Cleopatra (1912)

Quite some time back, TCM's Silent Sunday Nights selection was a 1912 version of Cleopatra. I'm always curious about very early movies, so naturally I recorded it to be able to see it and do a post on it.

The movie was made by one Helen Gardner, a stage actress who also was a teacher of "pantomime", which I would guess in this context means learning how to do the right gestures to try to display what action you mean in the context of silent cinema, where there's so much that you can't express with sound or dialogue. Gardner plays Cleopatra and the movie is based on a French stage play from about 1890. Obviously, being a silent film, one didn't need to worry about translating a stage play if the action could be followed; just the title cards would be necessary.

When I did my review of the movie Florence Foster Jenkins, I mentioned that the movie opens with her theatrical work presenting what were known as tableaux vivants, and much of the photography of this version of Cleopatra, being a pretty early silent, uses the same sort of staging. A fairly static camera films tableaux in medium-to-long shots, with a substantial use of title cards to add dialogue and action. (One IMDb reviewer mentions exactly 106 title cards; that number is probably right because in the print TCM showed the title cards seemed to be sequentially numbered.)

As for the plot, there are two plots. One is the relatively standard story line of Cleopatra falling in love with Marc Antony and getting him to fight the Battle of Actium against Octavian and his navy, with Antony and Cleopatra ultimately losing. This, of course, is what leads to Cleopatra retreating to her palace in Alexandria and having the venomous asp give her the fatal bite. The other plot, which takes up most of the first half or so of the movie, is about a fictitious Greek fisherman/slave named Pharon who is taken by Cleopatra's beauty and has a brief affair with her, even willing to kill himself just for the opportunity to have that affair!

One other interesting point about the movie is how many of the cast members are credited not by their full names, but as Mr./Mrs./Miss and their surnames. I know that some wives of prominent male actors would sometimes be credited as Mrs. and their husband's full name; I distinctly recall seeing Where Are My Children crediting Mrs. Tyrone Power (Sr.).

By the standards of 2024, this version of Cleopatra is an extreme antique, and notable by the fact that it does have a true feature-length running time of just under 90 minutes, which was astonishing for 1912. For anyone not interested in cinematic history, it's going to be difficult to watch thanks to Gardner not using much in the way of intercutting that other directors were already beginning to experiment with. She does use a lot of tinting, however.

Many of the IMDb reviewers also comment on the modern-day score that TCM apparently commissioned for this print some 20 year ago. That too isn't going to be to everybody's taste, but at least since it's a silent movie you can turn the volume off and imagine your own music.

The 1912 version of Cleopatra is a decided museum piece, but one that should probably be seen. As of this writing there are several copies available on YouTube.

Hair

Treat Williams died in 2023, and when TCM had its night in December honoring people who died, they selected him by showing the 1979 movie version of the musical Hair. Not having seen the movie (or, unsurprisingly since I don't do stage musicals for the most part), I decided to record the TCM showing in order to be able to do a post on it here. I've finally gotten around to watching it, so now it's time for the post.

It's the late 1960s, when the Vietnam War was at its height in America. Rural Oklahoma kid Claude Bukowski (John Savage) gets his draft notice, but for some weird reason this requires him to go all the way to New York City. I'd think the draft board would send him to a closer military base; apparently this is a change from the stage musical in which Claude was a New York hippie. So Claude heads off to New York, and seems as full of pride and willingness to serve as the steel-town workers from The Deer Hunter.

But in New York he gets waylaid by a group of hippies led by Berger (that's Treat Williams). They're basically being a bunch of dicks, trying to con people into giving them some money, and even devolving into behaviors that are rather more illegal (which escalates as the movie goes on). In this first encounter, they interfere with a rich girl from New Jersey, Sheila (Beverly D'Angelo), who's trying to rent one of thos Central Park horses. Claude saves her, and is smitten by her despite the fact that he's never going to see her again.

Or so he thinks. Since Sheila is a debutante type, the society pages mention one of the coming-out type dinners she'll be at, and the hippies arrange to crash the dinner, bringing Claude along. And Sheila kinda-sorta likes the idea of the bad boy. Not that Claude is a bad boy at heart, but the idea of the hippies violating all sorts of norms to get Claude to see Sheila again. And despite her supposed to be engaged to someone from her own class, Sheila is smitten with Claude, too.

Sheila's parents don't like any of this, so they understandably have the hippies arrested. Claude is so dumb that he uses up what little money he has left to bail out his "friends", who are inveterate moochers. To make matters worse, Berger and his merry band of hippies start carjacking Sheila and her boyfriend to get more money and access to a car.

Eventually, Claude does do his required enlistment, Berger is none to pleased about this, and decides to go out to the base where Claude has been stationed to try to get him to reconsider. Eventually, they even steal a car and commit much bigger crimes just to give Claude one more shot to see Sheila before going off to Vietnam. But there's a twist in all this....

The big problem I had with this version of Hair -- and again, I don't know how much the original Broadway musical has this problem, not having seen it -- is that the hippies are really selfish people here, not caring whom they inconvenience in order to get what they want. I mean, we're supposed to have sympathy for them despite the fact that they have no qualms about blocking drivers from going where they want and committing bigger carjackings, theft, and kidnappings. Regardless of your views on the Vietnam War, they're severely mean even to squares who did want to volunteer, and do it just so they can get their own way.

The musical version is also well known for having a nude scene in a draft board number. The movie, of course, couldn't go quite that far, and had to resort to "artistic nudity" in that scene. The actors are naked, but the camera work and placement of hands doesn't actually show the genitalia.

Still, I'm sure there are going to be people who enjoy this adaptation of Hair, even if I didn't.

Murder, but not my sweet

Robert Mitchum was TCM's Star of the Month back in January, and one of his movies I haven't gotten around to reviewing yet is Farewell, My Lovely. Recently, I finally watched it, so now I can do the review on it.

The movie is based Raymond Chandler's book of the same name, which had already been turned into a movie once before by a major studio, but under the title Murder, My Sweet. Mitchum stars as Chandler's detective Philip Marlowe, here in 1941 Los Angeles, with the passage of time marked by Joe DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak. Other than that, there's not much for Marlowe to look forward to, as he's stuck doing crappy cases finding runaway children or being harassed by the police who want information about one or another case they're investigating.

