Roast-Beef and Movies

A short that TCM ran as a TCM Extra in a time slot after something else that I watched recently was Roast-Beef and Movies.

A movie studio that's fallen on hard times is looking for new ideas and offers up to $100K for a movie they use. With that in mind, a would-be producer called Gus Parkyakaruks (George Givot, who is not the same actor who would be billed as "Parkyakaruks" in a string of movies from the late 1930s and 1940s) shows up together with two partners, one of whom is played by Curly Howard of the Three Stooges although none of the other stooges are here. Neiter is Ted Healy, who in this time frame would have been the "manager" of the Stooges, the short having been made in late 1933 and released to theaters in early 1934.

Most of the rest of the short is a sort of revue that shows the sort of "movie" that the producers wanted to make, although there's more to it than that. Eventually, the studio boss likes the idea behind the movie and offers Gus and his two partners a contract, but there's a catch that forms the humorous finale of the movie.

There are two things that are mildly interesting about Roast-Beef and Movies. One is the presence of Curly Howard (billed as Jerry Howard) without anybody else related to the Three Stooges. The other one is that the movie is in two-strip Technicolor. Now, Disney had already made a couple of animated shorts in three-strip. I'm not certain how much later the live-action three-strip shorts came out, although I've mentioned Warner Bros.' Service With a Smile from 1934 as a three-strip short with pretty vibrant color.

In any case, the reason for the two-strip Technicolor is because TCM wanted to reuse some musical dance numbers from a couple of earlier movies that had been filmed partially in two-strip. Something that was done in several movies in the early sound era was to have most of the movie in black and white, with Technicolor mostly for a musical finale; it's those numbers that are reused in Roast-Beef and Movies. Other than the Technicolor and Curly Howard, however, this short isn't particularly good.

Roast-Beef and Movies did, however, get a release to DVD as part of one the Classic Shorts from the Dream Factory box sets.

TCM "Star" of the Month July 2026: Singers in the Movies

Now that we're in the first full week of a new month, it's once again time for a new Star of the Month. This time out, we don't get a traditional one person as star. Instead, TCM has decided to do a spotlight on singers who decided to try their hand in the movies. Every Monday in prime time, leading into the daytime hours of the Tuesday schedule, there will be movies featuring people who, when they first appeared in the movies, were mostly known as singers.

Now, some of them became famous for their acting, such as Bing Crosby, whose early appearance in Going Hollywood is getting an airing at 7:15 AM July 7. Rudy Vallee is another such instance, as is, I would argue, Barbra Streisand. Streisand shows up in the 1976 version of A Star Is Born at 9:45 PM on July 13.

But some of them are certainly people best known as singers who didn't make very many movies in part because some of them aren't exactly good actors. Johnny Cash in Five Minutes to Live (July 14, 6:15 AM) would certainly be an example of that. Willie Nelson is basically playing himself in Honeysuckle Rose (12:15 AM, July 14), so he's not exactly bad, but I'm not certain how much talent he would have had in other roles.

There are also some movies I'm interested to see that I haven't seen before. I think I've only seen a bit of Ruthless People (July 20, 10:30 PM), probably back in the late 1980s when my parents would have been watching it on the VCR. Overnight, at 4:30 AM on July 21, is Paul Simon in One Trick Pony. I only know of that one because of the song from the film that was a commercial success as a single. I would have been much too young to have seen the movie in the theater, and it's not the sort of thing that shows up regularly.

Jazz Heaven

I think it's been a while since I've done a post on a movie from that year when Hollywood finally completed the transition from silent movies to sound: 1929. This time, the picture in question is one that I have to admit was new to me the last time TCM showed it: Jazz Heaven. But since I'm always interested in such early sound movies, I recorded this one and eventually got around to watching it to do this post.

In a rooming house in New York City, Barry Holmes (Johnny Mack Brown) lives with his piano. That's because he's an aspiring songwriter, trying to make it in the then musical capital of America. Unfortunately, he plays his piano all night long trying to figure out the last few themes to the melody of the song he's currently working on, and this pisses off a lot of the other roomers and especially his landlord, Mrs. Langley (Blanche Friderici). She wants to throw him out right now since he's also four weeks behind on his rent, but Mr. Langley (Clyde Cook) intervenes much to his wife's consternation. It doesn't help Mr. Langley that he only works as a night watchman in a piano factory.

