The Rat Race (1960)

TCM's Summer Under the Stars for 2024 concludes with a day of the films of Tony Curtis. The day includes a film or two that I haven't seen before and so am intending to record. However, there's a movie of his that's on my DVR but isn't airing today, so that's the movie I'm blogging about for today: The Rat Race.

Curtis plays Pete Hammond Jr. As the movie opens, Pete is in his home town of Milwaukee, getting on a bus to head to New York City. Pete plays the saxohphone and is into jazz, so heads to New York in the hopes of making it big in jazz. You'd think he could do better performing around Wisconsin with a combo of his own, but some people get stars in their eyes. The movie spends several minutes on a montage of Curtis heading east on the Greyhound bus before finally arriving in New York City. And then when he gets off the bus, he's ridiculously naïve. First he walks to Times Square with all his luggage in hand, and then heads to a hotel only to find that there's no way he can afford the daily rates there. So he inquires about rooming houses, which were still a thing in those days.

Cut to the other main character in the story, Peggy Brown (Debbie Reynolds. She's one of the people who lives in the roooming house. And she seems well enough off that she's able to have her own phone, something in the old rooming house movies from before the war wouldn't have had. Except that she's not so well off, as a man from the phone company (Norman Fell) knocks on her door with the intention of disconnecting the phone for non-payment. Peggy convinces him to give her another two weeks to collect the bill, with the implication being that the repairman thinks he's going to get "something" in return. Worse, Peggy hasn't been able to pay her rent, so the owner of the house is about to throw her out.

It's to this house that Pete shows up, and since the owner is evicting Peggy, there's a free room to let, one which Pete is immediately able to take. But as I said a few paragraphs above, he's impossibly credulous for a newcomer to the city, even by the standards of Hollywood movies that have dumb yokels making their way to New York. He hears Peggy's sob story and lets her stay, which I'd have though would be a serious violation of the Production Code. Worse, Peggy doesn't let on about her full story.

Peggy is a taxi dancer working at the dance hall run by Nellie Miller (Don Rickles, really cast against type here), and she's already asked Nellie for quite a few advances on her income. He's to the point where he's about to expect something more in return for all the money he's lent Peggy that she'll never be able to pay back. And she's about to ask Nellie for even more money.

Pete is so stupid that he gets caught out by a scam involving some musicians about to form a combo, only for them to ask him to go out and get beers for everybody. He goes out, and they take the opportunity to run off with his valuable musical instruments. He thinks he can just go to the police and of course they'll solve the case lickety-split, but Peggy, having been in New York for five years, knows much better. She turns to Nellie for the money to buy Pete new instruments, with serious consequences.

I can understand why the stars of The Rat Race would have wanted to be involved, as everyone was known more for fairly light movies. (Admittedly, Curtis had done more serious drama up to this point like The Defiant Ones.) The material here seems like a good opportunity for all involved to show off serious acting chops. Don Rickles takes that chance, and is surprisingly good playing a part that's totally unexpected for him. Tony Curtis, however, isn't so good. I think, however, that's more down to the script, which gives him the thankless task of playing a person you just want to shake some sense into. The movie also feels stagy at times, which is in no small part because it is indeed based on a stage play.

Still, I think The Rat Race deserves a watch, in no small part because of that performance from Don Rickles.

Some of these women or others

I've mentioned a couple of times over the past few weeks that I seem to have a disproportionate number of silent movies and foreign films sitting on my DVR. One of the things this means is that I'll be doing a slightly greater proportion of posts on films from both of these genres than normal, since the one thing with the YouTube TV DVR is that stuff only stays on it for nine months. Thankfully, it looks like I've got foreign films in several different languages to do posts on, so it's not as if I'll be doing six Japanese films in a row. Having done Japanese and French films so far in August, it's time for one in Swedish: Ingmar Bergman's All These Women.

Jarl Kulle is the nominal star here, not the women; he plays Cornelius, a biographer and would-be composer. He had been hoping to do a biography of the famous cellist Felix (only seen from behind or from the neck down), but Felix screws up those plans by suddenly dropping dead. His body is laid out, and a bunch of women show up so that they can all comment on how Felix looks the same, and yet different.

Go back four days, as Cornelius shows up with a composition in hand that he hopes Felix can play, and hoping to get interviews with Felix to complete that biography he's been working on. Instead, he finds a bunch of women, all of whom seem to have had romantic dalliances with Felix at one point or another. Humlan (Bibi Andersson), the "Bumblebee" is Felix's mistress. Isolde (Harriet Andersson) is a maid at the estate. Adelaide (Eva Dahlbeck) is his wife; Mme. Tussaud (Karin Kavli) supports Felix financially; and Traviata is studying under Felix. The one other man in the movie is Jillker, who is Felix's agent and responsible for bookings and Felix's repertoire.

So, unable to talk to Felix, Cornelius tries to talk to everybody else, especially the women, to learn more about Felix. Cornelius has varying degrees of success, although things take a turn for the rather more dramatic when Humlan takes him to her bedroom, only for Traviata to show up and attack him for... reasons. It continues like this, with various errors for poor Cornelius as he tries to get that interview with Felix, until he's finally able to get Felix to play his piece at a chamber concert, only for Felix to drop dead just as he's about to start performing it.

As I was watching All These Women, I couldn't help but think of Citizen Kane. To me, somebody taking the idea of Citizen Kane in that a writer interviews the people who knew a famous man -- but then turning the movie into either a farce or a dark comedy -- is an idea that definitely has potential. Unfortunately, All These Women is not that movie. Several of the reviews I read seem to think that the reason All These Women doesn't work is that comedy was just not in Ingmar Bergman's wheelhouse, but I've seen Smiles of a Summer Night, and really enjoyed that one.

However, I do think Bergman's direction is part of the problem here. It feels almost as though he's directing kabuki theater, with the whole production way too stylized. I think it needed more of the stereotypical French sensibility of a man having a whole bunch of mistresses, but also to be filmed as something straightforward and, as much as this will probably tick some people, a more conventional filming and not arthouse.

All These Women had potential, but for whatever reason, Ingmar Bergman was not able to reach that potential.

The golden city

Another of the movies that I think I recorded when Robert Mitchum was TCM's Star of the Month back in January is the western El Dorado. It's finally reached the top of my list of movies I've recently watched off the DVR, which means now is the time for the post on it.

Mitchum is one of the two above-the title stars. We see him after the opening credits, riding into the town of El Dorado, and going into a saloon. He asks the saloon-keeper about a tall man who came in on a particular horse, and we see that Mitchum's character is wearing a badge. He's the local sheriff, J.P. Harrah, and the guy who came riding in in an old friend and the other star above the title: Cole Thornton, played by John Wayne.

However, the two are kinda-sorta on separate sides. Cole was brought to town by one of the large landowners, Bart Jason (Ed Asner in one of his film roles before he spent a lot more time in TV). Cole expects to be a hired gun-hand, but Harrah informs him that the situation is actually quite a bit more complicated than that. Hannah tells him that there's one of those land wars going on, and that Jason is going up against another family, the MacDonalds. The MacDonalds have fallen on a bit of hard times, and Bart Jason is trying to get their land. But the MacDonalds are too proud to sell out, so Bart is trying to switch to more "active" forms of persuasion, which is why they've hired Cole. The sheriff is in the middle of it all, since there hasn't really been anything illegal done yet.

Cole, having heard all this, and trusting his old friend the sheriff, decides to ride out to Jason's spread to inform Bart that he's not going to take the job after all and return the expense money he'd already been given. But you can see himself already making an enemy when one of Jason's men sidles over to his horse to pick up a rifle. Cole is observant enough to see what's coming, and stops it without firing a shot, although that's also in part because Bart has at least a bit of common sense.

The MacDonalds have already heard about Bart's plan, so Cole is already an enemy in their minds, with them having no way of knowing that Cole has turned down the job. Kevin, the patriarch (R.G. Armstrong), has sent his youngest son Luke (Johnny Crawford) out to watch guard, but Luke, being too young, falls asleep, only being jarred awake by the approach of Cole and immediately shooting. Cole is a better shot, so his shot fatally injures Luke. This really ticks off Luke's sister Josephine (Michele Carey), who shoots Cole in a way that leaves him with a spinal injury that's going to get progressively worse.

Time passes, and Cole has left El Dorado. However, he runs into trouble when the gambler Traherne (James Caan) wants to avenge the gunmen who killed his gambler father some time back. The head of the gang, McLeod, has been hired by Bart Jason to do the job Cole wouldn't do. Worse, he informs Cole that in the intervening months, Sheriff Harrah has started to hit the bottle after being jilted by one of the women in town. So Cole, against his better judgment, is going to have to return to El Dorado both to try to keep the violence from erupting as well as to save his old friend the sheriff from likely death.

El Dorado was directed by Howard Hawks, and with him at the helm along with the cast he has here, it's easy to see how he's returning to a bunch of old themes that worked well in earlier westerns that he directed. So there's not really all that much new here, but at the same time the movie works precisely because of our familiarity with the themes and the professionalism of the cast.

El Dorado may not be remembered as an all-time great, but it's definitely better than a fair number of westerns out there.

The Symphony of Seven Thousand

If I've done the math right (or, more precisely, if Blogger's statistics are correct), this shoud be the 7,000th post here on my blog. As always when I reach an "odometer number", I think it's a good time to stop and do a little reflection.

It took me a little over 16½ years to get to 7,000, although that was in part because of the couple of months I took off a few years back when Dad broke his hip and we had to get the house ready to sell and move to the new location. Of course, that also meant moving somewhere with reliable high-speed internet, which means I can do the streaming thing. At least, I can do the free streaming since I'm not enough into the premium services to subscribe. At any rate, I've been having about five days a month where I write a second post, and at that rate it would take me a bit under 16½ years to get the next 7,000, which would also put me just shy of my 69th birthday.

