The Housekeeper's Daughter

This week's Noir Alley selection is a foreign film I've blogged about before: the 1960 South Korean movie The Housemaid, airing at midnight between July 27/28 (on the east coast; as always, that's still Saturday, July 27 in more westerly time zones) and again Sunday, July 28 (in all time zones) at 10:00 AM. With that in mind, I figured it's time to do a post about a movie that's been sitting on my DVR for several months, that's only related by title: The Housekeeper's Daughter.

Joan Bennett plays the daughter, although as the movie opens up there's no housekeeper involved. Bennett plays Hilda, who is watching one of those 1930s poker games in hotel rooms that, to anybody who had seen enough movies from the beginning of the decades, was obviously rigged. However, there's still one mark who must not have seen enough such movies, and keeps losing hand after hand. Hilda finally drops a hint that perhaps the mark can't win, which is trouble for her, as her boyfriend Floyd (Marc Lawrence) is one of the crooks fleecing the mark.

Hilda realizes she needs to get away, so she heads for her mother's house. Or, at least, her mother's living quarters, since mom Olga (Peggy Wood) is the housekeeper to the Randall family, an archeology professor and wife with an adult son Robert (John Hubbard) who wants to be a reporter instead of following in his father's footsteps. The parents are going away for a working vacation, so there's enough space for Hilda to stay at least until her troubles boil over. Meanwhile, Robert, partly wanting to earn his own living and partly from having seen Hilda, decides to stay.

Back to Hilda's boyfriend Floyd. He's looking for a new girl to replace Hilda, and has settled on a showgirl. A Runyonesque bum, Benny (George E. Stone), who helped Floyd procure this showgirl, is distressed at how Floyd is treating her, so serves Floyd a cup of poisoned coffee. Except that Floyd doesn't drink the coffee, giving it instaed to the showgirl, who promptly dies and gets dumped into the river by Floyd.

That story obviously makes the newspaper, and when Robert reads it, he wants to help solve the case. So he simply calls up one of the newspaper editors, Wilson (Donald Meek), and says he wants to help ace crime reporter Deakon Maxwell (Adolphe Menjou). Amazingly, the editor hooks the two up. Deakon is also a hard drinker (another of those 1930s stereotypes), and unsurprisingly Robert is unable to keep up with Deakon's drinking. Robert gets blackout drunk one night but interviews Benny, calling up Wilson and relating Benny's confession, waking up the next morning to have no recollection of having done so but getting a byline in the paper. This is what brings everybody's storylines together, not that Floyd knew Hilda was living under the same roof as Robert.

The Housekeeper's Daughter was produced by Hal Roach at a time when he was trying to get into bigger pictures than the "screenliners" and shorts his studio had been making, even though this one only clocks in at about 79 minutes. It is a bit more than a B movie thanks to the presence of Bennett and Menjou, but it's certainly not anything major. Despite the relatively low production values, it does entertain, at least for people who like old movies already.

Nobody will ever put The Housekeeper's Daughter on a list of greatest pictures of all time, but it's still definitely worth one watch.

Démanty noci

Another of the many foreign films that's been sitting on my DVR for quite some time is a film from the beginning of the Czech New Wave, Diamonds of the Night.

Diamonds of the Night is yet another film that doesn't exactly have a straightforward plot, and nobody famous in the cast. The movie starts with a long tracking shot. It's 1942 in Bohemia, which of course means the Nazi Protectorate and the Nazis transporting all the Jews first to the Theresienstadt/Terezin concentration camp, and from there to extermination camps farther east. Two teenaged boys, wearing coats clearly marked KL for Konzentrationslager, jump off the train in an attempt to escape.

Their escape involves going through the forest, and with the war on it's not as though there's much food to be had anywhere. That, and one of the boys appears to be possibly injured, considering he's walking with a stick. It could just be, however, that this is because of how ill-fitting his shoes are, as we see several scenes of him taking off the shoes and having his feet wrapped in rags.

As the two young men walk toward their possible escape, they have what might be flashbacks. Or they might be daydreams or hallucinations. The movie doesn't make this quite clear, but then that's the point, that the viewer is supposed to be disconcerted, much as the two boys are. Eventually the come across a farmer out in the field whose wife is bringing him some lunch. Ooh, a possibility for them to get food, although there's also the possibility for them to get caught.

And then a bunch of old-fart Germans do catch them, with the likelihood that the Germans will turn them over to whoever will take them back to the camps or else just kill them forthwith for trying to escape. As the old men sing, the local boss calls his higher-ups, leading to an ambiguous ending....

Diamonds of the Night is based on a book by Arnošt Lustig, who as a teenaged boy was sent by the Nazis to Theresienstadt but escaped before going on to become a successful writer well after the war. The movie is definitely well made, although the non-linear plot may be a bit off-putting to some viewers, especially those who like more conventional movies.

The movie also has a fairly low amount of dialog compared to most movies, so those who aren't thrilled at the prospect of reading subtitles don't have to read so much. Diamonds of the Night isn't a standard-issue movie, but it's definitely one that should be seen.

Roadblock

Another one of those movies that I saw several years ago but for whatever reason never blogged about -- heck, I wouldn't be surprised if the last time I saw it was before I started the blog -- is the B noir Roadblock. So the last time it ran on TCM I recorded it, and recently re-watched it in order to be able to give it a full-length review.

The movie starts off in Cincinnati, where Joe Peters (Charles McGraw) holds a guy up, looking for a cool $100,000 that the guy supposedly had. With a gun in his side, the man drives to a cemetery and goes in one of the crypts, where he undoes one of the tiles to reveal a banker's box protected by a gun. At that point, a third man enters the crypt, and it's revealed that Peters actually works in insurance recovery, with the third man being his parnter, Harry Miller (Louis Jean Heydt). This man had robbed a bank; Joe and Harry's employers ensure against robberies, and they want the cash back for the bank.

Joe sends Harry back to their home base of Los Angeles with the cash while he stays behind to deal with the police and whatnot. At the airport he sees a pretty woman who astute viewers could guess looks suspsiciously like a femme fatale. But Joe is a character in a movie, and he probably hasn't watched enough noirs. The woman flirts with him, and then goes over to the ticket counter. She wants to get to Los Angeles and doesn't have enough money for a ticket. But she knows of a scheme the airline has that one this day of the week a full-fare passenger can travel with a spouse who only pays half price. The woman, named Diane (Joan Dixon), claims to be Mrs. Joe Peters. Joe, unsurprisingly, is none too pleased when he learns of the deception.

Worse, he has to spend a fair deal of time with Diane because the plane has to land to avoid weather and the airline puts everybody up overnight. Diane is a woman with expensive tastes, hence the cheating to get a half-fare ticket rather than going by bus. But she also taunts Joe, telling him that one of these days he's going to develop a taste for something that his insurance detective salary can't cover. And that something just might be her. Those of us who have seen enough noirs can figure where all this is going, but Joe obviously hasn't.

So we know they're going to see each other again, and it doesn't take all that long. Joe and Harry immediately get put on another case, investigating who might be behind a string of robberies against a prominent furrier. No; it's not Diane who is behind it. But she's become the woman on the side of the racketeer who they think is responsible, Kendall Webb (Lowell Gilmore), and this would explain how she's able to go around in fine furs.

At this point the film gets a bit ridiculous. Joe decides to go bad in order to be able to get enough money to win Diane away from Webb. At the same time, Diane realizes that being a moll isn't all it's cracked up to be, and thinks about going straight and even possibly settling down with Joe. But since this is a noir, we know that Joe is going to make that fatal error, which involves working for Webb. Even if there weren't a Production Code, who could think this would go well?

Despite the plot twist that I don't think bears any resemblance to real life, Roadblock is a highly entertaining B noir. McGraw is well-suited to the genre, while Joan Dixon is a good femme fatale. Gilmore might be the weak link here, along with the plot that strains credulity more and more.

There are better noirs out there. There are better B noirs out there. Heck, there are even better B noirs out there that starr Charles McGraw (The Narrow Margin comes immediately to mind). But Roadblock is more than worth a watch.

Aren't parties supposed to be fun?

Actor Don Murray died earlier this year at the age of 94. One of his movies that's been sitting on my DVR for some time now is The Bachelor Party. I'd seen part of it from a previous TCM showing ages ago, but for whatever reason didn't watch the whole thing, which is why I made a point of recording it when it showed up again. This time, I did watch all the way through.

Don Murray is not the bachelor; his character is Charlie, a New York bookkeeper married to Helen, very recently having found out that his wife Helen is pregnant with their first child. Charlie loves Helen, but having knocked her up presents some problems for them. Charlie has been going to night school to study to become an accountant, and was hoping to be able to take a year off work to complete all the courses at lightning speed while the couple lived off Helen's wages. But her getting pregnant means she's going to have to quit work, and Charlie is going to have to drag out his education. He tells this on the way to work to his colleague Ken (Larry Blyden), who is having issues in his own marriage.

Meanwhile, both of them have another colleague, Arnold (Philip Abbott), who is engaged and getting married that weekend. So the bachelor party, being planned by another co-worker Eddie (Jack Warden), is going to be that night. Neither of the married men is certain they want to go, but eventually the two of them decide they will join in, along with another man who works in their cramped office, Walter (E.G. Marshall).

It's a relatively small party, and a good portion of it is held in public, as the men start off as a restaurant and then go bar-hopping. Along the way, Charlie runs across a strange woman, credited only as "The Existentialist" (Carolyn Jones). Each of the married men starts revealing that perhaps marriage isn't all it's cracked up to be, or at least a lot more work than just being in love. Arnold even lets on that he's not certain why he got engaged in the first place.