Quite stupidly, Barry keeps striking away at his piano even after being told to wait until 10AM. His playing wakes up his neighbor in the next room, Ruth Morgan (Sally O'Neil). She works for a pair of music publishers, Kemple and Klucke, both of whom seem to have the hots for Ruth even though they're much too old for her which provides a bit of ick factor. But more importantly, when Ruth is awakened, she goes about her morning routine by humming along to Barry's music, eventually giving Barry that last theme he needs and causing him to invite her over to help him by continuing to hum that theme.

Mrs. Langley shows up just as Ruth and Barry are talking about what a blankety-blank she is, so she gets angry enough that she decides to evict Barry right then and there and not renewing Ruth's month-to-month lease. She also plans to keep the piano since Barry owns back rent. Mr. Langley knows the rooming house across the stree takes people evicted by the Langleys, which will give Barry a place to stay, but when Langley tries to help out by moving the piano for Barry, he destroys it.

Barry needs a piano to finish up his work on the song, while Ruth is trying to get it sold to her bosses. Mr. Langley takes a risk by offering Barry and Ruth a room on an upper floor which is normally used as a remote broadcast location where the piano company airs a radio show they sponsor. Thanks to a totally coincidental mix-up, Ruth and Barry accidentally send a feed of their practice session to the radio station, with the two board ops at the station (as we'd call them today) deciding to broadcast this since it's more interesting than the lecture on birds that's supposed to go on air. The song becomes a surprise hit, and the owner of the piano factory gets a bunch of letters about it, causing him to want the two unknowns to reprise their song the next time the piano factory's show is scheduled to go out. Getting the two lovers together, however, is going to be a bit difficult because of the sort of complications you can probably predict if you've watched enough movies from this era.

By the standards of 1929, Jazz Heaven is an interesting enough movie if not spectacular by any stretch. Sally O'Neil is quite appealing here, with Johnny Mack Brown adequate. The plot, however, is fairly creaky and definitely the sort of thing that most people watching it nearly a century later would find it hard to get into. I mostly liked Jazz Heaven, but can easily see why it won't be a movie for everyone.

Born Free

Even though it's the Independence Day holiday in the United States, this being a Saturday TCM is continuing with the Two for One programming in prime time. Tonight's guest is songwriter Diane Warren, and the first of her selections is Born Free, at 8:00 PM.

Born Free is one of those movies where you probably know the basic plot synopsis already. And, to be honest, there's not a whole lot more going on in the movie beyond a basic synopsis. In the 1950s in what is now Kenya, George Adamson (Bill Travers) works as a game warden working to keep the national parks safe from poaching and keeping the locals from being harmed by wildlife rampagaing outside the parks. He lives in one of those well-appointed lodge-type houses together with his wife Joy (Travers' real-life wife Virginia McKenna) and a bunch of people working together with the responsible department for wildlife management.

One day out on patrol, George and some of his crew are attacked by a lioness and are forced to shoot in self-defence. Unfortunately, they discover the reason the lioness attacked was because she was a mama lioness defending their three cubs. It would be inhumane to shoot the cubs, so they take the cubs back to the lodge and start caring for them in the expectation that one or more zoos are going to come along to take the cubs when the time comes.

Everybody becomes attached to the cubs, whom Joy has named, with Joy becoming most attached of all. And then a zoo does come, but can only take two of the cubs. So the Adamsons keep the youngest and smallest cub, named Elsa, and continue to raise it. Elsa is relatively tame, but the freedom that the Adamsons give Elsa is the sort of thing that's bound to cause problems of mistaken identity. Worse, Elsa's lack of interest in hunting the other wild animals is going to disrupt the local balance of nature such that the wild animals can predate against the villagers.

After one such incident where Elsa more or less incites an elephant stampede, the government really starts to tighten the screws on the Adamsons giving Elsa over to a zoo. That, and there's policy that George is supposed to take a mandatory sabbatical away from his current posting. The fact that he's already survived a bout of malaria is another indication that the government policy might in fact be the right one. But in any case, it puts a pretty hard deadline on the question of what to do with Elsa.

Joy is horrified at the idea of Elsa in a zoo, so she comes up with the crazy idea that Elsa can be taught to hunt in the wild, and dammit, she and George are going to do just that so that Elsa can be integrated into a tribe. This is pretty much what the entire final third of the movie deals with.

