Assignment in Brittany

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

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

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

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

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

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

Invaders from Mars

I didn't pay much attention to the 2024 selection of films to the National Film Registry when those selections were announced back in December. Apparently, one of the films named was the science fiction film Invaders from Mars. That would probably explain why it's shown up multiple times in the past several years on TCM. It's got yet another airing coming up, tomorrow, April 5, at 1:45 PM, which means it's time for me to watch it and do a review on it.

Child actor Jimmy Hunt plays David MacLean, one of those space-obsessed kids of the 1950s, although in his case it's slightly more understandable since his father George (Leif Erickson) does some sort of classified space research at one of the nearby military facilities. Mom Mary is slightly worried about the kid's overactive imagination, thinking that the kid needs more sleep. One night during a thunderstorm, David looks over to the sandpit just across a field from his bedroom window, and sees what for all the world looks like a flying saucer coming to rest behind the fence. David tells Dad, who suggests he and the kid go out and look in the morning. But Dad goes out alone, and when he gets to the sand, he suddenly falls through.

Dad isn't back by morning, so Mom calls the police, with two policemen showing up, only for them to fall through the sand too. By this point Dad returns home, although to David it seems like something has changed, as Dad has no emotion other than anger at David for asking questions about that supposed spaceship. Dad also has some strange scar on the back of his neck. Worse, David also sees his friend from nearby, little Kathy, fall into the sand. And when she comes back, she burns down her house!

David is understandably fearful that something has gone terribly wrong, so he runs away to the police station to look for help. The police bring in a doctor, Pat Blake (Helena Carter), who gets the impression that perhaps David is telling the truth when she learns that he has a bit of a scientific bent and is not known to be given to making stuff up. She talks to a friend of the MacLeans, astronomer Dr. Kelston (Arthur Franz), and brings up the idea that not only is there life on Mars, but that they may well already be sending research ships to Earth. The working theory is that the Martians have already arrived, and they have a way of controlling the minds of earthlings.

Thankfully, there's a lot of military around that they can bring manpower and weapons to the situation, as well as the scientific minds of David, Blake, and Kelston. Sure enough, there are Martians in that field, although the Martians aren't stupid and have moved to a different part of the field. What's left behind is the tunnels they've left. The search is on for the Martians, and that search gets more desperate when David and Dr. Blake fall into another of the traps the Martians have set up.

Invaders from Mars was directed by William Cameron Menzies, who is probably more prominent for his set designs although he also directed the 1930s scifi film Things To Come. It's that earlier film I found myself thinking of as I was watching Invaders from Mars. The underground Martian sets are imaginative, while the sets above ground are decidedly 1950s B sci-fi stuff. But, with Menzies at the helm, we're given to some imaginative camera work as well. That's definitely a good thing, since the story is rather straightforward and resolved way too quickly. Reading reviews from people who first saw the movie as a kid, they say they were frightened by the film, and I can see why. As an adult, however, it's not scary but just another fun 50s scifi genre film. Definitely worth watching.

Margie

Tomorrow on TCM is a morning and afternoon of movies with screenplays written by F. Hugh Herbert, not to be confused with character actor Hugh Herbert. However, there's a movie airing on TCM on Saturday, April 5, that I'm planning on doing a blog post about tomorrow, so F. Hugh Herbert gets a mention today. As it turns out, I have one of his movies on my DVR, although it's not one of the movies that TCM is showing tomorrow. That movie is Margie.

The credits are done as something that wasn't uncommon for book adptations, which is the turning of pages with another batch of credits on each page. However, in this set of opening credits the pages are pages of a scrapbook with old photos on the pages accompanying the credits. After the credits, the camera pans into the attic of the house where Margie (Jeanne Crain) lives, together with teenage daughter Joyce (Ann E. Tood, not the same person as Ann Todd despite the middle initial E not being in the opening credits). Joyce finds some of Mom's old stuff from the 1920s when Margie herself was a teenager in the same small Ohio town where they still live, such as a scrapbook, and an old pair of bloomers. Joyce asks Mom to tell her about when she was in high school, so we get the requisite flashback....

The flashback is to 1928, since Herbert Hoover is running for President, although this seems a bit off since the movie was released in November 1946 which means Margie would have had to get married immediately out of high school and been knocked un her wedding night to satisfy the Production Code and have a 16-year-old daughter. Margie is in high school, living with her grandmother (Esther Dale) since Mom is dead and Dad (Hobart Cavanaugh) has to travel a lot for business. Margie has a best friend in Marybelle (Barbara Lawrence) who has a boyfriend Johnnie while Margie doesn't (yet) have one.

That pair of bloomers Joyce found is about to play a part in the plot. The elastic is no longer holding as it used to, and since is the 1920s, it's not as if you can go to your local big-box department store and buy a half dozen pairs of underpants cheaply, which is why the same pair of bloomers keeps falling down and causing all sorts of trouble for poor Margie. She escapes into the library, just as the school's new French teacher, Mr. Fontayne (Glenn Langan) comes in. Margie claims she's doing research for the upcoming debate, but she's as taken with the hot (by the standards of 1940s teens as Hollywood saw them) Fontayne; indeed, all the girls are talking about him.

Margie thinks she's in love with Fontayne, even though he's entirely the wrong age for her. Perhaps one of her fellow classmates would be better, even though she thinks they're all immature. She does have a crush on Marybelle's boyfriend, while pursuing her is nice but inept Roy (Alan Young). Over the course of the movie, Margie prepares for the big debate, on the topic of whether the US should have troops in Nicaragua; goes ice skating with her fellow students; and worries about who's going to take her to the big dance. It all leads up to the reveal at the end of the movie of which of the men she wound up marrying.

I've mentioned in the past that the post-war years at Fox saw a series of nostalgic musicals that were either straight-up biopics, or biopic-like movies. Margie isn't really a musical, although one might be forgiven for thinking you're getting into a musical. Fox probably didn't mind the confusion back in the day since those musicals seemed to be successes and I think audiences of the day liked the nostalgia value of a simpler time. If you're up for nostalgia, Margie certainly fits the bill. However, at the same time I have to say it's dated and definitely not the sort of movie that's going to be for everybody. It's not bad by any means; it's one of those things where I think there are other movies from the era that would be easier for people not necessarily fans of old-time stuff to get into. (For Jeanne Crain, Leave Her to Heaven immediately comes to mind.)

Piranha (1978)

Roger Corman died last year, and TCM did a programming salute with three nights of movies that he either directed or produced. I still have a couple I want to get through before they expire from the DVR, both some of the Vincent Price horror-type stuff from the 1960s and some of the later drive-in B fare. Up next is one from the late 1970s, Piranha.

OK, with a title like Piranha going into it there's probably a lot that you can already guess what's going to happen at the end of any given scene, starting with the opening pre-credits scene. A young man and women are going hiking in the a backwoods mountainish area when they come upon a fence that has an old "no trespassing sign". Naturally, they trespass, and quickly find a pool that's not a traditional swimming pool, but something they're not certain what exactly it's used for. Since this is a low-budget horror film, these two strip down to their undies and start swimming, only to be killed by somthing they have no idea what it is, although we can obviously guess since we know the title of the movie.

Maggie McKeown (Heather Menzies) is sent by her boss, private detective Earl Lyon (Richard Deacon), to try to find the two missing people. We then get a scene with some of the locals whom Maggie will be meeting, Paul (Bradford Dillman) and Jack (Keenan Wynn), talking about how idyllic life is up here on the mountain with the river going by their cabins. When Maggie's jeep breaks down, she goes to Paul's cabin. He informs her that it's just his and Jack's cabins. Well, those two cabins and a secret military facility that was closed down some years back in conjunction with the US ending its official involvement in the Vietnam War. Once again, you can guess that they too are going to go to the military facility.

Unsurprisingly, they don't find the two missing people, since we know they're both very much dead already. But they do find a piece of jewerly the woman would be missing. So they look for a way to drain the pool, thinking that perhaps the dead bodies wouldn't have floated to the top yet. And they also find they're not alone, which should have been insanely obvious the minute they discovered the place still had electric service. There are mutant creatures, as well as a man who tries to stop them from draing the pool.

That man is Dr. Hoak (Kevin McCarthy), a scientist who was working at the facility when it was closed down, and stayed on in part to be a caretaker and in part because he wanted to keep working surreptitiously on that research. What he was working on was breeding piranha to be extra vicious, to release them in Vietnamese rivers and kill Communist resistance or some such. And Maggie and Paul stupidly released those piranhas into the river....

Sure, the plot of Piranha is dumb and unoriginal, but one goes into a movie like this looking not for intelligence or new cinematic vistas, but for entertainment. And Piranhas certainly entertains enough. On my first run-through, I was going to argue that there was a big plot hole as to how the piranhas survived all these years: wouldn't they have starved or something? But now the plot hole is how Dr. Hoak got the money to keep the place going, which I'd guess you could claim is because some arm of the government was funding it through a slush fund. Heaven knows the events of the past few months have given people enough evidence to believe the US government maintains a plethora of such slush funds.

But Piranha doesn't really have any of the sort of political overtones my previous paragraph might have implied. It's just dumb mindless entertainment for the drive-in crowd back in the day, or people who want to sit around a bowl of popcorn with friends today.

Criminal Court

Someone whom I haven't given much attention to over the many years that I've done this blog is Tom Conway, brother of more prominent supporting actor George Sanders. But Conway was more than capable of doing a good job and bringing energy to an otherwise pedestrian movie. A good example of this would be the RKO B movie Criminal Court.

