Once again, for some values of "loved"

I'm always interested in early talkies, even if they turn out not to be so good. The way at which America looked at itself and some of the cultural norms that are different from today, close to a century on, are sometimes quite interesting. An example of this that really isn't a very good film is Three Who Loved.

One of the three is John Hanson (Conrad Nagel), presumably a Swedish immigrant although he's lost his accent and is working as a New York bank teller in an era when this was considered a highly respectable occupation. He works with his best friend Phil Wilson (Robert Ames), and both of them live in a rooming house run by fellow Swedish immigrant Anna Larson (Bodil Rosing). Anna is the aunt of Helga (Betty Compson), who happens to be the longtime girlfriend of John, or at least was back when he was still in Sweden as comment is made that John hasn't seen Helga in ten years.

But Helga is coming over to America to live, with John planning to marry her. In addition, in order to improve his life, John has been studying law at night and is hoping to take the bar exam as he's got a law firm already willing to take him on once he passes the bar exam and is admitted to the bar. Helga likes John and Anna does too, so there's the chance for them all to live happily ever after.

Yeah, right, since we're only about 15 minutes into the movie. John is supposed to be a good guy, but he's so busy tring to improve his life so that he can provide better for Helga that he doesn't have enough time for her. And he can't even bother to get engaged to her the day she steps off the boat. Phil, on the other hand, has no compunctions about putting the moves on Helga although it starts off innocently enough when John suggests Phil show Helga a bit of New York and John can take her out the following night. Helga falls in love with Phil, although he's not as much in love with her as she is with him. Anna can see the former and warns John, but even she can't see the latter.

And then the characters start to make really stupid decisions. The movie starts off in the mid-1920s, when the economy is going great guns. And John spends money he doesn't have -- an idiotic lack of probity for a banker -- first by buying stocks on margin and then putting $7500 down as the "first payment" for a house, a ridiculous sum for 1926. (IIRC, the house I grew up in was a 1974 new-build that cost maybe $50K in inflated money.) When John's stock tout shows up saying John needs to back his stock or lose his entire investment, what does John do but embezzle $10K from Phil's till. (What were bank tellers doing with this much cash on hand?) Phil is absent because he's just about to walk out on Helga after telling her he's going to get a marriage license.

Needless to say, the bank examiners show up and find Phil $10K short and about to leave for South America, so he is to them and the police obviously guilty. And John won't admit guilt because he knows Phil was about to walk out on her anyway and can't leave Helga high and dry. So John lets Phil be wrongly convicted and marries Helga, fathering a son (a very young Dickie Moore) by her.

Five years pass and Helga is trapped in a loveless marriage, at least from her point of view, because she's still busy pining after Phil not realizing he was going to jilt her. John sees Helga treating him and the kid not so well by constantly partying with her friends, while Phil is in prison vowing revenge against whoever sent him up, not realizing that the person in question is in fact John. And then Phil escapes and goes to Helga and John's house for help....

As you can tell from the synopsis, Three Who Loved is certainly interesting, although the plot becomes a complete mess in the second half. That, and it was produced by RKO, who at this early stage seemed to be making movies competently, if cheaply with the result being things that provided product for the exhibitors without being terribly memorable. The three main characters all need to be taken by the neck and shaken to get some sense into them. And poor Betty Compson has to put on that accent. Three Who Loved is definitely worth watching as a product of its time, even if it's not very good.

Dr. Cyclops

Horror movies tend to get overlooked at Oscar time, I think, with the exception of the effects awards. An example of a film that TCM was in fact able to show during 31 Days of Oscar because it got a Visual Effects nomination is Dr. Cyclops.

As we saw a few months back when I reviewed The Invisible Ray, radium was considered something of a great hope in terms of its potential medical uses, despite the radiation also being extremely dangerous. The ore was often found in exotic out of the way locations which, in the case of Dr. Cyclops means the Amazon jungle of Peru. Dr. Thorkel (Albert Dekker) is working on the good use of radium together with Dr. Mendoza (Paul Fix). But, Thorkel is beginning to lose his eyesight along with going mad, the latter of which Mendoza is noticing. So Thorkel kills Mendoza, and writes to America to get research help.

