Secrets with nice socks

In September 2025, TCM ran a night of films dedicated to the UCLA Film and Television Archive, which gave me the opportunity to record several lesser known films, a fact I mentioned with Wanda not too long ago. Another movie that aired as part of the salute was The Argyle Secrets. As is my wont, not having heard of it, I recorded it to watch and write up this review.

William Gargan stars as Harry Mitchell, a journalist who, as the movie opens, tells us he's still surprised that everything he's about to tell us about happened in the space of just 24 hours. That's an obvious sign that we're about to get Yet Another Flashback, although in this case it's not that much of a flashback, as it's basically just the previous 24 hours.

Mitchell has a colleague named Allen Pierce, a columnist who covers the Washington scene and has been writing a lot about something called the Argyle Album that will, if published, create a giant scandal. However, Pierce is known to have heart issues and is in hospital as a result, with Mitchell and a photographer visiting to cover the story. Pierce tells Mitchell to finish his work on the Argyle Album if anything should happen to him, at which point Pierce develops an acute issue and dies in his hospital bed. Mitchell is no dummy and figures out a way to keep the other reporters out of the room while he phones in his story. Except that by the time Mitchell gets back, Pierce's body is revealed to have a scalpel in it, while the photographer is missing at first before also being found very much dead.

Mitchell is an obvious suspect even though we know from what's shown that he's not guilty, never mind the opening narration. So he has to figure out a way to get out of the hospital so that he can find the rest of the Argyle Album, since Pierce only gave him a photostat of the cover. The first place to go is Pierce's secretary, Elizabeth Court (Barbara Billingsley), who doesn't have the album and doesn't want to help. It's also quickly revealed that Mitchell isn't the only person looking for the album, which should be obvious considering how we've been told that the publication of the album could lead to major scandals. One such person shows up, a man in a panama hat who gets the obvious nickname of Panama, who's rather violent in his desire to get that album.

So Mitchell has to escape again, going to the apartment of a friend who's out of town. Of course, he's been followed, only not by the police. Instead, a woman calling herself Marla (Marjorie Lord) shows up, offering Mitchell a substantial sum of money if only he'll give her the album, which she doesn't know that he doesn't yet have the album. Marla, for her part, has a bunch of nasty friends who also want the album, which is eventually revealed to have the names of people who were profiteers or collaborators during the recently-concluded World War II, which would explain why so many people so badly want this album.

Mitchell's search takes him all over the city, although at least at some point the police are able to figure out that he in fact did not commit the murder. Granted, he's still a material witness so shouldn't be trying to evade the police either. But then we wouldn't have much of a movie, would we?

The Argyle Secrets is another of those B movies that's surprisingly effective even if the album is more of a macguffin than anything else. It's somewhat reminiscent of a low-budget version of The Maltese Falcon, with Gargan as a journalistic Sam Spade. Gargan is more than good enough here, and the rest of the cast is entertaining although this isn't a movie that's going to be remembered as anything truly classic.

Mel Brooks Centenary!

Mel Brooks (l.) in The Twelve Chairs (2:30 PM)

Today is the 100th birthday of director/screenwriter/comedian Mel Brooks, known for his parodies and often absurd comedies. TCM is celebrating with five of his movies this afternoon and evening:

2:30 PM The Twelve Chairs, in which Brooks looks for a missing chair that may be concealing a treasure;
4:15 PM The Producers, starring Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder as Broadway producers who get involved in a scam regarding their latest show;
6:00 PM Spaceballs, a parody of science-fiction movies in general and Star Wars in particular;
8:00 PM Blazing Saddles; a boundary-pushing absurd comedy western; and
10:00 PM Young Frankenstein; a comic retelling of a descendant of the original Dr. Frankenstein.

Normal programming returns with Silent Sunday Nights at midnight.

A million tanks

James Gleason was an always reliable character actor, and it was nice to see him get a day in the 2025 Summer Under the Stars on TCM. One of his movies that I hadn't seen before was the Hal Roach Streamliner Tanks a Million, so I recorded it in order to be able to do the post on it here.

