At least Mickey Rooney doesn't strip

A movie that Eddie Muller presented on Noir Alley some months back that I was surprised to see I hadn't blogged about before considering it's an MGM movie with Mickey Rooney is The Strip. It's schuled to air tomorrow, Sept. 12, at noon as part of TCM's Saturday Musical Matinee with Dave Karger, so I watched the movie so that I could put up a review here.

The Strip, of course, refers to the "Sunset Strip", that portion of Sunset Boulevard in what is now West Hollywood, not quite as far west as where Joe Gillis got the swimming pool he always wanted. At the time of the movie, it was in an unincorporated area of Los Angeles County, meaning that the only government was the county (and therefore the sheriff's department, not the LAPD) with no municipal government. After an opening narration informing us of all this, the police come to the apartment of one Jane Tafford (Sally Forrest). She's in very bad shape, but not as bad shape as Delwyn "Sonny" Johnson (James Craig). He's quite dead.

Stanley Maxton (Mickey Rooney) knew both of them, and he's known to have plans to leave the Los Angeles area, so that makes him a natural suspect in the murder and the attempted murder. He's brought in for questioning, and he tells us his story in that most original of all Hollywood plot devices, the flashback. Stanley was originally from Los Angeles before being drafted to fight in Korea, where he got injured enough to wind up in a series of Army hospitals before his last stop in Kansas City. His buddies at the hospital know he was a drummer in the before times, so now that he's getting discharged they spring to buy him a drum set to start life again in Los Angeles.

Unfortunately, on the way west, he gets in a car accident caused by the other driver, which also destroys his drums, which probably shouldn't have been on the passenger and back seats of a convertible anyway. That other man is the aforementioned Sonny Johson, who offers to pay for the drums as well as offering Stanley a good job out in Los Angeles.

The only catch is that the job isn't exactly legal, since Sonny runs the numbers racket for a good portion of Los Angeles. It makes Stanley good money, but brings him to the attention of the police. It's in trying to escape the police that Stanley first runs into Jane, who works as a cigarette girl at Fluff's (William Demarest) nightclub on the Strip. Jane, however, has dreams of becoming a movie star. Part of the policy Fluff has is wanting to meet the prospective dates of his female employees, knowing that the wrong guy can be a bad influence and bring the police his way. Not that Stanley is a bad guy; Fluff, on learning that Stanley plays the drums, would like Stanley to give up his job and become a drummer in the house band which is a prestigious job considering the bandleader is Louis Armstrong.

Stanley and Jane start a romantic relationship, although Jane isn't ready to settle down since she still wants that chance at stardom. Stanley knows that Sonny has an in with any number of Hollywood types, so he introduces Jane to Sonny, telling Sonny in no uncertain terms that Jane is his girl, not Sonny's. Yeah, right. You know that Sonny is going to waste no time putting the moves on Jane while Stanley becomes incredibly jealous, leading to a shooting that we know is going to happen since all of this is in flashback and we were already informed of the shooting at the beginning of the movie.

There's nothing original to the plot of The Strip, although it holds up reasonably well thanks in part to Mickey Rooney's performance. That, and all the jazz music going on here, which is probably the real highlight of the film.

Baxter! (1973)

TCM did a spotlight on Hanna-Barbera a while back. They're best known for their cartoons, but the company actually helped produce a couple of live-action movies too. One example of this was Baxter!.

The movie opens on a plane that's flying from Los Angeles to London. Roger Baxter (Scott Jacoby) is an adolescent flying with his mother (Lynn Carlin) to what is going to be his new home, although how she was able to get a nice place in London isn't quite mentioned. Roger's parents are getting divorced, and Roger is none too happy with the move, in part because his mom doesn't really care about him, or at least that's the impression he gets -- she seems to be more concerned with her own appearance.

Compounding the problem is that Roger has a speech defect. Like Kay Francis (who was rather too dead to essay this role herself), Roger can't really pronounce the letter R, which is a problem considering his name starts with one. That might have caused problems with the relationships within the family, but worse is that it's left him an introvert. How is he going to make new friends in London? And yet he does.