The American institute sends Dr. Mary Robinson (Janice Logan) and Dr. Rupert Bulfinch (Charles Halton). They suspect there might be some sort of major discovery, so they engage Bill Stockton (Thomas Coley), a mineralogist who can't really refuse the offer because of the debts he's racked up. Getting overland to Thorkel's jungle research station is going to be difficult, and the pack animal owner Steve Baker (Victor Killian) is only going to rent the animals if he's able to go along. Rounding out the cast is Thorkel's servant Pedro (Frank Yaconelli).

The group gets to Dr. Thorkel's station, only to learn that all he wanted was for Bulfinch or Robinson to look at a couple of slides because of Thorkel's declining eyesight. This, along with other things such as bones that might be the harbinger of a new species, pique the group's curiosity, which is heightened when Bill determines this is the motherlode for some of the best pitchblende (the ore of radium and uranium) out there. And, Thorkel has learned how to harness it much more precisely than anybody before him.

Except there's the issue of how he's planning to use those radium rays. Thorkel has been experimenting on reducing the size of man in order to decrease man's environmental impact. But anybody figuring this out is going to be a danger to Thorkel's insane plans. And now this group of interlopers from America has come and seen those plans! So Thorkel locks them in the radiation chamber and shrinks them down to size, with the plan to kill them after subjecting them to suitable horrors since the group knows what's going to come and Thorkel is Bond-villianous in the way he reveals his plans. He could step on them, or let the cat kill them the way it kills mice.

Of course, the group isn't about to let any of this happen, and try to figure out a way to fight back. They being human, they really are the most dangerous game. Also, being miniature, it's a good excuse for the movie to engage in creative special effects, leading up to the climax.

Dr. Cyclops is another of those movies where they splurged on special effects, and Technicolor, to the point that the screenplay suffers. This isn't the most original plot by any means, and the cast shows that having the best actors in it wasn't that terribly important. Still, because of the effects, even a recycled plot works well enough to entertain. Only the effects that involve the players against rear-projection photography don't work so well, since the backgrounds look grainy from being so blown up. That's a minor objection. Dr. Cyclops, while not being great, succeeds at what it sets out to do.

He chews to talk

I knew I was going to have a post on a short going up today since I was planning to do that in conjunction with mentioning the Eva Marie Saint tribute. With that in mind, I pulled out my Will Rogers box set since when I watched Mr. Skitch I saw that there was a short on it. In fact, all four of the discs include one featurette. One is a standard 15-minute or so bio type piece, so no need to review that here. A second is Jane Withers remembering Rogers, which is a bit odd considering that the two of them never appeared in a movie together, at least not according to IMDb. Withers had been in several films by the time Rogers died. A third is a real short, which I'll post about some other time. Finally, there's one that the DVD case calls He Chews to Talk.

Having watched it, I'm not 100% sure of the provenance of this one. There's no opening title beyond a brief newsreel-type card of Rogers speaking on the radio. And that's about all this is, with Rogers delivering a monologue of about nine minutes starting with a take-off of ads of the day, before talking about the Depression. Now, considering some of the comments Rogers makes, this seems pretty likely to date to 1931, since he mentions Republicans delivering three bad years and then one good year at election time, with the Democrats being the other way around. Also, most of the commentary is the populist sort that you might have heard from blue-collar labor union types: there's enough wealth to go around, but also not 100% thrilled with Democrats.

As for the title, apparently Rogers wrote a series of "campaign" articles for Life magazine which got the title "He chews to run", which fits with the sort of homespun corn-pone humor you'd expect from Rogers. That and the fact that Rogers was well known for chewing gum. So it seems a bit obvious that somehere along the way this might have gotten a note of "He chews to talk" or something like that internally at Fox. However, IMDb doesn't list any Rogers short by that title and searching for it on the web only yields collections of his writings or this particular short on YouTube, which is probably the same print that appears on the DVD.

