Father of the Bride (1991)

Tonight and next Monday, TCM is running a two-night salute to comic actor Steve Martin. As it turns out, one of the movies that they're running is on my DVR thanks to my having recorded it during TCM's memorial tribute to Diane Keaton back at the end of January: Father of the Bride, which comes on tonight at midnight (so Technically May 12 in the Eastern time zone but the evening of May 11 in more westerly time zones).

Now, as you can probably guess, this is a remake of the 1950 film Father of the Bride starring Spencer Tracy as the father and Elizabeth Taylor as the bride. Indeed, the screenwriters on the original, Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, get a writing credit here too. This time, it's Steve Martin as the father George Banks, with the late Diane Keaton as George's wife Nina. The two of them have a happy life in a Los Angeles suburb where George manages a comapny that makes athletic shoes. They've got a surprise baby who's now eight or nine (played by a young Kieran Culkin), as well as an adult daughter Annie (Kimberly Williams), who up until a few months ago was studying architecture in Rome for her master's degree. But the movie opens up with George doing a voiceover just after the wedding ended, and with the title, it's fairly obvious that the wedding is going to take place.

So we get the flashback to the day Annie returns from Rome. At the dinner table, she's got a big surprise for her father. While in Rome, she met a nice man who works as a "communications consultant". The two fell in love and have gotten engaged, which is a pretty big shock to Dad, who doesn't yet seem ready to "lose" his daughter to whom he's devoted in the way that fathers are to their daughters. Unsurprisingly, Dad also expects the worst as Annie's fiancé Bryan (George Newbern) comes over for a visit.

We're told from George's opening narration that everything's taken place over about four months, so we get the preparations for the wedding in a way that displays the truth of Murphy's Law: anything that can go wrong will. Annie and Nina want the best to the point of hiring a wedding planner Franck (Martin Short) who's an extreme parody. Franck's suggestions result in the price of the wedding going up and up to a point that seems a bit expensive even for today, not that I've priced out a wedding and reception recently. Bryan's parents are also wealthier than the Banks, which at least in George's mind creates a bit of conflict. And as in the original, there's even a point where Annie thinks of breaking off the engagement because she thinks Bryan has disrespected her.

As I said a few paragraphs ago, we already know from the beginning that the wedding is going to go ahead, and it seems as though everybody is going to live happily ever after, so the conflict of the plot, such as it is, involves exactly how we get to the joyous occasion and the reception. It's been an age since I've watched the original, but there are enough minor differences between the two versions.

I have to say that of the two, I think I prefer the original. They're both supposed to be comedies, but with Spencer Tracy leading the original, it's more of a gentle comedy. Steve Martin is certainly talented, but with his known quantity as a comedian, the result is something that often plays as a bit more zany. That's not necessarily bad, but I personally like the gentleness of the original more. The other thing in the remake that I think is a bit of a weakness is the enlargement of Martin Short's character. He's certainly a talented actor too, but Short is really overplaying his character.

Still, there's definitely a lot to enjoy about this version of Father of the Bride, and certainly anybody who's been through a wedding recently is going to like it.

I think we can guess who the beauty is

Red Skelton was TCM's Star of the Month back in 2025, and I recorded several of his movies. I don't think I got around to watching all of them before they expired, but since he worked at MGM his movies show up often enough on TCM. One such film is the star-making turn for Esther Williams: Bathing Beauty.

Bathing Beauty was made when Red Skelton was still the bigger star, so we get him first in the credits and the story is more about his character. Skelton plays Steve Elliot, a Los Angeles-based songwriter about to get married to college swimming instructor Caroline Brooks (that's Esther Williams, as if you couldn't tell). Steve talks to Caroline about starting a new life after getting married and finishing up his current job of writing a musical for producer George Adams (Basil Rathbone). George is none too happy about this, so he comes up with a way to scupper the marriage by claiming that Steve is already married to somebody else and producing that fake wife. With that, Caroline leaves him and goes back to her college back on the other coast.