Conway plays Steve Barnes, a defense attorney who has a reputation for producing theatrics and gimmicks in the courtroom. He's currently defending a man who is accused of a gangland killing. This defendant isn't so important; what is important is the fact that the defendant has run afoul of underworld king Vic Wright (Robert Armstrong). Barnes is hoping to use this case as a jumping-off point in his campaign to become the new district attorney, running on a clean government campaign since the current DA is using "witnesses" paid for by Wright.

Complicating things is the fact that Barnes has a girlfriend, Georgia (Martha O'Driscoll), who is an aspiring nightclub singer. She's about to get an interview for a job... at a nightclub owned by Vic Wright. Steve isn't particularly thrilled with this, although he also realizes that he can't really get in the way of his girlfriend's career. She makes it past the first test and gets an interview with Wright himself later that evening.

But she's not the only person who's going to be seeing Wright at his club in the evening. Barnes has come across some pictures of Wright's kid brother Frankie (Steve Brodie) that will put a big dent in Vic's career. Not only that, but he plans on showing them at a campaign event. Vic tries to bribe him, and when that doesn't work, claims that he's got some sort of incriminating evidence of his own that Barnes really ought to come over and see.

The meeting doesn't go well, and devolves into a struggle between Vic and Steve, although it's also witnessed by Steve's secretary Joan since she's also on Vic's payroll to feed information from Barnes' office to him. She slips out the back way just as Steve comes in to Vic's office, but stays to listen. She knows that durin the struggle, Vic pulls out a gun, and the two men try to grab it since it's now clearly a matter of life and death. The gun goes off in such a way that Steve isn't really guilty but that could destroy his campaign. Vic gets shot and killed.

Worse, after Steve leaves, who should show up but Georgia? She sees the dead body and rather stupidly panics, picking up the gun. Dumb, dumb, dumb, although I suppose you can't fault her for panicking. But with her having been seen in Vic's office and having been seen by Frankie with the gun, she's an obvious suspect. Steve could get her off for reasons the audience knows why, but of course nobody in the film but Steve knows what those reasons are. Well, almost nobody.

Criminal Court is a B movie that doesn't cover any new ground. It was actually released in 1946, but has the feel of something that would have been right at home in the 1930s. This doesn't mean it's bad; instead, I'd say it feels overly familiar. We've seen all these plot devices before, but thanks to Tom Conway and director Robert Wise early in his career, the material is still entertaining enough.

My Beautiful Laundrette

TCM ran a double feature of films starring Daniel Day-Lewis a while back. I already did a post on My Left Foot, and now it's time to do a post on the other film they ran, My Beautiful Laundrette.

Day-Lewis plays Johnny, who is squatting in a derelict apartment building somewhere in London together with his friend Omar (Gordon Warnecke), at least until some sort of thugs come in and drive all the squatters out, forcing Johnny and Omar to beat a hasty retreat out the back window. Johnny is a sort of street punk who goes back to his all-white gang, while Omar goes back to see his alcoholic father Hussein and take care of him. Hussein and Omar are part of the Pakistani immigrant community, but Hussein is the sort of immigrant who believes in whatever the British equivalent of the American Dream for immigrants is, where you assimilate and the children's generation becomes wealthier, not having to do the terrible physical labor that immigrants generally have to do.

With that in mind, Dad wants Omar to go to university. To help with that, Dad thinks Omar should have a stable job in the off term. Omar's brother Nasser (Saeed Jaffrey) is the sort of immigrant like the brothers in Avalon who worked hard and became a success, now having a finger in multiple pies. Nasser, in fact, also has a white British mistress. Nasser offers Omar a job detailing cars at the car park he runs, London being one of those big cities where people don't have their own dedicated parking spaces outside their houses.

Omar takes to the work, but is also confronted by the presence of his cousin Salim. Salim is one of those children of immigrants who takes a different view of life as an immigrant and ethnic minority from people like Omar. Instead, immigrants should take what they "deserve" from the host country by whatever means, even if those means are scammy, and keep up ties with the old country to the extent of practically being bi-national. (Nowadays, you wonder if a character like Salim would become more of an Islamist, but that theme isn't explored in My Beautiful Laundrette.)

One night while Omar is driving Salim around London, the car is surrounded when it's stopped at a light. Wouldn't you know it, but the gang that surrounds them just happens to be Johnny and his friends. Johnny and Omar are able to resume their relationship, which as it turns out is more than just a friendship as the two have homosexual feelings for each other. Omar realizes that having Johnny around as a bit of "muscle" could be a good thing, and Nasser starts to give Omar bigger duties, such as trying to turn a laundrette (laundromat for American viewers) profitable. Omar is bright and hardworking, but also finds he has to get a bit of money via illicit means to make things work, which could get him in trouble with Salim.

My Beautiful Laundrette is an interesting if uneven movie. It presents a lot of ideas that in the wrong hands wouldn't just be controversial, but used as a laundry list for a morality play; think the movie No Down Payment that I blogged about back in 2013. Here, though, a lot of the stuff (homosexuality being the obvious one) are just presented as this is what the characters are and the viewer has to have the intelligence to figure out how this would play out in real life.

One thing I do wonder about as an American, however, is how much the director and screenwriter might have been trying to make a commentary about the Britain of this time. Being 1985, it was smack dab in the middle of Margaret Thatcher's time as Prime Minister, and as with Donald Trump here in the US, her being in power drove the arts "community", or the people in creative arts fields who saw themselves as a "community", hysterically around the bend. If there is commentary, however, it's certainly not to the level you see from contemporary Hollywood. And in any case, My Beautiful Laundrette is definitely a worthwhile, offbeat movie.

March 2025 end of month briefs

It's been a while since I did a briefs post, since I've been a bit busy trying to keep up with watching stuff before it expires from the DVR as well as putting in some overtime out in the real world. Heck, I don't think I even did a post for the clock change on Daylight Savings Time a few weeks back, although it's really more important to do a post when the clocks go back since that's when there's an extra hour in the schedule to fill.

The first order of business would be to mention the passing of actor Richard Chamberlain, who died yesterday at the age of 90. I think he might be better remembered for his TV work, especially the early 1980s TV miniseries Shogun. But TCM fans may recall that Chamberlain did a Star of the Month piece on Claude Rains, with whom he worked at the end of Rains' career making Twilight of Honor. Unfortunately, I don't think that piece seems to be on YouTube, although Warner Bros. does have a preview for Twilight of Honor.

Tonight's Silent Sunday Nights feature is the Clara Bow film It, starting at midnight. YouTube TV has it as a 72-minute movie in a 2-hour slot, which of course led me to wonder whether there would be a short to fill out the time slot. A two-reel silent would make sense, but as it turns out the short is 24 Hour Alert, supposedly starting at 1:25 AM and leading up to the 2:00 AM start of TCM Imports. TCM's site actually does have shorts listed at least a couple days out, and at least for the daily schedule; as far as I can tell they still only have a monthly "highlights" listing rather than a full monthly schedule.

Monday morning and afternoon on TCM are dedicated to director Lloyd Bacon in honor of his birthday on December 4. Wait a second, that wouldn't be his birthday. But since he worked at Warner Bros. in the 1930s it's easy for TCM to do a programming salute to him, starting at 6:00 AM with the Joel McCrea film Kept Husbands. Also of interest might be Marked Woman at noon. If you've seen the piece on Bette Davis that was done for one of her turns as Star of the Month, they use a clip of her from Marked Woman where she talks about being smart enough to know all the angles. Watch enough TCM, and you'll know exactly the clip I mean.

Tuesday is April 1, which means the start of a new quarter. I can't tell if FXM's Retro block as any new movies in the rotation, mostly because I haven't been paying close enough attention since I've done posts on the vast majority of what that block airs. Not their fault so much as it is that there are only so many films Fox made. Titles that I did posts on ages ago that are showing up in April where I don't believe I've seen them show up recently include Something for the Boys and Satan Never Sleeps.

Bikur Ha-Tizmoret

I've mentioned several times how I've got quite the backlog of foreign films to get through on my DVR before they expire, and frankly, I don't think I'm going to get through all of them. But with that in mind, I figured it's time I at least try to watch some of them. Up next is a film from a country whose movies I rarely frequent: the Israeli film The Band's Visit.

The movie was released in 2007 although it's supposedly set about a decade earlier; in any case I didn't notice any obvious signs that would point to precisely when it was set. The band in question is the Alexandria Police Orchestra, whom as you might have figured out from the name are actually Egyptian, from the large port city. They've been invited to appear at the opening of a new Arab Israeli cultural center in the city of Petah Tikva (remember, even disregarding the Palestinian areas Israel gained control of in the Six Days' War, Israel has a population of something like 15% non-Jewish Arabs). As the movie opens, the Egyptians have landed at Ben Gurion Airport, only to find that nobody has come to pick them up. With that in mind, they go to the bus terminal to inquire about a bus to where they're going.

Unfortunately, they not speaking Hebrew -- apparently modern Egyptian Arabic has trouble with the voiced P sound -- the destination they ask about gets them sent to a place called Bet Hatikva, which is well into the Negev desert in the south of the country, completely in the opposite direction from Petah Tikva. The band is unceremoniously dropped off in the middle of nowhere and make their way to a small cafe which is one of the only signs of human activity. There, shop owner Dina tells the orchestra's head Tawfiq that they've come to the wrong town. Worse, there are no more buses leaving tonight: when Tawfiq makes a comment about the cultural center, Dina says that Bet Hatikva has no culture.

Eventually, Dina comes up with a plan, which is to find several of her acquaintances and put the musicians up by ones and twos, since the orchestra only has eight members. It's an awkward and sudden imposition, considering that while Dina lives alone, everyone else has a life. One person's family is holding a birthday party; another guy was about to go on a blind date; and the like. But it's only for one night, and thankfully most of the people speak something close enough to English that they can all communicate with one another. Little things happen to everybody until the band is put on the right bus the next morning and are able to play at the cultural center that afternoon.