However: One of the copies on YouTube was put up by The Will Rogers Museum, calling it "Bacon, Beans, and Limousines", which doesn't seem to be an official title either, although they date it to October 1931.

TCM's Eva Marie Saint tribute

Eva Marie Saint in the scene that I think of as winning her the Oscar in On the Waterfront (Oct. 25, 8:00 PM)

Oscar-winning actress Eva Marie Saint died on October 6 at the age of 102. I mentioned when I posted about her death that I figured the TCM schedule for October was such that they probably wouldn't be able to get around to a proper tribute until November, but I was wrong. Saint didn't make a whole lot of movies, and TCM will be showing five of her best-known roles starting tomorrow afternoon:

12:00 PM Raintree County, which is really an Elizabeth Taylor movie;
3:00 PM All Fall Down, with Saint again playing more of a supporting role with a young Warren Beatty starring;
5:00 PM 36 Hours, an underrated suspense movie about Nazi Rod Taylor trying to extract information from James Garner, helped by Saint;
7:00 PM Eva Marie Saint: Live from the TCM Classic Film Festival, an interview she did with Robert Osborne at the 2013 TCM Classic Film Festival;
8:00 PM On the Waterfront, with Saint playing the woman whose brother was murdered by corrupt union thugs;
10:00 PM North By Northwest, in which Saint helps Cary Grant foil a ring of spies, with him not knowing she's actually working for the government.

Note that the TCM Film Festival interview is listed as running 59 minutes and is in a one-hour time slot. I don't know if anybody will be introducing the film, although since this a Sunday afternoon there normally is someone presenting the movies on Saturday and Sunday afternoons.

Note also that the schedule as it leaves time for the normal Silent Sunday Nights and TCM Imports selections.

Wee Willie Winkie

There aren't all that many movies airing in the FXM Retro block that I haven't blogged about before, mostly because I've been blogging for closing in on 19 years. One that hasn't gotten a post yet and is on my DVR is Wee Willie Winkie. Since it's getting another airing tomorrow, October 24, at 6:00 AM, I figure that now is a good time to watch it and put up the obligatory post on it.

In frontier India in 1897, Joyce Williams (June Lang) is an American widow with young daughter Priscilla (Shirley Temple). Apparently her late husband's father is an Englishman, serving with the British Army in India, and Joyce must not have any American relatives. Otherwise there would be no reason for Joyce and Priscilla to go all the way to India. Already on the train, we see that Priscilla can be rather annoying as she asks all sorts of obnoxious questions. As the train gets to the station in Raj Pore, Priscilla witnesses the arrest of Khoda Khan (Cesar Romero), a rebel leader who has been attacking the British.

Mother and daughter get to the army base just as Grandpa, Col. Williams (C. Aubrey Smith) is disciplining Lt. Brandes (Michael Whalen), the sort of young dashing officer who would be just right for Joyce; indeed, that's going to be one of the subplots of the movie as Brandes also likes little Priscilla. Meanwhile, there are other women on base who are trying to set up their adult daughter with Brandes, although that's more comic relief and a minor subplot. Priscilla continues to be naïvely mischievous, in the sense that she should be smart enough to know not to do the things she's doing but is either too young or too stupid. For this, she gets taken under the wing of Sgt. MacDuff (Victor McLaglen), who makes her a mascot of sorts for his platoon as well as a bit of a soldier. Not that a kid of Priscilla's age is actually going to do any real soldiering. Certainly not when that kid is Shirley Temple.

One of the stupid things Priscilla does is to give Khoda a religious pendant he lost when he was getting arrested that she picked up. Later, the colonel's manservant Mohammet Dihn gives Priscilla a "prayer" message to take to Khoda, who is being held in the garrison jail where the army is stationed. This is actually a message from Khoda's fellow rebels beyond the border about how they're going to spring him from the jail. Worse, in the ensuing attack, Sgt. MacDuff gets seriously injured.

