She Loved a Fireman

Another of the short B movies that I recorded during one of the Saturday matinee blocks some months back, was She Loved a Fireman, which runs a shade under an hour. As is once again the case, I eventually got around to watching it so that I could write this review and put it up here.

The main character is the fireman, not the she. And the fireman doesn't start off the movie as a fireman. Instead, the man in question, Red Tyler (Dick Foran) is a ward-heeler type who would be more comfortable making book and getting manicures than you'd think he'd be in a fire department. But for reasons that are vaguely suggested might be related to political corruption, he follows a fire captain, Smokey Shannon (Robert Armstrong), out of the salon where Smokey is getting a shave and Red is getting that manicure. Red thinks he's more masculine than the fire fighters, so he and his best friend Skillet (Eddie Acuff) decide to take the civil service exam to become firefighters.

The two both pass and go to the fire academy in one of the movie's better scenes showing some of the training the recruits go through. After graduation they both get assigned to Smokey's station. Red immediately makes everyone else hate him because Red thinks he's hot stuff. Meanwhile, he decides he's going to hook up with Margie (Ann Sheridan) who walks into the fire station one day. It's only later tht he finds out that this is Margie Shannon, the captain's sister. And boy is the captain none too pleased that Red is trying to pursue his sister.

Worse, Red decides he's going to cut corners so that he can get out of the station and go visit Margie. This includes some obvious foreshadowing of a shot of a hook that's supposed to keep the ladder connected to the fire truck. As you might guess, the station gets called out to a fire, Skillet is holding on to that ladder as the fire truck races to the fire, and then the ladder falls off, giving Skillet a lovely broken leg in the process.

Smokey gets Red transferred to the harbor fire station when Red should probably have been prosecuted for negligence and gone to jail for it, but then we'd have a lot less of a movie. As you might guess, there's a warehouse fire near the harbor, and both Red's new precinct and Smokey's get called to the scene. Smokey gets trapped on the roof, and this gives Red a chance to save Smokey and give the movie a happy ending.

There are a lot of problems with She Loved a Fireman, with most of the issues stemming from the fact that Red is just such a jerk of a character. You can't understand why anybody would like this guy, and then the obligatory redemption arc doesn't really work either There's some good footage of training as well as some good stock footage in the warehouse fire, but that's not enough to save the movie. Ann Sheridan was at the beginning of her career here, which is part of why Warner Bros. only put her in a trifle of a B movie like this. She's not enough to save the film either.

Scanners

Quite a few months back, TCM ran a night of movies on the theme of body horror. Unsurprisingly, if you're going to do body horror you would do well to include a David Cronenberg movie among the showings, and the movie TCM picked was Scanners.

The movie opens in what looks like a food court in a downmarket mall. A scruffy guy, Cameron Vale (Stephen Lack) sits down at one of the tables. At a nearby table, a copule of women are eating, and one of them makes derogatory remarks about bums like this Cameron seems to be. But there's more to Cameron than meets the eye, and he starts staring at the woman to the point that she has a seizure! This comes to the notice of a couple of men who act like plainclothes detectives, chasing Cameron through the mall until one of them shoots him... with a tranquilizer dart. Cameron is taken to a converted warehouse, where scientist Dr. Paul Ruth (Patrick McGoohan) informs him he's something known as a "scanner", a small group of people who have telepathic communities but have mental issues because they don't know how to deal with being able to hear everybody else's internal conversations. Dr. Ruth gives Cameron a drug called "Ephemerol" that dulls the other people's voices inside his head.

Meanwhile, at a company called ConSec which is obviously one of those evil defense contractor type companies that dotted conspiracy theory movies of the 1970s and 1980s, the executives also know about the scanners. But they have a rather more sinister plan, which is to use the scanners as weapons. They set up a demonstration event where they show what scanners can do, asking for someone to volunteer to be scanned. But what they don't know is that the man who volunteers, Darryl Revok (Michael Ironside), is himself a scanner. Worse, he's more powerful than the guy scanning him, so the end result is that the ComSec scanner's head explodes in what is one of the movies most memorable sequences.

