Duffy of San Quentin

I didn't mean to watch a couple of movies in close succession that had San Quentin as a major plot point, but then that somehow is the one prison in California that came to prominence, much like Sing Sing in New York was at least before the Attica riots of the early 1970s. In any case, after Southside 1-1000, there's also Duffy of San Quentin.

Duffy here is Clinton T. Duffy, a real person who was the warden of San Quentin between 1940 and 1952 and son of a prison guard meaning he grew up knowing a lot about the prison; Duffy is played by Paul Kelly who apparently in real life served a stretch in San Quentin in the 1920s for manslaughter. As the movie opens, the state administration is on another one of its good government drives, trying to clean up corruption, meaning the current warden has got to go. Duffy at this time is only an assistant to the warden, and he's given the task of being interim warden for one month. Duffy knows the head of the guards, Pierson (Horace McMahon), is corrupt too, but Pierson figures he'll outlast any interim warden. Meanwhile, Duffy's wife Gladys (Maureen O'Sullivan) seems like she'd be OK with Duffy leaving San Quentin.

Duffy immediately sets about trying to effect a series of reforms, although there's a question of how much support he's going to be able to get in a limited amount of time and with institutional obstinacy. One thing Duffy can do is to say nobody's going to be a stool pigeon any longer. He also talks directly with an unorthodox prisoner, Harper (Louis Hayward), nicknamed "Romeo". Romeo doesn't fit the standard profile of a prisoner, and yet here he is, and constantly getting into trouble too. He understandably talks about being set up, but then, all the prisoners do.

Another of the reforms Duffy wants to try is to make the prison hospital experience less bad. One way to go about it is to bring in an outisde nurse -- a female nurse. The eventual hiree is Anne Halsey (Joanne Dru), who is good at what she does, although as you might guess prisoners might not be the most trustworthy people to be around a nurse working as nurse's assistants. Then again, it's also easier work than some of the other details in the prison. Things come to a head when one of the prisoners drinks some "medicinal" alcohol and screws up the treatment of a patient while on duty.

And then, the "good government" brigade shows up again. John Winant (George Macready) is the prosecuting attorney who put Romeo in jail. Not just Romeo, but a whole bunch of other prisoners too. However, it looks like he may have used dishonest and corrupt means to get his convictions, meaning that he's going to face jail time. Putting him in San Quention is a problem since naturally, one might expect there are a lot of prisoners who would like to get their revenge on such a prosecutor much like there are with cops who go to prison. Will Duffy be able to stop people from committing violence against Winant?

Duffy of San Quentin isn't the worst movie out there by any means, although I wonder how accurate this is compared to the real Duffy's time as warden. (Needless to say, I haven't read Duffy's memoirs.) However, the movie also feels relatively formulaic, and as though there's not all that much new going on from all the other prison movies we've seen where the warden is an important character. Duffy of San Quentin is worth one watch, but not much more than that.

Pinky Tomlin

Another of those B movies that I hadn't heard of before the last time TCM ran is is Times Square Lady. But once again, since the plot synopsis sounded interesting enough, I decided I'd record it and give it a go, and since it's only 68 minutes, it wouldn't be as if I wasted much time it it wasn't very good.

Robert Taylor is top billed here, right at the beginning of his career being top-billed, but of course he's not the Times Square Lady. That honor goes to Virginia Bruce, although we don't meet her either in the opening scene. Instead, the opening deals with the sudden death of King Bradley, a promoter who has his fingers in a whole bunch of different sports/entertainment businesses in New York, which are at various points on the spectrum of being maybe illegal. Certainly, the sort of people running them aren't the most ethical.

As for Taylor, he plays Steve Gordon, who manages the Casa Nova, a nightclub that Bradley owned, and which features a new singer fresh from Oklahoma, Pinky Tomlin (playing himself), who had beome big at the time for a song called "The Object of My Affection". Steve has a girlfriend in Margo (Helen Twelvetrees), and a manservant in Mack (Nat Pendleton), who is clearly on the wrong side of the law. Virginia Bruce plays Toni Bradley, who is the daughter of King Bradley but for some reason not clearly mentioned is living in Iowa as the movie opens. Dad's business associates didn't know anything about the daughter, so they're stunned when the will is read and discover that Toni inherits everything.

