Eleanor Roosevelt is a macguffin

Some time back, TCM did a birthday tribute of movies starring British actress Flora Robson. One of the movies that I hadn't heard of before sounded interesting enough, so I decided to record it: Great Day, which is obviously not to be confused with Great Day in the Morning or other movies with similar titles.

It's 1944 in Denley, one of those small towns in England that would have been considered idyllic in the days before World War II began, although obviously that war has changed everything. The local women, as in many towns, have formed a "Women's Institute" to help do charity things for the men on the front. One day, the women of the Institute are called for a special meeting: they're told that US First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt will be visiting the following day to see how local women on the British homefront are getting along, but that this news is a secret. That seems a bit of a plot hole in that first, can an entire town keep news like this a secret, and second, how did the rest of the town know to show up if only the Women's Institute members were informed of the visit.

But then, the impending visit of Mrs. Roosevelt isn't the point of the movie. Instead, the movie looks at how the war has been affecting the village, with a closer look at one family in particular, the Ellis family. Flora Robson plays Elizabeth, the matriarch of the family, who has been keeping the family going during the war even though that's not always easy. First is that there's a consistent strain between Elizabeth and her husband John (Eric Portman). John had served in the Great War, but has reached the age where there's not much for him to do in a small village like this. He doesn't seem to have a job and has turned to drink as well as memories of his heroic service in the previous war, clearly feeling emasculated. He's also reached the point that the local pub doesn't want to extend any more credit.

The Ellises have an adult daughter, Margaret (Sheila Sim), who has a complicated life of her own. She's a Land Girl, one of those young women who worked on the farms during the war while so many of the men were away fighting since Britain didn't have quite so many men to spare as the US. In her case, she's lucky to be able to work on one close to home, run by unmarried Bob Tyndale (Walter Fitzgerald). He's much older than Margaret, but he's a thoroughly decent human being, and genuinely likes Margaret. He's asked for her hand in marriage, and Margaret is not unwilling to accept, knowing that such a marriage would provide the financial stability that she can't get from her home life. However, she hasn't made the engagement public for a couple of reasons. One is that Bob has a nasty sister who thinks that Margaret is just a gold digger. But the other is that before working on the farm, Margaret has a boyfriend in Geoffrey, who is now fighting the war. Well technically not now, as he's got a couple days' leave and shows up in Denley hoping to see Margaret. Margaret doesn't want to break his heart; and besides, she still loves Geoffrey while only considering Bob a friend.

Both story lines reach a climax that evening, with a few other minor subplots worked in, like making alterations to a dress for the little girl who's supposed to deliver a message to Eleanor Roosevelt. All of the subplots are worked out, and Roosevelt, seen only as an arm, shows up with the locals considering this a great morale booster.

Great Day isn't a bad movie if you could judge it on its own. But it has a couple of issues in that you can't really judge it for what it is. One is that it was released a year after A Canterbury Tale, and even stars two of the leads from that movie in Portman and Sim. A Canterbury Tale is one of the great British World War II movies, while Great Day is much more a programmer. But Great Day also had the misfortune of going into production too late, only getting a release in April of 1945 (and well after the war when RKO distributed it in the US), by which time the need for such a morale-booster had passed.

Great Day is an OK movie punctuated by good performances from Robson and Portman. But as far as British World War II movies go, I'd definitely select A Canterbury Tale, or even Millions Like Us.

For some values of "glorious"

Hollywood legend has long had it that silent film star John Gilbert was brought down by the advent of talking pictures and his having a voice that wasn't particularly suited to the new medium. Recently, TCM ran a night of movies dealing with the transition to sound, including the one credited with starting Gilbert's end: His Glorious Night.

The setting is one of those European resorts that catered to the upper crust of European society, especially in the pre-war years the nobility, that would have seemed exotic for American audiences of 1929, with an added vibe of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. It's the sort of place where the visitors amuse themselves watching polo and steeplechase, and dressing to the nines to go to dinner. Staying at the resort is Princess Orsolini (Catherine Dale Owen), accompanied by her mother Eugenie (Nance O'Neil) and a much older military attaché, Col. Krehl (Gustav von Seyffertitz). The princess is betrothed to Prince Luigi (Tyrell Davis), although he's an absolute drip and this is clearly a marriage of political convenience.

John Gilbert plays Captain Kovacs, a military officer who, however, is not of high birth. He meets Orsolini, and it's love at first sight like Vronsky and Anna Karenina, except that in this case Orsolini is only engaged, not actually married. However, Orsolini discovers that Kovacs isn't of the nobility, and that makes going any further in their relationship a decided no. Mom and Krehl find out what's going on, and they're pissed about it. Kovacs, understanding that a lot of what's going on is being driven not by the princess but by her handlers, figures out a way to try to get back at them all, which is to make himself look even worse than he really is, so that if this information comes out it would be an even bigger scandal. To this end he drops hints of having spent time in prison and the implication that he's still a conman and the relationship is part of a con.

Mom wants to see Kovacs personally, and she and Krehl hope that they can come up with some way to get Kovacs to leave the resort, even if they have to pay him off to do it. Their plan is to get to his suite and look for any love notes the princess may have written to Kovacs, and then impress upon him that he could get in trouble if he doesn't leave. Kovacs is having none of it, and makes the demand that the princess spend an evening alone with him in his suite. However, while they're trying to talk things out, Orsolini faints. Since this happens on the balcony and Kovacs has to get Orsolini back to her room, this gets seen by at least one other person, and gossip gets around. Worse, at breakfast it's discovered that Kovacs is still there.

His Glorious Night was the first John Gilbert talkie to be released to theaters, although it was the second one filmed. While the movie may have helped to start the downward slide of Gilbert's career, I have to say that it's not because of Gilbert's voice. True, it's not as stereotypically deep as some other stars' voices would prove to be, but it's not as bad as legend would have you believe. Instead, there were a bunch of other factors at play. Chief among them is the dialog, which is terrible, and doesn't serve anybody well. Gilbert's protestations of love here were parodied in Singin' in the Rain, and it's easy to see why anybody who remembered the movie (and Arthur Freed was at MGM already in 1929) woud make the comparison. Catherine Dale Owen comes across as wooden here, and like a lot of early talkies the direction feels like it's done for the benefit of the microphone and not for artistic reasons.

I'd also suggest that with the depression about to come, there was also going to be a range of new faces coming to the movie screen to replace many of the stars of the 1920s. For the young romantic comedy type, Robert Montgomery was already at MGM and would make waves the following year in The Big House; Clark Gable would make even bigger waves in A Free Soul; and the elegant type could be done by someone like Leslie Howard who had the British accent for it. The sorts of movies that Gilbert featured in would be going on their way out.

TCM ran a restoration print of His Glorious Night, and the print itself looks and sounds quite good. It's just a shame that it couldn't have been in service of a better story.

Jigokumon

It's been a little while since I've done a post on a foreign film, and as I've been stating I've got a bit of a backlog of foreign films on my DVR, to the point that I've had any number of them expire before even getting around to watching them. As an example, Un carnet de bal was on overnight and I had the previous recording on my DVR, but when I went to watch it in conjunction with the upcoming showing, it had expired. A film that I watched just before it expired showed up during 31 Days of Oscar: Gate of Hell.

The movie is set in medieval Japan during a short period known as the Heiji Rebellion, in which a couple of competing groups of samurai were battling for control of the government. Endo Morito (Kazuo Hasegawa) is loyal to daimyo Kiyomori, whose family is under threat from another group of samurai. To get the rest of the family to safety, Kiyomore comes up with a ruse: his sister's official carriage will be ridden not by his high-ranking sister, but a lady-in-waitng, Kesa (Machiko Kyo). Morito is to accompany that carriage while the daimyo's family makes it to safety. Morito gets Kesa to safety, although not without some difficulty, and falls in love with her along the way.

After the war is over, Kiyomori wants to reward Morito for his loyalty, willing to grant Morito one favor. Morito's wish is to have a marriage arranged between him and Kesa. Normally, their social classes wouldn't have resulted in them ever meeting each other, but Kiyomori could make it happen with his stature. There's only one catch: in the meantime, Kesa got married to someone who is of her social stature, Imperial Guard member Wataru (Isao Yamagata). Kiyomori could have tried to arrange a marriage between Morito and Kesa had she not been married, but he can't really force Kesa and Wataru to get a divorce.

Morito, for his part, isn't about to take no for an answer. If this were Hollywood, it would be the basis for some sort of noir on the theme of obsession, but this is medieval Japan so the movie takes a completely different tone. There's a slow buildup as first Morito tries to win Kesa's affection by winning the big horse race. When that doesn't work, Morito tries more direct means. But Kesa and Wataru aren't so willing to see Morito, since he's already shown himself to have a violent temper. Kesa's maidservant lies about Kesa's whereabouts, leading Morito to threaten to kill Kesa's aunt if Kesa won't talk to him.

It leads up to a climax in which Morito plans to kill Wataru, which would leave him free to marry Kesa if she's a widow. But the plan doesn't necessarily, well, go according to plan....

Gate of Hell won an honorary Oscar for the Best Foreign Film, having been released before that was an official competitive category. It also won a competitive Oscar, for color costume design. Those costumes, along with the color cinematography and production design, are all quite good. On the negative side, however, Gate of Hell is an extremely slow burn as a movie, being the dramatic equivalent of a one-joke comedy. That slowness doesn't always work in the movie's favor, so some people may find it a bit of a slog even though it clocks in under 90 minutes.

Double Dynamite

Tomorrow, December 10, is not the birth anniversary of writer/diretor Melville Shavelson. However, TCM is spending the morning and afternoon with his work, starting with Double Dynamite at 6:30 AM.

