One Touch of Venus

Back in April, I mentioned how TCM was running a limited series called Two for One, in which 13 film people were selecting double features to run on Saturday nights through June. It says something about TCM's budget, I suppose, that TCM is rerunning the series starting tonight. On the other hand, it gives me several Saturday posts over the next few months, as I recorded a number of the movies that the programmers picked. That starts tonight, with Martin Scorsese's second selection, One Touch of Venus, at 9:45 PM.

The opening credits are over a Greek amphitheater-style backround. It's then revealed, however, that this is a miniature, as rising from behind is Eddie Hatch (Robert Walker). He's a window-dresser in the department store owned by Whitfield Savory (Tom Conway), designing the fancy front window displays. He's called in to Savory's office, although it's not for bad reasons. Savory bought some art for the store -- specifically, an expensive statue of Venus, the goddess of love. Savory wants to do a big reveal of the statue in the department store, and who better to design everything that goes around it thatn Eddie?

Meanwhile, everybody else at the department store, like Whitfield's secretary Molly (Eve Arden) and Eddie's co-worker and best friend Joe (Dick Haymes), worry about how much the statue cost. But that's soon to become the least of everybody's problems. Eddie is doing the display, and sees what a lovely statue his boss has bought. On a lark, Eddie climbs the stepladder and kisses the statue before going back to his work. He makes a comment to himself, and a voice responds. Eddie looks and notices... the statue has come to life! Venus is played by Ava Gardner, so it's no wonder the statue was so beautiful.

Unfortunately, Venus can't really go back to being a statue. And she's fallen for the man who kissed her, I suppose like Larry Hagman and Barbara Eden in I Dream of Jeannie many years later. Venus gets off the pedestal, and Eddie realizes that when it comes time for Savory to pull up the curtain revealing the statue, there isn't going to be any statue to reveal. Of course, how Eddie could have carried it away is a question. But there's no statue, so unsurprisingly Savory suspects Eddie.

And then Eddie has his friens to deal with, including girlfriend Gloria (Olga San Juan). None of them are going to believe his story. And Gloria is definitely not going to like that there's another woman trying to steal Eddie away from her. Venus is about to make that a bigger thing for poor Eddie, as she shows up at Eddie's apartment. After several ruses to keep people from finding Venus, he decides to take her back to the department store. Perhaps when Savory finds her there the next day, she'll be able to explain things. After all, she does have the face of the statue Savory bought, and he should be able to recognize it.

One Touch of Venus is a silly romantic fantasy movie, but it's one that's more than fun enough. At the same time, however, it's the sort of fluff you probably shouldn't think too deeply about. Everybody does a good job with the material and it's entertaining, and sometimes that's all that's really necessary.

A Bucket of Blood

There are two movies coming up in quick succession on TCM that are on my DVR and that I haven't blogged about before, so one of them is going to get a post almost two days in advance. That's also in part because I'd like to space out the horror movies a bit more in October, and it looks as though I've got more coming up than I'd planned. So today I'm going to blog about a black comedy horror: A Bucket of Blood, which will be on TCM at 7:15 AM on October 6.

Roger Corman directed, and I had this one on the DVR from the Corman tribute back in July. The intro even included a bit from a sit-down with Ben Mankiewicz that Corman did I think in 2016; I wasn't paying as close attention to it as I might otherwise have since I think that bit was appended to the previous movie.

Frequent Corman bit player Dick Miller is the star here. He plays Walter Paisley, who is a busboy at The Yellow Door, a nightclub run by Leonard (Anthony Carbone), who is part of the local beatnik scene. (Anyone know just how common beatniks were? I've seen quite a few movies from the late 1950s that portray beatniks, but I don't know how many people actually followed the lifestyle.) Walter isn't respected by anybody, but he has dreams of being an artist and is taken by the bohemian beatnik artists that populate the club.