On the way up the elevator to their apartment, Roger and his mom meet the people who live one floor above them, Chris (Britt Ekland) and her French chef boyfriend, who just happens to be named Roger as well (Jean-Pierre Cassell), although his "Roger" is pronounced in the French way, "Ro-ZHAY". But it's enough of a connection for the boy to take to the couple, and since the elder Roger isn't a native English speaker, he has less of an issue with somebody having difficulty speaking the language properly. They even invite him for a weekend out in the country. There's also a girl about his age living across the street, who spies on him because he has a tendency to step out on the balcony wearing just his tighty-whiteys.

And then, at school, Roger gets sent to the speech therapist, Dr. Clemm (Patricia Neal). She's not just a speech therapist, but the sort of person who's seen enough children to know that the problems that show up in her office aren't always just physical problems. Considering how Roger's mom drinks too much and treats him like crap, while his dad is busy playing poker back in Beverly Hills, it's no wonder why young Roger is so badly adjusted.

He seems to be making progress, at least until he gets caught out in a cold rain and winds up with a case of pneumonia that sends him to the hospital. Dr. Clemm checks up on him, which is certainly understandable. But it leads to her understanding that Roger needs time away from his mom, who wants to bring him home as soon as possible, a sentiment that is also not unreasonable even if the movie paints Mrs. Baxter as being obviously in the wrong. This leads to things going even more badly for poor little Roger.

Apparently, Baxter! didn't do very well at the box office. Despite the small number of reviews on IMDb being almost entire positive, it's not hard to see why the movie wasn't very successful. It meanders, and while a lot of the characters are naturally unlikable, Roger came across as a bit too obnoxious for his own good at times. The production values also feel more like a 1970s TV movie of the week, ending with one of those nonsense freeze-frames that were in vogue in movies of the early 1970s.

The Yellow Canary

With the return of Noir Alley at the beginning of September, Eddie Muller presented a movie that wasn't quite noir, but was new to TCM largely because it was a restoration. That movie was The Yellow Canary. I forgot to record anything over the Labor Day weekend, so I had to watch it off of the Watch TCM app, where it's still available until October 5, so you've got a little while longer to watch it.

Pat Boone is the star here, and he made this movie in part because he wanted to broaden his acting chops and play something not as wholesome as before. Here he plays popular jazz-styled musician Andy Paxton, about to promote his new songs at a concert in Los Angeles. He's married to Lissa (Barbara Eden) and they have an infant son, but it's not quite a happy marriage. Andy is expecting his assistant Bake (Steve Harris), who himself has a troubled past, to smuggle a certain woman into the dressing room who is not his wife. As for Lissa, she's about to file for divorce because of Andy's constantly not being home nights and not from bein out on the road touring.

But they still have to be civil, so, before going out to a restaurant after the show, they stop off at home to check up on the kid. Lissa is shocked by what she finds, which is that the nurse has been murdered and the child kidnapped! The kidnapper has left a note referring to Andy as "Canary" and warning him not to call the police about the kidnapping.

Unsurprisingly, Bake, along with Andy's bodyguard Hub (Steve Forrest), who is himself a former police officer, prevail on Andy to call the police, who send in detective Lt. Bonner (Jack Klugman). Bonner is no dummy, and he knows that paying the ransom is a bad idea because it will only encourage other would-be kidnappers to do the deed for the ransom money. But Andy has a hysterical wife, and eventually sets out to liquidate some of his assets so he can get the cash necessary for the ransom. Perhaps the cops will be able to arrest the kidnappers at the pick-up.

And then, things happen that suggest to Andy and Lissa that the kidnapping might be an inside job. Well, not Andy or Lissa since they both had the iron-clad alibi of having been at the show all evening when the kidnapping would have occurred. But apparently Bake stepped out for a bit, long enough in fact to do the deed. (The movie doesn't address how someone would have gotten from the theater, to Beverly Hills, and back before the show ended.) Things get worse for Bake when his past catches up to him and he gets arrested on a forgery charge. Hub, for his part, uses his police past to do some investigating of his own with Andy. But who did the kidnapping, and why? And will the Paxtons get their kid back and reconcile their marriage?