Against the backdrop of all this, we learn that the married women aren't finding marriage a bed of roses either. We learn about Charlie's impending fatherhood from a conversation his wife is having with her sister-in-law. While the men are out partying, the two sisters-in-law spend some time in Charlie and Helen's apartment, talking about their difficulties. Helen isn't certain Charlie is happy about becoming a father, and the sister-in-law came over more to announce she's convinced her own husband is having yet another affair.

The Existentialist had invited Charlie to a bohemian party in Greenwich Village and he, by now sick of the bachelor party, decides to go to this bohemian gathering. At least she'll get him to think and be honest with himself as to whom he really loves.

I have to admit that I didn't exactly like The Bachelor Party. It feels way too talky to me, and filled with characters who aren't exactly likeable, although that might be because the situation itself, with a bunch of men getting drunk and doing drunk things, isn't particularly appealing to me. Other people are probably going to like The Bachelor Party a lot more than I did.

Don't forget the 1920 version

One of the TCM programming features this month that I didn't discuss before was one looking at the way Hollywood treated themes before and after the introduction of the Production Code in July 1934. Every Monday evening they've been having blocks of movies with pairs of thematically similar films. Tonight (July 22), that includes the two famous sound versions of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: first, the 1932 Fredric March version at 11:30 PM, followed at 1:15 AM by the 1941 Spencer Tracy version. Not airing, as it doesn't fit the programming theme, is the 1920 silent version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, starring John Barrymore as Robert Louis Stevenson's doomed scientist/doctor. But I had that one on my DVR, so I watched it to be able to review it in conjunction with the airing of the other two versions.

The only bad thing about trying to do a synopsis of a movie like this is that it's based on a work where pretty much everybody knows the basic story, or at least thinks they know the basic story. (I've seen the two sound versions before, but it's been years.) One thing I didn't know is that the movies are actually generally based on a stage adaptation, which has some significant differences from Stevenson's original book. But the basic plot is there.

John Barrymore, as I mentioned, plays Dr. Jekyll, who at the beginning of the movie is a paragon of virtue, working as a doctor and spending a considerable amount of time doing charitable work among the poor people of 1880s London. Jekyll has a belief that every man has within him two natures, one good and one evil. He's thinking that it would be a wonderful thing for mankind if a way could be figured out to split those two natures, such that we could cast out the evil nature and leave ourselves with the good one, although frankly to me a world in which we're incapable of having wrongthought sounds horrifying.

Dr. Lanyon, one of Jekyll's colleagues, doesn't agree with Jekyll, who decides he's going to go and do some research to come up with that way to split the natures. He also tells his friend Sir George Carewe about it. Sir George is also the father of Millicent, who is in love with Dr. Jekyll, just like in all the later versions. Like Lanyon, Sir George doesn't believe any of this is possible.

Of course, in Stevenson's world, all of this is in fact possible, as we wouldn't have a movie otherwise -- or, at least, we'd get a lot of slow space like in Madame Curie before the Curies figure out what radium is. Jekyll experiments, and eventually comes up with a potion that he tries on himself, because it would be unethical to try on anybody else. The potion actually works, turning Jekyll into what he calls Mr. Hyde, and also dramtically changing Jekyll's physical appearance. Hyde, however, keeps coming back, and Hyde's violent nature causes all sorts of problems.

This version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, being from 1920, has some advantages and disadvantages that are a result of being that old. Technically, they couldn't do as much with effects in 1920 as they'd be able to do in later decades. Barrymore has to show the transition as much if not more with acting than make up compared to the later Jekylls, and unsurprisingly, Barrymore is able to pull this off. A positive is that in 1920, and especially with a stage actor like John Barrymore, there wasn't quite as much need for the studio to protect an actor's image. So the movie can go farther with Barrymore and his descent into monstrosity, which is a big plus for a story like this.

One minor negative is the score on the print TCM ran, which to me is quite intrusive and doesn't really work. I suppose you could always turn the sound down since there's no spoken dialogue, or look for another print on your favorite video site, since the movie is in the public domain. Note, however, that various prints have had different running times.

The Hardy Family Noir

I mentioned a few months back upgrading my home "theater", not that it's much of a theater, by buying a 40" TV for the upstairs room and getting a Blu-ray player for the TV. The player, it turned out, was misconfigured out of the box in that it was set up to show everything in full-screen, so when I put in a DVD of an old movie not in a wide-screen format, it filled up the screen with no pillarboxing. I couldn't figure out how to change the aspect ratio on the TV until I figured it might be an issue with the Blu-ray player. So that's part of the reason I haven't gotten to my rather severe backlog of DVDs that I have. Well, that, and the fact that stuff only stays on the DVR for nine months while the DVDs are closer to permanent. But recently, I finally decided to watch another movie out of my Will Rogers box set: Too Busy to Work.

A brief establishing sequence shows something that's going to come up again later in the movie: a small town where a hold-up takes place one night, and there's shooting when the getaway car tries to get away. An older guy named nicknamed Jubilo (Will Rogers) witnesses all this. The next morning, we discover the guy is actually a hobo, and one who is very averse to work. He gets involved with another tramp trying to catch a rabbit, before coming upon a swimming hole where a third man has left his suit jacket hanging on a tree. So Jubilo exchages jackets, before walking to a house where we see on a mailbox, "Judge Hardy".

Now, this isn't the Judge Hardy from MGM's popular series of the late 1930s and early 1940s; that's just a coincidence albeit a rather humorous one. Jubilo gets treed by a dog, before the Hardys' maid (Louise Beavers) shows up. Jubilo charms her with stories about being from Alabama, even calling her "Mammy", and basically cons her into giving him some food. As for the man whose jacket he took, that's Axel, who works as a ranchhand on the Hardys' spread since the Hardys have a bit of a soft spot about helping out Depression-era hobos in exchange for doing work around the place.

But Jubilo is work-averse, and tricks Axel into doing what should be Jubilo's jobs, in a way that makes Jubilo seem like a very unsympathetic character. Then again, that's not the reason why Jubilo decided to stop at the Hardy place. He asks Mammy about the Hardy family history, and learns that the judge (Frederick Burton) lost his first wife ages ago and married another woman who had a young daughter Rose who is now an adult (Marian Nixon). Rose's mother died a few years back, and she's in love with the judge's son from the first mother, Dan (Dick Powell, yes, that Dick Powell before he did those Warner Bros. musicals).

That family is actually why Jubilo is here. Jubilo claims that he served honorably in World War I, although considering how we've seen him con Mammy and Axel, one wonders whether this is a made-up story as well. However, Jubilo also says that when he returned from the war, another man had run off with his wife, and that broke him, which is why he's now a tramp, having spent a long time going around the country looking for the man who did this to him. It doesn't take much to guess that Jubilo has concluded that it's Judge Hardy who married Jubilo's wife, and based on conversations the two men have, Judge Hardy knows it, too.

And then Dan returns home, telling Rose that he's going to have to run off. Dan and Jubilo actually saw each other the previous night, as Dan was tricked into serving as the getaway driver from that hold-up. Dan, seeing Jubilo, figures that Jubilo is there to rat him out to the authorities, not knowing anything about Jubilo's real reason for being here. Rose, similarly, doesn't know anything, and doesn't remember her biological father.

This is all rather strange for a Will Rogers movie, since he's generally more remembered for his folksy, homespun wisdom. In fact, this strangeness is why I had some difficulty warming up to Too Busy to Work. Rogers seems terribly miscast for a man with this sort of dark past, and his dark past turning him into a petty confidence man makes him unsympathetic for much of the movie. Also odd is that this is based on a story by Ben Ames Williams, a name you might recognize from one of his most famous works, Leave Her to Heaven.

I'm glad that a box set included Too Busy to Work, but it's definitely a bit strange and not to everybody's taste.

Technically it's a cyclone

We're in the middle of hurricane season here in the western hempisphere part of the Atlantic, and with that in mind I watched the copy of the 1937 movie The Hurricane that I've had on my DVR for several months, not to be confused with other movies with the same title.

The movie starts off with an establishing sequence of a boat sailing through the South Seas, with a Dr. Kersaint (Thomas Mitchell) among the passengers. The boat passes a deserted island, and Dr. Kersaint starts talking about the island to a female passenger. Kersaint had spent time in these islands, and he has bittersweet memories of them. As you might guess, this leads to a flashback....

The island in question, Manakoora, is part of an archipelago administered by France, who have sent a governor in the form of Eugene De Laage (Raymond Massey). This being the era before airplanes, and most of the islands not having suitable space for runways anyway, the islands are served by sailing ships that go from one island to another. Many of the ships use native Polynesins for the crews, since they have local knowledge of the seas and are accomplished seafarers, having gotten to all of these islands after all.

Among the sailors is Terangi (John Hall). The current voyage brings him back to the main island, where his fiancée Marama (Dorothy Lamour) is waiting for him. Also waiting with romantic interest for a passenger is the Governor, whose wife Germaine (Mary Astor) is on the boat. Also getting off the boat, at least with the movie making a point of showing him so we'll know it's an important cast member, is a new Catholic priest to serve the island, Fr. Paul (C. Aubrey Smith). Now that Terangi is returned to his home island, he can marry Marama and they can live happily ever after.

Well, not quite, since all of this has happened in the first 20 minutes or so. Terangi and Merama are in love, and Merama doesn't want Terangi to leave her. But his job is to go sailing, and he has to leave her, as there's no space for the wives of the sailors. This disappoints Marama, since the next voyage is taking the boat to Tahiti, the big island in the area.

But things go wrong on Tahiti, as a nasty European starts treating the Polynesian sailors like crap, even smacking Terangi. Terangi hits back in self-defense, but he breaks the other guy's jaw and this other guy has connections, which gets Terangi sent to prison for six months. Terangi is like Jean Valjean, having been oversentenced for a minor crime and wanting to escape. He keeps trying, again and again, to escape, which lengthens the sentence. But eventually he does escape, almost in time for the titular hurricane....