Walter goes back to his crappy apartment and tries to sculpt a bust of Carla, who is one of the habitues of the Yellow Door and for whom Walter has an unrequited love. But Walter has no talent. Worse, he hears the cries of his landlady's cat, who has more or less gone missing again, or at least the landlady is looking for the cat. Walter eventually deduces that the cat has got itself stuck in the wall, so fetches a knife to cut out the drywall to free the cat. Unfortunately, he accidentally stabs the cat to death.

Even though it was an accident, Walter most certainly is to blame. But this gives him an idea. In order not to have to tell the landlady what really happened, he'll cover the cat in clay and pass it off as a sculpture. And somehow, doing this actually makes a surprisingly lifelike sculpture. Not only that, but all of the beatniks where Walter works are taken with the sculpture because, well, they're wackos who could be taken with anything. Some of the suggest he sculpt a nude.

This, as you might guess, is where the plot of A Bucket of Blood goes around the bend. Walter is given some heroin by one of the patrons, and a cop (future game show host Bert Convy, credited as Burt) follows Walter back to the apartment because War on Drugs. Walter, thinking he's about to get shot, kills the cop in what he thinks is self-defense, and them turns the cup into a sculpture which amazingly preserves the death agony. More requests for sculptures, which means more killing, follow.

Objectively, A Bucket of Blood isn't a very good movie. Roger Corman had a very tiny budget, and the movie looks cheap. But the premise is so much fun, even if it isn't all that original -- Mystery of the Wax Museum was 25 years before this and had already been remade once. Corman's taking the idea and setting it against the beatnik subculture also turns the material from straight horror to some sort of ridiculous satire, which only heightens the fun.

There's no masterpiece in A Bucket of Blood, yet boy is it entertaining.

Midnight in Paris

Another relatively recent movie that I've got on my DVR from when it showed up in TCM's 31 Days of Oscar is Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris.

The movie starts off with an extended, dialogue-free montage of Paris. Then, when the opening credit show up, they're accompanied by a dialogue by an engaged couple, Gil (Owen Wilson) and Inez (Rachel McAdams). Gil is a screenwriter who seems to be more in love with the city of Paris than he is with Inez, and would love to stay in Paris to work on his novel. They're on a vacation with Inez' parents, as Dad is on a working holiday. When they're at a restaurant, who walks in but two of Inez' old friends, Paul and his wife Carol. Paul and Carol, whom Gil doesn't know at all, are there because Paul has been asked to lecture at the Sorbonne, and they invite Gil and Inez to go with them to Versailles the next day, which is another source of tension between them.

The conflict continues, until one evening at a restaurant. It's a late evening, and Paul, Carol, and Inez want to take a taxi back to the hotel. Gil, however, is so in love with the city that he'd rather walk back to the hotel and soak in the atmosphere. While Paul is on one of the narrow streets, a vintage car pulls up and the passengers invite Gil to get in with him. Eventually Gil does, and the car takes all of them to a bar that seems like it's as out of the past as the old vintage car that drove them there is. Everybody else is dressed like they're from the 1920s, and old Cole Porter songs are playing.

And then Gil notices that the pianist looks surprisingly like Cole Porter himself. Surely that can't be possible, but then other similar folks from the age when the "Lost Generation" was in Paris show up, starting with Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Obviously, this confuses Gil greatly, since he's from 2010 and there's no way this can possibly actually be the 1920s, no matter how much they drop names like Pablo Picasso, Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates), and Salvador Dali (Adrien Brody). Perhaps somehow, Gil really has been transported to the 1920s.

This is all exceedingly complicated for poor Gil, since there's no way anybody's going to believe that he spent a night in the 1920s. And when does he get sleep anyway? F. Scott Fitzgerald introduces Gil to Ernest Hemingway, who offers to share Gil's manuscript with Gertrude Stein. But as Gil leaves the building, he finds it's no longer a 1920s building.

At least, not until the following midnight. He gets picked up again, and this time meets Picasso's mistress Adriana (Marion Cotillard), who starts a relationship with him and like Gil has an interest in the past. Except of course, the past for Adriana is a different past than for Gil. And how is Gil going to resolve his relationships with everybody back in 2010?

