The Man I Killed

Well, OK, I didn't kill a man. But The Man I Killed is the title of the play on which our next movie was based, as well as an alternate title for the movie itself: Broken Lullaby.

The Great War ended on November 11, 1918. As it was the so-called "war to end all wars", the first anniversary of the armistice was marked in a way that it's not marked today, at least not in the US. As the movie opens, a memorial Mass is being celebrated in Notre Dame cathedral in Paris, with a whole bunch of military men in attendance. One man remains after the Mass, on his knees in prayer and seemingly distraught, noticed by the priest who officiated the Mass.

The young man in question is Paul Renard (Phillips Holmes), a former music student who was drafted by the French. His confession is that he killed a German soldier and can't get the face of the soldier he killed out of his mind, which has greatly reduced his ability to function in life. Worse, he saw the soldier's last letter so he knows the soldier's name, Walter Holderlin, as well as the fact that Walter was a fellow musician who had actually studied in Paris before the war and didn't hate the French the way that most German people did.

Paul decides that the way to expiate his perceived sins is to go to Walter's grave since he knows where Walter lived, as well as meet with any of Walter's surviving family to apologize for what he did. When he gets to the town where Walter is buried, we learn that Walter's father is a physician (Lionel Barrymore), who hasn't gotten over the fact that his son died. Ditto Mom (Louise Carter). Worse, Walter left behind a fiancée, Elsa (Nancy Carroll), who happens to spot this strange man who has been attracting gossip and rumor in town as Paul is putting flowers on Walter's grave.

Paul eventually sees Dr. Holderlin, who understandably doesn't want to see any Frenchman since he considers all of France responsible for his son's death. But when Elsa mentions Paul's having left flowers on Walter's grave, that gives Paul the chance to explain himself. In the film's critical moment, Paul is unable to bring himself to tell the actual truth, since that would destroy Walter's parents. Instead, he lies that he knew Walter at the conservatory and that as a result he doesn't really harbor any ill feelings toward the Germans.

The Holderlin parents warm to Paul, with Elsa doing so even further. And yet, among the rest of the townsfolk the gossip only continues to grow. And certainly, at some point Paul isn't going to be able to keep up the lie. After all, if Paul and Walther had been at the conservatory together for that long, he'd know Walter well enough to answer some of the questions about the past that are bound to come up. So what's going to happen when the truth finally does come out?

Broken Lullaby answers that question in an interesting way, which I won't spoil beyond saying the solution is one that is a big reason why the movie wasn't a financial success. Phillips Holmes is also a bit too over the top at times, although Carroll and Barrymore do a good job with an intriguing presence and interesting script. Broken Lullaby is definitely an unconventional Hollywood movie.

Not yet

I've mentioned on several occasions how I wound up with a substantial number of foreign films on my DVR that I don't always get around to watching before they expire. One that I did in fact watch is Akira Kurosawa's final film, Madadayo.

Tatsuo Matsumara plays Hyakken Uchida, a teacher of German at an all-boys school during the height of World War II. He's getting on in years a bit, but not yet so old that when he announces he's retiring to focus on his writing and the fact that he can live modestly off the proceeds of his writing, it's a shock to everybody. But retire he does, and he and his wife downsize.

Uchida is apparently one of those teachers who had an impact on his students, because all of those past students seem to admire him, to the point of coming to his house at the height of the war just to celebrate his birthday with a less-than-suitable feast because, well, you know there's a war on and the Japanese are inexorably losing. Part of that losing the the Americans' ability to carry out air raids on the Home Islands of Japan, and in one of those raids, the Uchidas' house is destroyed.

They're forced to move into a shack that's open to the elements, at least until the end of the war, when his still-admiring students look into finding a plot of land where they can move their professor and get him a better house. Also after the war, the students organize a better birthday party, which they call the "Not Yet" party (the film's title "Madadayo" means "not yet") because when they ask Uchida whether he's ready to die, he responds "Not yet!". The students are able to get a nice house built, as well as impressing on a neighboring landowner not to sell out to somebody who wants to build a house tall enough to block the sun from Uchida's house.

Madadayo is more a series of vignettes than a movie with a full plot, so the next portion of the film focuses on a stray cat that shows up at the Uchida place and basically adopts the professor and his wife. Uchida loves the cat, and is devastated when the cat goes missing in a rain storm, never to return. But everybody in the neighborhood drops everything to look for the cat in the hopes of finding it and bringing Uchida out of his depression.