Their idea to deal with this is one that's not unreasonable. They suspect that Toni won't have any interest in running such businesses, and may not have the acumen to do so. So they're more than willing to buy the businesses out from Toni, in what I think today would be called a leveraged buyout. But of course they also want to get the businesses for the best price they can, which for them is the lowest, before reselling them to a promoter who would pay true market value. Steve's job is to wine and dine Toni, since Steve's the only one with the requisite looks that Toni might fall for. (The rest of them are played by middle-aged character actors you've probably seen in a bunch of 1930s movies.) But, since they're also businessmen with dubious ethics, they're not above doing things like injuring their own hockey players or poisoning dogs at the greyhound track.

But, as you can guess, Steve falls in love with Toni which presents multiple problems. One is that he's got that girlfriend already, while the other one is that the other business associates are going to be none too happy with Steve working with Toni not to sell the businesses. And since they've got those questionable ethics, they're going to use those to try to force Steve and Toni out of the picture if they can.

I titled the post after Pinky largely because I have to admit to not having heard of him before seeing this movie. He didn't have that much interest in the movies and got out of the music business fairly early, going into oil. He gets a substantial subplot here, involving singing a second of his songs in a scene where he also milks a cow. His character isn't really necessary to the story, and it's also easy to see why he didn't have a long movie career. Certainly World War II and the changing tastes that came along would have ended it in any case.

For a bunch of reasons, Times Square Lady turns out to be a mediocre B movie. But again, it's only 68 movies, and seeing how Hollywood deals with this sort of business as it was back in the 1930s is a mildly interesting time capsule.

Hey There, It's Yogi Bear!

Back in December, TCM ran a salute to Hanna-Barbera, the animators nowadays better known for their TV show characters like the Flintstones. They had, of course, gotten their starts decades earlier working at MGM in their animated division. But even then, TCM showed movies based on the characters that had become popular on television. One example is Hey There, It's Yogi Bear!.

I assume most people here already know the Yogi Bear character, an anthropomorphic bear (voiced by Daws Butler) in Jellystone Park who pals around with little Boo-Boo (voiced by Don Messick) and making life hell for the park rangers because he's more interested in the park visitors' food than anything else.

As this movie opens, winter is coming to an end and the runoff from the melting snow is what wakes up Boo-Boo, who is excited to wake up Yogi. Yogi immediately sets out to get more food, which again makes him a terror at the park and causes the rangers to want to capture him and send him to a zoo because the rest of the bears are nowhere near as bad. However, Yogi is smarter than the average bear, leading him to come up with a ruse that gets a different bear captured and sent off to the San Diego Zoo. SOmehow, the park rangers don't notice this.

Meanwhile, Yogi has a female bear, Cindy (voiced by Julie Bennett) who is romantically interested in Yogi, even though he doesn't seem to notice since all he can think of is pick-a-nick baskets. She hears that Yogi has been captured, since that's what the rangers believe, and she's devastated. She'll never see Yogi again. So she comes up with the idea that if she can get herself captured too, she will also be sent to the San Diego Zoo where she'll be reunited with Yogi and the two of them can live more or less happily ever after, or at least as happily as you can live in a zoo.

Now, as I mentioned, it wasn't Yogi that was captured. And when Cindy gets herself captured, she doesn't get sent to the San Diego Zoo anyhow. Instead, she's put in a cage and on a train heading to Saint Louis and the zoo there, much to her dismay. Worse, the door of the train car she's on isn't properly closed, which results in her cage falling out of the car and breaking, which gives her a sense of freedom. At least, she's free until she's cought by a couple of dishonest guys from the circus who take her captive in a much worse way.

Yogi and Boo-Boo learn that Cindy has been sent away, and go looking for her, having a bunch of adventures along the way. But once they free her from the circus, how are they going to get back to Jellystone without getting caught by those awful circus people?

Along the way, there are also several musical numbers, because the story had to be padded out to something feature-length. Still, Hey There, It's Yogi Bear! is fairly weak in the story department. The Hanna-Barbera animation is also decidedly inferior to what Disney was putting out too, and the songs aren't very good. Still, kids may enjoy Hey There, It's Yogi Bear! even if I didn't think it was ll that good.

