I bambini ci guardano

I've mentioned on several occasions over the past few years how I keeping winding up with a ton of foreign films that are just about to expire from the YouTube TV DVR that I need to watch before they expire. The latest example of that was The Children Are Watching Us.

Now, the first interesting thing is that this movie was made in Italy in 1943 which, as you may know, was the height of World War II. But there aren't any references to the war, which may be because it's based on a book that was released in the 1920s, never mind the political situation that might have prevented filmmakers from setting a story like this against the backdrop of the war.

Pricò is a boy of about 5 living in a fashionable part of a fashionable city, with a father rich enough that they have a maid as well as living in a co-op in a building where the big issue is the elevator being too subject to needing repairs. Pricò and his mother go to the park one afternoon and watch a puppet show, although the trip is really an excuse for Mom (Isa Pola) to go see her lover Roberto, not realizing that Pricò sees what's going on. Mom has reached the point where she can't take it any more, so that night she packs her bags to run off with Roberto.

Dad, now a single father, doesn't know what to do, so he sends Pricò off to live with a series of relatives. None of them have much of an idea what to do with such a mischievous little boy, or don't really have the space to put him up for an extended period of time. In any case, Mom returns home after a short period of time claiming that she's gotten Roberto out of her system for good, and would like to return and try to start anew. You wonder how the family is going to be able to put itself back together, but it's not as if there's a whole lot Dad or the boy can do, so Mom gets to live with them again. Besides, it might not be bad to have a boy's mom living with him.

It's the summer, so Dad also decides that a good thing to do would be to get Mom out of the city and to one of those resorts that also populated Hollywood films of the era. The family can spend some quality time together, and Roberto won't be around. And the vacation seems to go well. Except that Dad, being a working man, eventually has to go back to his office job in the city. He tells Mom to stay at the resort for a few more days with Pricò as it will be good for the boy. But wouldn't you know it, Roberto shows up at the resort. Apparently there weren't that many places people in that Italian social class could go back in those days. Sure enough, Mom and Roberto start up their relationship again, although this time the results are much worse.

The Children Are Watching Us was directed by Vittorio De Sica, who would go on after the war to make several famous neo-realist movies. The Children Are Watching Us shows some foreshadowing of that style, but as a whole the movie is much closer to the sort of conventional Hollywood movie you might see from that era. I mean that, however, in a good way, as The Children Are Watching Us is very well made and the sort of foreign film that would be more easily accessible to people who think of foreign films from that era as the sort of arthouse stuff that was disproportionately what wound up in America. It's absolutely worth watching if you get the chance.

Twilight glory

Christopher Plummer was honored last year in TCM's Summer Under the Stars, with several of his pictures that I hadn't seen before. One of those was Stage Struck, which came early in Plummer's career.

Plummer isn't really the star here; that honor goes to Susan Strasberg, also early in her career. She plays Eva Lovelace, a young woman originally from Vermont who goes to New York City because she just knows she can make it on the stage. Indeed, she basically shows up unannounced at the office of theatrical producer Lewis Easton (Henry Fonda). Why not start out at the top, after all? Also waiting to see Easton are an actor on the glide path to the end of his career, Robert Hedges (Herbert Marshall), and an up-and-coming playwright, Joe Sheridan (Christopher Plummer). Nice people to meet if you're trying to make it on Broadway, I suppose.

Eva is so obnoxiously pushy that Easton, just to get her out of his hair, has Joe tell her to come for an audition for a suppoting role in Joe's new play where an aging diva of an actress is starring. Eva has her own ideas about how the role should be played which conflct with what the producer and playwright want, so of course the audition goes badly. Eva's pushiness causes even more problems when she runs into Joe outside the premiere of that new play and gets him to invite her to the afterparty at Easton's swanky apartment. She has too much to drink and, when she's stonking drunk, starts doing impromptu Shakespeare readings in front of the embarrassed guests!

Worse, she passes out drunk in the guest room and tells Lewis she loves him. Now, if all of this sounds familiar, that's because it's a remake of Morning Glory from 25 years earlier, in which Katharine Hepburn played the aspiring young actress. So you may know where the story is going. Eva has to suffer for her art before triumphing on the stage. Lewis is of two minds about her as she's really not right for such an older man. So he has his secretaries lie to her about his being out of town, and tries to get Joe to send her away from New York. But events conspire to bring us to the final act where Eva gets the leading role and makes a success of it.

I'm not the biggest fan of Katharine Hepburn, so Morning Glory isn't exactly a favorite of mine. Amazingly, Susan Strasberg takes the role and runs with it in what feels like a desperate attempt to be even more obnoxious than Katharine Hepburn ever was. Stage Struck feels artificial, like somebody who knows nothing about the Broadway stage writing about it, and Strasberg is so unlikeable here that it makes the rest of the movie hard to watch. Everybody else tries and is professional in their roles, so I suppose it's a good thing that this didn't sink Christopher Plummer. The movie does have some nice period photography, in color, of the way Broadway was in the late 1950s, but that's about the only thing good about this movie.

The Magic Box

I've mentioned having a glut of foreign films to get through on my DVR before they expire, as well as, I think, a glut of westerns. I also happen to have quite a few British movies on my DVR and again I'm not so certain I'm going to wind up watching all of them before YouTube TV expires them. Another of those British movies is The Magic Box.

The film opens by identifying several people who are part of the invention of cinema in one way or another, before winding up on the name William Friese-Greene (played by Robert Donat). Now, since the movie gives his dates of birth and death, we know he's going to die, although that's not really the point of the movie. In London, someone shows up looking for William's second wife Edith (Margaret Johnston). There's a conference of film distributors in London which William is hoping to attend, although he's not a distributor and has been largely forgotten in the film world.

In the first flashback, we learn why William is little known. William had always been interested in photography, and he thought it would be great if pictures could be in the same living color as real life is. To that end he's become one of those tinkerers that are trying to come up with a great invention without the benefit of much formal training. William is living with Edith and their four sons in a rented house in Brighton, always trying to stay one step ahead of his creditors. Needless to say, they're not always successful. Ultimately, three of the sons decide they're going to enlist in the military even though they're not really old enough to do so, just to help out the father they love.

Meanwhile, back at the conference, William is listening to a bunch of people arguing over whether importing non-British movies is a good thing, or whether they're taking up too much of the market. At this point, William starts thinking about how he got involved in the film industry, although it wasn't really an industry at this point since nobody had even really inveted moving pictures, William being one of the early pioneers.

In the late 1870s, William was an apprentice to another photographer, Maurice Guttenberg, who ran a photography studio in a time when this was the only way to get pictures in a time-consuming and expensive process. William has ideas of his own, but he's not the boss. One of the customers is Helena (Maria Schell), whom William winds up marrying, remaining married until her death. They're successful in business, at least until William starts thinking about making pictures move, which is the first of the things that leads him to spending money and neglecting his business.

Real life tells us that William Friese-Greene did in fact die at that film conference after being asked to speak and suffering a massive heart attack after concluding his speech, so that portion of the movie is apparently accurate. He also apparently did spend all his wealth trying to come up with those inventions, dying in poverty. Unsurprisingly, Donat's portray is a very good acting performance. As for the film as a whole, it wasn't a big hit at the time, and I think having watched it, it feels a bit old-fashioned in the sense of it being rather too heroic in a movie biography sense. The movie winds up feeling a bit sterile as a result. That's a bit of a shame thanks to what should be interesting subject material and that acting performance from Donat.

Run of the Arrow

In addition to foreign films, I feel like I've got a somewhat disproportionate number of westerns sitting on my DVR waiting for me to watch and review them before they expire. One of those movies that I hadn't heard of before the last time it showed up on TCM was Run of the Arrow.

The movie opens with something that's a looming theme in quite a few Hollywood westerns, the US Civil War. Specifically, the movie informs us it's the last day of the war. Virginian O'Meara (Rod Steiger) shoots Union Army lieutenant Driscoll (Ralph Meeker), although Driscoll survives. O'Meara takes Driscoll to where General Lee is, although he learns that Lee is in the process of surrendering, thereby ending the war. O'Meara had been a farmer on one of those hardscrabble farms, so on returning home to his mother, there's not much of a life for such a defeated Confederate soldier to return home to. There's that frontier out west, of course, where a man can start life fresh, so O'Meara decides he's going to do just that.

Some time later, in a part of the west that still has more natives than Americans, O'Meara meets one of the natives, an elderly and dying Sioux, Walking Coyote (Jay C. Flippen, yes, playing a native American). The two, however, meet a band from a different sub-tribe of the Sioux, who threaten to kill the two men. Walking Coyote, being Sioux, knows the "Run of the Arrow", which involves running a gauntlet of men trying to shoot arrows at you. If you survive the gauntlet, you're basically free, or some such.

O'Meara survives and winds up with yet another sub-tribe of the Sioux, the Lakota, headed by Blue Buffalo (Charles Bronson). O'Meara falls in love with one of the women who tends to the wounds, and decides he wants to become a member of the tribe, largely because the Lakota also understand that the Americans are moving west and destroying another people's way of life much the same way that O'Meara thinks the northerners destroyed the southern way of life in the recently ended civil war.

Soon enough, the Americans do come, in the form of Capt. Clark (Brian Keith) and his cavalry who have been given the task of finding a suitable location to build their new fort. The Sioux have negotiated that it be built on land that's going to interfere less with their traditional hunting grounds, and give O'Meara the job of playing scout to the cavalry since he's got such a good command of English. And wouldn't you know it, but serving under Capt. Clark is... Lt. Driscoll!

