A Lady of Chance

It's been a while since I've put up a post on a silent film. One that's been sitting on my DVR for a while that I recently finally got around to watching is A Lady of Chance, which probably ought to show up more often on TCM than I think it does since it was made at MGM. In any case, having finally watched it, now's the time for the obligatory post on it especially considering that today is the birth anniversary of star Johnny Mack Brown.

Norma Shearer stars as Dolly Morgan, and as the movie opens she's working in a big-city hotel as a switchboard operator, a job that puts her in contact with any number of people. One is a rich guy obviously looking for a woman to have a fling with while he's traveling and away from his wife. But then comes Bradley (Lowell Sherman) and his girlfriend Gwen (Gwen Lee). They recognize Dolly as "Angel Face", a con artist like them except that she got caught and spent time im prison and is supposed to be on parole although she seems to have skipped it, which gives Bradly and Gwen some power over her. They blackmail Dolly into putting the squeeze on the rich guy.

However, things don't go to plan, and while Bradley and Gwen plan to take the money and run, Dolly turns the tables on them and steals the cash herself, skipping town and going in pursuit of a suitable man far away from where Bradley and Gwen might be. Except that she's dumb enough to go to Atlantic City, just the sort of place where you can expect Bradley and Gwen to show up. There's also what seems to be a convention of people in the concrete business, including young Steve Crandall (Johnny Mack Brown), who's in town from his home town in Alabama hoping to consummate a business deal. Dolly starts the con by paying for his telegram home to Mother (Eugenie Besserer), and the two start a relationship that leads to his proposing rather quickly.

Except that just before they're going to get married, Bradley and Gwen show up in Atlantic City having found Dolly. They expect Dolly to con Steve, or else they're going to tell him about her past. Once again, though, Dolly is able to fool her partners in crime, being able to skip out on them and run off with Steve to get on a train back to his home town. The only problem is that, once the two of them get back to Alabama, Dolly discovers that Steve is not rich yet. He has an invention that could earn him a nice amount of money if he could get somebody to buy into it, but that hasn't happened yet. Dolly even considers leaving, but by this time she's so in love with Steve that she returns to him.

And then Bradley and Gwen show up again. They can't believe that Steve isn't a millionaire and lives in this modest house. But, complicating matters is the fact that on the day Bradly and Gwen come to Alabama, Steve gets a letter from a New York company saying that they want to buy the exclusive rights to his concrete. So Steve is in fact about to be rich, and Bradley and Gwen find this out, making them want to stay and force Dolly into conning Steve one last time.

A Lady of Chance is a lot of nonsense, but it's well-made nonsense coming from MGM. Norma Shearer does an unsurprisingly good job with a plot that is utterly unrealistic. Johnny Mack Brown is playing another of the naïve hick types, while Lowell Sherman and Gwen Lee do well as the villians. It's certainly not the first silent I'd recommend to people who are new to silent dramas, but it's certainly watchable enough.

55 Days at Peking

This year's Summer Under the Stars concludes today with a day of films devoted to actress Ava Gardner. And concluding her day, in the wee hours of tomorrow morning at 3:00 AM (so even if you're on the west coast but only have the east coast feed it's still technically on Sept. 1) is 55 Days at Peking.

After the opening titles, voiceover narration informs us that it is the summer of 1900, a restles time in Chinese history: the Manchu/Qing dynasty was weak, having been forced to give a lot of economic concessions to the various western powers that wanted to trade with China. Originally, the Chinese government had been in a powerful enough position to bar whole families from coming over and keep the westerners isolated in special communities much like the Japanese did with the Dutch in Nagasaki. But by the end of the 19th century the west had the upper hand. This combined with a bad harvest emboldened more radical Chinese forces, in a group commonly called the "Boxers" because of their closed-fist salute. They were trying to drive the west out wholesale, and the government was in a bind because trade duties with the west and taxes on the concessions were actually bringing in a sizeable chunk of money to the Chinese treasury.

It's against that restive background that the Americans rotate in a fresh platoon of marines to the American legation in the diplomatic quarter of Peking, under the leadership of career Marine Maj. Lewis. He shows up looking for rooms at the hotel just as a Russian, Baroness Natalie (Ava Gardner) is being evicted because her visa was revoked by her brother-in-law (Kurt Kasznar) for family reasons. Maj. Lewis doesn't know much about the local politics, but he's about to learn, and fast.

