Youngblood Hawke

I've always enjoyed the potboilers of the 1950s and 1960s. Even if they weren't particularly good, they're interesting, and some of them can be fun. One that's a fairly minor entry in the cycle is Youngblood Hawke.

James Franciscus stars as Arthur Youngblood Hawke, who as the movie opens is driving a coal truck in his home town in Kentucky and convinced that somebody is trespassing on the family land. He gets home and tells his mother Sarah (Mildred Dunnock) about this, and she's even more ticked about it. It seems that some years earlier, before Dad died, Dad's brothers dishonestly got the mineral rights on Dad's land, which is why they're rich and she and Youngblood isn't. She could use a good lawyer, and Youngblood could have been one, except that he decided to go to college to study creative writing in hopes of starting a writing career.

And then Youngblood gets a letter in the mail telling him that a publishing house in New York liked his manuscript and is thinking about publishing it, even though he submitted it unsolicited without an agent, which seems like a very bad idea. But in any case Youngblood goes to New York and gets treated like royalty by the publisher Jason Prince (Lee Bowman), who read the book along with his wife Fannie (Eva Gabor). If Youngblood signs the contract, he'll be working with editor Jeanne Green (Suzanne Pleshette). Youngblood wants more than the "standard" advance for a first-time writer, since he's been busy working on his second novel. A compromise is reached where that extra money is to be paid out in several monthly installments. Jeanne gets Youngblood a place one floor above her in her apartment building, and she proceeds to fall in love with him.

It's the first love in an exceedingly complicated life for Youngblood. At a Christmas party, he's introduecd to wealthy Frieda Winter (Geneviève Page), who loves studly young Youngblood albeit with the catch that she got her wealth by marrying a wealthy man (Kent Smith). She does things like secure Youngblood the use of a clients swanky Manhattan apartment while the client goes out to Hollywood to make a movie, something that ticks off Jeanne. Jeanne, for her part, has been thinking about going to another publishing company.

Where Youngblood's first book was at most a modest success, his second book is a big hit, and starts to give him a swollen head. Youngblood is approached by aging actress Irene Perry (Mary Astor) who wants him to adapt the first novel into a stage play with her as the lead actress. He also gets the idea of "investing" his money in various ways, including building out on Long Island along with starting his own publishing company. But this gets him into debt, and those debts are eventually going to be called in.

Youngblood is told, much like Fyodor Dostoevsky when he wrote The Gambler, that he has to deliver his next book by a certain time or else contractual clauses are going to leave him in a very bad state. Youngblood works himself into a very parlous state, while all his romantic relationships resolve themselves to varying degrees of satisfaction.

I called Youngblood Hawke a minor entry in the potboiler cycle largely because it's both not particularly good and not memorably bad. It's just there, as it were, and lingers on for over 130 minutes. Everybody does well enough with the material they're given; it's more that it's not very good material. Poor Suzanne Pleshette is used, and the whole mining rights subplot is never really examined as much as it should be.

Sweet Rosie O'Grady

Last year at Thanksgiving, Dave Karger sat down with comedy legend Carol Burnett to present some of her favorite movies, paired with the parodies that Burnett and her friends did on her weekly variety show in the late 1960s and early 1970s. One parody was The Doily Sisters, which if you know your old movies parodies The Dolly Sisters, a movie I wrote about back in 2017. Unfortunately, TCM couldn't work out the rights to that movie for some reason, so they obtained a different Betty Grable musical for Dave and Carol to talk about: Sweet Rosie O'Grady.

Grable plays Madeleine Marlowe, an American who's the hit of the London stage in the 1880s. She's about to head back to America to appear in her next musical. She's also had men pursuing her, especially Charles, the Duke of Trippingham (Reginald Gardiner). For various reasons, they're not getting married in England, and they're also not traveling back to America together. Madeleine will be going to America with her dresser Edna (Virginia Grey), while the Duke is going to be following in about a month. They'll get married and live happily ever after....