One night Marlowe finds a runaway teenaged girl working as a taxi dancer. Outside the joint just after getting his money, he's approached by a very large man, "Moose" Malloy (Jack O'Halloran). Moose has just been released from prison after serving a seven-year stretch, and the first thing he did was to go to the nightclub where his old girlfriend Velma worked, wanting to see her again. Seven years is a long time, and in the intervening years the place has changed to one serving a black clientele. So perhaps a private dick like Marlowe can help find Velma.

The new owners of the club, which had been named "Florian's" after the old owner, Jessie Halsted Florian (Sylvia Miles), suggest Marlowe go to the rooming house across the street since someone there might remember the old place. That is indeed the case, and the man suggests where to find Florian and to bring bourbon because she's a hopless drunk now. Jessie gives Marlowe a picture of Velma, and it looks like the case isn't going to be that difficult to solve.

Of course, we're only about a quarter of the way in to the movie, so it should be obvious that there's going to be a catch. The Velma in the photograph is not Velma at all, but a different woman who is now in a sanatorium. The real Velma is going to be much more elusive to find, and much more dangerous. Another guy calls up Marlowe for assistance, but that job goes bad, and the police pick up Marlowe telling him to stop looking for Velma, and that Malloy has gone to Mexico, which I'd think is a parole violation.

But Marlowe wants more information on the other man who hired him, since that guy got murdered on the job he hired Marlowe for while Marlowe was knocked out by unknown assailants. As he continues to poke around, he finds that things are complicated, as he's dealing with some very powerful people. No wonder one of them knocked him unconscious.

I have to admit that I haven't seen Murder, My Sweet in its entirety. But having The Big Sleep and Lady in the Lake, I should point out that at least Farewell, My Lovely isn't quite as convoluted as those other two, particularly The Big Sleep (which I find terribly overrated anyway). The movie has nice atmosphere, and Mitchum is good as the world-weary Marlowe who's getting too old to keep doin this job but doesn't know what else to do.

If you haven't seen Farewell, My Lovely before, it's definitely worth watching.

Kiss Me, Kill Me

TCM celebrated its 30th anniversary back in April, and one of their spotlights that month was to bring in some of the people who work(ed) behind the scenes at TCM to present a movie or two each. One of the production designers selected an early Stanley Kubrick movie, Killer's Kiss, although to be honest I recorded it more for the synopsis than realizing it was an early Kubrick film.

The opening credits are superimposed over a man in New York City's old Penn Station. After the credits, that man, Davey Gordon (Jamie Smith) delivers an opening monologue about how one can get oneself into a mess, just as he did starting a few days earlier.... Once again, this is a cue that makes it seem likely we're going to get another flashback, and sure enough we do. It also sounds as though Davey is on the run, although that turns out not to be quite true.

Davey is a boxer, as the monologue makes clear, since the flashback starts just before his latest fight, against an up-and-coming young man named Kid Rodriguez. Davey is down-and-going, to the point that his uncle out in Washington State has been suggesting that he go back west for a visit. Davey gets knocked out by Rodriguez and that just might be the impetus for him to go west to see his uncle and aunt again.

Meanwhile, Davey lives in one of those apartment buildings with a courtyard. In the apartment directly opposite his lives a taxi dancer, Gloria Price (Irene Kane). As Burt Lancaster had a tendency to do with Susan Sarandon in Atlantic City, Davey looks across from time to time at Gloria, without knowing anything more about her. Tonight, however, he has a bad dream (cleverly portrayed by the use of negative photography), from which he wakes up to discover that Gloria is having a bad time of it in her apartment with a man, who turns out to be Vinnie (Frank Silvera), her boss at the dance hall (Frank Silvera).

Davey goes over there to save Gloria, and over breakfast, she tells him her sad life story. Davey by this time has planned on going back to Washington, and has also fallen in love with Gloria, so the plan will be to bring her along. But each of them will need to pick up their final paychecks, which presents the big dramatic conflict of the movie. Gloria needs to get it from that nasty boss, with Davey waiting at the entrance to the dance hall. Vinnie is extremely jealous, and sends some goons out to rough up Gloria's companion. But in the meantime, Davey gets waylaid by somebody stealing his scarf, and his manager shows up with Davey's check from the last bout. So the henchmen rough up and kill the manager, with Davey being an obvious suspect. Worse, Gloria witnessed it, and Vinnie can't have her as a witness.

Killer's Kiss being a very early film for Kubrick, it was done on an extremely limited budget. Hence the no-name cast and a running time of only 67 minutes. And, in fact, it does have the feel of the sort of thing that might have worked better as one of those episodes in a live play of the week type anthology show that were the rage in the 1950s. That having been said, Kubrick shows that he has a great deal of talent, and also comes up with a lot of nice vintage photography of midtown Manhattan as it really would have been in the mid-1950s, the sort of stark black-and-white photography that can't be recreated by any of today's doe-eyed nostalgic looks back at the Boomer era.

Killer's Kiss certainly isn't the world's greatest movie by any means. But it's a decidedly interesting movie.

What if Sam Peckinpah directed Smokey and the Bandit?

Not too long ago, I notice a movie that sounded like it might be bad in a fun way was available on multiple of the FAST services: Convoy. I knew it was based on the novelty song from the mid-1970s, so I think I might have vaguely heard the movie but never seen it before. With that in mind, I decided to watch it before it leaves the FAST services.

The song tells about a trucker nicknamed "Rubber Duck", or at least that's his CB handle; those of you old enough to remember the 1970s will recall CB radio. Rubber Duck is played by Kris Kristofferson, and as the movie opens he's driving through Arizona in his semi when he gets passed by a woman in a convertible sports car, Melissa (Ali McGraw). This results in all sorts of dangerous driving, and Rubber Duck getting pulled over by a a cop. He gets out of it, however, by making up a story about the woman driving pantsless, which of course gets the cop to go chasing after the women.

The truckers chat with each other over the CB, as there are a bunch of them out on the road. In addition to Rubber Duck, there's "Love Machine" (Burt Young), who also gets named Pig Pen because he's hauling pigs. There's also Spider Mike (Franklin Ajaye). Then a fourth trucker called Cottonmouth comes on talking about the lack of police. It's a ruse, however, as Cottonmouth is actually the local sheriff (Ernest Borgnine) setting up a speed trap.