The Band's Visit is one of those little movies where not much happens. As such, it's a movie that's not going to be for everybody. Even with a modest running time just under 90 minutes, it can still feel slow. But it's the sort of movie you should stick with, because it really does work in the end, as you come to learn about all these characters' lives and how they feel like real people, warts and all, with lives that, like real life, are often boring with little going on.

At least somebody laughed

Some time back TCM had a two-movie salute to actor John Ritter, who is of course better known for his TV work on Three's Company than the movies he made, so both of the movies were new to me. First up will be the bittersweet comedy They All Laughed.

The movie opens up with John Russo (Ben Gazzara) taking a taxi down to the heliport in New York City. John is a divorcé and private detective who is going to the heliport in order to see, or at least watch, Angela Niotes (Audrey Hepburn). Angela is the subject whom John is investigating, as Angela's husband is worried that she might be having an affair. In addition to his work, John is carrying on a romance with country singer Christy (Colleen Camp). But it's a long-suffering romance for her, as John seems to be unable to make a committment. As a sign of this, John almost immediately asks his cab driver, "Sam" (real name Deborah although John keeps calling her Sam) on a date.

Also working at the detective agency is Charles Rutledge (John Ritter). He too is following a woman whose husband is worried that his wife, Dolores (tragic Dorothy Stratten) is having an affair, this one with a man names Jose nicknamed "The Gaucho" (Sean Hepburn Ferrer, Audrey's real-life son). Charles and another colleague at the agency, Arthur, follow Dolores from a Broadway show to a hotel where she meets Jose, and then eventually back to an apartment where Dolores and Jose enter through different doors but have a way of getting into each other's apartment from the inside. So they're clearly having an affair.

But things get complicated. Charles finds himself falling in love with Dolores, which is a fairly obvious ethical problem for him. Arthur makes things even more difficult by arranging for Charles to meet Dolores up close and personal. I guess in some detective work that would make sense, but it does make things a mess for Charles. Meanwhile, John finds himself falling for Angela, and Arthur comes up with a ruse for John and Angela to meet. And, of course, John is also already in multiple other relationships. Christy realizes what's going on, so she decides that she's going to try to get back at John by starting a relationship with Charles. And there's still the issue that Charles and John are supposed to be private investigators following women they're falling in love with.

They All Laughed is the sort of movie where you can see why director Peter Bogdanovich wanted to make material like this. However, the production was tragic as Bogdanovich fell in love with Stratten and her estranged husband killed her and himself before the original schedule release of the movie, which as a result was dedicated to her. (Dorothy Stratten's tragic end is, of course, the subject of the Bob Fosse movie Star 80, which is definitely worth watching.) As a result, the release was held back, and limited, with nobody really wanting to see it.

It also doesn't help that Bogdanovich, being the director and having co-written the screenplay (with the actor who played Arthur, a man I didn't recognize and didn't go on to big things), made it way too complex for the film's own good, as though he was making a film to please himself without paying heed to the idea that it would need to pay back its costs at the box office. There are a lot of good ideas here, but they don't jell as well as they probably should or might have had Bogdanovich had stronger studio heads overseeing the project.

Those who love New York City, as well as those who like Peter Bogdanovich and/or Audrey Hepburn, will definitely like They All Laughed. But it's not quite going to be to everybody's taste.

The Chalk Garden

Some months back, TCM ran a night of movies directed by British director Ronald Neame. This gave me the chance to record a couple of movies I hadn't seen before, such as The Chalk Garden.

Deborah Kerr is the star here, playing a woman named Madrigal. As the movie opens, shows up at one of those big old houses that looks like it's on the coast of Devon or Cornwall. The house is owned by the elderly Mrs. St. Maugham (Edith Evans), and she's put a help wanted ad in the papers looking for a governess for her adolescent granddaughter Laurel (Hayley Mills). Laurel, it seems, is quite the handful and has driven off several prior governesses in prior succession. Indeed, Miss Madrigal isn't the only prospect showing up on this day; as the servant Maitland (Hayley Mills' real-life father John Mills, although Maitland is not Laurel's father in this movie) talks about Laurel, the other prospect isn't so sure she wants the job. But Madrigal is badly in need of a job, even though she's never been a governess before and has no references. But she has firm opinions on how to deal with Laurel and even speaks candidly about the state of the garden and how it's a metaphor for Laurel's upbringing, so Mrs. St. Maugham gives Madrigal the job.

Laurel sets out trying to destroy Madrigal the same way she has all the previous governesses; never mind her other misbehaviors like being a firebug. She's also a chronic liar, saying that her father killed himself and that Mom abandoned her and basically drove Dad to kill himelf. She also claims that Maitland killed his wife and child. As for Laurel's mom, she's gotten remarried and is at the point where she could legally file for custody of Laurel since she is, after all, the kid's biological mother. Mrs. St. Maugham doesn't seem to want that to happen, while Madrigal is more non-committal, even though Laurel is still clearly trying to snoop around into Madrigal's past.

With a custody battle looming, St. Maugham brings in a judge friend of hers, McWhirrey (Felix Aylmer), for advice. McWhirrey may recognize Madrigal; in any case it seems clear that Madrigal recognizes the judge and is thoroughly disconcerted by that. Laurel picks up on this, and because the judge is talking about a murder case involving a female defendant who would have been the right age for that defendant to have been Madrigal herself, gets the idea that Madrigal's past involves murder. And she may just be right. But what good will it do her if she is right and exposes the fact that Madrigal's past is as a murderess?

The Chalk Garden feels like it was based on a stage play, which is because it actually was, one by Enid Bagnold, a name you may recognize from having written National Velvet. Neame and the screenwriters try to open up the action both with scenes in the garden and with an excursion into town. They're not particularly successful in hiding the legacy of a stage play, but that doesn't mean the movie is bad. It has uniformly fine performances, although Hayley Mills' character is so darn nasty that she's tough to like. That can make the movie a bit hard to take at some points.

The Chalk Garden is definitely a movie worth watching thanks to those fine performances.

Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid

William Powell was selected as part of TCM's Summer Under the Stars last August, and there aren't quite as many of his movies that I haven't seen before, in large part because he did a lot of work at Warner Bros. before moving to MGM in 1934, and the movies from both of those studios show up on TCM a lot. (However, I don't think I've done posts on the last four Thin Man movies.) A movie Powell made at Universal after World War II was one of the movies TCM ran, so I recorded that: Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid.

The movie opens at the office of psychiatrist Dr. Harvey. Mrs. Peabody (Irene Hervey) is in the office, but she's not the one in need of psychiatric help. That would be her husband, Mr. Peabody (William Powell), who's sitting out in the waiting room. Mrs. Peabody tells the good doctor that her husband fell in love with a mermaid. Unsurprisingly, the doctor thinks that sort of delusion is a reason in and of itself for a man to see a psychiatrist: there is no such thing as a mermaid, and if a man thinks he's fallen in love with one, well that's a sign something's wrong with him. So bring Mr. Peabody into the office and let him tell the story, which of course is also the cue for one more highly original flashback....

Mr. Peabody has just turned 50 and is going through a mid-life crisis, although I don't know if they used that term back in the day. Not only that, but being a New Englander and winter coming on, Mr. Peabody got sick and was laid up in bed for quite some time with a bad case of influenza. Since the Peabodys are wealthy enough that they can just go to down to the Caribbean for the entire winter at the drop of a hat, they do precisely this, on an island called St. Hilda that isn't yet the site of much tourism, even though there's a resort there (character actor Clinton Sundberg plays the PR man for the resort).

On one of Peabody's first days in the place they've rented, he looks out over the sea where there's a little cay just across the way where nobody lives. However, Mr. Peabody is surprised to hear music. A subplot includes a singer Cathy (Andrea King) who is also vacationing on the island, and Mrs. Peabody thinking her husband may be having an affair with her. But it's not Cathy doing the singing, so Mr. Peabody rents a boat and heads over to the island, which is where he finds the music coming from a mermaid, whom he names Lenore (Ann Blyth). Mr. Peabody brings Lenore back to the place he's renting.

But as with most mermaid movies, you have to keep the fish part of the mermaid wet or else the mermaid is going to wind up in a very bad way. Mr. Peabody first puts Lenore in the bathtub, but of course Mrs. Peabody sees the mermaid's tail (although not the human half of Lenore). This causes all sorts of complications to ensue, although as we know the Peabodys wind up back home in New England to meet with the psychiatrist.

Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid isn't exactly a bad movie, but it doesn't feel as good as other mermaid movies, notably Miranda. Something is missing, but I can't exactly put my finger on what that something is. Still, it's the sort of movie that's definitely worth one watch at least.

The Moonlighter

With Barbara Stanwyck being TCM's Star of the Month and my having multiple of her films on my DVR that I hadn't gotten around to watching yet, it should come as no surprise that I'm highlighting a couple of them over the course of the month as they show up on TCM. This time, it will be The Moonlighter, which TCM has tomorrow (March 27) at 8:30 AM.

The Moonlighter in the title of the movie refers to a man who works at night, specifically rustling cattle so that nobody can get a good enough look at his face while he's doing it. That man is Wes Anderson (Fred MacMurray), a man who's stealing cattle around the turn of the century, just at the time when the horseless carriage started to show up (which as you can guess is a plot point later in the movie). But as the movie opens, he's been caught by a sheriff in some town and is being brought in to jail. This is done under cover of anonymity, as the sheriff knows that the locals will try to break in to the jail and lynch Wes for his crimes.