Yeah, right, since all of this is happening in the opening reel. Over in America, there's a scandal sheet called the Police Gazette, edited by Tom Moran (Adolphe Menjou). His best writer, Sam McGee (Robert Young), has heard rumors of Marlowe's past here in New York before she went off to London and became big star Madeleine Marlowe. It seems that Marlowe is a stage name for a "Rosie O'Grady" who worked in the sort of theater that wasn't considered so respectable to the London audiences that flocked to Marlowe shows, making Marlowe the sort of woman a duke might not want to marry. Worse, when Marlowe gets off the boat in New York, she's tricked into getting in a carriage with McGee, who uses this ruse as a way of getting an even more scandalous interview.

Rosie, as I'll call her for the rest of the post, is unhappy. But she's also not stupid. So she decides she's going to turn the tables on McGee by starting a publicity campaign to get everybody to believe that she and McGee are actually carrying on a romance together, which is something that McGee doesn't really want. And even though the intention is that this be a fake romance, the Duke gets all the news when he gets to America, so he's not quite so happy himself and decides that he'll get together with McGee to try to turn the tables back on Rosie again.

Complications ensue, but considering who's got the top two billing spots, you can figure out where things are going to go. (Hint: Rosie does not end up with Moran.) Then again, you also might have been able to figure it out if you've seen other classic movies. Sweet Rosie O'Grady is a remake of a Loretta Young movie called Love Is News. There's also a third version of the story, That Wonderful Urge, which I have apparently not done a post on yet.

The obvious difference with Sweet Rosie O'Grady is that, as a vehicle for Betty Grable, it's got extra musical numbers, most of which are presented as numbers for her stage actress character to perform in her various stage shows. The plot works well enough again, and Grable does fine with her musical numbers even if those aren't quite so necessary to the plot. Sweet Rosie O'Grady is also in Technicolor, and the print Fox ran was quite good. Somewhat surprising for a Grable movie is that the running time isn't padded out by the presence of those musical numbers. IMDb lists the running time as shorter than Love Is News, which wasn't a long movie to begin with.

Two interesting FXM schedule notes

I was looking at the FXM schedule, for Friday, August 14, and saw two things worth mentioning. First is that FXM decided to run an entire block of Gene Tierney movies:

8:00 AM Laura
9:30 AM Leave Her to Heaven
11:25 AM Black Widow

I have to admit that I don't think I've seen Black Widow on the FXM schedule in a while. It's the least of the three movies, although that's partly because of how good Laura and Leave Her to Heaven are.

The other interesting thing is the double-bill that follows Black Widow:

1:05 PM Nightmare Alley (1947)
3:00 PM Nightmare Alley (2021)

I'll admit right up front to not having seen the 2021 version, since I don't go to the movie theater often becuase my local sixtyplex is in a dead mall and a terribly depressing place to go to. Besides, that version would have come out at the height of the covid masking idiocy. I didn't want to get panic attacks from not being able to have the mask under my nose. I was out in the woods with my since-deceased dog who, being on a retractable leash, served as my social distancing. Still I has some assholes who pointedly moved away because I was outside, without a mask, when the nonsense guidance even said no mask was needed since I wasn't going to be close enough to these other people.

No, I'm not sorry for the rant. I'll just go back and keep watching old movies.

No pizza in this one

Another silent movie that I had to make a point of watching before it expired from my DVR was Tod Browning's The Mystic, which had a copyright date of 1925 but looked like a re-release print considering that it had what really seemed like a synchronized score. (Then again, it's possible that a new score was commissioned for a video release, although there's no modern title card mentioning this.) In any case, as I always do, I made it point to watch it before it expired so that I could write up this post on the movie.

The Mystic opens in Hungary, at a traveling circus where one of the acts is a young woman named Zara (Aileen Pringle) who is part magic act, part phony psychic, working with her father Zazarack (Mitchell Lewis) and knife-thrower Anton. The show goes from village to village (although there are some surprisingly large building from the MGM backlot in this village) with the act traveling in the 1920s equivalent of a motor home. In this village however, someone who's clearly out of place has shown up and seems to be stalking Zara. Dad and Anton are worried, although Zara doesn't seem to care.

