Good Morning, Eve!

One of the shorts that TCM ran as part of the Saturday morning block was the early three-strip Technicolor short Good Morning, Eve!.

Leon Errol stars as Adam, looking much too old and certainly not the stereotypically handsome sort or Adam you'd see in other Bible-themed movies. Of course, he's in the Garden of Eden with Eve (June MacCloy), and is tempted with a bite of the apple.

This time, however, the apple sends them out of paradise, if you will, by going on a tour of history. This is an excuse for some sight gags since Adam and Eve are people out of place, as well as an excuse for musical numbers since that's the sort of thing audiences back in 1934 would have loved.

Adam and Eve make a stop in ancient Rome under Nero (Vernon Dent), who is holding some sort of musical competition that allows Adam and Eve to enter since Nero is bored of the traditional competition where he's always declared the winner. There's also a rural-style quartet from the days before it was commonly called country music.

Second is a stop in the England of King Arthur, four years before Warner Bros. made The Adventures of Robin Hood. Finally, Adam and Eve make it to the present, and a beach full of nubile young women in bathing suits, before the ending that reveals....

There is naturally very little plot to Good Morning, Eve!. The humor is dad joke level, but the audiences would have been OK with such dumb humor around the musical numbers. What is the most interesting about the short is that it's one the earliest live-action examples of three-strip Technicolor, coming after maybe Service With a Smile and La Cucaracha as far as shorts completely in the new process. The print TCM showed is excellent, with stunning color:

Briefs for August 7-8, 2026

A bit of the TCM schedule for September is available, and it looks as though there's already one movie on the schedule that I'd written up a post for recently and scheduled for in between now and when it's going to air, so I've got to move a bunch of stuff around since if I can schedule a post on a movie in conjunction with when it's going to air (or, less frequently, FXM), I like to do that. Once again, however, as always, check a listings site yourself, since my writing up posts some time in advance tends to make me do double takes over whether I've scheduled them on the right day.

Today in TCM's Summer Under the Stars is a day of movies with Basil Rathbone, while tomorrow is given over to Steve McQueen, including the first version of The Thomas Crown Affair at 6:00 PM. It got a remake in the 1990s, of course, and apparently there's going to be a third version coming out next year, starring Michael B. Jordan. Not that I'm likely to watch it since I don't go to the movie theater very often. As I think I've stated, our local sixtyplex is in a dead mall which I think is down to about the theater and Target, which was only attached to the mall at some later date. It's depressing to go there, and the service roads are badly maintained.

There's actually a couple of movies in the FXM rotation that I've got on my DVR but haven't watched or written up posts about, and they're coming up in the near future: Wee Willie Winkie at 7:20 AM August 9 as part of a morning of Shirley Temple movies, and Daniel Day-Lewis in Lincoln a couple of times next week. I have to admit part of the reason I haven't gotten around to watching them is that I'm always a couple of weeks ahead in my post scheduling, and besides, FXM repeats stuff often enough that I can keep seeing it if I missed the previous airing. The one FXM movie on my DVR that doesn't seem to be repeating is Anastasia, which I've mentioned in passing a few times but never actually done a full-length post on.

Today is the birth anniversary of actress Billie Burke (born 1884), who is probably best known for playing Glinda, the good witch, in the Judy Garland version of The Wizard of Oz although I always think of her as Lionel Barrymore's wife in Dinner at Eight. It's also the birth anniversary of Ann Harding (born 1901). That reminds me that I really need to get around to watching the 1930 version of Holiday, if it's still available on demand at Tubi. I noticed that among the films to put in my Tubi library ages ago, and rarely get around to watching anything from it.

The Arnelo Affair

I mentioned a few months back that I somehow wound up with a whole bunch of movies starring George Murphy on my DVR, not from a programming theme of his movies. Another of the movies was The Arnelo Affair, which I watched and wrote of this post that I could schedule at a suitable time after other posts on Murphy's movies.