Trois Couleurs: Rouge

I've mentioned several times that I've got a bunch of foreign films on my DVR, to the point that since YouTube TV "deletes" them after nine months I've had several foreign films I didn't get around to watching. One that was just about to expire and that I finally watched was Three Colors: Red, the final film in director Krzysztof Kieślowski's Three Colors trilogy following Three Colors: Blue and Three Colors: White.

Irène Jacob plays Valentine, a woman living in Geneva and studying at the university there while paying the bills by doing modeling work. She's got a difficult personal life, revealed in dribs and drabs over the course of the movie, involving a mom who is in England for some reason; a brother who has issues with drugs; and a difficult relationship with her boyfriend Michel. (None of these characters are actually seen, although we hear Michel's voice in phone calls with Valentine.) In a seemingly unrelated incident, law student Auguste drops his law books and meets his girlfriend Karin.

Some time later, Valentine is driving home one evening when a dog runs out in the street and Valentine is unable to avoid hitting the poor dog. Fortunately, the dog has a name tag: Rita, and the address of the dog's owner. So Valentine loads Rita into her car and takes her to Rita's owner, Joseph (Jean-Louis Trintignant). Joseph declares that he doesn't want the dog, so Valentine is welcome to keep Rita. Valentine takes Rita to a vet, who informs her that Rita is also pregnant with puppies and is going to make a full recovery.

The next day, Valentine takes Rita for a walk, but she escapes and goes to Joseph's house, which isn't a bad thing since Joseph had sent Valentine money for the vet bill but much too much money so Valentine wants to return some of it. When she goes to see Joseph this second time, she discovers a shocking secret: he likes to listen in on the phone conversations of his neighbors! This is for all sorts of obvious reasons illegal, and the sort of thing that for similarly obvious reasons disturbs Valentine. She plans on telling the neighbors about it, except that when she visits the neighbors, she finds that the daughter of the man on the phone is also listening in, so knows fully well that her father is not exactly faithful.

Eventually, everything comes together when Joseph hands himself over to the law and wouldn't you know it, but the judge at his trial is Auguste, who has had issues of his own with his girlfriend. Joseph takes Rita back although Valentine wants one of the puppies; Joseph and Valentine continue their platonic relationship as Joseph reveals more of his past and why he never married. Eventually there's a sort of twist ending that I won't give away.

Three Colors: Red received a lot of critical praise upon its release, although it was considered ineligible for a Best Foreign Film Oscar due to the Academy's rules on foreign films having to be credited to one country as opposed to international productions like this that don't quite neatly fit into being a film from a certain country. Having said that, I don't quite get the inordinate praise. It's not so much that Three Colors: Red is a bad movie so much as it's the sort of film that doesn't quite go anywhere. It's unbelievably talky, and leads up to an ending that doesn't satisfy. It's certainly competently made, and I can see why some people are going to love it. I just couldn't get all that invested in the characters.

For some values of spirit

Another movie that was sitting on my DVR when I noticed that it was about to get another airing on TCM is The Spirit of St. Louis. That airing comes up tomorrow, July 26, at 5:30 PM, so once again I made a point to watch it in order to be able to schedule a review for the TCM showing.

As you probably know The Spirit of St. Louis is the name of the plane that Charles Lindbergh (played by James Stewart) flew across the Atlantic Ocean in the first non-stop transatlantic flight in May, 1927. This right away brings up two issues with the movie. One is that we know how the movie is going to end, which is that Lindbergh is going to succeed in his attempt to cross the Atlantic, which removes much of the dramatic tension. The other is that Charles Lindbergh was a young 25 when he completed his fight, while James Stewart was 47 at the time of filming, and looks it for the most part despite the horrendously dyed blond hair. It's worse than Peter O'Toole as Lawrence of Arabia.

The movie opens about a day before Lindbergh takes off. He's already on Long Island, where the flight started, waiting for the weather to clear for take-off. Having time and nothing else to do, Lindbergh starts thinking both about the upcoming flight, and about how he got here. This is the lead-in to the requisite flashback, although since the second half of the movie is the actual flight, the flashbacks don't take up the entire movie. There are, however, multiple flashbacks to various points of Lindbergh's flight.