I was posting some comments about old movies on a group blog that's not specifically a movie blog, and one of the other regular commenters asked me why I don't try to monetize my posting with a Substack, that being the big new thing for content creators who want to try their hand at making money from their comment. I think the problem for me is that even if I really did want to monetize it and had a large enough following to make that worthwhile, I don't know that this is the sort of content that's worth trying to monetize.

At least, not monetize it in the substack way. There are lots of people who write movie reviews, and the way I do my posts is decidedly unprofessional. If I wanted to try my hand at being a more professional columnist, I'd have to spend a lot more time crafting my writing professionally, and I don't really have the time to take on a second full-time job. Instead, I'd probably have to take my old reviews and figure out a way to edit them thematically, doing the self-publishing thing of writing books on certain types of movie in a way to make the reviews more interesting. Unfortunately, some of the reviews are of movies I haven't seen in ages and my not be available to stream to refresh myself on them. I'd also need a good editor.

So, for the time being, it's keep on watching old movies and doing the post on them someplace like here. I do hope to do that for years to come, and hopefully the various movie channels and FAST services will be there for us all to watch.

The World Gone Mad

On another blog I frequent, one of the contributors likes to use a poster from the 1933 movie The World Gone Mad to illustrate that the world of today is, in fact, going mad. I had never seen the movie before, but I'm always up for an interesting pre-Code, so when I noticed that the movie is available on TubiTV (granted, with ads, although when I watched it was only 9 minutes of ads for a 71-minute movie so much less than traditional TV), I decided to watch it.

The movie, as a 1933 release, deals with a couple of themes that were quite common in the early 1930s: Prohibition and the underworld crime that it caused; and how the Depression led to people trying to enrich themselves through stock deals that aren't quite legal. Add a crusading prosecutor and wisecracking journalists, and you've got a lot of the tropes of the era. As for the crooked business dealings, this involves Grover Cromwell, who heads an investment firm. One of the companies in which his company owns a large stake is Suburban Utilities, and two of Cromwell's underlings have a plot to loot the coffers of Suburban to enrich themselves.

The District Attorney, Henderson, has gotten wind of this, and is getting the state examiners to investigate the books. So the embezzlers, knowing the jig is about to be up, do what any crook in the early 1930s would do, which is to arrange a rub-out. The DA is killed and replaced by his assistant, Lionel Houston (Neil Hamilton), who also happens to be the boyfriend of Cromwell's daughter Diane (Mary Brian). Houston, now that he takes over as acting DA, starts investigating the case, leading to an attempt on his own life and the suicide of an accountant that fingers Cromwell in the crime.

Houston also has a roommate, Andy Terrell (Pat O'Brien), who is a hard-boiled journalist. He investigates the case, too, since it's got enough lurid and headline-worthy elements that it's a natural for the big-city press to be covering, and because Terrell has an in what with being good friends with the new DA. Terrell's investigation is going to get himself in danger, too, before everything is resolved.

The World Gone Mad was made at Majestic Pictures, a Poverty Row studio. Majestic was fairly obviously, it seems to me, trying to pack as much into a small package as they could. Unfortunately, this doesn't always work to the movie's benefit. There's too much going on, and things move from one plot strand to another too quickly, making it difficult at times to figure out what's going on while at others one wonders whether critical material got left on the cutting-room floor. But despite all the flaws common to Poverty Row cheapies, The World Gone Mad isn't a bad little movie.

Note that some of the reviews suggest that at one point in the past, The World Gone Mad was included as part of a box set of public domain horror movies. The World Gone Mad is not horror in any way, and if you had come across it listed under that genre, you might be disappointed.

The Prodigal

There are movies that I'd see show up on TCM every so often but never got around to watching. Another such movie was the 1950s MGM biblical film The Prodigal, so the last time it showed up on TCM I recorded it in order to be able to watch it and do a review here.

The movie starts off with a voiceover about the ancient era being a time when very few people believed in only one God, as though that were the most natural and correct thing to do, with the only people doing that being the believers in Jehovah. We are then told that the action takes place in 70 BC in the seaport of Joppa (modern-day Jaffa, part of Tel Aviv in Israel), and is based on the New Testament parable of the prodigal son. Micah (Edmund Purdom) is a Jew living in Joppa, when he runs across a man named Rhakim (Neville Brand) chasing after a runaway slave.

Micah then returns to his father Eli, who informs him that Eli has set up an arranged marriage for Micah to young Ruth (Audrey Dalton). Micah isn't overly happy about this, since he barely knows Ruth, and is one of those people who apparently believes in the radical idea of marrying for love. And as you might be able to guess from the parable, Micah is going to have the opportunity to do just such a thing.

Micah runs into Rhakim again, this time with a group of people from Damascus who all believe in the false-to-Jews gods of Baal and Astarte. Micah doesn't believe in such gods, at least not until he espies Samarra (Lana Turner) doing her devoitional duties to Astarte. Who wouldn't love someone as good looking as Lana Turner, even if she looks ridiculously out of place as a priestess in the middle east? Micah decides right then and there he's going to have Samarra for himself, even though Mahreeb (Louis Calhern), the high priest in charge of worship of Baal, tells Micah that there's no way Jews can get a priestess like Samarra.

Micah, like so many other men, is now thinking with his wrong head, and he's insistent to his father that he's going to go after Samarra, despite this being a series violation of the first commandment that thou shalt have no other gods before Jehovah. Micah doesn't care, and insists that Eli give him his share of the family wealth so that he may go off to Damascus to pursue Samarra.

Now, this is a reworking of the parable of the prodigal son, so we know that Micah is eventually going to return home having realized how wrong he was, and that Dad is going to accept him again. But at this point we're only about a quarter of the way into the movie, and have 80-some minutes left to go for poor Micah to learn his lesson. And boy is Micah going to have to go through a lot in Damascaus to learn the error of his ways.

I remember many years back, when TCM had one of its first "gay images on film" series, that guest presenter Richard Barrios discussed the film The Sign of the Cross. One of his assertions was that director Cecil B. DeMille wanted to show Christian virtue triumphing over Roman vice, and the way to do that was to put as much Roman vice on the screen as possible. The fact that audiences would go for the vice was a plus. Granted, that was in 1932, before the stricture of the Production Code.

Here, we get the MGM version of blasphemy and idol worship, which probably even in the pre-Code era would have been toned down from what The Sign of the Cross gave us. It feels too sanitized, like MGM getting any number of other genre movies slightly off (a trend I think I first mentioned in Johnny Eager). It also doesn't help that Lana Turner is way mis-cast here, while Purdom doesn't have the greatest screen presence out there.

As always, though, it's worth watching a movie like The Prodigal to see just what goes wrong.

Six years before the Dixie Dancekings

Tomorrow's (August 27) star in TCM's Summer Under the Stars is Ossie Davis, who was generally more of a supporting player as well as the husband of actress Ruby Dee. One of the movies that I hadn't seen before is Sam Whiskey. But since it's available to stream from Pluto TV, I decided to watch that (granted, with commercials) in order to be able to do a post here for the TCM showing tomorrow at 2:00 PM.

Once again, it's not Davis who is the star here, although he has a fairly large role playing one of the second bananas to the star. The star here his Burt Reynolds, playing Sam Whiskey. Some time not overly long after the Civil War (the movie plays fast and loose with time and geography) Sam rides into a small town that's been around long enough to have fences and a full range of services. He walks into a bar where he runs into the local blacksmith Jed Hooker (that's Ossie Davis) and getting into a fight with Hooker. Sam is really there to meet a woman, however, Laura Breckenridge (Angie Dickinson).

Laura has a job for Sam. Laura is a widow, but the Breckenridges have a positive reputation. What the people don't know, however, is that her late husband did something that runs the risk of sullying that family name. To wit, he stole a whole bunch of gold bars from the US Mint in Denver, replacing them with gold-plated lead bars. Now, you'd think that Laura might be happy with those gold bars. But she never got them, as the riverboat her husband was on sank in the Platte River, with the bars still aboard. Worse, an inspector from the Treasury Department is supposed to visit the Denver mint soon, whereupon he'll find out about the heist and destroy the Breckenridge name. So Laura wants Sam to find the gold bars, but instead of bringing them to her, put them back in the mint in Denver!

As with any good heist movie, Sam sets out to look for help to carry out the heist-in-reverse. As you might have guessed, Jed Hooker is going to be one of his partners. But he's got a third for the scheme, an inventor named O.W. Bandy (Clint Walker) who can fashion all sorts of devices to help them get the gold bars and then put them back where they belong.

There are several catches, of course. Even before you try to figure out how to get the gold into the vault, there's the issue of getting it off the bottom of the river. The three men are also being followed by another gang of crooks, a gang of whom Laura was aware but never informed poor Sam. They, unsurprisingly, want the gold, but have no intention of putting it back in the vault. And they're willing to kill to get it.

However, Sam and his two friends do get the gold bars out of the boat and then to Denver. But how are they going to get it back into the mint? And surely, even though there's no longer a pesky Production Code to deal with, something's bound to go wrong, isn't it?

As I was watching Sam Whiskey, I couldn't help but find myself thinking of another Burt Reynolds movie, W.W. and the Dixie Dancekings. Now, I happened to like that later movie, even though I realize it's not a particularly great movie. The reason for liking it comes down to Burt Reynolds' easygoing charm. The same holds true for Sam Whiskey. It's full of plot holes that you'll spot if you pay too close attention. But Reynolds again shows what a charming little rascal he can be, elevating not terribly good or original material into a film that entertains. Just don't think too hard about it.

Going Highbrow

Next up is another of those Warner Bros. B movies that I recorded in part because I'm always up for Warner's B movies and in part because of the cast. It being at the top of the list of movies I've watched off my DVR but haven't done a post on yet, the movie in question is Going Highbrow.