Unsurprisingly, Steve wants to put things right, and follows her back to the college in New Jersey where she teaches, accompanied by singer Carlos Ramirez, who is clearly only in the script because the movie was made in early 1944 during the "Good Neighbor" policy with Latin America. However, the two men are blocked from entering campus because Caroline teaches at an all-girls' school. But this is a comedy, so we have to have a way for Steve and Caroline to end up in close proximity under odd circumstances. That happens when Steve meets one of the trustees and learns that the charter hasn't officially delared the college an all-girls' school. So Steve tries to enroll and, since the trustees can't legally stop him, come up with a way to admit him but with a plan to get him expelled for demerits.

Much of the rest of the movie deals with Steve's attempts to get back to Caroline, who is also being pursued by a botany professor Willis (Bill Goodwin), along with the comic predicaments the only male student at an all-girls' school is bound to get himself into. One such involves Steve's having to do ballet, in a skit that Skelton would reuse in the movie The Clown. There's also a whole bunch of musical numbers, including Harry James and his orchestra, along with Xavier Cugat and his orchestra. Oh, there's that Good Neighbor policy again. As you might guess with a movie like this, the film climaxes with an aquacade, along with Steve and Caroline winding up together at the end of the movie.

Bathing Beauty is one of those movies that was made in part as a morale-booster; indeed, the movie ends with a card mentioning that movies like this were also being sent overseas to entertain the troops who were off fighting the war against Germany and Japan. As such, the plot doesn't particularly matter here. Don't try to pay too close attention to the plot because that's not the point. Instead, the movie is more about the musical numbers along with the final big swimming number, along with Skelton's comic antics. The Technicolor is vibrant here, especially for that final aquacade. It's easy to see watching Bathing Beauty why it was a box office hit and the sort of movie that would get sent abroad to cheer up the troops.

If you're interested in Hollywood history, Bathing Beauty is a good entry into the phenomenon that was Esther Williams.

TCM schedule heads-up

Tomorrow is Mother's Day, and as always TCM is running a number of movies that are appropriate for the occasion. As usual, that includes another showing of Mildred Pierce, at 12:15 PM, which seems to be the one constant that shows up every single Mother's Day.

Another movie that shows up quite a bit is I Remember Mama. Indeed, it was originally scheduled to be on in prime time tomorrow night. Unfortunately, Ted Turner died earlier this week, and TCM has scheduled one of the quicker memorial tributes out there. Apparently Ted Turner's favorite movie was Gone With the Wind, which would also make sense as to why it was the first movie TCM ran when it went on the air back in 1994. So TCM is running Gone With the Wind at 8:00 PM tomorrow, along with a tribute that was given to Turner at the TCM Classic Film Festival some years back.

Three more musketeers

I've got a couple of movies from FXM that I hadn't seen before and was planning on blogging about the next time they came up. Now, as it turns, out, one, The Lieutenant Wore Skirts, is a movie I did blog about back in about 2018. But I know that I had not seen the 1939 Fox version of The Three Musketeers before. This one is getting another airing tomorrow, May 10, at 4:45 AM, so once again, now's the time to put up the post about it.

The movie informs us right from the start that this is a musical comedy version of Alexandre Dumas' famous story. Don Ameche plays D'Artagnan, the adult son of a Musketeer in the 1620s France of king Louis XIII (Joseph Schildkraut). D'Artagnan lives in Gascony in southwestern France, but is making his way to Paris in order to become one of the King's Musketeers. Along the way, he meets a couple of the Musketeers who aren't in uniform and pisses them all off to the point that he challenges them to duels in Paris.

So all three of them, who just happen to be Athos, Porthos, and Aramis, show up at the appointed place, at the same time: an inn/tavern where the proprietor seems to be off for the night and three dim-witted workers, played by 1930s comic team the Ritz Brothers, are running the place. The Musketeers challenge these men, whose characters are listed in the closing credits as Three Lackeys, to drink to every King Louis that France has had. Thanks to their incompetence, the lackeys spill most of their wine while the Musketeers get blackout drunk, prompting the lackeys to change into the much nicer Musketeer outfits. This is also how D'Artagnan finds the lackeys when he shows up, and since D'Artagnan wanted to be a Musketeer himself, he joins them, or has them join him.