If there's a problem with The Hurricane, it's that it goes on too long between the time Terangi gets sentenced and the time the storm comes, with there not really being enough plot development in between. Audiences of 1937 would have wanted to see the storm, however, and that's something that's definitely worth waiting for, as the special effects are quite good for 1937. It's just a shame that the effects aren't in service of a better story.

From Air to Eternity

Some time back, when I was in my previous house, TCM ran The Gypsy Moths and, for whatever reason, I didn't record it. Either it was before I had the DVR, or I just didn't have the space on my DVR. In any case, several months back it showed up on the TCM schedule again, so this time since the DVR is technically unlimited, I decided to record it to be able finally to watch it.

Three guys jump out of an airplane together, although it must be pointed out they have parachutes on. Those guys are Mike Rettig (Burt Lancaster), Joe Browdy (Gene Hackman) and Malcom Webson (Scott Wilson). On their way down, they unfurl a banner, and it's clear that these are actually stunt jumpers, putting on a show for the people watching from the ground below who have paid for the privilege.

Now, at this point, I was expecting a period piece, but after putting on the show the guys go to the next town to put on another show, and judging from the automobiles, it's contemprorary, meaning the late 1960s. The next town is Bridgeville, KS, which is an interesting place if only because Malcolm used to live there. He left many years ago, not having looked back, largely because his parents no longer live there. In fact, his parents no longer live at all. They died when Malcolm was young, and his aunt and uncle lived in Bridgeville. Now that he's back, perhaps he ought to look them up and see if they're still in Bridgeville.

Of course, they are in Bridgeville, and it's eventually going to become clear why Malcolm wanted to get the hell out of Bridgeville. Aunt Elizabeth (Deborah Kerr) and Uncle John Brandon (William Windom) never had kids of their own, and that has long been a bone of contention between them. But the couple is nice enough that they're willing to put the three skydivers up for the one or two nights they're going to be in town.

Although the Brandons never had kids of their own, they've got a big enough house not only to put the three men up, but to have boarders. Generally, that's students at the local college, although one, Annie Burke (Bonnie Bedelia), is staying there over the summer. She eventually becomes a bit of a love interest for Malcolm.

As you might guess, there's going to be love interests for the other two men. It also doesn't take much to figure out that one of the women involved is going to be frustrated Elizabeth, although at least she doesn't get into a relationship with Malcolm, because that would be really creepy. Instead, she and Rettig connect while the creep factor is from Joe trying to bed a dancer from the local strip club. They still have to perform the aerial stunts for the crowd, however....

The Gypsy Moths is the sort of movie that's too serious for its own good. The Production Code had recently gone out the window, and you can understand Hollywood wanting to deal with grown-up themes in a more grown-up way. But The Gypsy Moths has too much conversation between the various people involved, rather than aerial action. You'd think that in a movie dealing with parachute jumpers people would want to see the effects photography, instead of a romantic drama.

Everybody involved tries their best, and the movie's flaws are definitely not the fault of the actors. But it's still a movie that doesn't add up to all that much 50 years on.

Harve Presnell is Girl Crazy

A lot of people will recognize the song "I Got Rhythm", written by George and Ira Gershwin. It was from an early 1930s musical called Girl Crazy. You may also recognize that as a film title, as there's a famous Judy Garland/Mickey Rooney movie version of Girl Crazy from the 1940s. It's actually not the first movie version of the musical, as there was one a decade earlier that was retooled as a vehicle for Wheeler and Woolsey, of all people. It's also not the last version of the musical, as MGM revived it in the mid-1960s, using the title When the Boys Meet the Girls.

Danny Churchill (Harve Presnell, fresh off a big starring role opposite Debbie Reynolds in The Unsinkable Molly Brown) is a young playboy and student at an all-men's college. He's been given the job of procuring some women for a revue so that the male students don't actually have to go on stage in drag and do a chorus line number. The dean, as well as the attorney for Danny's trust fund, both show up backstage, which causes all sorts of problems since it gets him in the newspapers with absolutely terrible publicity.

The next day, Tess (Sue Ann Langdon), shows up claiming that she's a victim of a breach of promise from Danny. He's been expelled from college, and the stockholders want to take over his father's old firm that's the trust fund. So Danny's lawyer comes up with the brilliant idea that Danny should finish up his graduate degree by going to his father's alma mater, Cody College in the middle of nowhere in Nevada.

On the way out to Nevada, Danny and his friend Sam (Joby Baker) come across a horseback rider, with the horse bucking and eventually throwing the rider. The rider in question turns out to be a woman, Ginger Gray (Connie Francis), who was delivering mail for the US Postal Service. She's delivering the mail because her father Phin (Frank Faylen), the real mailman, is up in Reno gambling again and about to lose the ranch the family lives on.

The first meeting between Danny and Ginger of course goes bad, at least until Danny starts singing "Embraceable You"; Gershiwn tunes are apparently almost as good makeout music as Ravel's "Bolero". Even if you hadn't seen any other version of Girl Crazy, you've probably seen enough of this romantic comedy to know that The Boy and The Girl are eventually going to fall in love. Here, Danny, falling in love with Ginger, feels he needs to come up with some sort of sceme to save the family ranch, which is to turn it into a place where women can stay while waiting for their divorce to go through. I suppose it's something that would be a nice money-spinner at least until other states got the idea to permit no-fault divorce.

When the Boys Meet the Girls was made in 1965, a time when social norms were beginning to change, and movie musicals were beginning to lose steam. One thing MGM tried to do to make this more popular was to include non-Gershwin tunes, from a variety of acts such that moviegoers would like at least one of them. For the teens, there was Herman's Hermits, a British act that was part of the "British Invasion" of pop groups. For women, there was Liberace, and for older viewers in addition to the Gershwin tunes was the presence of Louis Armstrong.

The mishmash doesn't always work, but it's not as bad as review of the time made it out to be. It's hard, after all, to go wrong with George and Ira Gershwin as well as a lot of the supporting cast here.

Scenery vs. Story

Tomorrow (July 18) on TCM is a morning and afternoon of the movies of Constance Ford. One of the movies airing happens to be on my DVR from a recent showing, so I watched that movie: Rome Adventure, which will be on at 4:30 PM.

Ford is in a supporting role, as the real star is a woman who gets an "Introducing" credit, a young Suzanne Pleshette. She plays Prudence Bell, who at the start of the movie is an assistant librarian at a conservative women's college in New England. So conservative, in fact, that they ban books like Lovers Must Learn, which is a bit of an in-joke since that's the book on which the movie is based. Prudence has suggested to one of the students that the student read it, and this ticks off the faculty council enough that they're going to fire her. Prudence, however, knowing that, quits before they can fire her.

Prudence's plan is to go off to Italy to learn about love, which seems a bit nuts because who knows where she's getting her money from, and it's not as if she's got a place to live once she gets to Rome. Well, I suppose she's getting her money from her wealthy parents. At the pier, the Bell parents run into a Mrs. Stilwell, whom they met at a charity function and whose son is also heading off to Rome to study the ancient Etruscans. The younger Albert Stilwell (Hampton Fancher; for some reason I was thinking this was Chad Everett whose name appears down the credits) is actually standing right next to Prudence on the boat, so Mrs. Bell tries to hook the two young Americans up. However, Prudence misreads the signals and turns to the passenger on the other side of her, an Italian named Roberto Orlandi (Rossano Brazzi).

Both of these men are decent people, but since neither of them are at the top of the credits, we can guess that they're not going to wind up with Prudence in the final reel. But Roberto is so good that he directs the two Americans to the villa where he rents a room from a contessa, and both of them take him up on the offer to take rooms. (How many bathrooms did those old villas have?) Among the younger set of Americans living in the villa is Don Porter (Troy Donahue), who is finishing up his graduate degree in Rome. We first meet him as he's leaving the villa in a huff, having learned that his girlfriend Lyda (Angie Dickinson) is dumping him to spend time in Switzerland.

Now, Troy Donahue is top-billed, with Angie Dickinson second, but because of Pleshette's "introducing" credit and the fact that she's clearly the lead here, you know who is going to wind up with whom. Don falls for Prudence, and the feeling is mutual, and he starts showing her around Italy, even though by this time Prudence has gotten a job at the American bookstore run by Daisy Bronson (that's Constance Ford). How Prudence can just take the time to go traipsing around Italy and blow off her job is another unanswered question.

But Rome Adventure is one of those movies where you don't really care about the plot. It was released in 1962, at a time when travel to Europe still wasn't such a common thing, so movies like this set in "exotic" locations in lovely color were still a bit of a big deal in allowing American moviegoers to see these places as glamorous. I think I said in my post about Three Coins in the Fountain that somebody must have seen Roman Holiday and thought that what was needed was Technicolor and widescreen. It's a thought that's not wrong, but a movie still needs a good plot, or else you just have a Traveltalks short. Rome Adventure, I'm sorry to say, doesn't have that plot.

So watch Rome Adventure for a look at Italy as Americans might have wanted to see it back in the early 1960s. Just don't expect a good story.

That final night of Roger Corman

I mentioned two weeks ago that TCM was going to be running three nights of movies involving Roger Corman, who died earlier this year. The first two nights were a bunch of movies that he directed, while the final evening, which is tonight, is different in that he was the producer. It's an interesting night as well in that we get to see Corman giving several young directors an early shot at becoming big-time directors. There are five movies, and I've blogged about the first three before. So I'm looking forward to seeing the latter two:

The night kicks off at 8:00 PM with Boxcar Bertha, directed by a young Martin Scorsese. It's a fake biopic, in that it's based on a book that purported to be an "as told to" memoir although in fact the person doing the telling didn't really exist. The movie is set in the 1930s and tells of Bertha (Barbara Hershey), who gets involved with Depression-era union agitators on the run.