That man turns out to be an American, Michael Nash (Conway Tearle, half-brother of Godfrey). While the magic act is a small-time phony thing and presumably everybody in the village knows it, Michael is a much bigger would-be con artist. He has an idea that would fleece people out of large sums of money, but he needs a phony psychic like Zara to pull it off. He's willing to offer everyone in the act a substantial sum of money to come to America, where they'll engage in the con that Michael has planned.

But first, they need to engage in a smaller con to get the higher society of New York to believe that Zara is really what they claim she is, and this is one of the best parts of the movie, as we see all the preparations Michael goes to to make the effects of the séance seem real. There's a way for him to eavesdrop on the room, and a baseboard panel that allows someone to get into the room where the séance is being held even though the doors are supposedly locked. Even though a police inspector (character actor DeWitt Jennings) shows up with the express intention of debunking things, he's not able too and things go off well enough for the con artists.

Well enough, in fact, that they get the impression of wealthy heiress Doris Merrick and her guardian Bradshaw who is managing the trust that holds Doris' wealth. Michael's plan is to gain Doris' confidence so that he can get the bonds and other securities that comprise Doris' wealth. But things don't go quite as planned for a bunch of reasons, in part because with all that money there's bound to be jealousy over who gets how much, and in part because the authorities are on the case. Several guns are involved, and there's also Anton's prowess at knife-throwing that's finally a useful part of the plot.

Tod Browning's movies are always interesting for how shocking they try to be. Unfortunately, The Mystic is hampered by a Hollywood ending that I can't help but think wasn't Browning's idea but that of somebody at MGM. The story up until the climax works fairly well, with the best part being the special effects, and the way we more or less get to see how they were created because the creation of those effects is an important plot point. Despite the flaws, The Mystic is still a movie that's worth a watch.

The Invisible Ray

TCM unsurprisingly ran a bunch of horror films last October. One that I didn't get around to watching until just before it expired from my DVR was The Invisible Ray. Having finally watched it, I wrote up this post and saved it in drafts to post at a suitable time.

Boris Karloff plays Dr. Rukh, an astronomer living in what is probably Romania together whith his blind mother (Violet Kemble Cooper) and his wife Diana (Frances Drake), who is the daughter of Rukh's deceased scientific partner. Rukh has supposedly come across some great scientific discovery, involving looking at distant galaxies as a way of seeing Earth's own past. It's a hypothesis that brings researcher Dr. Benet (Bela Lugosi) in from the more civilized parts of Europe together with his sponsors, the British Sir Francis Stevens and his wife Lady Stevens (Beulah Bondi) together with their nephew Drake (Frank Lawton).

Rukh's experiments appear to show that a meteorite hit Earth in what is now Africa some time in the planet's distant past, and that this impact produced something that people in the movie call "Element Radium X". Now, at the time the movie was made, radiation therapy was in its infancy; people knew about radium and how the Curies discovered it as well as how it killed Marie. But the movie extrapolates from that into a bunch of stuff that's factual nonsense albeit entertaining nonsense. In any case, since the source of Radium X is in Africa, everybody goes off to Africa to find it.

During the expedition, Dr. Rukh separates from everybody else mostly because the rest of the cast is as much interested in doing charity work performing medical services on the natives while Rukh is obsessed with finding that Radium X. Rukh does find the meteorite, but it comes at a cost. He gets some form or radiation poisoning which results in his having a "deah touch" in that if he touches anybody else, it quickly kills them. Benet is the only person he can tell, and Benet comes up with some sort of, if not antidote, at least a treatment that will temporarily stop the effects of Radium X.

Meanwhile, Rukh also learns that during the expedition, his wife has fallen in love with Drake, which is none too surprising considering that she pretty much only married Rukh out of convenience sinces she was stuck in eastern Europe when her father died. But apparently another effect of Radium X poisoning is insane jealousy.

Everybody returns to Paris, and Dr. Rukh's plan is to kill the rest of the people in the expedition as a form of revenge. After all, all he has to do is stop taking Benet's antidote and he'll just be able to touch them and render them really quite dead. He even fakes his own death to aid in this. But Benet is no dummy, and after a couple of murders he figures out what's going on and comes up with a way to lure the supposedly dead Rukh out of hiding for the climax....