Murphy is technically the second male lead here, and we don't see him at first. Instead, we see the female lead, Frances Gifford, who plays Ann Parkson. Ann is in a car with Tony Arnelo (John Hodiak), and in a voiceover talking about how much she regrets this. And how she wishes her husband had never brought this guy home. So, as you might be able to guess, we're about to get Yet Another Flashback, to the time when Ann's husband Ted (that's George Murphy) brought Tony Arnelo home.

Ted is a Chicago lawyer who's trying to advance his career, and one of his clients is nightclub owner Arnelo, whom Ted is representing in a bunch of tax-related stuff. Ann and Tony have a kid, Ricky (a young Dean Stockwell), and a seemingly wonderful life, except that Ted is spending a lot of time on his work, to the point that he can't take Ann out for a night out on the town with friends like upstairs neighbor and couturier Vivian Delwyn (Eve Arden). But Tony shows up, and he immediately starts telling Ann how striking she looks. When he learns that Ann has a hobby of interior decoration, Tony offers her the chance to make a bit of money by decorating some of his places.

Ann being a bored housewife, she decides to take Tony up on the offer. However, she quickly learns that Tony is really interested in her for other reasons, and that she's not the only woman he's interested in. He's also seeing a local actress named Claire Lorrison who shows up one afternoon when Ann thinks she's going to be alone with Tony. Worse, Tony starts smacking Claire around, leading Ann to want to break off the relationship with Tony. Tony, for his part, is rather persistent, constantly calling Ann up.

Things take an even worse turn when Claire winds up dead, clearly quite murdered. Ann is innocent of the murder, although not necessarily of adultery, which is still an issue under the Production Code. But Tony being a nasty piece of work, he's able to blackmail Ann by making certain that the dead Claire is found with a compact that has a big letter A that can likely be traced back to Ann. But of course, since there's that Production Code, we know that the real murderer has to be caught and get his just desserts.

I can see why all the people involved in The Arnelo Affair might want to be involved with it, but the final result is something that's rather a misfire. If I had to guess why, I think that it feels like it's devoid of emotion. George Murphy isn't a very charismatic actor at the best of times, and he's certainly very much a second banana here. Tony Arnelo may be a piece of work, but Hodiak doesn't give off that vibe. And Gifford is a bit of a cipher too. The Dean Stockwell character is somewhat superfluous. And, not that it has anything to do with the movie itself, the print TCM ran looked like one of those older 16mm prints that TV stations would run of old public-domain movies.

Manhattan Murder Mystery

Tomorrow, August 6, is Diane Keaton day in this year's installment of TCM's Summer Under the Stars. Since Keaton died late last year and TCM had a programming tribute to her, this gave me the opportunity to record a couple of her movies that I hadn't seen before. One that I recorded that's part of her day tomorrow is Manhattan Murder Mystery, airing at 4:00 PM.

Keaton plays Carol Lipton, married to Manhattan editor Larry Lipton (Woody Allen) and living in a nice Manhattan apartment. One night, she agrees to go to a hockey game on the grounds that Larry will then go with her to the opera, a sign that there might be a bit of tension in their marriage. As they get home, on the elevator up to the apartment they meet some neighbors they haven't met before, Paul (Jerry Adler) and Lillian (Lynn Cohen) House. The Houses invite Larry and Carol over for a nightcap, and the two couples seem to get along moderately well.

That all changes the following night when Carol and Larry return from the opera, only to find the paramedics there. It seems Lillian has suddenly died of a massive heart attack. Not that there's much that Carol and Larry can do to console the old guy, who in any case thinks that perhaps he should take a vacation to Florida to go visit his brother and do a bit of snorkeling.

Some time later, Carol, who was already revealed to be a good cook, decides to bring over some dessert to cheer up Paul. He happily lets Carol and Larry in, but when Carol goes to put on a pot of coffee to have with dessert, she can't find the percolator. In one of the cabinets, she finds... an urn with Lillian's ashes! This surprises Carol, not only because it seems like a slightly odd place to keep a cremation urn, but also because Paul and Lillian had mentioned having bought a pair of cemetery plots up in Rockland County to be buried in. My first thought was that it's not uncommon in places with family plots for people to be cremated and have the ashes interred in the family plot/crypt.