O'Meara sees all of this as his chance to get back at the Americans for what they did to Virginia, while there are also a lot of US Army men who don't care for the Indians. As is usually the case in these movies, the treaty gets violated, and there's a decisive battle between the US Army and the Indians.

Run of the Arrow was made at RKO near the end of the studio's existence, so it has the feel of a movie that doesn't really have the budget it should have had. (At least the print TCM ran is much better looking than the one they run for Glory which is from a similar point in RKO's death throes.) The movie has an interesting premise, although it feels to me like it suffers from quite a bit of implausibility. Then again, it was directed by Sam Fuller, so one should expect it to rebel against the traditional constraints of Hollywood's view of what America should become: the idea of O'Meara's redemption feels like it's a metaphor for the post-Red Scare era of the 1950s.

Ultimately, while I find Run of the Arrow a bit uneven, I think it's got more pluses than minuses.

Sing and Like It

Some time back TCM ran a morning with several of the films of 1930s comic actress Pert Kelton. Another one that I hadn't heard of was Sing and Like It. Since the synopsis sounded interesting enough, I as always decided to record it so I could eventually watch it and put up this post on the movie.

ZaSu Pitts plays Annie Snodgrass, a housewife married to Oswald (John Qualen, credited including his middle initial although it's unmistakeably his voice) who has a thing for amateur theater. And I definitely mean amateur, as these people are definitely not ready for the big time. Annie sings one of those sappy songs of the era about being thankful for your mother, and it's not just the insipid lyrics, but Annie's lousy vocal stylings that make the song truly a disaster.

However, passing by the theater where they're practicing, and hearing the voice, is Fenny Sylvester (Nat Pendleton). He's a gangster, meaning that he's got a fair amount of money, along with a lack of scruples about threatening violence to get his way. He hears the song, and for whatever odd reason -- the movie is a comedy, after all -- decides that he loves this song. Never mind that everybody around him like his second-in-command Toots McGuire (Ned Sparks) thinks Annie is terrible. Fenny is the boss, so he gets his way. And having heard Annie, he wants to do his good duty by putting her in a show.

Nothing less than the best will do for Fenny, and he's able to use those threats to get people like theater producer Frink (Edward Everett Horton) to help mount the stage show, despite Frink's obvious horror at hearing Annie's voice. There's also Fenny's girlfriend Ruby (that's Pert Kelton), who gets tasked with making Annie come across as a higher-class stage lady. But there's not all that much they can do to make this nice but thoroughly untalented woman a success.

So it's decided that the thing to do to give the show some oomph is to stage a publicity campaign involving Annie going missing, except that she won't really go missing because everybody who matters will know exactly where she is until she shows up in time for the big premiere. The only thing is, Annie gets kidnapped for real.

Sing and Like It was, I think, not conceived as anything more than a B movie. But considering the cast of very good supporting actors, they all take the material and run with it for all it's worth, making it surprisingly funny. Then again, considering the cast, it shouldn't be surprising that they're all adept at this sort of comedy. They'd all played the sorts of roles they've got here enough.

Tragic Russ Columbo

One of the shorts that I had on my DVR waiting for me to post on a day when I had another post for something else to write up. This time, the short is musical two-reeler called That Goes Double.

The short opens up at an office where a young man and woman are both big fans of a radio singer named Russ Columbo, who is in the running to become the King of Radioland. There's an older-looking bookkeper in the office, however, who hates Columbo, because he looks a lot like Columbo and gets stopped by people and asked about it. This character is of course also played by Russ Columbo, who was about 25 at the time the short was made although the bookkeeper looks older.

For some reason this bookkeeper goes to the event where the King of Radioland is going to be named, which you don't think he'd do considering he doesn't like Columbo. There's enough of a crowd that the real Columbo can't make it through to get to the stage, at which point one of the hosts recognizes the lookalike bookeeper and brings him up on stage, thinking it's the real Columbo. The real Columbo shows up and proves who he is by singing one of his songs.

But the real Columbo realizes that having a lookalike can prove useful. There are a lot of PR appearances a celebrity has to make, but doesn't necessarily want to. The real Russ offers to triple the lookalike's salary in exchange for doing some of those appearances. Of course, there's bound to be an issue that the lookalike isn't much of a singer.

Soon enough, a socialite named Gloria, who is an admirer of Russ', wants to host a party with Russ singing one of his songs. This second half of the short is an excuse for a couple of talent agents to bring in various novelty acts, such as ukulele player Roy Smeck, or a trio of dancing roller skaters. The lookalike shows up on the night of the party, but the ruse is found out. There's more to the ruse than meets the eye, however....

That Goes Double is the sort of short that shows a good variety of what Hollywood studios were putting into their musical shorts to try to bring audiences into the theaters. At this time, of course, there was no television to showcase these talents, who are interesting albeit of varying talent levels. Some people may like Columbo's vocal stylings more than other people do.

Warner Bros. was presumably trying to groom Columbo for stardom as an actor, the way crooners at various studios started acting such as Bing Crosby over at Paramount or Dick Powell in a movie like 42nd. Street the same year as this one. Sadly, a freak accident on set a year later saw Columbo get shot by a prop gun but the projectile entered his head with enough force to kill him instantly, or at least that's how the story goes.

Briefs for April 7-9, 2026

TCM likes to advertise the wine club that puports to pair various wines with classic movies, in part because it's become a thing for famous people to lend their name to a winery, I'm guessing for tax purposes. On a similar vein, Leonard Maltin and his daughter Jessie have co-written a book Family Movie Night Menus which is the subject of tonight's TCM lineup. It's only a one night thing, and not every Tuesday in April as there are already spotlights on Texas and on Roger Corman. Of tonight's movies, I happen to have Meet Me in St. Louis (10:15 PM) and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers on my DVR, but of course I've already blogged about both of them.

A lesser-seen movie that's on my DVR and I've already blogged about, is Blonde Ice, which if memory serves was part of a Noir Alley presentation. It's getting another airing tomorrow, April 8, at 10:45 AM on TCM, and since it's one of those more obscure movies that doesn't show up so often, it's definitely worth mentioning compared to some other movies.

As for FXM, there's not much that I haven't seen before. But the Tyrone Power version of Nightmare Alley is on the schedule tomorrow, April 8, at 6:00 AM. Carmen Jones, meanwhile, will be on FXM at 8:50 AM on April 9.

Today is James Garner's birthday, as I mentioned yesterday in my post on How Sweet It Is!. Tomorrow marks the birth anniversary of Mary Pickford, not that TCM is honoring it. It's also the birth anniversary of songwriter E.Y. "Yip" Harburg, who wrote a whole bunch of stuff used in MGM movies, notably "Over the Rainbow" in The Wizard of Oz. He also wrote Finian's Rainbow, which is one of the rare movies I gave up on largely because I found it such a phony musical and the characters unappealing. Maybe I'll finally get through it some time, but I don't know.

For some values of sweet

I didn't intend to do posts on two of what I refer to as the 1960s "generation gap" movies in fairly close succession, after last week's post on Don't Make Waves. I also didn't intend to do posts on two Debbie Reynolds movies a few weeks apart, after I Love Melvin. But it turns out there's a movie on my DVR that's showing up on TCM tomorrow, April 7, that relates to both of those films. That movie is How Sweet It Is! at 8:00 AM as part of a birthdy salute to actor James Garner.

After wannabe groovy opening titles and one of those awful 1960s MOR songs, the action shifts to a bedroom in an upper-middle-class suburban house in New Rochelle, NY, where a man and a woman are in bed together making mad passionate love -- or least as mad and passionate as you could get on screen in 1968 -- in the middle of the day. The woman, Jenny Henderson (Debbie Reynolds), is worried about Davey (Donald Losby) returning home from work and catching the two in bed together. Davey does show up, but in a twist it turns out that Davey is Jenny's teenaged son, and the man in bed is Grif Henderson (James Garner), who is Jenny's wife and Davey's father.

Grif is a photojournalist, and the magazine he works for sends him on foreign assignments often enough that he doesn't get to see Jenny so often. Worse is that he doesn't get to see Davey, which worries Mom since she knows Davey needs a father figure. So when Grif goes to have a father/son chat, he learns that Davey is dating Bootsie (Hilary Thompson), the daughter of Grif's boss at the magazine. Bootsie is going to be spending the summer on one of those guided student tours of Europe, and Davey wants to use the money from his job to go over to Europe and follow Bootsie around. Dad kind of likes the idea -- it's a good way to learn about girls -- but Mom isn't so certain.

So what Jenny's Mom does is get Bootsie's mom to put pressure on Bootsie's dad. He, as the editor of the magazine, is planning to send a photographer along to document the trip for the magazine -- American student life on the European grand tour or some such. Perhaps it can be arranged so that Grif is the photographer, and Davey his assistant, so Dad can watch to see that Davey doesn't get into too much hijinks. Jenny, for her part, will rent a house on the Riviera for the family to stay in after the tour.