Frank Sinatra plays Johnny Dalton, a bank teller at a southern California bank in an era when bank tellers were supposedly more prestigious than they are today. I say "supposedly" because in this case Johnny isn't paid as though the job had any prestige. He's got a co-worker Mildred (Jane Russell) who's also his girlfriend, and whom he'd like to marry. The problem is that neither of them earns very much, with a secondary problem of Johnny being too timid. The best he can do is take Mildred to lunch at the Italian restaurant next to the bank. Working at the restaurant as a waiter is Emile Keck (Groucho Marx). When Emile hears about Johnny's problems, he suggests that Johnny needs to live dangerously and do something daring.

And wouldn't you know it, but on the way back from lunch, Johnny has just that opportunity. There's a mugging going on, and Johnny saves the victim from the two assailants. It turns out that the victim is Hot Horse Harris (Nestor Paiva), a well-known bookie who repays Johnny's kindness by taking him to the betting parlor in back of a shirt shop and gives Johnny $1,000. But there's a catch. Johnny is supposed to place a bet on one of the horses. With Hot Horse's help, Johnny has multiple bets pay off, winning something like $60,000. In theory, Johnny can use this money to buy Mildred some of the finer things she's want in life, and even marry her, since this amounts to several years' income.

At this point, the natural question from Mildred would be to inquire about the source of the income, since gambling by the tellers is something that's frowned upon. They're supposed to have probity. Worse is that when Johnny returns to the bank, it's to the news that something has gone wrong and the bank is short $75,000. The bank manager and president understandably assume somebody is embezzling, which would make Johnny's story about suddenly having saved a professional gambler and making money on hot horse tips something nobody's going to believe. Especially when it turns out that the betting parlor was a pop-up place that's moved locations to evade the police.

How is Johnny going to get out of this? Well, he enlists the help of Emile, who sees this in part as a chance to live high on the hog for a while. But Emile's schemes don't seem to work at all and only implicate Johnny further. Things go from bad to worse, and even Mildred is caught in the web of suspicion: Johnny had bought her a fur for a Christmas present, and the bankers see the tag. But of course both Johnny and Mildred are innocent, and with the Production Code, that innocence is going to have to be borne out in the end.

Double Dynamite was made at RKO in 1948, but held up for release until 1951. Having finally seen it, I can understand why. Sadly, it's not particularly good, being more madcap than anything else and a plot that's just too darn far-fetched for its own good. It's hard to understand why Johnny would go back to Emile for advice, or how somebody like Emile wound up as a waiter in a hole-in-the-wall Italian restaurant in the first place. However, I can also understand better now just why Frank Sinatra was so desperate to get the role of Maggio in From Here to Eternity. Movies like Double Dynamite were a sign of his flagging movie career, which he seriously wanted to revive. Of course, we know now that he did get the part and would go on to win an Oscar for it. But Double Dynamite had nothing to do with that.

Appointment With Death

It's not too long ago from the point of when I wrote this post that I did a post on a Lauren Bacall movie. It's even slightly more recent that I did a post on a movie based on an Agatha Christie novel. Today brings a post on another of those all-star Agatha Christie movies, this one a book I didn't know much about before seeing the move show up on TCM during Lauren Bacall's term as TCM's Star of the Month: Appointment With Death.

The movie opens in 1937 in New Jersey. Emily Boynton (Piper Laurie) is the widow of a wealthy businessman who has one daughter of her own by her late husband, Ginevra, and three step-children from her late husband's first marriage. The Boynton lawyer, Jefferson Cope (David Soul) is discussing the will with Emily. Well, actually, two wills. Apparently it was Dad's original intention that Mom be the head of the trust, judiciously using that money to keep the four children taken care of until Emily dies. This, even though the three step-children are adults by now, one with a wife of his own. Two days before Mr. Boynton died, he wrote out a new will that split the estate among the four children and the widow equally. Emily for fairly obvious reasons doesn't like this, and blackmails Cope into destroying the updated will in the fireplace.

The kids are, for equally obvious reasons, not happy about this and suspect that there was in fact a second will out there but cannot yet provie it. Lennox (Nicholas Guest) is married to a nurse, Nadine (Carrie Fisher); Raymond (John Terlesky) is the youngest; seemingly afraid to do anything to cross his stepmother; and daughter Carol rounds out the family. As a way of getting over the grief of the passing of the family patriarch, Emily suggests that a transatlantic cruise to England followed by a Mediterranean trip to the Holy Land would be just what the doctor ordered. It's also a good way to get away from Cope, since Emily knows what secret he holds over her head.

On the way to Europe, they meet some intersting characters. Lady Westholme (Lauren Bacall) is one of those beautiful Americans looking for a man with class and finding one in the late Lord Westholme who was looking for money which his wife's family had. Miss Quinton (Hayley Mills) is an archaeologist looking to do some digging in Mandatory Palestine, and Dr. King (Jenny Seagrove) is fresh out of medica school. Finally, when the boat docks in Trieste, the lot meet Hercule Poirot (Peter Ustinov), who claims to be on vacation.

Now, we know that Poirot isn't going to get that nice vacation he was hoping for. Everybody makes their way to Jerusalem and then to Qumran, which was one of the big archaeologic sited back in the late 1930s. And it's there that Emily finally gets what's coming to her. But who did it? If you've been watching the movie carefully -- or even not so carefully since this is an Agatha Christie story and you know the formula -- you'll know that most of the other main characters in the piece minus of course Poirot are suspects. Col. Carbury (John Gielgud) is part of the British administration, and he lets Poirot do an investigation as an official investigation might cause some problems since Lady Westholme is a sitting member of Parliament. In the end, Poirot will solve the case....

Appointment With Death follows a formula, but it looks like one of those movies where everybody was getting up there in years and the steam was running out of the formula. As a result, there are some nice locations, although the story and the acting aren't the greatest of the series. (From what I've read, Agatha Christie fans don't consider this one of her best books, never mind the changes made for the screen.) Still, it's an Agatha Christie movie with an all-star -- or mostly-star -- cast, so it will wind up being entertaining enough even if not up to the standard of some of the earlier movies.

Ragtime

I've metioned on quite a few occasions how, having been born in 1972, I grew up hearing about the release of a bunch of movies that might have sounded interesting, except that I was much too young to see them in the theater on their original release, so only got around to them much later. Another example of this is Ragtime, which TCM finally ran at the beginning of 2025 in honor of Debbie Allen's 75th birthday. So of course I recorded it, and eventually got around to watching it and writing up this review as part of the backlog of movies to post about.

The movie starts off in the first decade of the 1900s, although I think it doesn't quite get all of the historical events it portrays as quite accurately contemporaneous. Part of the opening involves Evelyn Nesbit (Elizabeth Montgomery), the chorus girl who was at the center of the celebrated case of Harry Thaw murdering Stanford White which was also covered in the movie The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing, which I blogged about all the way back in 2011.

Among the people interested in Evelyn is an unnamed young man known only as "Younger Brother" (Brad Dourif). He's the somewhat shiftless younger brother of a woman known as Mother (Mary Steenburgen) who married up to a man credited as Father (James Olson). Father runs an explosives factory and employs Younger Brother; Father is also not happy at all with his brother-in-law's dissolute life. Father is about to have a lot more to worry about, however, when a young black woman Sarah (Debbie Allen) gives birth and leaves the baby with the family, not being able to support it herself. Mother takes pity on Sarah, offering her a servant's job which will at least give her a place to stay and take care of the baby.

Meanwhile, performing in various clubs in New York City is Coalhouse Walker (Howard Rollins), a fairly talented pianist. It doesn't take much to guess that he's the father of Sarah's child, so when he learns of the news of this abandoned child he's eventually able to put two and two together, showing up at the family's house asking to see Sarah, who isn't quite happy to see him although the two eventually reconcile and plan to get married. Those plans are put on hold, however, when Coalhouse is driving back to New York and is stopped by a racist firehouse chief Conklin (Kenneth McMillan) who claims Coalhouse is going to have to pay a toll to go down the road. When Coalhouse can't pay it, the firemen trash Coalhouse's Model T, leading to a cause célèbre. Theodore Roosevelt passes through town on a whistle-stop tour, so Sarah decides she's going to try to get the president's attention which might help her husband's case. Unfortunately, the police assume she's someone out to attack the president so they accost her, beating her to death.

This drives Coalhouse off the deep end, and he and some of his radical black friends respond with a campaign of terror against white firemen, ultimately leading to their takng over the J. Pierpont Morgan Library with the demand of handing over Conklin to their vigilante justice. Younger Brother, chafing under his brother-in-law's control, wants to rebel, and since he knows explosives, he gets in touch with Coalhouse offering to help with explosives. This brings us to probably the best known part of the movie, which was the return of classic era star James Cagney after 20 years away from the screen. He plays New York Police Commissioner Rhinelander Waldo, whose job it is to try to get a non-violent resolution to what eventually becomes a hostage crisis. After all, the library holds any number of priceless artifacts that nobody should want to see destroyed.

Ragtime was based on a book by E.L. Doctorow which I haven't read, but which is from what I've read of reviews an incredibly complex book that was thought to be tough to translate to the big screen without excising a lot of it. As it is, the movie runs over two and a half hours, yet some reviewers still think too much was excised from the book. Not having read the book, I have to say that I think the movie can stand by itself as a pretty darn good story, even if it is a bit long and has some characters who I think could have been excised without losing all that much. The performances are good and the production design is very good. If you haven't seen Ragtime before, it's definitely one worth watching.

Oliver!

It's about five years ago now that I did a post on the 1948 British adaptation of Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist. As far as film adaptations go, however, the best known adaption is probably the musical version, Oliver!, which started on the stage before the rights to make a movie out of the musical were procured and the British did a movie version of the musical. That movie went on to win Oscar's Best Picture of 1968, meaning TCM could run it in 31 Days of Oscar and give me the chance to finally cross it off my list of well-known movies to watch.