The movie starts off with an establishing shot of one of those old transatlantic luxury liners on its way back from Europe. The press interview a young Frenchwoman, until an American worms her way into the press conference. That woman is Cora Upshaw (ZaSu Pitts), who is interested in getting interviewed because she and her husband have recently made it in the business world. They're from the midwest, out in Kansas, and it's the sort of place where high society doesn't think of anybody coming from. While in Europe, the Upshaws purchased several pieces of fine are. Cora's husband Matt (Guy Kibbee), however, isn't all that interested in the trappings of wealth, as we can see from his giving his European dress clothing to one of the ship's stewards.

Meanwhile, in New York, we meet Harley Marsh (Ross Alexander). He comes from a family that used to be rich, with his mother (Nella Walker) having inherited an estate when her husband died. However, the Marshes have lost most of their cash on demand thanks to poor investing -- the movie having been released in 1935, there is still a depression on. However, they still have a fair bit of property. The manager of the estate, Augie Witherspoon (Edward Everett Horton), reads an article in the newspaper about the Upshaws, and gets an idea: perhaps the Upshaws might be interested in buying some of the paintings that the Marshes still own.

Matt, not really wanting to take part in Cora's playing for high society, and having gotten rid of the "proper" clothing anyway, he goes to a diner across the street from the Waldorf where they're staying. There he meets Sandy Long (June Martel), the waitress out the counter. She obviously doesn't believe Matt is a millionaire. But then Augie suggests one way to get into high society which Cora wants, is for the Marshes to host a debutante party for their daughter. The problem is that they don't have a daughter. That's when Matt decides that asking Sandy if she'll play the part of their daughter.

Matt takes Sandy out to get her the clothes that will make her look like a debutante, and while they're out Harley runs into her. He falls in love with her, but it takes a while for the feeling to become mutual. There are also all sorts of complications.

Going Highbrow is, somewhat surprisingly, one of the weaker of the B movies that I've seen come out of Warner Bros. Granted, I've seen worse from RKO get shown on TCM, and Growing Highbrow isn't exactly bad. But the plot here feels like the writers just bolted together a whole bunch of different plot points that had appeared in a dozen B movies of the previous half-decade.

Still, with the B-movie constellation of stars in the cast, Going Highbrow is still worth a watch.

The Swan of no particular color

I mentioned yesterday that there are two Grace Kelly movies on my DVR that I hadn't blogged about before that were coming up as part of her day in Summer Under the Stars. (A search of the blog suggests I haven't done a full post on The Bridges at Toko-Ri either, having briefly mentioned it a few times. But I don't have that one on my DVR yet.) Running relatively early in the day was The Country Girl; showing overnight at 12:15 AM -- so technically on August 25 on the east coast but still August 24 in the rest of the time zones -- is The Swan.

A title card tells us that the action takes place in 1910, somewhere in Central Europe, in one of those minor royal houses. Grace Kelly plays Princess Alexandra, the eldest daughter in the house. She's got two much younger brothers, who are still young enough that they need a tutor, Dr. Agi (Louis Jourdan). The matriarch of the family, Princess Beatrix (Jessie Royce Landis), is a widow, and worried about both marrying her daughter off to someone suitable and getting the family line back into real royalty, as this branch no longer rules any lands, having lost everything to Napoleon a century earlier.

Then news comes that from a monarchy rather farther west, the Crown Prince, Prince Albert (Alec Guinness), will be coming for a visit. Beatrix realizes this is a perfect opportunity to try to play matchmaker and set up Alexandra with Albert. Not only that, but the two are cousins from a few generations back, so keeping everything in the extended family also seems like a great idea. And who couldn't resist somebody as beautiful as Princess Alexandra?

Apparently, Prince Albert can. He seems more interested in all the things the kid brothers are learning, and getting out in the fresh air around where the family lives, than in Alexandra herself. It should go without saying that this greatly distresses Alexandra, but even more so Beatrix. How to get Albert to notice Alexandra? Beatrix has the brilliant idea to try making him jealous.

There's going to be a going-away ball for Prince Albert, and Beatrix suggests to Alexandra that she might try inviting Dr. Agi and making it look to Albert as though Alexandra is interested in him. That would seem scandalous, since Agi is of course a commoner and in those days the higher-ranking princes and princesses. But desperate times call for desperate measures. Things get complicated, because Dr. Agi has long held a flame for Alexandra despite knowing he could never take the initiative because of the commoner/royalty divide. Worse is that this ruse doesn't seem to get Prince Albert interested in Alexandra.

The Swan is based on a play by the great Hungarian playwright Ferenc Molnár, from whose works a bunch of great movies have been made. Indeed, this was at least the third filming of The Swan, although I haven't seen the first two. This version of The Swan tries to open things up from the stage origins in part by having the duck-hunting scene as well as Agi and Alexandra going for a carriage ride together. I don't think the movie is quite successful in overcoming the staginess, however.

Not that The Swan is a bad movie; the performances are all competent. The production values are, being an MGM movie, quite good, with lovely color and beautiful sets and locations for the establishing shots. It's just that the material feels like it would work better with the spontaneity of a live stage performance and an audience to laugh where appropriate. Watch and judge for yourself.

The Country Girl

I think I might have mentioned at the beginning of the month in conjunction with my post on Summer Under the Stars that I had two Grace Kelly films on my DVR that I hadn't done posts on, and that both are showing up on her day. That day is tomorrow, August 24, but thankfully one of the films is airing overnight. So we'll start with the first of the two movies, The Country Girl, which TCM is showing at noon on August 24.

Kelly is, somewhat surprisingly the titular country girl, although we don't see her for a few minutes. Instead, we see the two male stars of the movie. One is William Holden, who plays Bernie Dodd. Bernie is a theater director, and in a big blow-up with producer Philip Cook (Anthony Ross). They're arguing over a faded star, Frank Elgin (Bing Crosby). They need someone for their new musical drama The Land Around Us who can both sing and act, which Elgin can do. The only thing is, in the intervening years, Frank has gained a reputation for becoming a raging alcoholic.

Frank comes in to audition for the lead role, not realizing at first that that's what they want him for, and when Bernie tells Frank this, Frank seems a bit nonplussed, as though he's not certain he's ready to take on such a big part after all those years of drinking. By the time Bernie and Philip are finished bickering, Frank has already left the theater, presumably thinking he's lost the part or just desperate for another drink.

Bernie goes looking for Frank, eventually going to his current address, which is an apartment in a crappy part of town. Opening the door is Frank's wife Georgie (Grace Kelly), looking decidedly frumpy since the studio obviously thought casting Grace Kelly against type would be exceedingly daring. Frank and Georgie talk, and it's a decidedly standoffish conversation. Frank comes home, and things get even more volatile.

Part of the reason for this is, that, as the movie goes on, Bernie finds himself wondering whether Georgie might be part of the reason why Frank turned to drink. Still, he takes a huge risk on giving Frank the role. The production goes into rehearsals, for the eventual road preview in Boston before opening in New York at some point in the future. Georgie is there, which she may think is for Frank's benefit. Bernie, for his part, thinks her presence is a huge problem. Frank has to deal with that conflict in addition to trying to stay sober.

The Country Girl is based on a play by Clifford Odets, who may not be to everybody's tastes. William Holden had gotten his big break in the movie version of Odets' Golden Boy, which is one of those plays that is a bit strident in trying to get its point across. This movie feels stagey, although to be fair to the movie a lot of that has to do with the fact that it's a play about the theater. It would be hard not to have a movie like this be stagey.

The acting is mostly good; Grace Kelly won the Best Actress Oscar which I think must have been down to the Academy voters being impressed by her playing against type. Frankly I still think I'd have voted for Dorothy Dandridge in Carmen Jones. The best acting here is really done by William Holden.

The Country Girl is one of those Oscar-winning movies that shows up surprisingly infrequently considering the fact that it's an Oscar-winner with multiple big stars. I'd guess that has something to do with being a relatively "little" picture and from Paramount, which is not one of the studios TCM has the easiest access to. Still, it's decidedly worth a watch.

Hot Chocolate, and other thoughts

I reviewed Ida Lupino in Woman in Hiding recently. It being a Noir Alley showing, it was a ~90-minute movie plus Eddie Muller's extended intro and outro put into a two-hour slot. This gave TCM time to include a short, which was one I'd never heard of before: Duke Ellington in Hot Chocolate.

This is only a four-minute short, so there's not much to it. We see Duke Ellington, and Ellington introduces one of his band members, saxophonist Ben Webster. As the band plays a song, we see some fairly talented dancers doing the jitterbug. Then, after the song ends, we get another shot of Ellington and that's about it. After all, it's only four minutes.

I didn't recognize the production company, and as such I was wondering where TCM got the rights to show this. Then I did a little bit of research that explained it. It turns out that Hot Chocolate was one of a whole bunch of what were called "Soundies", shorts made in the 1940s and that you could view in a nickelodeon-like device.

And wouldn't you know it, but last year, Kino Lorber released a box set of a load of these Soundies. Kino Lorber seems to be one of the DVD companies that TCM is cooperating with, much like Criterion for foreign films, which would explain why TCM was able to show this one. I think I've seen a couple of other shorts that look like they would have been Soundies as well showing up in the space at the end of the recordings of various movies on my DVR.

I'd rather watch Maud Adams

If you've read this blog for the 16 years I've been posting about classic cinema, you'll know that one of the things I complain about is the extent to which the limited window we get into foreign, non-English-language cinema is crafted in large part by people with a very arthouse sense of cinema. I couldn't help but think about that when I watched the recording of Eric Rohmer's My Night at Maud's that I put on my DVR last Christmas.

Jean-Louis Trintignant, who made Z the same year that this movie came out, stars as Jean-Louis, a Catholic college professor who has recently started a new job in the provincial town of Clermont-Ferrand. One Sunday in the run-up to Christmas he goes to Mass and sees a lovely young woman, Françoise, vowing to try to get to know her better. Instead, he runs into an old Marxist friend, Vidal, and the two go out together for a conversation.