Priscilla is too young to understand everything that's going on, and as far as she knows Khoda is a decent enough fellow. She figures that if she could just talk to Khoda she could get everybody to see reason and come to a peaceful settlement. So she gets Mohammet Dihn to take her to Khoda's headquarters through the well-defended pass that's a chokepoint such that if the British try to go through, they'll get slaughtered. Khoda thinks he's got a wonderful bargaining chip in the garrison commander's daughter, but then again, he's also got Shirley Temple and you know how a Shirley Temple movie is going to end....

Shirley Temple is appealing enough in Wee Willie Winkie. Certainly, I can see how audiences in the 1930s would have loved her in a movie like this. However, I find the plot here a bit weak and taking a bit too long to get to the real action. Also, Shirley Temple is being asked to be even more naïve than you'd expect a child to be. So this one wasn't quite as good in my view as some of Shirley's other movies. But it's still worth watching.

From Beyond the Grave

The second half of tonight's lineup on TCM, after midnight, includes several horror anthology movies. One that I hadn't seen before, but was sitting on my DVR from the last time it aired, is From Beyond the Grave, which comes on overnight at 2:00 AM.

The establishing story, or what connects everything together, is an antique shop in London run by an unnamed proprietor, played by Peter Cushing. Each of the stories is started by a different person coming into the shop looking to buy an item; whether the person has a positive or negative outcome in the story depends in part upon how honest they are.

First is Edward Charlton (David Warner), who buys an old mirror for his apartment. When he has some guests over, one of them comment about the mirror looking like it could have been in an old-timey ghost story. So the group decides to host a séance, not that anybody really believes in that stuff. Of course, this time it turns out that the other side is actually real, in the sense that there's a ghost in the mirror. And it decides to possess poor Edward, telling Edward that he needs to kill people in order to satisfy the ghost with the dead people's blood. But will the ghost ever be satisfied? And won't somebody figure out that Edward is killing people?

Next up is Christopher (Ian Bannen). He hasn't got much of a life. Since getting demobbed from the military, he's wound up in a loveless marriage to Mabel (Diana Dors) with a son Stephen and a low-paying, low-status job as an office manager. One day on the way to the office, he meets Jim (Donald Pleasance), an older man who sells matches and the like. Jim is pushy enough that Christopher should see warning sirens, but instead he pilfers a military medal from the antiques shop, feeling the need to go over to Jim's apartment and visit. Meanwhile, Mabel has weird feelings that there's somebody else in the room trying to stab her or something.

Reggie (Ian Carmichael) is a businessman with a wife Susan (Nyree Dawn Porter) who cheats the proprietor out of a snuff box before heading home to Sussex. On the train to Sussex, he shares a compartment with Madame Orloff (Margaret Leighton), who claims to be a clairvoyant and claims that Reggie has some kind of being on his shoulder that's all sorts of bad juju and that's trying to escape into the real world. Once again, no reason to believe any of this crap, at least not until Susan first tells Reggie there's a sudden bad smell followed by Susan realizing someone -- or something -- is trying to kill her.

Finally, William Seaton (Ian Ogilvy) sees an antique door he likes, even if he's only going to use it to replace the door to his stationery closet. His wife Rosemary (Lesley-Anne Down) jokes about using such a door for a terribly mundane purpose, but surprise surprise, installing this door opens a portal so a world from several centuries earlier inhabited by a magician only William can see, and not every time he opens the door. At least, not until the magician decides he wants Rosemary....

From Beyond the Grave is more than competent for the genre of horror anthologies. It's not great, certainly not as good as something like Dead of Night, but it's certainly good enough to entertain. And as always with anthologies, the stories are short enough that if you don't like one, you don't have to wait all that long for the next story.