Except that Jenny is a bit naïve and gets taken in by an obvious con artist (Terry-Thomas in a brief role) and the transatlantic voyage offers no prospects of rekindling the romance. When everybody gets to France, Jenny goes south to the house they've rented for the summer, only to find out that the owner, Philippe Maspere (Maurice Ronet), a prominent lawyer, is living there as his summer house. But since there's no place else for Jenny to go and he's obviously attracted to her, he lets her rent the place for the second half of what she was going to pay the agent.

The standard love triangle hijinks ensue, with Philippe kinda-sorta pursuing Jenny, who for her part seems flattered although she really does love Grif. Grif, meanwhile, is being pursued by the guide Nancy, who is thrilled to have an adult male with her after having to spend so much time with teenagers. One coincidence leads to another, and the movie climaxes with Grif and Jenny getting arrested; Jenny getting bailed out by a bordello owner (she's in a holding pen with the owner's stable of prostitutes); and Grif and Davey showing up at the bordello.

From what I've read, James Garner hated How Sweet It Is!, although he enjoyed the people he worked with on the movie. I can't say I disagree with him. The premise, beyond a middle-aged couple still having a sex drive but mostly unable by circumstance to act upon it, is forced, and the budget doesn't even allow for the sort of establishing shots or location shooting other "Hollywood goes to Europe" movies of the era had. Worse, a lot of the movie feels like it's trying to appeal to a younger crowd but failing badly. The movie also has any number of plot holes. The ocean voyage wouldn't give a husband and wife a cabin together? The teenagers' given ages are also much too young.

If you want to watch another example of Hollywood's difficulty in adjusting to changing social values in the 1960s, How Sweet It Is! fits the bill. But it's not a particuarly good movie.

TCM Star of the Month Apirl 2026: Sophia Loren

Sophia Loren in Two Women (Apr. 6, 9:15 PM)

Now that we're into the first full week of a new month and past the Easter holiday, it's time for some of the traditional programming features to show up again on TCM. Most notably, this means the Star of the Month goes from three nights of George Brent to four nights of Sophia Loren, whose movies will be appearing every Monday night in April in prime time. The salute actually kicks of at 8:00 PM tonight not with a movie, but with an interview she did at the TCM Film Festival a decade or so ago. Tonight includes her Oscar-winning performance in Two Women at 9:15 PM, followed at 11:00 PM by Legend of the Lost, a title that I saw showing up in the on-demand section of one or another of the free streaming services only to discover that it was an aggregator for the paid portion. So I'm recording that one tonight.

Sophia Loren and David Niven in Lady L (Apr. 14, 2:15 AM)

The second week of the salute brings another of Loren's movies that I'd never gotten around to watching before, Lady L, which is a bit of a surprise since I think this is one released in the US by MGM. I'm pretty certain I've seen the trailer show up enough. Anyhow, time to get this one on and then off the ever-growing watch list.

Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni in A Special Day (Apr. 21, 3:30 AM)

The last two Monday nights bring a rather more eclectic line-up of movies, including Man of La Mancha (another one I haven't seen) on April 27, but I'd like to mention the fine performances of A Special Day in the wee hours of April 21, since it's mostly a two-character play with fine performances from Loren and frequent Italian co-star Marcello Mastroianni. Surprisingly, I don't see Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow on the TCM schedule this month.

Warner Bros. B Urban Corruption Drama #23489567826

I've mentioned a lot how I like the Warner Bros. B movies, and this is often the case even when the plots turn out to be implausible. Another good example of this is Strange Alibi. I presume it turns up often enough on TCM, but I don't think I had noticed it until the last time it showed up several months back.

The backdrop is one that's not uncommon for B movies in the pre-World War II era: a big city where there's a crime syndicate, and they've been able to infiltrate various parts of the administration, leaving them free to act with impunity. When somebody does threaten to turn state's witness, that person is immediately shot. The police are quick to find the killer but wouldn't you know it the killer "commits suicide" by hanging.

The police chief, Sprague (Jonathan Hale), brings in a bunch of his detectives to have a long talk about the matter. The chief immediately gets into it with one of the men, Sgt. Joe Geary (a very young Arthur Kennedy), who proceeds to deal with his temporary suspension by getting into a fight with the police chief, which makes the suspension permanent. Wait until Joe's poor fiancée Alice (Joan Perry) finds out.

Except that all of this was a ruse. Sprague knows the syndicate has dirty cops working for it, although he can't figure out who. He wants Geary to figure that out, except that having Geary do it in uniform is going to present a problem for various reasons, hence the nonsense about getting Geary fired. This mission is so super-secret that only Geary and Sprague know about it. Sprague hasn't even bothered to tell anybody like the state Attorney General or governor or anyone in the feds.

So you can probably guess what happens next. Geary goes to an establishment known to be a hangout for syndicate types, run by Katie (Florence Bates), who isn't exactly law-abiding but also has a heart of gold which is going to come into play for the climax. Joe works from there, getting into the good graces of the syndicate by shooting some high-priced liquor bottles from a bar owner who's shorting the syndicate. Geary finds a guy named McKaye who can provide key evidence, only to discover too late that they're being watched. When Geary takes McKaye to Sprague's house (really, they're meeting there despite the code to communicate?), the bad guys follow along and kill Sprague in a way that clearly implicates Geary and only Geary, getting him sent up the river as it were to a nasty prison. The only way Joe is going to be able to clear his name is to find McKaye. After all, nobody else knows that Geary was working with Sprague to weed out corruption.

Geary is eventually able to escape, but has very few places to go. Worse, McKaye is found, but he's found rather dead. Still, Geary has some luck in that the governor is working on weeding out corruption and might just be able to help Geary out....

The whole plot of Strange Alibi feels like a mish-mash of tropes that had all been done before. But this being Warner Bros., they do it well even if the plot as a whole bears little resemblance to reality. They're also helped out by a fine stable of mostly supporting character-type actors. Arthur Kennedy, of course, would go on to much bigger things (and five Oscar nominations), but at this point nobody knew what they had in him. And Strange Alibi is also, like all of the good Warner B movies, breezily fast, clocking in at a sprightly 63 minutes. Definitely another one worth watching the next time it shows up on TCM.

A family friendly movie for Easter

Another of the movies that's on my DVR and getting another airing on TCM soon is the animated Watership Down. You can see it tomorrow, April 5, at 8:00 AM.

The movie opens with an origin story, about how the Sun god, named Frith and voiced by Michael Hordern, created all the animals and plants and how the animals lived harmoniously as herbivores and mostly alike. The rabbits, however do what rabbits do and multiply, eating too much of the grass. This causes Frith to turn a bunch of animals into carnivores who will be more than happy to eat rabbits, although rabbits do get the gifts of speed and cleverness.

Cut to the present day, in a bucolic part of Britain. Fiver (Richard Briers) is a rabbit living in a warren run by a chief (Ralph Richardson) and his deputy Capt. Holly (John Bennett), where everybody lives happil, eating, sleeping, and creating new little bunnies. Except one day Fiver, who is a bit timid by nature, has a vision in which the field suddenly becomes covered with blood. (It's later explained that developers turn the field into a new housing estate, severely disrupting the warren.) Fiver and his brother Hazel (John Hurt) go to the chief with the suggestion that the rabbits are going to need to move somewhere safer, although understandably a lot of the rabbits aren't so certain they agree, thus splitting the warren in two.

Fiver, Hazel, and a handful of other rabbits leave even though the chief and Capt. Holly try to stop them. The smaller group are successful in getting away, although trying to find a new place to start a new warren that's safe isn't going to be easy, since these rabbits have no idea where they're going and little idea of the big bad world that's out there. They have various misadventures in the forest and at a farm where a man breeds rabbits for food, before coming to the conclusion that they have to go someplace like the top of a hill that has a commanding view of the surrounding area in order to be safe.

They get there and live happily ever after, with one small problem. They don't have any doe rabbits. How are they going to procreate and make the new rabbits necessary to keep the warren going? Fortunately, they also save a seagull named Kehaar (Zero Mostel) who has lost his way and is somewhat injured. Kehaar offers to fly around looking for doe rabbits. They eventually learn of another warren called Efrara where the leader, General Woundwort (Harry Andrews) is such a nasty dictator with underlings who keep the regular rabbits in a state of terror that some of them would like to leave if only they could get the courage to do so. Hazel infiltrates the warren, becoming one of Woundwort's camp commandants if you will, in a move that seems like it would have been a strategic blunder. Of course Hazel leads a break to safety, and Woundwort is pissed, going after the escapees.

Watership Down is a surprisingly dark movie for something that sounds on the surface like it's going to have the trappings of a children's book. And since animation is -- and was even more so in the 1970s -- thought of as a medium for children's stories, Watership Down's open look at the violence of death is not what you might expect. Then again, Bambi many years earlier also did so. Unsurprisingly, since Disney was really the only quality animation studio in the 1970s -- compare them to the animation of a movie like Treasure Island that I reviewed not too long ago -- it stands to reason that people are going to compare Watership Down to Disney. It's a comparison that doesn't always come off well, particularly in the case of Kehaar the gull who to me is a rather obnoxious character.

The animation is better than what Hanna-Barbera or Filmways were doing on TV, but not as good as the Disney classics. The story is good, although from what I've read one might get more out of the movie if one is already more familiar with the book, which I never read. A plus however is that this, being a British production, is also rather different from what one would expect from a Hollywood movie. Definitely, Watership Down is one that's worth watching, warts and all.

