thing good about this movie.

The Magic Box

I've mentioned having a glut of foreign films to get through on my DVR before they expire, as well as, I think, a glut of westerns. I also happen to have quite a few British movies on my DVR and again I'm not so certain I'm going to wind up watching all of them before YouTube TV expires them. Another of those British movies is The Magic Box.

The film opens by identifying several people who are part of the invention of cinema in one way or another, before winding up on the name William Friese-Greene (played by Robert Donat). Now, since the movie gives his dates of birth and death, we know he's going to die, although that's not really the point of the movie. In London, someone shows up looking for William's second wife Edith (Margaret Johnston). There's a conference of film distributors in London which William is hoping to attend, although he's not a distributor and has been largely forgotten in the film world.

In the first flashback, we learn why William is little known. William had always been interested in photography, and he thought it would be great if pictures could be in the same living color as real life is. To that end he's become one of those tinkerers that are trying to come up with a great invention without the benefit of much formal training. William is living with Edith and their four sons in a rented house in Brighton, always trying to stay one step ahead of his creditors. Needless to say, they're not always successful. Ultimately, three of the sons decide they're going to enlist in the military even though they're not really old enough to do so, just to help out the father they love.

Meanwhile, back at the conference, William is listening to a bunch of people arguing over whether importing non-British movies is a good thing, or whether they're taking up too much of the market. At this point, William starts thinking about how he got involved in the film industry, although it wasn't really an industry at this point since nobody had even really inveted moving pictures, William being one of the early pioneers.

In the late 1870s, William was an apprentice to another photographer, Maurice Guttenberg, who ran a photography studio in a time when this was the only way to get pictures in a time-consuming and expensive process. William has ideas of his own, but he's not the boss. One of the customers is Helena (Maria Schell), whom William winds up marrying, remaining married until her death. They're successful in business, at least until William starts thinking about making pictures move, which is the first of the things that leads him to spending money and neglecting his business.

Real life tells us that William Friese-Greene did in fact die at that film conference after being asked to speak and suffering a massive heart attack after concluding his speech, so that portion of the movie is apparently accurate. He also apparently did spend all his wealth trying to come up with those inventions, dying in poverty. Unsurprisingly, Donat's portray is a very good acting performance. As for the film as a whole, it wasn't a big hit at the time, and I think having watched it, it feels a bit old-fashioned in the sense of it being rather too heroic in a movie biography sense. The movie winds up feeling a bit sterile as a result. That's a bit of a shame thanks to what should be interesting subject material and that acting performance from Donat.

Run of the Arrow

In addition to foreign films, I feel like I've got a somewhat disproportionate number of westerns sitting on my DVR waiting for me to watch and review them before they expire. One of those movies that I hadn't heard of before the last time it showed up on TCM was Run of the Arrow.

The movie opens with something that's a looming theme in quite a few Hollywood westerns, the US Civil War. Specifically, the movie informs us it's the last day of the war. Virginian O'Meara (Rod Steiger) shoots Union Army lieutenant Driscoll (Ralph Meeker), although Driscoll survives. O'Meara takes Driscoll to where General Lee is, although he learns that Lee is in the process of surrendering, thereby ending the war. O'Meara had been a farmer on one of those hardscrabble farms, so on returning home to his mother, there's not much of a life for such a defeated Confederate soldier to return home to. There's that frontier out west, of course, where a man can start life fresh, so O'Meara decides he's going to do just that.

Some time later, in a part of the west that still has more natives than Americans, O'Meara meets one of the natives, an elderly and dying Sioux, Walking Coyote (Jay C. Flippen, yes, playing a native American). The two, however, meet a band from a different sub-tribe of the Sioux, who threaten to kill the two men. Walking Coyote, being Sioux, knows the "Run of the Arrow", which involves running a gauntlet of men trying to shoot arrows at you. If you survive the gauntlet, you're basically free, or some such.

O'Meara survives and winds up with yet another sub-tribe of the Sioux, the Lakota, headed by Blue Buffalo (Charles Bronson). O'Meara falls in love with one of the women who tends to the wounds, and decides he wants to become a member of the tribe, largely because the Lakota also understand that the Americans are moving west and destroying another people's way of life much the same way that O'Meara thinks the northerners destroyed the southern way of life in the recently ended civil war.

Soon enough, the Americans do come, in the form of Capt. Clark (Brian Keith) and his cavalry who have been given the task of finding a suitable location to build their new fort. The Sioux have negotiated that it be built on land that's going to interfere less with their traditional hunting grounds, and give O'Meara the job of playing scout to the cavalry since he's got such a good command of English. And wouldn't you know it, but serving under Capt. Clark is... Lt. Driscoll!

O'Meara sees all of this as his chance to get back at the Americans for what they did to Virginia, while there are also a lot of US Army men who don't care for the Indians. As is usually the case in these movies, the treaty gets violated, and there's a decisive battle between the US Army and the Indians.