Guards try to chase Revok, but they don't have any nice tranquilizer darts or the like, so he's able to kill several of them in an extended car chase sequence. Dr. Ruth learns of all this and is horrified. But he also knew this was coming, which was part of the reason he was looking for Cameron. Apparently the belief is that Revok is not only a renegade scanner, but that he's looking for other scanners to join him in a plot to take over the world from the normies. And woe betide anybody who's a scanner but doesn't want to be a pawn in Revok's evil plot. Anyhow, Cameron's job is to infiltrate Revok's inner circle and take down Revok.

Cameron find an artist named Pierce (Robert Silverman) who is also a scanner, just in time for Revok's men to murder Pierce because Revok has obviously learned about Cameron and his being the second most powerful scanner behind only Revok himself. This also leads Cameron to Kim Obrist (Jennifer O'Neill), who is actively opposed to Revok and obviously in substantial danger because of it. Cameron and Obrist try to stay one step ahead of Revok while also trying to figure out exactly what's going on, which is rather more than Dr. Ruth has been letting on.

The idea of people with telepathic abilities fighting each other is an interesting one; indeed, it's something that had already been done in The Fury a few years earlier. The overarching plot of Scanners is frankly a bit silly, but this is the sort of movie that you don't watch so much for the plot, instead just sitting back and enjoying a ride through a dark and twisted world. That, and the special effects.

That having been said, I suppose that if Scanners had a more airtight plot, like, say, Alien, it might be remembered as an all-time classic and not just the interesting cult movie that it is. Either way, it's definitely worth your time to sit down with it and decide for yourelf just how much fun it is.

Il gatto a nove code

Some months back, I recorded a movie with an interesting premise not realising that it was one of those international co-productions that has actors from different countries who get dubbed into one language or another depending on which market the movie is being released in. That movie was Dario Argento's The Cat O'Nine Tails.

I didn't realize this movie was an Italian picture because TCM's synopsis listed the stars as Karl Malden and James Franciscus. They are of course the stars, although they're over in Italy for this one. Malden plays Franco "Cookie" Arno, a blind man who had worked as a reporter who now sets crossword puzzles and raises his niece Lori as his foster daughter. One night he and Lori go for a walk through their neighborhood in Rome, passing the Terzi medical institute which does some sort of genetics research in the era where DNA was still a relatively new thing. Somebody drives into the Institute, having assaulted the watchman at the gate, and goes into an office where he steals something.

One of the doctors claims to have a good idea as to who might have done it. The next day, a bunch of reporters are at the train station awaiting the arrival of a famous actress, when who should show up at the station but Calabresi, the doctor at the Institute who claims to know who was trying to steal something from the Institute. However, Calabresi gets pushed in front of the train! We viewers know it's murder, although the murderer was fairly clever to the point that the police think it's an accident.

Carlo Giordani (James Franciscus) is a reporter who is writing a story about the break-in at the Institute. When Arno learns this, he goes to the newspaper to see Giordani, asking whether the photo of Calabresi's death has been cropped: Arno, having been a reporter, knows something is up. Sure enough, the photo has been cropped, and shows that Calabresi has been pushed and the death is not accidental. Not that it reveals who actually committed the murder. Worse, the photographer gets strangled to death in his dark-room! So now Giordani and Arno definitely know that there's a much bigger story on their hands.

Both of them being (or having been) journalists, they naturally want to investigate. There are a lot of people who could theoretically be suspects of course, if the case were one of professional envy. There's Dr. Terzi and his daughter Anna (Catherine Spaak) and several researchers. Meanwhile, Arno and his daughter go to see dead Dr. Calabresi's girlfriend, Bianca. She too gets murdered for her trouble. And someone tries to kill Anna along the way with Giordani and Arno also facing significant danger.

Eventually, the reporters learn of something known as XYY syndrome. The movie doesn't clearly explain it, but normal humans are born with 46 chromosomes, with the 23d pair determining women (XX) or men (XY). About one man in 1000, however, is actually born with 47 chromosomes, with the 23d pair being XYY. This doesn't have a significant enough effect to result in a diagnosis early in life. However, when the syndrome was first discovered, there was a belief that men born with XYY were disproportionately violent. SO there's a feeling at the institute that one of the men might have been born XYY and he'd be the killer.