Meanwhile, there's that palace intrigue going on that you might recall if you've seen a more serious movie version of the story. Cardinal Richelieu (Miles Mander) is the King's prime minister, but is trying to amass more power by having his own private security force that is working on diminishing the power of the Musketeers who, in Richelieu's mind, are too prone to random violence. There's also the matter of relations with England. Her Majesty the Queen Anne (Gloria Stuart) had been carrying on an affair with the Duke of Buckingham, and gave him a brooch to remember her by when he had to go back to England. Richelieu is pretty certain of this thanks to his spies among the court such as the Milday de Winter (Binnie Barnes).

Meanwhile, D'Artagnan and the lackeys meet Lady Constance (Pauline Moore), another of the Queen's ladies-in-waiting, who is the one who gets D'Artagnan involved in retrieving the brooch for the Queen since D'Artagnan is clearly more of a stauch supporter of the royals and not Richeliu. Along the way Don Ameche gets to sing some songs while the Ritz Brothers do their slapstick routines.

This version of The Three Musketeers is less about the Dumas story and more about the songs along with the Ritz Brothers' shtick. Whether you like the movie is going to depend in good part on what you think of the Ritzes, who are a decidedly dated sort of comedy. It also doesn't help that poor Don Ameche is saddled with some subpar songs. I'm reminded of the I Love Lucy episode where Lucy and Ethel write a song for a Camelot number Ricky wants to do, and come up with terribly inane lyrics. However, I think the movie as a whole is just more forgettable than actually bad. It's only a brief 72 minutes, so more programmer-length than ponderous prestige movie. And of course some people may actually enjoy the Ritz Brothers.

Another pirate movie

Some time back I did a post on one of the MGM historical mystery shorts, Captain Kidd's Treasure. I mentioned at the time that I had a different movie Captain Kidd, on my DVR, uncertain whether I had seen it before. I watched it, and in fact had not seen it, so now we get a post on it.

Charles Laughton stars as the famed pirate William Kidd. As the movie opens, it's 1699, and Kidd is on a ship not far off the coast of Madagascar, having turned to piracy because his privateer work has come to naught leaving him heavily in debt. (At least, that's the real-life William Kidd, the movie legends play fast and loose with the facts.) Kidd and his men sink a British ship called the Twelve Apostles, and bury the treasure on one of the islands off of Madagascar. However, one of Kidd's men chafes a bit under Kidd's leadership, and gets shot for his trouble simply because Kidd is that brutal of a man.

Kidd returns to London, with a crew including Orange Povy (John Carradine) and Jose Lorenzo (Gilbert Roland). Kidd's plan is to ingratiate himself with the king, William III, in the hopes of getting a new ship and going out ostensibly in the King's service, but with the real intention of returning to piracy as well as getting to that island to get the booty from the Twelve Apostles. To that end, he needs to pass himself off as a gentleman, hiring the valet Shadwell (Reginald Owen).

The King buys Kidd's assertion that the captain of the Twevle Apostles was an actual pirate, and grants a commission to Kidd. Kidd goes to various prisons to round up a crew, seeing as most other men wouldn't want to go to sea if they could avoid it and condemned prisoners would be more likely to take up the job with the prospect of a pardon coming at the end of the tour at sea. They've got nothing to lose, after all. However, one of the prisoners seems a bit odd. Adam Mercy (Randolph Scott) is, among other things, able to write, and doesn't talk like the people of the social classes that make up the rest of the crew.

Out at sea, Mercy both ingratiates himself to Kidd and tries to spy, telling Kidd when he's caught out that His Majesty obviously wanted a representative on board to make certain everything is on the up and up. If something were to happen to Mercy, it could be bad news for Kidd. How much of that story is true is, well, something you'll have to watch to the end of the movie to find out. Meanwhile, Kidd is already plotting to kill the other men who were with him when they buried the treasure off of Madagascar.

In the Indian Ocean, Kidd's men destroy another British ship, although this one comes with more booty than just the traditional treasure. There's a good looking woman, Lady Anne (Barbara Britton), whose father was on board as the ambassador to one of the rajes in India looking to curry favor with King William. Lady Anne has the feeling she's seen Mercy before, while Kidd gets a stronger feeling Adam isn't what he seems or has claimed to be. Now, we know that the real-life Captain Kidd was hanged for his crims, so he's likely not going to get away with his perfidy here.