Eventually, the truckers decamp to a truck stop where, it turns out, Melissa is there, now without her car, which she had to sell for money to get to a job offer in Dallas. She'll eventually take up Rubber Duck's offer to ride in his truck, but not after some other shenanigans. The sheriff shows up looking for the truckers. He taunts poor Spider Mike, which results in a barroom brawl, and the truckers' case becoming a cause celebre as a whole bunch of other drivers start following them in the hopes that Rubber Duck can make it to Texas where he'll presumably avoid extradtion.

Now, you'd thnk the authorities could simply set up road blocks, but then, we wouldn't have much of a movie. Instead, they decide to jail and torture poor Spider Mike to try to get Rubber Duck to out himself in an attempt to rescue Spider Mike. But a lot of people, including the governor, seem to be on Rubber Duck's side.

I mentioned Smokey and the Bandit in the title of this post, and it should be obvious why. The material here has the potential to be reasonably funny, although Smokey and the Bandit would still probably be better thanks to the starring turn from Burt Reynolds. He had the charm to make this sort of role work, in a way that Kristofferson is just there.

The bigger problem, however, is that the movie was directed by Sam Peckinpah, who was known for his boundary-pushing violent westerns, notably The Wild Bunch. Peckinpah seems unsure here whether he should be directing a comedy, or whether he should try to push the boundaries again. So in things like the big fight at the truck stop, we get a lot of Peckinpah-style slow-motion gore that just doesn't work for the sort of comedy that Convoy is supposed to be. And the treatment of Spider Mike in the third act takes Convoy down much too dark a road.

Then again, Convoy was also based on a song that was well past its sell-by date, so it should be no wonder that it doesn't work. 45-plus years on, the movie is little more than a curiosity.

The Fuller Brush Girl

Another movie that I've had on my DVR for several months is the Lucille Ball comedy The Fuller Brush Girl. I don't think it's coming up on TCM any time soon, but it does show up from time to time on Cinevault Classics, one of the FAST channels that's on both the Roku Channel and TubiTV, albeit with commercials. (Indeed, it's one of the movies regularly in the promos.)

The movie begins with a comedic credits sequence of Lucy trying to see cosmetics, which is what Fuller Brush girls do, although she's not actually working for Fuller immediately after the credits. Instead, she's Sally Elliot, a switchboard operator for the Maritime Steamship Company. She works there with her fiancé Humphrey, who's a filing clerk. The two together would like to buy a house in the sort of new development that appeared in Lucy's earlier movie Miss Grant Takes Richmond, but they don't make enough money.

There's a chance, however, when Sally learns that the previous inventory has been fired. There's a chance for Harvey to get a promotion. What they don't know, however, is that their boss, Harvey Simpson (Jerome Cowan), is actually using the company as a front for smuggling. He could use an inventory man who doesn't realize what's going on, and Harvey fits that role perfectly. He's surprised, however, when he gets the promotion, since not five minutes earlier he just had the boss yelling at him to get the hell out of the office.

Meanwhile, Sally being in need of a job, she tries to apply with the Fuller Brush company since her best friend also has a territory in town with them. But Sally is as incompetent as Lucill Ball's character in her previous Columbia film Miss Grant Takes Richmond, which is an opportunity to engage in some side humor of the sort at which Lucille Ball was always quite good. But there's also a plot point here.

Simpson and his wife have gotten into an argument over some of those Fuller cosmetics Sally's girlfriend had brought to Sally's old office, and wants Sally to explain to Mrs. Simpson (Lee Patrick) what really happened. In the meantime, however, Mrs. Simpson decides to oust her husband from the shipping company, which would really screw up that smuggling. So Mr. Simpson hires a burlesque girl to impersonate Sally for that explanation, and then has the burlesque girl murder Mrs. Simpson. Sally shows up as a Fuller Brush girl just as the burlesque girl has murdered Mrs. Simpson. Said burlesque performer knows Sally out and frames her for the killing. Sally and Humphrey have to solve the case while evading the police, leading to a comic finale aboard one of the steamship company's ships.

The Fuller Brush Girl was made not long before Lucille Ball decamped for TV to start I Love Lucy. Ball is in reasonably good -- and reasonably typical -- zany form here, although I will admit that I prefer Miss Grant Takes Richmond. I think that's in part because Lucy was better paired there with William Holden, and because Lucy was the only incompetent one in that movie. Here, both leads are supposed to be somewhat incompetent, and that doesn't really work as well. Still, The Fuller Brush Girl is more than pleasant enough, and definitely worth a watch.

Thoughts on James Earl Jones, and other obituaries

So James Earl Jones died yesterday at the age of 93. I was thinking about his most famous roles, and wondering what TCM could show for a programming tribute. It was a bit surprising to me that there's a relative paucity of movies, with a lot more TV and straight-to-video stuff. Jones provided the voice of Darth Vader, but I don't think there's any way TCM could possibly get Star Wars now, even if it did get aired once several years back when TCM did a salute to 20th Century-Fox. I recall being quite surprised at the showing, since it was after Disney acquired the Star Wars franchise. Jones also provided his voice to The Lion King, but Disney animation is going to be a giant no go for TCM any more. Even when they had Leonard Maltin doing the Treasures from the Disney Vault series, feature animation was mostly non-existent.

So what could TCM show? There's certainly The Comedians, which without looking it up I'm pretty certain is MGM; if my memory serves it's one of the movies mentioned in that hilarious Lionpower promotional short. He was also in Dr. Strangelove. I'd love to see TCM show Sneakers, in which he has a smallish but important role, as well.

It was a week ago that James Darren died. I didn't realize quite how many movies Darren was in as a young man, although he was under contract to Columbia. TCM seems to have some ability to get the rights to run those pictures, although it's not quite as easy as stuff from the old "Turner library". I haven't seen anything about a tribute to Darren, although it wouldn't surprise me if he's the sort of person that gets a movie in December when TCM has its night saluting people who died over the course of the past year.

And, finally, I should probably mention the pasing of Will Jennings, who died last Friday aged 80. If you don't recognize the name, it's because he worked behind the camera. Or at least, off-camera, since he was a songwriter so technically not quite so directly involved in the movies. Except that he won two Oscars, for writing "Up Where We Belong" from An Officer and a Gentleman and that horrid "My Heart Will Go On" from the equally horrid 1997 version of Titanic.