The Cat o' Nine Tails is a movie with a good idea, but another one where for me the execution didn't quite work. I think in this case that's specifically down to the international nature of the production. It needed to be either a Hollywood movie, or else something entirely in Italian with everybody playing it straight and the movie being subtitled. The movie we get, however, feels slightly off in an artificial way. Some of that may also be due to the point-of-view shots Dario Argento used. Still, The Cat o' Nine Tails is an interesting misfire.

A rather tame bus

I have a soft spot in my heart for B movies and tend to record a lot of them when they show up on TCM. One that had a synopsis that sounded vaguely familiar, probably because B movies don't have the most original plots, was Wildcat Bus. Having watched it, I realized I hadn't seen it before, so with that it's time to write up this review.

Charles Lang plays Jerry Waters. As the movie opens, he's being evicted from his swanky apartment because he's a wastrel playboy who won't get a job. (It's revealed later in the story his father died tragically and Jerry has some sort of survivor's guilt.) His sidekick and chauffeur Pete (Paul Guilfoyle) suggests he get a job, and the two look for various jobs until winding up at the Federated Bus Line. Jerry kind of ticks off mechanic Ted Dawson, only later learning Ted is both a woman (Fay Wray) and the daughter of the owner of the line! Jerry obviously is not bus driver material, but Paul is.

Jerry still has a car that he can drive for two more weeks until it's going to be repossessed for missing payments, so Jerry responds to a classified ad about the wildcat limousine services. Now, the fact that this is on the second floor walk-up apartment should be a tell that this isn't quite a legitimate business. The guy who runs is certainly seems dishonest, and his insistence that the drivers live in the apartment building also ought to set off alarm bells.

And, as it turns out, the business really is a front. The bus line is in tough straits because the buses keep breaking down and a shyster lawyer is suing them over accidents. Mr. Dawson some time back sent his business partner to prison for embezzlement, and the jailed guy's wife, Ma Talbot (Leona Roberts), is trying to get revengs on the bus line! This involves sending out cars to cut the buses off and cause accidents; put passengers on the buses to tout for the wildcat limousines; and if none of that works have a mole in the bus company as one of the mechanics who can sabotage the buses.

So to try to figure out what's going on, Ted decides she's going to employ the services of one of these wildcat chauffeurs, who are really closer to the sort of ride-sharing/carpool thing one might have done in college when a bunch of people needed to go to the same city to get home at the end of term, except that these are fully adult people. In any case, the car Ted gets in just happens to be driven by Jerry, who also begins to start doing some investigating of his own since he's trying to put the moves on Ted.

Wildcat Bus is nothing more than a B movie, but it works well enough for the sort of thing that would have been a second-bill for people in the years before World War II and then television who didn't have any other outlets to see this sort of stuff. It's slightly odd in tone because it feels like the movie is trying to put a bunch of stuff in: part gritty drama about a crime ring; part romance; and even some attempt at comedy. As long as you're not expecting anything more than a B movie, I think you'll enjoy Wildcat Bus as a sort of time capsule.

Darby's Rangers

Another of the movies that will be airing as part of this year's TCM Memorial Day weekend marathon of war movies is Darby's Rangers. It shows up tomorrow, May 23, at 3:45 PM.

Darby's Rangers is based on a real person, Maj. (later promoted to colonel) William O. Darby (James Garner in his first starring role). As the movie opens, Darby is stuck in an office in Washington with his adjutant, Master Sgt. Saul Rosen (Jack Warden, who also narrates the movie). There's a war going on, this being 1942, and Darby as a West Point graduate wants to fight. However, as Gen. Truscott informs him, Darby has excellent skills as a planner, and planning is in fact something that the war effort needs just as much as people who can do the actual fighting. Darby's idea is to have the army have its own form of Rangers, who would do much the same sorts of commando work that the Marines do. They can't use the Marines in Europe because the Marines are stretched too thin in the Pacific theater.