I have no idea how much of this version of Captain Kidd is real. From what I've read of Kidd's life, some names from Kidd's real life are used here, but that seems to be the extent of the basis in reality. But regardless of that lack of reality, Captain Kidd is entertaining enough, thanks to a production that knows how to get a lot out of a little, along with a pretty good cast. Laughton overacts, although that works here because Kidd is in many ways a larger-than-life figure. Scott isn't exactly British, but is OK with what he's asked to do here.

There are higher quality seafaring movies out there, but if you're looking to be entertained, Captain Kidd will fill the bill.

Här har du ditt liv

I've mentioned a couple of times how I have a tendency to record enough foreign films that I don't quite get around to watching all of them until they're just about to expire from my YouTube TV cloud DVR. One night of TCM Imports included a pair of Swedish films, and I finally watched one of them: Here Is Your Life, from director Jan Troell.

The movie opens up around 1916. Olof (Eddie Axberg, who would appear in Troell's later films The Emigrants and The New Land) is a boy of around 14 in northern Sweden who has been forced to enter the working world because his father has some sort of terminal illness. Olof gets a job with a bunch of rather older men in forestry, specifically getting logs downstream to the lumber mills. It's difficult work and the sort of thing that led to industrial accidents and workers dying. Olof eventually takes a job in the mill part of forestry, and this time one of the workers is even younger, a boy named Oskar who really shouldn't be doing this work except that a good portion of rural Sweden was still poor enough that families had to send their children into work like this. Poor Oskar gets seriously injured when a pile of logs falls on him, and he later dies in hospital although we don't see the actual death.

In any case, all of this gets Olof to take a new job, especially since he's been doing some reading and shows some aptitude for intelligence even though he obviously hasn't had a lot of traditional schooling. That job is in a small town at a movie theater, although it's not a custom-built theater but the sort of space that would have been converted from something else into showing movies. Olof's job is to put up handbills for the coming attractions, as well as take tickets and sell snacks. If he's good enough, he might even be able to get a promotion to become a projectionist. This is also where Olof meets his first girl, although his love life, such as it is, isn't going to be straightforward. Olof also meets a socialist, although my reading of the timeline of the movie is that the October Revolution of 1917 in Russia had not yet taken place.

Olof's next job is indeed as a projectionist, although it's not with the theater he started at, but with an itinerant theater that sets up shop wherever it can. One stop is with a traveling circus, and it's there that Olof meets the woman who runs the shooting gallery. This too is going to be a complicated relationship. Olof eventually gets another job with Swedish Railways, which is a state-owned enterprise. That's worth mentioning since Olof is getting more heavily into socialism and workers' rights, railing against capitalism. He and his friend at the railway discuss getting the workers to strike as an anti-capitalist move, even though the railway is technically a socialist outfit. Olof goes on like this, until the movie ultimately ends with no clear resolution.

Then again, Here Is Your Life isn't a traditionally-plotted movie, but a coming-of-age story about one character, which is partly why I didn't mention the actors playing the other characters. Max von Sydow does appear, although I didn't recognize him. Axberg does a good job, and the cinematography is also quite good. However, I have to criticize the film for having a very slow pace and a way-too-long running time, at 160-some minutes. Either the movie should have been written to run into something under two hours, or it should have been conceived as something episodic like a TV miniseries. The adventures of Olof might work as a multiple-part miniseries, or what would nowadays be a limited series, but not as quite so well when it's one movie running close to three hours.

The Day They Robbed the Bank of England

Some time back, I mentioned how I had recorded The Day They Robbed the Bank of England off a TCM showing. Unfortunately, there was a technical issue with the recording such that the sound was not in sync with the video, making it unwatchable. It eventually aired again and the DVR picked it up. This time there didn't seem to be any issue with the synching, so I was able to watch it and write up this post.

The movie opens with an expository presentation about how the Bank of England had some hidebound traditions about guarding the currency, and the use of royal guardsmen to accompany the gold bullion that ended up in the vaults. We then go back to London at the turn of the century. Ireland was still controlled in its entirety by the UK government, although even at this time there were people advocating for Home Rule, which was a sort of autonomy (see the Clark Gable movie Parnell), as well as people who might be more willing to engage in violent means to achieve complete Irish independence from the UK. O'Shea (Hugh Griffith), the leader of one such revolutionary cell, has come up with an audacious plan to help the Irish independence movement.

