Blake Edwards does François Truffaut

It's not uncommon -- certainly it wasn't uncommon in the past -- for Hollywood types to see a foreign film and want to make an American version of it to make the subject matter more accessible to American audiences. Some such movies are big successes, like setting The Seven Samurai as a western and renaming it The Magnificent Seven. Other times, the resulting film doesn't hold up so well, as with the American version of The Man Who Loved Women.

The man in question is David Fowler (Burt Reynolds), and as the movie opens he's just died and his funeral is being held. The funeral is widely attended, and it seems as though almost all of the guests are reasonably hot women. Attending the funeral for a slightly different reason is Marianna (Julie Andrews), a psychoterapist who treated David and knows part of the reason why all of these women are at the funeral, and why they all seem to be OK with all of the other women being in attendance as well. As you might guess, we're about to get a flashback to the main story, which will of course also end with David's death....

David Fowler is a sculptor living in Los Angeles whose professional life seems to be going reasonably well. His personal life, however, is a mess, as he's become racked with indecision, being unable to make decisions over the smallest thing. He also has what seems to be an insatiable appetite for women: they're all beautiful, and why limit yourself to just one? His regular doctor refers him to a psychiatrist, which is where Marianna comes into the film.

Now, the actual why behind David's indecision is mostly a macguffin in the movie, with the more important question being whether David will be able to lead an emotionally healthy life. During David's time seeing Marianna, he meets several other women, starting in Houston when he gets a commission from an oil magnate, Roy Carr (Barry Corbin). Roy is married to Louise (a young Kim Basinger), and since she's nice looking, you can imagine what David thinks of her. But worse is that Louise has an even more outré attitude to sex than David does, wanting all manner of sex that's carried out in such a way that there's a substantial risk of the two getting caught. It's apparently what turns Louise on, and David doesn't know how to handle it.

Worse, David finds himself being attracted to Marianna, which while perfectly reasonably considering that Julie Andrews is still nice enough looking heading into middle age, is a problem what with the whole doctor-patient relationship. And she's going to need to break free at some point. How is David going to be able to resolve his problems, and how is he going to die?

The Man Who Loved Women is based on a French film directed and co-written by François Truffaut. Knowing the French stereotypes about the battle of the sexes (admittedly, I haven't seen the French original yet), I can understand why people in Hollywood might want to try to translate such material as a romantic comedy for American audiences. It's a game effort, but I don't think it quite works in the end. There's something about the material that feels artificial, in the sense that kabuki theater is artificial. Everyone does a professional job, and I certainly didn't hate the movie, but it's also something that left me a bit cold.

House of Usher

TCM's programming tribute to the late Roger Corman was even before Summer Under the Stars, which means the movies are going to expire from my DVR before the various stars who were profiled last August. Fortunately, I'm far enough ahead in my posts to be able to space out the posts on the Corman movies. And since he only produced some of them instead of directing, it's a bit less obvious that they came from the same programming blocks. This time, we're up to another of the Vincent Price films based on workds by Edgar Allan Poe: House of Usher.

Vincent Price plays Roderick Usher, although we don't see him for a few minutes. Instead, we see the other male lead, this being a four-character movie. That's Philip Winthrop, played by Mark Damon. As the movie opens, he's riding from Boston toward the Usher estate, hoping to see his fiancée, Roderick's sister Madeline (Myrna Fahey). Philip notices that the trees near the house all look like they're dying off, with the house itself not looking like the glory it would have been when previous generations of Ushers inhabited the place. And when Philip gets the house late that evening, the butler Bristol (Harry Ellerbe) answers the door and informs Philp there are to be no guests as Madeline is ill and not receiving guests.

Now, we obviously wouldn't have a movie is Philip gave up, turned around, and headed back to Boston. So of course he inveigles his way into the house, at which point Roderick shows up. Roderick is peeved at Bristol, and is even more put off by the way Philip is talking. Roderick, you see, claims to have some sort of nervous system condition that has resulted in all of his senses being super-sensitive. The softest sounds are too loud; the sunlight can't come into the house; food has to be bland, and so on. But since it's too late for Philip to head back home, Roderick lets him stay the night in a spare bedroom. After all, you can tell from the establishing shots of the house that this is a place that has lots of unused rooms.

Philip immediately starts plotting a way to get to see Madeline, preferably without Roderick around, with the ultimate plan being to take Madeline away. But there are a couple of alarming things. The first is that the house seems to be settling, although it's gotten to the age where the settling is becoming violent, leading to things like cracks in the ceilings that could cause a chandelier to fall. Also causing problems are Madeline's health conditions. Roderick finally lets on that the fear is one of madness running in the family, and that certainly Madeline is showing signs of this madness. This at least would explain why Roderick doesn't want Madeline to marry anyone, lest the madness extend to another generation of innocent children. But Madeline also suffers from a form of catalepsy that looks like death. Can Philip save Madeline? Should he even be trying to save Madeline?

I haven't read the original Poe story on which this movie is based, so I'm not quite certain how much it resembles the story. What I can say is that once again, Roger Corman shows his adeptness at taking a small budget and churning out something that, if not great, is eminently watchable. House of Usher may feel a bit slow at times, but I think more and more that might be because a lot of 19th century literature feels slow. Still, Corman wraps everything up in about 80 minutes, so it's really not all that tedious. Definitely another Corman film worth watching.

Count the Hours

Back in March, TCM's Noir Alley ran a movie that was surprisingly new to me considering the fact that it was distributed by RKO and, as such, ought to be part of the old Turner library that's made up the bulk of TCM's programming. That movie is Count the Hours, and it's getting another airing tomorrow (April 30) at 7:30 AM.

The movie opens one night in the house of a man named Fred Morgan. Somebody breaks into the house and breaks open a locked desk, looking for money. Fred is asleep in the next room but this wakes him up, so he gets his rifle to confront the burglar. Unfortunately, the burglar is quicker, shooting Fred dead, and that wakes up Mrs. Morgan, who also gets shot for her trouble. They're not discovered until the following morning when Morgan's nephew and heir shows up and finds his aunt and uncle dead.

The first person the police talk to is George Braden (John Craven), who works as an itinerant farm laborer and is currently renting a small house on Morgan's property. When George hears that Morgan was shot with a .32 caliber bullet, he's scared since he has a .32 gun of his own, and lies about it. His pregnant wife Ellen (Teresa Wright) overhears the conversation with the police and does something terribly stupid. She gets her hands on the gun and tries to destroy the evidence by throwing the gun in a lake. She's spotted doing this but dragging the lake doesn't find the gun, so husband and wife are both taken in for long questioning.

The questioning is so long that George finally gives in and confesses, even though he soon after regrets this and insists he didn't do it. Ellen realizes she has to find the gun so a ballistics test can be done and exonerate her husband, and this is what gets local attorney Doug Madison (Macdonald Carey) to take George's defense. However, without the gun, there's so much circumstantial evidence that it could still convict George. And then the gun is found -- but it's been underwater so long that they can no longer get a good ballistics report from the gun to prove whether it was or was not the murder weapon.

So with that, George is convicted and sentenced to death, and nobody lives happily ever after. Except that we're maybe halfway through the movie if that, so there's going to be an appeal, especially after Madison learns of a man named Max Verne (Jack Elam) who has a criminal history as well as a connection to Morgan. Proving George's innocence isn't going to be so easy.

Eddie Muller, when he presented Count the Hours, commented that professional lawyers are probably going to have big problems with the movie considering how it takes serious liberties with the criminal process. I'm not a lawyer, but I'd have to agree that if the movie has a problem, it's that the plot doesn't seem so tight, or at least not so realistic. That is, I think part of a bigger issue for the movie, which is that it was a very low-budget affair. Teresa Wright, despite being the star, isn't given much to do other than act like the poor suffering spouse. John Craven as the husband doesn't exude much personality, and the rest of the movie feels perfunctory.

That's all a bit of a shame, as the movie feels like it had some potential. With a bigger budget and some polishing, it could have been, if not a classic, at least a gem of a B movie.

End of month briefs

Gene Hackman died back in February, and TCM is going to be giving him a programming salute in a couple weeks' time. When that comes up I'll be doing a brief post on it. In the meantime, I'd like to point out that his starring role in Hoosiers is coming up on TCM tonight at 8:00 PM. It kicks off an evening of sports-themed films, which concludes with two of Ronald Reagan's movies: Knute Rockne, All American at 2:00 AM, and The Winning Team at 4:00 AM. I've blogged about both of them before, of course.

There's also the passing of Richard Chamberlain some time back; when he died, I mentioned how he did the Star of the Month piece on Claude Rains because of his appearance with Rains in Twilight of Honor. That movie can be seen on TCM tomorrow (April 30) at 2:30 PM.

I'm still not certain how much FXM is pulling out of the vaults that they haven't run in a while, although I think that's in part because I've blogged about pretty much everything that's in their current rotation. I will, however, note that I don't think I've see the Perry Como/Carmen Mirand film If I'm Lucky on FXM in a while, and that gets an airing tomorrow at 6:00 AM.

It looks like today is a day with a surprising number of birthdays that might be worth mentioning if I hadn't done so before. I'm pretty certain I've done a standalone post on Fred Zinneman (April 29, 1907) before, while Celeste Holm (April 29, 1917) died after I started writing this blog so she got an obituary post. It's also the 68th birthday of three-time Oscar winner Daniel Day-Lewis, while both Michelle Pfeiffer and Eve Plumb were born on this day in 1958. Rather younger, but still older than me, is Uma Thurman, who turns 55 today.

Now watch somebody of note die after I put up this post.

The Yellow Cab Man

Tonight's final night of TCM's Star of the Month salute to Red Skelton includes a pair of movies that are already on my DVR, although I'm only doing a post on one of them today. That movie is The Yellow Cab Man, which you can see at 9:45 PM.