In terms of science, The Invisible Ray is a bunch of nonsense. But it's very entertaining nonsense, thanks in large part to the acting of Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi. Thanks as well to the Production Code, you know where the movie is going to end up, but it's still an enjoyable watch.

Kirk Douglas, Mafioso

Kirk Douglas played a gangster in Out of the Past. Twenty years later, he would go back to the world of organized crime, this time as an Italian-American in the more modern Mob. That film, The Brotherhood, ran on TCM some time back, so I recorded it and watched it.

Vince Genetta (Alex Cord) is on an Alitalia flight to Palermo, on the Italian island of Sicily. He gets off the plane looking for his brother, Frank (Kirk Douglas), who has of course sent representatives to pick Vince up. Well, not quite, since Frank doesn't know Vince is coming but has been expecting someone from America. And the men Frank has sent to the airport call Frank up to warn him of this visitor before taking Vince to a pre-determined rendezvous point.

Of course, as my introduction gave away, although it wouldn't take too much guessing even if you didn't know the plot of the movie, Frank is a member of the Mob who has fled America for the ancestral home of Italy out of a fear that some rival mobster is going to put a hit on him. Frank is happy to see his brother, although as his wife Ida (Irene Papas in a criminally underused role) points out, it's not out of the realm of possibility that Vince could be the one the Mob sent over to get Frank. At this point Frank starts to think back to how things arrived at this point....

Vince was a college man who also served some time in the Army. He's finally been demobbed and, on meeting Frank again, informs Frank that he wants to go into "the business", meaning that he wants to be part of the Mafia family branch that Frank is the head of ever since Dad was rubbed out in a hit. Vince is also going to be getting married to Emma Bertolo (Susan Strasberg), head of another Mafia Don, Dom Bertolo (Luther Adler).

Frank is one of those people who believes in the old style of mobbing up, which means things like flashy hits, or at least stylized enough that they serve as a clear warning to other people who might cross him. As an example he has a couple of goons kill a guy in a brownfield site and stuff a bird in the guys mouth: don't be a stool pigeon. However, Mafia ways are changing. The Italians are beginning to work more with the Irish and the Jews, making democratic decisions among a board meeting of sorts. They want to diversify, doing things like buying up small defense contractors in new technologies like electronics, with the plan of bilking the government out of what would be tens of billions today. (Perhaps opening learing centers might have been more efficient.) Frank isn't so sure of this, because directly scamming the feds seems to him like a bad idea.

Frank's old ways alarm the other bosses, while Vinnie sets out to work as an accountant who can come up with two sets of books to minimize what they pay to the government, getting him in good with the other bosses. But Frank's really going to alarm the others when he comes into more direct conflict with them, learning about just how his family's branch of the Mob has become less influential. Now, as we already know from the beginning, Frank has decamped to Italy, which means something is going to happen to make Frank think that's a good idea. What that something is, and what Vince's role with his brother is, are things that I don't want to spoil.

The Brotherhood is another one of those movies that's got a really good idea behind it, but where the execution falls a bit flat. I think part of that is the flashback structure: we already know Frank is on the outs as the movie opens, which is a bit too much to reveal, I think. It also doesn't help that Alex Cord is a fairly wooden actor who's being asked to play a cipher. Kirk Douglas tries, but he's also not a particularly sympathetic character here. I'm glad, however, that I got the chance to see The Brotherhood, even if it's not the best film out there.

The attic around toys

I think I've mentioned quite a few times in the past that Southern Gothic is not one of my favorite genres of movies, in part because of how "loud" the movies are, and even more because they tend to be full of characters for whom it's difficult to have any sympathy. In any case, another Southern Gothic movie was on my DVR and getting a TCM airing at the end of Gene Tierney's day in Summer Under the Stars: Toys in the Attic, early tomorrow (August 10) at 4:15 AM.

Carrie (Geraldine Page) and Anna (Wendy Hiller) Berniers are a pair of sisters living together in the old family house in New Orleans, neither of them ever having apparently married. They've got an itinerant brother Julian (Dean Martin) who's gone north, supposedly to earn money, although the source of the money is a big point of discussion over the course of the movie. In any case, Julian is expected to return to New Orleans as the movie opens together with his new bride Lily (Yvette Mimieux).

