High School graduation

Tonight's lineup on TCM is a night of movies set in and around the end of one's time at high school. One of the movies happens to be on my DVR, so I watched it to be able to put up this post. That movie is Andy Hardy's Private Secretary, airing early tomorrow (May 5) morning at 4:00 AM, or still in the overnight hours depending upon your perspective and time zone.

Mickey Rooney returns as Andy Hardy, together with his father Judge Hardy (Lewis Stone), mother (Fay Holden) and English teacher Aunt Milly (Sara Haden), although his sister is absent from this installment of the series. As the movie opens, the Judge is ruling from the bench, called into his chambers because of a check with insufficient funds. As it turns out, that check was written by Andy, although Andy of course wasn't really trying to pass bad checks. Instead, Andy was trying to make up for insufficient funds elsewhere, but didn't have the money to rob Peter to pay Paul, as it were.

The original check was for the senior class' funds at Carvel. Graduation is coming up, and to deal with the expenses, the senior class has imposed a head tax on the seniors, not taking into account that perhaps there were students in Carvel who aren't so middle class like the Hardys and all their circle of society. Two such people are the Land twins, Kathryn (Kathryn Grayson) and Harry (Todd Karns). Indeed, the Lands are sort of not part of anybody's social circle in Carvel. Judge Hardy decides he's going to investigate of course, along with making certain that Andy starts to involve the two Land kids in the rest of his group of friends.

The Lands are not well off and new to Carvel because of the war raging over in Europe (the movie was released in early 1941, before the US was attacked at Pearl Harbor). Dad Steven Land (Ian Hunter) is a very bright man who can speak nine languages, and used those talents to set up a travel agency that facilitated rich people's travel once they got to wherever in Europe he was based at the time. But of course, World War II began in Europe and nobody wanted to travel and there weren't so many places safe for the Lands, so they returned to the US more or less broke.

Judge Hardy has influence, so he talks to one of his friends at the State Department. Steven Land's linguistic skills include Portuguese, and with the Good Neighbor policy, the State Department can use a man like Steven as part of one of their trade delegations. The only problem is, the delegation is leaving this Thursday, which is the day before the high school graduation. Kathryn and Harry are for some reason expected to follow their father to South America, which means they'd have to leave Thursday as well. Can't something at least be done to have the kids follow later, or better yet, start a life as adults here in the US?

Andy thinks he's doing a good deed by editing the telegram to Washington saying that the Lands are perfectly ready to leave for South America on Saturday. But since there's an entire delegation, and they're all leaving in unison, that's taken as an admission that Steven won't be taking the job, which promptly gets filled before Judge Hardy finds out what happens.

Meanwhile, there are Andy Hardy's own problems. He's on all the committees surrounding the graduation, with the result that he's stretched himself too thin. He needs help, and since Kathryn has been taking business courses it's suggested by Judge Hardy that Andy hire Kathryn on as a sort of secretary. Andy's traditional girlfriend Polly Benedict (Ann Rutherford) finds out and is none too pleased. But in addition to needing an assistant, Andy is doing so many extracurriculars that he neglects his studies to the point that he fails his English exam. This means that he's in danger of not graduating with the rest of his class.

Of course, this being a Hardy Family movie, you know that all of the personal problems are going to be resolved with all of the good people -- and there really aren't any bad guys in a movie like this -- getting the positive outcome they deserve. It's the sort of feel good movie that audiences were going to like in an era where there was still that war raging on "over there" without America, even if there was the worry that America was going to get involved. But in addition to that, Andy Hardy's Private Secretary" was an opportunity for MGM to introduce its new star, Kathryn Grayson. She was more of a singer than an actress at this point, so MGM included a bunch of operatic musical numbers in the plot for Grayson to show off that operatic voice. What you think this does to the movie is probably going to depend on what you think of opera music in general.

With that in mind, I think I'd say that Andy Hardy's Private Secretary isn't particularly better or worse than the other movies in the series that I've seen; it's just got such different music that it'll influence your choice of which Hardy Family movie to watch.