So Darby suggests his idea to another general, and is able to convince that general to give him the role of commander of the first batch of Rangers, who are going to go off to Scotland to train with the British since at the time it was considered that the British had the best commandos going. This also gives us the opportunity to meet some of the supporting characters. Hank Bishop (Stuart Whitman) meets bus conductor Wendy Hollister (Joan Elan) in London; she just knows she's going to get Hank to propose to her even though he doesn't know it yet. There's also Sutherland, who beds a girl in every port, or the army equivalent; Rollo Burns (Peter Brown); and some others. They all wind up in Scotland, and since the base where they'll be doing their training is short of barracks, the men are billeted with local families which also provides a couple to meet women they're going to fall in love with, notably Burns meeting the daughter of the Scot training them.

Eventually the training is done, and it's time for the Rangers to go off and do actual fighting, which starts in French North Africa in what is now Algeria. The Rangers serve with distinction, which puts them at the forefront of the next phase of the war, the invasion of Italy. As you may recall from your history or from having seen enough other war movies, the invasion started in Sicily as that's the closest point in Italy to Africa. After taking Sicily they established a beachhead in the southwestern most part of the boot of Italy, only to get bottled up by the Germans. So the Allies decided they were going to try to jump ahead of the German position by doing an amphibious invasion at Anzio.

This being a war movie, some of the Rangers die, which is the opportunity to bring in another character, Lt. Dittman (Edd Byrnes), a commander who's come straight from West Point and is just as by the books and humorless as you'd expect somebody who hasn't experienced combat and the stresses of having killed people and lost friends. As part of a delousing operation, he meets local girl Angelina (Etchika Choureau) and falls in love with her, which becomes another sub-plot in the movie.

If you read carefully, you might have noticed that I didn't talk all that much about the war action in Darby's Rangers. That's because there's not a whole lot of it, with a copious amount of military footage from the Army subbed in. The portions of the movie dealing with the training and then the romantic subplots take up a lot more of the film, which is fairly formulaic anyway. Darby's Rangers apparently didn't get the best reviews at the time it was released, and having watched it, it's not too hard to see why.

Accent on Crime

TCM ran a spotlight last summer on "Teens in Trouble". One of the movies they ran was an ultra-low-budget film from PRC, Delinquent Daughters. Since the synopsis sounded interesting, and I'm always up for low-budget exploitation stuff like this, I decided I'd record it so that I could eventually watch it and put up this post.

At what looks like a nice high school in one of those small cities that populated America, a group of the female students are discussing a shocking incident that occurred: one of their female classmates committed suicide by jumping off a pier! The various students have different attitudes. One, June, is sad; one is ditzy; a third, Sally, doesn't want to talk about it either with her classmates or the authorities and is incredibly truculent about it. Sally is obviously not one of the Good Girls.

This is further made clear by the fact that Sally has a boyfriend, Jerry, who owns one of those hot-rod type cars that can go just as fast as any police car. Not only that, but on the way to take Sally and one of her classmates home, Jerry stops and holds up a candy store! The kids also like to spend their evenings at a place called the Merry-Go-Round, a nightspot that is certainly not like anything Andy Hardy and his friends would have gone to to get a milkshake. Instead, it's run by the worldly Mimi (Fifi D'Orsay) and her friend Nick who is clearly connected to the local crime scene. Indeed he suggests to Jerry a good way to get rid of a car so that the police won't be able to recognize it.

Meanwhile, June is continuing to get herself in trouble by hanging out with the wrong crowd at the Merry-Go-Round. Her boyfriend Rocky brings a gun to the place to try to get in good with Nick, while Sally fakes her mom's voice to tell June's dad that they're studying at Sally's house. June's dad actually calls Sally's mom to confirm, finds out this is a lie, and basically throws June out of the house, which is a sure way to get June into deeper trouble.

There's a lot more crime to come, but Delinquent Daughters is one of those morality tales where the adult criminals are going to get caught, the kids are going to learn a lesson, and the "good" adults are going to change the Merry-Go-Round into something more benign. But there are a lot of twists and turns to get there.

Unsurprisingly, if you were to rate Delinquent Daughters on a technical scale, it's not a particularly good movie with its bad acting and shoddy production values. It's also hard to figure out what audience PRC intended to bring in to ensure that the movie would turn a profit. I can't imagine the teens of 1944 watching this one, and only a small set of do-gooder parents would think of watching it.