Finally, we fast forward to when Uchida is about to celebrate his 77th birthday, in the early 1960s. He has one more "Not yet" party, although this one doesn't have quite the ending as the earlier parties. But then director Akira Kurosawa was in his early 80s when he made this movie, and obviously thinking himself about themes of growing old and looking back at life.

Madadayo has a fair bit to recommend it, but it's also not a perfect movie. The relative lack of a plot may not be suitable for everyone. More importantly, and I'm not the only person to have mentioned this in the reviews I read, but the segment with the missing cat goes on far too long. Indeed, the movie as a whole is 134 minutes, which is a bit too long. There's a resonance to a film like Goodbye Mr. Chips which is also about a teacher, but I also found myself thinking about Harry and Tonto which deals with the idea that the elderly still have something to offer us and a sense of dignity that needs to be preserved.

Eva Marie Saint, 1924-2026

Eva Marie Saint learning from Marlon Brando how he was involved in her brother's death in On the Waterfront

Oscar-winning actress Eva Marie Saint died on Tuesday at the age of 102. Saint didn't actually make as many movies as one might think, even though TCM ran a bunch of them when she was star of the month for her 100th birthday in July 2024. In addition to winning the Oscar for On the Waterfront, Saint is well known for appearing opposite Cary Grant in North by Northwest. A Hatful of Rain doesn't get as much attention as it should.

As of this writing, I haven't seen anything from TCM about a programming tribute. There's enough going on in October with all the Hollywood movies and Mario Cantone hogging the channel that I'd guess a tribute is being pushed back to November.

Sayonara Sinatra

Another of the movies that I recorded the last time it showed up on TCM that's getting another showing is The First Deadly Sin. That next airing is early tomorrow morning at 4:00 AM, or at the end of tonight's prime time lineup if you want to look at it that way.

The movie starts off with some interesting intercutting. On the one hand, we have a woman on the operating table getting surgery for some sort of kidney condition. On the other, it's the streets of New York City at night, and one man comes up with what looks like some sort of hammer, and bashes another man to death with it! The two turn out to be indirectly related, in that the woman on the operating table is Barbara Delaney (Faye Dunaway), the wife of New York police detective Edward Delaney (Frank Sinatra).

Edward has a lot on his mind, because the surgery goes wrong, forcing the surgeon, Dr. Berardi, to remove one of Barbara's kidneys. Meanwhile, in the murder case, the coroner, Dr. Ferguson (James Whitmer), reveals to Edward that the wound from the weapon is circular, which is interesting in that it means the murder must have been committed with a weapon that's not all that common. It also turns out that there's a series of unsolved murders that seem to have involved similar wounds.

So Edward calls upon someone who doesn't work for the police, but is an expert in obscure weapons, Christopher Langley (Martin Gabel) at the Metropolitan Museum. He doesn't know of any weapons in his ambit that might have caused the death, but is intrigued by the case and decides to help investigate by going to hardware stores. They can't really help him, beyond suggesting that perhaps it might be the sort of ice axe that mountain climbers use. That's actually good information, since not many people use such an implement. And when Langley goes to the sporting goods store to investigate, he gets a list of people who have bought the sort of ice axe that was used in the murder.

So Edward starts doing some investigating of the sort that the police department wouldn't really approve of and would probably result in all the evidence gathered being thrown out of court. The first guy obviously couldn't have done it, since he was paralyzed in a mountain climbing accident. The second man, however, Daniel Blank (David Dukes), seems like a much more likely suspect. Then again, the way the movie is edited, it's already led us to believe that this is the killer. Meanwhile, another attempted killing goes wrong, and there's still the situation with Edward's wife, which is many ways is really extraneous to the plot.

The murder mystery part of The First Deadly Sin is reasonably well done, and the sort of movie where I can see why Frank Sinatra would want to do it. But there's that whole pointless subplot involving the Faye Dunaway character, who really has a thankless acting task here. So the movie as a whole feels like a bit of a mishmash that doesn't always work. Frank Sinatra was 64 at the time he made this, and it was pretty much his last real movie apart from some cameos. It's not a bad way to go out, although it could have been better.