A search of the blog says I haven't mentioned the Streamliners before. These were a series of movies Hal Roach produced that were longer than the shorts he had mostly been producing, but still shorter than even a lot of the B movies, clocking in mostly at a shade under an hour (this one is 50 minutes). Granted, this was still the era before TV so in later years material like this would probably have been storyboarded for episodic TV. The "star", if you will, here is William Tracy, playing Dorian "Dodo" Doubleday. As the movie opens, he's on a radio show where he's showing off his photographic memory. Dodo works at a train station information booth, but that work is coming to an end as he's just been drafted into the army. (The movie was released in September 1941, so no mention of any possible upcoming war.)

Sgt. Ames (Joe Sawyer) is the drill instructor assigned to the new recruits, but Pvt. Doubleday already knows the entire army manual and not only that, but seems to know how to actually do the stuff the manual asks of new recruits. And he's frankly obnoxious about showing off all this knowledge. Needless to say, it ticks Sgt. Ames off, but when Ames goes to his superior officers, they get the brilliant idea to promote Doubleday to sergeant, albeit with a bit of a devious catch. Doubleday is assigned to a unit that has the most inept recruits, who also have a bit of a mischievous streak in that they figure out ways to do stuff very close to sergeant's orders. If Sgt. Doubleday fails to mention every article of clothing they're supposed to wear, they'll only wear the ones he mentioned. The trick's on them, however, when they have to march barefoot.

Col. Barkley (James Gleason) is coming to the base, where he's supposed to deliver a speech that's going out on a national radio hookup. Not that he likes giving radio speeches. Sgt. Doubleday gets assigned to be Barkley's orderly. But when he gets some sort of powder on Barkley's uniform, he puts the jacket on himself to be able to clean the powder off. Unfortunately, this leads to his being mistaken for Barkley, leading to all sorts of complications. But since this is a comedy, and a short one at that, you know things are going to work out well, and quickly.

Tanks a Million is a film that's rather more episode than something that has a fully-fledged plot, although that's probably to be expected coming from Hal Roach since he'd been doing a lot more with shorts. The material is adequate for what it is, which is a throaway B movie. Nobody will consider Tanks a Million any great shakes, but back in 1941 I'd bet it entertained while it came and went, to be promptly forgotten as it was replaced by the next movie.

Ann Blyth, 1927-2026

Ann Blyth and Joan Crawford in Mildred Pierce (1945)

The death has been announced of actress Ann Blyth. Blyth, who was probably most famous for playing spoiled brat daughter Veda Pierce in the movie Mildred Pierce, was 98. I should point out that some sources listed her date of birth as 1928, but I believe Blyth talked about being 17 when she did the screen test for Mildred Pierce with Crawford, which would put her date of birth as 1927.

Blyth didn't have the longest of careers, at least not in the movies, as like a lot of actresses of her era, she aged out of roles and got married. The obituary I linked to says that her final feature film was The Helen Morgan Story, which I blogged about only a year ago.

Paul Newman and Ann Blyth in The Helen Morgan Story

As I write this, there hasn't been any tribute programmed on TCM for Blyth. She was the subject of a Summer Under the Stars day back in 2013, so TCM probably can get the rights to enough movies to do a reasonable tribute on her. I'm not certain if they'll pre-empt a night of programming in July, give her a day in Summer Under the Stars, or wait until September for a tribute.

Mr. Skitch

My internet went out for a couple of hours a few nights ago, forcing me to fire up the DVD player which in some ways isn't a bad thing considering the number of DVDs I've got sitting unwatched. This time, it was another film from my Will Rogers box set: Mr. Skitch.

In the town of Flat River, MO, Ira Skitch (Will Rogers) lives together with his wife Maddie (ZaSu Pitts), adult daughter Emily (Rochelle Hudson), and three young kids. Ira has been working as some sort of repairman, but there's a depression on, don't you know, and work has dried up. Also, the bank that Ira put the family's money in has failed, so Ira hasn't been able to pay off the mortgage and the home is about to be foreclosed on. Hardest hit by this is Emily, who had hoped to land a man above her station as husband but who rejects her as soon as he discovers the Skitch family's financial hardship. Some love.

So Ira, several years before The Grapes of Wrath was published, decides that the best thing to do is to pack up the family and head west to California since at the time it was seen as a land of economic opportunity. However, the family takes a rather circuitous route, as they go first to Yellowstone, then the Grand Canyon, and finally an auto-camp in what is supposedly the Lake Tahoe area of Nevada. (I don't remember how much gambling there was going on in Las Vegas in the early 1930s, and in any case it would have been much too hot for an auto-camp.)