Except that Julian is already in New Orleans, holed up at a hotel with Lily with the hotel owner expecting him to pay off a substantial bill. Julian has business to attend to with Cyrus Warkins, the nature of which will be revealed later in the movie. But the business ends with Julian in possession of a very thick envelope full of cash, which Julian in an incredibly stupid move does not deposit into a bank account.

Julian arrives at the old family home, bringing a whole bunch of gifts since one of the things the two sisters had hoped for was to be able to take a trip to Europe together. However, the sisters wonder about the source of the money, with one theory being that Julian was paid to marry Lily. Lily, you see, is the sort of woman who acts as though she's never going to grow emotionally beyond being an adolescent: she's physically marriageable, but not mentally. The two Berniers sisters even ask Lily's mother Albertine (that's Gene Tierney) directly about it.

There's also the suggestion that Julian earned that money by selling a factory up in Chicago, which he may well have done although he probably didn't earn that much money. He's also been way too profligate with the money he does have, the way that some poor people who win the lottery spend themselves into bankruptcy.

Meanwhile, Julian has also been seeing Cyrus' wife Charlotte, who as it turns out also has something to do with the money that Julian got although that's only going to be revealed later in the movie. But continuing to see her after Julian's got married to Lily is now going to be twice the issue: where it might only have been a problem with Cyrus, now there's Lily to worry about too. And Carrie, who seems to look up to Julian much more than Anna does. This warped relationship is ultimately going to lead to the climax of the movie....

There's a lot in Toys in the Attic that I can't really mention since it would give away too much information. But let's just say that Toys in the Attic is an overheated movie. Julian comes across as a dishonest grifter. Lily and Carrie are both obnoxious blankety-blanks who deserve to be slapped. Anna is the closest to a sensible person, but even she is not quite a prize. The crazy plot and unlikable characters make Toys in the Attic a difficult movie to warm up to.

But, as always, watch and judge for yourself.

Die Mörder sind unter uns

Every now and then, Eddie Muller dips into foreign films for his Noir Alley segment, leading to films that I'm likely not to have seen as well as a glut of foreign films on my DVR that I have to get through before they expire. One such foreign film was one of the earliest to be made in Germany after the end of World War II, The Murderers Are Among Us.

It's Berlin in 1945, not long after the defeat of the Nazis, with the city largely in ruins and people having to resort to various means, not necessarily ethical, to survive. Among the people returning to Berlin is Dr. Hans Mertens (Ernst Wilhem Borchert), who had worked as a doctor before the war but who was clearly scarred by his war experiences that will be revealed later in the movie. He gets an apartment in a building that was less badly damaged than some others: it seems to have four walls, but a lot of the windows are broken.

What he doesn't know is that the previous occupant of the apartment is still alive. Susanne Wallner (Hildegard Knef) was sent to a concentration camp for reasons not mentioned, although I'd guess it's political rather than being Jewish. She survived the war and expects that she might be able to return to her old apartment, only to find that Mertens has taken the apartment. With the housing crunch, it's not as though there are a lot of apartments out there, so the two agree to live together.

It's not long before Susanne finds a letter addressed to a Mrs. Brückner, which was written by Mr. Brückner and is only to be delivered to her in case of the husband's death. Obviously Mertens had served with Brückner in the war and was supposed to give that letter had Brückner died, only for Mertens never to hear of Brückner's death. With the war over, Susanne figures that Brücker probably died and that perhaps it would be a good idea for her to deliver the letter to Mrs. Brückner by hand.

However, what Susanna finds is that Mr. Brücker survived the war, and is making a reasonably good living in what is effectively the scrap metal industry, taking old military helmets and turning them into cookware. (One would guess that Brückner was of a fairly high social class before the war although this isn't quite mentioned.) Susanne returns home and tells Mertens that Brückner actually survived, something that will probably relieve Mertens.

However, Mertens is decidedly unhappy about this. It turns out that Brückner was involved with whatever it is that gave Mertens that emotional scarring, and in a bad way. Mertens, upon learning that Brücker is actually very much alive and doing quite well for himself, decides that Brückner needs justice, and that the only way for that justice to be meted out is if Mertens does it himself.