He Knows You're Alone

October is generally the month for horror on TCM, what with it being Halloween and all. But a horror movie that I recorded some months back is reaching the top of my queue of watched but not posted about movies and, since it doesn't seem to be on the October schedule, it's getting a post now, in September: He Knows You're Alone.

The movie opens up with a scene that made me think of The Town That Dreaded Sundown: two young lovers go off to a secluded Lover's Lane somewhere and, in the back seat of the car, proceed to try to make out. But the two think they hear something outside the car, so as a result, the boyfriend gets out of the car to investigate. The girlfriend gets nervous considering how long her boyfriend is outside the car, so she too gets out, and.... At this point, we see somebody get up, to be revealed that this is actually a movie-within-a-movie, and two female friends are watching together in a theater balcony. The one girl, being a bit too scared, goes down for a bathroom break. But in the bathroom, she thinks she hears somebody else! She gets back to her seat, at which point we see a man proceed to sit down behind the two girls, and stab one of them to death through the seat!

Fast forward to Staten Island. The murderer from the theater has gotten on a bus to get away from the murder location, and headed west from Long Island to Staten Island, where he presumably lived. A police detective, Gamble, investigating the murder on Long Island hears from the victim's friend that the victim was scheduled to be married soon, which horrifies Gamble. Apparently there was a serial killer some years back who killed brides-to-be, and one of those victims was Gamble's fiancée. So he's got a personal stake in this case, which is why he's at both that murder scene and trying to run the investigation in Staten Island once murders start happening there.

Oh, yeah, I suppose that's technically giving away a plot point, but it wasn't if if you didn't know there were going to be more murders. It's not as if the movie is trying to hide what it's going to be doing. On Staten Island, Amy is a college student studing psychology under Prof. Carl Mason (James Rebhorn, one of the few recognizable names in the cast) together with friends Joyce and Nancy. Amy is engaged to be married to Phil, although she's got an ex-boyfriend in Marvin who still likes her although she didn't like his working in a morgue.

The killer starts stalking Amy, while also killing a whole bunch of people around her. Gamble keeps investigating, taking the law into his own hands by stealing evidence from a crime scene (although to be fair, it's shocking the other police didn't find it on the murder victim's body). With He Knows You're Alone being an early 1980s slasher film, it's not surprising how this all plays out and leads to the finale.

He Knows You're Alone was unsurprisingly savaged by the critics, which is unsurprising partly because of the divide between critical reception and the views of the general public. However, part of the poor critical perception is that the movie really is generally pedestrian. It was done on a very low budget; Tom Hanks (as a college student jogger Nancy keeps meeting) and Paul Gleason as a police detective are the other two recognizable names in the cast. That low budget shows. Also, He Knows You're Alone has a ton of plot holes. As an example, for the finale, Amy makes a 911 call before the finale, but Det. Gamble shows up before the regular police do and is there a long time before the police show up. There's also one exceedingly obvious bit of foreshadowing. Well, multiple involving musical cues, but one not doing so.

He Knows You're Alone is probably the sort of movie it's more fun to watch with a bunch of friends and have a laugh over than it is a movie with any real frights. But it's still worth a watch.

Till the Clouds Roll By

I had some more movies that were about to expire from YouTube TV's cloud DVR, so I had to make a point of watching them to do a review now. The latest is the musical "biopic" Till the Clouds Roll By.

The movie opens with one of those old-style forewords informing us that the action begins on December 27, 1927, the opening night of the musical Show Boat. The music was written by Jerome Kern (played here by Robert Walker), a composer who had already had a string of Brodway hits in the 1920s, although getting to the top wasn't easy. On his way back home after the show, he asks the cab driver to detour and look for a particular brownstone. Since the movie opens up at the height of Kern's career, we know that we're about to get an exceedingly original plot device... the flashback to the beginning of the subject's career.

This time, we go back around 20 years (the real-life Kern got his start fairly young, around age 20 in 1905). Young Jerome is a budding composer, but he doesn't know so much yet about lyrics or good arrangements. To that end, he's been sent to the brownstone that older Jerome asks the driver to stop by. There (in 1905) lives an arranger, James Hessler (Van Heflin). Now, this leads to why I put the word "biopic" in sneer quotes above. James Hessler is the other main character of the movie along with Kern, but Hessler is a completely made-up person! Hessler is an arranger who would like to be a symphonic composer. He's also a widower with a young daughter Sally (grown-up Sally is played by Lucile Bremer). In any case, Hessler becomes Kern's mentor.

Kern writes good music, and would like to write for Broadway, but when they try to get a foot in the door, they learn that it's still the fad on Broadway to import revue-type shows from the UK and that the music of London is more popular to the Broadway crownd than the new American sounds bubbling up. So it's off to London.

Kern eventually meets British producer Charles Frohman (a real-life person, and his death along with Kern's tangential relationship to that being more or less accurately portrayed), and is able to sell one of his songs to Frohmann's London Gaieties. This also leads to Kern getting hired to write more songs for a show that's going to open in New York. Also while in the UK, Kern met Eva (Dorothy Patrick), the woman who would become Mrs. Kern.

Kern goes back to America with the Hesslers and Frohman, and I'd guess it was the US being out of the Great War for a couple of years while the European powers were fighting it that really boosted the careers of composers like Kern. Sally, now grown up, has always considered Jerome like an uncle, and wants to follow Jerome into musical theater. To that end, Jerome even writes a song for a musical that would give Sally her first solo even though she's not going to be the star of the show. The producer, however, thinks the song would be a better fit for the show's star, Marilyn Miller (another real-life person, played by Judy Garland). Sally has a hissy fit and... runs away!? Dad, by now ill with heart problems, wants Jerome to find Sally, but Dad dies before father and daughter can be reunited.

Jerome, like a lot of other composers and lyricists, went off to Hollywood once sound comes to movies, and wrote more memorable songs for movies in addition to adapting some of the old musicals for Hollywood. The last 10 minutes or so is a montage of various MGM stars doing numbers of a bunch of different songs, giving MGM a chance to put those stars into a big-budget musical if they hadn't already been used in a production number earlier in the movie.

If you like the Great American Songbook, you'll love Till the Clouds Roll By. The songs are unsurprisingly quite good. There's a reason why things like Show Boat or the song "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" from Roberta endure. The production numbers MGM did, at least up until the finale which is a bit more bland, are also very well done. The dramatic story, however, is something best not discussed. To be fair to MGM, however, the real life Jerome Kern story was mostly something not cinematic or dramatic enough for a biopic. But that's part of why Till the Clouds Roll By is a bit of a mixed bag.