Buford Pusser

Another of the stars who died in 2025 who got a one-movie salute on that night at the end of the year when TCM runs a salute to various people who weren't quite as prominent is consistent 1970s supporting actor Joe Don Baker. The movie that TCM selected for him was one of his starring roles in Walking Tall. So I watched it before it expired from my DVR, and wrote up this post to schedule for a suitable later date.

Baker stars as Buford Pusser, a real person who, as the movie opens, is giving up his career as a pro wrestler. He'd been criss-crossing the country in a trailer with his wife Pauline (Elizabeth Hartman) and two children. Pauline had been pushing him to retire, so he's returning to his roots in Tennessee to be close to his parents (Lurene Tuttle and Noah Beery Jr.) in rural Tennessee not far from the border with Mississippi.

Buford was known enough in town that his return is news, and showing up the next day is old friend Lutie McVeigh. Lutie wants to take Buford for drinks as well as show him the "entertainment" places that have sprung up in recent years, meaning the gambling joint the Lucky Spot outside of town along with the brothel that's sprung up to service the drunks. Buford isn't exactly pleased with this, and calls out the cheating that he sees going on at the casino. This causes the propietor's henchmen to beat the crap out of Lutie and Buford, as well as give Buford cuts that require hundreds of stitches.

Buford responds by showing up at the Lucky Spot after he recovers and holding up the cashier at gunpoint, which obviously leads to a trial but one that Buford wins by ripping off his shirt and showing off his wounds. The jury acquits, which makes him a hero to some as well as an enemy of the current sheriff, Al Thurman (Gene Evans), who is on the take from all the vice house owners in the county.

Seeing that nothing is being done about the rampant immorality occurring in his county, Buford decides that you can indeed fight city hall, which he plans to do by running for sheriff. He is, of course, going up against some powerful entrenched interests. The sheriff tries to get dirt on Buford in any way possible, and when he chases Buford to catch him speeding, it's the sheriff that drives off the road, getting in a fatal car crash.

Buford gets elected sheriff, and he now has to worry about the corrupt vice owners as well as the fact that the deputies are on the take. He also hasn't worked in law enforcement, so he doesn't know any of the niceties about things like constitutional rights that people under arrest have or how to properly draw up a request for a search warrant. Buford is unfazed and continues to go after crime in his community, even though it puts him in increasing danger.

It's easy to see why Walking Tall became a cult hit when it was originally released. Rural southern whites had been at the bottom of Hollywood's pecking order since the days of films that led Variety to write the "Stix Nix Hick Pix" headline all the way back in 1935. Just like blacks had the blaxploitation movies of the 1970s, here the southerners get what can easily be called for lack of a better term a "hixploitation" film. It's campily violent and gives people the thrill of being able to get revenge in a way they wouldn't have been able to in real life. This, especially because Buford Pusser was a real person. It's also fun, if a bit slow clocking in at over two hours. Walking Tall should really have been plotted to run 90-100 minutes.

Not mentioned in the movie, since nobody could have known it at the time (at least, not the people involved in making the movie), is that the real-life Buford Pusser's life was not quite as it was portrayed here, with later investigations (long after Pusser's death) revealing something darker that I don't want to mention since it would contain major spoilers. But Walking Tall is still worth watching, just like other Hollywood biopics that might be even more inaccurate.

That Lonelyhearts column again

Back in the studio era, it wasn't uncommon for studios to remake their B movies. After all, the previous versions weren't really showing up anywhere to remind people of them, and it was a budget saver on the screenplay. Paul Muni's Hi, Nellie! was remade three times within about 15 years. The third of four versions of the movie is titled You Can't Escape Forever and aired on TCM back when George Brent was Star of the Month.

Brent plays Steve Mitchell, editor of a big-city paper whose girlfriend Laurie (Brenda Marshall) is trying to make it as a reporter. However, she has issues like fainting when she covers an execution only to discover too late that the condemned man was pardoned. For this, she gets demoted to the "advice to the lovelorn" column. Meanwhile, the condemned man was believed to be working for Greer (Eduardo Ciannelli), the local crime boss, since this was an era where all of the crime was managed by gangsters, or so it seemed if you watched the movies.