That's followed by Targets at 9:45 PM. This really underrated film, directed by Peter Bogdanovich, stars Boris Karloff in one of his final roles (he really does look like death warmed over), as an again actor on his way to a drive-in that's going to be doing a retrospective of his work and using him as the main attraction. Unbeknownst to him, a sniper who's killed his family is going to converge on the drive-in.

Then, at 11:30 PM, is Dementia 13, which gave Francis Ford Coppola an early start. A family gets together in Ireland for a memorial service for a member of the family who died several years ago. The matriarch of the family is going to be leaving behind a substantial inheritance when she finally dies, and that leads somebody -- but who -- to try to speed things up.

One that I thought I might have seen is Caged Heat, at 1:00 AM. Directed by Jonathan Demme, Caged Heat is another of those 1970s prison movies. But I think the ones I've seen are the American International prison films from the early 1970s co-starring Pam Greer.

The night concludes with Piranha at 2:30 AM, which as you might guess is a horror movie involving the titular steretoypically ultra-vicious fish. The director, Joe Dante, did have a reasonable career, but not as big as the other four directors.

On an Island With You

Tonight's lineup on TCM is a bunch of movies set on tropical islands. This includes one that's been on my DVR for a little while now and that I've never reviewed before: On an Island With You, overnight tonight at 12:45 AM (so technically July 17 in the Eastern time zone but late in the evening of July 16 in the more westerly time zones of the US).

The movie opens in lovely Technicolor with a Pacific-sounding song that sounds like it could be a stand-in for "Aloha Oe". At the end of the opening and credits, a woman dives from one of the trees into the lagoon below, that woman being Rosalind Reynolds (Esther Williams). The scene, however, is one that's part of a movie-within-a-movie, as Reynolds is an actress making a movie in the islands together with her fiancé, Ricardo Montez (Ricardo Montalbán). Montez is playing a character who is a navy officer, which seems like miscasting considering Montez's accent. The character is loved by Reynolds' character, but also by another character played by Yvonne Toro (Cyd Charisse). What nobody knows yet is that Yvonne Toro is also in love with Ricardo Montez.

Since the movie-within-a-movie is about the US Navy, the studio has brought in a technical advisor whose job it is is to make certain that everything is done the way it would be done in the real US Navy. That advisor is Lt. Kingslee (Peter Lawford). But Kingslee has some rather odd ideas about how to be an advisor, which are down in part to the fact that some years back (I'd assume during World War II, as the war had been over for less than three years when On an Island With You was released) Kingslee had seen Reynolds in the flesh when she was doing one of her USO tours. She even invited a serviceman on stage for one of her routines, and that serviceman was Kingslee. This is also why Kingslee seems vaguely familiar to Reynolds, although she can't place him. This is actually logical; the non-famous person would remember the meeting with the famous movie star, while the movie star would likely only remember having invited a ton of servicemen on stage over the course of a slew of USO shows.

Kingslee is still infatuated with Reynolds despite the fact that she's engaged, and he decides to show it first by suggesting that Montez is handling a navy romance all wrong, offering to step in for one scene and how Montez how to do it, if only as an excuse for Kingslee to be able to kiss Reynolds. Later that evening, when Xavier Cugat (obviously playing himself) is the bandleader at the hotel floor show, Kingslee asks Reynolds for a dance, and is a total dick about it when Reynolds politely but firmly declines. So much a dick that he keeps insisting she dance with him, to the point that the assistant director Buckley (Jimmy Durante, mostly there to provide comic relief) offers to dance with Kingslee.

But Kingslee isn't done being a jerk. One scene involves flying over the set. Since Kingslee is a Navy pilot (which one would guess is how he got the dual job to be technical advisor), he flies Reynolds over the set, but then flies off with her to an island several hundred miles away so that he can have some alone time with her. This to me seems like kidnapping and going AWOL, both of which would be offenses deserving of a court-martial. And indeed, when Kingslee and Reynolds are finally rescued, his commanding officer is extremely displeased.

But the worst of all things is that Peter Lawford is billed above Ricardo Montalbán, which implies that Lawford's character is the one that's supposed to end up with Williams in the final reel. Cyd Charisse's character having the hots for Montalbán is, then, obviously in the script so that Montalbán can end up with her as the "right" match. But Lawford's character is just such a total jerk, and he's so violating the Hollywood Production Code, never mind military law, that you wonder how he's going to get away with it in the final reel.

As you might guess, the huge problem for me with On an Island With You is the plot that just doesn't work. None of this is Williams' fault. Once again, she gets to do aquacade numbers that are well choreographed and look lovely on screen. Jimmy Durante is the same sort of character he usually is, while Xavier Cugat as himself is as much of an acquired taste as is Durante's humor. Some people will like them, some won't.

So, if I were to recommend Esther Williams to people, I'd start with something else before On an Island With You. But there's enough here that people are going to like the visuals.

Brewster McCloud

When Shelley Duvall died the other day, I think I might have mentioned I didn't think she was in anything upcoming on TCM. I was wrong, as one of the movies in TCM's Friday night series looking at films of the 1970s was the one in which she got an "Introducing" credit, Brewster McCloud. Thanks to an internet outage I didn't get to record it, but fortunately it's on Watch TCM through the beginning of August so I was able to watch it.

The movie starts off with a rather obsessive ornithology lecturer (only named as "Lecturer" and played by Rene Auberjonois) giving a lecture about birds; several times during the movie the scene cuts back to him and each time he seems more and more birdlike as well as more and more unhinged. Meanwhile, the action shifts to the old Houston Astrodome, where an old woman named Daphne (Margaret Hamilton is practicing the national anthem with a marching band.

Also in the Astrodome is the titular Brewster McCloud (Bud Cort). He's a strange bird, pun intended, as he lives in the fallout shelter underneath the stadium and somehow nobody has discovered that he lives there. Well, that's not quite true as he's got a couple of women in his life, but nobody who really matters knows that he lives there. Brewster works a chauffeur to an extremely old man, at least until the old guy dies in a freak wheelchair accident.

Meanwhile, around Houston, people are dying an a bizarre series of murders in which all of the victims are found with strategically-placed bird droppings. The Houston police have no idea who could be doing this, so they call for help from a San Francisco police detective, Frank Shaft (Michael Murphy).

Brewster also has an interest in birds, being one of those nutjobs with an obsession about human-powered flight. Indeed, part of the reason he lives under the Astrodome is so that he can work on building a set of wings for himself without being bothered by anybody. The only people who bother him, as I alluded to above, are one groupie, as well as a guardian angel type named Louise (Sally Kellerman) who may have had wings herself at one time, as she's got scars where wings would be if one had had wings removed at some point.

Brewster meets a third woman, Suzanne (that's Shelley Duvall, unmistakable with that expressive face of hers), who works as a tour guide at the Astrodome. Brewster tries to steal her car, and when she sees him, she seems OK with it, getting into the car with him and eventually becoming his girlfriend. However, she has an old boyfriend who works for a political bigwig, and that connection might be able to help her break the case of all the murders, as the multiple plot streams eventually come together for a climax.

I'm sorry to say that I really didn't care for Brewster McCloud, as the various plot streams aren't all that well handled. I also didn't have any real sympathy for any of the characters, who to me were mostly written as almost obnoxiously unrealistic, playing into gross stereotypes, such as the gross incompetence of the authorities. Then again, it was directed by Robert Altman, and having seen several of his films I haven't been the biggest fan of them for the most part.

If you are a fan of Altman and you haven't seen Brewster McCloud before, however, you might well like it more than I did.

I Wouldn't Be in Your Shoes

I think I mentiones some weeks back how Eddie Muller mentioned in Noir Alley that Cornell Woolrich's stories don't always make sense; I think in conjunction with Black Angel. I mentioned that I had another movie based on a Woolrich story sitting on my DVR. That movie is I Wouldn't Be in Your Shoes.

The movie starts off in a prison, where a man named Tom Quinn (Don Castle) is on death row. He's not very talkative and more or less resigned to dying. The other prisoners wonder how he got here and what made him as closed off as he is. As you might imagine, this is the cue for a flashback, although a lot of the story involves stuff that Tom couldn't possibly know even if he were narrating it.

Tom is married to Ann (Elyse Knox); the two of them are struggling dancers living in one room of a rooming house. Tom doesn't get much work, while Ann is supporting the both of them by working as a taxi dance and getting big tips from one particular client, working until the wee hours of the morning. That latter fact unsurprisingly makes Tom a bit jealous, and also keeps him up nights.

One night, Tom hears a cat mewling in the courtyard behind the building they live in. It's too much for him, so he throws one of his old shoes at the poor cat. Except that when Ann gets home, she informs him that she had actually gotten rid of those old shoes, so that all he had left was his good shoes with the built-in taps. He really should go out and fetch the shoe before somebody else takes it.

Tom doesn't, but surprisingly a good Samaritan leaves the shoes by the door to their room the next morning. At the same time, they learn about the death of a guy in the building on the other side of the courtyard. Otis, the dead man, was murdered, presumably because everybody in the area thought he was some sort of miser who paid for his purchases with old currency in denominations too high for someone of his putative lot in life. Obviously, he must have a lot more of those notes somewhere, which would naturally make somebody want to murder him.

The two story lines come together in a number of ways. One is that Tom finds a missing wallet which had belonged to Otis; Tom doesn't want to spend any of the money in the wallet which is actually a smart move because the police are tracking Otis' money. The other thing is that there's a shoe-print at the murder scene that matches Tom's spiffy new tap shoes. So when everything is put together it's only logical that Tom should be thought of as a natural suspect. He's arrested, put on trial, and found guilty, although one should be able to figure that out considering that at the start of the movie he's on death row.