The review that I wrote for the 1948 version is relatively close to the plot of the 1968 version, which is unsurprising considering the two movies are from the same source material. I do notice, however, that Bill Sikes (played in 1968 by Oliver Reed) was for some reason spelled "Sykes" in 1948. The 1968 musical opens with Twist already nine years old and in the workhouse orphanage, with the opening song "Food, Glorious Food" leading to the sequence where Oliver asks for a second helping of gruel.

This again gets Oliver sent to apprentice from an undertaker, and again to run away, leading him to London which is where he meets the Artful Dodger (Jack Wild) in a sequence that results in the other very well known song from the musical, "Consider Yourself". The Dodger is one of a whole bunch of children working as pickpockets for Fagin (Ron Moody, consciously trying not to give Fagin anything that might make him seem obviously Jewish in another big change from previous versions of the story). Fagin, for his part, works for the nasty Bill Sikes, who lives with girlfriend Nancy (Shani Wallis) who takes a liking to little Oliver.

Oliver goes out on his first job together with the Dodger and a third kid. The Dodger steals a wallet from Mr. Brownlow (Joseph O'Conor), but it's Oliver who's left holding the bag so to speak as the other two kids run away before Oliver and Oliver is the one hauled before court. But there were witnesses who saw it was a different kid who did the actual deed, so Oliver is sent to the custody of Mr. Brownlow. There's an obvious bit of foreshadowing here, as Brownlow has a portrait of his niece, a yound woman who looks surprisingly like little Oliver.

In another change from the 1948 version (and the original book), there's no Monks character who knows about the locket that had belonged to Oliver's mother who died in childhood. Instead, the locket remained in the possession of Mr. Bumble who ran the workhouse where Oliver lived the first nine years of his life. Also in this version, Sikes is smart enough to know that Olvier might possibly spill the beans about Fagin and his gang, and ultimately Sikes himself, if he stays with Mr. Brownlow long enough. This leads to Sikes and Nancy kidnapping Oliver and taking him back to Fagin, although Nancy has a change of heart that brings about the movie's climax and fairly sudden ending. There are a lot more songs, although to me none of them are as memorable as the first two I mentioned.

If you like musicals and you haven't seen Oliver! before, then do yourself a favor and watch it. From a technical point of view it's very well done. The acting from the adults, especially Moody as Fagin and Reed as Bill Sikes, is also good. Unsurprisingly, the kids are romanticized a bit. As for the musical numbers, they are exceptionally well choreographed, almost like clockwork, and won an honorary Oscar since choreography wasn't an official category. However, I'm one of those people who isn't the biggest fan of musicals and found the choreography here a bit too machine-like. For me it was similar in that way to Guys and Dolls: the scenes are very well constructed from a technical point of view, but left me rather cold. So if, like me, you're not the biggest fan of musicals, consider yourself (no pun intended) warned.

Tarzan Triumphs

I mentioned some months back that TCM would be running the at least some of the Tarzan movies during the Saturday matinee block, and that I had one of them on my DVR to do a review on when it came up on TCM again. That movie is Tarzan Triumps, which is getting its next TCM airing tomorrow, Dec. 6, at 10:00 AM.

Johnny Weismuller appears again as Tarzan, together with Johnny Sheffield as Boy, although the series has moved from MGM to RKO. The means that Maureen O'Sullivan, who played Jane, couldn't come along since she was still under contract to MGM. So Jane is back in the UK to look after her mother what with there being a war on. Tarzan, who lived an idyllic life away from western influence, would presumably just like to go on living that life, not even being bothered by the people from the next tribe over. That would be the city of Palandria, whose princess Zandra (Frances Gifford since the movie neeeds some female eye candy as well) rescues Boy from a cliff but needs to be rescued by Tarzan.

Not long after this opening sequence introducing Zandra, a plane flies overhead. It's filled with Nazis, who need critical raw minerals to keep the war effort going. They send in a paratrooper, Lt. Schmidt, who gets injured in the middle of the jungle and is eventually found by Tarzan who saw the plane flying overhead and then saw it crash. Tarzan saves the paratrooper, not realizing he's a Nazi and that he's going to be in danger. He may not care for the war, but the war certainly cares about him. Schmidt tries to radio for help, but Cheeta the chimp is smart and steals a critical part that Schmidt would need to work the radio, and that's going to bring more Nazis looking for Schmidt and the missing part of the radio.

Meanwhile, a larger group of Nazis has shown up in Palandria looking for those raw materials, and willing to subjugate the people of Palandria to get those metals. Zandra escapes, but gets injured in the process. She wants to tell Tarzan about the danger that's about to face him, but Tarzan still doesn't care, wanting to live in peace unmolested by anybody else. Boy is bright enough to listen to Zandra, and even tries to help her convince Tarzan that something's terribly wrong, but these attempts only make Tarzan angrier.

But then the Nazis show up looking for their radio, and kidnap Boy in the process. They take Boy back to Palandria and torture him to try to find out where that lost radio part is. It's only when Tarzan loses Boy that he's spurred into action. He hasn't cared about the war, but now that it affects him personally, he can do something to fight the bad guys. Of course, this being a World War II movie, you know that Tarzan is going to win and the Nazis lose.

Tarzan Triumphs is no great shakes, but it's also not as laughably bad as some might have you believe when they criticize the movie series for melding Tarzan with a World War II morale booster. The idea of having the interlopers be Nazis is no dumber than having them be anything else. And the Allies did have good reason to be worried that the Germans would try to advance south looking for raw materials. But there are people out there who see the all-consuming war effort from the point of view of 80 years in the future, and feel the need to show how much better they are than the "rah-rah" patriotism of the day. Ultimately, Tarzan Triumphs is a silly little B movie that's enjoyable enough; had it been about somebody other than the Tarzan character it would probably be unremembered much like a lot of other B movies from the era.

I Married an Angel

I've mentioned on a few occasions that I'm not the biggest fan of the singing of Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy. But I do watch their movies to do posts on here because the pair were a big thing back in the 1930s and I feel a bit of an obligation to see a wide variety of movies to post on here. So I recorded their final film, I Married an Angel, the last time it showed up on TCM, and recently got around to watching it. It's getting another airing on TCM early tomorrow morning (Dec. 5) at 3:45 AM, or overnight tonight if that's the way you look at things.

I Married an Angel was released in the summer of 1942, several months after the US entered World War II, but is based on a play turned into a Rodgers and Hart musical in 1938, which is why the opening informs us the story is set in Budapest in those gay times of years gone past. Anna Zador (Jeanette MacDonald) works as a secretary at the Palaffi bank, run by the third generation of Count Palaffis, with the current Count Palaffi played by Neslon Eddy. Anna has a crush on the Count, and brings wildflowers from the country to his office every morning, but Palaffi's executive assistant Marika (Mona Maris) says the count doesn't notice them. Or Anna, who is really only in the typing pool so why would she be noticed by the count? Besides, Marika is pretty certain the count is interested in her.

In fact, the Count is interested in a lot of pretty, upper-class women to the point that people see him as a sort of playboy, with the most important among such people being the largest depositors in the bank. They could move their assets elsewhere, which would start a run on the bank that would likely cripple it. So he really ought to get married and settle down. When another of the assistants, Whiskers (Reginald Owen) hears that the count is not only not planning on settling down but hosting an extravagant costume party for his birthday, Whiskers has Marika give an invitation to a regular bank worker -- Anna, of course -- to make it seem at least a bit more like a work function.

Anna doesn't have the money for the sort of costume that people wear to these high-class costume balls in movies of this era, so she wears a largely homemade angel costume instead. This subjects her to some ridicule because she clearly doesn't fit in, and didn't necessarily want to be in the spotlight like this even if it allowed her to get close to the count for one night. What Anna doesn't know is that Palaffi had said that the only woman he'd ever marry would have to be a real angel. So during the party he goes into one of the drawing rooms while everyone else is out on the terraces and lawns partying away, and falls asleep and starts dreaming. (I'm not giving anything away here since in the context of the movie, we know that what follows is an extended dream.)

In the dream, Anna comes back to him as an actual angel, named Brigitta, telling Palaffi that she's just the sort of angel that Palaffi needs to marry to save the bank. Palaffi marries her and takes her on a honeymoon to Paris, although he finds out that being married to an angel isn't all he bargained for. The first issue is that the angel is just too virtuous, with the sort of inability to lie that leads to her telling truths that people don't want to hear. If anything, that's going to make the investors more likely to want to start a run on the bank. Of course, we know that this is the sort of movie that's going to have a happy ending, with several songs along the way for both MacDonald and Eddy.

To be honest, I Married an Angel isn't exactly a bad movie, although my view of the sort of singing that MacDonald and Eddy do stands. It's just not my thing. As stated above, the movie was released in the summer of 1942, and I get the impression that public tastes were really changing, accelerated by the US entry into World War II. Several stars of the 1930s (notably Greta Garbo and Norma Shearer) saw the writing on the wall and retired, but I think MacDonald and Eddy were suffering the same fate if you will, only without a voluntary retirement. I Married an Angel was a box office failure and gets panned by the critics, but I don't think it's any worse than the other MacDonald/Eddy movies I've seen.

For some values of "nice"

Some months back, TCM ran a Sunday night double feature of films starring Deanna Durbin. The first was It Started with Eve, but when I sat down to watch it I had the distinct feeling I'd seen it before. So instead I watched the other, Nice Girl?, to do the obligatory post on here. Now, as it turns out, I have seen It Started With Eve, but have never done a post on it; I wouldn't be surprised if the last time it was on TCM was before I started blogging since Deanna Durbin was at Universal and TCM doesn't get the rights to their films all that often. So I'll watch it again and eventually do a post on it.