If you like the Freed Unit, then Till the Clouds Roll By is definitely for you.

Maksim Gorky is turning Japanese

Another of the many foreign films I had sitting on my DVR was another Akira Kurosawa movie: The Lower Depths.

The opening credits mention it being based on a play by Russian playwright Maksim Gorky, although the action has been moved from early 20th century Russia to 19th century Japan. The action is mostly in a rooming house that looks a lot like it could substitute for the tenement neighborhood of Dodes'ka-den a dozen years later in Kurosawa's career. Osugi is a middle-aged woman who rents out alcoves around a large common area, the alcoves curtained off which is the only privacy the renters get.

Among the renters is an older tinker whose wife is terminally ill and everybody knows it; an alcoholic actor who's drunkien himself into a lack of ability to memorize lines; several men who gamble; and a thief Sutekichi (Toshiro Mifune) who fences the things he steals with Osugi's husband. Osugi likes Sutekichi more than her own husband, but she's also got a sister Okayo who develops feelings for him.

Into all this comes a much older man, Kahei, claiming to be a pilgrim traveling through the region. He has a bit of ability to put people at ease, and also to get in the middle of people's disputes and defuse things, but everybody also wonders where he's really what he's claiming to be. Everybody gets their day in the sun in terms of plot lines, although the biggest one involves Sutekichi since Mifune is the biggest star in the cast.

For me, The Lower Depths was a bit tough to come up with an assessment of, in part because of the lack of an overriding plot. I already mentioned Dodes'ka-den, which I watched first, and that was deliberate because there are certainly some similarities between the two films thematically. But The Lower Depths feels like it moves even slower, and is more philosophical.

Fans of foreign films will probably enjoy The Lower Depths, although if I were recommending Kurosawa I'd probably start off with something else, probably One Wonderful Sunday.

Quite contrary

Debbie Reynolds was TCM's Star of the Month back in March, and one of her movies that I recorded then is showing up again on TCM: Mary, Mary, tomorrow (September 8) at 1:45 PM.

Reynolds is the one big star here, although she's not the first person we meet, or even the second. The honor of first goes to Barry Nelson, who plays Bob McKellaway. Bob's a New York publisher, and he's about to get married to young socialite Tiffany (Diane McBain). But before he can get married, a few things have to happen, like his divorce getting finalized. Stop me if you've seen this one before, because it's really not difficult to see where the movie is going to wind up; it's more a question of how it gets there.

The how it gets there involves Bob's tax attorney, Oscar Nelson (Hiram Sherman). Bob is being audited for a mid-four-figure sum, which was pretty substantial for the early 1960s when the movie was made. Part of the problem is that Bob isn't the best of record keepers, with a bunch of canceled checks. Because it's a joint account, Oscar has invited Bob's wife Mary (that's Debbie Reynolds) up from Philadelphia so that the three of them can go over the accounts together, since you'd think that Mary having been his wife at the time would make a difference to her in terms of whether she has any tax liability.

Complicating matters is the fact that Mary and Tiffany have never met. Once again, as you can guess, they're about to meet, although Bob tries to prevent that. And then there's the final member of this cast of crazies. Dirk Winsten (Michael Rennie) is an actor whose best days are behind him. As a result, he's decided to write a memoir, but he's the sort of person who could really have used the more modern standard, especially with professional athletes of an "as told to" where a journalist or writer interviews the subject and then edits the interviews into something the public would want to read. The current state of Dirk's memoir is just a bunch of anecdotes, almost as messed up as Norma Desmond's screenplay for Salome. He comes up to Bob's apartment to discuss the memoir, and meets Mary there, asking her out to dinner.

When Mary and Dirk go out for dinner, Bob takes Tiffany for a night out. But Bob and Tiffany get caught in a blizzard and have to go back, while the blizzard also causes Mary to have to stay the night; not having gotten a hotel room, Mary is going to have to use the couch or a spare bedroom in Bob's apartment or something. With Bob and Mary alone together for a while, they start to wonder whether they're not still in love.

Mary, Mary was based on a popular stage play, and that really shows in this filming of the story. It's the sort of material that I have the feeling worked a lot better on the stage, where there's a live audience for the actors to play off of. Here, everything seems once again not quite right. That is, however, I think also in part because of the way Mary is written as a character. A comment is made that a big part of Mary's personality is that she's "direct, straightforward, and said exactly what she meant". This doesn't always work to make Mary a likeable character.

Still, since the play is over 60 years old and it's not as if it's going to be revived with big names any time soon, this TCM showing of the movie version is your chance to catch it.

The Secret Passion

Montgomery Clift was honored in Summer Under the Stars, and one of his movies that I somehow neglected to DVR was the biopic Freud. Fortunately, it was on Watch TCM for a while, so I was able to watch it there before it expired and write up and schedule this post.

As you might guess, the movie is about Sigmund Freud, one of the key names in psychoanalysis, even if a lot of his ideas were oversimplified when he proposed them, simply because nobody else had proposed such ideas before and most theories wind up needing a fair bit of refinement. Freud, played here by Clift, had a long and complicated professional life -- much too long for one movie, in fact -- so the movie only deals with a decade or so in the early part of his career.

The movie opens in Vienna in 1885, where he's engaged to Martha (Susan Kohner), and working at a hospital under Dr. Meynert (a real person, played here by Eric Portman). However, the two doctors get involved in a professional dispute over the treatment of hysteria, a disorder which for a good portion of history was thought to be centered in the uterus ("hysterectomy" comes from the same Greek root). The dispute causes Freud to leave the hospital, delay his marriage to Martha, and go to Paris to study further.

In Paris, Freud studies under Jean-Martin Charcot (another real person who did research into several neurological conditions including ALS). At this point in his career Charcot was studying the possibility of treating hysteria through the use of hypnotherapy, a fairly radical idea at the time, and one which I think the movie treats rather too simplistically, as if you can just hypnotize someone by snapping your fingers. But the idea intrigues Freud, and he starts using hypnotherapy to try to treat some of the more unusual cases he encounters when he gets back to Vienna.

