Olympia

Another of the movies that I had to watch off of my DVR before it expired was Olympia, Leni Riefenstahl's two-part documentary on the 1936 Berlin Summer Olympics. Today being the opening ceremonies of the Winter Olympics, I figured this would be a good time to put up the post on it. Apparently the original plan was to release one movie, but Riefenstahl's edit ran so long that the movie wasn't released until mid-1938, and in two parts as it ran over four hours. Stylistically there's not enough different to justify two full separate posts, so I'm doing a post that covers both Part 1 (Festival of Nations; linked above), and the second part, Festival of Beauty.

The first part starts with a long sequence of Riefenstahl's interpretation of what training for the ancient Greek Olympiad might have been like, with a bunch of nearly naked men wearing nothing more than a codpiece and running or doing throwing events. There are also women who are completely naked, albeit in a form about as artistic as Renaissance art nudes or ancient Greek statuary. We then transition to the Olympic torch relay, starting in Greece and going through southeastern Europe on its way to Germany, leading up to the opening ceremony when the Olympic cauldron is lit after all of the countries (I think 51 of them) march into the Olympic stadium.

The rest of Part 1 deals with most of the track and field events, attempting to document them to show what happened, who won and how, but without running ridiculously long. Berlin is the Olympics where Jesse Owens famously won four gold medals, and these events are shown, with pretty much no more propaganda or racial denigration than one would have gotten from a white American Hollywood production. The recreation of the German radio/public address athletes consistently refers to certain athletes as "the black man [surname]", but that's not much worse than American commentary would have been. But more on the propaganda in the summary later.

Part 2 opens with a shorter sequence of athletes training, which might be a bit controversial in that all the male German athletes retire to the sauna after their run and there's some obvious full frontal nudity. The sports covered here include very brief references to boxing and gymnastics, with more to yachting, and then rowing (showing the American men's win in the eights that became the subject of the book and movie The Boys in the Boat), modern pentathlon, the cycling road race, and the diving, with the diving being the most famous sequence because of Riefenstahl's camera use.

And it's that use of the camera for which Olympia should be rightly remembered. The opening sequences of the two parts are in many ways the most interesting in that Riefenstahl had the most freedom in composing them. When it comes to actual sports, that's a bit harder, since there's only so much you can do to film, say, an actual boxing match. So a lot of the movie has a slightly boring feel to it. To combat this, Riefenstal did as much as she could to put cameras in spots that were unorthodox for 1936, have them moving on rails to track the athletes, or put them under or over the athletes. She also made heavy use of editing, especially in the diving sequence. I think they might have mentioned the winner, but more than any other event that felt beside the point, as she was trying to show the beauty of the human form. Some sequences, however, especially in the cycling and probably in the sailing, look like they have to be recreations.

The beauty of the human body is also where one can start when it comes to discussing the propaganda nature of the movie. Adolf Hitler obviously wanted to show the Germans as a superior people, and all of those nearly-naked bodies are very clearly of a certain narrowly-defined standard of beauty. Riefensthal couldn't show Germans winning events they didn't win -- and she doesn't hide non-Germans winning as with Jesse Owens -- but beauty is clearly a German thing.

There's also the presence of Adolf Hitler. Some of this obviously can't be helped. Berlin had been awarded the right to stage the 1936 Olympics back in 1931, before the Nazis came to power, and it is traditionally the job of the head of state of the host nation to declare the games open. So of course Hitler has to be there. At the same time, one didn't need to show him later on watching the events. There's also a lot of shots of German athletes and spectators giving the Nazi salute to the German flag at various times. During the medal ceremony and anthem playing that's understandable. 90 years on, people are going to be a bit uncomfortable with other shots of it.

All in all, Olympia deserves to be remembered as a movie that introduced a lot of ground-breaking techniques to the coverage of sport, even if it will also always be remembered for director Leni Riefenstahl's involvement with Adolf Hitler.

Who Killed Teddy Bear?

Another of the movies that's showing up on TCM and sitting on my DVR is the 1960s exploitation piece Who Killed Teddy Bear, which will be on TCM tomorrow, February 6, at 6:15 PM. As is always the case, when one of these movies comes up, I make a point of watching it so that I can do the post like this on the film.