At this point, we learn that Ann's rich benefactor from the dance hall is none other than Clint Judd (Regis Toomey), a police detective. Ann knows that her husband just has to be innocent, and that whoever it was who returned the shoes to Tom has to have been the person who murdered Otis. Perhaps Clint could help Ann investigate and figure out who really killed Otis?

Eddie Muller said, and I'd have to agree, that with some of these Cornell Woolrich stories you just have to sit back and enjoy the ride. I Wouldn't Be in Your Shoes is definitely a good example of that. The story is full of plot holes, and yet it's surprisingly entertaining. I guess some of that is down to the fact that it's just a B movie, so it comes in with very low expectations. I don't think you can call it great by any stretch of the imagination, but it certainly succeeds at keeping an audience entertained for the 70 or so minutes it's on the screen.

To be honest, there's not much blushing

Looking through the movies on my DVR, and seeing that the 1930s have been slightly overlooked in the last few weeks of posts, I decided to watch Our Blushing Brides, an early Joan Crawford talkie.

If the title sounds familiar, it's because the movie is the third in a sort of unofficial trilogy with two silents also starring Crawford (and, in fact, a couple of the other female stars), Our Dancing Daughters and Our Modern Maidens. I know I've seen at least one, if not both, of those, but don't quite remember them well enough to do a full post on; in any case the women don't actually play the same characters in the three movies. Here, Crawford stars as Jerry, working in a New York department store together with her friends Connie (Anita Page) and Frankie (Dorothy Sebastian). The three also share an apartment in order to cut down on costs.

All three are single working girls, but this being 1930, it's the era when most women would be expected to stop doing work out in the wider world certainly once they became mothers, and often simply once they got married. Connie and Frankie seem to be OK doing what it takes to snag a richer man so they can live a life of more leisure, while Jerry wants virtue and not a man pushing her to be a trophy wife. Meanwhile, she's already getting approached at the department store by co-worker Joe Munsey (Edward Brophy) in a recurring comic sub-plot. This being 1930, many screen personas of actors in the sound era had not yet been set, but even in 1930, the idea of Edward Brophy as a romantic suitor is somehow rather humorous.

But as with the other two young women, Jerry also has a rich guy interested in her, partly because part of her job is to model dresses, something which implies that she's going to be seen by a lot of fabulously wealthy people, because who else can afford to buy the sort of clothes where you go and watch people model them. For Jerry, however, the rich man isn't one of the guys buying for his girlfriend; it's Tony Jardine (Robert Montgomery), the son of the store's owner. Tony has a kid brother David (Raymond Hackett), who happens to be pursuing Connie. Frankie also gets a rich guy who is interested in her, Martin Sanderson (John Miljan), who comes in looking for $500 worth of fabric. This being John Miljan, alarm bells probably should have gone off for Frankie; as it turns out, he's the mastermind behind gangs working the department store robbery racket, Frankie being totally ignorant of this.

Frankie goes off with Martin, while one evening, Jerry returns home to find a note from Connie telling her to call Connie at a certain phone number. Connie has been given an apartment by David, to live as a kept woman. Connie thinks David is going to marry him, but the second half of the movie turns to melodrama and Jerry learns that David has a girlfriend from the upper crust and is in fact going to marry that girlfriend. Jerry's also had some melodrama of her own with Tony, who has in her view trying to put the moves on her too fast in a fabulous (by the standards of 1930) treehouse.

Our Blushing Brides works best as a time capsule, now that it's well over 90 years old. Since the movie has three women's stories to tell, it has a tendency to veer rather sharply in tone when it goes from one subplot to another. As a result, there's some unintended comedy here. The movie is fairly slow in the first half, for me especially due to the fashion show aspect of it, but those as well as the set designs in general are part of the time capsule feel of the movie. And then there's that one scene where Joan Crawford has to wear a blonde wig and heavy makeup that makes her look ghoulish.

If I'm going to introduce people to early sound movies, there are other things I'd pick well before Our Blushing Brides. But for people who have already seen those other films, Our Blushing Brides is certainly an interesting, if mixed, glimpse into the past.

Also tough to review

A few months back, I did a post on My Dinner With Andre pointing out it was tough to review because of the well-known subject material and lack of a plot. Another movie that for me somewhat defies review, albeit for different reasons, is the 1970 version of The Boys in the Band, which has another airing on TCM tonight (July 12) at 8:00 PM.

I'm sure the main plot point is known already to a lot of readers, and the reasons why it's well known. Michael (Kenneth Nelson) is going through lower Manhattan running errands in advance of a birthday he's hosting for Harold (Leonard Frey) and several mutual friends. After he gets back to his apartment, a couple of things happen. One is that his friend Donald (Frederick Combs) shows up early, his session with his analyst having been called off. It's made quite clear from the conversation, if you didn't already know the plot, that both of them, as well as all of the guests at the party, are gay men, and that Michael and Donald are in some stage of a relationship.

The other thing that happens is that Michael's college roommate Alan (Peter White) calls up, looking to meet with Michael for dinner or something because he has something very important of a personal nature to discuss. Now, Alan has come up from Washington, and is not a guest at the party because Alan is straight with a wife. The play having been first staged in 1968 and the movie being from 1970, it's easy to see the potential problems this causes. All the guests are comfortable being open about being gay in front of each other, but not necessarily with certain straight people they know well. Michael tries to push off a meeting with Alan until the next day, but Alan at least eventually does call off the meeting.

The various guests start to arrive, although Harold is going to show up fashionably late. Playwright Mart Crowley, who was openly gay and wrote both the play and screenplay, populates the guests with a bunch of different character types who might seem like archetypes. But one presumes that Crowley really did know gay men like each of the characters. The most important of the guests for plot purposes is not the guest of honor, but Emory (Cliff Gorman), who fills the stereotype of the flamboyant and combative gay man, but one who can also be seen as obnoxious.

The gay men, free to be themselves, enjoy the party when there's another knock on the door. Everybody expects it to be Harold who hasn't shown up yet. But it is in fact Alan. And it wasn't Michael who opened the door; if he had, he probably could have kept everybody out on the terrace while he talks about that "important" thing Alan wanted to discuss. But with somebody else answering the door, Alan realizes that everybody at the party is gay, which obviously includes his friend and former roommate Alan.

All hell breaks loose, especially with Emory, who decides the right thing to do is to taunt Alan and suggest that Alan is acutally gay himself but severely repressed. Emory, in fact, is the reason why I found myself having trouble coming up with a good review of The Boys in the Band. Ultimately, it hit me what made me dislike his character so much: I couldn't help but think of Emory as being like the obnoxious jerk antagonist stereotype from a 1980s teen movie, except that the character in the 1980s movie would be straight. Emory also comes across as the sort of character who would immediately jump to screaming homophobia if anybody objected to his obnoxiousness, even though we all know similarly annoying straight people.

Reading reviews on IMDb, however, brought up another insight that I didn't think of. Several reviewers made comparisons between The Boys and the Band and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf in that the parties spiral out of control in much the same way. As you may recall, I really disliked Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf because of the nonstop bickering and unlikeability of any of the characters. In the case of The Boys in the Band, though, it was really more just Emory that I really didn't like and wanted to smack.

A lot of the reviewers also discuss whether The Boys in the Band is dated. In some ways, it probably is, but at the same time, all the character types portrayed here still exist (both the gay and straight equivalents), and many of the themes are timeless.

Briefs for July 11-12, 2024

I hadn't intended to write up a briefs post today, but then I saw the news that Shelley Duvall died at the age of 75. Duvall is best known for her performance in The Shining, one of those movies that I have to admit I have never actually seen before. Duvall's career didn't really go anywhere after that, in part because she wound up in some disastrous films like Popeye, and in part because of personal health issues. I don't know that any of her movies are coming up on TCM soon.

As for movies that are coming up, I've got more this week that are on my DVR and that I haven't blogged about until now. One of them is The Swan, which actually has a pair of airings on TCM in fairly close proximity this week, one earlier and one at 6:00 PM tomorrow. I had other stuff to blog about so I didn't do a full-length post on it, but then, it's airing in August since Grace Kelly is being honored in Summer Under the Stars. (I've also got The Country Girl sitting on my DVR from when TCM ran it during 31 Days of Oscar, so I guess you're getting two Grace Kelly posts in quick succession.)

Before The Swan, however, there's The King and the Chorus Girl, which I mentioned several months back; that one shows up July 12 at 12:15 PM. And then, at 2:00 PM Saturday (July 13) is The Password is Courage, which I recorde when Dirk Bogarde was Star of the Month last September. So it's currently expired on my YouTube TV cloud DVR, but because their system remembers what movies you recorded in the past, it catches new airings of stuff.

Raintree County

Eva Marie Saint is TCM's Star of the Month for July 2024, and one of her movies that's been on my DVR and that I haven't posted about before is Raintree County. It's on TCM again tonight at 10:00 PM, so I made a point to watch the movie to do a review on it now for the upcoming showing.

Once again, Eva Marie Saint is only a supporting actress here, although she shows up a lot earlier than the actual lead actress. The movie opens up in 1859 in Raintree County, Indiana, which is partly a sign that the Civil War is about to hit the US and change everybody's life. Everybody is about to graduate high school, and this being 1859, it's a huge deal that the class is going to be... photographed. Head of the class is John Shawnessy (Montgomery Clift), who is a bit of a dreamer. He's kinda-sort going steady, at least by 1859 standards, with fellow student Nell (that's Eva Marie Saint if you couldn't tell), and everyone expects them to get married relatively soon since younger marriages were much more common in those days.