O'Shea's plan is to rob a bunch of that gold out of the vaults. For one thing, that gold is worth quite a bit, and that would definitely finance the independence movement. But there's also the big political statement it would make if Irish revolutionaries could steal gold right out from under the government's noses. But they need expertise and people who wouldn't be suspected by the British. To that end, O'Shea sent Iris Muldoon (Elizabeth Sellars) over to the US to recruit, and she's picked up Charles Norgate (Aldo Ray), a mining engineer. This is a profession that has multiple advantages. One is us an explosives expert, while a second is in dealing with tight spaces and the spatial relations of mapping things underneath the bank. There's no real way they're getting past the guards, so they're going to have to tunnel.

Of course, simply tunneling right now isn't good enough. Norgate begins what is essentially a circa-1900 version of a phishing operation. He tries to get information from the bank officers, although you couldn't just open up a bank account at the Bank of England in those days. He also befriends Lt. Finch (Peter O'Toole in an early role), an officer in the guards who guard the vaults, although of course Finch doesn't really have a clue of Northgate's real intent. Northgate also passes himself off as an architect to get people to give him information about the construction of the bank and the vaults, although the actual plans of the vaults are kept under lock and key.

To get those plants, Northgate gets help from Walsh (Kieron Moore), another member of the cell. Walsh has a thing for Muldoon, not realizing that she and Northgate had a romantic relationship during their time in the States. They've got other reasons to be in conflict, so when the time comes to actually go into the sewers and get to the location from where they're going to dig into the vaults, there's debate over how to proceed. This gets more complicated when there's a twist of the Home Rule bill being reintroduced to Parliament. Go ahead with the robbery now and there's no way the bill is getting passed.

The Day They Robbed the Bank of England is one of those heist movies where there's quite a bit of time spent on building up the preparation of how the heist is going to be carried off. And, much like the later The Great Train Robbery, it's got the added interest of being a period piece. Unfortunately, The Day They Robbed the Bank of England doesn't quite have the budget or location shooting of the later movie, so while it's certainly adequate, it also feels like there's something missing. I think you'll enjoy it, but at the same time it could have been better.

Audrey Hepburn, Native American?

Another of those movies that I recorded quite some time back and didn't get around to watching until not long before it expired from the DVR was the 1960 western The Unforgiven, which is of course not to be confused with the Clint Eastwood film Unforgiven. Anyhow, having watched it, I wrote up this post and saved it in drafts for some time when I didn't have other westerns coming up on TCM to do posts about.

The action opens with a panoramic view of a ranch somwhere in west Texas where the nearest civilization is Wichita, KS, or at least where Ben Zachary (Burt Lancaster) returns from. Before that, however, we see the only two people on the ranch at the current time are Rachel (Audrey Hepburn), adopted kid sister of Ben, and their mother Mattilda (Lillian Gish). The camera also pans to a grave stone, which is that of the patriarch, Will Zachary, who was killed by the Kiowa.

And then a strange old guy named Abe Kelsey (Joseph Wiseman) shows up, claiming that Audrey was actually stolen from the Kiowa and adopted by the Zacharys, which might have something to do with why they wanted to kill Will and why Mattilda is ticked with the presence of this man. Meanwhile, the family is working with another family in the area, the Rawlins family. They're headed by patriarch Zeb (Charles Bickford), and have a son Charlie (Albert Salmi) who is thinking of courting Rachel. Kelsey shows up again now that Ben Zachary is back, and this time Ben ticks off Kelsey. Enough so that he starts telling anybody else who will listen the story of Rachel's supposed provenance. That, and he gets a couple of Kiowa to show up at the Zachary place, looking to buy Rachel from the family, a sort of bride price if you will, except that this man says he's actually Rachel's brother.

Best, I suppose, that they marry Rachel off now, and give Charlie permission to court Rachel. For this Charlie gets himself shot by the Kiowa, not that he's actually guilty of anything. But it gets the rest of the Rawlins family pissed at the Zachary family, especially Charlie's mom who gets to have one of those big emotional scenes cursing Rachel and the rest of the Zacharys. Making matters worse is that a posse goes out to catch Kelsey, and when they catch him and bring him back, Mattilda and Ben basically engage in vigilante justice which gets Zeb to believe that the story about Rachel is actually true.