The opening credits are done somewhat differently, with the names of the cast printed on, well, plaster casts. Those casts are worn by a character named Red Pirdy (Red Skelton) who, as you might guess, is accident-prone, to the point that insurance companies don't want to insure him. After the credits, he's trying to carry an oversized cuckoo clock down the sidewalks, when he accidentally starts crossing the street when the traffic has the right of way, not the pedestrians. This causes him to get hit by a taxicab from the Yellow Cab Co.

Now, Red is an honest, and inconceivably stupid man, so he's open about the accident being entirely his fault. Ellen Goodrich (Gloria De Haven) works for the cab company's insurer, an she tries to get Red to sign a waiver. Also showing up is a lawyer, Martin Creavy (Edward Arnold), who seems to have a way of committing insurance fraud and realizes he can use Red to make a ton of money, or so he thinks. Well, he will have that chance, but in a completely different way.

As part of Red's seeing Ellen and Creavy, Red reveals that not only is he one of those tinkering inventors who nowadays would be the target of those scammy commercials about getting a patent for your invention. But because of Red's stupidity, he also mentions that he's invented, but not yet patented, something called Elastiglass, which I suppose isn't that much of an invention since things like Plexiglas/Perspex and Lucite had been invented a good decade before the movie was released. Elastiglass is, like those other acrylics, shatter-proof and therefore much safer than traditional glass.

Ellen, and the executives at Yellow Cab, think that installing safer glass would be a good thing for the cab company's insurance bills, and hiring Red wouldn't be a bad PR move either. Martin, for his part, sees dollar signs if he can get the formula out of Red's mind. To that end, Martin hires a quack psychiatrist named Dokstedder (Walter Slezak) who uses drugs and hypnosis to try to obtain the formula. Murder is also involved, leading to a madcap climax.

I'm guessing that The Yellow Cab Man was conceived as a way for MGM to use Red Skelton's brand of physical comedy and sight gags. There's certainly a lot of that in the movie. Unfortunately, they didn't bother to come up with an intelligent enough script. Red is just way too stupid, to the point that you wonder how he's been able to live independently as an adult, never mind the concussions. The bad guys are cartoonishly bad, although I suppose that befits the cartoonish nature of the whole film. But to me it often came across more as grating than as working well.

Silkwood

I've been mentioning over the past few weeks how I've got a glut of movies on my DVR that I recorded during TCM's Summer Under the Stars last August that I need(ed) to watch before they expire from the DVR. One such star is Meryl Streep, from whose day I recorded three movies. First up is Silkwood.

Silkwood was released in late 1983, when I was still in elementary school, so it's one of those movies that I'd always known the basic story of but certainly didn't get the chance to see back when it was released. Streep plays Karen Silkwood, who is working at a facility in Oklahoma that processes nuclear fuel for the US's test breeder reactor site in Washington. It's a big contract, and one that management says they're falling behind on, which would have dire financial consequences. That much may be true; I was at a job where we lost one of our contracts leading to the layoff of a bunch of people. Additionally, the way the workers on the production floor interact with each other makes you wonder just how seriously they're taking their work.

They need to take it fairly seriously, too, since working with plutonium carries the risk of radiation exposure. How much exposure is acceptable is a matter of debate, but the consequences of exposure are bad even if it's just the decontamination procedure as we see from one older woman whose daughter is dying of cancer and who has to be scrubbed down herself.

Meanwhile, Karen is living with her boyfriend Drew (Kurt Russell) and another friend Dolly (Cher) who happens to be a lesbian and at one point finds a girlfriend who is a "beautician" for a funeral parlor whose job is to make the dead people look presentable, and who has some not-so-nice things to say about the dead people who worked at the plant where Karen, Drew, and Dolly all work. Karen is also a divorcée, with her ex having custody of the kids down in Texas.

Karen begins to suspect after seeing workers deal with the disposal of a truck that's been found to be too radioactive that perhaps, in the drive to fulfill that contract with the feds, corners are being cut regarding safety. Her suspicions grow when she's reassigned to a different unit of the factory. First, this can be seen as retaliation, since it puts seniority for dealing with overtime back to zero; secondly, she discovers that photo negatives used to check the safety of fuel rod welds are being doctored by a colleague (played by Craig T. Nelson as part of a fine ensemble cast).

The locals feel that the union isn't really representing them on wages, so there's a vote on decertification that galvanizes Karen in to action. She starts working with Washington labor lawyer Paul Stone (Ron Silver) on the safety issues, which does not really endear her to her co-workers since they're more worried about bread-and-butter issues. Karen tries to gather evidence against the company's lax safety, which is of course dangerous for her to do, leading ultimately to the ending you may well know since this is all based on a true story. As I recall, coverage of the movie back when it was released didn't do anything to hide the details of Silkwood's life.

Silkwood is a well-made movie that today is probably better remembered for the acting performances. Unsurprisingly, Meryl Streep is quite good and picked up another Oscar nomination. It's the performance of Cher, however, that's interesting. At this point, it wasn't really known how capable of an actress Cher was, having been known more for her singing and her variety show with Sonny Bono. But Cher gives a fine performance, getting a Supporting Actress nomination (she lost to Linda Hunt's outstanding performance in The Year of Living Dangerously). Less mentioned is Kurt Russell, who also gives a very good performance in a sort of movie he hadn't done to this point, he beting better remembered for more lightweight stuff. I also found the production design to be quite good as it really captures working-class life of that era: the Formica kitchen table, and the Texas diner were two scenes that really sprung to mind.

If you haven't seen Silkwood before, it's definitely one worth watching.

Not the multiple arcade machine emulator

Another of the movies that's on my DVR and is coming up on TCM is the musical Mame, tomorrow, April 27, at 3:45 PM.

Mame is a film version of a Broadway musical, which in turn was adapted from the play/movie Auntie Mame, with that ultimately having been adapted from a novel. I'm pretty certain I did a post on Auntie Mame ages ago, and the story is well-known enough that you might know the basics of it. Patrick Dennis is a 9-year-old kid in late-1920s Chicago whose well-to-do and conservative parents have died. The movie opens with the reading of Dad's will, which stipulates that he's going to live with his only living relative, Aunt Mame (Lucille Ball), in New York. But the will also stipulates that trustee Mr. Babcock (John McGiver) is going to be able to ensure that Patrick goes to a good traditional school and is raised Protestant. These are important for reasons we shall soon see.

Patrick shows up to Mame's large New York house one night with his nanny Agnes. His arrival is technically not unannounced, but Mame has made an error: the arrival is on December 1, as the telegram informed her, while Mame thought today was November 31. So when Patrick shows up, Mame is throwing a fairly wild party with a ton of guests and performing a Broadway-type musical number since this is after all a musical. Agnes is a bit put off at first, but Mame is a lot of a bohemian and a complete change of pace from the life Patrick knew up to this point. Some might think it's just what he needs, although Mr. Babcock is definitely not one of those people.

Life is pleasant enough for them, however, at least until October, 1929. That is of course the date of the stock market crash, and Mame is one of the people greatly affected by the lose in value of her investments. Somehow, though, she's able to retain her servants -- not on Patrick's money, since that is controlled by the trustees. But she has to go out and actually work, first in a Broadway show where her best friend, actress Vera (Bea Arthur), gets her the part, and then in a department store. It's there that Mame meets wealthy southerner Beauregard Pickett (Robert Preston), who ultimately marries her and makes her financially secure, at least until he dies suddenly.

By this time, Patrick has grown up (played as an adult by Bruce Davison) and is about to go off to college, with it not really beine mentioned that Pearl Harbor would have happened about the time he'd be a senior in college. Some time presumably after the war, Patrick has become conservative and is engaged to nice Connecticut girl Gloria Upson, who has fabulously wealthy relatives. The only thing is that they're also conservative in all the ways Mame abhors.

Mame was savaged by critics when it was released in 1974, and it's easy to see why. In the musical number at the party early on, the shots shift from long-focus and medium shots to close-ups of Mame. Every close-up is in exceedingly soft focus, to the point that it's distracting. Rosalind Russell was in her late 40s when she made Auntie Mame; the first stage musical version of Mame starred Angela Lansbury when she was about 40; Lucille Ball, however, was in her early 60s when she made this. She's not quite up to the singing, and the more slapstick screen persona of Lucille Ball is not what the Mame character needs. It's like all the charm was sucked out of the movie in turning it into a musical.

But, as always you may want to watch and judge for yourself.

Harry & Son

Yet another of the people to be honored last August in TCM's Summer Under the Stars was Ossie Davis, as I mentioned several weeks back when I did a post on Hot Stuff. Another movie in which he had a smallish role and therefore TCM could use for their programming, was Harry & Son. I had never heard of it, and having watched it, I understand why I'd never heard of it.

Davis is, of course, not the star here. That honor goes to Paul Newman, who also directed and co-wrote the screenplay. He plays the titular Harry, last name Keach. Harry lives in the Miami area where he works in construction although for some inexplicable reason he doesn't wear any safety equipment while operating the wrecking ball. One day he goes out with his co-workers to the bowling alley, where he has some sort of attack that screws up his vision. My first thought was that this was going to be a brain tumor, but when he finally does see a doctor later in the movie, it's explained as some sort of heart issue.

Harry lives with his adult son Howard (Robby Benson), who as the film opens is working detailing cars while wearing just a pair of cut-off jeans shorts. Now, you'd think he could make money by doing this in front of his female clientele, since Benson was clearly cast for his perceived sex appeal since the Robby Benson of this era couldn't act to save his life. But no. And in any case, Howard really wants to be a writer, a desire that his father doesn't get since being a writer has so far done nothing to pay the bills.

Harry has another attack while on the job that causes him to lose his job. You'd think he could go on disability since he's close to retirement age, but again that's not really discussed especially since he's a proud man and that pride has made his relationships with everybody else in his life difficult: his daughter Nina, his brother Tom (Wilford Brimley), and Lilly (Joanne Woodward), who operates a pet store nearby and who was a good friend of Harry's now deceased wife.