For better or worse, the cases Freud encounters all seem to involve odd sexual hangups. One, Cecily (Susannah York), is being treated by Freud's partner in practic Dr. Breuer (Larry Parks). Her father died in Naples and ever since then she's had partial paralysis and insomnia and a host of other problems. Worse, she starts showing an attraction to Dr. Breuer that results in his handing the case over to Sigmund. In turn, Cecily starts feeling attracted to Freud.

The other case involves young Carl (David McCallum) who describes some really weird dreams and an odd relationship with his parents, with the final result of the first session being that Carl tries making out with a dressing mannequin. Creepy stuff, and it starts giving Freud bad dreams of his own. Physician, heal thyself, some would say, but in a case like this Freud might want to try discussing his dreams with another professional.

However, in dealing with all these cases, Freud starts developing ideas about child sexuality and how not being able to deal with these childhood thoughts properly is one of the underlying causes of neuroses. It's a controversial idea, and needless to say when Freud tries to present it at a medical conference the other doctors are radically opposed to it because, as is also said, science advances one death at a time. Of course, Freud is a well-known and influential name today, so we know how his ideas eventually become a part of the public consciousness.

This biopic of Freud was directed by John Huston, who I think I've mentioned was not my favorite director, certainly not in the later part of his life when the movies became more self-indulgent. I can see why people would be interested in the idea of making a biopic on Sigmund Freud. Huston does, I think, about as well as possible with the material, but I still think Freud isn't going to be a movie for everybody.

What if Stanley Kramer did The Best Years of Our Lives?

In looking at the movies that are on my DVR, I notice that I've got quite a few from April when Marlon Brando was TCM's Star of the Month. So even though I've got some older stuff on my DVR, especially foreign films, I decided to fire up one of the Brando films. This time, it was his first feature film, The Men.

The movie begins with one of those prologues that in the earlier days, especially with historical films, would scroll up over the screen. This time, the prologue informs us that the movie is about the struggles men face after returning home from war, and how these can be greater than the actual struggle of combat. We then are presented with an establishing scene of urban combat in which a man is shot by a sniper, leaving him paralyzed. That man, Lt. Ken Wilocek (Marlon Brando), is then overlooked for several minutes while we get to scenes to introduce some of the other characters.

Probably most important here is Dr. Brock (Everett Sloane). He's been doing research into paraplegia, and is working at a veterans' hospital since World War II gave doctors a lot of injured soldiers to treat. Again, however, before we meet the soldiers, we meet the women in the soldiers' lives, wives, mothers, and girlfriends, as Dr. Brock gives them a lecture on what to expect and answers their questions, including some fairly frank questions for a film from 1950 about the regularity of the urinary and intestinal tracts, as well as the ability to father children.

As for the soldiers, they're housed in wards since there seems to be so many of them. The important ones for our movie are Norm (Jack Webb, sporting a ridiculous goatee that Sgt. Friday would have railed against for being the sign of a beatnik druggie), who is a bit of the boss of the ward and head of the hospital's branch of the Paralyzed Veterans of America; Leo (Richard Doolin), who since the war seems to care more about playing the ponies; and Angel (Arthur Jurado, a paraplegic in real life), a Mexican-American who wants to be able to build a better house for his widowed mother and younger siblings. Lt. Wilocek is still in a private room, which is where the more serious cases go, although it really feels as though what's serious about his case is that he, like Dana Andrews in The Best Years of Our Lives has greater psychological problems than physical.

It's easy to think of Dana Andrews here, not just because both characters needed to get wise to themselves. In addition, Ken's old girlfriend from college before the war, Ellen, is played by Teresa Wright. She's still in love with Ken, and she thinks she can make things "better" in some amorphous way. But Ken is trying to block her at every turn. To add to the Best Years of Our Lives comparison, there's a scene later in the movie with actor Ray Teal, who picked on Harold Russell about what good came of his injuries. Here, he picks on the paralyzed veterans at a bar and gets punched for his trouble.

I mentioned several months back when I reviewed Not As a Stranger that, watching a Stanley Kramer movie, it sometimes feels as though the point that he's trying to make is sometimes more important than the story itself. There's a fair bit of that in The Men, starting with the lecture scene. There's also a bit of a feeling that in discussing the relationship problems Ken and Ellen would go through, Kramer and scriptwriter Carl Foreman might have had a laundry list of issues they wanted to discuss.

On the whole, however, The Men does work, thanks in part to a strong performance from Brando, which is unsurprising given what his career would go on to be. Much more surprising, however, is the performance from Jack Webb, who most definitely is not the wooden stereotype he'd go on to be especially in the 1960s Dragnet days.

So even though The Men is not without its flaws, it's one you should probably watch if you get the chance.

The Cheaters

I recorded quite a few movies last Christmas and have been watching them before they expire on the DVR as they only last nine months. While I suppose I could write up the posts and save all of them for December, obviously the time at which they expire from the DVR is well before TCM's December schedule will be known. So I wouldn't know if all of them are going to be showing up on TCM this Christmas. (Then again, some of them, like My Night at Maud's back in August, are only set at Christamstime and not really Christmas movies.) The latest of the movies, which is definitely much more of a Christmas movie, is The Cheaters.

J.C. Pidgeon (Eugene Pallette) is a New York businessman who's fallen on hard times. That's in part because the rest of his family -- wife Clara (Billie Burke) and daughter Therese (Ruth Terry) especially, along with lazy brother-in-law Willie (Raymond Walburn) -- are profligate spenders to the point that they've spent him into near bankruptcy and a string of process servers coming to J.C.'s office. The only saving grace is that J.C. has a rich uncle Henry out west who is on his deathbed. J.C. has sent son Reggie out there to butter up Henry in the hopes that perhaps Henry might remember them in his will and secure the family's finances.

J.C.'s family are about to make his life more difficult. Therese has a boyfriend Stephen who's serving in the Army and is coming home for the holidays (the movie was released in 1945, just as World War II was ending, but was based on a play written before the US entry into the war), and she wants to impress him. To that end, she insists that the family take on a "charity case" for the holidays, as that's what all the rich people do. In the announcements in the newspapers, they read of a Mr. M., who was a former matinee idol on the stage before getting in a car crash that led him to drink, costing him his acting career. Mom loves the idea of having an actor, so they pick that case. Cut to a scene of Mr. M., real name Anthony Marchand (Joseph Schildkraut), renewing his Actors Equity card.