The movie starts with a man, face unseen, but with a fairly fit body and wearing just a pair of tighty-whities, making an obscene phone call to poor Norah Dain (Juliet Prowse). Meanwhile, we learn about the titular teddy bear, which comes about when a young girl named Edie Sherman (played as an adult by Margot Bennett) saw her brother Lawrence (Sal Mineo) having sex with someone, which scarred her emotionally and caused her to fall down the stairs, leaving her a brain-damaged adult.

Norah and Lawrence both work at a discotheque run by Marian Freeman (Elaine Stritch) that plays the sort of upbeat pop music that was all the vogue in the 1960s. Norah works as a hostess and playing records, while Lawrence is a busboy. Norah tells Marian about the phone calls, which brings the police into the case, in the form of Lt. Madden (Jan Murray). Madden is a piece of work himself. He's got a young daughter, but no longer has a wife, as the wife was raped and killed some years back. This led Madden to start doing his own independent research on what causes men to become the sort of sex maniac who would make such obscene phone calls or even go further. But, the way he does the research makes you think it's much more than just a professional interest and that he might be about to become one of the criminals he claims to be railing against. Indeed, higher-ups in the police have noticed.

The incident that left little Edie brain-damaged, and forced Lawrence to become her guardian after their parents died, has also saddled poor Lawrence with a lot of guilt in addition to an inability to have a normal relationship with a woman, to the point that he goes to the sort of adult establishments that dotted the streets just off Times Squares in the era before the place was cleaned up and Disneyfied. Meanwhile, the calls to Norah keep coming, so Marian offers to spend the night at Norah's apartment. However, Marian does something Norah considers a sexual advance, and kicks Marian out. But the man pursuing Norah mistakes Marian for Norah since Marian is wearing Norah's coat, and follows Norah and kills her!

Eventually, for the movie's climax, Norah offers to teach Lawrence how to dance. Lawrence reveals his feelings for Norah but, due to his being emotionally stunted, is completely unable to express his feelings in a healthy way.

Who Killed Teddy Bear is an incredibly sleazy movie considering the star power on offer here. That makes it interesting. Unfortunately, as an actual narrative movie it's not quite so good. The story is kind of a mess and it's really not that difficult to figure out who's making those calls to Norah. But the sleaze that makes it interesting also makes it worth a watch.

Un esercito di 5 uomini

Another of the movies that I had on my DVR that I wanted to watch before it expired was one that, unknown to me at the time, is a spaghetti western: The Five Man Army. At the time I recorded it, I only noticed the name of Peter Graves in the screen guide description, but when you watch the opening credits and several of the Italian names show up, it's fairly obviously a spaghetti western.

As I metioned, Peter Graves is the nominal star here, although he's not the first one we see. In a Mexican village in 1914 during the revolution, Luis Dominguez (Nino Castelnuovo) shows up where the authorities are registering men for work permits. Luis has a past, as we later learn, as a bank robber, and so as not to be found out, he takes another man's identity. Luis is then offered a job by a "Dutchman" (Peter Graves).

That job is a heist which is going to require a team of people with various abilities, so in fitting with the formula of a heist movie, we get a series of scenes of the Dutchman finding the right people for the job, all of whom are known to him while they don't know each other. Mesito (Bud Spencer) is a mountain of a man who rustled a rail car of cattle, only to make the mistake of trying to sell them back to their original owner. Mesito also thinks a lot about food, a sort of running joke throughout the movie. There's also the Dutchman's old comrade-in-arms Augustus (James Daly), who is needed because he's the explosives expert. Finally, there's the mysterious "Samurai" (Tetsuro Tamba), who somehow wound up in the US and is good with knives. I don't know if the producers thought Tamba's English wasn't good enough, but there's a conceit written into the script that Samurai is a taciturn man who only speaks when he needs to, and I don't think Samurai has an actual speaking line in the entire movie.

After the five men get together and escape the Mexican authorities again, they learn what the mission is for which Dutchman has assembled them. There's that revolution going on, and the revolutionaries need money. The legitimate Mexican government is shipping a bunch of gold by rail, so as always, why not hijack one of these rail shipments and give the gold to the revolutionaries? Each of them has separately been promised good pay for the work.