Lindberg was working as an airmail pilot around 1926 or so when he's forced to land in bad weather and reads a newspaper article about a couple of pilots who had an even worse flight trying to do that transatlantic flight. For several years there had been a prize offered to the first pilot (or pilots if a plane wasn't manned by one person) to make that non-stop transatlantic crossing. This gives Lindbergh the idea that perhaps he could be the pilot to make that flight. Except that he doesn't have enough money to buy a plane of his own and modify it so that it can carry enough fuel to make it all the way across the Atlantic.

The next section of the movie deals with Lindbergh getting the financial backing to buy a plane, although the contract with the plane manufacturer falls through since they want to pick the pilot. This leads to a different manufacturer being selected, but one based in San Diego. So they have to fly the plane cross country before it can make the actual flight to Paris.

The flight to Paris is going to take about 36 hours and, as there's no autopilot, it means Lindbergh is going to have to stay awake the entire time, which is a significant plot point. Worse is that Lindbergh didn't get enough sleep before taking off. To try to stay awake, Lindbergh has more flashbacks to other points of his flight career, whcih in the movie included a stint in the military as well as stunt flying. In addition to lack of sleep, there are other technical issues that threaten the success of the flight. But as we know, and it's not much of a spoiler, Lindbergh succeeds and becomes a hero.

For me, the big problem with the movie is the fact that we know fully well how it's going to turn out. Also, with half the movie being Lindbergh on the titular plane, there's not a whole lot that can be done to open up the action. Stewart and writer/director Billy Wilder try, but fall into a bunch of Hollywood tropes. I've seen worse, but then again I've also seen better.

To the Victor

Another of the movies that was sitting on my DVR, about to expire, was one that doesn't seem to show up all that much on TCM, which is a bit surprising considering that it's a Warner Bros. film. It also doesn't have that many reviews on IMDb. That movie is To the Victor.

It's post-war France, and the authorities are still de-Nazifying the country by going after collaborators. One such collaborator is Lestrac, who will very likely be convicted on the evidence of his Swedish-born wife Christine (Vivea Lindfors). However, Lestrac has some powerful friends, and those friends are looking for Christine to prevent her from testifying. So they send someone to shoot her, causing her to run though the streets of Paris. She's obviously able to escape, considering the fact that if she weren't we wouldn't have much of a movie. (Well, I suppose we could have a movie like The Killers.) Christine runs into the Hotel Anivers, which seems to cater to the sort of American involved with rebuilding France after the war.

Or, at least, the sort of American who wants to make a buck helping to rebuild France. Holding court in a private office in the hotel is Paul Taggart (Dennis Morgan), who, as it turns out, is actually a black marketer. He takes Christine to an upper-story room, but various bad guys are able to determine their location. One tries to shoot through the door of the room, while there are snipers in other rooms who get into a firefight until police on the ground are able to shoot one of the snipers. In any case, it's fairly clear that Paul and Christine are going to have to get out of town.

So they go to Normandy, where they stay with some people whose relationship with Paul or Christine isn't made particularly clear. But, this is also an excuse for Warner Bros. to do a bit of location shooting on the shores of Normandy where the D-Day invasion took place and some of the scuttled ships from that era are still there as a breakwater, which is frankly the one big reason to watch this film. Paul begins to fall in love with Christine, while thinking he can get out of France by taking a job in Cairo. He doesn't quite yet know just how complex Christine's personal life is. Never mind the fact that she's married; the police detective who's been investigating the case, Beauvais (Victor Francen), also has a yen for Christine. And, of course, the Fascist friends of Christine's husband are able to determine where Christine and Paul have fled to, and show up in Normandy.

It goes on like this for an hour and a half or more, along with a whole lot of political speechifying about what morally needs to be done in postwar Europe, with the eventual climax that I suppose satisfies the Production Code.

As I mentioned in the opening, I'd never heard of To the Victor before it showed up on TCM. Having watched it, I can see why I'd never heard of it. There might be the seed of a good story here, but boy is the presentation of that story slow, combined with a whole bunch of Marshall Plan-type commentary about what needs to be done in Europe now that the war is over. There's no particular reason to care about the Viveca Lindfors character, while Dennis Morgan is entirely the wrong Warner Bros. actor to play a black marketer. It's a mess of a movie, with the one big reason to watch it being the location photography, both in Paris and especially on the Normandy coast.