Certainly not the middle

A movie that I wasn't certain whether or not I'd seen before showed up on TCM some time back, so I recorded it: The Beginning or the End. Eventually I got around to watching it, and as far as I could tell I hadn't seen it before. A search of the blog claims that I certainly hadn't blogged about it anyway, so now that it's coming up again on TCM. it's time to rectify that oversight with this post. That airing is early tomorrow, April 4, at 4:00 AM.

The movie starts off with one of the more unique framing scenes I can think of. A time capsule is being prepared, only to be opened in the year 2446 which would from the point of the movie be 500 years in the future. A spokesman on the film in the time capsule talks about the development of the atomic bomb, and that the movie the people of 2446 would be about to watch is the documentation of that effort, how it ended that war in the distant past, and the hope that the atom could be used for peaceful purposes....

Back in the late 1930s, Matt Cochran (Tom Drake playing one of the fictional characters in the movie) is a graduate student who with some professors is working on the idea of nuclear fission. This of course results in energy being released, along with the realization that the energy could be used to make a bomb. Several of the professors of the day, like Robert Oppenheimer (Hume Cronyn) and Enrico Fermi (Joseph Calleia) feel that President Roosevelt should be informed of this. After all, war was coming to Europe, and it was pretty obvious that if scientists in America could figure all this out, certainly scientists in Nazi Germany would figure it out too.

Research continues on a small scale until December 1941, which is of course when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, sending the Americans into the war. President Roosevelt authorizes a covert spending of some billions of dollars for Oppenheim and the other scientists to figure out a way to weaponize the splitting of the atom, which of course has to be a controlled reaction since, if it can't be stopped during development, it's the places where the research is being done that will get blown up.

The military point man for all this is Maj. Gen. Leslie Groves (Brian Donlevy), with his second in command being Lt. Col. Jeff Nixon (Robert Walker; and again as far as I'm aware another of the fictional characters). Sites are set up in Illinois where Fermi was based; in Oak Ridge, TN; and in out-of-the way Alamagordo, NM. With a war being on, Americans are portrayed as happy to move out to help the government's war effort, although they have no knowledge of what the government is trying to do.

Now, since this is all based on history, we know that that first controlled nuclear bomb is detonated at Trinity in July, 1945. Harry Truman is at the Potsdam Conference, and it's his job to make the decision to actually use the bomb against Japan in Hiroshima and then Nagaski. Cochran is one of the civilians sent out to make certain the US bombers who have been running the mission will know how to deal with this special new kind of bomb.

The Beginning or the End is of course based on real historical events. However, liberties had to be taken with the story for a bunch of reasons. One is of course security; the movie was made only about a year after the end of World War II, and there was still a large amount that was classified and couldn't be revealed. There's also the fact that apparently, real people still alive had veto power over their portrayal in movies at the time. Several of the real scientists, notably Niels Bohr, didn't want to be used, necessitating more changes. The biggest reason, however, was the dramatic one for the perceived benefit of the audience. That's why the love story between Cochran and his wife (Beverly Tyler), as well as a secondary romance between Nixon and his girlfriend (Audrey Totter), are shoehorned into the movie.

It's these sops to the moviegoing public that make the movie one that's not so well remembered today, due to their lessening the dramatic power of the movie. It was only a few years later that Above and Beyond about the Enola Gay was released, with more realistic stuff coming out as the Cold War was winding down and culminating with the movie Oppenheimer a few years back. The Beginning or the End is competently enough made, but it does have the marks of MGM and the Hollywood studio system all over it, both for good and bad.

Strange Western on TCM

TCM's lineup tomorrow (Apr. 3) morning and afternoon is a bunch of mid-1950s widescreen stuff that I think is all from Warner Bros. One of the movies is one that I hadn't blogged about before and was on my DVR from the last time TCM ran it. That movie is Strange Lady in Town, airing at 4:00 PM, so as is my way around here I watched the movie in order to be able to put up this post for the upcoming showing.

After the credits, a title card informs us that the scene is the New Mexico territory in 1880, not far from Santa Fe. A wagon is going over the landscape, only to crash, fortunately near a bunch of ranchers. The lady passenger on the wagon is Julia Garth (Greer Garson) from Boston. She's a doctor in an era when lady doctors were uncommon, and out west even less common. But one of the ranchers has some pains so she treats the guy much to their surprise.

The military adjutant coming to pick her up arrives, but the two get waylaid on the way to what's going to be Julia's new house. Several bandit types ask about the military court of inquiry being held, although the adjutant knows knowing, not having been there. The adjutant in question, Martinez-Martinez, is working for Lt. David Garth (Cameron Mitchell), who happens to be Julia's brother, and one of the reasons Julia is coming out to New Mexico. His is also one of the two main plot strands going through the movie.

The other plot strand includes the doctor currently in town, Dr. O'Brien (Dana Andrews). He's got an adolescent niece Spurs (Lois Smith) who is quite the tomboy, and who has a thing for Lt. Garth even though he isn't right for Spurs. Getting back to Dr. O'Brien, he's one of those old-fashioned people who thinks it's not proper for ladies to be doctors, which is going to be an even bigger problem considering that she knows the latest advances in medicine from back east which are going to show her to be right in a bunch of situations Dr. O'Brien wrong. But at some point along the way Dr. O'Brien is going to fall in love with Julia.

As for Lt. Garth, I mentioned that he's not quite right for Spurs, even though she doesn't get that yet. He likes to gamble and is quick-tempered, which are traits liable to get an officer in trouble. There's also that court of inquiry mentioned in the opening. Lt. Garth tells his sister that the court of inquiry is being held because somebody sold the army a bunch of cattle that turned out not to have been owned by the person doing the selling, which equates to cattle rustling and a serious crime. As you can guess, especially considering a comment when Julia mentions not being able to buy a place for her on an officer's salary, Lt. Garth might know more about the rustling than he's letting on.

Finally, for a movie set in 1880 New Mexico, the studio had to insert a couple of historial tropes: Dr. Garth meets Billy the Kid (Nick Adams) when he and another man come in because of a toothache. Later in the movie, Garth treats Civil War general, and by this time territorial governor, Lew Wallace.

Strange Lady in Town combines a lot of different plot stuff into what is in many ways a pastiche of the Old West. It's a movie that's definitely competently made, although it's also one that's rather old-fashioned, in a way that reminds me of another Garson movie Blossoms in the Dust. It's certainly not the first film I'd think to recommend regarding any of the people in the movie, but it's also one that there's not anything particularly wrong with. It just doesn't do anything new. In the days before TV, this would have been enough, but having been made later, it's easy to see why this one has become little remembered.

Teacher's Pet

Every now and then, it surprises me to come across a studio-era film with big stars that I haven't seen before. Then again, TCM doesn't have the rights to films from studios like Universal and Paramount, so some of the stuff that's A-level but not famous doesn't show up on TCM all that often. A good example of this is Teacher's Pet, a late-1950s Paramount movie with two big names leading the cast: Clark Gable and Doris Day. So I recorded it the last time TCM ran it.

Clark Gable plays James Gannon, who works at the sort of big-city newspaper that was a staple of 1930s movies, with a hard-boiled editor trying to break news, especially on things like lurid murders, and up-and-coming reporters going out there to get the stories. One would-be reporter at the paper, who is only a copy boy since he can't get a real reporter's job, is Barney Kovac (Nick Adams), whose mom would rather he go to college.

You'll note that this is an era when reporters didn't necessarily have to go to J-school, although there were already college courses for journalism. One person teaching night classes at such a school is Erica Stone (Doris Day), whose father ages ago wrote for a small-town paper. As a result of her father's experiences, Erica has decided views on what journalism should be like, which isn't quite like what Gannon does. Erica has written to Gannon to give a guest lecture about city journalism, but Gannon turns it down because he really has a thing about journalism school as well as thoughts about lady reporters.

Still, Jim's boss insists he go to the class, so Jim goes undercover, pretending to be a salesman with the name Jim Gallagher. Surprisingly, Erica doesn't recognize him. If she did, we wouldn't have a rest of the movie. But Erica is so insulting to Gannon that he decides he's going to audit the class after all, if only to be able to show Erica just how wrong she is about what real reporting is like. Unsurprisingly, since Jim is a real reporter, he's able to handle the first assignment that Erica gives the students and come up with a much better story than any other student possibly could.

This leads to Erica, still not recognizing Jim for who he really is, offering to tutor him privately outside of class hours, since he can "learn" more that way than in class. The next unsurprising thing is that Jim falls in love with Erica. This is a bit of a problem considering that Erica already has a boyfriend in Dr. Hugo Pine (Gig Young), an intellectual who is superior to Jim at all the things that you'd stereotypically expect a female college professor to want in a man. Since Clark Gable is top-billed, however, you know things are going to work out such that it's Jim who winds up with Erica at the end of the movie, despite his dishonesty about his true identity.

Teacher's Pet is one of those movies that feels like it's breaking no new ground, but what makes it worth watching is the acting ability of the two leads, who take to the material well and make a surprisingly appealing couple despite their age difference. They fit their parts like wearing a comfortable pair of shoes, making for an enjoyable watch despite there being nothing new here. They're also helped by a pretty good screenplay and good supporting performances. If you can find Teacher's Pet, watch it and be entertained for two hours.

Pay no attention to that map

One of the Noir Alley entries that Eddie Muller presented quite some time ago that I didn't get around to watching until just before it expired from the DVR, and then saved until much later to put up this post, is the 1947 film Riffraff. (Note that there are multiple films with this title, and the posters for the movie but not the title cards have the hyphenated title "Riff-Raff".)