Except that one of their teachers, Prof. Stiles (Nigel Patrick), tells the class the legend Johnny Appleseed, He went through the midwest planting trees, and supposedly he planted on specific raintree after which the county is named, somewhere in the county's forbidding swamp. Find the tree, and you'll find the secret of life. It's a ridiculous idea, but this is the 1850s when there was more ignorance in the world, and young John is impressionable. So he blows off his girlfriend to go into the swamp looking for the tree.

Visiting the county for some reason is southern belle Susanna Drake (Elizabeth Taylor). Johnny is immediately taken with her looks, and continues to blow off Nell in order to spend time with Susanna. Enough time alone with each other, in fact that there might be the opportunity for Johnny to knock up Susanna before she leaves to go back home. Indeed, they must have had sex because some time later Susanna shows up back in town to tell Johnny that she's with child and he's the father of the child. I'd guess Johnny knew enough about sex to know that if he hadn't done it with Susanna, there's no way she could be bearing his child.

Johnny does the honorable thing and marries Susanna before heading south with her to live in her part of the country. The two stop in a plantation where Susanna grew up, at least before the place burned down in a fire. Johnny, in talking to the people who still live there, learns that Susanna's mom went insane, and Susanna may in fact be inheriting her mom's mental state, not that they quite understood genetics at the time. But it's the reason for the insanity that's a problem: The woman who went insane might not have been Susanna's biological mother, and that Susanna is in fact the product of a relationship between Dad and one of the family's slaves!

Oh, the movie is going to get a lot more ridiculous. John and Susanna move back north, and the Civil War breaks out. Johnny doesn't volunteer, at least not until Susanna runs off with their child to someplace in the south, leaving Johnny to join the Union Army just so he can spend all his time looking for Susanna, which I'd think might involve a bit of desertion. Meanwhile, Nell is still around, and still pining away for poor Johnny.

Raintree County was based on a novel publised a few years after World War II that was a commercial success. It's not hard to see why MGM would want to buy the rights and think that this sort of melodramatic material that has shades of Gone With the Wind would be a big hit. But the movie wound up in production hell in part because the novel's writer killed himself. And then when it finally did get made, nobody seemed to undertand just how wacky the material is. It also didn't help that this is the movie Clift was making when he had the very serious car crash that nearly killed him and delayed production for months.

Raintree County is certainly not the best film for anybody involved in the production, I'm sorry to say.

Invitation to the Dance

Some years back when Gene Kelly was TCM's Star of the Month, they ran a documentary on his career; unsurprisingly the documentary spent some time discussing one of his more ambitious projects: Invitation to the Dance. I had never seen the movie, so the most recent time that TCM ran it, I finally got around to putting it on my DVR. It has another airing coming up, tomorrow (July 11) at 11:30 AM, so now is the time for the review.

Invitation to the Dance is an anthology movie, which in and of itself is not unusual. But this is Gene Kelly, so he had a daring idea, which was to make a movie using only dance. Well, not only dance, but music of course. The bigger point, however, is that there's no dialog, not even like in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg where there is dialogue but it's all sung. Kelly appears in three stories told through dance, directing himself and a lot of people who are as I understand it better known as dancers than traditional actors.

The first story is called "Circus", which is set among the characters in an old-fashioned traveling circus. Kelly plays a clown, while there's a male aerialist and a woman. Kelly's clown loves the woman, but she and the aerialist are already in love with each other. So the clown decides he's going to try to win the woman over, but....

That's followed by the most complex of the three stories, "Ring Around the Rosy". This one starts off with a sort of opening credits scene that introduces us to 10 different characters. A man gives a bracelet to his wife, only for him then to learn that his wife may not be quite faithful to him. The wife then gives the bracelet to one of her friends, after which it goes through a series of people, including Kelly as a married marine. In the end, I couldn't help but think of the Jacques Tourneur short The Grand Bounce, about a bad check that gets passed among a bunch of different people to pay off a debt.

Finally is "Sinbad the Sailor". Kelly plays Sinbad, although this one looks more like a US Navy man who is in port somewhere in the stereotypical storybook Arab world. He buys a lantern and, because everyone knows the genie myth, rubs the lantern. Only, this one actually does have a genie in it, who takes Sinbad into a cartoon world where he falls in love with an animated odalisque protected by two animated guards. This segment is reminiscent of Anchors Aweigh for its combination of live action and animation.

Invitation to the Dance was released in theaters by MGM a good two years after it was made. It's easy to see why the studio sat on it, as they had no idea what to do with it. Critics of the time were not kind to it, and again, it's easy to see why. The dancing feels way too unnatural and stylized, and if anything the dancing really gets in the way of the story for the most part, although the last segment is a bit of an exception.

More recent reviewers have been less unkind to the movie, although I have to say I'm not one of those less unkind people. I can understand why Kelly would want to try something daring like this, but Invitation to the Dance just doesn't work.

House of the Seven Gables (1940)

Some months back, I mentioned the horror anthology Twice-Told Tales, based on three stories by mid-19th century American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne. The last of the stories is an adaptation of Hawthorne's novel The House of the Seven Gables. There was a full-length movie version of The House of the Seven Gables made in 1940, which TCM also ran last October even though it's not quite a horror movie in the sense that the version in the anthology movie is. Not having seen it (and, I should add, I haven't read Hawthorne's original book either), I recorded it to be able to watch it and do a review.

The movie opens with the device of showing pages from a book to give us establishing information since, after all, the movie is based on a book. In 17th century Massachusetts, Jaffrey Pyncheon engaged in some subterfuge to get some land from a Matthew Maule, and as a result, the Pyncheon house is thought by everybody else in town to be cursed, even though the Pyncheon descendants still live there.

Fast forward 150 years. Another Jaffrey Pyncheon (George Sanders) is a lawyer in Boston, and rising in the legal world. But he's been summoned home by his father. Also living in the house is Jaffrey's brother Clifford (Vincent Price) and their cousin Hepzibah (Margaret Lindsay), who is in a relationship with Clifford, since cousin marriage isn't quite the taboo it might be today. Clifford is a musician, a profession that Jaffrey looks down on, and you suspect that the brothers have disliked each other for years.

Dad called Jaffrey home because he's planning on finally selling the house. Not that he wants to; it's more that Dad and Jaffrey have been borrowing against the house to make risky investments that haven't paid off, and now they finally have to pay off the debts, with selling the house being the only way to do so. Clifford doesn't care so much since he's planning on going to New York to pursue his career in songwriting. Jaffrey, on the other hand, is deeply unhappy, since he believes in the family legend that there's some sort of hidden fortune in the house.

Clifford and his father get into an argument over selling the house, and in the course of that argument Dad suffers a fatal heart attack. This gives Jaffrey an idea. He accuses Clifford of having done something to cause Dad's death, with the result that Clifford is put on trial, convicted, and sentenced to a harsh prison sentence; the house is never sold.

Hepzibah pines for her cousin, and works on getting the governor to commute Clifford's sentence. He returns home, but he's not out of the woods yet. All these years, Jaffrey has been continuing to make risky investments, and Clifford's presence throws a monkey wrench into those plans. So Jaffrey comes up with a dastardly scheme to get Clifford out of the way once and for all.

As I said at the beginning, I haven't read Nathaniel Hawthorne's original book, so I can't compare this movie to the book. Supposedly, there are substantial differences between the two, but I can only judge the movie on its own merits. In that regard, it's not a bad little movie. Vincent Price unsurprisingly gives a good performance, as does Sanders as the villain of the piece. The production, however, feels like Universal, where it was produced, could have given it a little more TLC. This is the sort of material that probably should have been more of a prestige picture, but as produced, it has more of the look and feel of a programmer. Not that it's bad by any means, however. It's definitely worth a watch.

Gotta love those retro looks at the future

I've mentioned in the past that one of the things that's always fun about old science fiction movies set in the future is how much the future in question is rooted to the time period in which the film was made. Another interesting entry into that genre is one from Hammer Films in late 1969: Moon Zero Two. It's got an airing on TCM tomorrow, July 9, at 3:00 PM, so I watched the previous showing from my DVR to be able to do the post on it.

The movie starts off with some trippy and animated opening credits, backed by another hilariously dated title song, although at least this time it's not as much of a misfit for the genre as with Anzio that I recently mentioned. After the credits, we're transported to Moon Zero Two, a colony on the moon, circa 2021, so well in the future from when the movie was made, but in the past now. (At least, all the synopses say 2021; I thought I heard mention of the 23rd century. On the other hand, a plaque of people who died colonizing the moon didn't have enough names on it to be 250 years in the future.) Kemp (James Olson) and Korminski are going through lunar customs, getting dinged for a communications satellite they've brought, since electronics imports are regulated. Except, as they point out, the satellite has malfunctioned, being one of the satellites that provides communications to the far side of the moon. So for the time being, there's no communication with the other side, which as you might guess is a key plot point later in the movie.

J.J. Hubbard (Warren Mitchell) is a businessman who is interested in the mining claims on the moon. He and his men have learned of a small asteroid that in their spectranalysis that the asteroid contains extremely high levels of corundum, which for those not in the know is the mineral that forms sapphires and rubies depending upon color and the other trace elements in the corundum. They'd like to get a hold of that asteroid for fairly obvious reasons, but corraling something the size of an earth-sized duplex house is difficult even in the microgravity of space. They have a plan to get someone to crash the asteroid into the moon, where they can claim it, so Hubbard offers Kemp a new ship in exchange for doing this job of questionable legality.

Meanwhile, back at the cantina bar on Zero Two, a woman named Clementine (Catherine Schell, no relation to Maximilian as far as I can tell) shows up. She and her entire family have long been interested in mining, with Dad having wandered around the earth looking for precious metals. The moon is a great place to do that, so Clementine's brother decamped to the new frontier to get a two-year claim on a plot of lunar land. That lease is almost up, but worse, Clementine hasn't heard from her brother in several days. She's worried about him, and would like somebody to ferry her to where her brother's claim is to see if he's OK.