The day after he arrives, the Boxers assassinate the German ambassador to China, leading to an ultimatum from Dowager Empress Cixi (Flora Robson): all of the westerners must leave. The assembled ambassadors take a vote, with all of them voting to leave except for the American who is absent because he's dying in hospital, and the British ambassador, Sir Arthur Robinson (David Niven). The other countries, however, decide that they can't afford to give up all of their concessions to the British, so they change their minds and stay. And that causes the Boxers to start besieging the city.

The westerners are badly outnumbered, but all they have to do is hold out long enough for relief to arrive, which is supposed to get to Beijing fairly soon. Except that Imperial forces are mustered to prevent this from happening, and the westerners have to hold out longer until they can somehow get someone out of the area from below and get word that relief is still needed. Against the backdrop of all this, various personal dramas play out. These include a mixed-race child, Sir Arthur's family, and the relationship between Maj. Lewis and the baroness, which is turning romantic because apparently a movie like this needs a love interest in it.

The technical aspects of 55 Days at Peking are quite good, although it's Spain substituting for China in the backgrounds. This isn't terribly important, since the besieged quarter is all sets anyhow and mostly doesn't need large vistas. The sets and costumes work well as does the music. The weakness, however, is the story, which runs over 2½ hours and sags quite a bit, especially with the baroness character who's not really needed to advance the plot. There are also enough Hollywood-style reimaginings of the history that are probably going to bother some viewers. So it's easy to see why a movie like 55 Days at Peking got mixed reviews and hurt the career of its director, Nicholas Ray.

Captain Applejack

I'm always up for a pre-code movie I haven't seen before. So when Captain Applejack showed up on the TCM schedule quite some time back, I recored it. Having watched it, it's more of an early talkie than a pre-code, but there's still a lot about it that makes it interesting.

Ambrose Applejohn (John Halliday) is the latest -- and last -- of a long line of Applejohns, living in a manor-type house in southwest England along the English Channel. It's the type of place that is isolated and subject to bad weather, reminiscent of the place in Jamaica Inn. Ambrose has an elderly aunt Agatha (Louise Closser Hale) and a ward Poppy (Mary Brian) who pines for him although he doesn't realize it. Ambrose considers this a boring life, and has been thinking about putting the house on the market so that he can use the money to travel and lead a life of adventure.

This being a place subject to bad weather, sure enough we get a storm and a bunch of people looking for help getting out of the storm because reasons. First up are the Pengards, with Mr. Pengard claiming to be a clairvoyant, although of cource clairvoyancy is a bunch of nonsense. After that is Madame Valeska (Kay Strozzi). She's a woman of mystery, and she tells Ambrose that she's being pursued by a guy and needs to be kept safe. Sure enough, a man named Borolsky (Arthur Edmund Carew) shows up looking for Valeska, and threatening to kill Ambrose if he doesn't give up Valeska.

After dealing with Borolsky, Ambrose plans to retire for the night, although Poppy thinks she hears something. In the investigation, they notice that a window latch has been jimmied, and that somebody seems to have found a secret hidden panel that nobody in the Applejohn family ever knew about, which is the sort of plot point that makes no sense. Making even more lack of sense is the fact that the panel contains a parchment that whoever came in through the window didn't find. The parchment says that the Applejohns are really the Applejacks, descended from the pirat Captain Applejack who absconded with a bunch of treasure and hid it somewhere in the house. So clearly we're in the realm of nonsense plot.

After a dream sequence, the various visitors show up again. As it turns out, they were all imposters, and are actually thieves looking for the treasure that's supposedly in the house. This leads to a madcap climax, and a happy ending for our protagonists.

Captain Applejack was based on a play, and most of the movie apart from the pirate dream sequence is set in about two rooms. Indeed, the movie starts off slowly enough that I was thinking it wasn't all that good. But then the parchment shows up and things start to get really weird, especially with the pirate sequence and then the finale which seems to be trying to change the movie from drama to comedy. It ended up coming across to me as one of those early talkies where the filmmakers didn't quite know what to do and decided to through anything they could think of at the audience. The result isn't always successful, but that finale is certainly different, making the movie more fun that it probably ought to be.

