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.

Briefs for April 7-9, 2026

TCM likes to advertise the wine club that puports to pair various wines with classic movies, in part because it's become a thing for famous people to lend their name to a winery, I'm guessing for tax purposes. On a similar vein, Leonard Maltin and his daughter Jessie have co-written a book Family Movie Night Menus which is the subject of tonight's TCM lineup. It's only a one night thing, and not every Tuesday in April as there are already spotlights on Texas and on Roger Corman. Of tonight's movies, I happen to have Meet Me in St. Louis (10:15 PM) and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers on my DVR, but of course I've already blogged about both of them.

A lesser-seen movie that's on my DVR and I've already blogged about, is Blonde Ice, which if memory serves was part of a Noir Alley presentation. It's getting another airing tomorrow, April 8, at 10:45 AM on TCM, and since it's one of those more obscure movies that doesn't show up so often, it's definitely worth mentioning compared to some other movies.

As for FXM, there's not much that I haven't seen before. But the Tyrone Power version of Nightmare Alley is on the schedule tomorrow, April 8, at 6:00 AM. Carmen Jones, meanwhile, will be on FXM at 8:50 AM on April 9.

Today is James Garner's birthday, as I mentioned yesterday in my post on How Sweet It Is!. Tomorrow marks the birth anniversary of Mary Pickford, not that TCM is honoring it. It's also the birth anniversary of songwriter E.Y. "Yip" Harburg, who wrote a whole bunch of stuff used in MGM movies, notably "Over the Rainbow" in The Wizard of Oz. He also wrote Finian's Rainbow, which is one of the rare movies I gave up on largely because I found it such a phony musical and the characters unappealing. Maybe I'll finally get through it some time, but I don't know.

For some values of sweet

I didn't intend to do posts on two of what I refer to as the 1960s "generation gap" movies in fairly close succession, after last week's post on Don't Make Waves. I also didn't intend to do posts on two Debbie Reynolds movies a few weeks apart, after I Love Melvin. But it turns out there's a movie on my DVR that's showing up on TCM tomorrow, April 7, that relates to both of those films. That movie is How Sweet It Is! at 8:00 AM as part of a birthdy salute to actor James Garner.

After wannabe groovy opening titles and one of those awful 1960s MOR songs, the action shifts to a bedroom in an upper-middle-class suburban house in New Rochelle, NY, where a man and a woman are in bed together making mad passionate love -- or least as mad and passionate as you could get on screen in 1968 -- in the middle of the day. The woman, Jenny Henderson (Debbie Reynolds), is worried about Davey (Donald Losby) returning home from work and catching the two in bed together. Davey does show up, but in a twist it turns out that Davey is Jenny's teenaged son, and the man in bed is Grif Henderson (James Garner), who is Jenny's wife and Davey's father.

Grif is a photojournalist, and the magazine he works for sends him on foreign assignments often enough that he doesn't get to see Jenny so often. Worse is that he doesn't get to see Davey, which worries Mom since she knows Davey needs a father figure. So when Grif goes to have a father/son chat, he learns that Davey is dating Bootsie (Hilary Thompson), the daughter of Grif's boss at the magazine. Bootsie is going to be spending the summer on one of those guided student tours of Europe, and Davey wants to use the money from his job to go over to Europe and follow Bootsie around. Dad kind of likes the idea -- it's a good way to learn about girls -- but Mom isn't so certain.

So what Jenny's Mom does is get Bootsie's mom to put pressure on Bootsie's dad. He, as the editor of the magazine, is planning to send a photographer along to document the trip for the magazine -- American student life on the European grand tour or some such. Perhaps it can be arranged so that Grif is the photographer, and Davey his assistant, so Dad can watch to see that Davey doesn't get into too much hijinks. Jenny, for her part, will rent a house on the Riviera for the family to stay in after the tour.

Except that Jenny is a bit naïve and gets taken in by an obvious con artist (Terry-Thomas in a brief role) and the transatlantic voyage offers no prospects of rekindling the romance. When everybody gets to France, Jenny goes south to the house they've rented for the summer, only to find out that the owner, Philippe Maspere (Maurice Ronet), a prominent lawyer, is living there as his summer house. But since there's no place else for Jenny to go and he's obviously attracted to her, he lets her rent the place for the second half of what she was going to pay the agent.

The standard love triangle hijinks ensue, with Philippe kinda-sorta pursuing Jenny, who for her part seems flattered although she really does love Grif. Grif, meanwhile, is being pursued by the guide Nancy, who is thrilled to have an adult male with her after having to spend so much time with teenagers. One coincidence leads to another, and the movie climaxes with Grif and Jenny getting arrested; Jenny getting bailed out by a bordello owner (she's in a holding pen with the owner's stable of prostitutes); and Grif and Davey showing up at the bordello.