Now, the train has a whole bunch of soldiers guarding it, both on open cars and in the one sealed car that actually has the gold. Samurai is good at throwing knives to kill people silently; while Augustus has the explosives knowledge necessary to get into the car with the gold. And Mesito has a key role not on the train. The plan is to unhook that car and shunt it to an abandoned barn; Mesito has to lay a bit of track and operate the switch. And Dominguez, who was in a circus acrobat act before his parents' deaths broke up the act and forced him into a life of crime to make ends meet, is going to rehook the other cars together.

As often happens in heist movies, there are things in the buildup and execution of the heist that threaten to derail it, pun intended. And, of course, even if the heist does go off as planned, it's not unexpected that criminals might wish to get greedy over how much they're going to get paid for it. So with all that, it's not really as though The Five Man Army is breaking any new ground. And yet the road it takes is more than entertaining enough. It's not the world's greatest movie, in part because there's something about the spaghetti western genre's production values that always seems just a bit off. Also, in part because of the cinematography that screams late 1960s with its pans and zooms. But there's more in The Five Man Army that works than doesn't.

The Curse of Frankenstein

Tonight's second night of Bugs Bunny shorts includes a trio of monster/mad scientist-inspired entries in the 1:00 AM half hour. That will be followed by a couple of horror features, including The Curse of Frankenstein at 3:00 AM. Fortunately, I had that one on my DVR from when John Carpenter selected it in last year's Two for One series, so I was able to watch it to do this review.

Frankenstein is, as always, not the monster (called the "Creature" in this movie), but Dr. Victor Frankenstein, who created the Creature. Here, Victor Frankenstein is played by Peter Cushing, and as the movie opens, he's in a Swiss prison awaiting execution. As you might guess, this is going to lead to a flashback in which the main story is told, to a visiting priest.... (I suppose the other plot device could have involved Dr. Frankenstein escaping prison.)

Flash back to when Victor was an adolescent. His father has been dead for some time and now his mother dies, leaving Victor a fairly substantial estate in addition to the Baron title he's already had. His mom's sister shows up together with her daughter, ie. Victor's cousin Elizabeth (the adult Elizabeth being played by Hazel Court). Apparently Mom had given her sister a modest allowance, and she'd like that to continue, although this scene is more a way to introduce the Elizabeth character. Victor being on his own but still a legal minor, needs an adult, and hires a tutor in Paul Krempe (Robert Urquhart).

Krempe proceeds to teach Victor everything he knows about the sciences, and Victor is an adept learner. Victor seems particularly interested in the relatively new field of electricity and what sort of energy animates life-forms. This first bit of experimentation culminates in bringing a dog back to life, which is a pretty neat trick. As you might guess from a Frankenstein movie, however, things aren't going to stop there, and Victor wants to go much farther than Krempe would like, leading Krempe to feel a sense of alarm. Worse, Victor builds his human for the experimentation by obtaining various body parts in highly illicit ways, up to and including murder of an aging professor.

Adult Elizabeth shows up with the intention of marrying her cousin, but Krempe wants her to leave the house right away because he believes she's in danger. Indeed, when Victor kills the professor for the professor's brain, Krempe gets in an argument with him that damages the brain. So when Victor's creature (played by Christopher Lee) comes to life, it's brain-damaged and sociopathic, with a propensity to kill.

The Curse of Frankenstein tells the story of Frankenstein's monster in a very different way from the 1931 Frankenstein with Bela Lugosi. This version focuses on Victor as an openly malevolent person, and that's a take which I think serves the story quite well. This was one of the earliest Hammer horror films, and was extremely successful, which led to all those future Hammer horror movies. Cushing is very good, while Lee doesn't exactly have a whole lot to do here since he doesn't show up in the first half of the movie and doesn't have any lines anyway. If you haven't seen The Curse of Frankenstein before, it's an excellent way to kick off the Hammer horror films.

The Gauntlet

Another of the movies that's been sitting on my DVR for a while that I decided to watch is The Gauntlet.

Clint Eastwood stars as Ben Shockley. During the opening credits, a car is driving through the streets of downtown Phoenix early enough that although the sun is up, there's no traffic on the road. Parking near police headquarters and getting out is police detective Shockley, who drops his bottle of booze getting out of the car, which is a sign that Ben is an alcoholic. Ben runs into his friend and former detective partner Maynard Josephson (Pat Hingle), who warns Ben that Commissioner Blakelock (William Prince), who wants to see Ben, would like to see someone who's polite and polished, things that Ben clearly isn't.