However, watching it 80 years on, all of the things that make Delinquent Daughters a technical dud make it fun to watch just as a time capsule of how the adults of 1944 considered the teens of the day. It's also interesting to see how there's basically no mention of that pesky little war raging on over in Europe and the Pacific.

Flareup

TCM had a Raquel Welch double feature some time back. Of the films, I already did a post on Kansas City Bomber. Now it's time to do a post on the other film, Flareup.

We don't actually see Welch at first, unless that's her in the opening credits which seem obviously inspired by Maurice Binder's work on the James Bond title sequences. Instead, we see a woman named Nikki Morris, who is exiting one of the Las Vegas resorts and getting in a taxi. She's tailed by a man who follows Nikki to a meeting with her friends Michele (Raquel Welch) and Irish for an outdoor lunch by the pool. The man stalking Nikki is her ex-husband Alan (Luke Askew), who wants to patch things up with Nkki, although she obviously doesn't for good reasons: the guy is a creep. What she didn't expect, however, is that Alan was going to pull a gun out and shoot her, and then try to shoot at Michele and third friend Iris.

The police for fairly obvious reasons want to talk to Michele and Iris, warning the two women that they're both in danger and need police protection until Alan can be caught, although Michele doesn't really want the protection. That night, as Michele goes to the hospital to find out how Nikki is doing, she learns that Nikki just died. Alan learned that too, and he shows up outside the hospital where he shoots Iris and her police protector, although Michele is able to escape, which makes sense considering Raquel welch is clearly the female lead hear.

Michele goes to the go-go club where she dances for a living (sorry, she's not topless like some of the other women). She's got a sympathetic boss in Lloyd. He has a past working in burlesque, so he knows a Jerry Benton who runs the Losers Club in Los Angeles, which is a similar sort of club. Just mentiod Lloyd to Jerry and Jerry will be happy to give you a job. It's also a good way to get out of Vegas unseen.

Jerry turns out to be a female Jerri (Jean Byron), who does indeed offer Michele a job without even an audition. Joe (James Stacy), the valet parker, recognizes that something is wrong with Michele, and starts being nice to her to the point that she shows up at his apartment when she has nightmares about what happened in Vegas.

And that's not the only way in which what happened in Vegas does not, in fact, stay in Vegas. Alan kills a fourth person, this time one who offers him a ride. It's an excuse for Alan to get a car to get to Los Angeles since he was able to threaten someone at the go-go club to tell him where Michele went. Alan blames Michele for the breakup of his marriage, and he plans to get revenge by killing her.

Flareup doesn't have much of a reputation, and it's not too hard to see way. Having said that, the movie isn't quite as bad as some people would have you believe. It's more pedestrian than anything else, but it's entertaining enough. And that's really all one looks for in a movie like this. Well, OK, it's also got great vintage location shooting in Las Vegas and Los Angeles that will probably be of interest to anybody who's from either of those areas

Another penthouse

It wasn't uncommon for studios back in the studio era to remake their old properties. They had the scripts lying around, and since there wasn't much opportunity to see those old films until television came along, a lot of movie goers might not remember the original. Another example of this is Society Lawyer.

Walter Pidgeon plays the title character here, playing a character named Christopher Durant who's nominally a society lawyer in that he works for the high-class sort of law firm. But he's known to get terribly drunk at parties he hosts, which seems to me to run the risk of ethics violations. Also, he's taken on the defense of Tony Gazotti (Leo Carrillo), who is the nightclub-owning sort of gangster but still, someone with the sort of connections a firm of the sort Durant works for wouldn't want to associate with.

Durant's personal life is also a bit difficult in that he's got a fiancée Sue Leonard (Frances Mercer) but the two are about to break up partly because of those gangster ties. The other part of it is that for Sue, there's another man in the form of Phil Siddall (Lee Bowman), who himself has an ex-girlfriend Judy Barton (Ann Morriss). Ann seems to have fallen for the wrong sort of man and wants to rub Phil's face in it. So she invites him to a swanky party, only for her to get murdered at the party by an unseen assailant who drops the gun to make it look like Phil was the only one there. Even more stupidly, Phil picks up the gun so he'll be caught with it and anyway, his fingerprints would have been on it!