The movie starts off with an interesting introductory sequence that doesn't have any of the main characters. A plane is flying somewhere over Latin America, except that it's a cargo plane carrying a couple of passengers of the sort who in another movie would be on one of those shady tramp steamers. The cargo door opens, and one of the passengers jumps out with a briefcase; the other passenger is no longer on the plane. The jumper winds up in Panama very close to the Canal Zone, since there are a whole lot of Americans soon to be around.

The man who jumped out of the plane is mysterious Charles Hasso (Marc Krah), and he goes to the office of fixer/factotum/sometimes detective Dan Hammer (Pat O'Brien), a man who knows the local area and knows how to get things done. Hasso's request is for Hammer to basically escort him around for two days and make certain nothing untoward happens to him. Meanwhile, he takes a map out of the briefcase and pins it to the room divider while Dan is on the other side of it changing into a fresh set of clothes!

Also getting in touch with Hammer is Gredson (Jerome Cowan), who works for an oil company based in Panama. Gredson was expecting the other man on that cargo plane to come to him with that map that Hasso pinned up in Hammer's office, as that map supposedly has the locations of some new oil discoveries in Peru to which nobody really has the concessions or something. And Gredson is willing to pay big bucks for that map.

Amazingly, nobody seems able to find that map despite it being in plain sight in Hammer's office! Among the people who have an interest in that map is Maxine (Anne Jeffreys), a nightclub singer who feigns romantic interest in Hammer while also trying to play the other side by working with Gredson. And then there's Molinar (Walter Slezak), who claims to be an artist but, because he's played by Walter Slezak, is obviously somebody with ulterior motives of his own and not exactly a protagonist. Worse, Hammer's office gets ransacked in a search for the map -- and nobody finds it!

For me, that's the big problem with Riffraff, unless you consider that the map is just another macguffin with the interactions between the characters being the main thing here. In my case, I just found it way too hard to believe that everybody could be this stupid that they couldn't find that map. There's also the addition of Percy Kilbride playing Hammer's assistant/driver. I think he's supposed to be a bit of comic relief, but his is the sort of character who isn't going to be to everybody's taste.

Still, Riffraff is a visually stylish movie at times, which shouldn't be a surprise since director Ted Tetzlaff had started as a cinematographer. It's just that that visual style is most evident in the opening and the story rather fizzles out.

Staying hip with Tony Curtis

There's a cycle of films from Hollywood in the 1960s that I like to call for lack of a better term "generation gap movies" because they have the feel of old Hollywood trying to keep up with the times and not being particularly good at so doing. Another example of this is one that was on my DVR: Don't Make Waves, early tomorrow (March 31) morning at 4:15 AM as part of a night of movies saluting actress Claudia Cardinale, who died in September 2025.

Cardinale is the nominal female lead here, but this is Tony Curtis' movie all the way. He plays Carlo Cofield, a New Yorker who's vacationing in California when his car gets hit by Laura Califatti (that's Claudia Cardinale, as if you couldn't tell from the Italian accent). Laura decides to make it up to Carlo by putting him up at her house for the night; the question of what's going to happen to his car seems to be one of many plot holes not answered in the movie. More importantly, however, is the fact that this isn't quite Laura's house; instead, it's being funded by swimming pool manufacturer Rod Prescott (Robert Webber). Laura is Rod's mistress; he claims that his wife is an invalid which is why he can't get a divorce. In any case, Rod isn't happy to see Carlo.

Carlo gets an idea when he meets Rod, which is to stay out west and get a job selling pools for Rod's company, having learned that the company is trying to use Jim Backus (in a cameo role) for publicity. Before getting to see Rod again, however, Carlo is on the beach, which is one of those muscle beach types where bodybuilder Harry (David Draper) lives with his girlfriend, skydiver Malibu (Sharon Tate). Carlo falls for Malibu, which is a problem considering she's in a relationship with a big guy. There's also the issue of Laura falling for Carlo.

Further complicating matters is that when Carlo goes to see Rod, who should show up at Rod's office but... Diane Prescott (Joanna Barnes)? She's Rod's wife, and decidedly not an invalid. She also knows quite a bit about what's going on with Rod and Laura. Carlo, being a good publicity guy, is able to leverage all of this into a job for the swimming pool company. And then, to try to keep Malibu, he comes up with a way to have her sky dive into one of the company's swimming pools, although that stunt doesn't quite go off without a hitch. He also goes to see an astrologer whose column Harry reads, "Madame" Lavinia (Edgar Bergen; yes, his character is using a pseudonym), to drive a wedge between Harry and Malibu.

Eventually, everything winds up for the finale when all of the main characters meet at Carlo's beach house. They are, however, threatened with disaster when the monsoon season hits and the rainstorm begins to chip away at the land under Carlo's house....

Apparently Don't Make Waves is based on a book that was published in the late 1950s. Had the movie been made when the book came out, it might have felt fresh. By 1967, however, it feels tired and not particularly funny. The humor feels forced, and Carlo is such a dishonest schemer in the Jack Carson mode that his character isn't particularly likeable. But as always, watch and judge for yourself.

Your wacky family turns me on

A sub-genre, or maybe a plot trope, of a surprising number of movies is one where a person, usually a rich and hitherto proper man, falls in love with a woman who is either "free-spirited" or else has an entire family of unorthodox relatives. A minor entry into that field is the Lucille Ball comedy A Girl, a Guy, and a Gob.

Now, as you might imagine, Lucille Ball is The Girl, although considering how she'd later be known for her zaniness she's actually the one normal member of her family. She plays Dot Duncan, a working girl who does want to be more cultured. To that end, Dot's shiftless brother Pigeon (Lloyd Corrigan) found some opera tickets, for an entire box no less. Of course, the box has been taken out on subscription by the Herrick family, including Stephen (a young Edmond O'Brien) and his fiancée Cecilia (Marguerite Chapman), who if anything might be even more strait-laced than Stephen.

Dot gets the impression Pigeon came across the tickets by less than honest means, so she goes to Herrick's business, the shipping firm he runs together with Abel Martin (Henry Travers) to sort of apologize, and winds up getting herself hired as a secretary in the process. Of course with a young woman like this there's always the question of how long she'll be keeping the job since women generally quit to become housewives when they got married. And, as for Dot, she's got a fiancé of her own, of sorts, in the form of "Coffee Cup" (George Murphy). Coffee Cup is a would be professional wrestler, but that doesn't pay the bills in general, and certainly not enough to get married to Dot. So he did a hitch with the Navy that he's about to finish up.

Now, Coffee Cup is looking for ways to get that money to marry Dot, and Stephen isn't really doing anything to stop this since he wants Dot to be happy and has a fiancée of his own. But you know that the two are going to wind up together in the final reel. Things start going bad when Coffee Cup and Pigeon kinda-sorta cause a right in which Stephen gets knocked unconscious, so they take Stephen to the Duncan home to recover for the night. That's bad enough for Stephen, since it means he's neglecting Cecilia. And then there's the way Pigeon keeps blowing the money that Coffee Cup would use to try to get married to Dot.

More complications arise when Abel is the one person who thinks that Stephen and Dot would probably be more right for each other, so tries to push Stephen to pursue Dot even though both of them are already in relationships with other people. But again, this is the sort of movie where you known who's going to wind up with whom in the end.

I've mentioned several times how, when Lucille Ball was TCM's Star of the Month ages ago, Carol Burnett did a piece for the spotlight talking about her great friend. One of the things Burnett mentioned is how the studios, especially RKO to whom Ball was under contract, didn't quite know how to use her. This sort of comedy should have been more up Ball's alley, but then she's not really the one being asked to be zany. Also, some of the characters, especially Pigeon, are so unlikable that you just want Dot and Stephen to abandon their respective families.

But maybe you'll like A Girl, a Guy, and a Gob more than I did. Apparently the critics seemed to like it.

Briefs for Palm Sunday weekend

For those of you who belong to any of the western branches of Christianity, we're still a week and a day away from Easter. None of the Easter stuff yet on any of the movie channels; ABC's annual airing of The Ten Commandments is not until Saturday, Apr. 4. For some reason, I thought they always aired it the weekend of Palm Sunday. I've got it on DVD or Blu-ray somewhere, but I'd have to dig through my boxes of DVDs. Most of the stuff is still boxed up from when I moved three years ago with a few exceptions or stuff I've bought since the move. I've been meaning to watch more of it, mind you, but then there's that backlog of stuff on my DVR that actually expires....

And then there's the stuff on the streaming services. Someplace else somebody mentioned a young Rebecca De Mornay as a hottie, which prompted me to look up The Trip to Bountiful to recommend that, and find out that it is in fact for the time being available on Tubi, albeit as always with ads. However, there was another Oscar-nominated movie that I've been wanting to get off my list of Oscar-nominated stuff to watch that was recommended, albeit not with De Mornay. That film is Cross Creek, about Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, the author of The Yearling. This also made me think of another Mary Steenburgen movie, Melvin and Howard, which is not currently available on any of the streaming platforms.

TCM's full April schedule appears to be out now, which necessitated my going through t to see which movies are on my DVR that I haven't done posts on yet. I've already scheduled a couple of them, but I've got a couple more to watch and then put up posts about. Since my scheduling of draft posts is already four weeks out, that means posts are going to get moved around. So once again there's my caveat of checking the box guide listings to make certain the airdate and time I've put up for a post in conjuction with a movie airing soon.