Vidal introduces Jean-Louis to Maud, and Jean-Louis ends up going over to Maud's apartment, where the two spend the night together after a long evening of talking. The go out for a walk in the mountains the following day so they can talk some more, but back in town, Jean-Louis runs into Françoise again. Those two talk, and when Jean-Louis offers to take her back to her apartment, he gets stuck on an icy driveway, and is forces to spend the night in a spare room in Françoise's aparment, which gives the two an opportunity to talk some more.

My Night at Maud's is a movie that's filled with talk, and talk, and more talk, and it's the tedious sort of talk that makes My Dinner With Andre seem exciting by comparison. There's nothing going on in terms of action, and no reason to give a damn about any of these self-absorbed characters. The only good thing about the movie is the location shooting in Clermont-Ferrand. Watching My Night at Maud's gave me the distinct feeling that not only are the French different, they're different from America in a way that's much more different than the rest of Europe is different from the US. Even with something like the Czech New Wave Daisies that I didn't really care for, I didn't get the same sense of dealing with a completely different culture.

And yet, it baffles me reading the reviews and seeing how many people think something like My Night at Maud's is truly great. I can't help but wonder if it's the sort of guff where a certain class of people feels the need to praise it in order to look smart. To paraphrase Sigmund Freud, sometimes a bomb is just a bomb.

Woman in Hiding

I mentioned at the beginning of the month how Ida Lupino was one of the people spotlighted in this year's Summer Under the Stars for whom I had a movie on my DVR that wasn't airing as part of her day. I've finally gotten to the point in my library where that movie is at the top of the list for movies I've watched but haven't blogged about yet: Woman in Hiding.

The movie starts off in a really interesting manner. Lupino's character is driving a car down a windy mountain road as the opening credits play, complete with dramatic music that implies she's racing away from... something. As the credits reach their end, she fails to navigate a curve, and the car crashes through a guardrail into the river down below.

Next up is the police having pulled the car up from the river, with it hanging from a bridge, without a body to show for it. We then hear the voice of Ida Lupino, informing us that it's her body that the police are dredging the river for, the voice of one Deborah Chandler. The camera then shows a man on the bridge with the police, at which point Deborah informs us she's Deborah Chandler Clark; the man on the bridge is Selden Clark IV (Stephen McNally).

As you might guess, the movie then goes into a flashback. Deborah Chandler is the daughter of John Chandler (John Litel), who owns the factory that's the big employer in the North Carolina town where they live. John has hired on Selden Clark IV as the factory's general manager, largely because the Clarks were the big family in town; in fact, the town, Clarksville, is named after one of Selden's ancestors. Selden and Deborah have fallen in love, but Dad really disapproves of the romance, largely because he considers the last couple generations of Clarks to be really terrible people.

And then Dad dies suddenly in an accident at the mill, freeing the way for Selden to marry Deborah, while Deborah becomes the owner of the mill. It would seem a match made in heaven, but Selden is extremely anxious for the match to go through, and Voiceover Deborah says she should have seen things for what they were much earlier considering how Selden made the wedding proposal on the day of her father's funeral. Still, she goes through with the wedding.

It's then that things really get nasty. Selden takes Deborah up to a cabin in the mountains for their honeymoon, and when they get there, waiting for them is one Patricia Monahan (Peggy Dow) of Raleigh. Patricia is equally nasty, only to Selden, but then she has good reason to be nasty. She was -- and may still be -- Selden's other woman, and she has no qualms about letting the married couple know about it. Indeed, she points out that Selden had told her that he was finished with Deborah a year ago, so we know he's lying about that half of the relationship.

Selden responds by kicking Patricia out, and then trying to keep Deborah cooped up in the cabin. Obviously, now that she knows the full truth of the matter -- well she really learns the full truth when she concludes that her father's death was no accident -- she decides she's going to make a break for it. But we're only about a half hour into a 90-minute movie, which means that the flashback doesn't take up the full movie.

As you might guess, Deborah is giving the voiceover because she did not in fact die in the car crash, which would also explain why they can't find the body. Selden is also convinced that Deborah didn't die, and is obsessive about finding her. Deborah heads off to Raleigh to try to find Patricia. At one of the bus stations, a demobbed soldier, Keith Ramsey (Howard Duff), is manning the newsstand. He's quite taken with Deborah, not realizing who she is, but eventually decides to help her. He doesn't understand just how much danger she's in, of course.

When Eddie Muller presented Woman in Hiding in Noir Alley, he commented that it was a movie that Ida Lupino didn't really want to make, implying that she was taking a paycheck to be able to do the stuff she really wanted to do. That's a bit harsh, since Woman in Hiding is an effective enough little movie. In writing this post, I suddenly found myself thinking of Sleeping With the Enemy, which has a fairly similar plot of a wife running away and the obsessive husband going to the ends of the earth to find her, although in that one the husband is even more over the top in the way he treats his wife.

The cast does well enough here, and the movie is certainly reasonably entertaining, even if it isn't the best movie any of the people involved made. It's definitely worth a watch the next time it shows up.

Gloria

Gena Rowlands died recently, and I mentioned that I had seen about one scene of her 1980 movie Gloria show up on one of the FAST channels. As it turned out, the movie is available to stream on demand on Tubi, so I sat down to watch it and do a review on it.

Rowlands is the star here and plays Gloria, but we don't see her at first. Instead, we see a working-class Puerto Rican woman named Jeri Dawn coming home to her Bronx apartment having done the daily shopping, a Bronx that decidedly hasn't recovered from the terrible years of the 1970s. The trip home is filled with small indignities, but when Jeri gets to the lobby of her apartment, there's something more alarming, in the form of a man in an ill-fitting suit. Jerri gets into the elevator and goes up to her apartment.

Gloria lives in the same apartment building, being a neighbor of the Dawns, although this is the era when you wonder how well the people know each other despite living on the same floor of the same apartment building. Apparently, however, Gloria and the Dawns know each other well enough that Gloria can pop over to ask to borrow some sugar or whatnot. There, she discovers the Dawns in a state of panic. Jeri's husband Jack (Buck Henry) works as an accountant for the Mob, but he's also a double agent, ratting on the Mob to the FBI. That's a fairly obvious problem, and worse, Jack has physical evidence. (You'd think he'd be smart enough to make multiple physical copies of that evidence.) So Jeri understands that that man in the lobby was part of a hit squad sent to take out Jack, and quite possibly the rest of the family as well.

Jeri begs Gloria to take the kids back to her apartment, since the Mob wouldn't know about her, and presumably Gloria could then take the kids to the police or something. Except that Gloria is known by the Mob, since she had worked as a "companion", living on the largesse that mob men would give her and having socked away as much as she could in a safety deposit box. Worse is that only one of the two Dawn kids, young Phil, is willing to go off with Gloria. And Gloria doesn't really like kids at all. Still, she takes Phil, as well as the ledger, with Dad telling Phil to keep it safe, which doesn't make sense, since he should just have Gloria give it to the authorities.

The hit squad comes and kills the Dawns, and Gloria has to figure out how to escape while having a kid in tow. Not only that, but a kid who for the longest time isn't ready to admit that his family is dead and he's never going to see them again. Gloria is able to get out of the building just as a crowd of onlookers and the cops and media are showing up, so she's able to make an escape. But there's a catch, in that the running cameras capture the image of Gloria and Phil, so the mobsters know exactly who they're looking for. Gloria and Phil go on the run for the rest of the movie.

Gloria was very well-received by the critics when it was released in 1980, garnering an Oscar nomination for Rowlands and picking up a best picture award at the Venice Film Festival. I have to say that while I mostly liked the movie, I wouldn't give it quite the high marks that the critics do. For me, that's largely down to the amount of suspension of belief the movie requires. The police never show up anywhere in the movie after the initial hit, which is odd since Gloria is on the run for at least three nights and gets involved in several very public gun scenes with hit squads.

The pluses, however, include Rowlands' performance, which is excellent. Apparently, a lot of people at the time had an issue with the child "actor" (he never had another role) playing Phil; I didn't have that much of a problem with him. The other really bright spot is director John Cassavetes' photography of New York, which here is the same sort of really grimy and not-nice place that it actually was in those days. Hollywood could never make New York look like this during the studio era.

So I'd definitely give Gloria a recommendation as something you should watch.

Rent, minus the crappy songs

In the latest installment of "Honorees in Summer Under the Stars for whom I have a movie on my DVR that's showing up on TCM", the actor in question is John Gilbert, whose career spanned the silent era and the early part of the sound era. Among his silent films is the 1926 adaptation of La Bohème, which comes on overnight tonight, or in the wee hours of the morning, at 2:15 AM (which makes it still August 19 in the Pacific time zone).

La Bohème tells the tragic story of Mimi, played here by Lillian Gish. But we don't meet her first; instead we meet the future man in her life and his friends. It's the early 1830s in Paris, and bohemianism is already a thing, having taken its name in French from the idea that the wandering gypsies (now referred to as the Romani) came from the Bohemia region in what is now the Czech Republic. But the bohemians here are fully French. Rodolphe (John Gilbert) is a writer who would like the write the Great French Play. But he needs to pay the bills, so he resorts to writing articles for some sort of magazine, at least as they existed in the 1830s.

Rodolphe lives with Marcel, a struggling artist who at least has a girlfriend in Musette (Renée Adorée) who is able to provide Marcel and his friends with some food. The two men have two other roommates, musician Schaunard and Colline (a very young Edward Everett Horton). As for Mimi, she lives in the same building as the men, in a garret apartment where she does piece-work as a seamstress. She, like the men, has a lot of difficulty coming up with the rent money.

It's the first of the month, and the men are somehow able to scrounge up the rent money, but Mimi isn't, which means she's about to be thrown out. She couldn't even get enough money from pawning the few things she owns. But when Musette invites Marcel down for dinner, and he invites his friends, Rodolphe, the last to get invited, sees poor Mimi about to get thrown out and takes pity on her. However, the rich Vicomte Paul, seeing Mimi's beauty, tries to proposition her under the guise of offering her some work.

