The Heavenly Body

I've got another bunch of movies that are on my DVR coming up in fairly rapid succession on TCM. Thankfully, this time the first one gets an early morning airing while the other two are in prime time, so I don't have to start blogging about them too far in advance. The first one is part of a day of the films of Hedy Lamarr: The Heavenly Body, at 8:00 AM tomorrow (Nov. 8).

You could say that the title is a play on words, as Hedy Lamarr herself was one of the beauties of Hollywood. But the title also refers to an actual body up in the firmament. William Powell is the male lead here, playing William Whitley, an astronomer whose work, as makes sense, keeps him up at night since you can't really go to an observatory and make astronomical observations while the sun is shining. So he gets home from work and has his dinner just as everybody else is getting up and having their breakfast.

This everybody else includes William's long-suffering wife Vicki (that's Hedy Lamarr, as if you couldn't tell). She really wants her husband to take a vacation from work (never mind that there's a war going on; the movie was released in early 1944 and the war will become a plot point). He can't however, because he's got something big coming up. He's discovered a new comet, and if he's done the calculations correctly the comet is going to smash into the Moon -- as the Moon has no atmosphere even smaller meteors aren't going to burn up the way they might when they're approaching Earth. That impact is coming up soon, and William has to go to the observatory to do a presentation on it at the exact moment the comet is going to hit. (In reality, I don't think we had powerful enough telescopes at the time to see such an impact, but I could certainly be wrong on that.)

Worse for William is that his wife gets his astronomy mixed up with astrology. Astronomy is, of course, real science, while astrology is anything but. And if it got out that an astronomer was married to a woman who actually believed that nonsense, well, imagine the embarrassment for poor William. But this was the 1940s, when women were still mostly housewives and passed their days gossiping over the back fence, or at least that's what Hollywood would have us believe. And Vicki's neighbor, the widow Potter (Spring Byington), believes in astrology. She takes Vicki to her personal astrologer, Miss Sibyll (Fay Bainter), who gives Vicki the horoscope that she's going to meet a romantic stranger.

And wouldn't you know it, but a strange man stops by the Whitley place the next night while William is at work. That man is Lloyd Hunter (James Craig), who is the local air-raid warden. He looks fit, but he was a war correspondent who covered stories in all sorts of exotic places before getting injured and being reduced to supporting the war effort on the home front. Unsurprisingly, Vicki thinks this is the exotic stranger she was destined to meet, while William is understandably jealous.

Of course, the Production Code rather dictates the outcome of a movie like The Heavenly Body, and that's part of the problem with the movie. With a film like Grandma's Boy that I blogged about yesterday, you also know who's going to wind up with the girl at the end. But in that case, there's a clearly designed bad guy to root against. Lloyd isn't really a bad guy, and there's no good reason for Vicki to have a true dilemma. It also doesn't help that the humor tries too hard to be zany, and really shows that.

The Heavenly Body isn't exactly a bad movie, but it's another one where it definitely wouldn't be the sort of movie I'd show to non-movie buffs to try to get them intrested in any of the film's stars.