In another bit of foreshadowing, the sheriff and #1 deputy make a big deal about putting Wes in cell #3, the first time in a western I've seen the cells numbered like this. Then another prisoner is brought in and makes comments about the dirty state of the cells. So the sheriff lets this new prisoner use a broom to sweep out the cells, putting Wes in a different cell until that job is done. Having done all that, the sheriff and deputy go out for a quick bite to eat, leaving behind an older deputy who's clearly not up to the task of stopping the braying mob from breaking in.

Sure enough, said mob does so, and then goes to the restaurant when the deputy takes the keys there. The sheriff only tells the mob after they beat him that Wes is in cell #3, which we of course know is no longer the truth. But the guy in #3 looks vaguely like Wes, down to the beard that MacMurray is surprisingly sporting for plot reasons (he can disguise himself by shaving it off). The mob leaves the keys close enough to where Wes can get them from his cell, so he takes the opportunity to escape. Seeing the lynching, he decides to gain revenge on the people who did this to him, even if it wasn't him.

A week or so later, an emissary from Wes' family shows up to claim the body. That woman is Rela (Barbara Stanwyck), who had been Wes' girlfriend until he left five years back to try to make enough money to be able to support her so she'd marry him, only to find he had to resort to illicit means that for Rela are a deal-breaker. The undertaker tells Rela that another family member already paid for the burial and, in a flashback, we learn that it was Wes using just his initials as if that would fool the townsfolk.

Wes, during his revenge tour, eventually gets himself shot in the shoulder and, having nowhere else to go, decides to go home to his mother and kid brother Tom (William Ching). Tom is working at a bank but, more importantly, decided to start putting the moves on Rela himself since Wes is no longer in Rela's plans. And if Tom can earn enough money.... But he panics one day when a man comes in to the bank looking like a sheriff's deputy and asking about Tom and Wes. For the mistakes he makes handling money, Tom gets himself furloughed. Worse, it turns out the man was only an old friend of Wes' named Cole Gardner (Ward Bond). Cole has plans for "one last heist" that will leave everybody financially set. Tom overhears it, and thinks this is how he can get enough money to marry Rela.

But the plan goes wrong, Tom gets shot, and a posse is sent out to look for Wes and Cole. Meanwhile, as with lots of heist movies, the survivors start arguing with one another about the split. Rela is the only one who knows where Wes' old hideout might be, so she approaches the sheriff in asks to be deputized, going solo to find Wes.

The Moonlighter is a modest little western, and one that doesn't really do much special, with one exception. That exception is that somebody came up with the idea to film this in 3-D, this being early 1953 when 3-D was one of the gimmicks to get people to leave the small screens at home and come back in to the movie theaters. There's not much the 3-D is used for, apart from the opening credits and then some waterfall shots near the end. MacMurray and Stanwyck are professional here, although you get the feeling that they're just taking a paycheck since they're not doing anything that stretches their talents.

I don't think anybody involved with The Moonlighter had anything to be embarrassed about in having this be part of their filmography. But I also don't think anybody will think of it near the top of the lists of great movies they made.

Not to be confused with Sonja Henie in Idaho

I've mentioned before that when Carol Burnett did a piece for TCM on Lucille Ball for Ball's turn as Star of the Month many years ago, Burnett suggested that the studio (RKO) just didn't know what to do with her. Like a lot of other people who weren't necessarily suited to the genre, she even got cast in a western, Valley of the Sun.

Ball is the female lead here, although we don't see her for several minutes. Instead, we see action at a US Army fort in what is now Tucson, AZ, in 1868. Male lead James Craig plays Jonathan Ware, a scout for the Army who has gotten himself in trouble with the army because he's been soft on some of the Indians who have long been causing a problem for the settlers moving west into the Arizona Territory as well as the Army. Ware, however, knows that the people the Bureau of Indian Affairs have been sending from Washington are corrupt and robbing the Indians blind, which is a big part of why they're attacking. Still, Ware gets court-martialed and sentenced to five years, although one of the soldiers informs him of how to get a horse and escape.

Escape Jonathan does, winding up for a while on the underside of a coach heading to the town of Desert Center. Two men are on the coach: James Sawyer (Dean Jagger), and a justice of the peace. James is heading out to Desert Center to meet up with Christine Larson (Lucille Ball). Christine runs the local watering hole, at least for now, with some help from dimwitted Willie (Peter Whitney). But she's planning on getting married to Sawyer, which is why he's on his way to Desert Center. Sawyer is none too happy to see this stowaway on the coach, and the two men become fast enemies.

Willie may not be smart in the traditional sense, but he knows people well enough to know that Sawyer isn't right for Christine. And, of course, we can guess that Jonathan is right since James Craig and Lucille Ball are the two leads. Granted, meeting up with Christine while he's taking a barrel bath isn't exactly the most auspicious start for Jonathan. Willie, of course, being a good judge of character, figures out that Jonathan might be better for Christine, and that the two of them need to do something to stop the wedding from going forward. Or, repeated somethings.

And then there's the fact that Jonathan is still a fugitive from justice, having escaped from military court. There's more comedy and action to come until the movie reaches the inevitable conclusion of justice being meted out to the people who are actually breaking the law, and the good guy getting the girl.

Valley of the Sun mixes a good dose of comedy in with the western themes, although interestingly enough it's mostly not Lucille Ball who gets to be zany here the way she would be on I Love Lucy a decade later. In RKO's defense, Lucy hadn't developed that zany persona yet. Ball does OK, although the movie is really more interesting for being offbeat than it is for actually being a notably good western. I think viewers will like it even if it's certainly not great.

New York, New York

A movie that I had on my old DVR back at the old place before I moved was New York, New York. I was disappointed in not getting around to watching it before having to switch DVRs, so the next time TCM showed it, I made a special point to record it to be able to do a post on it. It's getting another airing on TCM, tonight at 8:00 PM, so now I've watched it to be able to do that review.

The movie opens up on V-J Day in New York City, or at least a stylized rendition of New York as conceived on a studio backlot since the whole movie is very stylized. Someone is throwing a military uniform out of a window, and later we see a man walk out of that building in an outfit reminiscent of a Hawaiian shirt, although they didn't call it that back in the day, I don't think (and the pattern isn't expressly Hawaiian). That man is Jimmy Doyle (Robert DeNiro), and he goes to the USO club where he's set to meet one of his friends. At the club, he sees Francine Evans (Liza Minnelli), who entertains the soldiers going through the club and also wants to be a singer. Jimmy, thinking he's a smooth operator, keeps trying to chat up Francine, although she keeps turning him down, at least until Jimmy's friend, who's found a date here, tries to set Jimmy up his date's friend, who turns out to be Francine, of course.

At Jimmy's hotel, the manager is pissed, because Jimmy turns out to be a smooth operator in dealing with hotel management, not only in trying to pick up women. Jimmy has run up a large tab that he has no intention of paying, and no ability to pay either. Surprisingly, this plot strand doesn't really get explored over the course of the movie. Instead, Jimmy and Francine wind up together the following morning again. Jimmy is a saxophonist who has an audition at a club out in Brooklyn. Unfortunately, he's been doing arrangements that are decidedly not what the club owners of the day want. Francine, hoping to get work as a singer, decides to have Jimmy play a standard to which she can sing along. The club manager is impressed and offers her a job -- but only as part of a double act with Frankie.

This is a problem, since Francine still doesn't really like Jimmy. But, as is the nature of a movie like this, you might guess that they fall in love. That does in fact happen. Not only that, but Jimmy gets his own band with Francine as a singer, and they go out on the road together. However, things hit a snag when, at some point after their marriage, Francine gets pregnant. A pregnant Francine could probably still sing in a studio and cut a record, but traveling with a band is a problem. And Jimmy is none too happy with his wife's pregnancy, even though he should have known this was a consequence of having sex with her. When the baby comes, Jimmy doesn't want to see the kid, and Francine eventually leaves him.

Jimmy stays behind in New York, opens a club of his own, and eventually records the standard "New York, New York", which was actually written for this movie and not a song of the early 1950s. Francine, for her part, has gone out to Hollywood and made it big there, doing the sort of movie musical that was soon to go out of style. When she returns to New York, she and Jimmy eventually meet again. But will they be able to reconcile?

New York, New York was not a success on its original release back in 1977, and frankly it's easy to see why. One big reason is that Robert De Niro is playing a character for whom the audience is supposed to have sympathy, but he's such a jerk to everybody around him that it's difficult to find that sympathy. Secondly, there's the production design of the movie. While watching New York, New York, I found myself thinking of the movie Pennies from Heaven, which was also set several decades in the past but has a look of being a way too antiseptic version of that past. Liza Minnelli looks way too like a product of the 1970s, and everything looks rather off. Maybe that look of artificiality was deliberate, but I don't think it works.

Perhaps the biggest issue is with the movie's running time. Supposedly, the original cut of the movie ran to over four hours, forcing a lot of edits. The version that got released to theaters ran a bit over two and a half hours, which is still too long. On a re-release, a scene depicting Francine's big number in her Hollywood hit was added back in, bringing the movie to a bit over 160 minutes. Frankly, New York, New York is the sort of thing that should have come in under two hours.

The one thing the movie will always be remembered for, however, is that title song, which Frank Sinatra would also sing and turn into a standard. That is not enough, though, to make New York, New York a good movie.

More of those exotic Egyptian stereotypes

Hollywood, for obvious reasons, loved doing movies about Egypt thanks to its long history and exotic locations. Even in the days before they could do a lot of location shooting, there were still movies made about Egyptian themes in all sorts of genres. Even a comedy team like Wheeler and Woolsey got into the act with Mummy's Boys.