The screenplay to The Yellow Canary was written by Rod Serling of The Twilight Zone fame, and in his outro Eddie Muller suggested that this wasn't Serling's finest 93 minutes. I'd say that's true, since the movie feels formulaic at times. But it's not exactly bad. There's a lot entertaining about it, from the familiar faces to watching Pat Boone try to play less-than-nice. It's more pedestrian than anything else, but The Yellow Canary is still definitely worth a watch.

In which Paul Henreid buckles swashes

It's been longer than I thought since I had a post on a pirate movie. With one of them about to expire fro the DVR -- The Spanish Main, I watched it so that I could write up a post on it and schedule it here. And then after writing up this post, I saw that TCM scheduled it for early tomorrow (Sept. 9) at 3:15 AM as part of the TCM spotlight of swashbuckling movies, so now is when it finally gets scheduled.

Paul Henreid stars as Laurent van Horn, a Dutch ship's captain who is taking a bunch of Dutch to the Carolinas circa 1720 to settle. A storm blows them wildly off course, since they're rescued in the Caribbean and taken to the colony at Cartagena, which is modern-day Colombia. That also happens to be part of a ring of colonies that control much of the Caribbean coast all the way up to the Gulf of Mexico. Non-Spanish ships are in decided danger there, even if they're blown off course. The local colonial viceroy, Don Juan Alvarado (Walter Slezak), takes van Horn and puts him in prison with plans to hang him. But several of the prisoners are able to effect an escape.

Fast-forward five years. There's a ship predating what the Spanish think should be their sea, one called the Barracuda, and the captain of that ship has been given that name by the Spanish since they don't know his real identity. As for van Horn, he's working as a navigator that's taking Francisca (Maureen O'Hara) to be married off to a man she's never seen before in what is clearly a political marriage. Her father is the viceroy of Mexico, while her husband-to-be is... Don Juan Alvarado, still viceroy of Cartagena. The Barracuda shows up to pirate the Spanish ship, and it turns out that the captain of the Barracuda is actually van Horn! Francisca decides to do a noble thing, which is to surrender herself to van Horn and let him marry her with the proviso that he'll not kill the people on the ship she was on or its escort. Of course, the other reason she had is that she finds van Horn so damn handsome.

The Barracuda puts in at Tortuga, where we learn that among the pirates is Anne Bonny (Binnie Barnes), whom you get the impression has really been pining after van Horn. It's not all a bed of roses for van Horn, as there are a bunch of pirates there, and not all of them get along so well with each other. There's a bigger problem, however, considering that Don Juan Alvarado is understandably displeased about having lost his betrothed and will stop at nothing to get Francisca for himself. The fact that she's actually married to van Horn, and the marriage is as far as we can tell licit under Catholic canon law, complicates things.

Don Juan is no dummy, and uses those pirates who don't care for van Horn to go after him. Francisca, you might think, would be just the wedge to get van Horn, but remember that she's never seen Don Juan so she has no allegiance to him. And as is unsurprising for a film like this, Francisca has also been falling in love for real with van Horn. All of this leads up to the climactic swashbuckling fight as Francisca and Anne try to break van Horn and his fellow prisoners out of jail before they can be executed.

There's nothing particularly new to the plot of The Spanish Main, but it's a movie that succeeds largely because it's not trying to do anything serious in a genre that's more about entertainment value than making big statements. Paul Henreid actually does OK as a pirate even though that's not the sort of character you'd expect him to be playing. Maureen O'Hara is as gorgeous as ever in Technicolor, Walter Slezak is suitably villainous, and Binnie Barnes hits the right slightly saucy notes as Anne Bonny.

Sit back, watch The Spanish Main, and be entertained.

Buzzin' Around

A short that I recorded from the Saturday matinee block on TCM as opposed to it randomly showing up after some movie to fill out a time slot was one from the end of Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle's life when he signed a contract to make shorts at Vitaphone to be distributed by Warner Bros. That movie is Buzzin' Around.

Arbuckle plays Cornelius, a rural inventor who has been working on a formula for a coating that, if applied to china, will render it shatter-resistant, as shown in a sight gag of dropping a pitcher and having it bounce, not just land without breaking. He's just received a letter from a china-shop owner who seems interested in the idea, and would like him to come and give a demonstration. However, in a mix-up, Cornelius takes a jug of moonshine that his friend Al (Al St. John) likes to drink from.