The Murderers Are Among Us is an interesting movie, partly on its own merits and partly for the atmosphere in which the movie was made. Germany was of course occupied in early 1946 when the movie was made, and for better or worse the occupying powers influenced how the film was made. This means that the director couldn't get the ending he wanted. However, the movie is filmed on location in Berlin, with all the ruins and deprivation that the city was facing in 1946. That alone is worth the price of admission. Never mind that the movie is pretty good despite the problems the ending has.

The Murderers Are Among Us is absolutely worth a watch.

Good Morning, Eve!

One of the shorts that TCM ran as part of the Saturday morning block was the early three-strip Technicolor short Good Morning, Eve!.

Leon Errol stars as Adam, looking much too old and certainly not the stereotypically handsome sort or Adam you'd see in other Bible-themed movies. Of course, he's in the Garden of Eden with Eve (June MacCloy), and is tempted with a bite of the apple.

This time, however, the apple sends them out of paradise, if you will, by going on a tour of history. This is an excuse for some sight gags since Adam and Eve are people out of place, as well as an excuse for musical numbers since that's the sort of thing audiences back in 1934 would have loved.

Adam and Eve make a stop in ancient Rome under Nero (Vernon Dent), who is holding some sort of musical competition that allows Adam and Eve to enter since Nero is bored of the traditional competition where he's always declared the winner. There's also a rural-style quartet from the days before it was commonly called country music.

Second is a stop in the England of King Arthur, four years before Warner Bros. made The Adventures of Robin Hood. Finally, Adam and Eve make it to the present, and a beach full of nubile young women in bathing suits, before the ending that reveals....

There is naturally very little plot to Good Morning, Eve!. The humor is dad joke level, but the audiences would have been OK with such dumb humor around the musical numbers. What is the most interesting about the short is that it's one the earliest live-action examples of three-strip Technicolor, coming after maybe Service With a Smile and La Cucaracha as far as shorts completely in the new process. The print TCM showed is excellent, with stunning color:

Briefs for August 7-8, 2026

A bit of the TCM schedule for September is available, and it looks as though there's already one movie on the schedule that I'd written up a post for recently and scheduled for in between now and when it's going to air, so I've got to move a bunch of stuff around since if I can schedule a post on a movie in conjunction with when it's going to air (or, less frequently, FXM), I like to do that. Once again, however, as always, check a listings site yourself, since my writing up posts some time in advance tends to make me do double takes over whether I've scheduled them on the right day.

Today in TCM's Summer Under the Stars is a day of movies with Basil Rathbone, while tomorrow is given over to Steve McQueen, including the first version of The Thomas Crown Affair at 6:00 PM. It got a remake in the 1990s, of course, and apparently there's going to be a third version coming out next year, starring Michael B. Jordan. Not that I'm likely to watch it since I don't go to the movie theater very often. As I think I've stated, our local sixtyplex is in a dead mall which I think is down to about the theater and Target, which was only attached to the mall at some later date. It's depressing to go there, and the service roads are badly maintained.

There's actually a couple of movies in the FXM rotation that I've got on my DVR but haven't watched or written up posts about, and they're coming up in the near future: Wee Willie Winkie at 7:20 AM August 9 as part of a morning of Shirley Temple movies, and Daniel Day-Lewis in Lincoln a couple of times next week. I have to admit part of the reason I haven't gotten around to watching them is that I'm always a couple of weeks ahead in my post scheduling, and besides, FXM repeats stuff often enough that I can keep seeing it if I missed the previous airing. The one FXM movie on my DVR that doesn't seem to be repeating is Anastasia, which I've mentioned in passing a few times but never actually done a full-length post on.

Today is the birth anniversary of actress Billie Burke (born 1884), who is probably best known for playing Glinda, the good witch, in the Judy Garland version of The Wizard of Oz although I always think of her as Lionel Barrymore's wife in Dinner at Eight. It's also the birth anniversary of Ann Harding (born 1901). That reminds me that I really need to get around to watching the 1930 version of Holiday, if it's still available on demand at Tubi. I noticed that among the films to put in my Tubi library ages ago, and rarely get around to watching anything from it.