And then Henry actually dies. Reggie was there for the reading of the will, which was a huge problem for the family. Mercurial uncle Henry apparently believed in charity cases himself. He was so taken by one such case, a showgirl named Watson from 30 years earlier when she was just a child actress, that he left the entire will to her instead of his nephew since Henry had the good sense to understand that Clara is a spendthrift. However, there's a catch, which is that Henry doesn't know what happened to Watson, so if the executor can't find the woman in question, the money will revert to J.C. With that in mind, J.C. comes up with the plan to find Watson himself and keep her incommunicado until the "reasonable" period of time to find her passes.

This is where the family's having taken on a charity case might just help. Marchand, being an actor, has access to Actors Equity and can use that to find her. Willie approaches her and says she's a long-lost cousin, and would she like to spend Christmas with the family. Not that she knows the ruse, although Marchand does. Everybody decamps to a cottage out in the country, and the rest of the movie deals with which secrets will be found out, as pretty much everybody in the movie is keeping things hidden.

I mostly liked The Cheaters, even though everybody here is being a bit dishonest at heart. You get the impression that none of these characters is going to use the money honestly and that frankly, Uncle Henry had the good sense not to bequeath it to J.C. and his side of the family. However, the acting overcomes the script problem, and the Christmas theme softens a lot of the greed.

The Cheaters was made at Republic, and because the cast is mostly people who didn't get to be leads in movies at the biggger studios, it's easy to see why the film became forgotten over the years until TCM resurrected it 15 or so years ago. But it's definitely worth one watch. Not as good as, say, It Happened on Fifth Avenue, but still enjoyable enough.

For Heaven's Sake

Among the plethora of silent films I've got sitting on my DVR is a pair of Harold Lloyd quickies, both running a shade under an hour in length. First up is For Heaven's Sake.

Harold Lloyd once again plays The Boy, this time named Harold Manners. He's an extremely wealthy man, as he gets in multiple car crashes in one day, totaling his luxury cars and getting a blurb in the newspaper for it. In addition to being that sort of accident-prone, Harold also accidentally sets fire to a food cart. The only thing is, this particular food cart wasn't being run by a traditional food vendor, but a Brother Paul, who together with his adult daughter Hope (Jobyna Ralston, referred to once again in the credits as The Girl), runs one of those missions in the poor part of town for the down-on-their luck.

Harold doesn't realize this, so he writes a check to cover the damage that he caused, which Brother Paul interprets as a check to support the mission, which he then names in honor of Harold. Harold is none too pleased when he finds out the next day that the mission is named after him, because he doesn't believe in that stuff and certainly doesn't believe in charity for the purpose of getting your name in the paper and looking good. He vows to go down to the mission and give the folks running it a piece of his mind.

But then he meets Hope, and falls in love with her because of how pleasant-looking she is. He then starts helping the mission out in an attempt to get Hope to fall in love with him, too. However, all sorts of mishaps happen, since this is after all a Harold Lloyd silent comedy with all the sight and physical gags.

For Heaven's Sake isn't exactly a bad movie, but in terms of Harold Lloyd's work, there's definitely a lot of his stuff that I prefer. Part of that is that there really isn't all that much of a plot here, just a series of scenes that don't always fit together. (I suppose you could argue the same for a classic like Safety Last!, but there, the framing story works better.) Still, it's Harold Lloyd, and he's always nice enough to watch.

TCM's Barbara Rush tribute

Barbara Rush and Richard Carlso in It Came from Outer Space (11:30 PM)

Actress Barbara Rush died at the end of March at the age of 97. Rush didn't hit the A list, but she made enough movies during the studio system that TCM was able to get the rights to run a handful of them, enough to eventually give her a night-long tribute. That tribute is tonight, and includes five of her movies:

8:00 PM Bigger than Life, in which Rush plays the wife of teacher James Mason, who gets addicted to... cortisone!?
9:45 PM World in My Corner, in which she plays an upper-class girl who falls in love with a boxer;
11:30 PM It Came from Outer Space, a scifi movie with professor Richard Carlson investigating an extraterrestrial phenomenon that falls to earth and could pose danger to mankind;
1:00 AM The Young Philadelphians, a Paul Newman vehicle with him as a lawyer from modest background who wants to marry his girlfriend (Rush) although his boss wants him to marry up and make partner; and
3:30 AM Robin and the 7 Hoods, a Rat Pack movie shifting the Robin Hood story to Chicago and putting Rush in the Maid Marian role.

Timberland guns

Another movie that I had on my DVR for a little while was Guns of the Timberland. TCM ran it I think in July, and then ran it again in August for Jeanne Crain's day in Summer Under the Stars. But I had enough other stuff to post about that I didn't get around to posting about it then. Besides, I noticed that it was coming up again in September, for a daytime of movies starring Alan Ladd. That showing is coming up tomorrow, September 3, at 1:00 PM.

Alan Ladd plays Jim Hadley, and as the movie opens, he and a bunch of other men are on a seeming freight train, no passenger cars, heading to parts unknown. Or, more specifically, a place called Deep Well. Ladd and his business partner, Monty Welker (Gilbert Roland), have a contract from the government to do a lot of logging in the area because the train line that's getting built needs more wood for rail ties. Ladd is bringing a bunch of men with him, and a bunch of money to provision the men, which seems like it should be a good thing for the townsfolk. Yet all of them seem unhappy when Jim reveals that they're loggers.

The deeper reasoning behind their antipathy is revealed by Laura Riley (Jeanne Crain). She owns a ranch and a bunch of horses that Jim is hoping to rent for his men. But when she finds out that he's a logger, she's fearful, for an understandable enough reason. Her, and everybody else's cattle, need land to graze on, and that land needs topsoil to grow the grass. The trees up in the mountains lock in that topsoil, and if somebody clear-cuts the trees, which is pretty much what Jim is going to do, the ranchers think the land below will become much less nutrient-rich.

Jim takes his men up in to the forest, which is in part an excuse for the moviemakers to show scenery, although this movie was made in 1960. If this were one of the early Technicolor forestry movies from the late 1930s, the scenery might have worked better here. In any case, the weekend comes, and the men want to go back into town to blow off some steam, or at least to have a few drinks. They get to the saloon while the townsfolk are holding a dance in a different building, which is also an excuse for Warner Bros. to show off its new star, Frankie Avalon, singing a very out of place song. Avalon plays Bert Harvey, one of Riley's ranch hands, but winds up having a more substantial role.