Lilly's daughter Katie (Ellen Barkin) was Howard's girlfriend back in high school, but they broke up, or rather Howard ghosted Katie even though they didn't use that word back in the 1980s, when rumor got out that Katie was promiscuous. Indeed, she's now pregnant and doesn't seem to care who the father was, although we're led to believe that it's definitely not Howard who's the father. Along the way, Howard gets a series of jobs trying to please his father. The first he gets thinking he's going to do PR thanks to a nymphomaniac who is one of his detailing clients. Instead, he winds up in a box factory working under Morgan Freeman. Then he tries to get a job repossessing cars, although I was wondering during that scene whether this was in fact a front operation for a chop shop. It's here that we meet Ossie Davis as a man whose truck Howard is asked to repo.

Harry & Son doesn't work for a whole bunch of reasons. One big one is the screenplay, which as I've implied above has several plot holes. The script also seems to both meander and jump from one plot point to the next, making it feel both slow (lasting a shade under two hours) and disjointed. But an equally big problem is Robby Benson, who just isn't (or certainly wasn't in the 1980s; I see that his later career seems disproportionately based on having voiced Beast in Disney's Beauty and the Beast) a very good actor. So all these flaws are a good reason why I'd never heard of Harry & Son before TCM ran it last August.

Lord of the Flies

TCM's lineup for tomorrow (April 25) is a bunch of movies set on islands, and includes a movie that I happen to have on my DVR: the 1963 adaptation of the novel Lord of the Flies. That movie comes on at 2:30 PM.

Now, I think this is another of those movies where most people have at least a basic knowledge of the source material and story before going into it, because of the way in which the original book has gained a lasting sense of endurance. In a sequence that's done, like La jetée, with mostly still photos, we're shown how England is faced with another non-nuclear war and bombardment from the air as in World War II. This leads to the evacuation of children not only from the big cities, but from the country itself to places abroad. One of the flights carrying a large group of boarding school students, however, is hit by a missile somewhere over the Pacific.

We now head to the live action, and discover that two boys have survived the crash. One is Ralph, while the other is a chubby, bescpectacled, and presumably more intellectual boy who was given the nickname Piggy at school. Here, Piggy does something stupid, which is to tell Ralph that everybody gave him the nickname Piggy, rather than give out his real name. Eventually, Ralph and Piggy come across a conch shell, which can be blown to produce a distinctive sound that any other possible survivors can hear. Sure enough, there are other survivors, but they're all young boys like Ralph and Piggy.

Ralph and Piggy bring the group together to try to figure out what to do next, until they hear voices and find another group walking along the beach, wearing not only the standard school uniform but robes that seem to mark them as part of a choir, which makes you wonder how this group of students knew each other but nobody from either of the two groups knew the people in the other group. Things need to be done to figure out whether they're on an island and whether there might be any civilization to save them, along with building shelter and finding out whether there's any possible food on the island. That involves electing a leader.

The election, such as it is, immediately devolves into a sort of tribal conflict, as the choir kids all vote for their leader Jack, while the other boys outvote them and select Ralph as the leader. Jack is none too pleased with this and, having a knife, immediately sets out turning his clique into hunters by fashioning spears to hunt for any possible meat. They find wild boars and something that suggests there might be a "beast" on the island. This, combined with deteriorating relations between the two cliques, leads to despotism and tragedy....

William Golding's original story is a parable on how it doesn't take much to destroy civilized norms, and that's something the movie version does quite well. Director Peter Brook, a stage director by training, gave the child actors, all non-professionals at the time, copies of the book and basically had the kids improvise the action which he would then edit together. I had the fear that this would make the editing extremely choppy at some point, but surprisingly, that doesn't happen, and the movie mostly works.

This version of Lord of the Flies is definitely worth watching. There was another version made around 1990 that I haven't seen.

Operation Frankton

Another person who was honored last August in TCM's Summer Under the Stars and whose movies are getting close to expiring from my DVR as a result is José Ferrer. A movie of which I'd heard the title but had never actually seen the movie is The Cockleshell Heroes, so I recorded it to do a post on it.

Intertitles just after the opening credits inform us a bit about the history of the Royal Marines, which were founded in the late 17th century but didn't get the "Royal" appellation until April 1802. Fast forward 140 years, to early 1942. This is, of course, the middle of the European theater of World War II. The Nazis have occupied a goodly portion of the continent, and are using various ports to make a mess of Allied shipping and naval movements in the Atlantic. Maj. Stringer (José Ferrer) shows up seemingly unannounced at a British military base, since he decided to kayak in which seems like a serious military breach.

Of course, that's part of the plan. Maj. Stringer is sent to where he's going to have his office, next to Capt. Hugh Thompson (Trevor Howard). Capt. Thompson has been in the military since 1918, but is only a captain, so outranked by Maj. Stringer, which is a bit of a plot point since it implies that Thompson did something that prevented him from rising above the rank of captain. In any case, Stringer informs Thompson of his plan, which is to come up with a type of collapsible two-man kayak (they us the word "canoe" because British English considers kayaks a type of canoe) and paddle up the estuary of the Gironde to the city of Bordeaux, where the Germans have a base from which they're attacking the British. Then, the commandos will attach magnetic mines to the hulls of the ships, which should blow up and sink the ships.

Now, if you've seen enough war movies, you'll know that there are several standard tropes. One is that the first part of the plot involves preparations for the operation. Maj. Stringer brings in a bunch of Marines to see who might be most suitable for the operation, and eventually whittles the crew down to about a dozen who were able to get across Britain dressed as Nazis in a way that frankly makes the British populace look stupid. But the men don't really respect Stringer, with the result that their first practice event trying to paddle up the Thames at night is a total disaster. There is, however, one funny scene involving what is actually a live mine and the marines' attempt to dispose of it at sea dressed only in their swimming trunks. (I did, however, wonder why they trained in trunks since the real operation would have them in a frogman's swimming outfit.)

And then they head off to the southwest of France for the difficult operation. One of the boats gets damaged, and those two men quickly get captured by the Germans, although they refuse to give up any information. The others do make it to Bordeaux, as you might guess since the title of the movie is The Cockleshell Heroes. But can they escape?

As you might have guessed from the title of this blog post, The Cockleshell Heroes is based on a real operation called "Operation Frankton" that tried to destroy German ships in Bordeaux. However, the real Operation Frankton was a failure because of its secrecy: it apparently interfered with another operation that likely would have had a higher chance of success and didn't cause as much damage as the British might have liked. José Ferrer directed, and the direction feels formulaic, although that may be down to the script as well, from actor/director Bryan Forbes.

Having watched The Cockleshell Heroes, I can see why it's not so well remembered. It's by-the-numbers, but something that in the end is entertaining enough if unmemorable.

Gotta love how the Code treated women

I always enjoy the Warner Bros. B movies, so when one that I haven't done a post on before shows up on TCM, I try to make certain to record it so I can watch it. One such movie that I only recently got around to watching despite it having been on my DVR for some time is The Law in Her Hands.

The main "her" in the title of the movie is Mary Wentworth, played by Margaret Lindsay. As the movie opens, she and her friend Dot Davis (Glenda Farrell) are getting sworn into the New York State bar, having passed the bar exam. They had been working at a restaurant to pay their way through law school, and plan to start their own law firm together. After the bar ceremony, they go back to their old restaurant to celebrate. A man shows up there, obviously from a protection racket, and trying to induce the boss to join the "benevolent association" voluntarily. When that doesn't work, the guy sets off a smoke bomb.

Frank Gordon (Lyle Talbot) runs the protection rackets in New York, and he's none too pleased about the violence his underling used. Now he's going to have to get the witnesses to find a reason not to show up at the trial. He's almost successful enough that ADA Robert Mitchell (Warren Hull) is unable to prosecute, at least until Mary, who also happens to be Mitchell's girlfriend, shows up with a photograph taken with the defendant in the background, convicting the defendant.

Mary and Dot's law practice isn't particularly successful, although a process server who is only in the movie for comic relief tries to help them. Mitchell tells Mary that perhaps she should give up practicing law and just marry him and start a family together, as all good women were supposed to do back in the 1930s. Gordon, for his part, has a different way of dealing with Mary, which is to try to get her on a very highly-paid retainer.

Of course, working for the man behind the protection rackets is bound to cause problems, and that eventually becomes the case. Mary is successful enough, but the way she gets acquittals challenges judicial ethics, jokes about the idea that lawyers actually care about ethics aside. The breaking point comes when Mary learns that in trying to spoil the milk of people who didn't want to join the dairy protection racket, Gordon's men actually poisoned it. Mary doesn't want to defend Gordon, but how can she get him convicted without violating attorney-client privilege?

The Law in Her Hands is entertaining enough for a B movie, which is to say that it does entertain although it won't be well-remembered after watching and doesn't bear much resemblance to reality. But then there's a coda at the end which I have a feeling would have dissatisfied a lot of women even in the 1930s. Glenda Farrell doesn't get as much to do as I would have liked, and Eddie Acuff as the comic relief isn't the most relieving person. But then again, The Law in Her Hands, being a B movie, is the sort of thing that the studio probably had no expectation that people 90 years in the future would be watching.

The Gun Hawk

Somehow I wound up with a bunch of westerns on my DVR several months back, which is why a few of them are going to show up in relatively close proximity. Up next is one I hadn't heard of before it showed up on TCM: The Gun Hawk.

We don't meet the titular gun hawk in the opening scene; that instead introduces us to the second lead, singer turned actor Rod Lauren. He plays "Reb" Roan, a drifter who winds up drunk in a town that's the old home town the "hawk" came from and is about to come back to. The sheriff, Ben Corey (Rod Cameron), is a childhood friend of the "hawk" but suggests to Roan that he settle down here since it's a growing town.