Born Free is, as you probably know, based on a true story, with the book and movie coming out before the end of the Adamsons' story, which doesn't quite have a happy ending. The movie was filmed on location, which is a big plus, as the cinematography is mostly quite lovely apart from a few insert shots of wildlife on stampede. As for the story, a lot of people have called Born Free a family movie, a designation with which I'd largely agree. But at the same time, the story feels like one of those things that's clearly simplified like a young person's guide to history. Some people will find the story in Born Free to be a bit too pat and simple, although those people will probably not be children. Well, that is the children who can handle the fact that there are predator and prey animals and that this is shown about as explicitly as one could do in a mainstream movie of the 1960s.

Judge Hardy and Son

There were 16 movies made in the MGM Hardy family series, if you count the one from the late 1950s after Lewis Stone died. Surprisingly, I haven't done posts on all that many of them. But one of them aired on Father's Day and is getting another showing tomorrow since the plot nominally deals with July 4. That movie is Judge Hardy and Son, on TCM on July 4 at 6:30 AM.

Lewis Stone is once again Judge Hardy, who shows up at court only to find that there are no cases on the docket. That tranquility is interrupted by an immigrant couple, the Volduzzis (Maria Ousepnskaya and Egon Brecher), who have been served with a writ that they're going to have to leave their house for being unable to pay the mortgage, which seems like a surprise since Mr. Volduzzi has only been out of work for three weeks and you'd think he's old enough to receive Social Security which had been in place four four years by the time the movie was released. If they have any surviving children, perhaps she could be imposed on to do something to help them. But Mrs. Volduzzi claims their daughter is dead. Judge Hardy suspects this is a lie.

Andy is at home getting ready for the Independence Day celebrations, except that all of the innertubes in his car's tires keep bursting, leading to a bunch of financial issues yet again. He's already borrowed money from Beezy, and now he's going to borrow some from big sister Marian (Cecilia Parker) before she heads off to a cabin with friends for the holiday. Mom (Fay Holden), meanwhile, and Aunt Millie (Sara Haden) are planning to head off to their parents' house for their parents' 50th wedding anniversary.

Andy needs to do something to get more money before Polly Benedict (Ann Rutherford) returns for Independence Day. One way he hopes to do so is to help his father find that Volduzzi daughter, which involved interviewing everyone in town who has the middle initial V because a grandkid would have the middle name Volduzzi. (It wasn't uncommon in those days for people to get their mother's maiden name as a middle name.) The other idea is to win the public oratory contest by writing a speech on Alexander Hamilton. Unfortunately, he misreads the contest rules and discovers that the $50 first prize is for the best speech by a girl. A boy gets a 20-volume set of biographies of great Americans. So Andy both sees a bunch of girls his age with the middle initial V, while trying to get them to read a speech he'll write in exchange for splitting the prize money. They, not being stupid, try to blackmail Andy by making him take them to the big July 4 shinding. When Polly returns and find this out, she's going to be none too happy.

And then things take a surprisingly dark turn for a Hardy Family movie. Mom gets off the train and returns home claiming to feel unwell. The doctor diagnoses her with pleurisy, which would certainly cause her a fair deal of pain. But the the pleurisy progresses into pneumonia, which is a much more serious illness with the rest of the family worried she might die. But then, this being a Hardy Family movie, you have to expect a happy ending.

There's surprisingly a lot going on here for a 90-minute movie. Also surprisingly, it mostly meshes well. There's nothing particularly groundbreaking about Judge Hardy and Son, but watching a movie like this you can see why the series was so popular back in the day. With the lingering effects of the Depression and the war going on in Europe, something like this was just what was needed to take audiences' minds off of their daily problems. Definitely worth a watch for MGM's rose-colored view of 1939.

FBI Girl

George Brent was TCM's Star of the Month back in March, and I recorded a bunch of his movies that TCM ran. One that they didn't show was a public domain movie from late in his movie career: FBI Girl.

Now, obviously, Brent is not the title character here. In fact, you could argue that there isn't one title character, as there are multiple "FBI girls" here. In the context of the movie, they're women who work in the fingerprints divison of the FBI, pulling the cards for various law enforcement agencies that need to match prints to identities, as a brief opening narration informs us.