So obviously Phil is held for booking, and Sue is out of her mind not knowing what to do about her boyfriend facing a murder rap. So she goes to Durant for help getting Phil off. After all, if Durant can get someone like Gazotti off, surely he can prove Phil's innocence. Meanwhile, someone's calling Durant up telling him not to take the case.

Gazotti, for his part, has an idea that the murder was committed at the behest of a rival underworld type, Jim Crelliman (Eduardo Ciannelli). So Gazotti is willing to help Durant with what one would guess is the ulterior motive of getting a rival out of the way. Gazotti has a nightclub singer Pat Abbott (Virginia Bruce) in his employ who also lived in the same building as the murdered woman and who might be able to help Durant. However, there are any number of red herrings and Pat herself may or may not be a 100% trustworthy character. Pat and Durant both continue to face threats until the case is solved, which it be since this one was made in 1939, well after the Production Code started being strictly enforced.

Society Lawyer is a remake of a pre-Code called Penthouse, which I blogged about all the way back in 2012 and frankly don't think I've seen since, which might explain why I didn't notice the connection until looking up the reviews for Society Lawyer. The remake is more than adequate, although it's only a programmer and once again not meant to be anything special. Just another movie that kept the audiences of 1939 entertained until the next movie came off the assembly line. Not that it's bad by any means, however.

One other thing is worth mentioning, and that's Durant's butler played by Herbert Mundin. Mundin was a character actor whose credits include a fun turn in The Adventures of Robin Hood where he's the love interest of Una O'Connor. Unfortunately, Mundin was killed in a car accident before Society Lawyer was released, obviously ending his career.

Rock Hudon Romantic Comedy #8857432896578234768902

Another of the stars in the 2025 Summer Under the Stars was Gina Lollobrigida. She made a pair of movies with Rock Hudson. I already did a post on the first of them, Come September. The second is Strange Bedfellows, which, being a Universal movie, hadn't shown up on TCM before. (That would also explain why I hadn't heard of it.) In any case, I recorded it and recently got around to watching it to put up this post on it.

The movie starts off with an opening scene told in narration. In London in what would be the late 1950s, Carter Harrison (Rock Hudson) is an American working for the American-Allied Petroleum company in London. He's the sort of stereotypical conservative businessman type, but on his first day in London he meets bohemian Italian artist Toni Vincente (Gina Lollobrigida). They go to bed together that night, already married. And then they wake up the next morning to find out that they have nothing in common and that Toni can have a rather violent temper. So the two separate, which is also a bit unsurprising considering that Carter's work takes him to all sorts of oil-rich sheikdoms and similar places.

Fast forward to the present day. Although the husband and wife haven't seen each other for seven years and don't really have any intention of ever seeing each other again, they also haven't really bothered to go through the motions of getting a divorce. At least not until now, when TOni starts the proceedings which is also going to have them meet, at least with their solicitors in tow. But there's also a catch that comes up.

Carter's PR man with the firm, Richard Bramwell (Gig Young), informs Carter that he's up for a promotion to an executive position when he gets back to Boston. However, this being a conservative business, the president J.L. Stevens (Howard St. John) would like a family man in the position. Carter getting a divorce might be a problem, but then having Toni as she is would also cause issues. In addition to the bohemian artist type, she also involves herself in the sort of social causes that would make conservative executives blush. Since this is the 60s, there's nothing environmental here; it's more helping the third world and more importantly, freedom of expression, complaining about the American museum not wanting to display a supposedly controversial sculpture (never actually shown). Harry Jones (Edward Judd) is the point man for the organization, and you get the impression that he'd like to romance Toni if that divorce ever went through.

So Carter is trying to convince Toni that he really loves here, while Bramwell is working on a scheme that might prevent Toni from going ahead with the anti-American protest. Bramwell's scheme involves another oil-rich region where the restive natives are busy killing UN diplomats, and saying that Carter is going to be sent there to negotiate following a briefing in the Bahamas. That fake briefing is just a ruse to get Carter and Toni on vacation together before the board meeting in Boston. Harry, as you might well guess, figures that there's something hinky first about Carter trying to repair his relationship with Toni, and then all this stuff about Carter having to go on a potentially fatal diplomatic mission. So he sets up a ruse of his own to try to determine what's really going on.