It's at this point that the "hawk", named Blaine Madden (Rory Calhoun) shows up in town, and has a conversation with the sheriff about not having been in town for three years. Not that he's planning on staying, since he has a new home that shows up later in the movie. But he runs into Roan, who is in the middle of being attacked by a couple of brothers for no good reason, other than we need a good plot reason to have Blaine and Reb fall in together.

While they're at the bar together, those two brothers who attacked Reb earlier show up again, this time harassing a drunk who happens to be Blaine's father. This is really a way to get at Blaine, although in the resulting gunfight it's Dad who gets killed. Against the advice of the sheriff, Blaine goes searching for the two men wanting to bring them to justice, even is his form of vigilante justice is illegal. Worse, he gets shot in the arm by the sheriff who has in turn followed Blaine, but is able to get away.

Reb goes after Blaine as well and eventually catches up to Blaine, removing the bullet from Blaine's arm and giving Reb some power over Blaine since he knows a crucial secret about Blaine. The two of them go back to Blaine's new home a town called Sanctuary that has a reputation for allowing people in regardless of their past, but with the proviso that it's a place where you go to cool off, which means no violence. And there's a man there to make certain everybody follows the rules: the gun hawk who we of course know is Blaine. But if he's been shot in his shooting arm, will he be able to maintain justice? And, of course, Sheriff Corey is going to be coming after Blaine.

The Gun Hawk was made at Allied Artists and released in 1963, at a time when there were still a lot of B westerns being cranked out. The Gun Hawk fits in well enough with the cycle of B westerns, which is to say that it's not doing anything particularly groundbreaking, and feels as though it could have been made easily enough for episodic TV. Western fans will probably be mildly entertained, although nobody will ever mistake this for one of the great westerns.

Tony Curtis in Merry Olde England

Another person who was honored last August in Summer Under the Stars is Tony Curtis. TCM showed a couple of hs movies that I hadn't seen before, or even heard of. First up is a period action movie from fairly early in his career: The Black Shield of Falworth.

The movie is set in the reign of English King Henry IV (played by Ian Keith showing up briefly toward the end), so around the beginning of the 15th century. The Earl of Alban (David Farrar) is traveling through the countryside with his retinue, and stops at a farm in search of water. The farmhouse is owned by Bowman (Rhys Williams), who is guardian to siblings Myles (Tony Curtis) and Meg (Barbara Rush). Alban and his men see a pretty young woman, so of course they think they can have her, which ticks off poor Myles. Myles fights back, which is a dangerous thing to do, so the three of them are forced to leave.

At the local church, the friar informs then that Myles' late father left a signet ring with a heraldic shield on it, as well as a letter of introduction to the Earl of Mackworth (Herbert Marshall) stating that this is the son of Falworth. Apparently, the elder Falworth did something than him afoul of the monarchy, with the punishment that that Falworth shield be stricken from the heraldic record and that the entire Falworth family be wiped from the face of the earth, which is why Myles and Meg are in danger. Mackworth is, however, a friend, and puts Myles and Meg into service: Myles as a squire, and Meg as a servant to Lady Anne (Janet Leigh).

Myles immediately proceeds to be a truculent little bastard, rebelling just for the sake of rebellion while trying to find out the truth about the shield on the ring. He also meets Anne and immediately falls for her, which is a problem since the two are, as far as everybody knows, not of the same social class. She's also going to be betrothed to Walter Blunt (Patrick O'Neal), who is at this point head squire and not yet knighted. Anne eventually falls in love with Myles as well. But all of this is buildup to the climax.

It's really the Earl of Alban who has been plotting against King Henry. When Henry plans to visit Mackworth Castle, part of the festivities require jousting against Henry's companion, a count from Burgundy. Mackworth names Myles, but only someone who's been knighted and joust against a count. Alban recognizes the Falworth shield and demands that Myles should be killed. Henry gives Myles the chance to save himself in trial by combat against Alban. Alban, however, has an even more devious trick up his sleeve, which is to have Henry killed while observing the trial by combat.

Henry IV was a real person, but most of the rest of the dramatis personæ in The Black Sheild of Falworth are wholly fictional. Universal conceived this as an action movie in color and widescreen as an attempt to get people to shut off their TVs and come back to the theaters. So while the movie is short of plot, it's another movie that's more than entertaining enough. This, even if Tony Curtis doesn't exactly personify late medieval England; this is the movie about which the legend of Curtis saying "Yonder lies the castle of my fodder" sprung, although Curtis doesn't say anything like that.

So The Black Shield of Falworth certainly isn't great, and it's easy to see why this isn't one of Tony Curtis' most remembered movies. Much better was still to come for Curtis in his career.

Easter 2025 briefs

I blogged about the 1959 version of Ben-Hur yesterday. I'm a couple of weeks ahead in doing blog posts, and one of the things I've been doing is to look at the TCM schedules a month-plus in advance to see what's been scheduled that's currently on my DVR so that I can do a post on it. As a result, I didn't notice at the time I wrote that post that the silent version is also tonight's selection for Silent Sunday Nights, at midnight tonight.

The rest of TCM's Easter schedule is nothing especially noteworthy, largely because it feels less than in previous years and in part because there's a small enough number of movies that they seem to get repeated. And, of course, there's the second showing of Noir Alley mixed in. Two things are worth mentioning: one is the showing of Harvey at 10:00 PM, which is of course not an Easter movie at all but a movie with the presence, or lack of presence, of a rabbit playing a major part. The other thing is that TCM Imports is not part of the Easter programming, as it includes two of Yasujiro Ozu's films, Late Spring and Early Summer. I was thinking I might be doing a post on Late Spring in May, but it turns out that the May TCM schedule includes a different Ozu film, Early Spring.

I looked at the FXM schedule a few days before Easter and noticed that they weren't doing anything holiday-related, which is part of why I kept procrastinating about doing another briefs post. I was probably also a week late with ABC's annual airing of The Ten Commandments, since it wasn't on last night, what with the NBA playoffs having begun. I've got that on DVD now and might have done a post on it if it weren't for the fact that I've got such a ridiculous backlog of stuff on my YouTube TV cloud DVR as well as stuff I've put in my "save" lists of various FAST services.

By the same token, there are several obituaries that I failed to mention, with the biggest being Val Kilmer, who died at the beginning of the month. One of the movie channels on Pluto has actually been doing off-and-on marathons of Kilmer's movies over the past few weeks. More recently was the death of Patrick Adiarte, a name I immediately noticed because Adiarte played the kid brother in Flower Drum Song which I had just watched not long before the news of Adiarte's passing was announced. Flower Drum Song shows up on TCM again in May, so the post for it is already scheduled.

Oh, tomorrow is Easter

Tomorrow, April 20, is Easter Sunday, at least for those who follow western strands of Christianity. There's a set of Hollywood films dealing with the biblical tellings of Jesus' crucifixion and resurrection that seem to get trotted out every year, one of which is the 1959 sound version of Ben-Hur, which kicks the day off at 6:00 AM.

This version of the story runs something like 3½ hours, depending on how you want to count the overture and intermission. Judah Ben-Hur (Charlton Heston) is a reasonably well-off man in Jersualem during the era when Pontius Pilate was the Roman governor and that famous carpenter was roaming around Judea preaching the gospel. He lives with his mom and sister, as well as servant to whose daughter Esther (Haya Harareet) Judah has been betrothed. Judah learns that his childhood friend and Roman citizen Messala (Stephen Boyd) is coming back to Judea. Unfortunately, Messala wants to exploit his friendship with Judah to get Judah to betray rebellious Jews, which Judah refuses to do, knowing fully well this will mean trouble should things go any more sour.

Of course they will, as a good 50 minutes into the movie the Romans are parading past Judah's villa when his sister knocks a roofing tile off, falling just inches from the governor. That's unforgivable, so Messala makes Judah a galley slave and imprisons Mom and sister, who eventually get leprosy, although that story line is at least another 90 minutes away. Judah is put on the ship captained by consul Quintus Arrius (Jack Hawkins), eventually saves Arrius' life, and gets freed and made Arrius' adopted son as a result, enabling him to go back to Judea to look for his family. Esther, rather than telling Judah his mom and sister are lepers, tells him they died, which leads Judah to seek vengeance on Messala.

That desire for vengeance is why Judah finally decides to take part in the famous chariot race, which we know he'll win, and spend the last 50 minutes or so looking for Mom and Sis since Messala tells him the truth. Along the way at several key points, Jesus shows up, filmed only from the back, and has a profound effect on the various characters in the story, including ultimately Judah.

I said at the beginning that this version runs long, and I do mean long. It's a good hour longer than the Ramon Novarro silent, as I mentioned in a brief post in 2013. I stand by the comments I made in that post. The 1959 version of Ben-Hur won a ton of Oscars, and the technical categories it won are probably mostly deserved, since I can't really be bothered to look through the entire list of Oscar nominations to determine whether some other movie had better costume design. The music, art direction, cinematography, and all that stuff are indeed of a very high standard.

But the acting and screenplay? I think they take a back seat to the much tighter Novarro version. A lot of the scenes feel like they go on way too long, notably for me being the time between being sentenced to the galleys to actually winding up rowing a boat. And then there's Best Supporting Actor Oscar for Hugh Griffith playing an Arab sheik and the financial backer of Judah in the chariot race. I'm surprised I didn't come across a bunch of modern reviews arguing he was a bad stereotype.

My criticisms aside, Ben-Hur is considered an epic, and for understandable reasons. Becuase of that, it's one that should definitely be on any film buff's list of "Essentials", even if you only watch it once.

Judex (1963)

I've mentioned several times how I've been recording too many foreign films, with the result that I've got a bunch of films that I have to watch before they expire from my DVR. This time, however, is different in that I've got a movie I recorded only a couple of months ago the last time it was on TCM but is showing up again: Judex, early tomorrow (April 19) at 4:15 AM.