The Jerk

TCM ran a two-night salute to actor Steve Martin back in May, which gave me the chance to watch one of his movies that, somewhat surprisingly, I had never seen before. That movie is the one which made him a movie star in addition to his TV and stand-up comedy work: The Jerk.

Steve Martin unsurprisingly plays the titular jerk, although his character isn't so much a jerk as a man named Navin Johnson who's just so profoundly naïve that you wonder how such a person could ever survive in the real world. As the movie opens, in fact, he's a bum with little to his name except the clothes he's wearing and a thermos, and he tells the other assembled bums how he wound up in this condition.

Navin was a foundling left on the porch of a family of very poor black sharecroppers in Mississippi (although, as a shot just before the closing credits reveals, it's the Universal backlot as we can see the Magnificent Mountains of Mississippi in the background). His adoptive family are good people, except that they haven't been able to bring themselves to tell him before now that he's not their biological child, let alone not black. When they do tell him, he feels he has to make his way to St. Louis to find his true purpose in life.

Navin gets hired as a gas station attendant at a station run by Harry Hartounian (Jackie Mason), where he deals with robbers before meeting inventor Stan Fox (Bill Macy, not to be confused with William H. Macy). Navin has come up with an idea for a device that will prevent eyeglasses from slipping down your nose, and Stan offers to find a buyer for the idea. But Navin has to leave the gas station when a crazy sniper (M. Emmet Walsh) tries to kill him.

Navin next makes his way to a traveling carnival where he's seduced by fellow carny Patty (Catlin Adams) before meeting fairgoer Marie (Bernadette Peters), who is sweet and just the right person for Navin, although they can't get married yet because Marie wants someone who can provide for her, which Navin can't do yet. At least, not until Stan finds him to let him know that his invention has paid off and boy is Navin going to be rich. Not that Navin has any idea what to do with the money: you'd think he goes bankrupt through overspending. And yet, that's not really what happens. He loses his fortune in a different way, and here I'm not exactly spoiling things considering that the movie opens with Navin as a bum telling us how he ended up that way. So you know things are going to go wrong somewhere.

A lot of people love The Jerk, and it's easy to see why. At the same time, the movie opened to mixed reviews, and I think that's easy to see why too. Not that this is so much a movie that divides critics and audiences the way movies do today depending on the political or culture war message the movie is trying to make. Instead, The Jerk is more of a showcase for Steve Martin's comic stylings than it is a movie with a fully fleshed-out plot. At times it feels like more of a series of episodes than a coherent whole. And Martin hadn't learned to tone things down the way he would in later movies, especially where he had a better script. So I definitely have some issues with The Jerk.

The Lovesick Maidens of Cuddleton

Going back to another of the box sets I've got, there are still two and a half discs worth of shorts on the Vitagraph Comedies collection. This time, it's the 1912 short The Lovesick Maidens of Cuddleton.

Once again, the short is only about 12 minutes, so there's not a bunch of plot. Charles Eldridge plays the venerable doctor in the town of Cuddleton, IN, with some sort of advisor who's constantly in his office. Apparently, they need a way to drum up business, and the idea is to bring in a younger doctor to his practice, that being Dr. Baldwin (Earle Williams).

Baldwin is, so we're supposed to figure, considered young and handsome by the standards of 1912, so suddenly, all the young unmarried women in town become hypochondriacs who want Dr. Baldwin to treat them. It's reminiscent, I guess, of the the relationship the Jean Harlow and Edumnd Lowe characters were having in Dinner at Eight. If it's funny how these young women all want to see Dr. Baldwin, it's even funnier when one of the women feigns illness, but it's th old doctor who comes to see her!

Unfortunately, the movie loses steam in the second half. Dr. Baldwin is married, and his wife has finally decided to follow him to town. Only she's supposed to pretend for some reason that she's his sister instead of his wife. Whatever the reason they give, it's not something that makes much sense, and not anything I can imagine the doctor's wife wanting to go along with.

The Lovesick Maidens of Cuddleton isn't bad by the standards of 1912, but it's also as technically limited as most of the shorts I've seen that were being churned out in the early 1910s when new theaters needed new content to show their patrons. I'd also say that there are better shorts from the era, too.