A man named Crowder shows up at the newspaper having written a manuscript by hand that he claims will blow the roof off of the Greer gang. Not long after, Crowder dies in what is an accident to everybody but Steve. So Steve publishes a headling claiming it wasn't an accident, only for the autopsy to say otherwise. So this time it's Steve who gets demoted to the lonelyhearts column.

Thankfully, there's a singles' club in town meaning there's ample work for a romance columnist. But there's something odd about this place and the weddings it performs, so Steve decides to investigate, figuring he can use this as a way to get out of the newspaper building and try to get the evidence that will prove he was right all along about Crowder's death. And, as it turns out, Crowder met his wife at the club, and wasn't the first person to get married at the club and die under mysterious circumstances.

Steve and his photographer Mac (Roscoe Karns) go to the club with Laurie following along, and she sees that the club is indeed a "respectable" front for a criminal organization, and probably laundering money to boot. Furthermore, the owner of the club, Robelink (Gene Lockhart) is the brother-in-law of Greer. Robelink, for his part, got the manuscript that Crowder wrote, but he's not planning to tell anybody where it is if he can avoid doing so.

You can probably guess how all of this is going to go, which is that Greer figures out Robelink may crack and that Steve is a threat. But this is the sort of movie that's going to have a happy ending. Crime does not pay, especially during the Production Code era.

I think now I've seen all four versions of this movie. I think my favorite is Love Is on the Air, which moves the story to radio and benefits from the presence of Ronald Reagan who was well-fit to Warner Bros.' B movies. In You Can't Escape Forever, Brent comes across as a bit of a conman and mildly unsympathetic, while Roscoe Karns is obnxiously incompetent at times. But this was B material, and released in the midst of World War II when audiences wanted escapism. You'll definitely escape here.

Canine HOMe Protection System

Another of the live-action movies that TCM ran as part of their salute to Hanna-Barbera is one that was more squarely aimed at kids than the previous movie Baxter!. This time, the movie in question is C.H.O.M.P.S..

Rascal is a dog owned by Brian Foster (Wesley Eure), who works for the home-security company run by Ralph Norton (Conrad Bain) and is dating the boss' daughter Casey (Valerie Bertinelli). The opening scene has Rascal being chased by a dog owned by neighbor Mrs. Flower (Hermione Baddeley), who doesn't have all that much to do with the plot other than her dog whistle causing a major plot point. Brian is a bit of a tinkerer, and in his garage/laboratory, he's working on an animatronic but hyper-realistic dog that could be used in building security the way a German Shepherd or Doberman might: the hope is a dog that can guard but have more strength and energy than a real dog.

The prototype, named "Chomps" for "Canine HOMe Protection System", shows potential, but also has some glitches since it's activated by numerical voice command to the point that anybody who knew about such a thing could just start calling out numbers to get the dog to stop. And who's going to remember all of the numerical commands out in the real world? Also, Brian hasn't bothered to file for a patent on his invention, something which would obviate much of the plot of the movie. The other issue is that, as I implied above, Mrs. Flower's dog whistle also causes Chomps to go haywire.

Brian thinks he's finally gotten Chomps to work, and wants to show him to Mr. Norton, who obviously (and understandably) doesn't believe that this sort of invention can actually work. But Chomps actually foils a crime where there's a TV reporter watching, leading Norton to be more interested in the idea. Norton, however, isn't the only one interested. Since Chomps shows up on a live TV news report and Norton is stupid enough to use the incident for publicity purposes without having all the IP rights to Chomps locked up, Norton's rival Gibbs (Jim Backus) also wants Chomps. And Gibbs has a plant, Ken Sharp (Larry Bishop) in Norton's business. Sharp has hired a couple of small-time incompetent crooks, Bracken (Red Buttons) and Brooks (Chuck McCann) to get Chomps.