Favraux (Michel Vitold) is a banker living in a French chateau sometime in the years not long before World War I. (The end has a title card mentioning 1914; the cars look like they could be 1910 vintage but could just as easly be 1920s; but the hairdos all scream 1960s.) He lives with his widowed daughter Jacqueline (Edith Scob) who has a young daughter of her own; and Marie (Francine Bergé), the governess hired by the family to help raise Jacqueline's daughter. Eventually, we learn that Favraux has developed the hots for Marie and would like to marry her, although she turns him down.

Meanwhile, Favraux has pressing problems. His daughter is about to announce her engagement, but that party may be disturbed when Favrau gets a letter signed by "Judex", which is a pseudonym comming from the Latin word for "avenger". It seems as though Favraux was fairly ruthless in getting to the top, starting off with finding some illicit information of powerful people and using that more or less to blackmail them. He is also alleged to have sent a man Kerjean to prison for a crime Kerjean didn't commit, while also having swindled a lot of people out of their money. This Judex supposedly knows all this, and says that if Favraux doesn't reimburse the people who harmed, bad things are going to happen to him. Favraux responds to this by running Kerjean over in his car, so we know he really is a bad guy.

Favraux hires a detective to play the part of a guest at the costume ball where he's going to announce his daughter's engagement, although the real intention is to figure out who this Judex is. At the ball, everybody is entertained until midnight, when Favraux is just about to announce that engagement for his daughter. Favraux is handed a glass of champagne... and promptly drops dead!

Except that it turns out Favraux is not really dead, only having been drugged by Judex who promptly robs the grave with help from his underlings since Judex turns out to be one of those Batman types. His plan is to keep Favraux prisoner for the rest of his live. But there are problems with this, as a Diana, who is a gangster, knows the location of those files Favraux had. And she plans to kidnap Jacqueline. Favraux is able to escape long enough to call Jacqueline, further complicating things.

This version of Judex is a remake of a serial from the silent era, and that's a bit of a problem, if you will. The reason why I say this is because the serial ran to a dozen chapters and five hours or so, with obvious points in those five hours to end one chapter. Trying to adapt this to a feature film that runs only about a third of the time is difficult, and at times makes it very difficult to figure out what's going on. Add to that the fact that characters are often wearing disguises, and it's in a language that I only studied for a couple of years in high school, and you can see why it has flaws.

Still, the idea is good, and the movie is entertaining enough if you're willing to stick with it, so give this version of Judex a try.

Two Guys from Milwaukee

In getting through the backlog of movies that I've watched off my DVR but have yet to do a post on, it's time to write about one of those movies that shows up on TCM often enough but that I'd never gotten around to watching before, Two Guys from Milwaukee.

The movie technically starts off at Pennsylvania Station in New York, although the opening scenes are really on a train. The two important passengers on that train are Prince Henry (Dennis Morgan) of one of those central European monarchies that in real life would have been overrun by Soviet-backed Communists a year or two after the movie was made, together with his advisor Count Oswald (S.Z. Sakall). Henry is on a goodwill tour of America, before his country votes on a plebiscite regarding whether to stay a monarchy. Henry thinks that if the vote is going to be rigged, he's going to want to meet real Americans.

Showing up at Penn Station and not realizing that a celebrity is about to get off the train is cab driver Buzz Williams (Jack Carson). He doesn't know anything about royalty, and if anything has mild contempt for them. In a plot twist that's fairly obvious, Henry decides he's going to escape from the train and pass himself off as a regular American, only to wind up taking the cab driven by Buzz. Unfortunately, Henry forgot to get any money when he absconded from the train, which is going to make paying for a cab difficult, as well as paying for dinner or getting a hotel room or anything like that.

Buzz lives with his sister Nan (Rosemary DeCamp), and since Henry has lied about where he was from and just happened to pick Buzz's hometown as where he is from, Buzz takes Henry home with him. Buzz also has a girlfriend Connie (Joan Leslie), and Buzz suggests the idea of a double date as Connie has a girlfriend Polly (Janis Paige).

As you might guess, Henry and Connie begin to develop feelings for each other, which is a problem since she's already got a boyfriend who's done nothing wrong, and because of that upcoming referendum. If monarchy wins, Henry getting married to a foreign commoner might be a problem. Meanwhile, there's still the issue that Henry is technically missing. Because this is a programmer, however, we know that it's going to resolve all its problems with a requisite happy ending.

Two Guys from Milwaukee is, as I just mentioned, little more than a programmer of the sort that Warner Bros. and the other studios churned out in the years before World War II. This one, however, was made just after the war, in 1946, so it does have the feel of being a bit out of place. That's not to say it's a bad movie, of course. Dennis Morgan and Jack Carson work well together, and the movie has a fun little coda at the end. But the sort of monarchy that Henry was a part of would have been destroyed by the recently-ended war, and the consequences of that are totally glossed over. Still, Two Guys from Milwaukee is entertaining enough, and definitely worth one watch at least.

William Shatner, monk

It's easy to forget that William Shatner was a classically trained actor before becoming Captain Kirk on Star Trek more or less turned his acting career into a bit of a parody, albeit a very successful one. So, a role that looking back seems terribly out of place is one of his earliest film roles, in the 1958 adaptation of the Fyodor Dostoevsky novel The Brothers Karamazov.

As you can guess from the title, there are multiple brothers, and that the action is set in Tsarist Russia. Yul Brynner is the star, playing Dmitri Karamazov, an officer in the army who is constantly getting himself into debt because of his high-living ways. Ivan (Richard Basehart) is a writer and a radical, while Alexei (that's William Shatner) is a young monk and in many ways the conscience of the family. Their mother -- well mothers, since they're the product of two marriages in the original book -- has died, but Dad Fyodor (Lee J. Cobb) is still alive, and a towering presence over the rest of the family.

Dad has a reasonable sum of money that could be a nice nest egg inheritance for three sons, and there may be a fourth son as well. Epileptic Smerdyakov (Albert Salmi) is rumored to be Fyodor's son, fathered out of wedlock, and now he's working as a servant to Fyodor and whom Fyodor treats very badly. Although, to be fair, Fyodor treats everybody badly, with the possible exception of his mistress Grushenka (Maria Schell). Dmitri, constantly being in debt, would like to be able to get that inheritance now, although in 1870s Russia I don't think they had those dishonest companies that would buy annuities for pennies on the dollar. Meanwhile, Dmitri has a mistress of his own in Katya (Claire Bloom) but starts to get interested in Grushenka, although that may only be for her money.

There are threats to kill Fyodor, and as you can surmise, Fyodor does ultimately wind up murdered. Alexei the monk clearly wouldn't do such a thing, while Ivan has the airtight alibi of having been in Moscow. Dmitri is the obvious candidate and gets put on trial for it, but we learn that Smerdyakov is smarter than he seems and has been plotting to have a confrontation between Dmitri and Fyodor. With that in mind, Dmitri proclaims his innocence at trial, and has Alexei as a character reference, even though there's a ton of circumstantial evidence that makes Dmitri appear guilty.

Fyodor Dostoevsky's original novel runs to something like 800 pages, depending of course on the size of the page. Suffice it to say that it's a pretty darn long novel. It's also as much a character and philosophical study as it is a narrative novel. Both of these things mean that it's the sort of book that can be tough to adapt to a more visual and narrative-driven medium like film. (Tolstoy is even more difficult in that regard.) Here, the 800 pages are distilled down to a bit shy of two and a half hours, but even this feels long because the characterizations don't allow for quick action.

As for the acting, Yul Brynner and Lee J. Cobb both get the opportunity to give outsized performances. Brynner, despite having been born in Vladivostok and being authentically Russian, feels like a caricature of Tsarist officer stereotypes. Cobb, as always, chews the scenery wildly. William Shatner is a decided supporting role, and he does the best he can with the material. If he hadn't gone on to Captain Kirk, I think his performance would be better regarded.

The Brothers Karamazov definitely has flaws because of the difficulties in translating the source material to the screen. But it's still interesting to see how the studio tried to pull it off.

Beau Brummell (1954)

Stewart Granger was cast in a whole bunch of movies that were period pieces from various eras of British history. When last I posted about Granger, it was for the Victorian-era film Blanche Fury. This time, we go back a couple of decades to the Regency, for the MGM costume drama Beau Brummell. It's airing tomorrow (April 16) at 3:30 PM as part of a morning and afternoon of movies dedicated not to Granger, but to supporting star Peter Ustinov.

You probably know that "Beau Brummell" is, even to this day, a byword for stylish fashion, and the term comes from a real person named George Bryan Brummell, who got the nickname Beau (played here by Stewart Granger). As the movie opens, Brummell is a captain in the British army in the late 1790s, when the real-life Brummell would have been about 20. Brummell's regiment is doing a military parade, and showing up for inspection is the Prince of Wales, the future King George IV (that's Peter Ustinov). Brummell shows himself to be good with a sword on horseback, in exercises involving cutting melons, and putting the sword through rope rings. Brummell gives the rings to another attendee, the socialite Lady Patricia (Elizabeth Taylor). But Brummell gets himself in trouble when he comments to the Prince of Wales that the epaulettes are too big, seemingly designed to make his highness look slimmer and not for ergonomics.

Brummell eventually quits the army, in part because life in the army is expensive since in those days officers had to provision their own uniforms and horses. Brummell runs across a candidate running for Parliament, and makes more comments, partly about fashion, such as the wasteful expense of powdering one's hair and how the flour could be used to feed the poor, as well as some comments about the royals, which again brings Brummell to the attention of the Prince of Wales. This time, however, Brummell is able to ingratiate himself to the prince, in part because of his views on the king, George III (Robert Morley in a small role). If you remember from The Madness of King George, the king's mental capacity had long been a question, along with his testy relationship with the Prince of Wales. The King wants his son to marry a suitable royal from Germany, while the prince is in love with a different woman.