Commissioner Blakelock has a special assignment for Ben. Apparently, there's a trial to be held in Phoenix, Arizona v. Deluca, and one of the witnesses, Gus Mally, is in Vegas. So the Arizona authorities need somebody to go to Vegas and pick up Mally, who is fortunately in the county jail awaiting extradition to Phoenix. Since this isn't much of a job and Shockley is supposedly not much of a cop, he can be spared the day or so it's going to take. Shockley flies to Vegas and asks the duty officer at the jail if they have a man named Gus Mally ready for extradition to Arizona. They don't: the reason is that Gus is actually Augustina Mally (Sondra Locke), making her a woman. She's also one who obviously doesn't want to go to Phoenix.

We fairly quickly learn that it's with good reason she doesn't want to be extradited. Because she's tried to make herself sick, an ambulance takes her to the car that Shockey is going to take her to the airport with. But when they get to the transfer point, the ambluance driver starts the car only to reveal it's been booby-trapped with a car bomb! And somebody from the Mob is following them as they try to get away in the ambulance. They take the ambulance to Gus' house just outside of Vegas, and Shockley calls Blakelock to get the Vegas police to send a car so they can get to the airport. Instead, the Vegas police send an entire divison of man who shoot up the house!

Gus has various reasons for why the Mob would be after her, but it seems the police want her dead too, and Shockley has no idea why, in part because Gus, who doesn't want to testify, still doesn't trust him. But whoever is after Gus seems to be after Shockley too. Gus, not being stupid, has a feeling that perhaps it might have been Blakelock himself who tipped off the Vegas police as to her and Shockley's whereabouts. Shockley doesn't seem to be able to put two and two together, at least not until they reach the Nevada/Arizona border and find the Arizona cops sent by Blakelock seem to have been sent there to kill him. Still, having escaped yet again, Shockley is compelled to get Gus to Phoenix, in part because he wants to show the world Blakelock's corruption, and in part because the Mob is wagering on whether Gus will make it to Phoenix to testify.

The Gauntlet is another entertaining action movie in the 1970s style, although this again means one of those movies where you're kind of going to have to shut your brain off and just enjoy the ride because the movie is as riddled with plot holes as it is with bullets. I'm sure you all know my thoughts about police corruption, but at the same time I find it hard to believe that a commissioner could make a few phone calls and suddenly every policeman would shoot first and ask questions later. And how come none of this stuff seemed to make the news? And why is every sniper such a terrible shot? But as I said, sit back and watch without too critical an eye. I think you'll be entertained.

TCM's Sorta Star of the Month, February 2026

Bugs Bunny in What's Opera, Doc? (Feb. 2, 8:20 PM)

We're into the start of a new month on TCM, which normally means it's time for new programming features including a Star of the Month. However, the Academy Awards are on Sunday, March 15 this year, which means that 31 Days of Oscar is beginning on February 13 so that the final day of it will fall on the same day as the Oscars, so only the first half of February (and then the second half of March, which as far as I know has not had a schedule release yet) have the more traditional themes.

Having said that, there have been years where TCM programmed something like the Star of the Month differently, but doing prime time every night for a whole week. John Wayne and Katharine Hepburn both had their centenaries in the same month (May 2007), and TCM gave each of them a different week in that month. This month, TCM is doing something similar yet different. To celebrate getting the rights to the Looney Tunes (and I think Merrie Melodies and earlier) cartoons back, TCM is honoring Bugs Bunny as their "Star of the Month".

Of course, most of what Bugs Bunny appears in is one-reel shorts, and I don't think there are enough shorts that TCM could run entire nights of prime time with them. So, instead, TCM has picked trios of Bugs Bunny shorts that have something thematic in common, and then paired those shorts with a traditional movie that also fits the theme. Tonight's opening theme has Bugs with Elmer Fudd, and since two of the shorts are the classic opera shorts Rabbit of Seville and What's Opera, Doc?, the movie at 8:30 PM is the Marx Brothers film A Night at the Opera. It goes on like this all week.

NB: Tuesday night opens with three desert shorts, and currently the 1939 version of Beau Geste comes on at 8:30 PM. The TCM schedule lists it as 120 minutes with the next set of Bugs shorts to begin at 10:30 PM, which would obviously clash considering that there should be an intro and outro. Wikipedia and IMDb, however, both list Beau Geste as running 112 minutes. (It's been ages since I've seen it, so I don't recall the running time, or whether that might have changed due to any restoration.)