This, however, is not Carol's first thought. She has a feeling that Paul must have been lying about the plots up in Rockland County; that, combined with a cremation that precludes any sort of autopsy, suggests to Carol that perhaps Lillian could have been murdered! So what does Carol do? She tells her and Larry's friend Ted (Alan Alda) about this, and gets the bright idea that perhaps one day while she knows that Paul is out of the apartment she can get the superintendent's key and search Paul's apartment for evidence proving that Lillian did not in fact die of natural causes.

This is understandably a crazy idea for poor Larry. But he keeps getting dragged further and further into things, as Carol discovers one inconsistency after another that only strengthens her belief that Paul in fact killed Lillian. And dammit, like a 1930s husband/wife comic murder mystery movie, she's going to investigate until she gets to the real truth!

Complicating things are a pair of possibly romantic subplots. Since Ted is more willing to believe Carol than Larry is, Larry gets the impression that perhaps there's something romantic going on between Ted and Carol. Larry, meanwhile, is working on the newest book from client Marcia (Anjelica Huston), so Carol starts to wonder whether perhaps Larry has some sort of romantic involvement with Marcia. Eventually, the four team together when the evidence that there really was a murder becomes too strong to ignore.

Frankly, the plot of Manhattan Murder Mystery is, like a lot of the 1930s mysteries, wildly unrealistic. You're going to have to suspend a lot of disbelief here. However, the movie is decidedly well made. I think it's going to appeal more to fans of Woody Allen than the more casual movie fan, but it's not hard to see why it got mostly positive reviews upon its release.

That Glenn Ford version of Cimarron again

Edna Ferber's novel Cimarron was famously made into a motion picture not long after its publication, and that version is notorious for winning the Best Picture Oscar for RKO where time has been extremely unkind to the movie. Somewhere along the way MGM got the rights to the book. After RKO closed up shop, and after MGM's own best days had gone by, a second version of Cimarron made it to the screen. That version airs early tomorrow morning, or overnight tonight if you wish to look at it that way, at 3:30 AM.

Glenn Ford stars as Yancey Cravat, and despite the opening title cards going on about the first (1889) land rush in what is now the state of Oklahoma, we don't actually get to the rush for about a half hour. Instead, we have to hear Yancey talk about how this land rush is going to be the biggest thing in history, along with meeting Yancey's new bride Sabra (Maria Schell). She seems to be from fairly well-to-do immigrant stock, and her parents are none too happy with her marriage to a man they barely know and who is going to take her away to some god-forsaken place.

We also meet a couple of other people who are going to take part in the land rush. The Wyatts (Arthur O'Connell and Mercedes McCambridge) are the parents of a large family. Dixie Lee (Anne Baxter) knows just the piece of land that Yancey wants in Oklahoma, and has no qualms about beating Yancey to it and claiming it for her own, even though there's no way she can farm that much land. And then there are the Peglers (Robert Keith and Aline MacMahon). Mr. Pegler was the publisher of a newspaper in Texas, together with his printer Jesse (Harry Morgan, oddly credited as "Henry 'Harry' Morgan" despite already having some credits as Harry). Unfortunately, in the land rush, Mr. Pegler gets trampled to death, and the Cravats wind up as owners of a newspaper.

It's one step on the way to the family becoming wealthy, but that's not going to be an easy road. For one thing, there's a lot of prejudice in Oklahoma. Some of it is towards a Jewish merchant, Sol Levy (David Opatoshu), although Sabra doesn't have any issues with him, repeatedly going to him to ask to borrow money. Somewhat surprisingly is that Sabra has a lot of problems with the Cherokees who have populated the area ever since being forcibly relocated there by Andrew Jackson and the Trail of Tears. Imagine Sabra's horror when her kid marries a Cherokee near the end of the movie.

The other problem is that Yancey just can't stay in one place. He's always searching for the Next Big Thing which in some ways would be admirable, if it weren't for the fact that that next thing isn't something that can be achieved in the same location. Heck, that's why he took part in the first land rush. He takes part in another one in what is now the Oklahoma panhandle, and goes off to join the armed forces first for the Spanish-American War and then for the Great War fighting for France. This latter even though his character would be past 50 by this point.