The Kiowa show up again demanding Rachel, who really ought to be allowed to make the decision herself since she's now an adult. But instead Ben and brother Andy kill one of the Kiowa, who respond by laying siege to the Zachary homestead. It's a siege they ought to be able to win because they've got time and numbers on their side. But the Zacharys seem willing to fight to the last man, and woman.

The Unforgiven was produced by Burt Lancaster's production company and suffered a troubled production including Audrey Hepburn falling off a horse and the original director being replaced by John Huston. Huston and Lancaster apparently clashed over the artistic vision of the movie, and I think it shows somewhat in a movie that takes some odd twists and turns tht don't always work. Everybody's professional and the movie is visually nice to look at for the most part, but there's always this feeling that something isn't quite right here.

Still, even though The Unforgiven is a bit of a misfire, it's an interesting misfire.

High School graduation

Tonight's lineup on TCM is a night of movies set in and around the end of one's time at high school. One of the movies happens to be on my DVR, so I watched it to be able to put up this post. That movie is Andy Hardy's Private Secretary, airing early tomorrow (May 5) morning at 4:00 AM, or still in the overnight hours depending upon your perspective and time zone.

Mickey Rooney returns as Andy Hardy, together with his father Judge Hardy (Lewis Stone), mother (Fay Holden) and English teacher Aunt Milly (Sara Haden), although his sister is absent from this installment of the series. As the movie opens, the Judge is ruling from the bench, called into his chambers because of a check with insufficient funds. As it turns out, that check was written by Andy, although Andy of course wasn't really trying to pass bad checks. Instead, Andy was trying to make up for insufficient funds elsewhere, but didn't have the money to rob Peter to pay Paul, as it were.

The original check was for the senior class' funds at Carvel. Graduation is coming up, and to deal with the expenses, the senior class has imposed a head tax on the seniors, not taking into account that perhaps there were students in Carvel who aren't so middle class like the Hardys and all their circle of society. Two such people are the Land twins, Kathryn (Kathryn Grayson) and Harry (Todd Karns). Indeed, the Lands are sort of not part of anybody's social circle in Carvel. Judge Hardy decides he's going to investigate of course, along with making certain that Andy starts to involve the two Land kids in the rest of his group of friends.

The Lands are not well off and new to Carvel because of the war raging over in Europe (the movie was released in early 1941, before the US was attacked at Pearl Harbor). Dad Steven Land (Ian Hunter) is a very bright man who can speak nine languages, and used those talents to set up a travel agency that facilitated rich people's travel once they got to wherever in Europe he was based at the time. But of course, World War II began in Europe and nobody wanted to travel and there weren't so many places safe for the Lands, so they returned to the US more or less broke.

Judge Hardy has influence, so he talks to one of his friends at the State Department. Steven Land's linguistic skills include Portuguese, and with the Good Neighbor policy, the State Department can use a man like Steven as part of one of their trade delegations. The only problem is, the delegation is leaving this Thursday, which is the day before the high school graduation. Kathryn and Harry are for some reason expected to follow their father to South America, which means they'd have to leave Thursday as well. Can't something at least be done to have the kids follow later, or better yet, start a life as adults here in the US?

Andy thinks he's doing a good deed by editing the telegram to Washington saying that the Lands are perfectly ready to leave for South America on Saturday. But since there's an entire delegation, and they're all leaving in unison, that's taken as an admission that Steven won't be taking the job, which promptly gets filled before Judge Hardy finds out what happens.

Meanwhile, there are Andy Hardy's own problems. He's on all the committees surrounding the graduation, with the result that he's stretched himself too thin. He needs help, and since Kathryn has been taking business courses it's suggested by Judge Hardy that Andy hire Kathryn on as a sort of secretary. Andy's traditional girlfriend Polly Benedict (Ann Rutherford) finds out and is none too pleased. But in addition to needing an assistant, Andy is doing so many extracurriculars that he neglects his studies to the point that he fails his English exam. This means that he's in danger of not graduating with the rest of his class.