Mimi rejects Paul's advances, but accepts Rodolphe's, and as you can guess, the two fall in love. This love gives Rodolphe the inspiration for his play. However, he spends so much time writing his play that he runs way behind on the articles he's supposed to be writing for the magazine, to the point that the editor basically fires him. However, the editor only does this when Mimi brings over Rodolphe's latest piece, he being too busy working on his play to go over to the editor's office himself.

At this point, Mimi does something profoundly stupid. She doesn't tell Rodolphe that he's been fired, and is going to have to find some other writing job to pay the bills and give him the time to write that play. Instead, she decides to work double time so that she can earn more money herself and give the extra to Rodolphe, who thinks those are his wages. Mimi promptly works herself to an early grave, and the rest, as they say, is history.

To be honest, I haven't seen either the opera La bohème, or the musical Rent which is based on the opera. This version of the story, however, is at least reasonably well-acted, even though the story is melodramatic and might be eyeroll-inducing for some. Just when you think it can't get tragic enough, it gets more tragic. But that's the fault of the source material, not the actors or director.

While I'd have to say I prefer other movies from the silent output of John Gilbert and Lillian Gish, this version of La Bohème is definitely worth watching.

Some might say it's under-exposed

I was recently looking through Tubi's selection of movies that are leaving the platform at the end of the month, and came across a title that sounded like it might be fun, so I watched it: Over-Exposed.

Cleo Moore, one of those young actresses hired for her looks who left acting early and died tragically young, is the star here. She plays Lily, who at the start of the movie is one of a bunch of women being hauled before the court because the place she'd been working at has just been raided. As in the movie Virtue that I reviewed a couple of months back, the various defendants here are given the choice of time in the clink, or leaving town. Unfortunately, Lily doesn't really have the money to get out of town, having just arrived in town and not even having received her pay for her evening's work.

On her way out of court, she falls in with photographer Max West (Raymond Greenleaf), who took the job of taking booking photos because he needs the money. Presumably he drinks and that's caused reliability issues with his normal photographic work. Then again, some of his "normal" work suggests seediness. Lily follows Max to his studio/apartment, where he realizes he can use her to take glamour shots, giving her some pay as well to tide her over.

The movie begins to get a bit weird here, as Lily turns out to be a good girl who somehow went wrong by taking a job where she did. She sleeps on Max's couch, helps him with a client, Mrs. Grange (Isobel Elsom), who turns out to be wealthy, and decides she'll spend her time learning how to become a photographer herself, getting good at it fairly quickly. Eventually, she outgrows Max and needs to go to the big city to try to make it on her own.

In New York, she takes her portfolio to a news agency, but she accidentally gets knocked down by one of the agency's reporters, Russ Bassett (Richard Crenna). The two are going to fall in love along the way, but that's not really the point of the movie. Lily insists on making it on her own, even stopping to take photos of a burning building in the hopes she can sell the photos to the news services. All she gets is a job at one of those high-end nightclubs where back in the day they hired pretty women to take souvenir photos of the patrons.

One night at the club, she accidentally gets bumped into, screwing up a photo. That photo happens to be of an attorney who defends members of the crime syndicate, and in the background is one of those crime syndicate members. The next morning, it's revealed there was a murder, and the guy in the background of the photo could be a suspect, except that as a crime boss he can pay a whole bunch of people to produce phony alibis. Or could if there weren't photographic evidence, not that he knows about Lily's photo.

Lily rises in the world of photography, calling herself Lila because it sounds more elegant, while Russ tries to get her a good job with the agency. Eventually he gets the agency to offer her a job as his personal photographer while he becomes an international roving correspondent. Shockingly, she refuses! And then, Mrs. Grange shows up at the club where she still works, only to suffer a fatal heart attack on the dance floor. Lila had taken the last photograph of her, but a less scrupulous newspaperman steals the negative to have that photo printed.

Lila then blackmails the mob lawyer, leading to the mob boss' henchmen kidnapping her and a completely different tone for the finale than you might have expected.

Over-Exposed is in B-movie territory, although it's really the sort of thing that, 20 years earlier, would have been a programmer for a studio's more established star. I could easily see somebody like Barbara Stanwyck taking on this role in her earlier days. But Over-Exposed was made in the mid-1950s, so we get a strange little sort of movie here, that goes in all sorts of directions.

The idea behind Over-Exposed is good. It doesn't always work, however, in part because I don't think Cleo Moore was a good enough actress. Not that Over-Exposed is a bad movie; it's definitely interesting and worth a watch. It's more the sort of movie that in the right hands could have been a lot better.

Multiple obituaries for the week ending August 18, 2024

Actress Gena Rowlands, who was the wife of actor/director John Cassavetes and featured in several of his films, died on Wednesday at the age of 94. A search of my blog suggests I haven't mentioned her all that much. I noticed that the Wikipedia listing mentioned the movie Gloria. I came across that one on one of the FAST streaming services, but only got to watch about 10 minutes of it because the scheduling didn't fit my day when it was streaming "live". However, Tubi seems to have it right now, so I'll probably try to get around to watching it in the near future.

Wednesday saw the death of Peter Marshall, whom most people will likely remember as the master of the Hollywood Squares in the 1960s and 1970s. However, he did a fair bit of acting in the 1950s with his comic partner Tommy Noonan and continued making sporadic appearances in the 1960s and later, such as in Edgar Ulmer's final film The Cavern. Many of those earlier movies were made at Fox and would show up from time to time on FXM, but right now I don't think any of them are in the FXM rotation.

Finally, news broke this morning of the death of Alain Delon, the French actor who appeared in a string of movies in the 1960s and beyond, starting with Purple Noon. Delon was 88. Right now, I've got Delon's Le Samouraï on my DVR, but I may not get around to the review for a bit partly because of the number of foreign films I've got to get through and partly because it looks like it's going to be on the TCM schedule in October thanks to TCM's re-running Two for One and somebody having selected it then.

Little Women (1933)

I seem to have copies of a surprising number of movies in Summer Under the Stars this year that I haven't blogged about before. Another one coming up, for Katharine Hepburn's day, is the 1933 version of Little Women, tomorrow (August 18) at 9:30 AM.

Now, I have to admit that before doing this post, I had not read the novel by Louisa May Alcott on which this and the other movie versions is based. Nor had I watched any of the movie versions all the way through, although I had seen parts of at least the 1949 version that has Elizabeth Taylor and Peter Lawford in the cast. But I did know vaguely of the plot, namely that it deals with the struggles of the four March sisters in Massachusetts during the Civil War while their father is off serving the Union Army.

The sisters are Jo (short for Josephine, played by Katharine Hepburn), Meg (Frances Dee), Beth (Jean Parker) and Amy (Joan Bennett). Meg, the eldest, is making some extra money for the family by working as a seamstress. Jo is a bit of a tomboy and dreams of becoming a professional writer. Amy is the youngest and just finishing her education, while Beth is musically inclined. They live with their mother (Spring Byington), while also having an Aunt (Edna May Oliver) who is better off and exerts a bit of control on the family although she's not the villain of the piece by any means. There's really no villain here.

The Marches live next door to Mr. Laurence (Henry Stephenson) but aren't all that close to him. The relationship is about to change, however, when his grandson Laurie (Douglass Montgomery) arrives from Europe and spends some time with grandfather. All the girls are taken by this handsome young man, but obviously, no more than one of the girls can have him. Laurie also has a tutor, John Brooke, which gives another man for the girls to go gaga over.

The war hits home for the family when news reaches them that Dad has been injured and is at an army hospital in Washington; eventually he comes home although he's never a major character. Beth has gotten sick by this time and there's some fear that she's going to die. Jo eventually goes off to New York to try to make it as a writer, where she meets German professor Baer (Paul Lukas), and those two may or may not wind up becoming romantically involved if Jo can't have Laurie.

Little Women is more episodic than having an overriding plot, and this telling of the tale really puts the emphasis on Jo since it's Katharine Hepburn in that part. Hepburn is, unsurprisingly, a force of nature here, and to me that force is not always appropriate. At times it works quite well, but sometimes it's just too much.

The movie has production values that are quite good for 1933, although this sort of period material is stuff that modern productions can do without making it look quite so backlot-bound. Still, for a 1930s literary adaptation, this version of Little Women does quite well.

The Nutty Professor

The next star of the day in TCM's Summer Under the Stars is Jerry Lewis, whose movies show up tomorrow, August 17. I've got a box set of 10 of his movies, and have blogged about most of them before. Some of the movies in that set are on TCM tomorrow, and the one I haven't blogged about before is The Nutty Professor, which airs at 8:00 PM on August 17.

Lewis plays Julius Kelp, a professor of chemistry at a local university; as the opening credits roll Kelp is doing the sort of experiments stereotypical to the movies: photogenic colored liquids in various forms of glassware, and mixing liquids together to produce stuff that bubbles over. The last experiment, however, sets off an explosion that rocks the whole campus, especially the administration building where the trustees are meeting. So college president Dr. Warfield (Del Moore) is none too pleased.

The next day in class, one of Dr. Kelp's students is revealed to be a player on the football team, not taking a course like Rocks for Jocks or Clouds. (To be fair, my freshman fall I was in Multivariable Calculus with a future NFL starting quarterback.) Dr. Kelp is disappointed that one of his students puts athletics over academics, and the football player responds by stuffing Dr. Kelp into a closet. Helping out of the closet is another student, Stella Purdy (Stella Stevens).

Dr. Kelp has up to now been the apotheosis of the 98-pound weakling pictured in the old Charles Atlas-type ads: small, a voice not suitable for radio, wearing thick glasses, and the like. So Kelp decides that he's going to try to change himself by going to a gym, which is really just an excuse for an extended scene of Jerry Lewis-style visual and physical humor, not that that's a bad thing. But of course the upshot is that working out does not, in fact, work out for Prof. Kelp.