Clementine is asking Kemp for help because he's got that spare ship he's not using, and because getting to the claim over land is prohibitively long. Now, we know that Kemp is kinda-sorta working for Hubbard, so there is a conflict there. But it's not the only way the two plot lines are going to come together, as we shall see when Kemp and Clementine finally get to her brother's claim.

Moon Zero Two was, as I said at the beginning, filmed in Britain in 1969, and the movies look at the moon is very seriously (or humorously, I supposed) stuck in 1969 despite ostensibly being set decades later. The fashions are mod gone wrong, with garishly colored hairstyles to boot. And then there's the floor show at the moonbase bar, which is really wild, with groups of ladies in tight costumes doing ridiculous dances. The production design for the moon bases has decidedly not advanced past 1970. The first primitive cell phones were still a few years away. But the look of the movie is something that's so badly dated that it's trippy and fun.

One just wishes one could say the same for the rest of Moon Zero Two. The plot doesn't seem much more fleshed out than what one could get on episodic television, while the acting is wooden at best. The special effects range from "trying hard, but don't have anything better than 1969 technology" on the good side to bad miniatures on the bad side. Moon Zero Two is a mixed bag that objectively has more misses than hits, but still should probably be seen once just to figure out how a movie could go wrong.

Yentl

TCM is running a double feature of Barbra Streisand films tonight. I've blogged about the second, The Way We Were at 10:30 PM, before. The first is Yentl at 8:00 PM. I was too young to see it in the theater when it came out, and never got around to watching it in the intervening years. But the last time TCM ran it I recorded it; with it showing up again in short order I decided to watch that showing in order to be able to do the blog post on it.

Yentl was famous in its day for, I think, its unique plot and the fact that Barbara Streisand had greater responsibility for a major motion picture than almost any woman had had up to that point. It's based on a story by Isaac Bashevis Singer, a Jewish writer born in what would now be Poland but was then part of the Russian Empire, emigrating to the US to escape the Nazis and becoming a writer in Yiddish. Streisand had read the story and since the time of Funny Girl had wanted to make a movie version of it, but for various reasons that took a long time.

The title of the original Singer story, Yentl, the Yeshiva Boy, gives a good quick synopsis of the story. Streisand plays Yentl, a seeming spinster living with her father, Rabbi Mendel (Nehemiah Persoff), in a shtetl somewhere in Eastern Europe in 1904. Dad teaches local boys the Talmud, the commentaries on the Torah and the basis for Jewish religious law and dispute resolution. Yentl having overheard all her father's teachings, would like to study Talmud herself. But she's female, and since women are the only ones who can carry babies to term and provide the next generation of Jews, that and other domestic duties are a Jewish woman's lot in life, not Torah and Talmud study. Yentl chafes at this, studying with her father in secret and never getting married despite being in her mid-20s, which is seen as a bit scandalous for the early 20th century.

And then Dad dies, with Yentl reading the Kaddish at his funeral, something that is also seen as a bit scandalous because Orthodox Judaism even in its religous services kept men and women largely separate. The local women come to "help" clean Yentl's house of her father's things that she would no longer have any use for, but Yentl is aghast when they want to take the books. So she gets a brilliant idea. She cuts off her hear, starts wearing men's clothing, and runs away to the big city, where she'll try to pass herself off as "Anshel", using the name of her dead brother, so that she can study Talmud.

This being Barbara Streisand, you have to wonder how anybody would have taken the ruse that she's a man seriously; indeed, a major plot point in the movie is Yentl trying to navigate keeping her secret a secret. This becomes complicated when she meets Avigdor (Mandy Patinkin), a fellow yeshiva student. You get the impression that deep down inside, he already knows Yentl's secret, although the screenplay suggests he doesn't. He too is in mourning, for his late brother who died of, well, that's another plot point for later in the movie. Avigdor has been matched by the matchmaker with Hadass (Amy Irving), a woman who really does love Avigdor, and the feeling is mutual. In theory, Hadass and Avigdor should marry, Yentl should emigrate to America and become a Reform Jew, although even the Reform Jews weren't ordaining women until several decades later.

But that would end the movie fairly quickly. Instead, Hadass' family learns the truth about Avigdor's brother, which is that he killed himself, suggesting there might be mental illness in Avigdor's family and thus a valid reason to call off the marriage. Yentl as Anshel then marries Hadass in order to keep all three of them close together. Yentl obviously is not able to consummate the marriage, and this by itself should be a reason to invalidate the marriage. But it's still going to take a while to get to that point.

At the time of its release, Yentl both received critical praise and was the butt of quite a few jokes, picking up Razzie nominations as well as Oscar nominations. Part of the problem is that I didn't find Streisand believable as a man. Another part is that, in order to get the movie made, Streisand and her collaborators turned the movie into, if not a full musical like Funny Girl, something that was dominated by Streisand's singing. (The ending sequence also made me think of Streisand on the tugboat in Funny Girl. To me, this gave Yentl entirely the wrong tone.

On the other side, part of getting the movie made and I'd guess keeping costs down involved filming in Europe, with a lot of location shooting being done in Communist Czechoslovakia. The cinematography is lovely, and I think the best part of the movie. Streisand co-wrote the screenplay, and also directed. While neither is bad, I really did get the impression at a lot of points of a bit of self-indulgence in the direction.

So while I'd give a decidedly mixed review to Yentl, it's also the sort of movie you should definitely watch and judge for yourself.

Robert Mitchum in another invasion movie

Back on June 6 I mentioned The Longest Day about the D-Day invasion of Normandy, in which a ton of Hollywood and international stars, including Robert Mitchum, have roles of varying sizes. Several years later, for Italian producer Dino di Laurentiis, he made a movie about a different World War II invasion: Anzio.

After a horrendously awful song sung by Jack Jones over the opening credits that makes it sound like one of those 1960s potboilers instead of a war film, we see a bunch of Allied soldiers somewhere in southern Italy. The Allies had taken Sicily relatively early since it was an island, while getting across to the mainland was somewhat more difficult. They were able to take some of southern Italy before the Nazi commander in Italy, Field Marshal Kesselring (played in Anzio by Wolfgang Preiss), was able to set up a defensive line that more or less stalemated the Allies as winter was setting in.

Obviously, the Allies were going to try to break out somehow, and while the generals were preparing, the grunts are getting all rowdy in one of the palazzos, observed by war correspondent Dick Ennis (Robert Mitchum playing a composite character; most of not all of the Allies are either wholly fictional or composites based on real militry officers). But then some commanders come in, which can only mean one thing: the big invasion is about to being.

Thankfully, although this is winter, it's Italian winter, so it's not bitter cold like the Allies would get the following winter when they pushed eastward from Normandy, meaning that another invasion is doable if not necessarily easy. The big question is, how much resistance are they going to face from the Germans. In command is American general Lesley (Arthur Kennedy), who wants to make certain the Allies can secure the beachhead, that being necessary before further advances can be made.

So the Allies land at Anzio, and as Gen. Lesley sets about securing the location, everybody seems surprised at the lack of resistance that they're facing. Indeed, the lookout points for snipers seem to be completely empty. With that in mind, Ennis procures a driver and sets out for Rome, which isn't all that far away from the landing site. They even get all the way to the outskirts of Rome, basically facing no resistance whatsoever. The Allies, it appears, could just take Rome right away, which would be a major victory.

However, the difficulty lies in getting in touch with the commanding officers and getting them to believe that the Allies could in fact advance. Lesley has some reason to believe that the Germans are in fact setting a trap, trying to get the Allies to overextend themselves after which the Germans can really put a hurting on the Allies. This proves to be wrong, however, and this delay gives the Germans vital time to fortify their position, more or less trapping the Allies on the beach.

It's not hard to see why someone would want to make a movie about Anzio, and with the movie being made in the late 1960s, it's also not hard to see why moviemakers would want to make something that suggests the futility of war. However, there's something about Anzio that makes it come off as not quite right, already starting from that opening song. I think what goes wrong has a lot to do with the script, and a sense of di Laurentiis wanting to make an epic on a tight budget.

The cast is professional although a lot of them are underused. They do the best they can with the material, but ultimately, Anzio comes off as another of those movies that probably could have been so much more than the final product we get.

Clickety Clack

I've got quite a few foreign films on my DVR that I need to watch before they expire. One of those is the Akira Kurosawa film Dodes'ka-den.

The movie is, like Street Scene, a look at the various inhabitants of a poor neighborhood, although in this case, the residents are much, much poorer, basically on the edges of society in conditions much closer to a shantytown or the Brazilian favelas than a tenement. The movie's title comes from an onomatopoetic word for the sound that rail wheels make on a track. A young man lives with his single mother and they both seem to have substantial mental problems. She engages in very loud religious chanting, while the son goes off to "work" as a streetcar conductor, although none of it is real. The son prays for his mom to be granted intelligence by Buddha; left unmentioned is how the two of them survive.

We are then introduced to other inhabitants of the neighborhood, all of them poor, but some vastly poorer than the others:
One man makes hairbrushes by hand, supporting a wife and several kids, with the wife getting pregnant again. Eventually, the eldest son says he gets bullied by other kids at school saying that Mom is sleeping around and none of the kids are the dad's biological kids.
Two couples appear to be in an open relationship, in that the husbands, who both work menial jobs, come home and may or may not, depending on their moods, go home to the women who are their legal wives.
One kid begs for food, and then goes "home" to his father, who lives in the back of Citroën 2CV; not being able to cook the food properly, the kid eventually gets food poisoning.
Another woman is raising her adolescent niece, who is being pursued by an adolescent sake delivery boy. The woman's husband is an alcoholic. Eventually, the niece gets pregnant, leading to violence.
An old guy who worked as a silversmith is the sort of wise old man of the neighborhood, letting a thief take his cash when the thief inadvertently tries to steal his tools.