Not that Cornelius is going to be able to get to the china shop anyway. The title of the short comes from a scene early in the film when a beehive falls into the back of Cornelius' car as he's about to set off for the city and the china shop, with Cornelius swallowing one of the bees. But that's by far not the only issue Cornelius faces. There's a sight gag involving parallel parking, along with Cornelius' fender getting caught up with the fender of a much nicer car. This latter incident leads to a dispute that continually escalates until a policeman gets involved, with Cornelius finding a way out of it.

Eventually, Cornelius does make it to the shop, and of course his formula doesn't work considering that he doesn't have the formula with him and his friend Al is trying to get it to the shop before Cornelius can do any damage. And then the owner of the shop who was the one who wrote the letter shows up, revealing one last joke....

Fatty Arbuckle's career had, of couse, been destroyed a decade earlier by the incident where actress Virginia Rappe died in a hotel room he was renting, and his subsequent trials for his responsibility in her death. What a short like Buzzin' Around reveals is that Arbuckle's style of comedy had clearly gone out of fashion in the intervening decade. The comedy is way too broad and not particularly funny. This short was released in early 1933 and later in the year Arbuckly would suffer a fatal heart attack. But in any case, I don't know that he would have had a successful revival if he kept making shorts like this one.

TCM Star of the Month September 2026: Ricardo Montalbán

Ricardo Montalbán in Mystery Street (Sept. 7, 10:00 PM)

We've been into a new month for some time now, but it's finally time to get to the new Star of the Month. This time around, it's Ricardo Montalbán, since the second half of September sees the start of Hispanic heritage month and Mexican-born Montalbán certainly fits that bill. Montalbán's movies will be airing every Monday in prime time.

Unfortunately, I did not notice until too late that only on this first Monday in September, Montalbán's movies would actually start on Monday morning, meaning that by the time you see this post you'll probably have missed some of the movies, especially the ones I was thinking about putting up pictures of. For some weird reason, TCM decided to run one of Montalbán's later movies, The Singing Nun, this morning at 10:00 AM in and among a bunch of stuff from the late 1940s:

On the other hand, this month also sees what I think is the TCM premiere of a role that a lot of people who aren't so much movie fans think of when they think Montalbán: that of Khaaaaaaan! in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, at midnight on Sept. 29, so still on the 28th in more westerly time zones.

The Brighton Strangler

Another of the movies that had been sitting on my DVR for quite some time was The Brighton Strangler. Recently, I finally got around to watching it.

The movie was released in the US in May, 1945, just after the war in Europe ended, so was clearly filmed and set during the war. It's London on New Year's Eve, and a man is just about to strangle a woman to death before being shot by the police. The curtain comes down, which means not that it's the end of our movie, but the opening scene is actually of a play about a strangler in Brighton. That strangler, Edward Grey, is played by a man named Reginald Parker (John Loder). It's getting close to Christmas, and Parker has already decided he's tired of playing this character. So his fiancée Dorothy Kent (Rose Hobart) is writing a new play for him before she goes off to Canterbury for Christmas, with him to follow after closing night.

However, on closing night, after one final successful performance, there's another round of the Blitz. Parker isn't able to make it to a bomb shelter before the bombs start falling and, wouldn't you know it, but one of the bombs hits the theater. Now all of this is 15-20 minutes in, so we know he's not going to be killed. Instead, he's only concussed. On coming to, he sees that he has a baggage claim check in his overcoat pocket, since his baggage was sent ahead to the train station for him to pick up before getting his ticket to Canterbury.

Unfortunately, the concussion has screwed with his memory. He picks up the baggage, but before being able to get his ticket, he overhears a snippet of a conversation between a British WAC, April Manby (June Duprez), and the American flyboy she's eloped with, Bob Carson (Michael St. Angel). She's going home for leave without him because her parents aren't going to be excited about her marrying an aviator. More importantely, she mentions going home to Brighton, which jogs Parker's memory. Except that it jogs his memory of the play, so he buys a ticket to Brighton and gets in the same car as April.