The townsfolk learn of the loggers' entry into town, which gives them an idea to come up with some way to try to delay the loggers' progress. They eventually do this by dynamiting the access road back to where the loggers are working. They can walk back, but getting the logs out of the forest is going to be tough. There's another approach, but it goes over the Riley spread.

So the rest of the movie plays out like the sort of western that saw the relatively common theme of the rancher who wanted an open range versus the homesteade who wanted to fence in the land, only with ranchers versus loggers this time. Guns of the Timberland is one of the many movies where it's again easy enough to see why people were interested in the source material (a Louis L'Amour novel) that would give them the chance to film in some very pretty locations. But the plot winds up being a fairly tepid affair and slow going despite the film's putative action and shortish running time of only 91 minutes.

Ultimately to me, Guns of the Timberland felt more like the sort of thing that would in later years be made as a TV movie of the week.

TCM Star of the Month September 2024: Lauren Bacall

Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall in The Big Sleep (Sept. 16, 10:00 PM)

We're into a new month, and that means it's time for a new Star of the Month on TCM. This month, that honor goes to Lauren Bacall, which would be because this month sees the 100th anniversary of her birth, specifically on September 16. So every Monday in prime time in September, TCM is going to be showing her movies. TCM is only showing 20 movies, which you might think would be appropriate for four nights. But I'd bet Mondays (five nights) were selected in large part because the actual centenary falls on a Monday. And, in fact, there are only four nights of Bacall because Sept. 30 sees a salute to Truman Capote.

Lauren Bacall and Hoagy Carmichael in To Have and Have Not (Sept. 16, 8:00 PM)

I included a photo from The Big Sleep at the top of the post, since it's the one I've got that includes Bacall with her husband Humphrey Bogart. They made four movies together, and in fact TCM will be running all four of those movies in chronological order on Bacall's centenary on September 16. Ending the night, at 4:00 AM on Sept. 17, is a documentary, Bacall on Bogart.

The salute kicks off tonight with one of Bacall's movies at Fox that was in the FXM rotation ages ago, but I don't think has shown up for a while, Woman's World, tonight at 8:00 PM. Executive Clifton Webb wants to elevate one of his employees to vice-president, but he also believes that seeing the men's wives and how they handle the stresses of having an executive husband is important in finding the right man. So he brings three of the candidates and their wives to New York to make the decision. Bacall plays Mrs. Fred MacMurray.

September 9 kicks off at 8:00 PM with Written on the Wind, for which I only have a picture of the poster on my hard drive. But I had only posted that to Photobucket ages ago, so I wanted to put it up on Blogger. There's one other poster I've got, for Bright Leaf, which is on at 4:15 AM on September 24, so at the end of the final night of Bacall's salute.

Shipmates Forever

A couple of months back, I did a post on the Dick Powell/Ruby Keeler movie Flirtation Walk, mentioning that it was going to be airing in a double feature with another Powell/Keeler movie, Shipmates Forever; in fact I had both on my DVR from a previous double feature. Going through the long backlog of movies on my DVR, I've finally gotten around to watching Shipmates Forever, so now would be a good time to do a post on it.

This time around, Dick Powell doesn't start off in the US military. Instead, it's his father, a man named Richard Melville II and played by Lewis Stone, who is in the military. Specifically, he's an admiral who has reached the age where they can't really use him on a ship any more so that he'd be better for the Navy as the commandant of the Naval Academy in Annapolis. He's about to have his last watch ceremony on board ship, and would really like his son, Richard III (that's Dick Powell, as implied above) to come down and see it.

Dick III, being played by Dick Powell, is a radio crooner who loves his father, but would really rather continue being a radio crooner since his heart isn't anywhere near the navy and besides, his radio work really pays the bills in a way serving in the navy wouldn't. But since he loves his father, he travels to port to see his father's retirement ceremony. Dad uses this as an opportunity to try to manipulate his son into trying out for the Academy. Interestingly, Dad's rather selfish treatment of his son is consistently portrayed in Shipmates Forever as a good thing.

At the ceremony, Dick III meets a lovely young woman, June Blackburn (Ruby Keeler), and immediately falls for her. In talking about joining the Navy, June mentions that she's not so certain she wants a husband in the navy, since she lost her father and a brother in the war (which of course refers to the first World War, since the movie predates the European theater of World War II). But young Dick finally caves to his father's pressure, and takes the entrance exam with the intenion of refusing his commission when he graduates.

We then get introduced to a couple of other men who also want to enroll at the academy. Coxswain (John Arledge) is already in the Navy but wants to become an officer, which necessitates getting into Annapolis. Cowboy (Eddie Acuff) is joining from Arizona, while Sparks (Ross Alexander), who has a way with the radio, is also not from a navy family.

As you can guess, all for get in, and become roommates together, at least during their first year. But young Dick is still insistent on going back to crooning after graduation, refusing the commission, so he makes himself distant from those who would otherwise be his friends. This includes even Coxswain, who really wants Dick's help in not flunking out of the Academy. Once again, Dick's actions are presented as being a bad thing. And then, to make matters worse, June tells Dick that she can't marry him if he drops out of the Academy or refuses his commission!

Of course, as you might guess, Dick is going to get a chance to "redeem" himself at the end, and given what's transpired in the first 90 minutes or so, you can guess how that's going to go. Shipmates Forever is supposed to be a feel-good movie.

For me, however, Shipmates Forever doesn't work as well as Flirtation Walk, for several reasons, and I say that as someone who didn't think Flirtation Walk holds up as well as the Warner's musicals from 1933. One is that, as I strongly implied above, Lewis Stone is just downright nasty here at times as the father trying to cajole his son into following his footsteps, and not what the son wants -- especially considering what the son wants is in no way unrespectable or immoral. Worse, however, is that Powell and especially Keeler are somewhat misused here. Shipmates Forever is somewhat of a musical, and Powell certainly gets to sing. But Keeler, known as a dancer (cue the jokes about the quality of her dancing), gets precious few opportunities to dance. And there aren't any Warner Bros.-style musical numbers here.

Shipmates Forever comes across as the sort of movie where the studio bosses saw the success of Powell and Keeler as a screen couple and wanted to put them in another movie together, but didn't really have anything ready to put them into. The result is a movie where the component parts don't really jell.