We don't actually Wheeler and Woolsey until four or five minutes into the movie. There's an establishing scene first at the mansion of Phillip Browning (Frank M. Thomas). He's one of those rich men who wanted to make a name for themselves in posterity by doing something noteworthy, which in his case meant sponsoring and heading an expedition to Egypt to look for the hidden grave of one or another old pharaoh. His expedition was on the face of it successful, expect that the pharaoh Pharatime had a curse, or so the legend goes, and since returning to America, people on the expedition have a way of winding up dead. Phillip wants to take all the artifacts back to Egypt and reburying them, before he or his daughter Mary (Barbara Pepper) wind up dead. Fellow expedition member Dr. Sterling (Moroni Olsen), one of the few survivors, scoffs at the idea of a curse.

It's only after this opening scene that we meet Wheeler and Woolsey. Although they're much too old for it, they're playing a pair of ditch-diggers on a government welfare project. Wheeler plays Stanley, who is forgetful unless he can sleep on something, while Woolsey is Aloysius, who's more of the schemer of the two, sort of manages Stanley. The two get fired, but fortunately Aloysius sees a classified ad from Browning who is looking for people to go on that expedition to Egypt to return the artifacts. Their stupidity gets them the job, since you expect that somebody in the movie is more than willing to sacrifice the pair.

Everybody gets on a boat for Egypt, and near-disaster keeps heading for the passengers, which might be a sign of the curse in action. After one of the disasters, a stowaway named Catfish (Willie Best) is found, and he's brought into the crew because he says he's from Cairo, although he's actually from Cairo, Illinois. They all make it to Egypt, but more danger awaits them once they get there. As you might guess, there's not actually a curse, but a sinister plot afoot. Wheeler and Woolsey, however, foil it and all the good people get to live happily ever after.

I know that Wheeler and Woolsey aren't going to be to everybody's taste. Further, as the series went along, the humor becomes more and more trite, as though they're coasting. I can't help but think that's in part because the humor was becoming dated, and possibly because of Woolsey's health issues. In the case of Mummy's Boys, though, it's also definitely in part down to a weak script that relies on fairly insipid tropes about Egypt and has Wheeler even stupider than ever.

If you want to see what Wheeler and Woolsey were about, I'd definitely recommend watching the earlier movies before Mummy's Boys.

Fanny

Yet another of the movies that I had sitting on my DVR that's coming up again on TCM is Fanny. It's next airing is tomorrow, March 23, at 3:30 PM, which is why you're getting the post on it now.

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Fanny is played by Leslie Caron, and is a young woman of 18 living in Marseilles with her mother Honorine, who sells fish in the seaside equivalent of a farmers' market at some time in the past. (This movie was released in 1961, based on a musical from several years earlier which was in turn based on stories written in the 1920s. And, as you'll see, there's a ten-year gap between acts of the movie. The earlier scenes in this movie, however, don't look like they're set in any sort of past beyond an old car here and there.) Fanny is in love with Marius (Horst Buchholz), who is the son of César (Charles Boyer), a bartender at the sort of bar that served the sailors and where you wonder how the proprietor could earn a living. As such, Marius doesn't care for ths sort of life, and wants to go to sea where he feels he can be free.

Although Fanny loves Marius, he only sees her as a friend. Meanhile, Panisse (Maurice Chevalier) is a man who has saved up a bunch of money. So when he approaches Honorine, she unsurprisingly thinks he's like to live with her and be a father figure to Fanny. She's shocked to learn that he's willing to marry Fanny (who doesn't want an 18-year-old who looks like Leslie Caron). Never mind the fact that Fanny doesn't have any feelings for Panisse and has no desire to marry him. She only pines for Marius. But Marius is looking into getting a job with a scientific research vessel that's going to be at sea for five years. Even though Fanny is willing to wait, Marius says she shouldn't. She lets Marius go off to sea, because she doesn't want Marius to have any regrets.

Of course, the night before Marius goes off to sea would be the one night that Marius and Fanny make sweet sweet love. And of course, that one time they get it on is, in the best Hollywood tradition, enough to get Fanny knocked up. She knows the baby needs a father, so she sucks it up and tells Panisse she's going to marry him. Panisse doesn't much care since he's OK with having Fanny near him, even if she doesn't love him and still holds a torch for Marius.

Marius comes back and sees the child, but Fanny isn't going to punish Panisse. Several years later, the child is given the opportunity to meet the man who is his father without actually being told this is the father. By this time, Panisse has gotten old enough that he's about to die.

Fanny feels like one of those old-fashioned movies that will appeal to a certain sort of viewer. I'm sorry to say that I'm not particularly that sort of viewer. Having said that, everybody involved does a professional job with the material, and a good portion was shot on location, and in color, which are both big plusses. It would just be nice if all of this were in service of a better story.

Oh, right, musicals aren't my favorite genre

I've metioned before that musicals aren't my favorite genre, although I don't necessarily mind the backstage musicals or the musical biopics. So it's not a surprise that I didn't particularly care for this week's selection for the TCM Musical Matinee: Brigadoon, tomorrow (March 22) at noon.

Musical star Gene Kelly is the star here, as Tommy Albright, an American who's decided to go on a hunting trip to the Scottish highlands together with his best friend Jeff Douglas (Van Johnson). It's partly to get away from America for a while to try to figure out whether he really wants to marry his girlfriend back home, Jane Ashton (Elaine Stewart, fourth-billed in a surprisingly small role). While hunting, Tommy and Jeff get lost, and come to the crest of a hill overlooking a village that doesn't seem to be on their maps.

So, naturally, curiosity gets the better of them, as well as the idea that perhaps if you go into town the locals might be able to tell you where on the map you are and how to get back to where you were originally going. The town is called Brigadoon, and and it looks like it could pass for one of those places that's deliberately been restored for the historical purpose of showing the way things used to be.

But it's a real village, all right, and more than that, the place is about to celebrate. Young Jean Campbell is about to get married to Charlie Dalrymple, and the whole village is taking part, and willing to have Jeff and Tommy join them in the celebration. Jeff isn't terribly thrilled with the place, but Tommy takes to one of the locals, Jean's older sister Fiona (Cyd Charisse), which is of course a bit of a problem since he's got that girlfriend in America.

There are bigger problems, however. Not only do Jeff and Tommy wonder why the village wasn't on the map. When Tommy goes off with Fiona to pick heather, she's absolutely terrified when she gets to the bridge leading out of the village. And then Tommy and Jeff find the Campbell family bible, which has Fiona and Jane's dates of birth back in the 1730s, which makes no sense. The town elder, Mr. Lundie, then tells them that Brigadoon is a special place, saved by a miracle 200 years prior. When the villagers go to sleep, they'll wake up the next morning having only aged one night, while the rest of the world has spent 100 years. But the price is that none of them can leave the village. While outsiders can spend a day, if they want to stay it will have to be forever. If one villager leaves, the rest of the village will cease to exist.

This is a big issue because, as if you couldn't tell, Tommy falls in love with Fiona. Worse is that Jean had a suitor other than Charlie Dalrymple, that being one Harry Beaton. and he, having lost Jean, decides that no one else should have her and that he'll leave the village as a result.

One of the problems I have with Brigadoon, not having seen any stage version of the musical, is how it feels even more artificial than other movie musicals. I think that comes down to the fact that while Gene Kelly and director Vincente Minnelli wanted to do a location shoot, preferably in the Scottish higlands, MGM felt they needed to save money and really wanted it done on soundstages. That doesn't work here at all, although a secondary fact that only occured to me after watching is that I don't think the Scottish highlands are as forested as the film version of them. I get the impression that having to do the movie on a soundstage may also have taken Kelly's heart somewhat out of the picture. Van Johnson isn't really the right star for a movie musical, either, unless it were one of those biopic films where everyody else was doing the singing and dancing.

What's Kay Kyser like?

Tastes change, and things that were popular decades ago may not be so popular today. I think a good example of that would be bandleader Kay Kyser, who hosted a radio show calle the Kollege of Musical Knowledge that involved Kyser dressing like a professor among other this. It was popular enough that he was brought to Hollywood and made several movies. One that happens to be on my DVR is You'll Find Out, and you'll find out indeed if you watch the movie.

The movie opens up with a fictionalized version of Kyser doing his radio show. Chuck Deems (Dennis O'Keefe) is the band's manager, and he's got a girlfriend in socialite Janis Bellacrest (Helen Parrish). She's about to turn 21, and is living with her aunt Margo (Alma Kruger) at the family estate on an island with only one bridge (which means some obvious foreshadowing). But before everyone can get to the mansion, somebody tries to bump off Janis as she's exiting the auditorium where Kay Kyser does his show.

Kay and the band go to the mansion because they've been hired to perform for Janis' 21st birthday party, which gives Kay the chance to meet a bunch of offbeat characters. That's because Aunt Margo is one of those people that populated movies back in the day who believed in spiritualism. She's hired Prince Saliano (Bela Lugosi), who is a medium, to hold séances at which he can supposedly speak to the dead and which will allow Margo to hear from her dearly departed brother (ie. Janis' father). Kay doesn't believe in this stuff and wants to disprove it, while Janis and Chuck are worried that Aunt Margo is being scammed financially.

Kay would like to leave, but of course the storm that's been going on outside destroys the bridge. So Kay has to stay for the séance, which is a good thing because there's another attempt on Janis' life at the séance and Kay basically saves Janis. But who's trying to kill Janis, and why? Perhaps Prof. Fenninger (Peter Lorre), or Margo's lawyer, Judge Mainwaring (Boris Karloff), can answer those questions. More likely, it's going to be up to Kay and his band members to solve the mystery themselves.