Sky around the satellite

TCM's lineup for the daytime portion of tomorrow, May 4, is a bunch of 1950s science fiction. One of the movies is a film that's been sitting on my DVR, so once again I made the point of watching it in time for a post here on its upcoming TCM showing. That film is Satellite in the Sky, which airs at 7:30 AM tomorrow.

Satellite in the Sky is set in the UK, although Warner Bros. distributed it here in the US which gives the movie a bigger budget to work with. If you recall the movie The Right Stuff, before man got into outer space there was a bunch of test pilot stuff in planes that could break the sound barrier. The UK's scientists are doing similar stuff and have lost a couple of pilots, to the point that one of the commanders, Michael Hayden (Kieron Moore), plans to go up himself to make certain everything is safe in preparation for the first manned spaceflight.

Hayden's flight is successful, witnessed by the assembled press who kinda sorta know there's thoughts about going into outer space. Some of the reporters, however, aren't all that excited about the prospect because of their risk aversion, notably Kim Hamilton (Lois Maxwell). Worse, what the press doesn't know is that there's more to the mission than going into outer space. In a shocking bit of exposition, two of the higher-ups discuss these secret plans while they're in the same room as the reporters! Massive breach of security. And it's not going to be the last.

Anyhow, the War Department has the idea of testing a new sort of nuclear bomb in outer space. Prof. Merrity (Donald Wolfit) is the physicist in charge of developing it, and he's going to be on the mission to deploy the bomb since so few people know about it that he has to be the one to attach all the fuses and whatnot. Can't have it going off on earth, don't you know. Indeed, Hayden, who is the commander of the mission, isn't told about the presence of the bomb until the night before.

Meanwhile, there's a bunch of drama before the rocket takes off. In another even more shocking breach of security, Kim is able to waltz right through an unlocked gate that doesn't have anyone guarding it, and down to where the rocket is on its sloped underground launching pad. She's even able to climb into the ridiculously spacious rocket ship unseen: everybody's gone home for the evening, it seems! And then there are the two crew members who have issues with their love life: Jimmy (Bryan Forbes) was planning to propose marriage to his girlfriend who suddenly has to leave for a fashion show; Larry Noble has a wife who's fed up with his having to be away all the time because of the mission.

The next morning comes, and the rocket ship takes off just fine, which is shocking considering the extra weight that's it's carrying in the form of Kim Hamilton. Nobody's wearing any sort of pressure suit or personal oxygen system, either. Oh, and even though the ship has escaped the earth's gravity, it still has its own gravity that allows Kim to find a thermos of coffee and pour it for everybody. But the time comes to release the bomb. The plan is to set the fuse and then have the rocket head back for earth with the bomb exploding in space. But in the physics of Satellite in the Sky, the absence of gravity in outer space means that magnetism takes over in their theory of unified forces, so the bomb clings to the ship. One astronaut goes out to push the bomb away, which should give the obvious answer, but the bomb comes back. And the astronauts aboard bicker about what to do.

Satellite in the Sky is another of those movies where you can see what the filmmakers were going for, but they come up with a script that goes badly wrong in part because of the plot holes, and in part because they rely on so many tropes that it's unoriginal. It's also slow even at only 84 minutes. I'm glad I finally got the chance to watch Satellite in the Sky, but it's not particularly good.

The face that launched a thousand ships

A movie that for some reason I thought I may have watched ages ago, before I even started this blog, was the 1950s version of Helen of Troy. I had never blogged about it, and having watched it, am not 100% certain that I even had seen it before; perhaps I may have watched the 1950s version of Alexander the Great on TCM instead. In any case, Helen of Troy is getting an airing on TCM tomorrow, May, 3, at 7:45 AM, so now's the time for me to watch it and write up a review of it.

The movie is based on Homer's Iliad, although liberties are taken. We're introduced to Troy as the city that guarded the entrance to the Dardanelles between what is now the Turkish Mediterranean and the Black Sea. Troy grew wealthy by charging a toll for safe passage through the straits, although this ticked off other civilizations and mean that Troy didn't have ships of its own. Particularly the Greeks, led by Spartan King Menelaus (Niall MacGinnis), were unhappy.