What if The Exorcist were a comic heist movie?

I found myself with a couple of Zero Mostel movies unwatched on my DVR and getting to the point where both of them were getting close to expiring. I've watched both of them now and am writing up the reviews, as usual spacing them out because I try to avoid posting about movies with the same star in close proximity unless they're both showing up on TV soon. In any case, the first of the two Zero Mostel movies is The Great Bank Robbery.

A train is heading for the town of Friendly, TX, and we see several people watching the train from afar, with the implication being that they're casing the train for a possible robbery. One group is led by Papa (Akim Tamiroff), father of Juan (Larry Storch); these are Mexicans who have come across the border and, one would guess, are planning to abscond with the presumed gold on the train back to Mexico. There's also Slade (Claude Akins), a gunman who knows a bit more about the bank in Friendly which is part of why he's scouting out the train.

Riding on the train is the Rev. Pious Blue (Zero Mostel), leader of a Salvation Army-style itinerant missionary group. His companion and second-in-command is sister Lyda (Kim Novak), and they're accompanied by a bunch of older character actor types, including Peter Whitney, Sam Jaffe, and John Fiedler. They, as it will be seen, have ulterior motives for making their way to Friendly.

We then learn that the bank in Friendly has two sets of books. One is the official set, although there's a second set and extra vaults because the bank supposedly holds the loot of a bunch of famous bank-robbing outlaws. Why, however, gangs like the James brothers would rob one bank and then trust the proceeds with another, is not answered. Texas Ranger Ben Quick (Clint Walker) has a feeling something is up in Friendly and is there to investigate.

Little does he know how much is up. Rev. Blue's group is, of course, there to rob the bank as well, with their plan being to tunnel under and blow their way into the vault during the Independence Day celebration and then get away with the gold somehow. Of course, they're going to have to stay one step ahead of the law but also one step ahead of the other robbers, who are going to feel aggrieved at having what they think should be "their" money stolen right out from under their noses.

The Great Bank Robbery is played for laughs, so there's a lot of comic styling in the reverend's plans to rob the bank as well as in their planned getaway, including using Sister Lyda to seduce Ben Quick. Complicating matters is the fact that Lyda finds herself legitimately falling in love with Ben.

It's fairly easy to surmise that The Great Bank Robbery was produced in part because there had been a spate of comic westerns in the 1960s as well as a spate of comic heist movies. Unfortunately, The Great Bank Robbery, coming at the end of both of these cycles, suffers greatly from being derivative. I'm also not the biggest fan of Zero Mostel, finding his humor much too broad, which is also a weakness of this movie. Instead of being genuinely funny, the whole thing comes across as the tiresome brand of zany. Ooh, let's have the climax be a hot-air balloon trying to flee the area! The movie is directed by Hy Averbaack, who worked mostly in television, and that shows, too.

Surprisingly, the screenplay is by William Peter Blatty of The Exorcist fame. The Great Bank Robbery does not rise to that level.

Several months before Black Sunday

Today's (August 28) star in TCM's Summer Under the Stars is Brock Peters. This gives me the chance to do a post on a movie that's been sitting on my DVR and I hadn't seen before. That movie, Two-Minute Warning, comes up in the wee hours of the overnight at 2:15 AM, which is technically August 29 on the east coast although technically very late on August 28 if you're in the Pacific time zone and only have the east coast feed.

The movie starts off by sort of giving away something that's going to be the main plot point later in the movie. A man with a rifle and telescopic sight looks out a high window and sees a couple of bicyclists in what looks like a typical Southern California suburb. The man with the rifle then proceeds to shoot one of the cyclists dead. We don't see the shooter, which is a good thing as it adds suspense to the movie.

Cut to the Los Angeles Coliseum. "Championship X", the big football game is going to be held there the coming weekend. We do get Howard Cosell and Frank Gifford, although nothing closer than that to the NFL because they didn't permit the use of any of their properties for Two-Minute Warning the way they would for Black Sunday which was released a few months later. (I don't know the full production schedule for both movies. It's possible the NFL had agreed with pre-production on Black Sunday and didn't want to be involved in two movies with similar themes.) Brock Peters works at the Coliseum in maintenance and security, looking after the Dobermans who are partly responsible for security.