Durbin plays Jane Dara, middle daughter in a family that is somehow middle class enough to have a maid Cora (Helen Broderick), as well as a father Oliver (Robert Benchley) who is doing experiments on the diets of rabbits that Jane helps with. Indeed, Dad is hoping to get a fellowship with a prestigious institute in New York to be able to help fund his studies. Jane has a boyfriend in Don Webb (a young Robert Stack), who has an interest in cars and could probably make a reasonable living as an auto mechanic, although I get the impression that even in those days this wasn't necessarily the profession a middle class man would want his daughter to marry.

A running subplot is Cora's relationship, or her being pursued by, the mailman Hector (Walter Brennan), who also leads the town's band that meets in the small-town park band shell for holidays like July 4, this being one of those Connecticut small towns that populated Hollywood movies like this in the years leading up to World War II. Hector brings Oliver a special delivery letter informing him that the foundation is sending a man from New York to look over the experiments with a view to the foundation funding these experiments. Jane goes to the train station to pick that man up: Richard Calvert (Franchot Tone). Richard has done research on various pygmy populations and the extent to which diet has made them short, and this has caused him to travel all over the world (and as we'll see later, have an impossibly big New York apartment for someone of his employment). That travel makes him sophisticated in the eyes of the three daughters, all of whom put on airs in the hopes that he'll take an interest in them, even if they're all too young for him.

Eventually it's time for Calvert to go back to New York, and Jane offers to drive him to the train station, in Don's convertible since Don's working on her car. However, she sabotages the convertible so that it won't get to the station on time, meaning she has to drive him to New York. They get stuck in the rain, and in a series of coincidences, Jane winds up wearing a pair of pajamas belonging to Richard's sister while her own clothes are drying. Then when Calvert makes it clear there's no romantic interest between them, Jane drives home in the middle of the night, arriving home at a scandalous time and making the whole town gossip about her.

Now, this is a Deanna Durbin movie, so we know that everything is going to come out right in the end. But to see exactly how that's going to happen, you'll have to watch for youreself. Nice Girl? is the sort of movie that I can see why it would appeal to fans of Deanna Durbin, especially back in 1941 when it was released. However, I can also see why Deanna Durbin was growing tired of these ingenue roles and wanted something more talent-stretching. This being Deanna Durbin, there are also several opportunities for her to sing, which again fans of hers will enjoy. The misunderstandings plot doesn't always work, and to me it felt wrapped up a bit too quickly. But for the most part Nice Girl? is simply inoffensive fun.

Maid for a Day

I've mentioned a couple of times now that I've been recording some of the shorts the TCM Saturday matinee block for when I want to blog about something on a day where I have another post that's not going to be a traditional review going up. We've got that again today, and this time the short in question is a Vitaphone two-reeler, Maid for a Day.

Peter Lind Hayes, credited here as just Lind Hayes, plays Freddie Hayden, a college student who wants to become a radio star, this being the mid-1930s. Needless to say, he gets teased by his roommates, although he tells them about the big hit his mother Grace (played by Peter's real-life mother Grace Hayes) had on stage with a song called "My Man Is on the River", performed on a stage with a curtain that depicts black people eating watermelons which of course everybody reviewing the movie today has to mention.

Grace is now working as a maid out on Long Island, where she serves a pair of society matrons. One of course, is her boss, while the other one is the boss' friend, who is running a bizarre little charity scheme, if you want to call it a charity. It's designed to set up a special beach just for the servants, although the real point of it is so that the rich people can have their own private beach without the servants seeing them. In any case, Freddie has gotten a job performing at that benefit radio show, which has elaborate musical numbers because of the live audience that's paying to show up.

It's only revealed later that Grace took on the job of a maid under an assumed identity to learn about maids for a performance she's going to give at some point in the future. She's saved her money from performing, and is somehow able to snag a ticket to the benefit. She has one of the ushers give a message to the producer telling him who she really is, which gets her backstage and ultimately performin in the finale, which just happens to be the song her son is doing.

I'd really only noticed Peter Lind Hayes in the movies he did when he was rather older, notably The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T and the terrible Once You Kiss a Stranger, so seeing him here so young is interesting. Grace Hayes isn't the best, but she's not exactly bad either. The songs are all rather odd choices for a short like this, notably one called "Two Cigarettes in the Dark". WIth all that, I can understand why Maid for a Day is even less remembered than other Vitaphone two-reelers.

TCM Star of the Month December 2025: Merle Oberon

Merle Oberon as Cathy in Wuthering Heights (Dec. 16, 8:00 PM)

Once again, we're into a new month, which as always means it's time for a new Star of the Month. For December, that Star of the Month is Merle Oberon, who was last TCM's Star of the Month back in early 2015. Oberon's movies will be airing on four of the five Tuesday evenings in December. There's going to be a break on December 23, since this being December, TCM has its annual marathon of Christmas movies that I'll be mentioning again when we actually get to the marathon.

TCM is only airing 17 of Oberon's movies, as far as I can tell. There are a couple of movies in the tribute that I'm not certain whether I've seen yet, so I'll be recording them. There's also at least one that's on my DVR that's airing, so I've already watched it and schedule the post for when it actually airs in a few weeks time. There also seem to be a few omissions of movies that I've blogged about before, which makes me wonder a bit about TCM's finances and what they're able to get the rights to. The Cowboy and the Lady was released by United Artists, although IMDb says that it got a DVD release from Warner Home Video back in 2016; I don't know whether that would be the Warner Archive or not. Also not showing up this month is A Song to Remember, which was released by Columbia. I'm not surprised the Fox stuff didn't show up; I'm not certain whether TCM would have to negotiate with Disney to be able to show that stuff nowadays since I don't recall how much of the back library Disney got when they bought part of Fox.

Glory Alley

I've stated two different general thoughts on MGM over the years. One is that, as probably the most prestigious Hollywood studio, they brought a lot of gloss to movies that would have benefitied from having no gloss. The other is that, once the Freed Unit musicals really got going, it was the other stuff made that's really a lot more interesting. Both of those thought came to mind as I was watching Glory Alley.

The movie is ostensibly set in New Orleans, although it's the MGM backlot's version of New Orleans, which has all the connotations you can think of. Working for one of the newspapers, although about to retire, is columnist Gabe Jordan (John McIntire), who tells his editor that he's never told the full story of boxer Socks Barbararossa (Ralph Meeker). So, as you can guess, we're about to get a flashback that tells us... the rest of the story. Wait, this isn't Paul Harvey, either the radio man or the character actor.

Some time in the past, before the Korean War (the movie was released in June 1952), Socks is about to fight a title bout. But as he's in the ring, he looks up at the very bright ring lights, and realizes... he can't go ahead with the fight! So he just gets out of the ring right then and there and goes to his dressing room in the basement to hide from everyone. Not quite everyone; there's his manager Peppi (Gilbert Roland), trainer of sorts Shadow (Louis Armstrong), girlfriend Angela (Leslie Caron), and Angela's blind father The Judge (Kurt Kasznar). Now, since Leslie Caron had a French accent, she and her dad are portrayed as having fled France when the Nazis occupied it, with Dad hoping to get the family assets back and Angela training to become a nurse to get the money for Dad to have an operation. Except that that last bit is only what Dad thinks; Angela in fact dances in one of the dive nightclubs which brings in rather more money. Anyhow, why did Socks just up and leave the ring? The full reason isn't explained until the end of the movie, but Socks looks at himself in the mirror and sees some of the toll boxing has already taken from him.

Peppi buys a bar of his own while Socks lets himself go, drinking heavily to the point that he's going to have to accept a pity job at Peppi's place. Peppi holds the contract of one other fighter, "Newsboy", which he gives to Socks. Socks intends to raffle off the contract to get some money and to get out of the boxing game for good, but he and Newsboy both get drafted to serve over in Korea. Then, in a truly nutty twist, Socks is able to show some real bravery and win the Congressional Medal of Honor, except that's an award he doesn't really want although he can't really sell it legally to make money.

Socks returns from Korea, and eventually tells Angela the real reason why he left the ring just as he was about to fight for the title, and... everyone lives happily ever after? Yes, basically that's what happens, and the "official" reason Socks gives for running away from that previous title fight is one that makes no sense.

In fact, the movie as a whole doesn't make much sense, seeing as how it veers wildly from one genre to the next. The characterizations are also all wrong. Ralph Meeker is asked to play something much too gentlemanly for a boxer who came up from poverty. Leslie Caron was most likely cast here because it was just after An American in Paris made her big. With her French accent, the studio had to make her character French, necessitating that back story. The melodrama with Dad's operation is an odd thing to shoehorn in here. Even worse is how the movie suddenly switches to the Korean War, looking like a cheap B movie at the same time it's doing this.

So Glory Alley goes wrong in so many ways, and yet that's something that actually makes the movie interesting, to watch how it goes so badly wrong. Not good, mind you, but interesting nevertheless.

A Dangerous Profession

George Raft was TCM's Star of the Month in January 2025, and as always that gave me the chance to record a couple of his movies that I hadn't blogged about before, including the noirish movie A Dangerous Profession. Eventually I got around to watching it and writing up this post to schedule some time in advance.

The movie opens up with a monologue narrated by Los Angeles police detective Nick Farrone (Jim Backus) discussing the bail bond industry and how it's quite the money spinner, with firms such as that of Joe Farley (Pat O'Brien) and Vince Kane (George Raft). Kane, for his part, is a former police detective himself before leaving the force to join the bail bond industry and living the sort of life that the police probably wouldn't approve of. Indeed, it's at a craps game that Kane is contacted by Ferrone.