Surprisingly, there are still some Fox movies I haven't blogged about before that are showing up on the FXM schedule, which means I get to record them and do a post about them again sometime in the future. The next such example is Ingrid Bergman's second Oscar-winning role in Anastasia, which will be on in the wee hours of tomorrow at 3:00 AM. I think I've done posts on both of the following two movies, but starting off the Retro block on Monday, March 31 will be A Letter to Three Wives, with The Ox-Bow Incident on at 6:00 AM.

Obviously I should have mentioned the passing of Chuck Norris last week at 86, even if he wasn't exactly the biggest movie star out there. Instead, he got cast into a lot of low-budget stuff especially at Cannon, as mentioned in the wonderful Electric Boogaloo documentary on Cannon.

There's also Valerie Perrine, who died on Monday at the age of 82 after a long battle with Parkinson's disease. TCM ran a documentary on her a few years back that was interesting. Slaughterhouse-Five is available on some of the subscription streaming services, but I don't actually have subscriptions to any of them.

The Wild Party

Back in the spring of 2025, TCM did a spotlight on Merchant-Ivory productions, although this time there weren't any of the 1960s films from India where the team got its start. I did a post on the late 1970s movie Roseland a few months ago, but even before that there was The Wild Party.

The Wild Party was, somewhat surprisingly, distributed by American International, and one of the interesting results is that there's something in the cinematography that seems reminiscent of the flatness of some of AIP's other 1970s stuff and not the richness that Merchant-Ivory would have with its period pieces of later years. The movie starts off with a man in a hospital recovering from a gunshot wound and writing a story which, he claims, is based on his real life experience. That man is James Morrison (David Dukes), and as you might guess, most of the rest of the movie is a flashback or depiction of that story that Morrison was writing.

It's late 1920s Hollywood (and I should point out that the hospital scene is also set in the late 1920s), during the transition from silent pictures to sound. Jolly Grimm (James Coco) is a successful silent film comedian who lives in one of those great Spanish-themed mansions, with a mistress Queenie (Raquel Welch) and a servant Tex (Royal Dano). However, as the silent era is fading, so too is Jolly's star beginning to fade. He's been working on a new, more ambitious silent movie that's part comedy and part melodrama, and has decided that the best way to get the distributors interested in it is to host a party where he'll give the assembled Hollywood royalty a screening of the new feature.

However, as you might guess, there are some complications. One is that Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks have also scheduled a party for the same night, meaning both that some people Jolly would have invited might not show up at all, while others may or may not be able to stay for the showing of the movie. There's also the fact that a lot of the guests seem more interested in the debauchery of the party, which was part of the reason people went to parties like this in the first place, especially during the Prohibition era.

One of the guests at the party is the sort of new star that Hollywood was looking for at the beginning of the sound era, Dale Sword (Perry King). He's young and handsome, and it's no surprise that he and Queenie wind up somewhat interested in each other, which is bound to get Jolly ticked off if he finds out. For Jolly's part, there's also the arrival of the young ingenue Nadine who is hoping to break into Hollywood by auditioning for Jolly. She's much too young to be involved with a party like this, especially as the night goes on and everybody seems to get drunker and drunker. That much alcohol is bound to cause somebody to lose their temper and tragedy to strike. Not that we didn't know this was going to happen considering how the movie starts.

I have to admit that I recorded The Wild Party not realizing that it was part of the TCM spotlight on Merchant-Ivory, and was surprised to see their name show up on something with James Coco as the star. Coco was the sort of zany comic who I think worked best in smaller doses. As the star of something like this, he's a bit too much. It's not so much that he's bad as he's just misused. The script doesn't seem to know whether it wants to be a straight-up comedy or something more tragic, and the attempt to combine the two winds up in a misfire.

Thankfully, The Wild Party didn't hurt the careers of Merchant and Ivory, and they were able to go on to much bigger and better things.

A quarter century before Oh, God!

Another of the movies that's been sitting on my DVR for a bit is the 1951 MGM version of Angels in the Outfield. It's getting another airing on TCM, somewhat surprisingly not as part of a day of baseball movies considering that baseball season is right about here. That airing is tomorrow, March 28, at 1:45 PM.

The movie was filmed in part on location in Pittsburgh, at the old Forbes Field which I think went away in 1970 for Three Rivers Stadium, one of those dual-use monstrosities which has since been demolished itself and replaced with purpose-built stadia for baseball and football. The Pirates were a perennially poor team, and the version here is even worse, with a good portion of the blame being given to manager Guffy McGovern (Paul Douglas). They're so bad that the newspaper is putting a bunch of its writers, including the women's editor Jennifer Paige (Janet Leigh) on the story to try to figure out what's ailing the team. This, even though she doesn't know anything about baseball.

Jennifer goes to a game and discovers that Guffy is incredibly irascible and prone to harsh language, which we of course don't hear since there was a Production Code. (Instead, special effects are used to obscure whatever dialogue is used when Guffy is chewing out his players or the umpires. Also blaming the manager is the sports reporter who handles the radio broadcasts of the games, Fred Bayles (Keenan Wynn). For this, Fred gets fired and becomes an even more ardent opponent of Guffy's.

One day after a game, Guffy is alone out on the field when he hears a voice coming out of nowhere. That voice (voiced by James Whitmore), claims to be an angel, chiding Guffy for his bad language among other things. Indeed, heaven has decided that the Pirates are going to continue to be lousy cellar dwellers until Guffy changes his ways. Unsurprisingly, Guffy doesn't believe that this voice is that of an angel, so the angel responds by sending a bolt of lightning down even though there's only like one cloud in the sky. So Guffy does believe it's an angel, not that he's going to tell anybody considering the obvious fact that nobody's going to believe him.

Amazingly, the team does start doing better. And then one day the nuns from the girls' orphanage (played by Spring Byington and Ellen Corby) take a group of girls to the ball game. One of them, Bridget, excitedly declares that she can see angels! The nuns don't believe her since they can't see the angels. But Jennifer overhears the story from an attendant at the field, and writes it since it's an obvious human interest story. That makes the whole angels thing a national story, although again nobody really believes that there are angels guiding the team, do they? Except maybe Guffy and Bridget. Jennifer, by this time, starts becoming a bit of friends with Guffy as he's been reforming himself in rather strange ways like reading Shakespeare so he can chew the umpires out in Shakespearean language. He even thinks about adopting Bridget, although he realizes that's not really going to happen since they don't normally let single men adopt orphaned girls. You can guess where that part of the story is going, of course.

Matters hit a head when Guffy gets hit in the forehead by a line drive during a game. Concussed, he confesses after the game that there really have been angels helping him. Obviously, nobody believes this any more than they believed Bridget. In the case of a little girl, it's harmless, but when it's the team manager, there's a rather more pressing issue. It leads to an investigation, with Commissioner Hapgood (Lewis Stone) brought in. Guffy causes a ruckus, and that leads the angels to decide jsut before the big game that they're no longer going to help Guffy and the Pirates.

Angels in the Outfield has a lot of the tropes that are common to the more family-friendly sports movies, so it's not to difficult to see what's going to be happening. But it's done with the sort of earnest charm that old Hollywood had, and, thanks to the professionalism of stars like Paul Douglas, Angels in the Outfield actually works.

Fugitive in the Sky

I've mentioned quite a few times how I almost always enjoy the Warner Bros. B movies, even when they're objectively nothing more than pedestrian. Another such movie that certainly fits the "fun if not great" category is Fugitive in the Sky.

Before airline deregulation in the late 1970s, but even more so before World War II, flying was one of those luxuries that average people couldn't afford and was considered glamorous. Jean Muir plays Rita Moore, a stewardess on the sort of cross-country flight that stops at a bunch of places on its way from Los Angeles to New York. She's got a boyfriend in reporter Terry Brewer (Warren Hull), although the pilot Bob White (Gordon Oliver) also has a thing for Rita and as a result doesn't really care for Brewer.

Brewer has been covering the case of missing and wanted criminal Killer Madsen, and when Brewer sees an FBI agent board the plane, he figures that the agent must be after Madsen, and wangles the final seat on the plane for himself, which seems to make a bunch of people unhappy. Never mind that the flight is about to make a lot of people even more unhappy. The plane makes a scheduled stop in Albuquerque, where an obnoxious female passenger who keeps wittering on about astrology buys an Indian knife from the sort of souvenir stand that's set up to serve the passengers who are passing through. And wouldn't you know it, but that knife gets used to kill one of the passengers while everybody is ostensibly asleep.

At this point the FBI agent, Phelan (John Litel) reveals who he is; he kind of has to considering there's been a crime committed in the air. Madsen deduces as well as Brewer had before the flight that Phelan's original reason for getting on the flight was to follow him. So Madsen takes the passenger cabin hostage before going into the cockpit (this being well before 2001, there were no fortified doors) and turning the gun on the pilot and co-pilot and finding the spare guns that the two of them have just for a situation like this.