Gibbs offters to buy out Norton, but Norton also has another much more lucrative offer to merge with a major defense contractor, pending an experiment with Chomps. Unfortunately, Norton unwittingly brings Rascal to the experiment since Chomps was designed to look like a real dog and Brian used his own dog Rascal as the model. At the same time the defense contractor trial is set to take place, Sharp has his two hired burglars trying to get the plans to Chomps while Gibbs has secretly shown up to where the trial is taking place. Can Chomps save the day? Of course he can, since this is the sort of movie that couldn't possibly have anything but a happy ending.

Frankly, C.H.O.M.P.S. is a dumb movie, but it's endearingly dumb because it's so unbelievably amateurish. The plot is paper-thin, the acting on par with the sort of sitcom that's churned out in one take, characters like the two burglars are impossibly stupid, and Chomps is repeatedly shown in slow-motion in a way that looks obviously phony and bad. I can see why it didn't get very good reviews on its release. But is has a bit of charm.

Dancer, Texas Pop. 81

TCM did a spotlight some months back on films set in Texas. One of the more recently films that I had never even heard of was Dancer, Texas Pop.81. But it was another of those movies where the synopsis sounded interesting enough, so I recorded it and eventually got around to watching it.

The movie opens with four adolescent boys sitting in the middle of the road and one of them doing a voiceover about the town of Dancer in west Texas and how Rand McNally doesn't have it on their maps apparently because it's so small. The four young men are about to graduate high school in what is Dancer's largest graduating class in years: five of them, with one girl in the graduating class. (You'd think they'd go to a larger school, but questions about things like groceries are never quite answered.)

The young man doing the narration is Keller Coleman (Breckin Meyer), who lives with his grandfather because his parents have died. So Keller and the other three boys made a pact years before, when they were maybe 10 or 11, that they would get on the first bus out of town and go to Los Angeles to try to find a more successful life for themselves, something millions of small-town people in America have done for generations. The other three young men are:

Terrell Lusk (Peter Facineli). He's the son of one of the richer families in town, as his father works in the oil industry. Mom expects Terrell to go straight into management at Dad's business and is quite insistent on it, to the point that you can see why Terrell would want to get out of town.
John Hemphill (Eddie Mills). John's father runs a ranch, so there's definitely a career waiting for John if he wants it. And he could even go off for a few years to study at the nearby ag school.
Squirrel (Ethan Embry). Squirrel is the one who really has no prospects, as he's got an alcoholic father (Keith Szarabajka) who's screwed up his life so much that he lives in a trailer that's not even level.

So as we see, all four have good reason to leave. But there's also things that could lead each of them to stay: Keller's grandfather is doted on by the town's elderly widows to the point that Grandpa can't give the various Tupperware bowls back to the right people. Terrell and John both have jobs waiting for them if they want, while Squirrel could be seen as basically abandoning his father to die if he goes off to Los Angeles, even though you couldn't really blame Squirrel for doing so. Additionally, town members put subtle pressure on the four young men to stay, to the point that some of them place bets on how many of them are going to get on the bus. All of this leads up to the point where the bus does pull in to town and... how many of them leave?

There's a lot to like about Dancer, Texas Pop. 81, certainly for anybody who grew up in a smallish place. I went to a large high school, but it was a "consolidated" school district and I grew up in one of the outlying areas that was small even if it was a lot closer to a fairly large (and giant by Dancer standards) place, so I get a lot of the vibe here. The movie, however, does have some problems, mostly relating to the fact that although this is supposed to be a town of 81, the way the peripheral characters act and the number of them implies that this is a rather larger place even it if it a small town. (Wikipedia says it was filmed in Fort Davis, Texas, a town of about 1,000 people.) The relationships between the four young men also seem more Hollywood than small town. But overall, if you want a more loving look at small towns than you normally get from Hollywood, I can certainly recommend Dancer, Texas Pop. 81.