But, before the game, we have to be introduced to the requisite character types, much like any other disaster movie. Among them are a family man, Mike Ramsay (Beau Bridges) and his wife and kid; a husband and wife (David Janssen and Gena Rowlands); a pickpocket (a very elderly Walter Pidgeon a few years after Harry in Your Pocket); and Stu (Jack Klugman), a gambler who's heavily in debt but thinks he can make it back by betting on the big game. Oh, Stu also winds sitting next to a Catholic priest (Mitchell Ryan) at the game because the priest knows one of the quarterbacks.

The big football game has always had security although back in the 1970s it wasn't quite as tight as it is today. Sam McKeever (Martin Balsam) manages the Coliseum, and has the local police precinct run by Capt. Holly (Charlton Heston). Meawhile, since the sniper already killed that cyclist, we've got the SWAT team out looking for the sniper. They're headed up by Sgt. Button (John Cassavetes), and for obvious reasons wind up at the Coliseum too.

That's because the sniper, seen only in long shots until the very end of the movie, has holed up behind the scoreboard at the top of the Coliseum tower where the Olympic flame would have been in 1932 and 1984. Eventually Mike Ramsay looks through his binoculars and spots the sniper, who has also already been spotted by people in the control booth since they've got shots from the Goodyear blimp above. At this point, it's not known if the sniper has a particular target, which isn't entirely unlikely since there was talk of some elected officials showing up; or whether the sniper just wants to kill random people the way he did with the cyclist. And when is the guy going to start shooting?

Two-Minute Warning is a movie which has some decided problems, in large part down to the lack of character development. Nobody gets to be much more than a stock character, and we have no real reason to care about any of the fans. On the other hand, the main idea of the story is a good one, and fairly well executed. The plot device of not giving the sniper any discernable motive, and not showing him until the very end, is an inspired move that I thought heightened the suspense.

Two-Minute Warning is an overlooked and underrated movie in the disaster film genre of the 1970s, but one that works well despite the one-dimensional characters.

James Barton

I've mentioned a lot how I think Warner Bros. made some really fun B movies, while B movies from other studios aren't quite as good. This is a bit true of MGM which has the whole MGM gloss that makes the B movies look a bit artificual. In the case of RKO, it feels more like the ideas are lacking. I couldn't help but think of that as I watched His Family Tree.

James Barton, who was apparently a vaudeville dancer, stars as Patrick Murphy, a former boatswain who now runs a pub of that name in Ireland. His son emigrated to the States, and is living in the sort of small city -- this time in Iowa -- that features a lot in movies of the 1930s. Supposedly they're small, but they've got so much of everything that you wonder how the US could have so many such cities with a population about 40% what it is today. But the bigger point is that Patrick's son Charles (William Harrigan) hasn't written to Dad in a while, so Dad decides that he's going to go over to Iowa to look up his son and see what the deal is.

Charles seems to have done reasonably well for himself, with a wife Maggie and daughter Elinor who is engaged to be married to one of the wealthier guys in town. The good government types even want Charles to run for mayor against long-time mayor Holtsapple (Ferdinand Munier), who isn't quite as corrupt as the local politicians in other movies, but is definitely the villain of the piece if there is one. Apparently the election is set to come down to which candidate the fourth ward comes down to, led by Irish-American community leader Nellie Oulihan (Maureen Delaney).

And herein lies part of the rub. Charles, when he came to Iowa, changed his name the way a lot of immigrants did. Except that he made up a bogus story to go along with the name change to Murfree (not much disguise there) that involves having a family in Murfreesboro, Tennessee that goes back generations. Now this was only seven years or so after Al Smith lost the presidential election, so maybe small cities in the midwest still weren't ready for an Irish Catholic mayor. But for whatever reason, it's decided that the idea that Murfree isn't Charles' original name is something that's totally going to sink his election chances, which you'd think he would have told his backers before running. And having one's Irish father come over certainly wouldn't help in that regard.