Cut to a generic southern state. Governor Grimsby (Raymond Greenleaf) is the governor, giving a live speech on TV to the people who are interested in the new US Senate crime committee that's coming to the state to investigate corruption. Grimsby says he looks forward to the commission since he's got nothing to hide. Now, for a movie like this, that's an obvious clue that the governor does indeed have a lot to hide, as he informs his chief advisor Blake (Raymond Burr in his bad-guy pre-Perry Mason phase). The thing is that some 20 years ago Grimsby was involved in a murder, when he was going by the name John Williams. If the crime committee suspects anything, he'll be fingerprinted, those prints will be sent to Washington, and Grimsby will be found out as Williams, ending his career. But then he's to the point where he would be relieved to get this off his conscience.

Blake, however, is having none of that, and decides that the best thing to do would be to get one of those FBI girls to remove the Williams fingerprint file. Blake knows just the girl, as Natalie Craig's brother Paul is a small-time crook who has to repay some favors. Natalie does get the file, apparently not wanting to put her brother in danger, but she screws things up just enough that one of the male employees will be able to implicate her in the subsequent investigation. Except that the investigation is into her death, as Blake has her killed in a road accident to prevent her from talking.

Worse for Blake and Grimsby is that Natalie doesn't have the file on her when she's killed. They have to come up with another way to get the file, and FBI agents Stedman (Cesar Romero) and Donley (George Brent) are on the case and begin to suspect things. They talk to Natalie's roommate Shirley Wayne (Audrey Totter), who agrees to help, although things get much more complicated when Stedman and Donley reveal that one of the people who's going to be implicated in the case is the lobbyist Chercourt (Tom Drake). That's because Chercourt is engaged to Shirley. She doesn't realize how much danger even a lowly FBI girl like her can get into in the pursuit of justice.

FBI Girl is one of those low-budget movies that, a few years later, probably would have been the subject for an episode of one of those TV shows that glorified the work of the FBI. It's not a bad movie, although it does strain credulity in a few places -- there are just too many coincidences for the case to be wrapped up so neatly and quickly. And for as ruthless as Blake is, he's also surprisingly incompetent at times.

FBI Girl is perhaps a bit more interesting as a time capsule into the way people looked at the FBI back in the early 1950s, as well as the appearance of a very young Peter Marshall back when he was still paired with Tommy Noonan. Entertaining, but there's a good reason the movie fell through the cracks.

The Match King

Hollywood movies from the Depression era on business are certainly an interesting watch, as the impression given of the way big business was done back then is much different from what we'd think of today. That, and the stock market, although at least back then a very small percentage of the population was invested in the stock market and it wasn't really something one could do for oneself. One such movie, loosely based on a real person, is The Match King, which I recorded the last time it came on TCM.

Warren William stars as Paul Kroll, who as the movie starts is a Swedish immigrant in Chicago who is making a living as a sanitation worker. He's written to his family back home that he's made it in businesses, although that's a lie. The best he's been able to do is start a no-show scam that has a bunch of non-existent people on a payroll which allows Kroll to rake off a bunch of payroll.

However, word comes from his native Sweden that the old business in his home town, a match factory, is in financial difficulty. Since Paul has made it in America, at least according to his letters, the townsfolk would like to know if he could come back and help save the match factory. Of course Paul isn't really in a position to do this. So he engages in another lie. He's been cheating on his best friend by having a relationship with Babe (Glenda Farrell in a brief performance), so he decides now is the time to tell Babe they should run off together. Except that he runs off with Babe's money, which he uses to get over to Sweden.

Paul, of course, doesn't know how to run a match factory or how to save it from its financial difficulties, so he has to continue resorting to confidence schemes. He's able to convince Swedish banks to extend him credit to keep the current match factory open as well as to acquire another in an attempt to corner the market on safety matches. The one person who has any inkling things might not be on the up and up is assistant Erik Borg (Hardie Albright).

Unfortunately, Paul's scheme turn out to have some of the qualities of a pyramid scheme in the sense that he has to keep going because, once the merry-go-round stops, the whole thing is going to come crashing down. So he turns to foreign countries, like Germany, where he finds a girlfriend Ilse (Claire Dodd) and then the one love of his life, actress Marta Molnar (Lili Damita). He keeps pursuing her, to the point that he puts off all sorts of important match-factory business. It's not that the feeling isn't mutual, although what Marta really likes is a violinist named Trino. So Marta decides to run off from Berlin to Salzburg, with Paul eventually figuring out where she's gone and following her.