Why not Anthropoid

One of the more daring operations in World War II was the plan to kill Reinhard Heydrich, the Nazi Reichsprotektor of the Czech lands. It was known enough to be the subject of two movies at the height of World War II, Hangmen Also Die and Hitler's Madman (airing today at 12:30 PM on TCM, hence scheduling this post today), as well as the much more recent Anthropoid. In between came a co-production between the west and Communist Czechoslovakia, Operation Daybreak.

One thing I didn't realize about Operation Anthropoid is that the Free Czech paratroopers who parachuted into the country from Britain in fact did so in December 1941, quite a few months before the actual assassination on May 27, 1942. The movie opens with three of the paratroopers: Kubiš (Timothy Bottoms), Gabčík (Anthony Andrews), and Čurda (Martin Shaw) being brought in to see a Czech General in exile who is telling them about the plan since Heydrich (Anton Diffring) is considered a second-in-command to Hitler who could take over the Nazi leadership were Hitler to die and is thought of as more intelligent than Hitler. The men all accept the assignment, and parachute in to ares near Prague, landing in the snow (which is what prompted me to look up more of the details of the operation).

Eventually, the paratroopers meet up in Prague with members of the Czech resistance, personified as members of General Moravec's extended family. The first plan is to shoot at Heydrich while his train is leaving the station in Prague, with Kubiš shooting from a control room at the station, but another train passes by just at the exact wrong moment, thwarting the plan. Of course, if you've seen any of the other movies, you'll know that Heydrick was really killed as a result of his car being attacked. This time is was Gabčík's job to shoot Heydrich, but when his gun jams, Kubiš throws a grenade into the car.

The Nazis are, understandably, pissed about one of their higher-ups being so brazenly assassinated. They also have that repuation of being brutal, so it's natural that their reprisal is going to be nasty. They destroy the village of Lidice, and set up a manhunt for the people involved in the plot to kill Heydrich. They're more than willing to commit torture and further reprisals, but Čurda eventually cracks and reveals details about who was in the group and where they were being kept. By this time, the rest of the members of the assassination plot had holed up in a church, but it was already too late. The Nazis were able to surround the church, and all of the plotters were killed (or killed themselves) in the church.

I found it interesting that Operation Daybreak was an international co-production, meaning that they were able to film on location in Prague. This gives the movie an air of authenticity. However, I also couldn't help but think about the fact that in real life, the Free Czechs who had been based in London were decidedly not considered heroes by the Communists who ran the country after 1948. There's little if anything in the way of Communist politics in the way of the movie, which is competent if a bit straightforward in its storytelling. The plotters don't get the time to be complex characters, for example.

Worse, though, is the print that TCM ran. It's only in 4:3, when the original aspect ratio was 1.85:1. Worse is that it had some sort of motion problem, as though there were visual frames missing but there's nothing wrong with the soundtrack. This gives large portions of the print a sort of jerky motion that for me was disconcerting to watch.

Ösz Badacsonyban

I mentioned a couple of years back that I bought a Kino Lorber box set of movies from Hungarian director Miklós Jancsó, although I haven't mentioned anything about it in over a year. So with that in mind, I put in another of the discs that has a couple of shorts, and watched the short Autumn in Badacsony.

I didn't know anything about Badacsony, but Wikipedia helpfully informs us that it is the name of both a region on the north shore of Lake Balaton, one of the biggest lakes in Central Europe, and a mountain that towers over the lake. This short starts off by mentioning some Hungarian poet I'd never heard of who lived in the region, and a romantic legend of how he met his wife by a famouse "rose stone".

But the region is better known for its wine production, and it is with that that the bulk of this 18-minute short deals. A certain Mr. Ihasz is part of a family that's been growing grapes in the region for five generations, and it's hard work because if you ever take a break from keeping the weeds at bay, they'll take over like, well, weeds. But now that the Communists are in power, everyone is able to work together and put a lot of manpower -- and womanpower on the case.

Well, Jancsó doesn't put it quite so bluntly, which is to the benefit of the short. But it's clear that Jancsó is constrained in what he can say and, whatever he might have thought about the Communists, he's not about to bad-mouth them. Ihasz goes to see the People's Committee to tell them that he has a lot to offer, and as we see, he does do a lot of work.