Of course, this being a Hardy Family movie, you know that all of the personal problems are going to be resolved with all of the good people -- and there really aren't any bad guys in a movie like this -- getting the positive outcome they deserve. It's the sort of feel good movie that audiences were going to like in an era where there was still that war raging on "over there" without America, even if there was the worry that America was going to get involved. But in addition to that, Andy Hardy's Private Secretary was an opportunity for MGM to introduce its new star, Kathryn Grayson. She was more of a singer than an actress at this point, so MGM included a bunch of operatic musical numbers in the plot for Grayson to show off that operatic voice. What you think this does to the movie is probably going to depend on what you think of opera music in general.

With that in mind, I think I'd say that Andy Hardy's Private Secretary isn't particularly better or worse than the other movies in the series that I've seen; it's just got such different music that it'll influence your choice of which Hardy Family movie to watch.

Sky around the satellite

TCM's lineup for the daytime portion of tomorrow, May 4, is a bunch of 1950s science fiction. One of the movies is a film that's been sitting on my DVR, so once again I made the point of watching it in time for a post here on its upcoming TCM showing. That film is Satellite in the Sky, which airs at 7:30 AM tomorrow.

Satellite in the Sky is set in the UK, although Warner Bros. distributed it here in the US which gives the movie a bigger budget to work with. If you recall the movie The Right Stuff, before man got into outer space there was a bunch of test pilot stuff in planes that could break the sound barrier. The UK's scientists are doing similar stuff and have lost a couple of pilots, to the point that one of the commanders, Michael Hayden (Kieron Moore), plans to go up himself to make certain everything is safe in preparation for the first manned spaceflight.

Hayden's flight is successful, witnessed by the assembled press who kinda sorta know there's thoughts about going into outer space. Some of the reporters, however, aren't all that excited about the prospect because of their risk aversion, notably Kim Hamilton (Lois Maxwell). Worse, what the press doesn't know is that there's more to the mission than going into outer space. In a shocking bit of exposition, two of the higher-ups discuss these secret plans while they're in the same room as the reporters! Massive breach of security. And it's not going to be the last.

Anyhow, the War Department has the idea of testing a new sort of nuclear bomb in outer space. Prof. Merrity (Donald Wolfit) is the physicist in charge of developing it, and he's going to be on the mission to deploy the bomb since so few people know about it that he has to be the one to attach all the fuses and whatnot. Can't have it going off on earth, don't you know. Indeed, Hayden, who is the commander of the mission, isn't told about the presence of the bomb until the night before.

Meanwhile, there's a bunch of drama before the rocket takes off. In another even more shocking breach of security, Kim is able to waltz right through an unlocked gate that doesn't have anyone guarding it, and down to where the rocket is on its sloped underground launching pad. She's even able to climb into the ridiculously spacious rocket ship unseen: everybody's gone home for the evening, it seems! And then there are the two crew members who have issues with their love life: Jimmy (Bryan Forbes) was planning to propose marriage to his girlfriend who suddenly has to leave for a fashion show; Larry Noble has a wife who's fed up with his having to be away all the time because of the mission.

The next morning comes, and the rocket ship takes off just fine, which is shocking considering the extra weight that's it's carrying in the form of Kim Hamilton. Nobody's wearing any sort of pressure suit or personal oxygen system, either. Oh, and even though the ship has escaped the earth's gravity, it still has its own gravity that allows Kim to find a thermos of coffee and pour it for everybody. But the time comes to release the bomb. The plan is to set the fuse and then have the rocket head back for earth with the bomb exploding in space. But in the physics of Satellite in the Sky, the absence of gravity in outer space means that magnetism takes over in their theory of unified forces, so the bomb clings to the ship. One astronaut goes out to push the bomb away, which should give the obvious answer, but the bomb comes back. And the astronauts aboard bicker about what to do.

Satellite in the Sky is another of those movies where you can see what the filmmakers were going for, but they come up with a script that goes badly wrong in part because of the plot holes, and in part because they rely on so many tropes that it's unoriginal. It's also slow even at only 84 minutes. I'm glad I finally got the chance to watch Satellite in the Sky, but it's not particularly good.