Yancey also has adventures involving dealing with a couple of outlaws, as well as being asked by old friend Mr. Wyatt, himself wealthy from swindling the Cherokees out of oil rights, to become governor when the territory is about to become a state. Yancey just can't do it, which brings us to another half-hour of adventure.

Part of the problem with this version of Cimarron is that it runs nearly two and a half hours, and boy does it seem slow. The story also doesn't feel all that coherent, but like a series of vignettes in a bad way. The one thing the film has going for it is some nice cinematography, but that's not enough to save it.

The Private Life of Don Juan

Merle Oberon was TCM's Star of the Month late last year, and that gave me the opportunity to record a movie or two that I hadn't seen before. This time out, the movie is one she made over in the UK: The Private Life of Don Juan.

Now, as you might guess, Merle Oberon is not playing Don Juan; that honor goes to Douglas Fairbanks (Sr.) in his final film role. And, as you might also guess considering this is a movie about Don Juan, there are a bunch of actresses in the movie with a fairly similar role, that being a woman who might want Don Juan.

Fairbanks was 51 when he made The Private Life of Don Juan, and that's part of the conceit of the movie. As they say in sports, "Father Time is unbeaten", and time is catching up to Don Juan too. He and his friend/assistant Leporello (Melville Cooper) have returned to Sevilla in part to get medical advice because Don Juan is at the age where he's not as spry as he used to be. However, Sevilla is also the home of Don Juan's wife Doña Dolores (Benita Hume), who basically has a warrant for Don Juan's arrest.

Complicating things is the fact that word of Don Juan's return has reached the city, so there are young men who idolized Don Juan. One of them, Rodrigo (Barry MacKay) is even imitating Don Juan by climbing up to women's balconies to try to seduce them, a fact that needless to say gets the women's husbands irritated.

And then, something happens that may or may not solve Don Juan's problems. Rodrigo goes after the wrong man's wife, resulting in the angry husband killing Rodrigo. Except that everybody thinks this is Don Juan, which at least in theory solves Don Juan's legal issues as well as any financial issues he might have. Don Juan and Leporello go off to a small village where nobody will recognize them. But then he realizes that women are no longer interested in some random middle-aged guy who isn't known to have the reputation that preceded Don Juan wherever he went. But how can Don Juan convince people that he's still alive, and that this claimant really is Don Juan? Never mind the fact that if his real identity were to come to light, he'd still face criminal proceedings.

In any case, Don Juan does try to tell everyone that no, he's not really dead. Some writers tried to cash in on Don Juan's death by writing a pulp fiction pamphlet about the exploits of Don Juan, a book that got turned into a play. Don Juan goes to a performance of that play and tries to tell everyone that hey, he's still alive, but unsurprisingly he's just laughed out of the theater. Perhaps Doña Dolores can vouch for Don Juan....

I really like the premise of The Private Life of Don Juan, which made me think of a movie like From Noon Till Three. Douglas Fairbanks does well as an aging Don Juan, and since he's the focus of the movie, that's important. However, there's something in the movie that's a bit off. I think the story is a bit too slow, or maybe barebones, for the movie. Despite the obvious charm, there's not a lot of there there.

Vacation from Humor

I've stated before how much I generally prefer the Warner Bros. B movies. MGM had the sort of class and production values that made things like highbrow literary adaptations suitable for the studio, while for whatever reason, things like B comedies weren't particularly up MGM's alley. A good example of this is the 1938 screwball comedy Vacation from Love.

Dennis O'Keeffe stars as Bill Blair, a saxophonist in the big band led by Barney Keenan (Edward Brophy in a rather odd casting choice). He's not playing in time or tune with the rest of the band during the rehearsal. The reason for this is that he sees a picture in the paper of socialite Patricia Lawson (Florence Rice), who is about to be married. She was apparently recently in the nightclub where the band plays, and Bill immediately fell in love with her without even having talked with her. So Bill vows that he's going to see her again.