Badacson is mentioned to be a mountain of volcanic origin, and basaltic soils are a well-known factor in many terroirs in wine-making. That and the steep slopes seem very well fit for growing grapes, and the wines produced here are portrayed as excellent. This may or may not be true; I haven't drunk much Hungarian wine since little is available where I live. And certainly, the portrayal is partly the sort you'd see in a promotional ad from the tourist board. That's further emphasised by the final act of this short dealing with the harvest festival. This act also shows how everybody works together the way Communists like to say people do to harvest the grapes and start producing the wine.

I have no idea how much of the footage here is authentic and how much is staged -- indeed, a lot of this feels like a foreign version of a Traveltalks short -- but Jancsó shows he's got a good technical command of how to make a movie on a specific subject. Unfortunately, this being the early 1950s and being early in Jancó's career, Jancsó likely didn't have access to color film stock. That, and the Communist authorities who commissioned this weren't thinking in terms of art but simply documenting a wine harvest. In any case, the scenery really cries out for color.

Autumn in Badacsony is interesting enough, although in the end it is just a documentary short. I'm definitely glad I got the chance to see it despite any shortcomings it may have.

TCM Star of the Month October 2026: Myrna Loy

Myrna Loy (l.) with Clark Gable, Jean Harlow, and Spencer Tracy in Libeled Lady (October 5, 8:00 PM)

We're into the first full week of a new month, which means that it's time for a new Star of the Month. This time out, that star is Myrna Loy, who was also Star of the Month back in December 2016 meaning that I've already got a couple of photos that I used back then and I can use again. One thing that's different about this month's programming is that Myrna Loy made enough movies that her films start in the daytime on Monday rather than other times where TCM would schedule the movies to start in prime time and continue into the following day if there were that many movies.

The movies are scheduled somewhat in chronological order and somewhat thematically. The daytime scheduling is chronological, and I'm sorry to say that by the time you read this you'll probably have missed Loy's silent movies. I'm hoping they show up on Watch TCM. The daytime programming is almost entirely 1930s films; I didn't realize just how many 1930s films Loy made.

William Powell, Myrna Loy, and Asta in a publicity still from one of the Thin Man movies

The first two Mondays in prime time feature Loy with William Powell. October 12 is a marathon of all six Thin Man movies, which is going to give me the chance to do a blog post on one of the Thin Man movies that aired back on New Year's. Those movies are technically expired from my DVR now, but I watched one before they expired and already wrote up and scheduled a post on it.

Myrna Loy, Melvyn Douglas, and Cary Grant in Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (October 20, 12:45 AM)

The final two Mondays jump ahead, with Myrna Loy mostly in the second half of the 1940s on October 19, and in the 1950s and beyond on October 26. October 26 also brings a rare TCM showing for From the Terrace and one for Airport '75.

Not always a bride

Back in June 2025 I did a post on a movie called Always a Bride. Some months back I recorded a Ross Alexander movie called Brides Are Like That. Only after watching the movie did I realize that this one and Always a Bride came from the same source material, a play from the early 1920s.

Ross Alexander stars as Bill McAllister, a wastrel playboy living with his uncle Fred (Joseph Cawthorne) presumably because both of his parents are dead. Ross went to college not to get a good education and respectable job, but to play football. Indeed, he doesn't want to work at all, which makes him a rather unsympathetic character. He's even bought an engagement ring for his would-be fiancée, but charges it to Uncle Fred's account, uncle being rich from his shipping business.

Said girlfriend is Hazel Robinson (Anita Louise). She's the child of orchard owner John (Gene Lockhart) and his wife Ella (Gene's real-life wife Kathleen). They understandably wish their daughter to marry somebody respectable, and indeed Hazel does have just such a respectable person pursuing her, in the form of a doctor named Randolph Jenkins (Dick Purcell). However, Bill is just so charming that he's able to convince Hazel to break off her relationship with Dr. Jenkins in order to marry him.

Bill's uncle and Hazel's parents both have the good sense not to want to support Bill directly financially, although Hazel is able to get her father to agree to a somewhat reasonable compromise: he'll find a job for Bill, and Bill should agree to take it. Bill is just so obnoxious, though, that he basically refuses this, instead deciding to tinker around and work on some invention that will allow apples to last longer in transit. The only thing to his credit is that he really is working on this and has been talking to another distribution company about testing the device, which is a fancy thermos box, and something you'd think wouldn't work.

