Obey that Impulse

Once again I went looking through the movies Tubi has streaming on demand, and found another Hollywod movie from the Studio Era that was surprisingly unknown to me, and not a B movie either: the 1931 movie Indiscreet, which has nothing to do with the Cary Grant/Ingrid Bergman film of the same title that was released in the late 1950s.

Gloria Swanson is the star here, playing Gerry Trent, a woman who God only knows how she's able to support herself. It's likely off the back of her aunt Kate (Maude Eburne), although she and her kid sister Joan (Barbara Kent) talk about having come from Oklahoma to New York, and Joan was able to go off to Paris too. In the meantime, Gerry found a boyfriend in Jim Woodward (Monroe Owsley), but dumped him because he's boring. The dumping happens as the movie opens; Joan, for her part has a nice enough guy Buster Collins (Arthur Lake) who is interested in her, but Joan seemed to merely want to be friends, which might have had something to do with her going off to Paris.

At any rate, Gerry having recently broken up, she's given a bit of advice by Buster, who has her read the hot new book Obey That Impulse by author Tony Blake (Ben Lyon). It's one of those "modern" books, with new and presumably scandalous ideas about love and marriage. Gerry likes the book, and meets Tony. Naturally, she likes Tony as a man too, and the two fall in love. They even talk about marriage, despite Gerry's worry that if Tony hears about the previous relationship with Jim Tony might not want her any more. She needn't have worried, at least not about that. Gerry soon finds she's got a lot more to worry about.

That's because Joan returns from Paris. She talks about the most wonderful American expat she met during her time in Paris, and how she's in love with him. And then she introduces Gerry to that man. You probably already guesed it, but that man is Jim Woodward. Oh dear. How to get Joan to be no longer interested in Jim, since Gerry thinks of him as bad news for her? Her first idea is to make Jim and his family believe that some insanity runs in the Trent family, so Gerry goes to a big fancy party at the Woodward place and tries to act nuts. That doesn't work, however, so she tries another tack, which is to buttonhole Jim and get him to believe that perhaps Gerry still loves him and it's Gerry who is the right sister for him. The problem with this, however, is that Tony is liable to come across Gerry pitching woo to Jim and conclude that Gerry was being dishonest about the relationship when she first informed Tony of it.

Indiscreet is an interesting enough movie that probably wouldn't be remembered at all today if it weren't for the fact that Gloria Swanson is the lead. She was big in the silent era, before the pictures got small, and would go on to revive her career with the role that probably made her most famous, that of Norma Desmond in Sunset Blvd. Take Swanson out of Indiscreet and who would think of it today. It's not a bad movie, although it doesn't feel overly original. It also feels very dated, and not just because of its provenance as an early talkie with all the technical things that implies.

Still, I think fans of early talkies will enjoy this version of Indiscreet.

Heart of a City

I recorded a couple of Rita Hayworth movies in relative proximity several months back. One of them was One Touch of Venus, as part of the spring run of Two for One and which I blogged abou when Two for One was re-run during the autumn. The other one was Tonight and Every Night, and recently, I finally watched it.

The movie opens up with an establishing shot of London, presumably in 1944 (the movie was released in January 1945 and based on a 1942 play). A photographer from Life magazine shows up at the Music Box theatre, having heard that it's the one theater that never shut down during the bombings of the Blitz and that this would make a good story. Theatre owner May Tolliver (Florence Bates) lets the reporter take photographs, while one of the stage hands informs him that there's a really good back story to all of this. As you can guess, this means we get the inevitable flashback....

Tolliver is preparing a new stage show, which will be an ensemble affair and which includes a couple of American chorus girls, Rosalind Bruce (Rita Hayworth) and her friend Judy Kane (Janet Blair). Walking into the theater is Tommy Lawson (Marc Platt), an improvisational dancer who is clearly talented, but who Tolliver feels wouldn't be appropriate for the show since he only dances how he feels instead of sticking to choreographed steps. However, he's so determined to dance that he learns the routines from Rosalind and Judy and gets a spot in the show. He also develops felings for Rosalind, although as he's not the top-billed man in the movie, he's not going to wind up with Rosalind.