Meanwhile, in Troy, there's debate over what to do, with King Priam's (Cedric Hardwicke) son Hector wanting to go on the offensive and attack the Spartans first, while younger son Paris (Jacques Sernas, credited as Jack) disagrees and thinks they should offer peace. You can always try war later, so Paris gets on a boat bound for one of the Greek harbors. Except that the ship is overcome by a storm, with Paris going up to fix the mast and going overboard when the mast snaps. He washes ashore and is rescued by a gorgeous woman who turns out to be Helen (Rossana Podestà) although she doesn't reveal her true identity who is AWOL from the palace with an old governess and her slave servant Andraste (Brigitte Bardot in one of her first international roles). Unsurprisingly, Paris falls for this lovely woman, although everybody realizes there's a problem if the Greeks were to find the guy.

Paris does make his way to the Spartan council, where Menelaus is meeting with Agamemnon (Robert Douglas), Achilles (Stanley Baker), Odysseus (Torin Thatcher), and others. Paris proves who he is by being good at combat, but then who should show up to the council but Helen? Menelaus is no dummy, and realizes that Paris and Helen have already met somewhere before. Menelaus is also insanely jealous because Helen doesn't really care for him on the grounds that she's been basically forced into a marriage and he tries to keep her captive in a gilded cage. So although Menelaus feigns talking peace, he actually plans to keep Paris hostage and ransom him to Troy.

Helen's servants inform Paris of this and effect an escape, leading to Menelaus getting even angrier, and sending soldiers to find Paris and kill him. They do find him, but there's a problem in that Helen has escaped the palace to make certain Paris gets to the Phoenician boat that's supposed to take him back to Troy. Whether the soldiers can kill Helen along with Paris is an open question, but one that Paris obviates by taking Helen in his arms and jumping off a cliff to the ocean below much like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Paris takes Helen back to Troy.

When Menelaus learns of this, he vows to go to war with Troy, using Helen as the reasonable excuse, but with as much of an intention to loot Troy and let a bunch of people bring the treasures of war back to Greece with them. Unfortunately Troy is in an easily-defensible place, and has a bunch of land behind it that's going to make it hard to surround. So instead, after the first attack is repulsed, the war becomes a largely frozen war of attrtition. Can the Greeks wait out the Trojan subjects' increasingly poor morale? Well, as anybody who knows their history will remember, the Greeks eventually came up with the Trojan horse that had a couple of commandos inside who could open up the city gates while the Trojans, drunk having thought they won a big battle, are hung over.

This version of Helen of Troy is pretty impressive to watch from the point of view of all the technical parts of the production; it was filmed largely in Italy with wide-screen color photography and what generally look like very high production values. The story and the acting, however, leave a bit less to be desired, in part because the two leads were not native English speakers. Still, I think the good parts of the spectacle ultimately outweigh the shortcomings of the story.

House Around the Woman

I've mentioned a couple of John Nesbitt's Passing Parade shorts before. They're interesting, although definitely the sort of thing a lot of people today are going to find old-fashioned. One of the shorts that I hadn't seen before until it showed up in the space after one of the features I watched to fill out the time slot is The Woman in the House.

John Nesbitt, giving his stentorian narration once again, discusses fear and how it's normal to have, especially in the time in which the movie is hitting theaters: it premiered in May 1942, about five months after the attack on Pearl Harbor that brought the United States into World War II. One particularly odd fear is called "anthropophobia", the fear of people, and a dramatized case study of one sufferer of it is shown. That woman is Catherine Starr (not a real name if there's even anything about this story that is real, which I doubt; Starr is played by Ann Richards), a woman who hasn't left her house in 40 years.

Apparently Starr was a schoolteacher in a small English village who was enagaged to be married to a British army officer in 1901. However, a small dispute over the wedding leaves her fiancé to say that he's going to leave the house and she'll never see him again. He has to go with his regiment down to South Africa where the Boer War is being fought. Some time later, she gets a letter of the "we regret to inform you" type that her fiancé died, not in battle, but of malaria in Africa. As a result, Starr can't bear to face the world, although apparently she has money saved up for 40 years of living.