So instead, he decides to subscribe to the idea of better living through chemistry, which makes sense considering that he's a chemist. As with Village of the Giants several weeks back, Julius starts mixing all sorts of chemicals, and then experimenting on himself. But instead of the result turning him into a giant, it turns him into a lounge lizard, which is in many ways a good thing for him in that the students like to hang out at just such a lounge, and Stella has suggested Dr. Kelp show up there.

So Kelp, having taken the potion, turns into a suave alter ego he calls Buddy Love, and shows up as Love at the student lounge. Stella is taken by Buddy Love, and eventually all the students are intrigued by him. Of course, the potion is bound to wear off, and when it does, it has all sorts of problems and consequences. More surprising is the fact that nobody seems to put two and two together for the longest time.

The Nutty Professor is, like many of Jerry Lewis' movies, one that doesn't exactly have the greatest of scripts, in that the plot is once again more a vehicle for Jerry Lewis' brand of humor than it is something that drives a story. Now, in a movie like The Bellboy, the sketches really work. The Nutty Professor isn't quite as good, but much of the material does come off fairly well. The Kelp character and the absurd transformation are also obvious places to mine humor, something that Lewis does quite well here.

If you haven't seen The Nuty Professor before, definitely see it since it's airing now.

Barbary Coast

A few months back, I was looking through some of the offerings on Tubi, and saw an old movie I don't think I'd heard of, one with some pretty big stars in it: Howard Hawks' 1935 version of Barbary Coast. I finally got around to watching it, and it's one that doesn't have any indication of being about to expire.

Miriam Hopkins is the star here, playing Mary Rutledge. But before we meet her, we get a prologue informing us of how gold was discovered in California in 1848 and how that brought a ton of men to what the US had recently gained in the war against Mexico, and would soon become a state. Following those men is Mary, who is about to get off the boat in San Francisco in order to meet again with her fiancé, Dan Morgan. Unfortunately, she's informed by the denizens of San Francisco that Mr. Morgan is quite dead.

Taking Mary under his wing is Louis Chamalis (Edward G. Robinson). Now, if Barbary Coast were a pre-Code, Mary would have been his mistress, but the movie was released in 1935, when such a relationship couldn't be depicted. Louis runs one of the local gaming houses, and is a pretty big cheese in Frisco. So while Louis takes Mary on and gives her room and board, and presumably expects to start a romantic relationship with her, he also gives her a job as a croupier.

Of course, the roulette wheels are crooked, as that's just one way Louis makes his money and keeps it. There's not much real law here yet, so Louis has a bunch of henchmen led by Knuckles (Brian Donlevy) to mete out force so Louis can keep what's his, and he intends to get a bunch of that gold for himself without having to mine it. A lot of people are unhappy with this arrangement -- Dan Morgan would have been one such man, but he's dead now. One of Mary's fellow passengers, Col. Cobb, is also unimpressed, so he buys a printing press and vows to start a muckracking newspaper. Louis, unsurprisingly, threatens him.

That finally pushes Mary over the line, and she decides to go out by herself for a horseback ride just to get away for a day and clear her head. But the weather isn't good and, San Francisco not being a big city yet, Mary gets lost. She finds what she thinks is an abandoned cabin, except that it's being used by prospector Jim Carmichael (Joel McCrea). He lets her come in and dry off, and as this happens you know he and Mary are going to fall in love. Jim has finally hit gold, and is planning to head back to New York.

But in San Francisco while waiting for the boat, he learns what Mary does for a living, and this makes the two hate each other for some reason. Mary takes all of Jim's money at the roulette wheel, while Col. Cobb decides to start on a campaign of vigilante justice to get at Louis. Mary and Jim eventually get caught in all this, and it threatens to end tragically for the two of them.

Except, of course, that Barbary Coast was released in 1935. Had it been a pre-Code, you might possibly get at least an ambiguous ending. But because of the Code, you know that Louis is going to get what he deserves for his crimes, while Mary is going to find a way to expiate her sins.

Barbary Coast is another of those movies where the big problem I have with it is the fact that the Code forces a certain ending on them. Having read a bit more about the movie, it was based on a novel with a plot that, if not entirely different, at least is able to handle things with a much more grown-up sensibility. Joe Breen and friends were apparently thoroughly displeased, and forced all sorts of script changes, which are decidedly not to the movie's benefit, which is a huge shame given the cast.

Still, that does make Barbary Coast the sort of movie you should watch to see how the Production Code could hurt a Hollywood movie.

Torch Song Trilogy

Today in Summer Under the Stars is the day for the movies of Anne Bancroft. One of her movies is on my DVR from when TCM ran it back in June as part of a two-night salute to "Pride" Month: Torch Song Trilogy. It concludes Bancroft's day, early tomorrow (August 15 in all time zones in the contiguous US) at 4:00 AM.

The movie is based on a set of three one-act plays by Harvey Fierstein that were eventually combined into a Brodway play in the early 1980s and the edited down to movie length for the film, and since the plays all have (mostly) the same set of characters, the material fits as one coherent whole. Fierstein plays Arnold Beckoff, who in a prologue is a New York boy caught by his mother (Anne Bancroft) trying on women's make-up and clothes. Nowadays, the Ts who have tried to take over the LGBT community would try to tell you that young Arnold was really showing he's "transgendered", but thankfully in those days they didn't have puberty blockers and people pushing chopping off genitals, so Arnold and all the other boys like him were able to grow up to be the gay men they always were.

Fast-forward to the first of the acts, set in 1971. Arnold, now an adult, is a female impersonator using the stage name "Virginia Hamm" and working with a bunch of other impersonators at a gay nightclub. But Arnold doesn't really have any love in his life, at least until he meets Ed (Brian Kerwin) at a bar. The two start a relationship, but Arnold is consistently more needy than Ed and pushing the relationship faster and farther then Ed is thinking of going. Arnold then goes over to Ed's apartment for Ed's birthday, to find out that Ed is having dinner with... old girlfriend Laurel (Karen Young). Ed says he's bisexual, although Arnold notes that most bisexuals are really gay and just not ready to admit it.

Act two starts at Christmas, 1973. Arnold is still performing at the same club, and one night a bunch of young men including Alan Simon (Matthew Broderick) show up. The group seems to be slumming by acting like it's daring to go to a gay club to see the show, but one of Alan's companions starts being really nasty to Arnold in a way that results in fisticuffs and Alan ending up unconscious. Arnold takes Alan back to his apartment to recover. A few days later, Alan shows up again outside the stage door, mostly to reveal that he's gay too, and the sort of young man who all the older gay men found gorgeous. But now, as a fully legal adult of 21, Alan wants something more out of life. The two start a relationship that goes on for several years, until out of nowhere, Ed and Laurel call, wanting to meet Arnold. Arnold decides he wants a real family, and applies to foster a troubled gay teen, David. This necessitates moving to a new neighborhood, but they pick one with a lot of gay-bashing....

Finally, in 1980, Arnold is alone with David, since Alan was killed in one of those gay-bashing attacks. Arnold hasn't had the courage to tell Mom that he's taken on a son, or even about his relatinoships with Alan and Ed, because Mom is so full of regret that one of her kids turned out to be gay that she just can't handle it. Arnold, for his part, can't handle Mom, either. She decides to return from Florida and learns about what's going on in Arnold's life, which opens up all those old wounds again.

For the most part, Torch Song Trilogy is an excellent movie, although sometimes I feel like the script has Arnold not realizing that he's partly causing his own problems through his emotional neediness (in a way, I should point out, that is not because Arnold is gay; there are straight people who are just as clingy). But then, the main theme of the movie is how tough it would have been for gay men to find love in a time and place where there was a lot less acceptance of gays than there is now. One other problem for me is that I don't know that Fierstien can really sing like a woman. I found myself thinking of Carol Channing, who looked and sounded like she was 60 even when she was 30; Fierstein here sounds like the male equivalent with a voice that sounds like it should be coming out of the mouth of a character like Vic Tayback's short-order cook in Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore.

But these are minor quibbles that don't really distract from what is generally a fine movie. If you haven't seen Torch Song Trilogy before, take this opportunity to watch it.

Pee-wee's Big Adventure

Paul Reubens was another of the stars who died in 2023 and who got a one-film tribute in December as part of their annual night where they honor some of the people who didn't merit a full programming salute. For Reubens, the movie they ran was his film debut, Pee-wee's Big Adventure.

Now, I assume most people know a bit about the Pee-wee Herman character already. Pee-wee, created by Paul Reubens, was a goofy kid who never grew up. In this movie, adult Pee-wee lives in a house that's part mid-century modern and part Rube Goldberg, the entirety being the sort of thing that you wonder how someone like Pee-wee could afford to live in. Indeed, what he does for a living seems to be left for the viewer to guess.

The one thing Pee-wee loves is his tricked-out bicycle. And he's not the only one to love it. As with 1980s teen movies, there's an antagnoist who grew up about as much as Pee-wee did, Francis Buxton, who still lives with his wealthy father (Ed Herlihy in a bit part). Francis has the money to buy the bicycle, but Pee-wee has no intention of selling it.

So when Pee-wee goes shopping one day, stopping at among other places, the bike shop, where employee Dottie is trying to make Pee-wee see how much she loves him, he comes out of the store to find that his bike is missing. The logical conclusion is that Francis stole it, although to the police, this is a small enough crime that they've got bigger things to worry about. Pee-wee's hunch is of course right, but when Pee-wee offers a reward for the return of his bike, Francis is worried enough that he sells the bike to someone who will take it out of town.

Pee-wee visits a psychic who suggests that the bicycle was taken to the Alamo, where he'll be able to find it in the basement. This really sets off the adventure, as Pee-wee has to make his way to San Antonio. Of course, there's a big plot hole in that if Pee-wee could afford the reward money, why couldn't he fly or take a bus to San Antonio instead of having to hitchhike? But if that were the case, he wouldn't meet the assorted strange but mostly good-hearted people that he does.