Ferrone is taken to the home of Claude Brackett (Bill Williams), a stockbrocker who has just been arrested in a case involving stolen bonds and that's going to involve a fairly substantial bail of the sort that a bail bond company lke Farley-Kane may be able to help with. However, when Kane gets there, he realizes that Claude's wife Lucy (Ella Raines) is in fact his own former girlfriend. Complicating matters is the fact that Claude and Lucy were separated from each other up until Claude got arrested for the robbery.

Bail is high, and Lucy can't raise all the money for it, until a mysterious lawyer named Dawson comes up with a bunch of the money even though Claude and Lucy claim to know nothing about this lawyer. Worse is that Kane dips into a greater portion of the company's funds to pay off the rest of the bail than the company normally does, with everybody thinking that Kane is doing it for personal reasons, which would be to try to win Lucy back for himself. Lucy, for her part, is claiming that she only married Claude for his money and that she still really loves Kane. Just how honest is she being?

Farley is more concerned, and rightly so, when word gets out that Brackett has jumped bail, and then it's found out that Brackett has been murdered! Kane is trying to figure out who this mysterious Dawson is and who hired him. He's also trying to solve a murder and figure out why he's being followed. All of this is happening while he's got both the police trying to solve the murder, and a business partner who is none too happy with everything that's going on considering how much of the company's money is involved.

A Dangerous Profession is decidedly B noir, but it's entertaining enough. Everybody puts in a professional job, although the story itself feels like a bit of an overcomplicated mess at times. Even though this one was released by RKO and is therefore part of the old "Turner Library" that has always made up a substantial portion of the TCM schedule, I think it's not without reason that A Dangerous Profession isn't so well known.

The Fool Killer

Back in the spring, TCM ran its second season of Two for One, in which people from the movie industry select a double feature of films they feel are significant to them in some way or another. Both seasons got a rerun in the fall. One of those people was director Joe Dante, whose night is getting a rerun tonight. His first film at 8:00 PM is Night of the Hunter, with the second being a new-to-me film influenced by Night of the Hunter: The Fool Killer, at 10:00 PM.

Edward Albert (Jr.) stars as George Mellish. As the movie opens, were in rural east Tennessee some time not too awfully long after the end of the US Civil War. George lost both of his parents in a way that's not fully made clear and isn't exactly relevant to the plot anyway. Suffice it to say that George is living with foster parents, who treat him badly any time he does anything wrong. Eventually, George has enough of the abuse, so he grabs a go bag and stows away aboard the next train that comes, going west to parts unknown.

Unfortunately, when the train stops to take on water, George hops off, losing his bag when he can't get back on in time. Oops. So George becomes a sort of hobo, until he meets and old guy Jim Jelliman (Henry Hull), nicknamed Dirty Jim because he doesn't keep his house clean. Indeed, Jim calls young George a fool for trying to clean up the place, and then tells George what today we'd call an urban legend, about the so-called "Fool Killer" who stalks the countryside and chops people to death. It's almost enough to get George to run away again.

George continues to go west, with vague thoughts about wanting to become a gold prospector out west and even see the ocean. He meets another drifter, a man who for the longest time won't speak and doesn't seem to want to hear George say anything either. This man eventually reveals that his name is Milo Bogardus (Anthony Perkins). Except that he's not really Milo Bogardus, although we'll call him that because that's the only name the man has now. Apparently Milo fought in the Civil War and suffered some sort of injury that left him with PTSD and amnesia, such that when he was in the hospital recovering nobody knew his name. There was another dying soldier named Milo Bogardus, so they gave our Milo this name once the original Milo died. George seems to look up to Milo, although Milo might not be quite the role model one would like. Milo has no time for the traditional southern Protestantism of the era, so when they happen along a "camp meeting" revival show which George would like to attend, Milo is horrified.

This leads to George and Milo's parting and George's being taken in by a much nicer set of foster parents, the Dodds. But Milo eventually shows up again and is one again disgusted by the change he sees in George, leading to the film's climax.

Joe Dante suggested that The Fool Killer is some sort of tremendously good movie that never got a proper release back in the day which is why it's largely forgotten. (Indeed, the majority of the limited number of IMDb reviews date from the days immediately after the previous TCM showing.) While I'm glad Dante selected this film and gave everybody a chance to see it, I'm sorry to say it's not nearly as good as Dante makes it out to be. It's not bad, but to me it came across as the sort of movie that's trying really hard to be daring when in fact it really isn't. Perkins is given a very unappealing character to play, and I found the revival scene to be particularly badly handled. Still, as I said, I'm glad I got to see this, and will say that anybody else interested should watch and make their own conclusions.

His sister-in-law

Barbara Stanywck was TCM's Star of the Month back in March 2025, which gave me the chance to record a couple of her movies that I hadn't done posts on before. Among those was the melodramatic programmer His Brother's Wife.

Robert Taylor plays the he who has a brother and eventually a sister-in-law. The "he" in question is Chris Claybourne, the latest in a family line of medical researchers who, despite having been trained to do medical research, would rather be a playboy. To be fair to him, the research in question is the tick-borne disease spotted fever, which is affecting mining camps in the jungles of South America; since a lot of the basic research has to be done down there away from civilization, it's understandable why Chris might not want to go down there. This disappoints his dad (Samuel S. Hinds) and older brother Tom (John Eldredge), also medical researchers. Tom has an unseen fiancée Mary.

Chris makes an agreement with his family, which is that before he goes off to South America at the beginning of June to work with Prof. Fahrenheim (Jean Hersholt), he gets to spend the month of May doing what he wants. So he goes to the Crescent Club, a gambling establishment run by a guy called "Fish Eye" (Joseph Calleia). Working at the club as a tout who brings in rich guys to be fleeced by the club in exchange for a commission on how much they're fleeced is Rita Wilson (Barbara Stanwyck, who would go on to marry Robert Taylor after making this movie). Not that Chris knows Rita is workin for Fish Eye, or that she has debts of her own to him that she's basically working off. In any case the two of them fall in love, with Chris deciding to elope with Rita instead of going to South America.

Except that Chris runs up $5,000 in gambling debts that he can't pay off, passing off a bad check since it's generally believed he's going to go down to South America away from American law. Fish Eye is no dummy and calls Chris on his bluff. Dad can't mortgage the clinic again to pay off his son's debt, so Tom makes Chris agree that he (Tom) will pay off the debt in exchange for Chris' going off to South America for that two-year research hitch. If Rita really loves Chris, she'll wait the two years before Chris returns and only marry him then.

Rita is no dummy and understands that Tom is trying to get rid of her because she's déclassé and the Claybournes are high-class. So she goes into debt herself to pay off Chris' debt, not telling either Chris or Tom, and letting Chris go off to South America. She then starts working her wiles on Tom, getting him to dump that unseen fiancée and marrying Rita, who really doesn't love him and is certainly never going to grant him a divorce.

If that's not insane enough, Chris returns from South American before the two years are up and finds out about the marriage. He knows Rita is still at the Crescent Club, and discovers that she still loves him, although now it's Tom who won't grant a divorce. So he takes her to South America on the theory that this will make Tom finally grant that divorce. Meanwhile, the research into the spotted fever isn't going well, to the point that the South American authorities will charge Chris or Fahrenheim with manslaughter if they try out a serum on another local and that local doesn't survive. You can guess where this is leading....

His Brother's Wife is the sort of movie that audiences of the 1930s might have liked, but 90 years on seems dated and with a plot that veers in a direction that feels like a hilarious misfire. Stanwyck does the best she can with the material, as do the rest of the cast. This is one of those movies where the studio (MGM) has the ability to cast a fine stable of stars, even if the material more or less sinks the movie.

The sky of size

Another movie that I had sitting on my DVR until it very nearly expired was The Big Sky. So I made the point of watching it before it did in fact expire so that I could get this post on it written and scheduled for some future time.

The movie opens in Kentucky in the early 1830s, although the movie isn't going to stay there for long. Kirk Douglas stars as Jim Deakins who is transporting a body to Louisville. In the woods along the cart path he hears a bird, and when he goes to investigate he finds it's not a bird but a man good at bird calls, Boone Caudill (Dewey Martin), who for whatever reason first gives the name of his uncle, Zeb Calloway. Boone and Jim get into a fight at first, but become fast friends by the time they get to Louisville.

Boone's intended destination is St. Louis, where he plans to look for Uncle Zeb. Zeb (Arthur Hunnicutt) is a trapper who returns to St. Louis with his wares once a year since that's basically the end of civilization in 1830. Trapping in the upper Missouri River valley and the Rockies is difficult not just because of the mountainous terrain and bad climate, and not just because of the violent Indian tribes who for obvious reasons don't like having the white man impeding on their territory. No; there's also the fur company which lays claim to the fruits of the land, having set up several forts along the Missouri to trade with the Indians. They don't like having anyone else trying to trap or hunt in their perceived territory without them getting a cut, and that is apparently just what Zeb's been doing. Zeb's in jail for stealing whiskey from the fur company, and when Jim and Boone get sent to jail on a drunk and disorderly, they get put in the same holding cell as Zeb.

Zeb's plan is to go west again, up the Missouri on a boat captained by a holdover from the days this area was part of the French Louisiana teritory, Frenchy Jourdonnais (Steven Geray). They can always use extra crew, so Boone and Jim are allowed to hire on. The boat is also taking a Blackfoot woman up the river, Teal Eye (Elizabeth Threatt). She had been kidnapped by the rival Crow tribe but escaped some years back. Zeb, having found her and speaking a Blackfoot language better than anybody else in the crew, knows that returning her to her people is going to go a long way toward getting trading rights for them and not for the Missouri Fur Company.