Run of the Arrow was made at RKO near the end of the studio's existence, so it has the feel of a movie that doesn't really have the budget it should have had. (At least the print TCM ran is much better looking than the one they run for Glory which is from a similar point in RKO's death throes.) The movie has an interesting premise, although it feels to me like it suffers from quite a bit of implausibility. Then again, it was directed by Sam Fuller, so one should expect it to rebel against the traditional constraints of Hollywood's view of what America should become: the idea of O'Meara's redemption feels like it's a metaphor for the post-Red Scare era of the 1950s.

Ultimately, while I find Run of the Arrow a bit uneven, I think it's got more pluses than minuses.

Sing and Like It

Some time back TCM ran a morning with several of the films of 1930s comic actress Pert Kelton. Another one that I hadn't heard of was Sing and Like It. Since the synopsis sounded interesting enough, I as always decided to record it so I could eventually watch it and put up this post on the movie.

ZaSu Pitts plays Annie Snodgrass, a housewife married to Oswald (John Qualen, credited including his middle initial although it's unmistakeably his voice) who has a thing for amateur theater. And I definitely mean amateur, as these people are definitely not ready for the big time. Annie sings one of those sappy songs of the era about being thankful for your mother, and it's not just the insipid lyrics, but Annie's lousy vocal stylings that make the song truly a disaster.

However, passing by the theater where they're practicing, and hearing the voice, is Fenny Sylvester (Nat Pendleton). He's a gangster, meaning that he's got a fair amount of money, along with a lack of scruples about threatening violence to get his way. He hears the song, and for whatever odd reason -- the movie is a comedy, after all -- decides that he loves this song. Never mind that everybody around him like his second-in-command Toots McGuire (Ned Sparks) thinks Annie is terrible. Fenny is the boss, so he gets his way. And having heard Annie, he wants to do his good duty by putting her in a show.

Nothing less than the best will do for Fenny, and he's able to use those threats to get people like theater producer Frink (Edward Everett Horton) to help mount the stage show, despite Frink's obvious horror at hearing Annie's voice. There's also Fenny's girlfriend Ruby (that's Pert Kelton), who gets tasked with making Annie come across as a higher-class stage lady. But there's not all that much they can do to make this nice but thoroughly untalented woman a success.

So it's decided that the thing to do to give the show some oomph is to stage a publicity campaign involving Annie going missing, except that she won't really go missing because everybody who matters will know exactly where she is until she shows up in time for the big premiere. The only thing is, Annie gets kidnapped for real.

Sing and Like It was, I think, not conceived as anything more than a B movie. But considering the cast of very good supporting actors, they all take the material and run with it for all it's worth, making it surprisingly funny. Then again, considering the cast, it shouldn't be surprising that they're all adept at this sort of comedy. They'd all played the sorts of roles they've got here enough.

Tragic Russ Columbo

One of the shorts that I had on my DVR waiting for me to post on a day when I had another post for something else to write up. This time, the short is musical two-reeler called That Goes Double.

The short opens up at an office where a young man and woman are both big fans of a radio singer named Russ Columbo, who is in the running to become the King of Radioland. There's an older-looking bookkeper in the office, however, who hates Columbo, because he looks a lot like Columbo and gets stopped by people and asked about it. This character is of course also played by Russ Columbo, who was about 25 at the time the short was made although the bookkeeper looks older.

For some reason this bookkeeper goes to the event where the King of Radioland is going to be named, which you don't think he'd do considering he doesn't like Columbo. There's enough of a crowd that the real Columbo can't make it through to get to the stage, at which point one of the hosts recognizes the lookalike bookeeper and brings him up on stage, thinking it's the real Columbo. The real Columbo shows up and proves who he is by singing one of his songs.

But the real Columbo realizes that having a lookalike can prove useful. There are a lot of PR appearances a celebrity has to make, but doesn't necessarily want to. The real Russ offers to triple the lookalike's salary in exchange for doing some of those appearances. Of course, there's bound to be an issue that the lookalike isn't much of a singer.

Soon enough, a socialite named Gloria, who is an admirer of Russ', wants to host a party with Russ singing one of his songs. This second half of the short is an excuse for a couple of talent agents to bring in various novelty acts, such as ukulele player Roy Smeck, or a trio of dancing roller skaters. The lookalike shows up on the night of the party, but the ruse is found out. There's more to the ruse than meets the eye, however....

That Goes Double is the sort of short that shows a good variety of what Hollywood studios were putting into their musical shorts to try to bring audiences into the theaters. At this time, of course, there was no television to showcase these talents, who are interesting albeit of varying talent levels. Some people may like Columbo's vocal stylings more than other people do.

Warner Bros. was presumably trying to groom Columbo for stardom as an actor, the way crooners at various studios started acting such as Bing Crosby over at Paramount or Dick Powell in a movie like 42nd. Street the same year as this one. Sadly, a freak accident on set a year later saw Columbo get shot by a prop gun but the projectile entered his head with enough force to kill him instantly, or at least that's how the story goes.