Back in the present day, or late 1941 in the UK, there's that little war going on, and the Blitzkrieg with Nazi airplanes trying to bomb British targets. Starr's village is targeted, which meand that she's going to have to be taken from her house by force to a bomb shelter. Can't they just let her die in peace? But this is just what poor Catherine needs, as she finds a couple of children in the bomb shelter who need a bit of first aid. And don't you know it, but service to others is the best way to overcome one's fear.

Oh boy is the service propaganda on display here. Yeah, there's a war to be fought, but making a short like this with such an obvious agenda came across to me, at least, as a bit cringe-inducing, largely because the message feels shoe-horned in. This isn't one of those service movies or a film set in one of those occupied people where the locals were bravely fighting the Nazis. Instead, it's ostensibly about psychiatry, and then it turns into "how dare you have a mental illness -- do your part".

I don't know if the Passing Parade shorts got put out on a box set, but this isn't the first one I'd watch off of such a box set.

TCM Star of the Month May 2026: Gregory Peck

Gregory Peck (r.) and Dean Stockwell in Gentleman's Agreement (May 2, 12:15 AM)

Today is the first day of a new month, and that means it's time for new programming features on TCM. This includes a new Star of the month, that being Gregory Peck. His movies will be airing on all five Fridays in prime time, starting tonight at 8:00 PM with his Oscar-winning performance in To Kill a Mockingbird. Note that the running times for tonight's movies may cause a bit of a problem with the starting time for following movies: Spellbound starts at 10:15 PM in a two-hour slot, but is 118 minutes plus presumably an intro and outro. The fourth movie, which may or may not have an intro, is The Yearling at 2:30 AM, which is listed as 134 minuts and is in a slot that's two hours and 15 minutes. So it would fit without the intro and outro, but since it's often been the case to have four movies in prime time with host intros....

Gregory Peck and Dean Jagger in Twelve O'Clock High

It looks as though two of the nights of the salue are more genre-specific. The May 8 schedule has Peck in several westerns, while May 22 is the start of TCM's annual Memorial Day marathon of war movies. As such, it's appropriate that that night of the Peck salute includes a bunch of the war movies he made, although not among them this year is Twelve O'Clock High.

Audrey Hepburn, Gregory Peck, and Eddie Albert in Roman Holiday

In fact, looking at the TCM schedule, it's a bit surprising what movies aren't airing this month. In addition to Twelve O'Clock High, you also can't see Roman Holiday on TCM this month. There is, however, a showing of The Boys from Brazil (May 29, 10:00 PM) that I've wanted to see for a while, as well as Peck in the 1950s version of Moby Dick (May 30, 5:00 AM).

Not home in Indiana

Another of the people honored in TCM's Summer Under the Stars in August 2025 was Shirley Jones. This gave me the chance to record a pair of her films. One is a supporting role in the horrendously bad The Happy Ending, which I gave up on halfway through and may or may not get to before it expires off the DVR, that's how bad it is. And it's not even bad in a good way. The other film was one from early in her career, April Love.

Pat Boone is the star here, and he does sing the title song "April Love", although not over the opening credits; instead, the opening credits are over establishing shots of what is supposed to be bluegrass horse country in Kentucky. We then get Boon, who plays young Nick Conover, in a mail truck looking for the Bruce farm. It seems Mr. and Mrs. Bruce are his uncle and aunt, and he's going to be spending some time working on their farm. Not that it's much of a farm anymore, not since Jed Bruce's (Arthur O'Connell) son Jed Jr. died in Korea and Dad lost his zest for living and raising harness racing horses.

It was also Aunt Henrietta's (Jeanette Nolan) idea to bring Nick to the farm. Nick's father presumably died; Nick's unseen mom has to work to support Nick and can't be the necessary presence in the kid's life. As a result, Nick fell in with the wrong crowd, went joyriding in a stolen car in Chicago, and got probation. As part of the plea deal, Nick lost his driver's license and is getting sent away to this farm. So you can understand why uncle Jed isn't exactly thrilled. If Nick were played by someone other than clean-cut Pat Boone, you might wonder whether the plot would have Nick engaging in predations on his aunt and uncle.