Watching Pee-wee's Big Adventure, it's easy to see why it's a movie that divided critics when it was first released. Some people are going to find a feature-length film of the Pee-wee character too much to take, even if the movie is a relatively short 90 minutes. But the movie is another of those good-hearted movies that's utterly harmless. The material works in fits and starts, but I think what works does outweigh what doesn't.

Briefs for August 12-13, 2024

Tomorrow's (August 13) star in TCM's Summer Under the Stars is this year's big international star, French actor Jean-Paul Belmondo. I don't think I've got anything of his sitting on my DVR right now that I haven't blogged about before, and certainly not any of the movies that are airing as part of his day. However, I did want to mention a couple of the movies, for various reasons.

When Belmondo died back in 2021, I mentioned the movie Mississippi Mermaid as a movie I had seen some years back as part of a month-long TCM programming salute to director François Truffaut. It's airing at 6:15 AM (the odd starting time for Summer Under the Stars is becaus there's a short that kicks off Belmondo's day at 6:00 AM), which means I'll be putting it on the DVR and hopefully getting to it before my glut of foreign films causes some of the ones I haven't watched yet to drop off. I've got quite a few Japanese films to get through, for example.

Mississippi Mermaid is followed by one of Belmondo's international productions that I mentioned several months back when it was about to leave Tubi: The Burglars, at 8:15 AM. So this is your chance to catch it commercial-free.

One of my favorite Belmondo films is That Man from Rio, which shows up at 6:00 PM. It's followed by one of my least favorite out of the Belmondo movies I've see, Breathless, at 8:00 PM. To me, Breathless is one of those overly talky movies with the last act being way too much philosophizing. Breathless got a Hollywood remake in the early 1980s, and TCM showed that some months back, so I've got the Hollywood remake on my DVR but have not gotten around to watching it yet.

As far as non-Belmondo news, I'm still not used to stuff randomly leaving the various FAST platforms. The other day, I was going to log in to PlutoTV to watch something off the "Watch List" that I had set up, and was surprised to see a fairly large number of movies from the list missing. I assume that Pluto's contract to be able to show those movies ended, so all those movies just silently leave one's watch list. As always, it's a reason for getting physical copies of media and why content holders seem to want to get out of physical media.

FXM's retro block is still chugging along, although again there's nothing in the lineup that I haven't mentioned recently as being back, at least not since the last big refresh last October. I'm hoping there's another big refresh this October.

Love in Pawn

I've picked up several DVD sets from Amazon of the sort of British B movie that back in the day probably never got a release in America; I've already gone through one set. I've got another set of British B comedies, and among the movies in that box set is Love in Pawn.

Real-life husband and wife pair of Bernard Braden and Barbara Kelly, who had emigrated from Canada to the UK in the late 1940s, play a married couple who similarly emigrated from Canada, Roger and Jean Fox respectively. Roger is an artist who is making a modest living as a painter, and so tries to make some money on the side as a comic book writer. Their modest living only permits them to live on a houseboat. On the bright side, they've escaped the clutches of Roger's uncle Amos (Laurence Naismith). Amos is a well-to-do man back in Canada, owning a series of sawmills, and had suggested to Roger going into that family busines, which is part of why Roger left.

As you might have guessed from my naming an actor who plays Amos, the Foxes haven't completely gotten away from him. They get a call from a solicitor who wishes to see them about a bequest. Uncle Amos has offered to give the couple a cool £10,000, which would have been a pretty substantial sum back in 1953, but of course there's a catch. The catch is that the Foxes have to prove that they're living a sober and moral life (not that big an issue), but worse, they have to prove that they're not in debt to anybody. I'd think that might be a problem if they had a mortgage, but at least the terms of the bequest only say to the trustee's satisfaction. And it's not as if the couple have a mortgage anyway; part of the reason they're living on that houseboat is because that's all they can afford.

Worse is that they don't even have the money to live in the sort of lifestyle to which Uncle Amos might be accustomed, and he's going to be coming over from Canada to check on the Foxes. They try to call in any debts from anyone who might owe them money (not much), and also find they don't have much that they truly own and can sell to raise a substantial amount of funds. Until Jean gets an idea, that is. She read about an actress producing a play who pawned herself for one night in order to be able to pay the cast. So perhaps Jean could pawn Roger off for one night, which would raise a bit of money and also allow her to lie to the trustee that Roger has been called away to work on a commission.

Needless to say, it's a daft plot, and one that's not going to go like clockwork. First is that the lies about Roger being away don't seem very convincing. But then Roger gets sent to a family that could use someone to do a bit of painting around the house, the Trussloves. They've got an adult daughter, Amber (Jean Carson), who grows to like Roger. The whole story makes the "news of the weird" across the UK, but when Jean tries to get Roger back, she finds that the pawn ticket has gone missing!

Love in Pawn is the sort of offbeat story that I could easily see a Hollywood studio having made back in the 1930s. But because this is the UK, the studio seems to have an even smaller budget than what Hollywood's B movies "officially" had, never mind that in Hollywood they had the professional production values that the studios brought to prestige movies to play off of. The result is a movie that isn't terrible, but is also decidedly not memorable apart from the premise of pawning your husband.

The Flying Fleet

August 12 on TCM is the day in Summer Under the Stars for Anita Page, who was fairly big at MGM during the dawn of the sound era until she was eclipsed by other stars. Indeed, all of the films TCM is showing date from a four-year period between 1928 and 1932. The day kicks off with a movie that was on my DVR from the Memorial Day weekend military movie marathon: The Flying Fleet at 6:00 AM.

Anita Page is of course not one of the flyers since women were not admitted to the the Naval air corps when the movie was released in early 1929 as a silent film with a synchronized soundtrack and sound effects. That honor goes to the men, and there are six of them, headed by Tommy Winslow (Ramon Novarro) and Steve Randall (Ralph Graves). The six men are about to graduate from the Naval Academy in Annapolis, at which point they'll get commissions, although they all hope to become pilots instead. (Recall that the US did not have a standalone Air Force until after World War II.) But before any of them even get to pilot training, five of them go out for a night on the town while Tommy has to stay behind to relieve the duty officer. This is a blessing in disguise, as the men get drunk. One of them, Dizzy (Edward J. Nugent), gets expelled for his trouble and being the only one to get caught.

After graduation, they all do naval training before starting flight school. The first thing to do is a physical, and since one of the characters is "Specs" for his glasses, he's right out, although he's told that Admirals can have glasses, just not pilots. After a bunch of training in the naval air station in Pensacola, FL, the remaining men get sent to San Diego for training.

It's there that Anita Page shows up. She plays Anita Hastings, who apparently lives in San Diego, and immediately both Tommy and Steve are smitten with her. It's clear that since they're the only two so smitten, that the other two friends from Annapolis are going to wash out of pilot training. The other thing that's clear is that there's going to be a romantic rivalry between Steve and Tommy for Anita. Since Ramon Novarro is top-billed and was a bigger star at the time, you might guess that Anita is going to go for him. In some ways you'd be right, but....

Steve decides to try some underhanded things to win Anita's affection. Or, underhanded things to be able to spend more time alone with Anita. It climaxes with Steve stealing Tommy's trousers when Tommy and Anita go to the beach together. Steve proposes to Anita, and Tommy responds by strafing Steve. The superior officers notice Tommy's act, which is a violation of the rules. They punish Tommy by taking him off a test flight from San Diego to Honolulu.

In some ways, however, that turns out to be a good thing. The plane takes off, with a prototype aircraft carrier following behind. The plane, piloted by Steve and with two of the friend who washed out on the crew as navigator and radioman, hits a storm. Nowdays, flying over the top of a storm might not be such a big deal, and modern planes are tougher anyway. But the crew's attempt to avoid the storm fails, and they crash into the ocean, with Specs being badly injured. Will the search and rescue crews from the aircraft carrier find them in time?

The Flying Fleet is one part military movie and one part melodromatic romance, and it's the military part that works much better. Fans of old planes and old naval vessels will enjoy all the documentary footage, as The Flying Fleet was made with the sanction of the US Navy. The love triangle half of the movie, well, that doesn't work quite so well given how formulaic it is. Not that this is Anita Page's fault. Or even Novarro or Graves' faults, although it should be added that Graves doesn't have the screen presence that the other two do.

IMDb claims that The Flying Fleet is 100 minutes, while Wikipedia says 87, and the shorter running time fits the print that TCM ran over Memorial Day. I don't know if there was footage cut. The screenplay was courtesy of Spig Wead, who had been in the Navy himself before a serious injury. His story was told in The Wings of Eagles, where he was played by John Wayne.

Why people are afraid of Virginia Woolf

Today is Meryl Streep day in Summer Under the Stars and the day includes a couple of her films that I've wanted to see before. In an odd coincidence, the Streep films on my DVR are not among those on the lineup today. In any case, however, I decided to make today's post be about one of those movies: The Hours.

British writer Virginia Woolf (played here by Nicole Kidman) suffered from depression all her adult life, and she ultimately dealt with it by walking into a river and drowning herself to death in 1941. The movie begins with a dramatization of this, before we switch to the main action. That action is three different stories in three different time periods, all of which are related to Woolf's novel Mrs. Dalloway (itself turned into a movie a few years before The Hours). The stories are intertwined in the movie in the sense that it's not an anthology movie of discrete stories; instead, the action moves back and forth from one time period to another. I believe the first jump is to the then-present day of 2001, although to make the synopsis a bit easier to follow, I'm going to mention the three time periods and the stories each in its own discrete paragraph, and in chronological order.

Since Nicole Kidman won the Oscar for The Hours, you can expect that Virginia Woolf is rather prominent here. Indeed, Woolf is the subject of the first story, set in 1923 when Woolf was writing Mrs. Dalloway. Woolf was already suffering from her mental illness at the time, and everyone around her knew it, especially her husband Leonard, who moved her from London to one of the Home Counties so she could live somewhere less stressful, and he could start a publishing business out of the house to be closer to Virginia. Virginia's sister Vanessa (Miranda Richardson) pays a visit from together with her three children, and this is enough to bring up another of Virigina's depressive episodes, as she'd like to live in London again.