But the Missouri Fur Company isn't going to go without a fight. They have their forts along the river, and send a man named Streak (Jim Davis) to try to sabotage Frenchy's boat. It leads to a series of adventures as the boat goes up the river and the men have to fight both the Crow and Streak's men along the way. Teal Eye and another Blackfoot named Poordevil know the lay of the land and are able to help. Things get more complicated, however, as Jim and Boone both fall in love with Teal Eye. Will they ever make it Blackfoot territory? Will they be able to make it home?

The story in The Big Sky is one of those rousing adventure yarns that boys of a certain age will probably like. I don't know how much historical accuracy there is in this movie however. Meanwhile, the print TCM ran wasn't very good. In fact, it felt like it came from two different prints, with some sections not being so bad while others looked like they were from a bad 16mm TV print. That might have something to do with the fact that the movie was edited down for original release from 140 minutes to 122. The TCM print was back up to 140 minutes. I don't know if the movie would have been better edited down to 122, but I think it certainly would have been better if it had been written to run only two hours if that. It's also a movie that screams for a Technicolor treatment instead of the black and white we have here.

So The Big Sky isn't exactly bad, but it could have been a lot better.

Thanksgiving 2025 briefs

For those of us in the US, today is Thanksgiving, which among other things means programming changes on a lot of regular channels before the Christmas season kicks off. (I'll probably start thinking of Christmas on Sunday, which I think is the first Sunday of Advent for those of us born Catholic.) TCM tends to have more family-friendly programming on the day, and is doing that again this year. Apparently, Carol Burnett is back for two nights to present a bunch of movies most of which she parodied on The Carol Burnett Show back in the 1960s and 1970s. I'm too young for the original Carol Burnett Show, although I was a very young kid when the comedy skits were cut up and put into a syndicated Carol Burnett and Friends package, so I remember some skits from there. Sorry.

Speaking of the TCM website, it's gotten another downgrade in the past week or so, as the TCM Database is no longer there. I liked to use it when I was writing up a post on a movie that I had watched off my DVR but not gotten around to doing the blog post on yet, as the TCM database tended to have the best synopsis for jogging my memory as I was rewatching the movie on the little video player in the corner of my computer screen. I also wonder whether it's eventually going to have a negative effect on getting the monthly schedules ahead of time, since the monthly schedule guide that TCM has is terrible: view "this month's highlights", without giving most of the daytime schedules.

And now that I'm looking at the monthly "highlights", I see something worse. I was looking at the monthly schedule somebody else was able to compile, which I downloaded just before the start of November. I noticed that Sunday night will have a two-movie tribute to Diane Ladd, who died at the beginning of the month: Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore at 8:00 PM and Rambling Rose at 10:00 PM. Since I downloaded the schedule at the end of October, it was just before Ladd died at the age of 89. TCM's "highlights" page has it listed as "Diane Ladd's 90th birthday", as if she were still alive. Oh dear.

As for FXM's schedule, it still doesn't look like there's a whole lot that's been pulled out of the vault that hasn't been on the channel in a while. I do note, however, that I haven't done a post on the 1960s Pat Boone version of State Fair which is showing up on the schedule. So I'll have to record that and watch it for a future airing of the movie. I also forgot that FXM was one of the channels that Disney got when they bought out parts of Fox, as FXM was missing from my YouTube TV lineup for the first 10 days of November or so when YouTube TV and Disney had their contract dispute.

Jean, Jean, roses are green?

Maggie Smith died last year, leading TCM to run a programming tribute to her in December. One of the movies that I had never gotten around to reviewing was the movie that won Smith her first Oscar, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. So I made certain to record it so that I could watch it and write up this review.

The movie opens up in 1932, at the Marcia Blaine Girls' School in Edinburgh, Scotland. Girls are making their way to school for the opening bell, as are various faculty members, including Jean Brodie (Maggie Smith). When Brodie arrives at the school, she's buttonhole by the music teacher, Gordon Lowther (Gordon Jackson), who has been trying to get her to see him, even though he's married if unhappily. In fact, Jean is also the art teacher, Teddy Lloyd (Robert Stephens), making her personal life rather complicated.

Miss Brodie's personal life isn't the only thing that's complicated, as her professional life is, too. Jean is a bit of a free spirit, which gets her in conflict with the headmistress, Miss Mackay (Celia Johnson). She's also taken a couple of her students, notably Sandy (Pamela Franklin), and made them a sort of clique who Jean suggests are going to become a sort of higher-class group of girls. Added to this group is young Mary McGregor (Jane Carr), a Catholic orphan with an elder brother and enough of a trust fund to be able to pay for the schooling.

The other thing that makes Jean controversial is her political views. She visited Italy at some point in the past and shows her students slides from her vacation. But partly as a result of that vacation she developed an admiration for Benito Mussolini's governance. That's not a massive deal in 1932; remember that Cole Porter included a positive reference to Mussolini in the original lyrics to "You're the Tops" and one of Marie Dressler's dogs in Dinner at Eight was originally called "Mussolini". But the movie opens before 1933, and once Hitler comes to power, supporting Mussolini is much more questionable. Worse is that the Spanish Civil War starts and Jean takes the side of Franco even though pretty much everyone else in the UK doesn't like them. Mary's brother runs off to Spain, and Jean naturally believes that he's gone to join Franco's forces, and tries to convince Mary to run off to Spain to follow her brother.

Sandy is the one person who, despite being one of "Miss Brodie's girls", has a mind of her own as well, and doesn't always do what Jean thinks she should. So when Jean starts sleeping with Lowther despite still seemingly want to have a relationsihp with Lloyd, Sandy starts seeing Lloyd herself, even posing nude for a portrait. Except that Lloyd is also less than fully honest, as we learn that the portrait is in fact one of Jean. Tensions continue to rise, until there's the possibility for Miss Mackay of finally being able to get rid of Jean.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie isn't quite as complicated as my synopsis might make it sound, although you'll have to pay attention because of the high number of young girl characters. The movie, however, is much more Jean Brodie's story, and Maggie Smith is magnificent as Brodie, a woman who thinks she's much more hot stuff than she really is. The rest of the cast is quite good in support of Smith as well.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is another of those movies where, if you haven't seen it before, you really should.

Insert into slot A

Another of the movied that I recorded off of TCM some time back because the premise sounded interesting and that was wholly unknown to me when TCM aired it was the movie Flap. Having seen it, I can see why it was wholly unknown to me.

Anthony Quinn plays Flapping Eagle, an aging member of the Navajo tribe living on the reservation and drinking too much, making a meager living by transporting goods to and from the reservation. As the movie opens, he's hauling tchotckes through Tucson on his way to the edge of the reservation where one of those kitsch places is going to sell them as "authentic" Indian dolls. Except that Flapping Eagle misjudges a turn resulting in some of the boxes falling off the truck. When he and his friends Lobo (Claude Akins) and the much younger Eleven (Tony Bill) get out to pick up the stuff, it causes a traffic backup that results in police Lt. Rafferty (Victor French) engaging in a bit of police brutality on them.

Back at the reservation, Flapping Eagle talks to tribal lawyer Wounded Bear (Victor Jory) to find out if there's anything that can be done. To which, the answer is, not much. And it's not as if Wounded Bear is much of a lawyer anyway. He's more of a historian in that he's got the old copies of all the tribal treaties between the Navajo and the Americans, most of which isn't going to to Flapping Eagle any good in traffic court.

Life on the reservation is tough, and is only about to get tougher when the US government plans to extend the Interstate Highway System over land that happens to belong to the Navajo. This necessitates the exhumation and reburial of several bodies, as well as the placement of a whole bunch of heavy equipment on tribal land that's going to be cut in two.

But, at this point, knowledge of the old treaties is something that might finally be useful. Apparently, there was a clause in one of the old treaties that if the Americans abandoned anything on tribal land, it would become property of the tribe. Now, the construction equipment can't really be considered abandond, but Flapping Eagle gets the idea that the Navajo could cause something else to just happen to be abandoned on the reservation, as there's a disused railroad spur leading onto the reservation. Flapping Eagle gets the railroad switch in working order, and gets cars of a cargo train to be shunted onto the reservation, but not the engine or the caboose, since that would result in humans being held technically captive on the reservation.

When Flapping Eagle claims ownership of the "abandoned" railroad cars, this causes a national sensation, as news organizations from all over the country want to see what's going on with this human interest story. Of course, the government wants the original owners to get their stuff back, and that leads to a conflict with ultimately tragic results.

I can once again see why people would want to make the story that forms the basis of Flap. Unfortunately, the movie goes wrong in its execution. Flap and the other Indians are basically stereotypes, and not particularly appealing characters. I'm not certain whether Flap was supposed to be a dark comedy or a serious drama, but it consistently feels off in tone with the result that it's neither funny nor serious enough in its drama. Shelley Winters appears as a love interest for Flap, but she way overplays it and is more irritating than anything else.

Nazis at the American Film Theater

I've mentioned the American Film Theater in conjunction with a couple of films before; it was an ambitious plan in the mid-1970s to take relatively modern stage plays and adapt them into films that kept almost all the dialog while opening them up where cinema allowed for it. Another of the films from that series was on my DVR and I finally got around to watching it: The Man in the Glass Booth.

People with a good knowledge of history should know what the title comes from, although the play is not a historical drama in that the characters are not taken from real people. Maximilian Schell stars as Arthur Goldman, a Jew who survived one of the Nazi extermination camps, emigrated after the war, and became a wealthy property developer in New York City. At least, that's his story; Goldman is a bit of an odd bird. He lives in a penthouse apartment with serious security in the form of right-hand man Charlie Cohn (Lawrence Pressman), has a couple million in cash squirreled away, and has rather odd views of Jews and Judiasm. He also has some sort of vision where he keeps thinking he sees people on the sidewalk below coming for him; sometimes they're Nazis and sometimes they're, well, something else. He's also trying to burn off recognition of something on his skin, but it's not on the forearm where the tattooed concentration camp ID numbrer would be.