But wait, there's more. There's a dust storm going on even if it's ostensibly not over the part of the Plains that got the dust storms but in Missouri and points east. This means that the airports can't track the planes (never mind the fact that there was no radar yet) and want to ground all of the planes, while Madsen wants a detour to Evansville, IN where he was planning to make an escape. The radio's already been knocked out, and now the dust knocks out both engines, forcing the plane to land somewhere where nobody can quite deduce where they are. Except that there's a farmhouse in the area that Killer Madsen flees to. Since it's the only thing in the area, sure enough the passengers and crew of the stranded plane wind up there for the finale.

There's too much in Fugitive in the Sky that doesn't bear much relationship to reality. But audiences didn't always go to the movies for reality. Especially not when it came to the B movies. For audiences who wanted to be entertained, a movie like Fugitive in the Sky was going to give them that, all in just under an hour. Definitely worth watching the next time it shows up on TCM.

The Trap

I've got so many movies to get through on my DVR that it's not uncommon for me to watch multiple movies that have something in common, whether it be the same star, genre, or something thematically in common. One rarer case of the last phenomenon was a pair of movies that have mute women as prominent characters. The Spiral Staircase was scheduled because it was coming up on TCM, while the other movie necessitated my saving the post on it in drafts so that the posts on the two movies weren't scheduled so close together. That other movie is The Trap.

The opening credits mention that the movie was filmed on location in British Columbia, with the opening being a village near the sea since oceangoing vessels can approach. It's the sort of tiny place at the mouth of a river that serves the trappers and whatnot who eke out a meager living upstream and then come down to sell their goods once a year and buy the provisions they'll need to survive another year. One of the trader familes (none of the family members' names are given) has a father, mother, and bratty teenage daughter, who's thrilled that the family is getting a piano because the daughter really ought to learn cultured stuff like that. They've also got a maid, Eve (Rita Tushingham), whom they've fostered for the 10 years or so since an Indian raid killed Eve's parents and left Eve in such a state of shock that she hasn't been able to speak since. Meanwhile, one of the hunter/trapper types ordered a mail-order bride who is coming off the boat. But the man who ordered her died in the meantime, so she's being auctioned off.

One of the traders who's made his way down the river is Jean La Bête (Oliver Reed), who grew up in Quebec and lost both of his parents at a fairly young age, causing him to migrate west to British Columbia where the trapping is better. He goes to see the trader, as the trader has been holding some money for the Jean in escrow. Jean has come to claim that money, which really ticks off the trader's wife, as she'd been hoping to use that money to get the family to San Francisco and away from an uncultured shithole like this. Worse, she learns that her husband has gotten the family heavily into debt. He can't get any more credit.

Jean could use a wife, but somebody else bought the mail-order wife. The trader's wife, however, has an idea: offer Eve to Jean in exchange for that money that Jean had gotten back from the trader. Jean considers it a relatively fair deal, although Eve doesn't. Not that anybody asked her. But since she doesn't really have a choice, she's sent up the river with Jean. Needless to say, she tries to escape on several occasions, while Jean stops her. After all, it's going to be dangerous for the two of them at the cabin, what does Eve think it's going to be like if she tries to go off on her own?

Jean starts teaching Eve all he knows about how to hunt and trap and how not to get lost in the woods; this is important stuff for Eve to know if she wants to survive. Eve begrudginly starts doing her part to keep things running, if only just to survive and plot an escape later. Life out in the wilderness is harsh: nasty, brutish, and short as Thomas Hobbes would have said, and eventually that brutishness comes for Jean when he gets his foot caught in one of the traps that he'd set while trying to get away from one of the big cats that are predators out in that part of the world. Eve is going to have to take care of him as well as keep the cabin running and check the trap lines.

The Trap has pretty good performances from Oliver Reed and Rita Tushingham, who form the bulk of the movie's action. However, the bigger problem with the movie is the relative lack of action. It's hard to make a story about surviving in a cabin in the wilderness exciting. If characters are trying to go from point A to point B as in any of the pioneer migration movies, that's one thing. But winter survival? And then, the movie resolves its conflict with an ending that doesn't really make much sense. I can see why actors would want to stretch themselves with a movie like this, but the plot doesn't serve them well, which is a bit of a shame.

From Headquarters

Tonight continues TCM's Star of the Month salute to actor George Brent with one of the movies where he's the star and there's not really much in the way of a big female star to eclipse him. That movie is From Headquarters, which comes on tonight at 8:00 PM.

We don't actually see Brent at first. Instead, we see the workings of a bug-city police department, where they're bringing in various people they've arrested. However, the big news of the day is going to be the discovery of the dead body of a famous playboy, Bates, whom we'll see briefly in a couple of flashbacks. It's obvious that somebody has shot him, and, as it turns out, there are going to be quite a few suspects. Multiple department members are assigned to the case, with Dr. Van de Water (Edward Ellis) doing the forensic work. Sgt. Boggs (Eugene Pallette) has definite ideas on what's happened, while Lt. Stevens (George Brent) is much more thorough in trying to figure out who killed Bates.

Part of Van de Water's analysis is to determine the time of death, which seems a bit strange since all of the suspects have conflicting views of when they might have seen him. Some claim they saw him after he died, while others may be able to have an alibi in that they saw him before the shooting, if at least that was the last time they saw him. One of the obvious suspects is Lou Winton (Margaret Lindsay), as she is his ex-girlfriend. She tried to break off the relationship and Bates might have been forcible in trying to prevent that, which might make the case self-defense. Except that Lous has a brother Jack who shows up and seems to be way too protective of his sister, which implies that he knows more than he's letting on and might have something to do with the shooting himself.

And then there's Bates' butler Horton who is less than fully honest. There's also Anderzian, a dealer in Oriental rugs who has been selling stuff to Bates and says there are letters in Bates' safe that Bates wanted him to have in case Bates were to die. But Anderzian also seems a bit too insistent that he gets those letters, which gives Stevens an idea. Meanwhile, that opening sequence comes full circle. One of the guys being booked in that scene has wanted to see Stevens when he hears of the killing of Bates. That guy is found out and gets murdered as well for his troubles. When the detectives discover the dead body, the building goes on lockdown, leading to the killer ultimately being found out.

From Headquarters is an interesting enough little programmer, although I have to say that the police procedural would get much better in later years. Brent does a competent job, even though he's not the sort of actor that you'd think of as playing a police detective. Margaret Lindsay as the nominal female lead is OK too, but she doesn't have much to do. Audiences watching this in 2026 won't find it anything special, but back in 1933 when moviegoers didn't have TV or much chance to see these movies after first-run, I think it would have entertained them.

The movie isn't exactly a comedy

In the latest of the musical biopics that I wanted to make certain I watched before it expired from my DVR, it's time for Funny Girl. It's finally coming up again on TCM, tomorrow, March 24, at 5:15 PM, as part of another day of musical biopics, so now's the time to put up this post.

Funny Girl is story of the earlier years of stage actress and singer Fanny Brice, played here by Barbara Streisand. As the movie opens, it's a bit before World War I, and although the second half of the movie covers events that are in Brice's real life after the war, I don't think the war itself is ever mentioned. Fanny was born to a Jewish immigrant family in New York, although the only family member we see is her mom, played by Kay Meford. Mom runs a pub/restaurant and plays poker with lady friends, while all the neighborhood cares about Fanny because that's the way this sort of neighborhood is.

Fanny, after the roadshow opening music, shows up at the New Amsterdam Theater that hosted the Ziegfeld Follies, where she hopes to get a job as a chorus girl in the follies run by Florenz Ziegfeld (Walter Pidgeon). But she's going to have to make her way up the ladder first, which includes doing a vaudeville act on roller skates, even though she can't really skate. However, she can sing, and the combination of singing that appeals to the audience combined with the comedic value of not being able to skate, makes her a hit. In the audience is Nicky Arnstein (Omar Sharif), who comes backstage and is so charmed by Fanny that he negotiates a salary increase for her right on the spot even though he has no real job in any theatrical production company.

Eventually, the Ziegfeld Follies does come calling, putting Fanny in a musical finale that will have her dressed as a bride while singing to a bunch of men. Fanny isn't comfortable with the number, so she changes things by having the costume altered to imply that the bride is already pregnant. Once again, Nicky is in the audience. It turns out that he's a professional gambler, but he's so taken by Fanny that when he goes to her mom's place after the show, he lets the old ladies beat him at very low-stakes poker. Fanny and Nicky run into each other again in Maryland when he's buying a race horse that he eventually loses betting on a race. He has to go back to the ungentlemanly routine of playing the cruise ship trade, playing cards against the rich gentlement to earn more than his passage. Nicky wants Fanny to pursue her dream, but she loves him so much that she gets on the boat and accompanies him to Europe.

In the next scene, they've just gotten married, although in real life that didn't happen until 1918 so puts a major hole in the timeline considering World War I was raging. (The real life Fanny and Nicky were romantically involved for several years but couldn't get married until Nicky's divorce from a previous marriage went through.) Fanny is a big star, and the house they buy could just as easily have been purchased by either of them. But things start to go south for Nicky when his gambling stops paying off, and he starts racking up debt to everyone in town save Fanny, who is totally oblivious to it all. One of the people to whom Nicky is in debt offers a chance to pay it off by taking part in a "bond deal" that's clearly fraudulent, while Fanny secretly tries to use her husband's name to help open a new high-class casino with Nicky as promoter. Nicky figures out what's going on, doesn't want to be beholden to Fanny in that way, and goes for the bond deal, which is going to land him in prison eventually.