This bunch of detours is really an excuse to make Mr. Skitch a bit more of a sketch comedy movie with the various characters Skitch meets while he tries to make enough money to actually get to California. There's a British actress, Flo (Florence Desmond) who at one point does her best Greta Garbo impersonation. Eugene Pallette plays an inebriated gambler in the Nevada segment, and there's also a wealthy retiree traveling across country in a mobile home whom Skitch encounters at Yellowstone. Oh, and Yellowstone is also an excuse for Mrs. Skitch to have an encounter with a couple of bears that is of course played for comic event.

Emily's lack of job prospects back in Missouri that led her to go along for the ride is also a bit of an excuse for her to be in the romantic subplot that dominates a good portion of the movie along with supplying the requisite happy ending. At a pond in Yellowstone that thankfully isn't one of those hot mineral springs that would have killed her instantly, she falls in, and is rescued by Harvey Denby (Charles Starrett before playing the Durango Kid) who is dressed as a West Point cadet because he's going to be heading back to West Point after the summer. Denby has a wealthy uncle, not that he's letting on, and is willing to love Emily even if she is poor. But she doesn't get this until the final reel.

To be honest, Mr. Skitch isn't as good as some of the other Will Rogers movies I've seen, largely because of the series of vignettes structuring. That, and this time even more than other Rogers movies, the Depression forces him to be uncomfortably dishonest in trying to earn that money to get the family to get to California. We understand why he's doing it, but it all still seems scammy.

Mr. Imperium

Another of the movies that I reecorded when Lana Turner got a day in the 2025 edition of Summer Under the Stars was Mr. Imperium. It's a movie that I don't think gets all that much mention when it comes to Turner's filmography. Having seen it, I can understand why.

Turner plays Frederica Brown, an actress who is doing some sort of American-themed stage show at a club in Italy in 1939, which is of course just before World War II kicked off in Europe, and a fact that ought to set off all sorts of alarm bells in terms of anachronisms and the question of how the movie will handle the history of the intervening 12 years. Anyhow, one of the male patrons sees Frederica and falls for her, creating a ruse in which he calls himself Mr. Imperium to get the chance to meet her.

Imperium takes Frederica to the sort of lovely Mediterranean villa that, by the end of the decade, would have been filmed on location in lovely wide-screen in addition to the pretty good color we have here. (IMDb says the California coast around Monterey and Pebble Beach are standing in for Italy, which isn't a bad stand-in.) Imperium played by the much older Ezio Pinza, reveals that his true identity is Alexis, the crown prince of Italy. Alexis is a widower with an unseen 5-year-old son. Alexis knows his duty is to become king, and he's resigned himself to that, although he's not thrilled that this is going to be his son's fate too. And not that Alexis can really marry an actress like Frederica: it would cause a royal scandal.

In any case, Alexis suddenly hears from the prime minister Bernand (Cedric Hardwicke) that the King has taken a sudden turn for the worse and that Alexis is going to have to go to Rome to see the King. Alexis writes a note to Frederica to explain, but Bernand burns the note so that Frederica won't understand why Alexis just up and left her, at least not until she sees the news of the king's death. Frederica has to be smart enough to know what all that means.

Anyhow, a dozen years pass. Frederica, now using the stage name Fredda Barlo, is a successful Hollywood actress with a boyfriend in producer Paul Hunter (Barry Sullivan) who is trying to get her to sign a long-term contract. In Paris, Alexis sees a marquee and lobby card for Fredda's latest movie. He realizes he has to get to America incognito to have another chance to see her again. So he schemes to get in contact with Fredda, who is going to be going to Palm Springs to contemplate her next movie. Fredda is staying at a private resort run by Mrs. Cabot (Marjorie Main) and her shockingly indiscreet niece Gwen (Debbie Reynolds).