As I mentioned above, the movie starts off with Kay doing his show, and frankly, it's full of the sort of cornball humor that may have worked in the days before World War II (the movie was released in 1940) but today is worse than groan-inducing. And some of Kay's band members are even worse, notably the cornetist with terrible hair who was given the stage name Ish Kabibble. One positive is that Kay is pretty much only playing himself, since I don't get any impression that he had much acting ability.

The story isn't exactly bad, although it's unoriginal, being part of a genre of haunted house movies that had started in the early 1930s and began to include comedy in the late 1930s with movies like The Cat and the Canary. Fans of the genre will probably enjoy seeing Karloff, Lugosi, and Lorre together, but the film isn't that great.

Nothing in Common

I've still got a couple more movies on my DVR from when Eva Mare Saint was TCM's Star of the Month, so again I'm making a point of watching them before they expire and then putting up a post, although because of how far ahead I'm getting in terms of posting, they may expire by the time the posts go up. Anyhow, next up is a later movie from the mid-1980s, Nothing in Common.

Tom Hanks is the star here, playing David Basner. In an opening scene, he's returning home from a Caribbean vacation to his job at an advertising agency in Chicago. There's he surprised by the new that he's been given a promotion, which in part means a move from a cubicle to an office with a door and a window to the outside world. He's also a ladies' man, as he was putting the moves on one of the stewardesses on the flight home and has an on-again, off-again girlfriend in Chicago in the form drama teacher Donna (Bess Armstrong).

However, life for David is about to get turned upside-down. While he's in bed with a woman, his phone rings. Naturally he lets it go to his answering machine, since this was the 80s and people didn't really have voice mail back then. But he hears that the call is from his father Max (Jackie Gleason). He informs David that David's mom, Max's wife of 36 years Lorraine (Eva Marie Saint) up and left him, and that this clearly isn't some sort of trial separation. So the following day, David has to go see each of his parents, and deal with their complex relationship with one another as well as his own complicated relationship with each of his parents.

Meanwhile, David had been hoping to make parter in the ad agency. To do so means not only making good ads and coming up with good slogans and whatnot, but bringing in new clients, as his boss Charlie (Hector Elizondo) points out. At least there's the chance of landing a big new client, as Colonial Airlines is thinking of a new ad campaign to grow their business. David's agency is understandably hoping to get that contract, and David is the point man on the pitch.

David and the rest of the division do their research, finding that the company is run by somewhat mysterious pilot Andrew Woolridge (Barry Corbin). What is known about Andrew doesn't quite fit David's interests, as is scene in one of the comic relief scenes where David goes on a duck hunt with Andrew and some others, a scene that made me think of Libeled Lady and the remake Easy to Wed. But Nothing in Common is more of a light (for the most part) drama and not a straight-up comedy. Mixing the two is a subplot involving David's having a relationshi with Colonial Airlines bigwig Cheryl (Sela Ward) who turns out to be the daughter of Andrew -- the married daughter, no less.

But the drama really comes in David's relationship with his father. Dad is getting to the age where he should think of retirement, but that's only going to be forced on him by the fact that he's about to get fired from his job selling children's fashions. That, and his health. Max has had diabetes for some time, but never wants to see a doctor. As a result, he has a medical emergency that's going to require surgery. At the very least, there's going to be some toes amputated; at worst the surgery could go bad and Dad could die on the operating table.

I have to admit to not having heard about Nothing in Common before I saw it show up on the TCM schedule last summer. I think that's because it's the sort of movie that doesn't seem to show up much. It got mixed reviews at the time, and as a middle-brow drama doesn't have anything about it to make it especially memorable the way other genre movies might. That's a shame, because while it's not a great movie, I think it's certainly better than "mixed reviews" might lead you to believe. Everybody does a professional job, with Hanks taking a big step in moving out from just the straight comedy roles he had done to this point.

Especially if you're of the age to have elderly parents, I think you'll enjoy Nothing in Common.

Another movie not about furries

Another movie that I've had on my DVR for quite some time and wanted to make certain I watched before it expired is the British costume drama Blanche Fury. Now that I have watched it, it's time for the review.

The movie starts off with a woman in bed in one of those English estates out in the middle of nowhere in the mid-1850s. (The movie is based on a book that was based on a true crime from 1848, although the first date we see in the movie is 1853.) That woman is Blanche Fuller (Valerie Hobson), and the servants of the house are calling in a doctor for reasons that will become clear later in the movie. But the doctor's administration of ether as an anesthetic causes Blanche to have a flashback, which is so highly original.

Back in 1853, young Blanche is working a series of jobs as a companion to relatively well-to-do older ladies, having had to take on the jobs after her parents died. The work isn't really suited to Blanche's temperament, so when she gets a letter from her uncle Simon who lives at the estate house, she jumps at the chance to join him and her cousin Laurence (Michael Gough). They've got a position for her as a governess to Laurence's daughter Lavinia, and she can get away from the drudgery of her current job.

Blanche misses Simon where the carriages stop in town, so heads to the estate alone. When she gets there, she meets a man who she thinks is Laurence, but in fact turns out to be Philip Thorn (Stewart Granger). He works as a steward in the stables, but his story is much more complicated than that. The estate had been owned by the Fury family, but the last Fury died and bequeathed the estate to Simon, who has taken on the name Fury as a result. Philip, however, is the illegitimate son of the last Fury male, and thinks he should have inherited the propery. Simon kept him on since he's good at what he does, but Philip bears a severe resentment and is trying to find evidence that his father actually did marry his biological mother, which would make Philip legitimate and the rightful heir to the estate.

Meanwhile, Blanche thinks about marrying cousin Laurence, which would give Lavinia a more stable family. At the same time, she's carrying on an affair with Philip. This is going to cause all sorts of problems in Philip's attempts to win back the estate. And to do so is going to require the deaths of Simon, Laurence, and Lavinia, all of whom have more right to the estate than Philip does.

Blanche Fury comes across as being similar to the sort of Hollywood period melodrama that was popular in pre-TV days. Think Forever Amber or, earlier, All This and Heaven Too, but with a British sensibility about their past history and British production values. It's very competently made, and fairly well acted, although at heart it's still a melodrama which means it's got an air about that makes me think it's a bit silly at times. That's not to say Blanche Fury is a bad movie; in fact it does quite well for the genre. It's more of a question of whether that genre will appeal to everybody.

Faithful in My Fashion

The next movie that's showing up on TCM that's currently on my DVR is the MGM programmer Faithful in My Fashon. That next airing comes up tomorrow, March 18, a 6:15 AM. So once again, with that in mind, I watched the movie in order to do a review of it here.

The movie was released in August 1946, so not long after the end of World War II, and a time when soldiers were still being demobbed. One such example of this is Sgt. Jeff Compton (Tom Drake). He went off to war four and a half years ago, spent some time in a POW camp, and is now finally going through the process of getting out of the military. He hopes to return to his old job in the stock room at a department store. So, of course, the first thing he does when he gets two weeks' leave is to go back to that store, where he meets manager Hiram Dilworthy (Edward Everett Horton) and assistant Miss Swanson (Spring Byington).

The real reason he made the department store his first place to visit after being given leave is because his old girlfriend Jean Kendrick (Donna Reed), whom he nicknamed "Chunky" for reasons that I don't think are ever explained. The two had a whirlwind romance before Jeff went off to fight and that romance ended up with Jeff giving Jean a ring that was obviously supposed to represent an engagement ring until he could return home and marry her. And the thought of marrying Jean is clearly what sustained Jeff through the years of war.

Unfortunately that's not what sustained Jean. She didn't really think of herself as Jeff's fiancée. During the intervening four-plus years, she's advanced from the stock room to being a purchaser for the department store. She's also moved to a better apartment, and gotten a fiancé of her own. She's trying to come up with some way to let Jeff down gently. But Jeff seems pretty darn certain that he not only still wants to marry Jean; he wants to do it today if at all possible. Worse, Jeff is considered a sort of war hero so hurting him by breaking off the engagement is bound to cause problems.

Dilworthy comes up with an idea. It's only two weeks that Jeff is going to be on leave, so perhaps everybody can do something to keep Jeff from finding out during those two weeks that Jean has become engaged to another man. Or at least maybe they can keep up the ruse long enough for Jean to figure out how to let Jeff down most gently. Of course, since Tom Drake and Donna Reed are top billed, you know that they're just right for each other as a couple and that they really ought to wind up together in the final reel. There's also the fact that, the movie being released not long after the end of World War II, you can't imagine a way for a returning soldier to have his heart broken in what's supposed to be a romantic comedy.

And that's the big problem with Faithful in My Fashion. It all feels way too contrived, and the sort of thing where everybody has to lie far too much for the movie to come across as nice. Why couldn't Jean be allowed to keep her position as a purchaser and let Jeff know she's been promoted, for example. That, and moving to a better apartment. Instead, we get a dumb scene of Jean trying to convince the "new" (for the past three years) tenant of her old apartment to let her live there for two weeks.

Perhaps this sort of material worked better for audiences back in 1946. I'm sorry to say, however, that Faithful in My Fashion didn't work for me 80 years on.

The Daughter of Rosie O'Grady

Tomorrow is St. Patrick's Day, and as always, TCM is running a bunch of movies with Irish, or at least Irish-American themes. One that I hadn't seen before is The Daughter of Rosie O'Grady, which shows up at 9:30 AM. But I happened to have it on my DVR, so seeing it on the schedule, I watched it to be able to do a post on it here.