The Prince of Wales, having become friends with Brummell, helps Brummell rise in society, but there are storm clouds on the horizon. One is that Brummell has been spending freely to maintain the appearances of being a member of the aristocracy, and this has led to heavy debts that he's going to be unable to pay off. If he can't pay them off, eventually the debtors are goingto come for him, with the likelihood of debtors' prison looming. The other issue is Lady Patricia. Brummell loves her, and she certainly likes him. But she's long been betrothed to a man who is of her proper social class, Lord Mercer.

Eventually, Brummell and the Prince of Wales have a falling out after he becomes regent and assumes more power. This means he no longer has a protector and is going to have to flee to France post-Napoleon to stay out of debtors' prison. The movie at least gives Brummell the chance at reconciliation with the former Prince of Wales, who by this time has assumed the throne and is George IV.

The problem, if you will, with Beau Brummell, is that it's a fairly fanciful version of history. Lady Patricia is not a real person, but the bigger issue is that in real life, Brummell outlived George IV by a decade. Additionally, from what I've read, he didn't particularly have public political views the way he's presented here. But the total Hollywood lack of historicity aside, Beau Brummell is a good example of how MGM could make a fine color costume drama. Granger is OK, Taylor doesn't have much to do, and Peter Ustinov steals the show. Morley is quite good too, although he only has one or two scenes. If you want to see an example of what MGM could do well, Beau Brummell is definitely a good example.

Lady Be Good

Red Skelton is TCM's Star of the Month for April, and as I mentioned last week, I've got a couple of his movies on my DVR that are showing up as part of the salute to him. First up is a movie that has Skelton in a supporting role: Lady Be Good, early tomorrow (April 15) at 5:00 AM.

Eleanor Powell gets top billing here, although that was a ruse by MGM to get audiences into the theater. In fact, the female lead is Ann Sothern, whom MGM was trying to turn into a musical star. She plays Dixie Donegan, and as the movie opens, she's in divorce court, trying to obtain a divorce from her husband Eddie Crane (Robert Young). This introductory scene is a pretense to go to a flashback, as Donegan tells Judge Murdock (Lionel Barrymore) how the two met and why she wants a divorce. Before the marriage, Crane was a composer, and his girlfriend Dixie sees him and his lyricist have difficulty collaborating. Somehow, Dixie is able to come up with lyrics for Eddie's latest music, and the song they release together becomes a big hit, leading them to get married as well.

Eleanor Powell plays Marilyn Marsh, who is a friend of Dixie's and to a lesser extent Eddie's. She's also a star on Broadway who dances to the sort of music written by people like Eddie. She's happy to see the two married, but distressed by the fact that after they get married, Eddie lets success go to his head, where Dixie just wants to go on writing music for another Broadway show. This is what leads to the Dixie deciding she needs a divorce, even if we all know the two of them are still friends. They just can't work together as husband and wife, at least not until Eddie learns how to combine the two.

After the divorce, Dixie tries to find other composers, while Eddie seems unable to create new music. Eventually he calls Dixie and she thinks he's looking once again for a lyricist. Except that he wants someone to clean up his apartment, as if he thinks this way she'll come back to him. She's already got a new boyfriend, but once again we know this drip isn't right for her. Mutual friends like Marilyn, or Red Willet (that's Red Skelton) who plugs Eddie's and Dixie's songs, try to bring Dixie and Eddie back together. They're even seemingly successful, except that their second marriage hits a snag for the same exact reasons the first marriage did. Still, we know that Dixie and Eddie are going to wind up together in the final reel, so the question is how are they going to resolve their problems.

The on-again, off-again romance story in Lady Be Good is serviceable, and Young and Sothern are able to handle this light drama material well. Red Skelton was on his way up here, and was I think brought in for comic relief which he is unsurprisingly good at providing with his brand of physical comedy. But Lady Be Good is really to be watched for the music and dancing. Arthur Freed, who was of course a lyricist before he become a producer at MGM and made those big post-war Technicolor musicals, provides the song "Your Words and My Music", while some famous composers have old songs of theirs borrowed, with a couple of songs by the Gershwins (including the title number), and "The Last Time I Saw Paris" having been done by Oscar Hammerstein and Jerome Kern. Eleanor Powell has a very good dance number she does with a dog, but most critics mention a different Powell number as the highlight of the film, one danced to "Fascinating Rhythm".

Despite the story which feels like a retread, fans of MGM musicals and dancing will, I think, love Lady Be Good.

Pat O'Brien grows a moustache

Ever since moving and getting access to reliable high-speed internet two years ago, I've been able to watch the FAST services. Tubi seems to have access to a whole bunch of stuff that wound up in the public domain. One that I hadn't heard of before seeing it in the "classic" movies section was Slightly Honorable.

The movie starts off with the idea that perhaps there's an island somewhere in the South Pacifc that doesn't have corruption, but we're in America, 8,000 miles away. Cut to a shot of the highway commissioner in some state getting killed in a road accident, which is the height of irony because the commissioner was the one more or less responsible for the shoddy state of the roads, what with all the graft in the highway department. At his funeral are newspaper publisher Vincent Cushing (Edward Arnold), who is in on the graft and getting wealthy from it; and attorney John Webb (Pat O'Brien), who wants to eliminate corruption and graft.

Complicating matters is that one of Webb's clients, Alma Brehmer (Claire Dodd) just happens to be the mistress of one Vincent Cushing. Webb and Cushing are brought together again when Alma invites Webb to a swanky party at a nightclub hosted by Cushing. It's also a place for Webb to meet chorine Ann Seymour (Ruth Terry), who thinks of Webb as someone to look up to as well as woo once he saves her from one of the brutes at Cushing's party trying to slap her around because he's jealous of her dancing briefly with Ann. Ann, however, seems mostly to be comic relief, which is surprising considering that Eve Arden is also in the film playing the part of Webb's secretary.

Up to now the movie has been more comedy than drama, although things are about to take a turn. Alma being one of Webb's clients, she wants him to see her about some jewelry Cushing gave her and that she wants appraised so she can have it added to her insurance policy. Webb goes up to her swanky apartment, and finds that somebody's stabbed her! Needless to say, since he's the one to have found her, he's an obvious suspect. Cushing's wife has good reason to worry that perhaps her husband could be held responsible, what with his having an obvious motive of trying to silence poor Alma. So she tries to keep anything bad about Cushing from being released. Worse for Webb is that Cushing's daughter actively wants to implicate Webb. Helping to save Webb is his legal firm partner Sampson (a young Broderick Crawford).

I mentioned above that the movie starts off on a somewhat humorous tone, and in the years before the US got involved in World War II there was quite a cycle of comic murder mystery-type movies. However, Strictly Honorable takes a slightly different tack of being humorous up to the murder and then tacking a much darker turn. It's an odd strategy, and one that doesn't always work. However, the flaws in the movie are also in part to it being a low-budget independently produced movie.

Not that Strictly Honorable is a bad movie; it's more that it's the sort of thing where it's easy to see why it's fallen through the cracks and become largely forgotten.

The American Film Theatre

Back in the 1970s, producer Ely Landau tried a bold experiment of taking prominent, mostly modern playwrights, and producing more minimalist versions of their plays as movies. Tickets for these movies would then be sold together, like buying a subscription to a stage theater or the ballet or opera. This project, called the American Film Theatre, only lasted two years and produced about a dozen movies in all. Among them is a version of Edward Albee's play A Delicate Balance.

The leads here are Katharine Hepburn and Paul Scofield. They play a married couple, Agnes and Tobias respectively, who have made it in life and are living an upper middle class life in suburban Connecticut of the generation of American prosperity that followed the second World War (the play was first produced in 1966 and the movie was released in late 1973). The sort of older couple who would stay in on a Friday night and enjoy the fruits of their life of hard work. Or, at least it seems they've made it.

Unfortunately, Agnes has a sister Claire (Kate Reid) who drinks too much and has been in and out of Alcoholics Anonymous and has as been rather less of a success at life. As a result, Claire lives with Agnes and Tobias. I imagine it can't be much fun for Tobias, but then they're at an age where life it more about a pleasant enough routine than fun. They can settle down to a nice dinner before enjoying the weekend.

At least, they can until a couple of neighbors and best friends knock on their door. Harry (Joseph Cotten) and Edna (Betsy Blair) are a married couple who seem to have just as good a life as Agnes and Tobias. But somehow, suddenly, they've both decided they're going to have a midlife crisis at exactly the same time. The two have reached the conclusion that they're terrified of... something that they can't quite figure out what it is. Except that whatever it is, they know they can't live in their current house. So they're just going to knock on Agnes and Tobias' door and move right in. And Agnes and Tobias are willing to let them do this because they're such good friends and have enough spare bedrooms to do so. It's a turn of events that makes no sense in any sort of real life, but there you are.

Things go from bad to worse. Agnes and Tobias have an adult daughter, as well as a son who died some time back. The adult daughter, Julia (Lee Remick), has made an even bigger mess of her life than her aunt Claire, and has just announced she's getting a divorce from her fourth husband. So she's coming back to her parents' place since she needs a place to stay. And dammit, Harry and Edna have her room. So there's a lot now for everybody to bicker about and talk in unnatural stage dialogue.

I suppose that the material in A Delicate Balance is the sort of stuff that might work well on the live stage where you've got a live audience to play off of and play to with communal reactions. And I can certainly see why stage actors would read a script like this and jump at the chance to develop characters. But it's material that's decidedly not going to be to everyone's taste, as well as material that doesn't translate to film as well as other plays do. So definitely some people are going to like it. I'm just not one of those people.

Grosse Pointe Blank

It may seem hard to believe, but it's been 28 years to the day since the release of Grosse Point Blank. I have it on my DVR since one of the TCM Guest Programmers some months back selected it. Recently, I finally watched it to do a review on it.