Eventually, the stories get resolved, more or less, although the movie runs at a slow pace and it takes a while for those stories to resolve.

Alicia Malone presented the movie as part of TCM's Imports, and mentioned in her outro that Dodes'ka-den is a movie that divides critics. It was a box-office failure in Kurosawa's native Japan, while some latter-day critics give it high praise. I tend towards the somewhat negative side. For me, that's largely because of the film's structure. If it had been written as a traditional anthology, with each story getting its own segment, I think it would work a lot better. But it's more like one of those ensemble cast movies, except that the stories don't work so well together.

But because of the decidedly mixed reaction, Dodes'ka-den is one you'll probably want to watch and judge for yourself.

Briefs for the weekend of July 5-7, 2024

With the new month having started on Monday, it's time for new programming features. I mentioned Star of the Month Eva Marie Saint getting her tribute on Thursdays, but on Fridays there's going to be a look at movies of the 1970s. It kicks off tonight at 8:00 PM with New York, New York, a movie that I had on my old DVR before we moved but never got around to watching. Unfortunately for me, the second one, Looking for Mr. Goodbar at 11:00 PM, is another of those that for whatever reason TCM seems to have rights issues involving streaming as opposed to traditional cable or satellite. (No, I don't get why those issues would be a thing, or why the most recent round of contract talks didn't solve those issues.) So for those of us with YouTube TV, Looking for Mr. Goodbar doesn't seem to be available. I had it on my old DVR ages ago but only got halfway through watching it for some reason.

Speaking of 1970s movies, Robert Towne, a screenwriter best known for some of his 1970s work like Chinatown and Shampoo, died earlier this week aged 89. As of right now, it doesn't look as though any of Towne's work is part of the salute to 1970s films. The Last Detail, I think, showed up as part of the Two for One mini-series that finished up at the end of June.

As for stuff on my DVR that's coming up on TCM, you are going to get a whole series of such posts over the next week, as there are four or five movies I haven't blogged about before that will be showing up. As for what I have previously blogged about, there's most of the FXM Retro lineup, while over on TCM, The Reluctant Debutante is on this afternoon at 4:00 PM, so there's not much time left to catch it.

I put the entire weekend in the title of the post, however, in large part because I wanted to mention that The Flag is showing up as part of Silent Sunday Nights at 12:45 AM on July 8 (that's in the Eastern time zone; further west it's still late in the evening of July 7). I mentioned it ages ago; it's a short movie that was produced by the Technicolor company as a way of trying to show off their two-strip Technicolor process. Francis X. Bushman plays George Washington, who gets Betsy Ross to make the first American flag. At the time I wrote a post on it, the movie had not yet fallen into the public domain. It should be now, but I wouldn't know who holds elements of the movie that might put it onto one of the video sites.

TCM Star of the Month July 2024: Eva Marie Saint

Eva Marie Saint and Karl Malden in On the Waterfront (July 4, 8:00 PM)

We're into a new month, which as always means that we get new programming subjects on TCM. For the Star of the Month, TCM is giving us the films of Eva Marie Saint, mostly because today, July 4, is her 100th birthday. Not that Saint made a whole lot of movies; TCM's tribute contains 15 or 16 of them, I think (there's a TBA slot and tonight includes her 2014 appearance at the TCM Film Festival). Those movies will air every Thursday in prime time.

Of course, Saint won the Oscar for On the Waterfront, so it's no surprise that this is the movie that kicks off the salute. Coming up on the 11th is Raintree County, which will be the subject of a full-length post. It aired early this year and again in June. I was thinking about doing a post on it in June, but when I noticed that Saint was Star of the Month in July and Raintree County would be airing, I decided to hold that post back since I had several other movies that were on my DVR and coming up on TCM to post about.

To be honest, I didn't have a whole lot of photos of Saint, and I've been remiss in not getting screenshots/publicity shots from movies to illustrate my posts with. The one other Saint photo I could find on my hard drive was of her, Don Murray, and Lloyd Nolan in A Hatful of Rain, which concludes tonight's Saint lineup in the early hours of the morning. It's another fine dramatic performance. I first blogged about it in 2011, but the photo was from a birthday salute to Lloyd Nolan (a very underrated supporting actor) in 2014.

The Gull

With me already having written one post for today, my next post is going to be a bit briefer of a review than normal, although that's also in part because it's a movie based on a classic work of literature: a 1968 international production of The Sea Gull.

The movie is of course based on the play by Anton Chekhov, which probably should have been originally translated as just The Gull since the movie isn't set anywhere near the sea. Instead, it's set at a country estate somewhere not far south of Moscow where bureaucrat Sorin lives. His sister Arkadina (Simone Signoret) visits; she's a successful actress whose son Konstantin (David Warner) would like to be a writer but is writing more daring stuff that the public doesn't care for.

More successful with the public is Trigorin (James Mason), but he doesn't much care for the sort of stuff that sells commercially; he's also carrying on an affair with Arkadina. And then, living over on the next estate, is young Nina (Vanessa Redgrave). Konstantin has been pursuing her, but she meets someone successful like Trigorian and she's immediately smitten with that achievement. The various characters see each other and philosophize a lot, to the point that the whole proceedings get boring.

Eventually, it comes time for everyone not living in the area to go home, except that Nina goes off with Trigorin to become his mistress. Two years pass, and most of the same characters return to Sorin's estate because he's getting to the age where everybody expects him to die soon. There's more philosophizing, and then an ending that's a bit shocking.

Apparently the first performance of the play back in the 1890s was a critical failure and it wasn't until a few years later when a new production was an artistic breakthrough. I'd never seen any version of the play, nor read it, before seeing this version of the movie. All I can say is that having seen this movie, I can understand why the original stage play was a failure. The one thing that the movie has going for it is the settings; the movie was filmed in Sweden with lake areas just outside Stockholm substituting for country Russia, and doing so rather beautifully.

However, I think Signoret is miscast as a Russian actress, while director Sidney Lumet didn't do anything particularly imaginative in the direction. The actors mostly declaim their lines, as if they're not on screen together, and since the movie is slow and talky, none of this really helps the production.

TCM's Roger Corman tribute

Director Roger Corman died in May at he age of 98. Due to his work with American International and directing movies on a budget, followed by his work as a producer, Corman was involved with a lot of movies. So TCM's salute to Corman is a bit different from normal. Rather than a night in prime time or even a 24-hour salute, TCM is giving Corman three nights in prime time.

Those nights will be three consecutive Wednesdays starting tonight and followed on July 10 and July 17. I don't see any particular overriding theme for either of the first two nights, although July 10 starts off with three or four of the Corman films based on works by Edgar Allen Poe. July 17 is a bit different, in that it's movies produced, not directed, by Corman, with several of the films directed by people who would go on to become prominent directors. You can probably guess who those directors are and what the films are.

Suprisingly, I think I've only seen one of the movies airing tonight, The Wasp Woman at 10:45 PM, so I'm looking forward to some of the others. And on July 10, Bloody Mama (technically 2:30 AM on July 11) is definitely worth watching with Shelley Winters playing a character inspired by 30s gangster Ma Barker.

More on the final night of the tribute when it comes up on July 17.

Der Tod in Venedig

One more of the movies that TCM showed when Dirk Bogarde was TCM's Star of the month was Luchino Visconti's Death in Venice, a 1971 adaptation of Thomas Mann's novella. As the book is only a novella, it's a relatively shorter synopsis here. Also, it's been a good 30 years since I read it (in translation although I'd like to think my German is good enough to handle it), so I can't really comment on the differences between the novella and the movie.

The story deals with a writer Gustave von Aschenbach (that's Dirk Bogarde), a widower who needs to get away from the stress of his life in Germany. He plans to go to the Mediterranean for the climate, winding up in Venice. At the hotel, where he dines alone, he sees a family at a table: a mother, several daughters, and an adolescent son (Björn Andrésen) in a sailor suit. Aschenbach considers the boy the apotheosis of the classical Greek standard of beauty.

With that in mind, Aschenbach does what any rational person would do: he starts stalking the family just so he can get glimpses of the boy. He figures out that the family is Polish, and that the boy is probably named Tadeusz, since it sounds like they're referring to him as Tadzio. Aschnebach keeps following the family until the day he dies, which you might have guessed he's going to do considering the title. (I seem to recall the death being mentioned at the beginning of the novella, but again, as I've said, I read it ages ago.)

Another theme in the movie is that, as Aschenbach is following Tadzio around, he sees signs going up in the less touristy parts of Venice in Italian warning the locals and giving Gustav the distinct feeling that there's some sort of epidemic about that the government doesn't want to tell the tourists about lest it destroy that season's tourist trade. He's right, of course, and we can presume it's that disease (likely cholera) that's going to kill Gustave.

I didn't care for the novella, because the main character following Tadzio around is frankly creepy, and not because of the homoeroticism. After all, if it were about an author stalking a girl -- think Lolita -- there would also be a serious creep-out factor involved. As a result, I was hesitant to watch the movie. And I have to admit that I have many of the same problems with the movie that I did with the novella. That's not necessarily the fault of anyone in the movie; it's that the story is one that has natural challenges in making it more palatable. Visconti tries this by turning it into a two-hour affair, with lots of languorous scenes of Venice as it might have looked circa 1910 before it got zillions of tourists of a more modest economic class, and before authorities decided to turn the place into a museum, stopping the rebuilding that was one of the things preventing the city from sinking into the lagoon.

Many of the visuals in Death in Venice are pretty. But for me it wasn't enough to overcome that ugly story.