The movie opens in 1898, just as the Spanish-American War has ended and the victorious soldiers are returning home to victory parades for a heroes' welcome. The three O'Grady sisters: Katie (Marcia Mae Jones), Patricia (June Haver), and adolescent Maureen (Debbie Reynolds), are watching the parade. The reason is that just before the soldiers went off to war, Katie had married one soldier, James. The only thing is, she never told her father Dennis (James Barton) about the marriage. Not only that, but Katie and James consummated their marriage before he went down to Cuba, and that one act of sex knocked her up with twins!

Dad is very protective of the daughters, being a widower. In his younger days, he and his wife Rosie worked vaudeville, retiring after she started having kids, with dad taking a job driving horse-drawn trolley cars together with his friend Miklos (S.Z. Sakall, credited here as Cuddles without the initials). Dad thinks having to do all that work in vaudeville drove Rosie to an early grave, and because of that he put away all of the couple's vaudeville stuff, not wanting the kids to look at it or even entertain any thoughts of going on the stage.

After the parade, Patricia and Maureen go to take Dad his lunch at the depot, but take a detour to go by the vaudeville theater run by producer Tony Pastor (Gordon MacRae). Tony is sitting in the alley outside the stage entrance dressed as a tramp since that's one of the outfits he wears in the show. He tricks the two girls into giving him the lunch that's supposed to be for their father. At least the sisters have the plausible lie that they couldn't get past the parade lines.

When Patricia learns that the "tramp" was really Tony Pastor, she goes back to the theater to give him a piece of her mind. He learns that she's Pat O'Gradie, daughter of Rosie, and of course he recognizes the O'Grady surname and the significance that this has for vaudeville. So he'd love to see Dennis and talk shop, not realizing how much Dennis wants to keep his daughters away from vaudeville. As you can guess, things are going to get more complicated when Pat goes on stage with Tony and the two fall in love. And of course, there's still the issue of Katie and James. It's going to cause a lot of heartache before the predictable happy ending.

The problem with The Daughter of Rosie O'Grady is how predictable and formulaic the plot is. I wouldn't be surprised if Warner Bros. knew this, which is why they loaded the film up with what feels like even more musical numbers than normal for a movie like this. It makes the movie one that people who like musicals in general, and the nostalgia musicals from the post-World War II period that were set about a half century earlier than that in particular.

The Mission

One of those movies that I had heard about when it was first released but was too young to see in the theater was The Mission. Eventually, it showed up on TCM last year, and so I made a point of watching it in order to be able to do a review on it.

The movie starts off in 1758, as a Cardinal Altamirano is writing from Asunción to Rome informing the Vatican of the status of the Guaraní, which had been the subject of some controversy over the preceding several years. The Guaraní are the native people who lived in the region of what is now roughly where Paraguay, Brazil, and Argentina meet. The Jesuits, by the time the movie is set becoming a political problem themselves in Europe, had been sent to try to convert the native peoples of South America to Christianity, and set up several rural missions.

Flash back some years, to about 1750. Father Gabriel (Jeremy Irons) is sent from the metropolitan diocese of Asunción out to the jungle after the martyrdom of the previous priest. Irons plays the oboe on his way to the jungle, and that appears to be his saving grace, as the locals seem to be interested in the music. That's what makes Gabriel able to start a bit of a frienship with the locals, as well as set up those missions.

Meanwhile, in the city, Capt. Rodrigo Mendoza (Robert De Niro) has some problems of his own. He's been hunting for slaves, something the Portuguese don't have a problem with, in the area where Fr. Gabriel is planning on building the mission. That mission would be a haven for the Guaraní, especially since the Spanish don't have slaves the way the Portuguese do. (Indeed, Brazil didn't abolish slavery until 1888.) But more pressing is Mendoza's personal life. He's got a wife, but she doesn't love him. Instead, she loves his brother Felipe (Aidan Quinn in a small role), and that causes Rodgrio to challenge Felipe to a duel in which Rodrigo kills Felipe. Rather than have Rodrigo face the death penalty, Fr. Gabriel is able to get the colonial governor to release Rodrigo to Gabriel's custody as part of Rodrigo's penance; he'll spend his life out at the missions working with the Guaraní, even though they'll be certain to recognize him from his attempts to capture them and sell them into slavery.

Fr. Gabriel and Mendoza work together to try to convert the Guaraní as well as to build for them about as prosperous a life as you could hope for in that part of the world at that time. And indeed, when Altamirano comes to visit, he finds that the missions are doing an exceptionally good job. But there's a catch. Back in Europe, Spain and Portugal have signed a treaty which will result in awarding the section of land on which the missions have been built to Portugal's colony of Brazil. They would be perfectly happy destroying the missions and enslaving the Guaraní. The Spanish don't want this, but they also know that if they try to prevent Portugal from doing this, it's going to set off some serious problems with the Jesuit order, which is already being perceived in Europe as having too much power.

It's clearly going to come to war, although not between Spain and Portugal, but with them ganging up on the Guaraní. Fr. Gabriel and Mendoza don't want to lose the missions, but disagree on how to deal with the colonial powers' plans for the missions.

I have to admit to not knowing all that much about the period of history covered in The Mission before seeing the movie, and apparently there is some fair degree of liberty taken with the history, both conflating events and more starkly delineating between good guys and bad guys. Some of that is always going to be a requirement for a movie, and what results in The Mission is a pretty darn good movie. I'm glad that I finally got the chance to watch it.

Murder on the Blackboard

TCM is going through the Hildegarde Withers mysteries as part of the Saturday matinee programming block. There were six of them and Edna May Oliver played Withers in three of them. I know I hadn't recommended Murder on the Blackboard before, as I had never actually sat down to watch it despite the fact that the Withers mysteries show up on TCM often enough and I enjoy the acting of Edna May Oliver. So the last time it aired I recorded it, and now it's getting the Saturday matinee airing, tomorrow (March 15) at 10:15 AM.

As you can guess from the title, the movie is set at a school. Before we get into the mystery aspect of the film, however, we're introduced to the school's janitor, Otto, who seems to live in the basement of the school, probably because he's an alcoholic. We also meet the school's secretary, Miss Davis (Gertrude Michael), who for some reason brings a gun to school. Principal MacFarland (Tully Marshall) tries to put the moves on Miss Davis before seeing the gun; Miss Davis tells him that it belongs to one of the teachers, Louise Halloran, who is also sharing an apartment with Miss Davis. Louise is scared of something.

Miss Davis is in a relationship with one of the teachers, Addison Stevens (Bruce Cabot), who had a failed relationshp with Louise previously. MacFarland has also been trying to put the moves on Louise. And, Lousie and Otto the janitor get into a dispute over her owing him money and having given him a check that bounced. So it doesn't take much to figure out who is going to get bumped off, as well as the fact that we've got a handful of suspects who all had the motive and opportunity to kill the eventual murder victim.

It's only here that we finally meet Hildegarde Withers. She's at school late because she keeping one of the students for being a gossip. That turns out to be fortuitous in a way, in that she's able to find the body of Louise Halloran, who has obviously been murdered. Since she's already solved one murder case in The Penguin Pool Murder, she sends the student to call police detective Oscar Piper (James Gleason), since the two of them worked together on that previous murder case.

The method of killing is kind of nonsensical, and the reveal is particularly silly, but the point of watching the Hildegarde Withers movies isn't so much for the mystery as it is for the comic banter between Withers and Piper, who could each dish it out and who both have their strengths and weaknesses in trying to solve mysteries. Edna May Oliver is in pretty good form here, as is Gleason, and together they much more than the story make the movie something worth watching. These were only B movies, too, so it's not like you're going to be investing too much time in them.

Bez końca

Another of the selections on TCM Imports that was about to expire from my DVR was one of director Krzysztof Kieślowski's films from his native Poland before he want to France and did the Three Colors trilogy, a mid-1980s film called No End. So, I watched it before it expired and wrote of this post, although the post itself probably isn't going up until after the movie expires since I'm several weeks ahead in writing posts.

The movie was released in 1985, but is set at the beginning of 1983. Antek Zyro is a Polish lawyer who has just died, and he shows up at the beginning of the film to tell us how he died of a heart attack while driving his car, and how his spirit was able to see his late wife Urszula (nicknamed Ula which is how she's referred to in the movie) and young son Jacek, as well as witness his own funeral. In fact, one of the themes of the movie is how Ula thinks she caa n sense Antek's presence and that he may be there as a ghost.

Antek was a lawyer, and one at a particularly difficult point in Polish history (and indeed, I'm surprised the movie was even able to be made in mid-1980s Poland). Poland was of course part of the communist bloc at this time, but there were rumblings against the regime. The workers' protests at the Gdańsk shipyards that led to the Solidarity trade union happened in 1980, and the government eventually responded in late 1981 by putting the country under martial law and a curfew among other repressive measures. In the movie, Darek Stach is a blue-collar worker who bristled under these restrictions and, with the rest of his co-workers, wanted to organize a strike. He was arrested, and it's Darek's case that Antek was working on at the time of his death.

One day not long after Antek's death, Ula gets a call from Joanna, who is the wife of Darek. She knows that Antek had files on Darek's case, and perhaps Darek was able to secret away some material that the communist authorities have been searching for in the apartments of Darek and other people around him. She's also looking for help from Ula, perhaps to find a good attorney who can take the case. That latter obligation eventually falls to Labrador, under whom Darek had clerked back in the 1970s after finishing law school. However, some people question whether Labrador is the right man for the job. One of those people might even be Antek himself: in going through Antek's files, Ula sees there's now suddenly a red question mark next to Labrador's name that she's convinced wasn't there the last time she looked at the file.

Ula goes to a hypnotherapist to try to get Antek's ghost out of her mind, but it doesn't really work. Meanwhile, she and everybody else involved in Darek's case is putting herself into more danger because of the political situation in the country.