John Cusack stars as Martin Blank, and as the movie opens up he's in Miami, and on the phone with his executive assistant Marcella (Joan Cusack). It's quickly revealed that Martin is in a hotel room on a high floor, working as a sniper to kill some figure. To lighten the mood, Marcella tells Martin that today's mail includes an invitation to his 10-year high school reunion in Grosse Point, MI, a tony suburb of Detroit.

The killing goes wrong and multiple people get killed thanks in part to fellow hired killer Grocer (Dan Aykroyd). Martin also gets a phone call from Grocer, about a plan Grocer has to consolidate the hired assassin business, something Martin doesn't want, even though they're about the only people who can understand each other. Certainly having trouble understanding Martin is Dr. Oatman (Alan Arkin), whom Martin has been seeing in no small part because being a hired killer leaves him with all sorts of mental issues. Well, that and ex-girlfriend Debi, whom Martin jilted on prom night ten years ago.

And then Marcella gives Martin his next assignment, which is to kill a guy who's about to blow the whistle on some sort of corrupt business or other. Obviously there's some bad guy who doesn't want this guy to testify in court, which is why the guy is a target. The thing is, the target is in Detroit. This would be the perfect opportunity for Martin to kill two birds with one stone, so to say. Not only can he do another job, but he can go home and attend his class reunion.

Except that, as Tom Wolfe wrote, you can't go home again. Well, you can go back to the place you used to live, but it will have changed, and not always for the better. Martin finds out that his old childhood home was sold and redeveloped into a convenience store, with his mom being forced into a nursing home with one or another form of dementia. Debi is still in Grosse Pointe, working at the local independent radio station, and not pleased at seeing Martin considering how he jilted her all those years ago.

Worse is the fact that there seem to be quite a few people who want Martin dead. There are two Feds following him around, while another hitman tries to blow up the convenience store while Martin is in it. He's convinced Grocer is responsible for at least some of the people on his tail. And there's still that reunion to attend. Perhaps Martin might be safe there, since you have to be a graduate, or guest of a graduate to be there. There's also that contract killing Martin is supposed to carry out, which has also not been resolved.

Grosse Pointe Blank is a quirky little movie where you never quite know where it's going to go next, and that's decidedly to the film's benefit. I think it also helped me that I was in high school in the late 1980s, so a lot of the nostalgia vibe was definitely in play. The performances are also all enjoyable, with a bit of a surprise turn from Dan Aykroyd since the movie is a dark comedy and not the sort of comedy he'd normally be more associated with. Alan Arkin is good in his small role too.

If you haven't seen Grosse Pointe Blank before, it's definitely worth a watch.

Sidewalks of New York

About twenty years ago, TCM produced a relatively brief documentary titled So Funny It Hurt: Buster Keaton & MGM, which discusses how Keaton's signing a contract with MGM at the end of the silent era more or less derailed his career as MGM terribly stifled Keaton's creativity. If you want to see a sad example of what MGM did to Keaton, try watching Sidewalks of New York.

Keaton plays Homer Van Dine Harmon, and as you might guess from a name like that, he's an idle rich guy. Specifically, one who owns several tenement apartment buildings. So, as the movie opens his assistant Poggle (Cliff Edwards) is down at the tenements to collect the rent, only to get beat up for his trouble by the sort of young hoodlums who a decade later would be played by the Dead End Kids, or maybe the East Side Kids or the Bowery Boys. Homer is going to have to collect the rent himself.

However, Homer's attempt also leads to the same sort of scuffle that Poggle got into previously. It also results in Homer's meeting Margie (Anita Page), who is the adult sister of Clipper, one of the delinquent boys. She's also his guardian, since 100 years ago it wasn't all that uncommon for there to be large age differences between siblings and the parents to die relatively young. In a trope that MGM probably liked but doesn't work for this version of Buster Keaton, Homer immediately falls head over heels for Margie, so Homer wants to do something for Clipper and the rest of the neighborhood boys.

Homer's plan is to take one of the buildings he owns and convert the ground floor into a YMCA-like gymnasium, where the local boys can blow off their steam and possibly get fit in the process too. But Clipper doesn't like Homer from the previous incident of trying to collect rent, and vows not to go to the gym at all, and convince he friends not to go either. Clipper prefers the company of Butch, who is much more of Clipper's social class. The only problem is that Butch is an actual criminal. Worse, Butch decides to bring Clipper into his schemes.

The final scheme is a plot to kill Homer. Homer, as part of his trying to do good deeds for the deprived neighborhood boys, is going to put on a play with the kids playing most of the parts. The plot of the play will have Clipper's character shoot one played by Homer with a prop gun and blanks. When Butch learns about this, he plots to have real bullets put in the gun so it will kill Homer!

Sidewalks of New York is, I'm sorry to say, fairly dire. That I think, is largely down to MGM, as well as to the fact that the movie was released in 1931, well into the sound era. MGM, instead of letting Buster come up with his trademark physical humor, wants a bunch of dialogue-based stuff, which doesn't work at all, as in a terrible courtroom scene. The movie also feels like a bunch of disjointed scenes. It's a shame that Buster Keaton wound up in stuff like this.

The Paleface

Another of the type of movie that I've said I wound up with a bunch of on my DVR that I need to watch and do posts on before they expire is westerns. One that aired during Summer Under the Stars was The Paleface, so recently I finally got around to watching it.

The star being honored in conjunction with the showing I've got on my DVR is Jane Russell, who plays Calamity Jane. As the movie opens, she's in prison, but is being busted out by people not known to her, and who force her to go with them. (Coincidentally, another western on my DVR that I'm going to be writing a post on before the recording expires has the same theme, Gunfight at Comanche Creek, although the breakouts in that movie are done for a different reason.) The men who break Jane out take her to the territorial governor Johnson, who offers her a bargain. Somebody is smuggling weapons to the Indians, who are obviously using them to attack settlers. If Jane can figure out who, the governor will give her a full pardon. Jane being a woman would be less likely to be suspected of being an agent of the government.

The plan is to have Jane go to a town called Port Deerfield, where she'll meet up with her contact from the feds. She'll pose as the guy's husband and the two will join a wagon train to their ultimate destination, Buffalo Flats. But Jane gets to Port Deerfield and finds that the federal agent she's supposed to work with has been discovered and killed. Worse, she realizes that the men who killed the agent are hot on her trail and coming after her, so she needs to get away, but how?

Also in Port Deerfield, and decidedly not part of the gang of men running guns to the Indians or trying to kill Jane is Painless Pete Potter (Bob Hope). Potter is an itinerant dentist who goes from one town to the next to provide dental work. Except that this being a character played by Bob Hope, Potter isn't the most competent denitst, which I suppose is part of why he has to go from one town to the next. His makeshift office is on the ground floor of a building that houses baths for women on the upper floor, which is how Potter and Jane wind up in the same building together, and then wind up in the same wagon when Jane has to jump from the balcony to escape the gunmen coming after her at the same time Potter is escaping irate patients.

They have a pretend marriage, and join the wagon train, but since Potter isn't good at that either they lead a bunch of wagons off course to spend a night at a cabin in an isolated part of the countryside where a group of Indians can attack. Unbeknownst to Potter, who doesn't know that he's with Calamity Jane or that she's working with the feds to stop gun-running, Jane helps repel an Indian attack while making it look like Potter is responsible for stopping them and thus a hero. It serves Jane's plans, as if the gunmen think Potter is the fed they won't suspect her, although of course this puts Potter into danger which is a bit of a problem from a Production Code point of view.

So eventually Jane has to kinda, sorta let Potter in on what's going on, which is also in part because she needs his help. The two both get captured by the Indians, but you know that this is the sort of movie that's going to have a happy ending.

If you've seen any of Hope's comedies from the 1940s, and I've reviewed several of them here, you'll know what your in for with The Paleface. The surprise here is Jane Russell, early in her career since Howard Hughes didn't use her much in the 1940s. She shows herself to be extremely adept at doing comedy with Bob Hope, and the screenplay, while not particularly realist, is simply a lot of escapist fun. The movie also won an Oscar for introducing the song "Buttons and Bows".

Spoiler: There's really not that much crying

Another of the foreign-language films that I needed to watch off my DVR before it expired was one from German arthouse director Rainer Werner Fassbinder: The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant.

Petra von Kant (Margit Carstensen) is a fashion designer living in apartment in Bremen, in the northern part of what was the old West Germany, together with her assistant/secretary Marlene (Irm Hermann). Petra treats Marlene like dirt, seemingly making her work day and night, even when people like Petra's sister Sidonie (Katrin Schaake) comes over to visit. Complicating this sort of ill treatment is the fact that Petra and Marlene may be having some sort of sexual relationship, something that might have been controversial when this movie was released back in 1972, but is fairly passé today.

But Petra is more likely bisexual, as she's been in two marriages, the first of which left her a pregnant widow, with daughter Gaby away at boarding school. Gaby, along with Petra's mother Valerie, show up for the final act since that's set some months later on Petra's birthday. But, once again, we're getting ahead of ourselves. There's one more main character we haven't met. That's Karin (Hanna Schygulla), a young woman Sidonie and her husband met when they were in Australia. Karin and her husband are German but were living in Australia; she's decided to return because she couldn't take it in Australia.

Karin needs a legitimate job, and Petra offers her one as a model for her designs, although the presumption is that there are also going to be sexual favors involved. But with Karin modeling the clothes, Petra gets a chance as a major German department store is interested in the new designs. Those designs are in fact what the department store wants, and the major commission is good financial news for Petra.

However, it also gets Karin a job modeling, and one that means she's going to be away from Bremen a lot. Worse is when Karin gets a phone call from her husband saying that he's coming back to Germany, and could she come to Frankfurt to meet him. That's all too much for Petra.

There's not much going on in The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, as the whole movie is set in that apartment. It's not nearly as obnoxious as some of the other arthouse films I've mentioned here relatively recently, but I think it's also not likely to appeal to the more casual movie fan. Fassbinder is very deliberate both with the camera movement as well as focus (often to focus on a frustrated Marlene in the background), which to me heightened the feeling of the movie being slow. One other thing that doesn't help is that Petra has a bunch of wigs that she wears over the course of the film. That can make things harder to follow, especially if you don't speak German and have to rely on the subtitles.