For some values of "mad" and some values of "youth"

A lot of the Poverty Row B movies can be fun to watch in part because they're so nuts, but also because they're so short: if you don't like them, it's not as if you've wasted too much of your time. Recently I watched another such movie, the exploitation frilm Mad Youth.

The "youth" in question is Marian Morgan, played by Mary Ainslee, who was about 25 when the movie was made but playing about 18. (There's no shots of high school, but Marian is considered old enough to marry without parental consent.) She lives with her divorcée mother Lucy (Betty Compson), both of them surviving on the money they get from the ex-husband, which is presumably substantial, since she can call up the "escort" service and get them to send a date of sorts over to accompany her to her bridge game. Mom wants Marian to go over to her friend Helen's house to spend the night, but Marian is horrified: Helen lives with an incredibly old-fashioned granny.

So as a compromise, Marian is allowed to invite her "good" friends over, although of course her friends are the sort who enjoy entertaining themselves in a way that's scandalous for 1939 but fairly tame today. They dance the jitterbug, while some play strip poker! Eventually Mom comes home with her companion, the "Count" DeHoven. Apparently he's supposed to be a young, dashing sort of count, because Marian immediately falls for him and start dating, which really pisses off Mom who is still trying to pass herself off as 28.

The Count and Marian start double dating on the sly with Helen and one of her boyfriends that she's not serious about, since she's been corresponding with a man she's never actually seen before. Eventually we learn that Helen has been climbing out the window to get away from Grandma, who herself figures out what's going on. So Helen decides that she's going to run off and elope, since the alternative is to go live with her uncle on a farm in Iowa. Yeah, the plot, such as it is, gets nuts. And it's only going to get more nuts.

Marian's mom reads Marian's diary, where she learns about the dates Marian has been going on with the Count, as well as learning of Marian's disappointment that the Count just ghosts her for reasons, not that they used the term "ghosting" back in 1939. Marian decides to go off to visit her friend Helen, only to find that Helen is not in fact married but that the correspondence dating was in fact a front for "white slavery"!

Fortunately, the story ends more or less happily, with the young people learning a valuable moral lesson, which was theoretically the point of a movie like Mad Youth. In fact, the real point was to try to slip in as much luridness as they could get away with while making that point. In the case of Mad Youth, it's actually a pretty tame movie by the standards of 2026. But it's some of the attempts to be shocking that are fun, as Mad Youth is a fairly ridiculous movie. The highlight is probably the nightclub "bull fight", with the matador basically made up like a clown and a dog with bull horns acting as the bull and "goring" the matador in the groin on multiple occasions. It's so off the wall that it's fun.

Also, Mad Youth only runs 63 minutes, so if you don't care for it, well, it's not as if you would have been doing something useful with that hour of your life, is it? I've seen much worse.

Mrs. O'Malley and Mr. Malone

Some time back TCM did a prime-time spotlight on some of the films of Marjorie Main. One that I had seen quite a few years back, but did not blog about at the time -- it might even have been before I started blogging -- was Mrs. O'Malley and Mr. Malone. So with that in mind I recorded it and eventually got around to watching it so that I could do this post on it.

Marjorie Main plays Mrs. Hattie O'Malley, a widow living in Proudfoot, MT and running some sort of boarding house; the Montana setting at the start is basically an excuse for Main to do a version of the rustic Ma Kettle character. She gets a sudden call from a radio program in New York which plays her a mystery song for a chance to win a cash and prize package of $50,000, which is a pretty darn big sum for 1950 when the movie was released. She's able to recognize the song, and she's invited on an all-expenses paid trip to New York to receive her winnings.

Cut to Chicago, where John J. Malone (James Whitmore) lives. He's a struggling lawyer, who owes a bunch of money largely because his big client, Steve Kepplar (Douglas Fowley), owes him. Malone had defended Kepplar on an embezzlement charge where Kepplar stole $100K from the firm run by Myron Brynk (Don Porter). Kepplar was convicted, but is about to be paroled now, and Malone would like the money he's owed for his services defending Kepplar. But Malone needs to get in line: Kepplar has an ex-wife Connie (Ann Dvorak) who wants alimony. And, besides, that $100K was never returned to the Brynk business. Still, Brynk offers Kepplar his old job back and to celebrate, they'll go to the same hotel lounge where Mrs. O'Malley is staying on a stopover in Chicago. This, as you can guess, is how the two title characters meet.