If you remember that the original "man in the glass booth" was Adolf Eichmann, who was kidnapped from Argentina and brought to Israel to stand trial for crimes against humanity, being put in a glass booth in a specially constructed courtroom for the trial, then you'll know where the movie is going. Mossad agents are able to get into the apartment and do a physical evaluation of Goldman that comports with medical records they have of him. This is not Arthur Goldman, who was killed in the concentration camp, but one of the camp commandants who was actively killing the Jews. So they drug him and Cohn so that Cohn can't fight back either, and then take Goldman to Israel where they intend to put him on trial.

Goldman freely admits to being a Nazi, but also says that he's not going to stand trial unless his captors give into certain demands, which they ultimately do because the demands are more delusional than a security risk. Goldman intends to defend himself, and also asks that he be called by his Nazi rank. The court, including prosecutor Rosen (Lois Nettleton) and the judge (Luther Adler) do. Goldman doesn't seem to be putting up much of a defense, instead acting increasinly delusional, until something happens that may just change the course of the trial....

As with the other movies from the American Film Theater that I've seen, I think you have to give producer Ely Landau credit for the idea, while at the same time admitting that again this is a movie with some serious flaws. For me, the first big problem is that the first half of the movie, set in New York before the trial, is incredibly slow. Some people may almost want to give up on the movie before it gets to Israel, which is a problem with the screenplay and/or the play itself. Something that again may be a problem with the screenplay is that Goldman as a character almost requires whoever is playing it to overact badly, since the character is delusional. Schell does that, although it's also a compelling performance -- one doesn't really care about the other characters in the story who are just there in service of the Goldman character. Schell received an Oscar nomination, losing to Jack Nicholson for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

From what I've read, the one truly good movie from the American Film Theater is The Iceman Cometh which I have not yet seen. The Man in the Glass Booth is interesting, but ultimately rather a mess.

Girl trouble

Next up on my list of movies that are on my DVR and getting another airing on TCM soon is one of Elvis Presley's final films, The Trouble With Girls. The TCM showing is tomorrow, November 24, at 8:30 AM.

Elvis Presley plays Walter Hale, who runs a traveling "Chautauqua" in the 1920s. These were named after Chautauqua in New York, which in the 19th century was the site of the Chautauqua Institution, a sort of forum of ideas and the fine arts. (The Institution still exists and hosts summer programs, but the traveling counterparts died out during the Depression.) So back in the 1920s before mass media become more prominent, programs like these functioned as somewhat higher-class versions of the traveling carnivals and medicine shows that show up a lot more often in popular culture to this day.

Walter's Chautauqua rolls into the town of Radford Center, Iowa, which is clearly the MGM backlot rather than location shooting, which is one of the many problems with the movie. He's got various musicians and lecturers (including Vincent Price in a small role as "Mr. Morality"), but is having the biggest trouble with Charlene (Marlyn Mason), the "Story Lady". She's joined up with Actors' Equity, and knows all of the employment rights that are due Equity members. She keeps reminding Walter of these, and trying to get all of the people involved with the show signed to an Equity contract.

One of the things that Walter's Chautauqua likes to do is hire a local child for one of the pageants they put on. There's an interracial pair of kids who would do, although ultimately the choice is little Carol Bix. Carol is the daughter of Nita (Sheree North), who works at the local pharmacy run by Wilby (a very young Dabney Coleman) in the days when drug stores did all sorts of things like serve floats as well as fill prescriptions. The only problem is, Wilby seems to have is eye on Nita's legs as much if not more as his business.

Radford Center has a nearby lake, and another of the lecturers is a swimmer modeled on Gertrude Ederle, who not long before the action in the movie would have been the first person to swim the English Channel. But the other purpose of the lake is that it's a place to dispose of Wilby's body after somebody offs him. Obviously, suspicion falls on some of the more shady characters who accompany the itinerant Chautauqua, because if you were somebody looking to con people and get away with it, what better way to get away than be part of a traveling show? Clarence, a gambler, is charged, although he's not the actual murderer. Will the authorities be able to find the real killer? Well, you might guess that Walter figures things out, and after the Chautauqua moves on to the next town we're told that it was only a few more years until various advanced technologies like radio and talking pictures would consign Chautaquas to history for good.

Having seen The Trouble With Girls, I can see why Elvis didn't make many more movies after this. He's out of place here with the beginnings of his "fat Elvis" hair. He's also not given much to do. The plot is all over the place, and worse, the big finale has some terrible editing in that it cuts constantly for no good artistic reason. The production values feel cheap, too, with the obvious use of all those buildings on the MGM backlot when movies were really beginning to spread away from the studios. The Gypsy Moths, which was released at just about the same time as The Trouble With Girls and which shows up on TCM at the end of this week, actually filmed on location in Kansas for example.

If you're looking for a good Elvis movie, I'm sorry to say that there are other movies you should watch instead of The Trouble With Girls.

City of Missing Girls

I've mentioned before that of the FAST platforms, TubiTV has a whole lot of Poverty Row B stuff that presumably fell into the public domain at some point and wound up obscure as a result. But the plots sound interesting enough and since many of the movies are short, it doesn't matter that much if they're not all that good. Another one that I watched recently is City of Missing Girls.

The movie begins with one of those old tropes in B movies, the montage of headlines telling us how a bunch of young women, in this case the sort of girl who'd try out for the chorus line with dreams of something bigger, have gone missing and in many cases found dead. The police in the form of detective McVeigh (H.B. Warner) are investigating, as is assistant DA James Horton (John Archer). Reporting on it and needling the authorities for the lousy investigating, is Nora Page (Astrid Allwyn), who is also liable to become a love interest to Horton. (Obviously not to McVeigh, who is much too old for Nora.) Anyhow, one obvious place of suspicion is the Crescent School, which teaches dancing and acting for the sort of woman who wants to get into it. In fact, the owner, King Peterson, also owns a nightclub and funnels some of the women there.

Another woman, Pauline Randolph, goes missing, and Nora starts investigating the case herself. Thankfully she's got a bit of an in as her father Joe Thompson is a theatrical booking agent and can get information on the sort of women who show up at these places. But it's only after Nora talks with Dad that we see him having another conversation, with Mr. Peterson, and that the two are in cahoots. Peterson is obviously involved in some sort of trafficking that Thompson doesn't want to be on the hook for, while Peterson intends to make certain that Thompson is held equally liable.

Pauline actually show up, much to her grandmother's relief, although Nora isn't able to get an interview with her as Pauline goes off with a friend just as Nora arrives. Nora, being an intrepid reporter, takes down the license plate number. As you can guess, this is going to be important later in the movie. Pauline is later found murdered. The other woman in the car is playing hard to find, until King Peterson gets an idea as to how to use her to his benefit, which involves framing Horton in this other woman's murder! Of course, even though this is a Poverty Row movie, it still has to follow the strictures of the Production Code, so we know that the bad guys are going to get caught.

City of Missing Girls has the sort of plot that you could easily see having been used in a Torchy Blane movie a few years movie. But here it's done on a much lower budget with the concomitant lower production values. It's not as bad as some people might have you believe, but at the same time there's a lot of good reasons why the movie isn't remembered beyond it having fallen into the public domain.

I'm glad that City of Missing Girls is now available on a FAST platform, and if you're looking for a way to spend 75 minutes, it'll do.

Roseland

Some months back, TCM ran a spolight on Merchant-Ivory productions, which gave me the chance to record a couple of movies that I hadn't seen before. One of those movies was a film that predated the later sterertype of Merchant-Ivory being about British period pieces for which the pair became famous: Roseland.

The title Roseland refers to the Roseland Ballroom, a dancing spot in Manhattan that operated for about 90 years before it was finally closed in 2014 and demolished to build a high-rise apartment building. But even by 1977, when the movie was released, it felt like the Roseland had seen better days, with a clientele of disproportionately older people who would have enjoyed going dancing when they were younger decades earlier, think the old Kinks song "Come Dancing". Roseland the movie is more or less an anthology film telling three stories.

The first one is called "The Waltz". Teresa Wright plays May, a relatively recent widow, who goes to the Roseland to have someone to dance with and not feel so lonely now that she's a widow after all these years. She likes to dance with Stan (Lou Jacobi), who is a widower, although is story is a bit more tragic as is revealed at the end of the segment. The main thrust of the story deals with the fact that when May dances in front of one particular mirror at the Roseland, she sees herself as she was back in the day, together with her late husband as he was all those years ago. But nobody else can see this.

The second story, "The Hustle", is the longest and most complicated. Christopher Walken, before becoming a star with The Deer Hunter a year later, plays Russell. He's a gigolo to Pauline (Joan Copeland), a childless woman who likes to dance at the Roseland. As the segment opens, she's celebrating her birthday at the Roseland, together with Russell and Cleo (Helen Gallagher) who gives dancing lessons in a small studio on an upper floor to make extra money. Invited to the party it Marilyn (Geraldine Chaplin), a divorcée who's between jobs but looking for a good one. She falls in love with Russell and may even be willing to make sacrifices to help Russell win the big dance contest. Russell makes intimations that the feeling is mutual, but he's got all those attachments to other women, too.

Finally comes "The Peabody". Lilia Skala is Rosa, an older widow who started coming to the Roseland and found a platonic dance partner in Arthur. The story is told in flashback, however, as Arthur has recently died. Rosa's big dream was to win the dance contest dancing the Peabody, although this contest has the reputation for having a contestant die since it's a tough dance for the mostly older people who enter the competition. Poor Rosa never seems able to enter for one reason or another, and then Arthur suddenly dies threatening to scupper things permanently.