Alexis, again registered under the alias Mr. Imperium, tells Fredda about the history of what's been going on in his country since the war. He abdicated following a post-war revolution, and his kid is at a boarding school in England, soon to turn 18. However, the country has been going through revolution for quite some time, with one section of the population tired of the revolution and thinking that the monarchy would be a good way to return stability and a unifying force to the country. There's going to be a plebiscite next week on whether to restore the monarchy, and Alexis plans to lose it so he can stay with Fredda. And then Bernand shows up to reveal a twist....

Mr. Imperium is another of those movies that's decidedly of its time, and is supposed to be inoffensive. If you're not the biggest fan of MGM's musical romances of the era, especially considering that Pinza's music stylings are more operatic, you're probably going to have a problem with this one. For me, the bigger problem was with Debbie Reynolds' scenes. She's just so obnoxious in trying to snoop on her guests. If she hadn't been the proprietress' niece, she would have been fired for cause.

Mr. Imperium is a minor movie, but I can see why some people might like it.

Never Steal Anything Wet

It's time for another of those movies that I recorded from the previous TCM showing, and is now getting another airing on TCM. This time, the movie is Catalina Caper, and the next airing is tomorrow, June 25, at 9:30 AM.

After some cheesy animated opening credits, we get a scene of a guy snooping around a museum late one night, stopping at one of the paintings. Well, technically, it's not a painting; it's a scroll from one or another of the Chinese dynasties, so several hundred years old. The man removes it from its frame, this being the era and the sort of lower-tier museum that doesn't have an alarm on each painting, and is able to get the scroll out of the building without being discovered, more or less.

Cut to the ferry that goes between Southern California and Catalina Island. Bob and Sid are a couple of Harbor Patrol workers seeing that people get on board the ferry safely, before making the trip over to Catalina Island themselves. Among the people on the ferry is the thief from the opening scene, as well as a couple of college guys. Don Pringle (Tommy Kirk) is from Arizona and has apparently never seen the ocean, so he's being brought over to Catlaina by his friend Charlie, who's quite the ladies' man. Another reason Charlie is bringing Don to Catalina is to introduce him to the hot bikini-clad girls who show up on the beaches of Catalina. One last person is an unnamed (until the finale) man played by Robert Donner who provides comic relief but is clearly going to be integral to the plot in some way that is revealed in the finale.

The ferry ride is an excuse to bring in Little Richard to perform a number, on the theory that presumably the teens who were the target audience for a movie like this were still interested in Little Richard even though his heyday had passed several years earlier. And why does he never show up again even though he was on the ferry?

Anyhow, after the ferry makes it to Catalina, the thief makes his way to a yacht owned by Arthur Duval (Del Moore). Arthur commissioned the heist, with the idea that his wife was going to forge a copy of the scroll and sell the forged copy to wealthy Greek collector Lakopoulos. Arthur has a son Tad who is about the same age as Charlie and Don and all the bikini-clad women. He suspects his father is up to no good, but for understandable reasons doesn't want his parents to wind up in prison.

Lakopoulos doesn't plan to pay for the scroll, but steal it. In his attempt to have his henchmen steal it, however, the container in which Duval put it gets thrown overboard, leading to a Lakopoulos' scuba divers trying to find it. The younger set, meanwhile, also scuba dives for pleasure, not knowing that danger lurks beneath the surface. There's also a lot of scenes of those young people doing beach things along with music by a group called the Cascades who had had a hit several years earlier with a song called "Rhythm of the Rain".

Catalina Caper came near the end of the cycle of beach movies, and as far as I can tell was more or less independently produced on the cheap. That shows, as the movie is fairly lousy, with a paper-thin plot that's an excuse to show shots of nubile young women in bikinis. The music is typical for movies of the era: I've seen a whole bunch of movies from the 60s where a character turns on the radio and this instrumental guitar music plays as though this was the popular music of the era. Most of the score is that sort of bland and not very good music. Worst, however, is the acting, which is wooden at best.

I'd guess that the people behind the movie thought they could make a quick buck by cashing in on a trend. They clearly weren't thinking about creating a good movie.

An American Romance

Tomorrow's daytime programming on TCM is a bunch of movies directed by King Vidor. One that I hadn't seen before, but that was on my DVR was An American Romance, which TCM is showing at 8:15 AM. By now, you know the drill, which is that I watched it off the DVR in order to be able to do this write-up in time for tomorrow's showing.