While Jed is showing Nick the work he's going to have to do, including some obvious foreshadowing involving a horse that won't let anybody ride him now that Jed Jr. is dead, one of the neighbors shows up: young Liz Templeton (Shirley Jones), whose father still raises harness horses. Liz is good with horses, too, and can even ride a sulky. She falls for Nick and invites him over, although she and the rest of the Templeton's don't know just why Nick is here. And why he doesn't want to get behind the wheel of a car. Liz has a big sister Fran who interests Nick's eye, although she already has a boyfriend in college kid Al.

Part of the plot involves the good influence that Nick and Uncle Jed wind up having on each other. Nick fixes up Jed's broken-down old tractor, while Nick rescues the horse when it falls during an escape. The horse starts letting Nick get in the sulky to race him. There's also the Nick/Liz romance. And then there's the plot about Nick's probation. After fixing another old car on the farm, Liz and Fran make comments that lead to a drag race between Fran's sports car and Nick's old jalopy. Fran gets some dents in her car, and the insurance claim reveals that Nick has been violating his probation. Oh dear, he might be hauled off to prison instead of being allowed to race in the grand prize race.

April Love is harmless stuff, being a remake of a World War II-era movie Home in Indiana. The update brings nice color photography and Cinemascope, along with the songs for both Boone and Jones to sing. Other than that, the movie is old-fashioned and totally inoffensive. Nick is technically a criminal, but at heart he's really got a good heart. There's no antagonist here, and the Templetons don't seem to care when they learn about Nick's past, that's how clean-cut the movie is.

If you want something clean cut and to be transported to a past that doesn't exist any more, you could do a lot worse than to watch April Love.

End of April 2026 briefs

It's hard to believe that it's already the end of April. Then again, my current pattern of writing posts well ahead of time leads to not paying quite so close attention to how far ahead I'm scheduled, or to writing up other administrative posts like this. So once again I'll mention with the full TCM May schedule out that I've seen several movies on it that are on my DVR and will require my juggling other movies around to do the posts in conjunction with the upcoming TCM airing. As always, check your local schedule.

I learned something disappointing about YouTube TV's "DVR" (technically the cloud library) recently. While it in theory adds every showing of a title you've added to the library, the "select a version" option only shows the most recent half-dozen showings. What this means is that when TCM shows something that's popular enough (and usually more recent) to be in rotation on one of the commercial channels, all those commercial channel airings are going to wind up in the six most recent showings, crowding out the TCM showing which there doesn't seem to be a way to access. No; I specifically added the TCM showing to my library precisely because it's less likely to be edited, and certainly not larded up with commercials and pop-ups. I don't know if the metadata encoded with the programs would allow for a chance to only record the TCM showing.

Apparently the TCM Film Festival starts today and runs through Sunday, April 3. Not that I'd had any plans of going since I can't really afford it and have my elderly father to look after anyway. I don't think TCM on-air really does all that much any more either in terms of being "live" from the festival between movies, but then I've been watching a lot less live TCM. Now, the FAST services, I have to admit I've been watching a lot of stuff live that way.

Sissy Spacek, Beatnik

If you've watched enough Hollywood movies from the late 1950s and early 1960s, you may know that Hollywood had what feels like a rather stereotypical view of the beatnik. And then many years later they had the chance to show the original beatniks, only to come up with something that feels rather tepid. That movie is Heart Beat, which I recently got the chance to watch.

Sissy Spacek provides the narration, giving a stereotypical talk about 1950s suburbia and introducing us to a pair of men. One is the well-known writer Jack Kerouac, who would go on to write On the Road and get it published in the late 1950s, although as the movie opens it's the late 1940s and Kerouac (John Heard) is still living with his mother in a New York City apartment. The second man is Neal Cassady (Nick Nolte), who came from Denver where he spent a lot of his adolescence in reform school since his alcoholic father abandond him. Indeed, in this telling of the story when Cassady gets out of prison he immediately steals another car and heads to New York, which is where he meets Kerouac. The two then head west for San Franciso together with a girl.