But there's still that pesky match factory, and all sorts of notes are going to come due. There's also a man who's invented a match you can strike over and over, which would seem to violate the laws of physics. In any case, Paul has to resort to increasing ruthless things to keep his schemes going and the creditors at bay. As you might guess, there's only so far all of this is going to be able to go before the walls come crashing down.

The Match King is an interesting if not great movie. One problem for me is that Warren William's character is rutless to the point that it's fairly unsympathetic. He has one man committed to an insane asylum and lets another man die. That's certainly shocking enough to make the movie worth watching, but damn if you don't want to beat the crap out of William. One other issue is that, despite the number of interesting character actors and actresses in the movie, most of them only get a few scenes because of the way the movie is plotted. Still, the plusses of The Match King outweigh the minuses.

Notes on the early July schedule

TCM got the rights to the Looney Tunes (or maybe the Warner Bros. cartoons more generally; I'm not certain) shorts some months back, which is why they did a "Star of the Month" simulation for Bugs Bunny in the short month before 31 Days of Oscar began. Tonight sees a lineup of shorts where they recycle songs from earlier Warner Bros. movies, a practice that was not uncommon as other studios did it often enough too. The night also features the movies from which the songs are apparently taken, although I can't confirm the accuracy of this as I haven't seen the shorts in question. It was only about four months back that I posted on Going Places, which is on tonight's lineup at 10:00 PM for the song "Jeepers Creepers".

Charles Laughton gets a birthday salute a day late tomorrow, which includes a couple of excellent lesser-seen movies. Payment Deferred kicks off the day at 6:00 AM, while the afternoon ends with This Land Is Mine at 4:00 PM and Hobson's Choice at 6:00 PM.

The "Summer of Darkness" noir series continues on Friday evening with some very good 1940s noir where I thought I'd already blogged about all of them. A search of the blog claims I haven't done a post on Thieves' Highway (Jul. 4, 12:45 AM; still the evening of July 3 in more westerly time zones) before, although I've definitely seen it on the old iteration of the Fox Movie Channel. So I suppose it's time to record that one. I was thinking of the "Summer of Darkness", however, more for some of the neo-noir that shows up, such as this week's TCM premiere of Against All Odds (July 4, 2:30 AM). People of my age will remember not the movie -- we would have been too young once again to see the original theatrical release -- but the Phil Collins title song.

Sophie's Place

TCM ran a double feature of films with Telly Savalas some months back; not having seen either of the movies I decided to record both of them. The first of them was Crooks and Coronets.

The opening credits and plot synopsis made this one sound like it was made in England with Savalas one of those Hollywood stars sojourning in the UK. As the movie opens, there's a "state penitentiary" that seems just far enough off. Herbie Haseler (Telly Savalas) is a convict being released from prison, picked up by his friend Marty Miller (Warren Oates) who got out of prison himself a few months back and is supposedly going straight. However, it's quickly revealed that Marty stole the car he used to pick up Herbie from prison.

While confined in prison, Herbie has been reading up on the great manor houses of England, and he's become convinced that he's got a great idea for a heist that would solve all his financial problems. The Fitzmore mansion is owned by some people on hardish times, and they've got a lot of artwork that could easily be stolen and sold off in the States. But Herbie is going to need some money to fund the scheme, and the only person he knows is his old crime boss Nick Marco (Cesar Romero). The thing is, Nick already laid out money for the last scheme, the one that got Herbie and Marty in prison, and Nick has been calculating interest on that money for the entire time the two were in prison. So Nick is reluctant at first to fund Herbie, and certainly not going to accept any failure.

But Herbie and Marty make it over to merrye olde England, and eventually get to the gates of the Fitzmore place, although getting in to case the joint is not without some comic difficulties. The Fitzmores, Lady Sophie (Edith Evans) and her son Lord Freddie (Nicky Henson) are in bad enough straits that they're giving tours of the house for a price. The two crooks take one of the tours, and find somebody trying to fish one of the statues off a table, stopping the heist. That would-be robber is in fact Lady Sophie, under the ruse of trying to test the security arrangements. Herbie and Marty stop it, which gets them in good with Sophie, who being an eccentric old lady also decides to offer the two of them a place to stay, which is just the stroke of luck they needed.