To this end, Bill drags Barney along to the house where the wedding is going to be held, commits a ruse to get somebody else's invitation, and walks in to where the wedding is taking place. When the bit about "speak now or forever hold your piece" comes up, Bill speaks up. Patricia's father (Reginald Owen) is none too pleased for fairly obvious reasons. But his daughter is an absolute ditz, and is willing to listen to what Bill has to say. Now, in this sort of movie, it's already obvious that the would-be groom in this sequence is going to be a total drip, so Patricia decides Bill is right, and is willing to run off with him and get on the boat to Europe where she and the original groom were going to be in the honeymoon suite. They get married with the vows being love, honor, and obey -- and have fun doing it.

Patricia's dad gives his new son-in-law Bill a job at his advertising agency, and Bill proves to be adept at it. Except that the job requires a lot of travel, so he's away from his wife and misses a lot of social engagements of the sort that rich people in the 1930s go to. And then, one day, Barney shows up at the ad agency's office with the band's singer Flo (June Knight). This is just about the same time when Bill and father-in-law get an important client to re-up with the agency so the four go out on the town to celebrate. Unfortunately, it's also Bill and Patricia's first wedding anniversary, so she's brought a lot of people over to celebrate. When Patricia gets so angry at Bill that she won't let him in her bedroom to explain what happened, Bill decides to take Barney up on his offer and start playing sax in the band again on the band's European tour.

Patricia follows in the hopes of getting a divorce, because French divorce laws are presented as somehow more permissive. But once again, this is the sort of movie where we know that the male and female leads are going to wind up together in the final reel, so we know that something is going to stop the divorce from going forward.

The premise behind Vacation from Love is totally nonensical. That, and the characters, certainly Bill and to a lesser extent Patricia, seem to have radical changes to their personalities over the course of the movie. It's supposed to be a comedy, but it's also the sort of material where you want to take the main characters and smack them upside the head to knock some sense into them. Thankfully, this being a B movie, it's over fairly quickly and you haven't wasted too much time.

Sterling Hayden, Frenchman

Another person who was honored in Summer Under the Stars in 2025 was Sterling Hayden. Once again, TCM ran some new-to-me movies that I had the chance to record, such as The Golden Hawk.

Opening titles inform us that in the 17th century, England and Spain were allied together against France, at least against France. There were, however, some people who engaged in piracy for their own sake of adventure.... One such pirate is Kit Gerardo (Sterling Hayden), based on the French island of Basse-Terre (part of Guadeloupe) where he romances the ladies and talks about plundering loot with the men who would be sailing under him. One such boat is the Spanish boat the Garza, sailing out of the big Spanish Caribbean port of Cartagena captained by Luis del Toro (John Sutton).

In the middle of the fight against the Garza, a captive woman jumps overboard to escape del Toro and make her way over to Kit's boat. The woman (played by Rhonda Fleming) is a Dutch maid named Jane and therefore neutral, or at least that's her story at first, even though she doesn't have a Dutch accent. (Then again Sterling Hayden doesn't have a French accent.) In any case, the libidinous Kit immediate starts trying to put the moves on Jane, who understandably suspects Kit of trying to keep her captive. So she escapes from Kit just like she escaped del Toro.

As you might guess, Kit, Jane, and del Toro keep running into each other. Jane is also known as Captain Rouge, and wants to plunder other ships herself because she claims her family used to be wealthy but had their wealth stolen from them and she's only trying to take back what's rightfully theirs. She's also not really got any allegiances to anybody but herself, which will prove useful later in the film.

Kit keeps plundering and eventually takes a woman named Blanca de Valdiva (Helena Carter, no relation to Helena Bonham Carter) who claims to be betrothed to del Toro. And yet Kit immediately starts romancing her too despite her story about being betrothed. Action shifts all around the Caribbean as Kit also continues to search for Captain Rouge while also making war on the Spaniards.

Ultimately, Kit tries to invade one of the Spanish fortresses, which is going to put him in a lot more danger, leading up to the climax in which all the relationships are revealed and, as you might guess, the heroes come out all right in the end.

The synopsis of The Golden Hawk is, to be honest, a bit bare bones. That's largely because the movie is fairly formulaic. It's an entertaining enough movie, and the cinematography is actually quite gorgeous although nowhere near the Caribbean. There's nothing much new here, and that's part of the reason why the movie isn't so well remembered today. Still, you'll probably enjoy it for one watch.