The top-billed actor is Lee Bowman, playing RAF pilot Paul Lundy. Paul shows up at one of the shows at the Music Box, and obviously likes Rosalind too. After all, who wouldn't? But how to meet her? Well, luck in a way intervenes in the form of a German bombing raid. The air-raid sirens go off, forcing everyone into the basement bomb shelter, with Paul and Rosalind winding up in close proximity. Paul wants a further relationshp with Rosalind, but makes the mistake of coming up with a lie about an American soldier from her hometown being at his apartment and using that as an excuse to get Rosalind there to try to put the moves on her. Needless to say, Rosalind is put off.

We're less than halfway through the movie, and when a notice is put up at Paul's RAF base of a Shakespeare company coming through to do a benefit prformance for the soldiers, Paul gets his CO to ask the Music Box company to do a performance. Paul is able to convince Rosalind of his love for her, and the start the relationship anew.

Of course, Paul being a pilot, he often gets called away, and it's not always for just one night, something that Rosalind probably should have expected. But she doesn't, and other misunderstandings also threaten to blow up the relationship. With the movie having been released while World War II was still going, however, you can expect that there's going to be a happy ending of sorts.

Tonight and Every Night is an interesting idea for a World War II-era musical, and unsurprisingly Rita Hayworth does quite well. However, the movie probably could have used her better. She had already danced with Fred Astaire and showed herself to be a very adept dancer. Yet the movie doesn't really give her one big dance of her own, prefering to stick more to ensemble numbers and songs (with Hayworth's singing voice dubbed). The military romance is also a plot that's not particularly original.

So, I think there are reasons why Tonight and Every Night is not an all-time classic. But it's certainly something that none of the people involved in making it would have had anything to be ashamed of. It also succeeds in being an entertaining morale-booster for the audiences on the homefront, so it's definitely worth a watch.

Take Aim at the Police Van

I've been mentioning pretty much every time I do a post on a foreign film recently that I've got a bunch of them on my DVR, which is why they've been showing up as blog posts more often. My most recent foreign film watch was actually a move selected by Eddie Muller for Noir Alley that I'd never heard of, Take Aim at the Police Van.

Thankfully, the movie opens up with someone taking aim at the titular police van, which is more like a bus, but that's not the point. On a road in a place that looks deserted enough that it's got to be someplace outside of Tokyo, prisoners are being transported when the transport van gets in a run-in with a truck. This is of course a ruse to get the bus stopped. Not so somebody can free prisoners which would normally be the case, but instead to shoot some of them. The shoot is successful, in that two men wind up dead.

Tamon was the guard on the transport responsible for the safety of the prisoners. Even though there wasn't really anything he could do to prevent the shooting, he's still responsible, so his superiors suspend him for six months. On the one hand, that sucks, but on the other hand, this gives him the chance to do some investigation of his own. One the bus, one of the prisoners had been writing the name "Aki" in the fog on the window, so Tamon goes looking for this man, Goro, to see if he has any clues. Goro, however, still seems to be wanted by someone else, so even though Tamon finds him, Goro immediately goes on the run.

Tamon's search also brings him into contact with an employment agency that presumptively provides masseuses and the like, but it's really providing them for the happy endings. They've provided women to a hotel in a seaside spa town, so it's there that Tamon goes. And just before he can interview the woman he wants to, she gets shot with an arrow right through the breast!

Tamon talks to Yuko Hamajima, who is currently running the agency in place of her father, who's in hospital. She has obvious reasons to distrust Tamon, but wouldn't you know it, she seems to be falling in love with him. And what does all of this have to do with the two people who were shot on the prison bus, anyway?

Take Aim at the Police Van has a convoluted plot, as even Eddie Muller himself would admit. As such, it's the sort of foreign film that would probably work better if you're actually fluent enough in Japanese that you don't need subtitles. I'm not, so I felt as though there was a lot that I was missing. I do have to say, however, that the movie was extremely visually stylish, and that covers up for a lot of the film's messy plot.