In San Francisco, the pair meet Carolyn Robinson (that's Sissy Spacek), who's studying art at the art institute and is engaged to a guy named Dick who doesn't play all that much part in the rest of the story. Jack, Neal, and Carolyn become an inseparable threesome living in a tenement apartment and working what odd jobs they can to make the rent, although Neal ultimate gets a better job with the railroad. Eventually Jack decides to head back to New York to try to sell his manuscript to On the Road which he keeps rolled up in what looks like a grocery bag. Neal has by this time knocked up Carolyn, and Jack suggests to Carolyn that she probably shouldn't marry Neal because she's not going to be happy.

With kids and responsibility, Neal and Carolyn move out to the sort of early-1950s tract housing that was being builty to accommodate the families creating the Baby Boom, and Neal has a tendency to shock the neighbors. After several years, Jack shows up again, and takes a "room" in the attic of the Cassady house with the three living in what again seems like somewhat of an open relationship, something that really shocks the neighbors. Jack heads back to New York again, and with help from Ira (Ray Sharkey), someone supposedly based in part on Allen Ginsberg who wanted nothing to do with this movie, gets On the Road published and becomes a sensation. The fact that the main character is rather based on Neal, however, causes problems for Neal, who eventually gets busted for marijuana possession.

The last act of the movie involves Cassady's itinerance, driving a converted school bus with a bunch of hippie-like characters; Cassady would die fairly young not having published much in his lifetime, although the movie doesn't mention Neal's death.

Once again, I can see why any number of people would have felt influenced by works like On the Road and would want to make a movie based on Kerouac. (I, to be honest, have not read On the Road and have never been terribly interested in the counterculture.) The movie we get in Heart Beat, however, feels rather anodyne. These people lived what in many ways turned out to be wild lives, yet everything feels rather sanitized. I think the actors do the best they can with the material, but it doesn't work as well as one might hope.

Ann-Margret is 85!

Today marks the 85th birthday of actress Ann-Margret, who was born in Sweden but became an American citizen before the age of 10. TCM is honoring the occasion with four of her movies:

8:00 PM Bye Bye Birdie
10:00 PM The Cincinnati Kid
midnight Once a Thief
2:00 AM Made in Paris

I haven't seen Made in Paris, so I'm planning to record that. However, I had Bye Bye Birdie on my DVR, so I watched that in order to write up a post on it for tonight's airing. Bye Bye Birdie is, of course, based on a musical, and before that, derived from an idea that a Brodway writer had when popular singer Elvis Presley was drafted into the Army.

Jesse Pearson plays Conrad Birdie, a singer popular with the teenaged girls because of his sex appeal who gets drafted into the army, causing an uproar amongst the girls of America. Songwriter Albert Pearson (Dick Van Dyke), hearing about the story, hopes he can write up a song quickly for Conrad to sing before Birdie goes off to the Army. Meanwhile, Albert has a complicated personal life. He's got a girlfriend Rosie (Janet Leigh) who should be his fiancée by now. But Albert's mother Mae (Maureen Stapleton) helped found the family music publishing business and consistently guilts the devoted Albert into not leaving. Rosie unsurprisingly wants Albert to choose between her and his mother, and it seems he's choosing his mother.

Meanwhile, The Ed Sullivan Show (with Sullivan playing himself) has the idea of putting Birdie on the show before he enlists, and even have Birdie kiss one of his legion of fans. Rosie has the membership rolls of the Conrad Birdie fan club somehow, and randomly picks a girl from the small town of Sweet Apple, Ohio. That girl is Kim MacAfee (Ann-Margret), who has a happy life with her kid brother, her parents (Paul Lynde and Mary LaRoche), and a boyfriend in Hugo Peabody (Bobby Rydell). Kim gets the call from New York, and she's naturally thrilled about having been chosen to represent the town of Sweet Apple to America, and get a kiss from Birdie.

Not everyone is thrilled, however. Hugo is ticked, fearing that he's going to lose Kim to Birdie. Dad also doesn't like it so much. He's still responsible for Kim, of course, and doesn't care for Birdie's music or the way in which Birdie drives everybody wild. But he warms to the idea when Albert suggests that perhaps Mr. MacAfee could get on TV too. Meanwhile, the subplot involving the long-simmering relationship between Albert and Rosie keeps rearing its head although one would think in a musical like this that Rosie and Albert are going to have a happy ending.