Brian Donlevy plays Stefan Dangosbiblicek, a Czech man in the early 1890s who is emigrating to the US in part because he's got a cousin in the iron-mining part of Minnesota, the Mesabi range on the north shore of Lake Superior. He barely speaks English, and doesn't have enough money per the law on how much an immigrant should have so as not to be a burden for at least some period of time. But one of the men manning the immigration booth has pity on Stefan, who claims to be a hard worker, and sends him on his way to work -- and walk -- his way west to Minnesota.

Amazingly, Stefan makes it all the way out to Minnesota, where he finds cousin Anton (John Qualen), who does indeed still work in the open-pit iron mine, with the real thing being shown on screen here. He is indeed a hard worker, which is going to stand him in good stead later in the movie, but also wants to learn. Thankfully there's a schoolteacher, Anna O'Rourke (Ann Richards), who is willing to help him learn English, and the two fall in love along the way and get married. Anna eventually has five children: a duaghter and four sons named after US presidents.

Stefan, who along the way had his name Americanized to Steve Dangos, keeps working hard and becomes foreman at a steel mill in one of those mid-sized midwest cities. It's enough for him to be able to buy a car, but this being a car from the crank era of starting, it's still not particularly reliable. This causes him to take the car completely apart to figure out how it runs, although even that stands Steve in good stead as he comes up with an idea to start a factory of his own for new ideas in automotive engineering. This even though other companies aren't so certain of the innovations like a steel roof to keep people safer in roll-over accidents. The fact that there's about to be a Depression on doesn't help either.

And, along the way, various other parts of US history are going to intrude on Steve's story. There's World War I, which costs Steve one of his sons. At the end, there's also World War II, which is handled in a rather propagandistic manner. An American Romance was released in 1944, while World War II was still raging. It seems fairly clear that An American Romance included a fair bit into the story designed to further the war effort explicitly, or through fostering social cohesion. Just before World War II is a long sequence about the labor union struggles of the 1930s, with Steve's own son Theodore Roosevelt Dangos (Stephen McNally, still early enough in his career to be credited under his birth name Horace) on the side of the labor union.

Watching An American Romance, I couldn't help but think about some of the other epic movies about the American experience, such as Avalon. An American Romance is certainly well-made, although the story feels like a romanticized (no pun intended) version of the immigrant experience. That, and it also comes across as having to check off a bunch of boxes about what the American Dream of social and economic advancement was about for early 20th century immigrants. An American Romance isn't a bad movie by any stretch of the imagination, but it does feel a bit formulaic.

Love Begins at 20

I've mentioned a lot how I like the Warner Bros. B movies. But even they produced some that are stinkers. One that's a mess because of how much it's trying to do is Love Begins at 20.

Hugh Herbert is the star here, which may be a red flag for some people because I know he can be a bit of an acquired taste. He plays Horace Gillingwater, a man who seems to be surprisingly wealthy considering his working at a broom factory. He can support two adult daughters, Lois (Patricia Ellis) and Alice (Mary Treen), although he has an overbearing wife Evalina (Dorothy Vaughan) as well as an overbearing boss Ramp who wants to cut Horace's pay. Lois wants to get married to Jerry (Warren Hull) who helps run deliveries for the local grocer, but Mom is so overbearing that she hates the guy and has no desire to let her daughter marry a man like this. Indeed, Mom makes Dad's life hell by constantly telling him she should have married some guy named Harold Macauley.

Horace gets tasked with going to the next town over to retrieve some bonds that the boss has at the bank in that town: couldn't the boss go himself? And wouldn't the boss have to do so to fetch the bonds? But it's a plot device for Horace to have the bonds in his hands when a couple of bank robbers come in and rob the joint, taking the bonds as well as a bunch of cash, which is an obvious problem, even though there's not really anything that's Horace's fault.

And then Mom decides to go out to the movies with Alice. This gives Jerry the chance to show up and hopefully convince Dad to give his permission for him and Lois to elope. Also coming over is Horace's lodge friend Jacob Buckley (Hobart Cavanaugh). Buckley also has some alcohol with him. Horace would never drink in the presence of his wife, because she's so controlling that she'd have an absolute fit. Indeed, she did the last time Horace had too much to drink, which was before Prohibition.