No relation to Kevin McCarthy

TCM is doing a morning and part of the afternoon of Val Lewton's films tomorrow, April 8. I happen to have one of those on my DVR, so I'll put up a post on it now: The Body Snatcher, at 1:30 PM.

The scene is Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1831. Donald Fettes (Russell Wade) is a medical student who had been studying with Dr. MacFarlane (Henry Daniell), this being an era when dedicated medical schools weren't a thing. But he's going to have to give up those studies for monetary reasons. He's stopped by a cemetery for no other reason than to come up with an expository scene mentioning body snatching, which is digging up the grave for the body therein, not for any valuables that might have been buried. Body snatchers were a thing back in those days because the anatomist-doctors teaching the next generation of doctors needed bodies to do that teaching, and they couldn't get enough legally, say from people who would othewise be buried in potters' field.

Fettes goes to see Dr. MacFarlane at the same time a difficult paralysis case shows up: Mrs. Marsh is bringing her daughter Georgina, hoping that MacFarlane can operate on her. MacFarlane has no bedside manner to get Georgina to explain exactly what the pain is like which would help diagnose exactly where and what the injury is. Fettes, however, does have a bedside manner, so MacFarlane makes him his assistant.

Meanwhile, the Marshes were brought to MacFarlane in a cab driven by John Gray (Boris Karloff). What Fettes doesn't (yet) know is that John is in fact a body snatcher, bringing the bodies to MacFarlane. Fettes is disturbed by this, but MacFarlane explains that the bodies are absolutely necessary for the advancement of science.

This, however, is also where that opening scene at the cemetery comes back into play. While at the cemetery, Fettes met a woman whose son died and whose dog is mourning at the grave 24/7. Gray knows about the boy having died, but when he goes to the cemetery and gets confronted by the poor dog, Gray hits the dog over the head with a shovel, killing it. Good like getting bodies from the cemetery, now that all of them will be given police protection.

So what does Gray do? Why, turn to murder! Unfortunately, he decides to murder a woman who was trying to eke out a living by singing on the street in exchange for coins. He brings this body to MacFarlane but Fettes recognizes it and realizes that Gray is now murdering people and MacFarlane is complicit in it. (Granted, Fettes has his own problems by not going straight to the police.) This sets the denouement of the film into motion.

The Body Snatcher is based on a story by Robert Louis Stevenson, which explains why Val Lewton wound up making a movie set in 19th century Scotland. It's not quite in the same vein as the straight-up horror movies Lewton produced like Cat People or The Seventh Victim. Since we know who's doing the killing, it's more of a horror-tinged melodrama. That's not to say that The Body Snatcher is bad, although once again the fact that the ending is going to have to satisfy the Production Code office does raise some issues with the film.

Still, Karloff and the rest of the cast are effective enough for what was only ever meant to be a programmer and not some sort of prestige film. In that light, The Body Snatcher works quite well and is definitely worth a watch.

Star of the Month April 2025: Red Skelton

Red Skelton and Lucille Ball in Du Barry Was a Lady (midnight between April 14/15)

As we're in a new month, it's time for a new Star of the Month on TCM. This time around, that star is Red Skelton, who's known for his physical comedy. His movies are going to be showing up every Monday in prime time.

I didn't quite realize it when I was scheduling posts ahead of time -- and I'm getting to the point where I'm close to a month ahead -- but I've actually got two posts on movies that are going to be showing as part of TCM's Skelton salute. Given a choice, I try not to have multiple movies starring the same person show up in fairly close proximity, in part because I also prefer to watch a variety of movies rather than a block of one star or one genre like westerns. This post is a day early because for some reason I thought the first of the Skelton posts was going to appear tomorrow; in fact, it actually shows up in the second week of the salute.

By the same token, I've actually got two movies on my DVR that are part of the final night of the salute, but am only going to be doing a post on one of them, which is actually already scheduled. Also of interest is Du Barry Was a Lady, featured in the photo above, although I blogged about that ages ago, and it's a bit more of a vehicle for Lucille Ball, I think. Indeed, I had to go out and search for a good color photo of Skelton in the movie. There are a lot of black-and-white publicity stills out there.

Fate Without Music

I was looking at the upcoming TCM schedule, and noticed that tomorrow, April 7, at 8:00 AM, you can catch the Howard Keel musical version of Kismet. It's from 1955, based on a then-recent musical, with the musical being based on an old stage play from the turn of the last century. That play had already been turned into a non-musical movie on multiple occasions, most notably a 1944 MGM Technicolor production also titled Kismet. I have that 1944 version sitting on my DVR, so I figure that now wouldn't be a bad time to do a post on it.

Thankfully, the movie has some opening narration that greatly helps to explain everything that's going on in the movie. The setting is Baghdad in its golden age, or "old Baghdad when it was new and shiny" as the narrator tells us. Hafiz (Ronald Colman) is a beggar by day who has somehow obtained some fancy clothes that enable him to go out at night disguising himself as a prince, calling himself Prince Hassir. It's as his prince that he makes his way into the palace of the Grand Vizier where he meets the Vizier's Macedonian wife Jamilla (Marlene Dietrich). But we're getting ahead of ourselves here.

Also given prominence in the opening narration is the nominal ruler of the empire, the Caliph (James Craig). The Caliph is smart enough to know that his advisers are going to engage in toadyism and tell him whatever they think he wants to hear, and that those things aren't necessarily going to be the truth. So he escapes from his own palace at night, dressing in regular clothes and passing himself off as the son of the royal gardener. This he does in order to be able to find out what his subjects honestly think. What they think isn't pretty, of course. But this going out at knight is also what brings him into contact with Hafiz as Hassir. One other person the Caliph meets is Marsinah (Joy Page). He falls in love with her, not knowing that she's really the daughter of Hafiz. Hafiz, meanwhile, has been feeding Marsinah a bunch of lies about how she's going to marry a prince and her life will be one of luxury.

Now, as I said earlier, Hafiz meets Jamilla, and is taken with her. The feeling is mutual, although Jamilla is smart enough to know that Hassir is a disguise as there's no real Prince Hassir in Baghdad. After all, the arrival of a prince would be big news, especially in the palaces. In any case, Jamilla is also the wife of the Vizier, played by Edward Arnold. Edward Arnold's casting is a sign that the Vizier is the baddie in the piece. While the Caliph is the nominal power, the Vizier fancies himself as the real power, and he's going to get into a power struggle with the Caliph. He also meets Hassir when Hafiz gets himself invited to the Vizier's place by posing as the prince. This is, unfortunately, going to cause a great deal of legal difficulty for Hafiz when the Vizier figures out the deception. But it also is what really puts the plot into motion for the second half of the movie.

Kismet received four Oscar nominations (which is why TCM aired it -- as part of 31 Days of Oscar) in various technical categories. It's easy to see why the movie picked up those nominations, but not for any of the more traditionally prestigious categories like acting or direction. The movie is certainly lovely to look at, and to be fair to the actors they do a reasonably good job with the material even if none of them look Arab. What makes this version of Kismet a movie that's not as well remembered as other 1940s classics is, I think, the screenplay, which is slow to develop and tends to meander, as if the screenwriters couldn't quite decide what to do.

That isn't to say this version of Kismet is bad. It's more to say that you wonder whether a truly classic movie could have been made from the material. I have yet to see the musical version, so maybe that musical will be the classic.

Assignment in Brittany

Another of the movies that I needed to watch before it expired from my cloud DVR is an MGM World War II morale-builder, Assignment in Brittany.

The movie doesn't start in Brittany, but in North Africa, where the allies are fighting the Germans. Captain Metard (Jean-Pierre Aumont) is a spy doing espionage work, dressed as one of the local Arabs. However, it's a ruse to murder a Nazi officer, and one that works. Metard, being French, can't go back to France since the Nazis occupy it, so he returns to the London headquarters of the Free French. But they have a plan for him that's going to allow him to go back to France, as if you couldn't tell from the title of the movie.

Bertrand Corlay is a farmer and poet from Brittany, but he was believed to have been collaborating with the Nazis since they occupied France. The British got him, and found out that he and Metard look surprisingly alike. So perhaps the British and Free French can train Metard in what Corlay is like, so that he can go back to Brittany as Corlay and move around the area the way that Corlay could to get vital information that the Allies want. Now, to me, it seems silly that somebody like Metard could learn to become Corlay in the short time period that the movie requires, but in those days apparently it wasn't considered so far-fetched.

Now, you might guess from my comment that Metard is caught out fairly quickly, but that's not the case. Only Mme. Corlay (Margaret Wycherley) figures out the deception right away. She's opposed to the Nazis even though here real son isn't, so she's not about to betray this interloper. The bigger issue is that Bertrand had a fairly complicated personal life. He's got a fiancée, Anne (Susan Peters), but also has a mistress in Élise (Signe Hasso). And everybody around knows that Bertrand Corlay is liked enough by the Nazis to be able to go to Paris (which is how the British are able to make the switch).

However, since this is a World War II movie and the Nazid obviously can't win in the end, we can assume that Metard is able to get information, which is that the Nazis have taken a seaside village, Saint Lumaire, and turned it into a port for their U-boats, forcibly evacuating all of the locals. Metard has to get the information back to the Allies, and that's going to require a radio broadcast. If you've seen enough World War II movies you know that the Nazis and Allies were going around searching for the location of illicit transmitters. This results in Metard getting captured, and the movie reaching its climax.

Assignment in Brittany is typical for the sort of movie released during World War II and dealing with resistance to the Nazis. It's well enough done, although it was designed to be jingoistic in order to keep up the spirits of the people on the home front. Audiences of the day probably would have enjoyed it, although watching 80 years on it might appear dated to some.