April sees that Parker has been injured, so tends to the injury and asks him his name... and he gives the name Edward Grey, going to Brighton because he used to have family there. April takes pity on him and offers to invite him for Christmas dinner which is also convenient for her since she can't really bring her husband. But Parker-as-Grey gets to Brighton, and the first thing he thinks of doing the next day is to find the barrister who screwed up Grey's trial, which is what led to Grey's becoming a strangler in the play Parker had starred in. Clearly a case of life imitating art.

To be honest, the premise in The Brighton Strangler is a bit contrived, but this is only a B movie. You're not supposed to take it that seriously. And for what it does, it succeeds fairly well once it gets past a slow section in the middle of the movie. One other minor issue that is has is that it has to deal with the Production Code, so you wonder how it's going to get to a satisfying ending considering that the Parker character has on the one hand clearly committed murder, while on the other hand not being of sound mind or body. It's not something you'll evrer consider great, but I think it would certainly have entertained audiences back in the day as the lower bill on a movie night.

The Young Runaways

MGM was always the wrong studio to do certain types of movies, and I would suggest that adolescent social issue stuff was not up their alley. Things got even worse for the studio after the Freed Unit musicals dried up. Trying to be socially relevant just wasn't going to cut it, as you can see if you watch the late 1960s movie The Young Runaways. It's showing up on TCM again tomorrow, Sept. 6, at 6:00 AM, so now's the time to put up a post on it.

Now, as you can guess from the title, there are indeed young runaways, and we're introduced to them in a pre-credits opening sequences. (Or, maybe, sequences, since each of them has his or her own reasons for running away.) First is Deanie Donford (Patty McCormack), who is hanging out with the wrong crowd and staying out too late and lying to her mother (Lynn Bari) about it. Mom is so clueless that she's terrified of her daughter even uttering the word "sex". Deanie says "sex"; Mom slaps her. Repeatedly. It's funny, but this isn't supposed to be a comedy. In any case, Deanie runs away that night.

Dewey Norson (Kevin Coughlin) is a fundamentally good kid who has let his hormones get the better of him. He's been having a lovers' lane type of relationship with Carol Mae who informs him that despite having taken "pills" (this isn't all that long after the birth-control pill was introduced), she's gotten pregnant. Dewey isn't ready to be a father and can't handle the shame of telling his parents he's knocked up a girl, so he too runs away.

Finally there's Shelly Allen (Brooke Bundy), daughter of widowed PR man Raymond Allen (Lloyd Bochner). Both of them are also fundamentally decent people, although Dad with his high-powered career has made the mistake of never really having listened to his daughter. Worse, he makes the mistake of telling a client that he's been using his PR techniques on his daughter and that they're clearly working. Shelly, being thoroughly unhappy about having been called a commodity, decides she's going to run off too. She hitchhikes, but when the guy who picks her up puts the moves on her, it results in a car crash where Shelly has to flee without her suitcase. All three adolescents wind up in Chicago.

Deanie's story is almost entirely separate from the other two. She winds up in an apartment that two guys, Loch and Curly, are sharing. Both of them have heretofore been open about willing to share girlfriends, but this time Loch wants to keep Deanie for himself. Curly drinks too much, and this leads to tragedy. It's also the less interesting story.

Dewey looks for a place to stay and spends a night with a "guru" (Dick Sargent of all people, playing another totally non-grifting person) before getting a job at a gas station and having to deal with a former resident of the guru's settlement house who's dishonest and expects Dewey to help him. (That's a very young Richard Dreyfuss who's name is relatively high up the credits but whom I didn't recognize.) Dewey gets a small apartment of his own and meets Shelly one night out in the rain.

Shelly was taken in by two other girls who are more or less being pimped out by the boyfriend of one of them. The two girls give Shelly a place to stay, and even some clothes to wear, but it's obvious they want her to get involved in being pimped. When Shelly doesn't want this, she runs away, and everybody else is worried she's going to squeal to the police, so they try to find her to prevent that, which forms the climactic finale.