This is the sort of romantic comedy where you have to figure that the Rock Hudon and Gina Lollobrigida characters are going to end up together at the end, so the question is how exactly they get there. There are parts of Strange Bedfellows that are good, but the resolution relies on stuff that's way too much a series of coincidences that feel more forced than funny. It's a bit of a shame considering the cast who all put in respectable performances. It's not really their fault that the scrip is letting them down.

Sister Carrie

Jennifer Jones was honored last August in Summer Under the Stars, which once again gave me the opportunity to record some movies I hadn't seen before. One of those was Carrie, the adaptation of the Theodore Dreiser novel Sister Carrie.

Jones stars as Carrie Meeber, daughter in a small-town Missouri family at the turn of the century who have already had one daughter go off to Chicago for better economic opportunities. It's Carrie's turn, as her parents buy her a one-way ticket to Chicago. One the train, she's keeping to herself, except that she's pestered by one of the male passengers, Charles Drouet (Eddie Albert). Charles is a traveling salesman and is immediately taken by Carrie although he's really much too forward about it, especially for circa 1900. And he doesn't seem too happy when Carrie gets off the train in South Chicago, since that's considered the slum area.

Life with her sister isn't the greatest, since money is tight and Carrie's brother-in-law is tough in a sensible way: you have to be a bit strict to survive in such conditions. Carrie has a job as a seamstress in what is essentially a sweatshop, but injures her hand in an industrial accident and gets fired, this being the days before workers' comp and other such benefits. Carrie goes to see Charles, who takes her to Fitzgerald's, an upscale restaurant managed by George Hurstwood (Laurence Olivier).

Carrie, having lost her job, winds up moving in with Charles, which is rather scandalous. Just as scandalous is the idea that Hurstwood is also smitten with Carrie. The thing is, Hurstwood already has a wife Julia (Miriam Hopkins) and two teenaged kids. The restaurant manager job is a good one that puts the Hurstwoods on the cusp of being upper-middle-class, with the prospect of marrying off the kids to people of better economic status. But if it were to be found out that George is lusting after someone young enough to be his daughter, well that might be a problem.

And then George does something profoundly stupid. At the end of the day at Fitzgerald's, George makes a mistake with the time lock on the restaurant's safe, leaving him with about $10,000 that he can't get in the safe. Now, the right thing to do would be to contact the owner of the restaurant, although that would have been a bit time consuming for 1900. Instead, George decides he's going to run off with the money, but not before picking up Carrie and bringing the two of them to New York. George also rather stupidly blows through the money in double-quick time. Sure enough, Fitzgerald sends men to New York to look for Hurstwood, who can't really keep a job in the restaurant business once his past is discovered.

Things get even worse when George's son is about to get married. Julia wants to sell the house, but George has to co-sign to sell. The thing is, he's still married to Julia, despite having told Carrie that he'd gotten a divorce. And by this time Carrie has gotten knocked up. But while George keeps going downhill, there's a third act for Carrie. She lies about her past and says she's been on the stage in Chicago, which gets her a job as a chorus girl with the opportunity to move up in the world. She splits from George hoping that George's son will forgive him, and eventually becomes reasonably big in the theater world, big enough to have a name in noticeable letters on the posters. Both Charles and George see that name, and show up (at different times) at Carrie's dressing room....

I haven't read Sister Carrie, so I can't be specific on what was changed from the book to the movie, although when Alicia Malone presented Carrie on TCM she mentioned that the book had floated around Hollywood for quite some time while people tried to figure out how to make it conform to the Production Code. The movie was not a success at the box office, and having seen it, I think I can understand why. This was supposed to be a prestige production, and the leads all give good enough performances. But at the same time, it feels like there's something a bit off with the movie, like the various characters don't really have the appropriate emotional connection with each other. There's just something flat about the final product.

But give Carrie a try and see for yourself if you like it.