From what I've read, James Garner hated How Sweet It Is!, although he enjoyed the people he worked with on the movie. I can't say I disagree with him. The premise, beyond a middle-aged couple still having a sex drive but mostly unable by circumstance to act upon it, is forced, and the budget doesn't even allow for the sort of establishing shots or location shooting other "Hollywood goes to Europe" movies of the era had. Worse, a lot of the movie feels like it's trying to appeal to a younger crowd but failing badly. The movie also has any number of plot holes. The ocean voyage wouldn't give a husband and wife a cabin together? The teenagers' given ages are also much too young.

If you want to watch another example of Hollywood's difficulty in adjusting to changing social values in the 1960s, How Sweet It Is! fits the bill. But it's not a particuarly good movie.

TCM Star of the Month Apirl 2026: Sophia Loren

Sophia Loren in Two Women (Apr. 6, 9:15 PM)

Now that we're into the first full week of a new month and past the Easter holiday, it's time for some of the traditional programming features to show up again on TCM. Most notably, this means the Star of the Month goes from three nights of George Brent to four nights of Sophia Loren, whose movies will be appearing every Monday night in April in prime time. The salute actually kicks of at 8:00 PM tonight not with a movie, but with an interview she did at the TCM Film Festival a decade or so ago. Tonight includes her Oscar-winning performance in Two Women at 9:15 PM, followed at 11:00 PM by Legend of the Lost, a title that I saw showing up in the on-demand section of one or another of the free streaming services only to discover that it was an aggregator for the paid portion. So I'm recording that one tonight.

Sophia Loren and David Niven in Lady L (Apr. 14, 2:15 AM)

The second week of the salute brings another of Loren's movies that I'd never gotten around to watching before, Lady L, which is a bit of a surprise since I think this is one released in the US by MGM. I'm pretty certain I've seen the trailer show up enough. Anyhow, time to get this one on and then off the ever-growing watch list.

Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni in A Special Day (Apr. 21, 3:30 AM)

The last two Monday nights bring a rather more eclectic line-up of movies, including Man of La Mancha (another one I haven't seen) on April 27, but I'd like to mention the fine performances of A Special Day in the wee hours of April 21, since it's mostly a two-character play with fine performances from Loren and frequent Italian co-star Marcello Mastroianni. Surprisingly, I don't see Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow on the TCM schedule this month.

Warner Bros. B Urban Corruption Drama #23489567826

I've mentioned a lot how I like the Warner Bros. B movies, and this is often the case even when the plots turn out to be implausible. Another good example of this is Strange Alibi. I presume it turns up often enough on TCM, but I don't think I had noticed it until the last time it showed up several months back.

The backdrop is one that's not uncommon for B movies in the pre-World War II era: a big city where there's a crime syndicate, and they've been able to infiltrate various parts of the administration, leaving them free to act with impunity. When somebody does threaten to turn state's witness, that person is immediately shot. The police are quick to find the killer but wouldn't you know it the killer "commits suicide" by hanging.

The police chief, Sprague (Jonathan Hale), brings in a bunch of his detectives to have a long talk about the matter. The chief immediately gets into it with one of the men, Sgt. Joe Geary (a very young Arthur Kennedy), who proceeds to deal with his temporary suspension by getting into a fight with the police chief, which makes the suspension permanent. Wait until Joe's poor fiancée Alice (Joan Perry) finds out.

Except that all of this was a ruse. Sprague knows the syndicate has dirty cops working for it, although he can't figure out who. He wants Geary to figure that out, except that having Geary do it in uniform is going to present a problem for various reasons, hence the nonsense about getting Geary fired. This mission is so super-secret that only Geary and Sprague know about it. Sprague hasn't even bothered to tell anybody like the state Attorney General or governor or anyone in the feds.

So you can probably guess what happens next. Geary goes to an establishment known to be a hangout for syndicate types, run by Katie (Florence Bates), who isn't exactly law-abiding but also has a heart of gold which is going to come into play for the climax. Joe works from there, getting into the good graces of the syndicate by shooting some high-priced liquor bottles from a bar owner who's shorting the syndicate. Geary finds a guy named McKaye who can provide key evidence, only to discover too late that they're being watched. When Geary takes McKaye to Sprague's house (really, they're meeting there despite the code to communicate?), the bad guys follow along and kill Sprague in a way that clearly implicates Geary and only Geary, getting him sent up the river as it were to a nasty prison. The only way Joe is going to be able to clear his name is to find McKaye. After all, nobody else knows that Geary was working with Sprague to weed out corruption.

Geary is eventually able to escape, but has very few places to go. Worse, McKaye is found, but he's found rather dead. Still, Geary has some luck in that the governor is working on weeding out corruption and might just be able to help Geary out....

The whole plot of Strange Alibi feels like a mish-mash of tropes that had all been done before. But this being Warner Bros., they do it well even if the plot as a whole bears little resemblance to reality. They're also helped out by a fine stable of mostly supporting character-type actors. Arthur Kennedy, of course, would go on to much bigger things (and five Oscar nominations), but at this point nobody knew what they had in him. And Strange Alibi is also, like all of the good Warner B movies, breezily fast, clocking in at a sprightly 63 minutes. Definitely another one worth watching the next time it shows up on TCM.