Midnight in Paris was for me, a charming little movie. Sure, it's unrealistic, but the movie makes no pretense of being grounded in reality. It's just a fun little story that to me didn't feel like it was trying to do anything profound. Just sit back and enjoy this little fantasy.

Roof Without a Fiddler

If I've looked at the calendar correctly, tonight at sundown sees the beginning of the new year in the Jewish calendar, marking Rosh Hashanah and leading up to Yom Kippur. With that in mind, I wanted to post about a movie that TCM ran last year in the run-up to Hanukkah but that I couldn't quite save for that long since YouTube's cloud DVR gets rid of movies after nine months: Tevya.

I assume most people have heard of the Broadway musical turned into a movie, Fiddler on the Roof. It tells some of Sholem Aleichem's stories about Tevye, a dairyman living in one of the shtetls, Jewish villages in what are now places like Ukraine, Belarus, and eastern Poland, but at the time would have been in the Russian Empire with the heavy influence of the Russian Orthodox Church. Sholem Aleichem himself grew up in this environment, speaking Yiddish, and wrote a whole bunch of stories about Tevye, a lot more than are used in either movie. Eventually, however, Sholem Aleichem emigrated to New York to escape the pogroms; one can presume that a lot of the stories are based on what Sholem Aleichem knew.

Now, I have to admit here that I haven't seen Fiddler on the Roof in full; I find the whole "Tradition" number right at the beginning of the movie to be off-putting enough that combined with the long running time I've never actually sat down to watch the whole thing. Reading synopses, however, the musical and the movie Tevya tell different stories from the set of stories Sholem Aleichem wrote about the character. Tevya, of course, is also not a musical and is a much less happier story. Finally, the other important thing to note is that it was made in America in Yiddish. Up until World War II, there was a reasonably thriving community of Jews who had emigrated to America from Eastern Europe, where Yiddish was a lingua franca among the Jews. Like many immigrants, they kept using the language in their new country, and there were newsapers and even a Yiddish-language stage theater scene. (Sidney Lumet's father Bruch was a prominent performer in the Yiddish theater.)

As for the story, in Tevya, the dairyman lives in a small mostly Jewish village with one daughter Chavah, and another daughter Zeitel who has already married and moved in with her new family, although she returns for a visit with her children. Chavah as fallen in love with Fedya, which is a problem, since Fedya is... a Gentile. Tevya knows that someday the Gentiles are liable to turn on the Jews, and even asks Chavah which side she'll take when it comes down to that. Chavah doesn't care and marries for love, leading Tevya to declare her dead to him.

Father and daughter find themselves unable to reconcile and go through one heartache after another, until the Tsar declares a pogrom and orders the Jews to go somewhere else. This is what might finally bring the father and daughter back together, but it is of course in the tragic sense that they have to leave the only home they really knew for an uncertain future.

The Yiddish theater was based out of New York, so the indoor scenes were filmed at the old Biograph Studios in New York with the place of the Jewish village being taken by a farm somewhere out on Long Island. This being before World War II and the move to suburbia after the war, Long Island was a much more rural place so they didn't have to go so far to get to the farms, even if the farms don't really look like eastern Europe.

Tevya is a reasonably well-made movie, at least for its budget. Since the Yiddish theater was very much a minority thing, it, like all the other minority cultural movements of that time had much smaller talent pools and budgets than anything Hollywood -- even Poverty Row -- could get. If you've seen Fiddler on the Roof, then I think you'll definitely want to see Tevya to compare and contrast. But even if, like me, you haven't seen the musical, Tevya is still worth a watch.