And then there's a twist. TV production is a complicated thing, and in the case of the Ed Sullivan Show part of that includes making certain everything times out properly considering that it's live TV. There's time planned for Birdie and Kim, although that gets cut into by Mr. MacAfee's desire to speak as well as MacAfee trying to promote the mayor, too. Worse is that the Russian Ballet which is also scheduled to appear that night decides it's going to do a number that would take up almost all the time allotted to the Birdie segment.

Bye Bye Birdie is the sort of movie that fans of musicals are going to like. If you're not that much of a fan of the artificiality of musicals, and I include myself in that genre, then it may not be quite as appealing. For the most part, everybody does well, although the material is such that at times it felt much too forced for me. Still, as I said, I can understand why some people are going to love Bye Bye Birdie.

A century before noir

Hedy Lamarr was honored in last year's edition of Summer Under the Stars, which allowed me to record a movie that I hadn't seen before, largely because it was an independent production that has fallen into the public domain: The Strange Woman.

We don't see Hedy Lamarr for a bit, because the movie opens up when her character is a kid in 1820s Bangor, Maine. Jenny Hager is the daughter of alcoholic widower Tim Hager, who is a scandal in town as he tries to get drinks off of shopkeeper Isaiah Poster (Gene Lockhart). Isaiah, for his part, is a widower himself with a son Ephraim. Out at the river, a bunch of kids are standing on the bridge when Jenny dares Ephraim to jump into the river, even though Ephraim can't swim and is afraid of the water. So Jenny pushes him in. When an adult, Judge Saladine (Alan Napier), shows up, Jenny drags Ephraim out of the water and claims she saved Jenny.

Jenny is already a wanton kid, and she's going to be a wanton woman, looking to marry rich. Matters come to a head one night when the now adult Jenny (that's Hedy Lamarr) pursues the sort of man Dad doesn't like. Dad tries to beat Jenny, so she beats him to death and runs off to Isaiah's house looking for help, in part because he's the richest man in town, and in part because this is a scheme. She claims Dad has suffered some sort of attack while trying to beat her, winning the sympathy of Isaiah and the Reverend Thatcher (Moroni Olsen) who both know Jenny needs to be married off. The only man around seems to be Isaiah, now that Ephraim is off to college, so Jenny marries Isaiah, which was sort of her plan all along because she wants that money.

Of course, Ephraim returns, and things get awkward because Jenny also has feelings for Ephraim that are mutual, not that Dad knows any of this. Dad by now owns not just a bunch of ships, but also forest inland, and has to deal with the lumberjacks who get rowdy when they come to town because they're in need of women. Isaiah is so concerned with the running of the town that he basically works himself to a heart attack, although this doesn't kill him as much as Jenny would be happy that it does. Jenny is looking for a way to inherit Isaiah's property, so when Isaiah decides to go up to the lumber camps, Jenny manipulates Ephraim into doing the same sort of thing Montgomery Clift may or may not have done to Shelley Winters in A Place in the Sun. And then Jenny, having inherited Isaiah's property, throws Ephraim out of the house!

Jenny then starts to seduce her business manager John Evered (George Sanders), who is also in love with Jenny's best friend Meg. Meanwhile, Ephraim has become a terrible drunk and confesses to Evered what he did to his father. Whether or not Evered truly believes this is a good question, considering how completely drunk Ephraim is.

Now, the movie was made in 1946, which means there's the little matter of the Production Code. Jenny isn't going to be able to get away with what she's done up to this point, so there's the question of how she's going to expiate her sins and how the rest of the movie is resolved. The screenwriters have sort of painted themselves into a corner by this point, and there's not really a good way to get out of it.

I knew The Strange Woman was going to be interesting when I saw in the opening credits that it was based on a book by Ben Ames Williams, who might be best known for Leave Her to Heaven. Sure enough, the movie is never less than interesting, although the plot is wildly implausible at times. There's also the question of whether the movie is truly noir. Hedy Lamarr's Jenny certainly is the sort of femme fatale who would appear in a noir, although I don't quite think the historical setting is a noir setting. It's perhaps closer to the historic melodrama of a movie like Forever Amber. In any case, it's definitely worth watching.