Norman Jewison centenary

According to Wikipedia and IMDb, yesterday, July 21, was the centenary of director Norman Jewison. However, Tuesday nights in July on TCM have been given over to American independent directors, I'm\ guessing because that and the "singers acting in movies" Star of the Month were both things TCM wanted to spend four nights on, and the calendar worked out such that Monday and Tuesday were the weeknights in July that had only four nights.

What that means is that TCM's centenary salute to Norman Jewison is being held tonight in prime time. Now, it looks as though TCM has run enough of Jewison's movies over the years that perhaps they could have done a 24-hour salute, but as it stands we get four of Jewison's movies in prime time:

8:00 PM The Thomas Crown Affair
10:00 PM In the Heat of the Night
Midnight A Soldier's Story
2:00 AM Fiddler on the Roof

The very end of the overnight is an episode of the MGM Parade, at 5:15 AM, which mean there will be filler before the start of tomorrow morning's schedule.

Now, I didn't notice it until I looked up Jewison's filmography, but he directed Only You, which ran I think on New Year's night. If I had known that was a Jewison movie, I would probably have watched it in conjunction with his centenary.

Daddy's Dipsomania

Another of the movies that had been sitting on my DVR for a while that I needed to watch before it expired was Papa's Delicate Condition. Once again, having finally gotten around to watching it, it's time to write up a review and schedule it on the blog.

Jackie Gleason stars as Jack Griffith, who works as a railroad superintendent in a small town in northeast Texas in the early part of the 20th century. (The movie is based on the memoirs of silent screen star Corinne Griffith, born in 1894, but the sets look closer to a pastiche of small-town American between about 1900 and 1915.) Jack has a wife Ambolyn (Glynis Johns), and two daughters: younger daughter Corinne (Linda Bruhl) and Augusta (Laurel Goodwin). Corinne is a bit of a mischief-maker, but also unfailingly honest. Dad, for his part, eschews church, which is mildly scandalous for the early 1900s. But that's not the real focus of the movie.

Instead, the main plot driver is what's referred to as the titular "delicate condition". Dad has a tendency to drink "medicinal" alcohol, which is of course not medicinal but just to get Dad good and sloshed. And when Dad does drink, he also gets rather irresponsible with the family's money. Now, he's trying to do good-hearted things with the money, but what he does is still not fiscally imprudent, to the point that you wonder how the family can afford to live in the nice house they have. One would think Dad's spendthrift ways had been going on for years and that Mom would have taken the kids home to her father. After all, her father Mr. Ghio (Charlie Ruggles) is the mayor of Texarkana.

The first time we see Dad spending the family money unwisely, it's to "help" a man who's painted his house in a garish color that Ambolyn doesn't like get the house repainted in white. Sure, it's dumb to see Jack do this, but you can understand him wanting to make his wife happy. Next up, however, Jack stops by a drug store where the guy behind the counter has a wife who's going into labor and can't get the time off bcause of nasty boss Mr. Cosgrove (Charles Lane). Jack takes over for an hour and gets into big trouble by service a kid a banana split. To get out of his trouble, Jack comes up with a plan to have a "syndicate" of his friends buy the place. He then blackmails his friends into co-funding the scheme!

And then the circus comes to town. Corinne like the pony and wishes she could have one. Unfortunately, the only way Jack can buy the pony is if he buys the whole damn circus. And, of course, he's stupid enough to pay the two crooked proprietors cash. They run off, leaving Jack owning a circus that's heavily in debt and has lots of process servers chasing them. Yeah, he really is that dumb. It's here that Ambolyn finally has the good sense to go off to Texarkana to be with her father. Jack, having screwed things up badly, realizes that he has to go where they can't find him, and takes a job as a railroad superintendent with a railroad in Louisiana. But this is also the sort of movie that you know is going to have a happy ending. So how is it going to get there?

I can see why people think a movie like Papa's Delicate Condition has its charms. For me, however, it had a bunch of problems, which are mostly down to the script. Jack Griffiths is, if not a nasty character, one for whom it's hard to have sympathy. He's causing all his own problems, and you keep wanting Ambolyn or perhaps her father to knock some sense into Jack. The other big issue is that Jackie Gleason is miscast for a period piece like this. It's as though he's still playing Ralph Kramden and not Jack Griffith.