TCM Star of the Month October 2024: Bela Lugosi

Bela Lugosi as Dracula (tonight at 8:00 PM and again on Halloween)

We're into a new month, and that means that it's time for a new Star of the Month on TCM. This being October, it's the month with Halloween at the end of it and so horror movies are a big thing. With that in mind, TCM picked Bela Lugosi as their Star of the Month for October. His movies will be airing on the first four Wednesdays in October. The last Wednesday, being in the run-up to Halloween itself, is being given over to TCM's annual Halloween marathon. Dracula itself is getting a second airing in that marathon; not having blogged about it before, I'm planning to record tonight's (8:00 PM) first airing and doing a post on it for Halloween.

One other movie that's worth mentioning is Broadminded, airing at midnight between October 23 and 24, so still the evening of October 23 in more westerly time zones. This one isn't a horror, but a Joe E. Brown comedy with Bela Lugosi as a man who consistently winds up on the wrong end of Brown's actions, although not intended by Brown. It's interesting seeing Lugosi doing comedy, and the move starts off so strangely -- I blogged about it many years ago but won't spoil the ridiculous opening here -- that it's decidedly worth a watch.

I've got several more horror films to post about over the course of October.

The Grass is Greener

Back at the beginning of January when I posted about Robert Mitchum being TCM's Star of the Month for January, I mentioned that one of his movies I hadn't heard of before was The Grass Is Greener. Recently, I finally got around to watching it before it expired from the DVR, and now I can do a post on it.

The opening credits, designed by Maurice Binder, oddly show a bunch of infants, with four names getting roughly equal credit and only one name being listed among co-stars. After the credits, we get a song from Noël Coward about British stately houses and how the aristocrats who lived there can now no longer necessarily afford to do so. Cut to one such manor, where Victor (Cary Grant) and Hilary (Deborah Kerr), the Earl and Countess of Rhyall respectively, live, together with their two children. The couple live in a couple of rooms in one wing of the house that are marked "Private", which is because the rest of the house with all its artwork and other museum-quality furniture is subject to guided tours to help pay for the upkeep of the house. They even have to get rid of the governess, giving those duites to the butler, Sellers (Moray Watson, the one non-star in the credits).

During one of those tours, a man walks into what is essentially Victor and Hilary's living room, claiming that he did not see any "Private" sign because it fell off the door. That man, Charles Delacro (Robert Mitchum) is an American oilman who is in the UK on an extended holiday. Hilary is obviously none too pleased at first about seeing this strange man walk right into her living quarters, but the two strike up a conversation and Charles reveals himself to be extremely charming, as they head out onto the grounds. Eventually, however, Victor comes back into the living room from his office, discovering the two, and figuring out (correctly) that there's some sort of budding romance taking place.

Charles heads back to London where he's staying, and Hilary finds a reason to go to London, namely to get her hair done. But the only appointment is first thing in the morning, before the train would get her there, so she's going to have to stay overnight. She calls her and Victor's frend Hattie (Jean Simmons), a recent divorcée living off the alimony, to ask to stay there. What Hilary apparently doesn't know is that Hattie and Victor were romantically involved. Hilary spends several days in London consistently meeting up with Charles, while Hattie goes to see Victor, with the latter two planning a way to get back at poor Hilary.

That "revenge" is to try to get Charles to agree to a duel, and to use that duel to get Hilary to make up her mind about what to really do. Along the way, however, there's a lot of verbal jousting over who knows what about whom. The duel does eventually take place, albeit with somewhat surprising results.

It's mentioned in the opening credits that The Grass Is Greener is based on a stage play, and despite the attempts by the playwrights (who also wrote the screenplay for the movie adaptation) to open up the play, it's always very obviously based upon a stage play. Now, all five of the players give very good performances, and the movie isn't bad by any means. However, I must admit that it's once again the sort of material that probably would have worked better on the stage with a live audience than in this screen version. Watching it by myself, and with the stars not having any audience energy to play off of, it just feels like something is missing.

Of course, it's also not as if The Grass Is Greener is going to be widely revived on the stage for people to be able to see, so this movie version is going to have to suffice. It's a thoroughly professional outing from everyone involved.