Kepplar is a no-show at the big reunion, and the natural suspicion is that he's fleeing the jurisdiction, and absconding with the $100K. His probation officer, Marino (Fred Clark), has good reason to believe that Kepplar is on the train to New York, so he gets on the same train that Mrs. O'Malley will be taking. Malone also gets on the train because he wants his $10,000, even though he should know that the money Kepplar embezzled can't be touched. The ex-Mrs. Kepplar shows up too.

Sure enough, Kepplar is on the train, disguised as a sailor and hiding in the compartment of his girlfriend Lola (Dorothy Malone). But wouldn't you know it, that night Malone returns to his compartment, which conveniently enough for the plot happens to be right next to Mrs. O'Malley's. In that compartment he finds... the undressed body of Steve Kepplar, who has been stabbed to death! Who would want to stab him, and why would the murderer want to remove his clothes? All Mr. Malone knows is that since the body was found in his compartment he's going to be the prime suspect. Mrs. O'Malley sees Malone and the body, and is willing to help in a murder mystery.

Mrs. O'Malley and Mr. Malone is another of those movies where it's easy to see why the people involved in it would want to make it; the premise of another comic murder mystery is one that has obvious appeal. Unfortunately, this one comes across as a bit too manic. Worse, Mr. Malone is just too dishonest to be a sympathetic character, as opposed to a charming person like Nick Charles. I also think it doesn't help that 1950, when the movie was released, was just about the time when stories like this would have started moving to television. So Mrs. O'Malley and Mr. Malone was underwhelming at best.

Glenn Holland's journey

Every year, TCM's 31 Days of Oscar serves up some "newer", at least in the context of TCM, movies, that I haven't necessarily seen before. One such movie that's 30 years old now and that I hadn't seen is Mr. Holland's Opus. So, as always, I recorded it and eventually got around to watching it and putting up this review here.

Richard Dreyfuss stars as Glenn Holland. As the movie opens, it's the start of the 1964 school year and Glenn is a young musician and would-be composer. However, as any musician or composer would tell you, trying to make a living doing either of those things is difficult, so a lot of college music majors go on to take jobs teaching music. (My sister is an example: some years back she went to a college reunion which included questions about what jobs in music the assembled graduates had; by far the most people stood up for "being a music teacher". She still gives music lessons.) Dreyfus is taking a job at Kennedy High School in Portland, Oregon under principal Helen Jacobs (Olympia Dukakis). Jacobs is understanding, while taking a much more businesslike attitude is her vice-principal, Gene Wolters (William H. Macy).

Mr. Holland teaches his students the basics of music, while trying to compose a symphony at home with his young loving wife Iris (Glenne Headly) and becoming friends with the gym teacher, Bill Meister (Jay Thomas). Mr. Holland teaches a bunch of different types of students, many of whom aren't very good at music, such as clarinetist Gertrude Lang, or a kid who needs a credit to be able to stay on the football and wrestling teams. Mr. Holland resorts to unorthodox methods, such as showing how pop tunes of the day are often taken from classical themes. This causes trouble with Mr. Wolters, which is going to be a recurring theme throughout the movie. Mr. Holland's story focuses on about three or four stints during his career, with montages showing the intervening years for the skipped-over years at school, although all the major historical events show up.

At home, Glenn knocks up Iris, who eventually gives birth to their son Cole. When Cole is about a year old, there's a parade where Glenn is leading the marching band and Iris and Cole are watching. A fire engine sounds its extremely loud horn, causing everybody to cover their ears -- except poor little Cole, who doesn't even cry. Tests at the doctor's office reveal that Cole has lost 90% of his hearing. Having a deaf kid is tough for any parent, but for a man whose whole life is music, it seems even worse, and a large part of the movie also deals with Glenn's consistently estranged relationship with his son, with Dad not even bothering to learn American Sign Language properly. Things finally start to change, however, when John Lennon gets killed and Cole reveals he knows fully well who Lennon was and what his impact on popular culture is.