Meanwhile, Bill is facing increasing financial difficulty to the point that Hazel's parents have gotten her this close to agreeing to move back in with them, unless Bill agrees to take the job Dad is offering him. But we know this is a movie that's going to have a happy ending, and Bill is going to come out OK in the end.

One thing that Brides Are Like This doesn't have that Always a Bride added was the political corruption subplot. This one is more about whether Bill will get a real job. Unfortunately, it's still a subpar movie, in large part because Bill spends the entire movie up until the final reel being an obnoxious jerk of the sort that you can't understand why anybody would want to marry him. A woman would never be able to have a stable life with him, and it's not as if he's that good-looking to overcome such stuff.

Brides Are Like That is decided second-tier material, and even if Ross Alexander hadn't had the personal problems that drove him to commit suicide, it seems clear that he wasn't going to become a big star, but the sort of person whose star would have faded with the start of World War II.

Death on the Nile (1978)

I've done posts on two of the four movies in which Margaret Rutherford played Agatha Christie's sleuth Miss Marple, and believe I have the other two sitting on my DVR. A dozen or so years later, there was a vogue started with 1974's Murder on the Orient Express of making movies of especially the Hercule Poirot stories, with an all-star cast of suspects. One that I haven't done a post on before is Death on the Nile. So when it last showed up on TCM I recorded it to watch, write up this post, and save it to be posted at some later date either when it airs again or when I haven't posted on a mystery movie in a while.

As with the other all-star extravaganzas based on Christie works, we meet the characters much the same way the mastermind in a heist movie rounds up the people he needs to help him commit that heist. One is Jacqueline de Bellefort (Mia Farrow), who is engaged to be married to Simon Doyle (Simon MacCorkindale). Jackie has a friend, Linnet (Lois Chiles), who has an estate that needs looking after in the UK. She's got a lawyer, Pennington (George Kennedy), who is responsible for part of her affairs, but hires Simon to look after the actual estate. Unfortunately for Jackie, Linnet and Simon fall in love, get married, and go on honeymoon in Egypt, with Jackie basically stalking them and Penning trying to get Linnet to sign some papers that may or may not be in her interest to do so.

Eventually, to get away from Jackie, Linnet and Simon decide to go on a cruise up the Nile, which is where we meet the other characters. Peter Ustinov plays Poirot, so we know he's not the killer when someone actually gets bumped off. Colonel Race (David Niven) is a lawyer who suspects Pennington is up to no good. Salome Otterbourne (Angela Lansbury) is a trashy romance novelist who wrote a book that led Linnet to threaten a libel suit; Salome is traveling with her daughter Rosalie (Olivia Hussey). Louise (Jane Birkin) had worked for Linnet at the estate, and was expecting to get a bonus after the marriage that never materialized. And then there's Mrs. Van Schuyler, one of those Americans of the 1930s who seems to know everybody or at least claims to, and also has a yen for stealing jewels, of which Linnet has a bunch. Mrs. Van Schulyer is traveling with Bowers (Maggie Smith), a woman who thinks Linnet's father duped her family out of their wealth. So as you can see, a lot of people have reason not to like one another and be suspects when somebody finally gets murdered.

Now, the one person who is apparently not the suspect is Jackie. She gets drunk and shoots Simon in the leg one night, but some of the other passengers give her a sedative which knocks her out for the night. So the following morning, when Linnet is found quite dead, Jackie is the one person who seems like the most natural suspect but also has the best alibi for not having done it.

So, then, who did it? Obviously, I'm not going to tell, but Poirot starts putting his little gray cells to the test, interrogating each of the other passengers with a little help from Col. Race. Poirot also gets a cobra in his cabin for his trouble, although there's the question of who would have had access to a cobra making it seem more like a bit of a red herring. There's also at least one more murder, so we'll be able to get rid of another person as the suspect. For the climax, Poirot brings everybody together and correctly solves the case.

To be honest, I found the actual solving of the case more unrealistic than some other Agatha Christie movies I've seen, although not anywhere near Manhattan Murder Mystery which I watched not too far apart from Death on the Nile. Then again, with these all-star mysteries, part of the point is to watch the stars as much as the story. Everybody looks like they're having fun here, but I think there's a reason that Death on the Nile isn't as well-remembered as Murder on the Orient Express.