Summer Under the Stars 2026

Today being July 31, it's time for the annual reminder that tomorrow begins TCM's annual Summer Under the Stars programming feature. As always, each day in August is given over to the films of a different actor or actress.

Looking through the schedule, I see several movies on the schedule that are currently on my DVR and that I haven't done posts on, so I already know what's going to get posts on certain days coming up. As always, check your schedule since I've got a couple of weeks of posts already scheduled and seeing what films are on my DVR means moving stuff around.

Summer Under the Stars also means that some of the other programming features are taking a break for the month of August. That includes Noir Alley, Silent Sunday Nights and TCM Imports, and Dave Karger's Saturday matinee musicals. There's been a summer theme kicking off Sunday afternoons with a romance movie, presented by Alicia Malone, although TCM's article for some reason says it's on Saturdays. In any case, the five Sunday afternoons in August all kick off with relatively romantic movies. I don't know if Alicia Malone is presenting those.

TCM's page for Summer Under the Stars is up and running.

Personality clash rom-com 57894276804278507

A very common trope in movies about romances is the way in which the two characters can have totally different personality types, with one being a free spirit and the other fairly strait-laced. Another movie of this type that I saw recently is Ginger in the Morning.

Sissy Spacek plays the free-spirited hippie-ish young woman, named Ginger; as the movie opens we see her hitch-hiking through New Mexico trying to get to Colorado Springs where she has a boyfriend working at the Air Force Academy. Cut to Albuquerque, where an airplane is landing. Getting off at the airport are Joe (Monte Markham) and Fred (David Doyle who gets a surprisingly high credit considering he's only in this one scene before the opening credits even show up). It's intimated that Joe has recently gotten a divorce and, with New Year's coming up, Fred is suggesting that Joe ought to be looking for a woman to spend the holiday with. Get back into the dating scene, although Fred is trying to present himself as the sort of man who considers himself God's gift to women.

Now, as you might guess, Joe comes across Ginger out on the road, and decides to pick her up. However, he engages in a series of lies about his real situation, saying he's driving up to Denver for business and similar things before saying he's got a friend who would happily him borrow the friend's house for the holiday. This is, of course, Joe's own house, where he spends time being an amateur artist while not working at whatever executive type job he has out in the real world. The two talk and seem to be OK with each other's company, and spend the night together although it's not made clear how far they go.

Things go wrong the following morning. Charlie (Mark Miller) served with Joe in Korea, before going back to ranching in Texas and starting a family of his own, although, like Joe, Charlie's marriage ended in divorce. In Charlie's case, however, it's because of his drinking, which causes all sorts of obvious problems. Among the problems is showing up unannounced at his old buddy's house to celebrate the new year, which irritates Ginger for obvious reasons. Now here, I was frankly hoping that the plot twist would be that Joe and Charlie were both gay as it certainly would have made for an intriguing movie. Instead, the plot twist is that Charlie's ex Sugar (Susan Oliver) calls up from the airport in Albuquerque saying tht she's got a layover. Since Charlie has screwed up Joe's assignation with Ginger, Joe decides he's going to get revenge on Charlie by setting him up with Sugar, only without telling him that it's Ginger he's going to pick up from the airport.

Things get complicated from here, although as I was watching the movie I kept expecting there to be the typical Hollywood happy ending. That ending does more or less occur, but I wonder how long all of the four principals would continue to be happy after the closing credits. Ginger in the Morning is an interesting enough premise, and clearly the sort of movie that couldn't have been under the Production Code. However, it also felt to me like the sort of film that hasn't dated all that well, in part because Ginger and Joe come across more like character types than fully fleshed-out human beings. The other thing that made Ginger in the Morning a bit difficult to love is that Charlie is a rather obnoxious character, from the time he shows up to when he starts getting way too drunk for his own good.

If you want to see a look at the cultural values of the first half of the 1970s, along with some nice location shooting in New Mexico, you could do a lot worse than Ginger in the Morning. But at the same time, there's a reason this is the sort of movie I had never heard of before it ran on TCM.