And then we get to the present day. Schools are facing increasing budget pressures, although the movie doesn't mention how much of this is due to prioritizing the needs of "special needs" students, instead taking a 1990s-standard view that schools are chronically underfunded. Jacobs had retired many years back, so for the last 15-plus years the principal has been Mr. Wolters. He takes this chance to cut the school's arts and music programs, which is going to cost Mr. Holland his job. Is Mr. Holland going to get a chance to live happily ever after?

My title for this blog post references an old Lionel Barrymore movie called One Man's Journey. I can forgive the writers and everyone else involved with Mr. Holland's Opus for not knowing that movie since it was one of the RKO movies that Merian Cooper gained the rights to and was out of circulation for some 40 years by the time Mr. Holland's Opus was made. TCM got the rights to it in about 2005, and it tells the story of a doctor (Barrymore) who spends 30 years ministering to the poor people of a small midwestern town, sacrificing his chance at a prestigious research career. At the end, Barrymore's doctor gets a celebration of his career in a very sentimental finale. Mr. Holland's Opus, however might outdo One Man's Journey with its own mawkish ending. And that is part of why so many of the reviews I read had issues with Mr. Holland's Opus. It's a well-acted movie, but boy is the plot formulaic and the ending incredibly sappy.

Reckless

Another of the movies that TCM ran during Mickey Rooney's turn as TCM's Star of the Month because it had a small juvenile role for Rooney is Reckless.

Rooney is obviously not the star here; he only gets about one scene. The male lead is William Powell. Powell plays Ned Riley, a professional gambler and promoter. As the movie opens, an old lady is coming out of his office. That's Granny (May Robson), who is not Ned's grandmother but the grandmother of Broadway star Mona Leslie (Jean Harlow), who at this point is as well known for the antics she's getting into off-stage as well as what she does on stage. Granny is there to ask for Ned's help in getting Mona bailed out of jail. We also learn that Ned has known Mona since she was a kid, and has done some behind-the-scenes help in making Mona famous.

Ned is able to get Mona out of jail under extenuating circumstances, which is that she leave to go to a theater where she's going to perform a charity function. That's a ruse, but not on Ned's part. Insted, the "charity" in question is the "Society for the Admiration of Mona Leslie", which has one member: Bob Harrison (Franchot Tone). Bob is one of those idle rich playboys whose using his wealth in all the wrong ways, much to the consternation of his father (Henry Stephenson). Even though Ned has secretly always loved Mona, he's not going to try to stop Bob from pursuing Mona. Bob keeps taking Mona out on his yacht, and the two have nice times together. Ned finally works up the courage to tell Mona how he really feels about her, only to find out that she's fallen asleep.

And then Bob and Mona get incredibly drunk and run out of town to get married somewhere where nobody will find them, except that of course the press does find them as well as a bunch of Bob's friends and family who send them telegrams, including one from a Jo. The new couple rushes back to the Harrison home, where Mona meets Jo (Rosalind Russell). Jo has been Bob's nominal fiancée for quite some time, but it feels like another of those upper-crust relationships where the older generation just knows which families should be brought together for the next marriage. Bob likes Jo as a friend, and Jo is a decent person who likes Mona. (Mona, for her part, is trying to be a decent person, although her reputation precedes her.)

At this point, the movie really starts taking a turn. Jo gets married, Bob gets drunk enough to start thinking that perhaps he should have married Jo all along, and Mona finds out that Bob's been letting this on to Jo. She's also gotten pregnant with Bob's kid. Eventually, a drunk Bob winds up in Ned's hotel apartment, finds Ned's gun, and shoots himself in a way that everybody in the public thinks Mona is responsible, to the point that she should be forced to give custody of the kid to the Harrisons.

Reckless is an odd little movie because of the way it changes tone in the middle of the movie from what seems like a light romantic triangle comedy into a fairly ridiculous melodrama. A lot of people have criticized the casting of Jean Harlow as not being right for the role, and Harlow herself wasn't sure. Harlow does her best, as do everybody else. And the problems with Reckless aren't really because of the casting of Harlow. Instead, I think the problems it has are down to the script, which really is a mess as it veers from one act of the plot to the next. The comic parts are better than the melodrama, with May Robson shining.

Still, Reckless is interesting to watch to see as the sort of misfire a studio could have when it used its contract players in the wrong way.