I was mildly surprised to see Roseland get largely mediocre reviews. I found it to be a fairly well-done movie, albeit one that might not be to everybody's tastes thanks to a decidedly elegiac tone. As I mentioned above, the Roseland Ballroom shown here feels decidedly like it's full of faded glory. But the stories are interesting enough and not overly long, with the acting definitely worth watching. So definitely Roseland is one that's worth looking out for and watching, even if you disagree with my judgment on it.

Mary's bells

I think I've mentioned it before, but there's some lore in my family about how much my father hated the movie The Bells of St. Mary's. He was about seven years old when it came out, and was attending a Catholic elementary school in the Bronx, so of course the nuns took the kids to the theater to see this uplifting movie. Anyhow, some months back TCM ran this in a double feature with Going My Way, since The Bells of St. Mary's is in many ways a sequel to Going My Way. Not having seen either in their entirety, I recorded both, I reviewed Going My Way in conjunction with a subsequent TCM showing, and now am getting around to scheduling my review of The Bells of St. Marys.

Bing Crosby returns as Fr. Charles O'Malley, although he's pretty much the only character from Going My Way who shows up here. At the end of the previous movie Fr. O'Malley was being transferred from his old parish, so as The Bells of St. Mary's opens, he's showing up at his new assignment, the titular St. Mary's. This parish has a parochial school attached to it, but it's run by nuns who cannot lead Mass. The Mother Superior running the school is Sr. Mary Benedict (Ingrid Bergman), who rather incongruously is a Swedish-American nun, which makes you wonder when and why she converted from Lutheranism. The two get off on the wrong foot when one of Fr. O'Malley's first acts is to give the students a day off so that he can discuss with the nuns how to run the school

St. Mary's is in a parlous state, being an old building in need of significant repairs and having a lot of students who can't exactly pay a big tuition to attend. Indeed, the parish even sold off an adjance plot of land at some point in the not too distant past to wealthy businessman Horace Bogardus (Henry Travers). Bogardus is busy building a shiny new building on his new plot, and is presumably hoping the parish will have to close down so that he may be able to purchase the plot of land on which St. Mary's sits. Fr. O'Malley, meanwhile, sees the building under construction and gets to go inside it. He realizes this building would be perfect for the new St. Mary's school, and sets about using his gift of gab to try to convince Bogardus that the building would make a wonderful bequest.

Set against the backdrop of what's going to happen to St. Mary's parish are a couple of other subplots. One involves a new student at school, Patsy Gallagher (Joan Carroll). She's being raised by a single mother, Mary (Martha Sleeper). Mary has a sad story: she was married to an itinerant musician, who felt that he couldn't support a family on his musician's income and basically decided to abandon his wife and young daughter. Mary hasn't provided Patsy a very good life, but perhaps St. Mary's could take Patsy on as a charity case and do something? Fr. O'Malley, for his part, sets about trying to find Joe Gallagher for one of the climaxes.

There's also poor Sister Mary Benedict, who starts feeling unwell and finds out that there's something much worse going on with her, which will probably necessitate her having to leave the parish, although everyone else involved wants to avoid telling her how bad things really are. Of course everything works out for everybody in the end, since this is an avowedly Catholic, family-friendly film.

The Bells of St. Mary's isn't anywhere near as bad as my father would have you believe, although in his defense I can see why he'd have a negative opinion of it. Dad basically didn't have a choice in watching the movie and, while I can see it being described as wholesome and even family-friendly, the idea of a seven-year-old boy liking it is something that tests belief. The Bells of St. Mary's is also quite sentimental, at times way too sentimental for its own good. It also runs a bit slowly, at a touch over two hours. So although there's nothing that parents should find particularly objectional about The Bells of St. Mary's, it's also not something that's going to have strong appeal for young children 80 years on.

Oregon Passage

Another of the movies that was sitting on my DVR for a while that I needed to watch before it expired was the cavalry western Oregon Passage. Having watched it, I wrote up this review which is going into my queue of movies to post about at some later date since, as of this writing, I've got a few too many military-themed movies scheduled in close proximity.

The scene is 1871 in Oregon, which is already a state, but still has a bunch of Indian tribes in the less-developed parts of the state that aren't exactly happy about the encroachment of the white man. Chief among these are the Shoshone, led by Black Eagle. At a fort, the cavalry have enlisted the help of a member of a different tribe, a man named Nato, to try to find Black Eagle. He gives Lt. Ord (John Ericson information that sends the cavalry out on a raid. Unfortunately, they don't find Black Eagle, but Little Deer, a member of a rival tribe who has been kidnapped by Black Eagle with the intention of becoming Mrs. Black Eagle, as it were. The cavalry returns to the fort.

Now, Black Eagle is sure to be pissed about having bride stolen, never mind the assertion that he stole her himself. He's going to start organizing the various tribes to get together to raid the cavalry forts. But in the meantime, there's the other half of the story that we have to get to. Lt. Ord is serving under the fort commander, Maj. Dane (Edward Platt), who is decidedly ill-suited to commanding this fort. He's rigid and, having dealt with Plains Indians in the past, thinks he can just deal with the Shoshone in the same way regardless of whether that's working in reality. Worse, he's got a trophy wife, Sylvia (Lola Albright), whom he's brought to the fort from Washington presumable to keep her under his watchful eye since she's good enough looking to tempt other men.

Among those other men just happens to be Lt. Ord, although in Ord's defense, he apparently knew Sylvia back east so they have a past together. Sylvia thinks the two of them can just pick right up from where they left off back east. She's also inherited money, and keeps trying to convince Lt. Ord that if only they leave this god-forsaken fort together, they can run off to South America or someplace else where the US government will never find Ord. They can't stay in the US, of course, since in that case Ord would be a deserter and be found and probably executed.

Meanwhile, Little Deer, having been rescued by Ord's raid, seems to think this is some sort of omen that the two of them are destined to be together. To that end, she keeps making totems that are supposed to be symbols of this fate, not that Ord is intending to be with Little Deer. Not that he's malicious about it, it's more that he's focused on duty rather than love. He's also focused on trying to get Maj. Dane not to undertake policies that he believes are going to be a disaster. And, among all that, there's still Black Eagle out there, waiting to attack....

Oregon Passage is a competent enough B western, although it's one of those movies that feels rather formulaic and mildly old fashioned even by the standards of the late 1950s when it was released. It's not a bad little movie for the most part, although it's a fairly simple tale of good versus evil by the end. The one bigger negative is the print. There were some scenes that gave me the impression that stock footage was used from other movies, although I don't see any indication of this on IMDb. But the color quality and the focus seem to change from shot to shot. Oregon Passage is a good enough movie to sit down with on a rainy day, but nothing that will be remembered as an all-time great movie.

The Devil Is a Sissy

Up next in the movies that I recorded during Mickey Rooney's turn as Star of the Month and had to watch in rapid succession before they expired from my DVR is another of his juvenile roles in The Devil Is a Sissy.

Rooney is only one of three juveniles here who are all relatively close to being the lead. Nominally, that lead goes to Freddie Bartholomew. He plays Claude Pierce, a boy whose parents have gotten divorced and whose mom (Katharine Alexander showing up briefly for the film's climax) got custody of the swanky New York apartment and a house in Florida, forcing architect father Jay (Ian Hunter) to live in a more working-class part of lower Manhattan, where he's going to have custody of Claude for the next six months.

Claude is put in a school where there are the sort of kids who are heading the wrong way but, since this is an MGM picture and there is the Production Code, you know are going to come out right in the end. Chief among them are "Buck" Murphy (Jackie Cooper), who lives with a surprisingly nasty father (Gene Lockhart) and who is more or less the head of the "gang" of schoolkids, although it's rather less violent of a gang than anything you'd get later on. His best friend and co-leader of the gang is "Gig" Stevens, who has it even rougher than Buck. Gig's father is sentenced to the electric chair, and Mom has a new suitor willing to take care of Gig (played by omnipresent character actor Grant Mitchell) but whom Gig doesn't like. Gig has an aunt Rose (Peggy Conklin) who was a showgirl, and whom Mr. Pierce apparently saw on stage, but who never really cared for Gig's father.

It's into this that Claude steps. Claude tries to fit in, not knowing that these kids are a bunch of petty troublemakers who are liable to get Claude into trouble as well. Gig wants to scrape up $80 -- a substantial sum in the mid-1930s -- for the headstone for Dad's grave, although he only finds out later this is a down payment for the stone he really wants to get. And to get that $80, he first tries to ask Aunt Rose, introducing his friends to her at her penthouse apartment. When that doesn't work, he thinks about stealing spare tires along with Buck, but that's liable to get them caught and is difficult anyway. Claude knows a place where they can steal much more valuable stuff to pawn for the $80....

Doing so, however, gets all three kids and their parents hauled before juvenile court where the judge gives them probation and makes them see a probation officer. Claude, being the goody two shoes, is bound to go along with this. Buck and Gig, however, have no intention of doing it; besides, they've got worse families they want to get away from. The plot gets even more nuts when, as part of running away, they get in a car driven by a bunch of real hoodlums much more ruthless than Gig's father ever way. Claude also goes out in the rain to keep Buck and Gig from trying to run away, and gets a life-threatening case of pneumonia for his trouble.

I didn't realize it until after watching The Devil Is a Sissy, but apparently there were two directors, with W.S. Van Dyke taking over from Rowland Brown. I'm guessing that it's this that results in the movie having a very uneven tone, careening from trying to be tough to being fairly melodramatic. This, and the plot twists and turns suddenly in ways that are even more unrealistic than most Hollywood movies. The three juvenile stars do as well as can be expected, and among the adults Gene Lockhart is quite good as the nasty father. But the material is what prevents The Devil Is a Sissy from being anything more than pedestrian.