As I said at the beginning, this was made by MGM, who clearly didn't know how to handle such a topic. Imagine, if you will, that Jack Webb had been blacklisted and had somebody front for him while he wrote the sort stories you'd see on Dragnet. That's basically what you get here. It's terrible, but it's funny in an unintentional way. Oh, and there's terrible 60s music of the sort that's trying to be relevant but sounded old-fashioned even back in the 1960s. The other half of the fun is looking for all the the names in the credits. Norman Fell, with a mustache, plays Deanie's dad, James Edwards is the police detective, and Isabel Sanford gets one scene as the Allens' maid.

Oxford around a Yank

The past, wrote L.P. Hartley in The Go-Between, is a foreign country. I certainly couldn't help but think of the past as a very different place when I watched the late 1930s film A Yank at Oxford.

Lakedale College is another one of those small liberal-arts schools that dotted Hollywood pictures in the first half of the 20th century, located in one of those Hollywood-style small cities. Dan Sheridan (Lionel Barrymore) is the publisher of the local paper, but you wonder how the paper makes any money considering how it keeps missing the deadline while Dan waits for news about the latest athletic exploits of his son Lee (Robert Taylor), a star on the college's track team.

Lee's done well enough in athletics that it's giving him a swelled head, although the fawning headline press he gets from his father's paper isn't helping either. In part because of this and becaue he really is the biggest thing the town has going for it. So he's awarded a scholarship to one of the colleges at Oxford University, which you know he's going to accept because with a title like A Yank at Oxford, he kind of has to. So fairly quickly we get Lee sent over to Europe and then on a train to Oxford.

Except that Lee keeps being just as much an arrogant blankety-blank before he even gets to Oxford, pissing off his fellow train passengers Paul Beaumont (Griffith Jones), Ramsey (Peter Croft), and Wavertree (Robert Coote) without realising that these are going to be some of his fellow students. So they respond with a practical joke that gets Lee in trouble with the Dean of the college (Edmund Gwenn). And it's not the last bit of trouble that Lee gets himself into.

Lee more or less take's Paul's place on the track team, and then also starts dating Paul's sister Molly (Maureen O'Sullivan). As for Paul, he's busy seeing Elsa Craddock (Viven Leigh), who works at a local bookstore and often goes to London to hunt down rarer books for the customers. The only thing is, Elsa is Mrs. Craddock, wife of the bookstore owner. And as for Wavertree, he gets in even more ridiculous trouble. Apparently, he's got a rich uncle who got himself expelled from Oxford. If Wavertree can get himself expelled from Oxford, too, he'll be in line for a bigger inheritance.

More of the dew-eyed American look at olde England comes in the form of rowing. Not just small boats on ponds, but crew, as Lee gets himself on the team for the big Oxford v. Cambridge boat race. But things could go disastrous for everybody when Elsa decides to go see Paul on campus and Mr. Craddock gets suspicious. Having that sort of relationship is decidedly frowned upon and could get you expelled. Unfortunately the plot solution is not to pass of a relationship between Elsa and Wavertree, which would satisfy all of the students.

A Yank at Oxford might have been what audiences of 1938 wanted, but oh my goodness was this one full of The Quiet Man-style tropes for me, where everybody takes a sentimental look at a place as they think from far away it exists but in reality probably never was anything close to that. Normally I like that the past is different, and that's not really the problem here as the lazy stereotypes. Still, watch and judge for yourself.

Briefs for September 3-4, 2026

Dolly Parton of course died last week at the age of 80. I had seen 9 to 5 show up on the FXM schedule a couple of times recently, but I couldn't remember when the next showing would be. FXM put one showing in the commercial-laden portion of the schedule, but the next commercial-free showing is tomorrow, September 4, at 11:15 AM.

Tim Curry also died last week and was also 80 years old. Pluto TV in one of their emails put up Clue in their on-demand section in his honor, also putting up Steel Magnolias for Dolly Parton. Neither of those two movie seem to be getting a commercial-free showing anywhere in the near future that I could find, but then again, searching TV listings very far in the future seems to be getting more and more difficult, by design.

One of TCM's spotlights for September is Stanley Kubrick, whose movies are going to be showing on Thursdays in prime time. Eyes Wide Shut, Kubrick's final film, will be showing overnight between September 24 and 25, and I even had that one on my DVR. But I didn't get around to watching it before it expired from the DVR, so sadly, I won't be doing a review of it here until sometime later. Maybe this time I'll actually get around to watching it before it expires.