But Patrick is Movie Stereotype Irish, the guy who's got a charming brogue and Irish jig and all that goes with that, along with being able to bring everybody over to his son's side regardless of whether the thing about Charles having changed his name is true. Mayor Holtsapple and his campaign managers see this, and realize that the only way they're going to win is to stop Patrick from campaigning for his son, using force if necessary.

I've also stated before on a couple of occasions that I find Hollywood's doe-eyed view of Ireland to be detrimental to films because of the treacly attitude it induces, but that's not the big problem with His Family Tree. Instead, it's that the script is so unintelligent and unoriginal that I found myself rolling my eyes at it all. People who are interested in seeing what James Barton was all about may enjoy the couple of scenes where he gets to do his dance routine, but the movie as a whole doesn't quite hold up.

Ivan the Terrible, Part I

Two of the foreign films sitting on my DVR are the two parts of Sergei Eisenstein's proposed three-part film on the first Tsar of All Russia, Ivan the Terrible. Only two parts were completed in part because Eisenstein died and in part because of the political reaction to the second part. Recently, I watched Ivan the Terrible, Part I.

To understand this film requires a bit of an understanding of Russian history. Before about the middle of the 16th century, Russia was rulled by a bunch of local princes along with noblemen called boyars. This internal conflict left Russia weak and subject to predation by various forces on its borders including Poland, Baltic Sea kingdoms, and the Muslim khanate of Kazan in what is now central Russia. In 1547, the teenaged Ivan rises to the throne of the principality of Moscow and pretty much crowns himself Tsar of All Russia, a move that understandably creates a whole bunch of political enemies. Russia was also, at this time, despite being Christian, very much not western compared to the rest of Europe; it wasn't really until Peter the Great went to Holland to study shipbuilding that Russia really began to become more westernized.

To deal with all of this, Ivan needs to do a bunch of things. One is to try to ally himself with the Orthodox Church and the common peasants against the boyars and competing princes. Another is to get himself married and set about creating an heir to the throne. The third is to try to unite Russia, for which a common enemy would do nicely. Thankfully for him, the wedding celebration is interrupted by envoys from Kazan. It seems that Kazan is planning to attack Moscow again, and this is the declaration of war.

Ivan is no dummy, and decides that the best defense is to attack himself, so he besieges Kazan and blows up the fortress from below, earning him a major military and political victory as well as gaining some key allies among the people who served under him. However, there's still quite a bit of opposition from the boyars, as they're going to be throughout Ivan's life. Ivan nearly dies but miraculously recovers, earning himself more allies.

But there's still opposition, including quite close to him in the form of his aunt who is plotting to poison his wife. And she actually succeeds. This emboldens the boyars, and Ivan eventually announces that he's going to go away from Moscow for a while to regroup, gather his strength with the peasants and other people allied to him, and return to Moscow triumphant. Since there's a second movie in the Ivan the Terrible story, the first one ends on a rather uncertain note.

As I watched Ivan the Terrible, Part I, released in early 1945 and filmed in 1943 and 1944, I couldn't help but think of how the movie mirrors the situation Russia was facing against Germany at the height of World War II. Indeed, Eisenstein had to decamp to Central Asia to film much of this. But more relevant here is how Eisenstein was able to make a hagiographic movie about the first Tsar against the repressive dictatorship of Joseph Stalin. Indeed, it's quite easy to look at this and argue that a case is being made for the idea of a present-day leader with an iron fist. The need to unite all the principalities is also a natural parallell to the need to unite the Soviet people against Germany.

Although I have mostly positives for this movie, there are some negatives to note, which is notably in the stilted dialogue. Eisenstein was moving away from the sort of realistic storytelling which was common in Hollywood and commercial films, instead focusing on a style that has a lot of closeups. I wonder whether part of the dialog issue is also because of the backdrop of medieval Russia and also liturgical Russian.

Holiday (1930)

I mentioned earlier in August the birth anniversary of actress Ann Harding, and how I'd come across the 1930 version of Holiday on Tubi. As it turns out, it was still there, so I finally watched it.