The second story is set in 1951, in one of those new developments in Los Angeles that sprung up after World War II. Laura Brown (Julianne Moore) is a housewife with young son Richard, and a second child on the way, married to Dan (no connection to the crappy writer). Dan had served in World War II and one of the things that sustained him was the hope that he could return home to a happy and quiet domestic life. He thinks he has that in his marriage to Laura, but deep down inside she's unhappy, and reading Mrs. Dalloway as a form of escapism. Meanwhile, her next door neighbor Kitty (Toni Colette) has to go to hospital for a uterine biopsy that may explain the reason why she's been unable to get pregnant. It's all enough to drive Laura to have thoughts of suicide, just like Virginia Woolf did.

Finally, in 2001, Clarissa (also the first name of Mrs. Dalloway in the Woolf novel) is a successful New York editor with a complicated personal life. She's living in a lesbian relationship with Sally (Allison Janney) and has an adult daughter Julia (Claire Danes). But, much earlier in life, she had an affair with Richard (Ed Harris), a gay poet who now has AIDS-induced mental issues. He lives in a crappy apartment converted from some sort of industrial building, where he spent 10 years writing a novel about all his friends, including his gay ex, Louis (Jeff Daniels). Richard is about to receive a prestigious award for his poetry, and Clarissa is throwing a party for him where he's expected to attend. He doesn't care for the award, however, figuring they're giving it to him now since he's probably dying.

The three stories are a bit complicated since the action keeps moving back and forth. I think the stories are also not always helped by the writing, especially the 1950s portion which seems like the stereotypical "gee, aren't the suburbs so stifling" message that gave me big problems with a movie like No Down Payment. The Hours, instead, is a movie for the acting. Pretty much all of the performances are excellent, Kidman picked up the Oscar, although any of the three female leads would have been worthy of a nomination. The male supporting roles are also well-portrayed, and even the child actor playing Laura's son in the 1950s timeline is quite good, with no cloying overacting.

It's a shame TCM couldn't be showing The Hours today, but then again, Meryl Streep has so many excellent movies to her name that a lot of them have to be excluded in just a 24-hour period.

The Taste of Sanma

I've got enough movies on my DVR that I'm in danger of not getting around to some of them before they get deleted, since YouTube TV only keeps stuff on your DVR for nine months, in exchange for a theoretically unlimited DVR. In fact, I think I've got quite a few foreign films recorded that I've needed to get around to watching, so there are going to be several posts that I wrote up quite some time before scheduling them to show up on the blog; it's not as if I want four or five posts in a row on Japanese films, for example. First up is director Yasujiro Ozu's final film, An Autumn Afternoon.

It's the early 1960s, and Shuhei (given name) Hirayama (Chishu Ryu) works in an office where he has a couple of young women working under him. This is the era when it still wasn't a certain thing that a woman would keep working when she got married, and one of his secretaries informs him that another one is about to get married, at the age of 23 or 24. That age thing is also important, because it's still apparently a time in Japanese society when if a woman doesn't get married before a certain age, she's going to be fated to be a spinster.

And, in fact, Mr. Hirayama has just such a daughter himself, Michiko. She's been helping take care of Dad largely because he's a widower, having lost his wife quite a few years back, presumably during one of the American bombing raids in World War II. Michiko doesn't have such strong memories of Mom, similar to her kid brother Kazuo. On the other hand, they have an older brother, Koichi, who is already married to Akiko.

After the opening scene with Mr. Hirayama at the office, the action cuts to a baseball game, which is in part a way to show that Japanese society is changing, what with the American occupation after the war and all the cultural influences that brought. We then cut from exterior shots of the stadium to the game being shown on television at a bar, followed by Hirayama and some of his old friends from his school days. There's some talk about the younger generation, and people getting married off or not getting married off.

Hirayama has regular meetings with his old school friends, and at one of them, a surprise face shows up: one of their former teachers, Sakuma. Sakuma didn't have the greatest fate in life, but in one key area he has something of not in common with Harayama: he's got an adult daughter taking care of him, who is also under threat of becoming a spinster. The sets Hirayama to thinking that he has to marry his own daughter off before she gets old enough that Japanese society no longer considers her marriageable.

An Autumn Afternoon is in many ways a slice of life movie, although I certainly wouldn't say it's plotless. It's more that the look at the life of its characters is more that than a decided story arc. It also has a leisurely pace -- but in the case of a movie like An Autumn Afternoon, that's something that actually works. The movie also does something that I've increasingly found myself liking in foreign films, which is crossing cultural boundaries and not being pretentious arthouse stuff. A lot of the themes here are things you could easily see being done in Hollywood films or movies from other countries, although obviously not quite the same way since there is Japanese-specific stuff.

But suffice it to say that An Autumn Afternoon is definitely a winner, and one that deserves to be watched.

The letter of color

Quite some time back, TCM ran a night of the films of Colleen Moore, who is best known for her silent films but did make a few sound movies before retiring. The last of those movies was an adaptation of the Nathaniel Hawthorne novel The Scarlet Letter.

I'll assume most people know the basic story. I'd already seen the Lillian Gish silent version but have never actually read the book before, so I can't say precisely how faithful any of the films are to the details of the book, but the basic story is there. This version starts off with a bit of humor, as we see the Massachusetts Bay colony in 1642. A couple of people other than Hester Prynne (that's Colleen Moore, of course) have committed offenses against the Puritan ideals, a gossip and a man who laughed on the Sabbath, and both are punished for comic effect.

We then meet Hester, who already has her baby Pearl in her arms. Hester is married, but her husband is presumed dead, so we know that Hester couldn't have gotten knocked up by her husband. Because of that, she's on trial, put up on the sort of platform that in movies set in a later era would have a hangman's noose and a trap door. But they're not hanging people for getting pregnant out of wedlock; not even the Production Code would be that mean. Instead, the colonial governor, Bellingham (William Farnum) and the minister to the congregation, Arthur Dimmesdale (Hardie Albright), implore Hester to identify the father so that he too may repent. She refuses to do so, so she's punished by being forced to wear a giant A on her bosom. (Too bad for her the Atlanta Braves and the University of Alabama didn't exist yet.)

In the very next scene, a bearded man shows up from out of nowhere, and registers with the authorities as Doctor Roger Pr.... (Henry B. Walthall). He then stops himself, and refers to himself as Roger Chillingworth, looking for a place to stay. Rev. Dimmesdale takes him to a lodging house where Hester works as a seamstress. The doctor shows up to tend to Hester, and apparently he's been away long enough that nobody but Hester recognizes him. Roger feels that both he and Hester have been wronged, but Roger feels that he really wants some sort of vengeance against the father. That, and he doesn't want anybody to know that he's Mr. Prynne, largely because in their society dishonor follows the husband of the faithless wife as well.

Of course, we know that Rev. Dimmesdale is actually the father. But he's a pillar of the community. So how is everybody going to find out the truth?

This version of The Scarlet Letter was made by Majestic Pictures, one of the Poverty Row studios, and it certainly has the look of a Poverty Row film. It doesn't help either, that the dialogue sounds all wrong coming from many of the cast members, and that it feels terribly talky.

Mikey and Nicky

I've mentioned quite a bit how I have a tendency to put movies on the DVR simply because they have an interesting synopsis. I also mention a lot how I watch movies that have an interesting idea and that you can see why the people involved would want to make it, but that it doesn't quite work for the audience. (Or, at least me personally as a viewer.) Another example of this is Mikey and Nicky.

Nicky is played by John Cassavetes, and as the movie opens he's in one of those cheap, grungy urban hotels that were a thing especially in movies up until about the 1980s. Nicky reads a newspaper headline about a man killed by gangsters, and he realizes that he's next. He's a small-time gangster collecting betting moneys for the syndicate higher up, except that this time he's decided to try to abscond with some of that money. Unsurprisingly, the bigwigs don't like that and want him dead.

Nicky doesn't have many people he can trust, and he's even driven his wife to the point of not wanting to see him, in part because she's smart enough to understand that if Nicky comes home to her, the Mob is going to come after her, too, and not just him. So Nicky calls the one person he thinks he can still trust, old friend Mikey (Peter Falk).

The plan is for Mikey to pick up Nicky and take him, well, somewhere. There's the question of whether there's any place Nicky can go and be safe, since the Mob will follow him to the ends of the earth. Worse is that Nicky is making life difficult for Mikey to the point that it's easy to understand why everybody else has abandoned him. They go first to a diner, then to a cemetery, and eventually talk about going to and all night cinema, with a few other stops along the way, including a hopeful visit to Nicky's wife.

Meanwhile, it's up to Kenny (Ned Beatty) to find Nicky and off him if possible. Kinney is consistently hot on their trail, although for most of the movie one step behind at least Nicky. Nicky, however, does finally piss off Mikey to the point that he thinks about saying the hell with it and helping Kinney find Nicky once Kinney finds Mikey.

As I implied above, it's not hard to see why people might find the idea of Mikey and Nicky a fun movie to make. Elaine May wrote and directed, and it feels like she was able to cast several of her very talented friends who all liked the idea of a bunch of friends working together. But then the film goes wrong.

Having read a bit more about the movie, I'm going to have to put the blame on May, no Gilda pun intended. Apparently, she shot a ridiculous amount of footage, much of which was unusable. And since she went well over budget both in terms of money and time, the studio asserted its contractual right to take the final edit away from her. The version we have now may be closer to what May intended, but in any case the result is way too talky, with a main character in Nicky with whom it's extremely difficult to have any sympathy.

A lot of people, however, insist that Mikey and Nicky is a lost classic, so it's one that you might wish to watch for yourself and develop your own judgment on.