Jacob convinces Horace to go to the lodge, and a bunch of plot points start to come together. The bank robbers have fled here not knowing that one of the witnesses to the robbery lives here. Horace's boss shows up at the lodge and Horace, now drunk, picks a fight with his boss. And then the robbers plant the bonds on Horace so they won't be caught red-handed when the cops show up. But they go looking for Horace at his home.

Love Begins at 20 is based on a play that apparently starred Bette Davis before she went off to Hollywood. The material is something that probably worked better on the stage where everybody is coming and going on the same set. Trying to open it up, ironically, didn't really work. Then again, I'd expect that the play would have run longer than an hour, so everything wasn't so rushed.

Ultimately, I didn't particularly care for Love Begins at 20, but I can see why some people might find it interesting.

The Story of Esther Costello

Another actor who has several movies that wound up on my DVR without being part of any particular tribute is Italian actor Rossano Brazzi. This time, the movie that features him is The Story of Esther Costello.

As you might guess, Brazzi does not in fact play Esther Costello. Nor does the female lead, Joan Crawford, although we get to see Crawford quite a bit before we get to see Brazzi. We first get to see Esther herself. In a prologue scene, it's 1948 Ireland in one of those dirt-poor villages, and Esther is playing with a couple of boys. Esther has found a cellar where a cache of explosives from either the war of independence from Britain or perhaps the civil war that followed remains hidden a quarter century on. The kids must be too young to read, or else they'd know that these are dangerous explosives and not toys to be played with. But they're stupid, and one of them pulls the pin on one of the grenades. In the resulting explosion, Esther's mother is killed as, presumably, are the two boys.

Fast forward to 1953. Margaret Landi (Joan Crawford) is a childless American woman who is apparently rich enough to travel to the village where she grew up, and even buy chocolates for the village children. The parish priest, Fr. Devlin (Denis O'Dea), informs her there's one more child, which is how Margaret gets introduced to Esther (Heather Sears). In the accident, Esther became deaf-blind, and is living in squalor with an alcoholic granny. Margaret is horrified, and decides that she's willing to become the child's guardian and take her over to England and then the US, where there are schools that teach the deaf-blind how to use their sense of touch to learn Braille as well as finger-spell and things like that.

It's a lot of work, but Esther is a good student and eventually reaches the point where Margaret it willing to bring her to a school assembly at a school for children with all five senses for a talk about overcoming hardships. One of the girls is overcome by emotion, and it's there that the idea is born, in part with help from newspaper reporter Harry Grant (Lee Patterson) who has already met Esther. Esther's could be an inspiring story, and that inspiration could be used to raise money for other deaf-blind people. Those schools need quite a bit of money, after all.

Margaret decides it's a good idea, and has good intentions, so she takes Esther around and parades her to large audiences as the donations start pouring in. And then Margaret sees a check she'd rather not see: it's signed by one Carlo Landi (that's Rossano Brazzi). Carlo is Margaret's estranged husband, the sort of man who cheated on Margaret and likely cheated his clients in whatever work he did, to the point that for the first half of the movie I was expecting Margaret's husband to be in prison.

Carlo works his way back into Margaret's life, although it's also a bit of a ruse. Carlo sees all that money coming in, and figures it's a good way for all of them to live a life with at least some luxury in it. Or, at least, a good way for Carlo. He has the idea of bringing Esther back to Europe and going on an extended engagement tour, lying as well about how much money is coming in so that he can skim some of it off. You'd think Margaret might have figured this out by now.

She eventually does figure it out, as does Harry, who wants to rescue Esther from all this because he thinks he's in love with her. But there's the question of what it would do to Esther if she found out that people around her whom she trusted are basically scamming her. And if that's not enough, the story takes a plot twist just in time for the finale....

The main idea of The Story of Esther Costello dealing with charities scamming gullible people, isn't a bad one. And for the most part The Story of Esther Costello really isn't a bad movie. But it does have some plot holes that do bring it down a peg or two. One is the plot's requiring that Margaret be a bit too dim to figure out that her husband just wants to scam people again. She's incredibly quick to bring him back into her life. And really would a charity of that size be run by only one or two people, especially someone like Margaret who had no experience doing such things?

Still, overall, The Story of Esther Costello is definitely one that's worth watching.