Man of a Thousand Faces

TCM's lineup tonight is dedicated to silent screen star Lon Chaney, starting with an old documentary. The first feature film up is not a movie starring Chaney, but a biopic that aired a couple of months back when TCM did a spotlight on Hollywood biopics of Hollywood stars. That movie is Man of a Thousand Faces, at 9:30 PM.

The movie starts off mentioning that Hollywood came to a standstill for one day in August 1930 to honor one of their old stars. Irving Thalberg (Robert Evans, who would go on to become a producer) enters a sound studio that had been the filming location for films like The Unknown that starred one of MGM's early stars, Lon Chaney, who has recently died. (Phantom of the Opera was made at Universal, as was Man of a Thousand Faces, which I supposed made for some interesting discussion between the studios.) As you might guess, this is the opportunity for the film to go into a flashback, because as I mention over and over, it's a highly original way for a movie to introduce its story.

In the early 1890s, young Lon Chaney is living in Colorado Springs, as the child of two deaf parents, something that causes Lon a lot of grief because the other kids treat him terribly. But it also gave him the ability to communicate without having to speak, which would eventually become useful when he got to Hollywood. But before Hollywood, there was a career in vaudeville with his first wife Cleva Creighton (Dorothy Malone). They're working a crappy part of vaudeville, and Cleva gets them fired for her lack of punctuality exacerbated by the fact that she's pregnant with what would become Lon Chaney Jr., although Lon Jr.'s given name was Creighton.

Lon takes his wife back to his family in Colorado Springs, which is where Cleva learns that Lon's parents are both deaf, something that Lon couldn't bring himself to tell Cleva up to this point. And with good reason, since she believes in the stereotypes that deaf people are some sort of freak. Worse, she's worried that if Lon's parents are deaf, there's a very high possibility that her child is going to be deaf too. The kid isn't, but it's something that causes tension for the rest of Lon and Cleva's marriage as she still wants work of her own to help support the family. Helping look after the boy is vaudevillean chorus girl Hazel Bennet (Jane Greer). Cleva and her boyfriend think Lon and Hazel are having an affair, one of the things that leads Cleva to walk out on her and the marriage to end in divorce.

But this being the early 1910s, Lon is deemed unsuitable to raise a child by himself, so young Creighton is declared a ward of the state and put in a foster home. Lon is determined to get a good enough job to be able to get his son a stable home, leading him to head out to Hollywood. Having been in vaudeville, he knew how to play a multitude of characters, and he also has a way with the sort of Hollywood makeup necessary to personify those characters on screen. That latter is a very useful skill for Lon in trying to get work as an extra, although being an extra is not enough to get custody of his son back.

Eventually, Lon's old agent Clarence Locan (Jim Backus) also decamps to Hollywood, and, finding Lon, also brings Hazel along. Hazel is the one who has the perception to figure out that what the state wants to consider Lon a fit father is for him to have a mother for the child, even if it's a stepmother. The fact that she was somewhat in love with Lon back when Cleva thought they were having an affair helps, and Lon marries Hazel, getting custody of adolescent Creighton. Clarence is also able to get Lon a bigger job, which is the first stepping stone on the way to Hollywood stardom.

Now, of course, we know that Lon is going to die young in 1930 from the flashback structure in addition to this being a biopic. The final act, therefore, is concerned with Lon having a difficult relationship with his son, in part because Creighton wants to follow his father into acting and in part because Cleva shows up wanting to see her son. Lon isn't thrilled with the idea because, to be fair, she basically abandoned the kid, and because Lon dealt with the abandonment by telling Creighton that Cleva had died. It's less bad, I suppose, than telling a young boy that Mom abandoned them.

James Cagney, unsurprisingly, gives a good performance in Man of a Thousand Faces. There are some liberties taken with Chaney's real life, although they're somewhat less substantial than in a lot of other biopics. Showing, for example, that Hazel had an ex-husband who was a double amputee is surprising but, from what I've read, is actually the truth. The one flaw that the movie has is that it runs a bit over two hours, which is longer than the movie needs to be. I think it spends a bit too long on Lon's pre-Hollywood life. But mostly, Man of a Thousand Faces works and is one of the better biopics I've seen.