Now you may know the more famous 1938 version of Holiday, which I blogged about back in 2015. This earlier version has pretty much the same plot, which I suppose is unsurprising. As the movie opens, Johnny Case (Robert Ames) is being brought home to the house of Julia Seton (Mary Astor). The two of them had met on a ski vacation up in Lake Placid, and Johnny proposed to Julia knowing little about her background. Now, it turns out that Julia is fabulously wealthy, as the older daughter of banker Edward Seton (the original William Holden, not the one from films like Stalag 17). Julia has a younger daughter Linda (Ann Harding), and a cynical alcoholic brother Ned (Monroe Owsley). Julia isn't quite so certain how to break the news of her engagement to Dad, since he's morally traditional, and this sort of quick engagement is anything but.

Linda offers to help, largely because she's the one person in the family who is decidedly not stuffy, and resents the sort of buttoned-down upbringing that Dad and his social class represent. To Linda it's stultifying and takes away one's individuality. So she sees Johnny as a breath of fresh air, especially because considering taking a sort of sabbatical before finally settling down to life, again the sort of thing that Mr. Seton would find shocking.

We can see just how square Dad is when Linda announces she wants to hold a small party up in what had been the children's play-room, with an intimate dinner for a few of Linda and Julia's friends, just calling them up. She specifically mentions not having engraved invitations, so what do we see in the next shot? You guessed it, an egraved invitation. Linda brings the few bohemian friends she has, Prof. Potter (Edward Everet Horton) and his wife (Hedda Hopper), and sulks up in the play-room, for good reason.

Now, at this point, it starts to become clear that Mr. Seton isn't going to be such a good influence on Johnny, either. Where Johnny wants to take a sabbatical, having worked hard in regular work to get to where he is, Dad wants him to join the family business and use the honeymoon to go to Europe to network with some of Dad's influential friends in the worlds of politics and high finance. Johnny begins to chafe, and you get the feeling that he might be better suited going off with Linda. Not that Linda would do such a thing to Julia. She genuinely likes her sister.

The Linda character is at the heart of the biggest differences between the two versions of the movie. In the remake, Linda was played by Katharine Hepburn, who was exactly the right person for the role. Hepburn could be obnoxious in a movie like Bringing Up Baby or getting her comeuppance in The Philadelphia Story, but since the character is supposed to be a rebellious free spirit, that sort of acting from Hepburn works. Ann Harding's Linda is much more the sort of person who's suffered in silence and is only now finally going to stand up for herself, even if she doesn't quite know how to do it. It's a different portrayal, and Harding does a good job, but the way Hepburn played it makes the movie much more lively.

Not that the Ann Harding version of Holiday is bad by any means. It's more that the remake is one of the all-time classics, while this version is a good movie that has the unfortunate luck of having been made at a time when movie makers were still figuring out sound along with having to compare to the remake.

Briefs for August 25-26, 2026

I apologize for the posting schedule last week that was a bit screwed up. As I've posted on a bunch of occasions, ever since moving house and getting high-speed internet that allowed me to do streaming stuff back in 2023, I've been getting ahead in terms of scheduling posts. Last week saw Marie Windsor's day in Summer Under the Stars, and I put up a post on one of her movies, Mail Order Bride, that was airing that day. However, as I wrote more posts, I started scheduling them after the post on Mail Order Bride, not realizing that I had a couple of days where I had no posts scheduled. I think as of right now I'm good for about the next three weeks, unless I come across something that I haven't noticed is airing and is on my DVR, in which case I might wind up juggling posts around.

The TCM September schedule is out in full, and I've already found several movies in the second half of September that are on my DVR. I think that's enough where I shouldn't be juggling stuff around. On the other hand, someone famous could die -- I actually have a couple of posts written up on movies related to some seriously old people whose death notices I haven't come across yet and have been saving them in draft for that morbid occasion. To be fair, legitimate news outlets have obituaries for famous people ready to go just in case.

Speaking of that Shelley Fabares died over the weekend at the age of 82. She was in multiple films with Elvis Presley, although she's better known for her TV work. I actually went to my YouTube TV cloud DVR because I thought I had Girl Happy on it. I haven't posted about Girl Happy, and as it turns out the Elvis movie sitting on my DVR is Girls! Girls! Girls! which was the subject of a post 2½ years ago. Oops.