There's a lot going on in No End, and to be honest, I'm not certain that all of it works, such as the character who had met Antek before he married Ula, and the nude pictures of Ula. But I think that on the whole, a lot more works here than goes wrong. Despite the opening, the movie develops a bit slowly, but more in a way that intelligent dramas did. The material here is to me definitely more accessible than arthouse. No End is, despite some flaws, a film that's absolutely worth watching.

Don't call me Byron Barr

Tonight into tomorrow brings the second night of Barbara Stanwyck's turn as TCM's Star of the Month. One of her movies that I hadn't seen before and recorded the last time TCM ran it is The Gay Sisters. It comes on as part of the Star of the Month salute tomorrow (March 13) at 1:00 PM, so I made a point of watching the movie to be able to do a post on it here.

The movie opens with a brief establishing scene set about 25 years before the main action. As the movie was released in 1942 and set more or less at that time (possibly just before Pearl Harbor although World War II doesn't play into the action), that means the opening is set in the mid-1910s, which is the run-up to World War I. The Gaylords are one of the richest families in America, and the current patriarch, Penn Gaylord (Donald Woods), has a wife and three young daughters. Or should I say had a wife. She was somehow traveling alone on the Lusitania, which as we all know was torpedoed and sunk in the Atlantic. Eventually the Americans entered the war, and Daddy Gaylord for some weird reason went off to fight despite having those three young daughters and presumably being the same sort of captain of industry as Jerry Lewis in Which Way to the Front. Dad gets it in France, leaving the thre girls orphans.

Two dozen years pass, and probating the will has been a nightmare. Apparently, somebody over in France claims that Papa Gaylord wrote a codicil before getting killed in action in which he gave ten percent of the family fortune to a French children's charity. The remaining Gaylords back home naturally contested this, and somehow international legal delays have dragged the case out for all these years, while the Gaylord sisters grew up and slowly lost the estate's cash. They have, however, held on to the land, because family tradition has it that land is more important than money.

The three sisters are Fiona (Barbara Stanwyck), the eldest, who is foster mom to an orphan child Austin; Evelyn (Geraldine Fitzgerald), who married an English nobleman and has come back to America in the only sop to the fact that there's now another war going on in Europe; and Susie (Nancy Coleman), who got married except that it's one of those loveless marriages she'd like annulled. Her unseen husband is willing to do it for a price, but since the money has been spent on contesting the will, Susie doesn't have the money. So although she's in a relationship with painter Gig Young (the print TCM ran has the character being played by the Gig Young who became a prominent supporting actor; he was born Byron Barr and took his stage name from this character although I don't know if he did that before the movie was first released or TCM only has a re-release print). Complicating matters is that when Evelyn returns to America, she sees Gig and starts pursuing him.

But since Barbara Stanwyck is the star here, she gets the biggest complication. That comes in the form of Charles Barclay (George Brent), who is contesting the will on behalf of that French charity. Of course, he really wants the land the Gaylord house is built on because he's a land developer who has bought all the surrounding land in order to be able to build a skyscraper. He also seems to know quite a bit about Fiona's past. More, even, than Fiona's first lawyer Gibbon (Gene Lockhart) who gets replaced with Ralph Pedloch (Donald Crisp). Even the poor foster kid gets dragged into all of this.

The Gay Sisters was based on a novel that I'm guessing was popular at the time to the extent that you can see why a studio would want to turn it into a movie. However, something goes wrong in the adaptation, which I think is the screenplay since it seems to go all over the place, with the reveal of Fiona's past being a bit bizarre. And if the Gaylords were supposed to value land over money, couldn't they have just given up that ten percent right at the beginning?

Still, The Gay Sisters isn't a terrible movie. It's just not what you'd want to show as the first movie for any of the main players involved.

TCM's Quincy Jones memorial

Record producer and sometime composer Quincy Jones died back in November at the age of 91. With Christmas and then 31 Days of Oscar, it took a little time for TCM to get the movies together to do a memorial tribute, but that tribute is coming up tonight in prime time, with five films of scores by Jones:

8:00 PM In the Heat of the Night
10:00 PM In Cold Blood
12:30 AM The Getaway
2:45 AM The Anderson Tapes
4:45 AM The Split

Looking through Jones' filmography, there are some other films I wouldn't have minded seeing show up, but then they would have had to pre-empt some other schedule ideas. I actually have The Out-of-Towners on my DVR and recently watched it, but the review is going to come up some time later, since I already had something else on the TCM schedule to blog about today and have a bunch of stuff coming up that I've already written posts for.

Ooh, another Hitchcock day

I like the films of director Alfred Hitchcock, and to be honest he might be my favorite director if you think about movies in terms of directors -- the whole auteur theory and whatnot. At the same time, however, I have to admit that it can feel a bit lazy to me to fill a day of programming by just throwing up a bunch of Hitchcock's films. Perhaps it's the case that Hitchcock programming blocks come up more regularly than other those for other directors since Hitchock probably has more movies that are closer to tentpoles than almost anybody else from the studio era. TCM ran two nights of Hitchcock's earlier work back in January, wrapped around a documentary called Becoming Hitchcock: The Legacy of Blackmail. They're running another morning and afternoon of Hitchcock tomorrow, and that includes another showing of the documentary, at 6:30 AM.

Blackmail was Alfred Hitchcock's first talking picture, although it wasn't intended to be. Indeed, the first section especially has some lengthy scenes where there's pretty much only ambient sound if you will, or sound effects put in in post-production that are supposed to be what ambient sound would sound like. However, with sound films coming over from Hollywood, the studio realized they needed to start making sound films in the UK as well, and Blackmail got the honor of being made as the first all-talking feature-length British movie, at least according to the promotional material of the era.

In fact, however, both a silent version of Blackmail, with traditional silent film intertitles, and a talking version, were produced. Quite a few of the scenes could be used in both versions, but not all. Part of what the documentary does is explore how Hitchcock handled the new medium by comparing the two versions of Blackmail and showing where sound made a difference. But that's not all of what the documentary does.

Blackmail wasn't Hitchcock's first thriller/suspense picture; that honor would probably go to The Lodger. But Blackmail has a whole bunch of themes that would be reused in later of Hitchcock's films in varying combinations, and a good portion of the documentary looks at how Hitchcock kept putting the same themes into his movies while keeping them looking fresh.

Becoming Hitchcock isn't a bad documentary, although I have to admit to that me it feels sometime like the sort of thing I'd come up with if I were doing one of my old list posts when I had a day where I couldn't think of a movie to blog about so just mentioned several films that had something thematic in common. Having said that, there is some stuff I didn't necessarily think of when grouping Hitchcock's films together. And for people who haven't seen many of his movies, this documentary is definitely not a bad way to bring up some of the titles that aren't quite so well known. Most of Hitchcock's sound films get a shout out at least once; I think Under Capricorn was the one Hollywood film not to be mentioned.

So definitely worth one watch, although not particularly groundbreaking by any means.

84, Charing Cross Road

Back in 1987, one of the movies that I hear about getting a release, but never got the chance to watch because I wasn't really in a place to go to the local mall sixtyplex by myself was 84 Charing Cross Road. Over the years, I'd heard other people say some really good things about it, and it was one of those films I'd wanted to see. So when TCM ran it last August when Anne Bancroft was honored in Summer Under the Stars, I finally got the chance to record it and watch it.

I had known that the movie was based on an epistolary novel, but what I didn't realize is that it's actually based on a true story. Helene Hanff (played by Bancroft) is a woman who, as the movie opens, is getting on a plane to London. A big part of her visit is to get to the titular 84, Charing Cross Road (no comma in the title of the movie but apparently there is in the title of the book), which was the home of used book store Marks & Co. She gets there to find that the store is closed and workmen are renovating it into something else. But as with the opening of Twelve O'Clock High, this is a chance for all those old memories to come back....

Flash back to 1949. Helene Hanff is a research writer/script editor working in New York and living in the sort of apartment filled with books. She needs more books for her work, and is having a dickens of a time finding them in New York. In the Saturday Review of Literature, she sees an ad for Marks & Co., and decides to write to them to see if they have the books she needs. That letter is answered by Frank Doel (Anthony Hopkins), who fills the order and starts both a tab for Hanff and a long running correspondence between the two.

Helene responds, in some ways coming across as the character Bancroft played in Garbo Talks: the quintessential New York stereotype of a person who won't back down and do things her own way. The two also talk about their personal lives. Hanff is single, while Frank has a wife Nora (Judi Dench) and two daughters. Eventually, one of Frank's co-workers writes to Helene as well, and everybody in the store is interested in Helene, with the interest being mutual as the movie in part becomes a sort of retrospective of life for a certain class of British person over the course of 20 years.

Frank and the rest of the people in the store hope that perhaps Helene can make it to London some day, although this is the early 1950s when transatlantic travel is very expensive. Helene does make plans to get over to the UK, but financial issues keep coming up to prevent it. She has a friend who does stage acting and gets a part in a touring company that will be going to London. But when she goes to Marks & Co., she doesn't recognize Frank. The correspondence goes on, until.... Well, we know that Helene does make it to London but only after the store went out of business.

84 Charing Cross Road is the sort of movie that you'd think would have a tough time working, from the idea of adapting letters into a good movie to the fact that the two main characters never meet. And yet the movie is something very charming, thanks in part to Bancroft's very American performance and Hopkins' very British performance. Perhaps for people who are more used to current-day movies from the 2020s, 84 Charing Cross Road may seem a bit old-fashioned and tough to get into. But for anyone who likes classic film, I think they'll very much enjoy it.