Lady Sophie is so charming that, as Herbie and Marty plan the heist, they start to wonder whether they should go through with it at all, although that's a big problem too since Nick back in the States is beginning to wonder why it's taking Herbie and Marty so long to carry out the robbery. And eventually he's had enough, coming over to the UK himself to take over the heist so that he can make sure it goes according to plan. But by the time Nick comes over Herbie and Marty are thinking up ways to foil Nick in the comedic climax to the movie.

Crooks and Coronets was released in 1969. It's in a genre that had been successful over the years, although by 1969 this sort of view of British society was getting dated. Crooks and Coronets isn't exactly a bad movie, although it's one of those that feels like it doesn't have all that much that's original to it. Had it come out in 1959 it might have worked better, but by now the whole premis is beginning to feel tired. Still, it's also another of those movies where you can understand why the people involved, espcially Savalas and Oates going over the Britain, would have read the screenplay and decided they wanted to make the movie. Crooks and Coronets is modestly entertaining, but nothing spectacular.

Desert Hearts

Another of the movies that I recorded from the September 2025 TCM salute to the UCLA Film and Television Archive was Desert Hearts. It's got a showing tonight (June 29) at 11:15 PM as part of TCM's "Pride" movie day, so I figured now would be a good time to schedule this post that had been lying in my drafts in conjunction with the TCM showing.

It's 1959, and getting off a train in Reno, NV, is Vivian Bell (Helen Shaver). Reno in those days of course meant the place the people go to when they're looking to get a divorce since the divorce laws in other states still hadn't been liberalized. Vivian is an English professor at a college in New York, in a marriage with a man who was more or less just a friend at the time they got married, with no real plans to have children or anything. The two have basically just drifted apart, so a divorce is apparently the best thing. (We never see Vivian's husband.) She has come out to Reno for the requisite several weeks of residency and will be spending them at a ranch-type place that's been converted to tourism and partly to accommodate the sort of woman who is looking to fulfill the residency requirement for that divorce.

The place is run by Frances Parker (Audra Lindley), who is a widow with an adult son Walter and stepdaughter Cay (Patricia Charbonneau). Walter works solely for Mom, while Cay has a job on the outside, making change for the sort of pathetic people who go to one of the lesser casinos to play the slot machines, a job she shares with her best friend Silver (Andra Akers). Silver is planning on geting married to Art, while Cay is being pursued romantically by her boss Darrell (Dean Butler). They're advances that Cay has decided she really doesn't want.

That's because Cay is a lesbian, and is relatively open about it for 1959 and a place like Reno. This is going to cause some serious issues with her stepmom later in the film. Cay is also in some ways very much a product of the west at a time when there were much greater cultural differences between the various regions of the United States. So the sudden presence of an urbane New Yorker like Vivian is bound to shake things up.

Cay is one of those way too extroverted people who immediately starts to befriend Vivian who, for various reasons, is a bit repressed. After all, she is there for a divorce, and starting a relationshp with anybody could theoretically be seen as giving her husband grounds to make the divorce settlement less in her favor. Never mind that this being 1959, she probably hasn't had any openly lesbian friends before.

But Cay makes Vivian realize that she might in fact be lesbian or at least bi, which would also explain the fairly loveless marriage, even though she's also rather reluctant to consummate the relationship. Cay's pursuit of Vivian also makes Frances extremely uncomfortable. And there's also the fact that Vivian is going to have to return to New York eventually since she does have that job waiting for her next semester.

Desert Hearts isn't a bad movie by any stretch of the imaginaton. But I can't help but think that, had the story been about some sort of heterosexual relationship -- say, the woman going out to Reno and finding a nice man who falls in love with her on the rebound -- it would be the sort of movie that would have gone in an out of theaters, largely forgotten because it doesn't do anything anyone could consider groundbreaking. Part of that, though is down to the low budget; I have a feeling that it the director had wanted to do a more mainstream heterosexual relationship film funding would have been easier to come by. Still, as long as you're OK with the fact that it has a fairly explicit sex scene, Desert Hearts is one that's worth one watch at least.