The Paramount/WB saga is still going on; for some reason I thought the merger/buyout had been called off. Or maybe it was another of the proposed buyers backing out. The merger ideas have been going on long enough and there have been enough proposals that it's easy to mix them up. And it's not as if I'm paying particularly close attention to it. But the news now is that A bunch of state Attorneys-General want their pound of flesh and are grandstanding about it. I'd think the barriers to entry are lower than they've ever been, but then you have to remember that politicians find it easier to control a couple of large market players than a system with a whole bunch of small players. The big players also have less of a problem with regulation than you might think since they can handle the regulation for the most part while it's that barrier to entry for newcomers. So I'll sit back and largely not pay close attention to what's going on until it has a more direct impact on me.

And in more FXM programming notes, today's Retro block concludes with Alien at 1:00 PM, which in itself is not terribly interesting because it's been in the Retro lineup before and I blogged about it almost five years back. However, Alien is followed by the commercial half of the lineup which includes the rest of the movies in the Alien series, starting with Aliens at 3:00 PM and going through to Alien vs. Predator: Requiem at midnight. Or at least, that's the last one they're showing and it's nearly 20 years old; I can't recall whehter there have been any since as I don't go to the movie theater very often. The one thing I do find curious is that I can't recall Aliens being in the Retro block. It was released in 1986, and the Retro block has certainly had stuff more recent than that show up. It's also 40 years old, which is getting to be plenty old enough. For me, I think the first movie less than 40 years old I posted about was Yours, Mine, and Ours, subject of a February 2008 post, which would have made it about two months shy of 40. If not that, than the spelling bee documentary Spellbound. And consider that when TCM was launched, 40 years old would only have been 1954. On the Waterfront would have been less than 40 years old as it was released in July 1954.

Seven Miles from Alcatraz

The star for tomorrow, August 25 on TCM's Summer Under the Stars is Bonita Granville. Once again, I happen to have a movie of hers on my DVR that's showing up in the day and that I haven't blogged about before That movie is Seven Miles from Alcatraz, at 2:45 PM, so in order to be able to do a post on it before it airs, I watched it, which means that again you get a post on an upcoming movie.

Alcatraz, was, of course, famously used as a prison on an island in the middle of San Francisco Bay, a body of water with a lot of shipping traffic and difficult waters so they need a lighthouse too, although that's on a different island. Meanwhile, there's a war going on even though none of the prisoners are doing their part for America by fighting in it. Indeed, one of the prisoners, Champ Larkin (James Craig), is worried that San Francisco Bay is just the place for the Japanese to bomb, meaning there's a good chance a stray bomb or missile could his Alcatraz. Champ is having none of that, so he decides he's going to break out of the most secure prison in all of the United States.

And wouldn't you know it, but pretty much in the very next scene, Champ and his fellow prisoner Jimbo (Frank Jenks) are escaping and are able to evade all the patrol boats. They don't make it to the mainland, however, instead washing ashore on the island with the lighthouse. The lighthouse keeper, Captain Porter (George Cleveland), lives there with his daughter Anne (Bonita Granville). Also working at the lighthouse is a radioman, Brenner (Erford Gage), and the custodian Stormy (Cliff Edwards). Champ and Jimbo break in and immediately set about holding the four hostage, although there's the issue that Brenner is supposed to call in at a certain time as part of his duties. Not doing so would certainly be noticed by the authorities.

On the other hand, what the Porters and the two criminals have no idea of is that Brenner is actually working with Nazis to send and receive coded messages. There's a pair of Nazis aboard a U-boat, as well as a "baroness" on the mainland who has a whole group of fifth columnists around her, because of course there's always one ringleader with a bunch of supporters in movies like this. Anyhow, the message Brenner has been sending is that that ringleader has targeting information that will allow the Nazis to target the coast better, and needs to rendezvous with the Nazis on the U-boat to give them that information.

Now, this being a World War II movie from Hollywood, you know that the two prisoners are going to have a change of heart and be instrumental in foiling the Nazis' diaboloical scheme. But it's also an RKO B movie, which means that it's all done in a shade over an hour with RKO's lesser production values. Seven Miles from Alcatraz is a fun enough premise, if one that would be done dozens of times over the course of the war. The script is a bit of a mess to the point I was wondering whether the Porters would turn out to be part of the Nazi ring, too.