The movie ends when Nicky gets out of prison, which was in December 1925 in real life, although the movie seems to imply it's earlier. The movie doesn't mention the less-than-happy ending of Fanny and Nicky's marriage crumbling, although at least Fanny would go on to have a fairly successful third act playing a character named Baby Snooks on radio before her untimely death at the age of 59.

Somewhat surprisingly, despite the well-known musical talents of Barbra Streisand, the material is something that I think would have worked better as a non-musical, or limiting musical numbers to scenes from when Fanny was on stage. Yeah, I know this would mean ditching a song like "People" which Streisand sings just after the evening with Nicky at her mom's place, and that people went to the movie to see the songs from the Broadway show from which this is adapted. But keeping the songs from the musical turns this into an overlong slog lasting right around 150 minutes, which is a good half hour too long, I think.

Streisand, of course, does well, even though I'm not the biggest fan of her style of singing. She tied in the Best Actress Oscar race that year with Katharine Hepburn for The Lion in Winter, and was deserving of that Oscar win. But for me that wasn't quite enough to make Funny Girl as worth watching as some of the other musical biopics out there.

Well, Debbie Reynolds loves him

TCM is running a couple of Debbie Reynolds' movies tomorrow (March 23) morning. There's one that I hadn't blogged about before, but that I have on my DVR, so I watched it as I always do with an intention to writing up this review for the airing. That movie is I Love Melvin, which comes on at 7:45 AM.

Debbie Reynolds plays Judy LeRoy, a chorine who has dreams of making it on Broadway although she currently is only appearing in the chorus of one of those dumb college musicals. (This is not an indictment of the movie; it's that the college musical as a genre is disproportionately insipid in my view as musicals go.) Not having hit it yet, Judy still lives with her parents, real surname Schneider (Una Merkel and Allyn Joslyn) and an obnoxious kid sister Clarabelle (Noreen Corcoran).

However! Good news comes for Judy when she gets a call from the manager of the show that she's got the chance for a more substantial role, that of the football in a highly stylized dance scene that Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen might have come up with except that as far as I know they didn't have their fingerprints anywhere near this movie. So Judy heads off to the theater, walking and singing her way through Central Park.

Also in Central park is Melvin Hoover (Donald O'Connor). Melvin works for Look magazine as someone at the bottome of the ladder, a would-be photographer who is still just an assistant to Mergo (Jim Backus). He too is singing his way through the park in the sort of duet where the two aren't together until they literally bump into each other. Judy isn't pleased at first, although you know she's going to fall in love with Melvin by the end of the movie. Never mind that her parents have been trying to hook her up with a guy who's really got nothing wrong with him beyond being boring, Harry Flack (Richard Anderson).

Melvin, for his part, falls for Judy immediately. Knowing that she's a chorus girl, he comes up with an excuse to do a photo shoot on her. He makes a much bigger mistake, however, when he lies to her by telling her that he's going to get her photo on the cover of Look, something he has no power to do. His bosses don't seem to be particularly interested in his work, either. Melvin compounds the lie by getting Mergo to make a mock-up cover of Look that has one of Melvin's photos of Judy on it, which Melvin presents to Judy even though the editors have no plan to put Judy on the real cover of the magazine.

Judy and the rest of the Schneiders are dumb enough to start gossiping about Judy's being on the cover of Look, and as you might guess, everyone goes to buy copies only to find out that Judy is not in fact on the cover. This leads to the sort of complications you might expect from a light romantic comedy, although you also know they're going to get solved with a happy ending, since MGM wasn't about to put Donald O'Connor and Debbie Reynolds into something dark and twisted.

I Love Melvin is a competent enough vehicle for Donald O'Connor and Debbie Reynolds, but it never rises to anything great. Part of that is that it's only programmer length at 76 minutes, and part of that is that it was conceived more as a musical. The numbers take even more away from the story line, leading to a movie with a wafer-thin plot. It's inoffensive, but incredibly minor stuff.

Tribute to a Bad Man

Another movie that's coming up on TCM that was on my DVR for a while is Tribute to a Bad Man, which will be on this afternoon (March 21) at 4:15 PM. So, as always with that in mind, I sat down to watch the movie in order to be able to do the post on it here.

Don Dubbins provides the narration, as he plays Steve Millar, a young man originally from Pennsylvania who in 1875 moves west, making it out to Wyoming and the horse ranch owned by Jeremy Rodock (James Cagney). Although as the narration tells us, Steve at first knows nothing about Rodock or his reputation, or even much about horse ranching. Steve is a bit of a naïf, and has the good fortune -- or maybe the misfortune -- of running into Rodock just after Rodock was shot chasing horse rustlers. Steve removes the bullet from Rodock and brings Rodock home. Like Androcles and the lion, Rodock is grateful enough to offer Steve a job on the ranch.

The ranch has a bunch of men working for Rodock, led more or less by wrangler McNulty (Stephen McNalley). There's one woman on the ranch, Jocasta Considine (Irene Papas), whom Steve mistakes for Mrs. Rodock. In fact, there is no Mrs. Rodock. Jocasta escaped war in her native Greece, but had to do things she's not quite proud of to survive in America, which is why she's escaped to this isolated ranch in Wyoming. Jocasta understands that Steve is not right for this place, and in return, Steve develops a bit in the way of feelings for Jocasta. Since she's the only woman around, it's not just Steve who is going to develop feelings for her. But we're getting ahead of ourselves.

Somebody tries to steal some of Rodock's horses again, so Rodock sets up a posse to find out who did it, which offers Steve the opportunity to see just how hard a man Rodock can be. To be fair, horses are his lifeblood, and stealing the horses would be like rustling cattle. But still, Rodock can be quite harsh. Suspicion leads to the Petersons, a family who used to work for Rodock but had a falling out. Rodock has been trying to drive the Petersons off their land, without success. They've got a son Lars (Vic Morrow) who is an adult but who, like Steve, is a bit too young to be in such a range war.

McNulty is another of the men who's interested in Jocasta, and is more open about pursuing her than Steven is. This really pisses Rodock off, and Rodock gets in a fight with McNulty and gives Steven the responsibility of making certain McNulty leaves and doesn't come back. McNulty is unsurprisingly none too happy about this, and decides to get revenge on Rodock by stealing Rodock's foals and treating the horses worse than your average rustler might. This leads to a climax, although you might figure out how things go considering the narration at the beginning of the movie.

James Cagney did make a couple of westerns in his career, although the western is a genre with which he's not generally associated. That having been said, Cagney was of course a fine actor, so when he's given an intelligent script like this he has no difficulty handling it. In fact, Tribute to a Bad Man is as much of a character study that just happens to be placed in the context of an old western as it is a traditional western. Don Dubbins does well enough as does the rest of the supporting cast, although this is really Cagney's movie.

Billy Wilder's Bad Seed

Now that we've finished 31 Days of Oscar for another year, it's time for TCM to get back in to its various spotlights. One of them is going to be a prime time night of TCM Imports tonight. One of the movies is one that's already on my DVR and that I hadn't blogged about before is Mauvaise graine, early tomorrow at 2:00 AM (so March 21 in Eastern time, but still March 20 out on the west coast if you don't have the west coast feed). With that in mind, I watched the film in order to be able to put up this post in conjunction with tonight's airing.

Henri Pasquier (Pierre Mignand) is a playboy living in Paris with his doctor father. Dad makes a reasonably good living as a fashionable doctor, but it's not enough to be able to support Henri in the manner to which he has become accustomed. Henri drives a nice car and can't be bothered to work. So one day when Henri gets home, Dad asks if he's got the car keys and registration. That's because Dad decided to sell the car. Henri can join the 7/8 of Parisians who don't have their own car.

Henri is none too pleased about it, and then one day he happens to come across the old car. The people who bought it left it parked with the keys in the ignition, this being the 1930s when people were much more trusting. So Henri decides he's going to "borrow" the car since he was hoping to meet up with a woman in one of Paris' many parks for a date. The two start driving around, until Henri discovers that he's being followed.

The reason the men are following him is that they are part of a ring of car thieves who steal high-value cars and sell them off to people looking to get a good car on the cheap. However, the ring considers Paris their territory, and they don't want anybody horning in on it. Henri's quick thinking convinces the leader of the ring, against his better judgment, to let Henri into the ring. There, Henri meets two of the other members, Jean (Raymond Galle), a kleptomaniac who steals neckties, and Jean's sister Jeannette (Danielle Darrieux). Jeannette is the bait for a lot of the men thanks to her looks. These two become Henri's friends in the ring.

Henri screws up the theft of one of the cars, losing the rear license plate which is picked up by a little kid who rides one of those pedal replica cars. Eventually, the rightful owner of that car spots the kid, which brings the police on to the ring. But before that, the head of the ring has decided to get rid of Henri, sending him to Marseilles where the plan is to have Henri killed along the way by having him drive a car with a busted axle. The two make it to Marseilles where they plan to escape to Casablanca. Except that Henri doesn't want to leave Jean behind, which is why he goes back to Paris and arrives just in time for the police pinch.

Billy Wilder, along with any number of people involved in the German-language cinema, fled Germany and Austria after the Nazis took over. Wilder wound up in Paris briefly becure making his way to Hollywood, and it's in Paris that he directed Mauvaise Graine. Another refugee was Franz Waxman, who provided the score. This was the first time Wilder directed a movie, having done screenwriting up until now, and continuing to write for several years more once he got to Hollywood.

As an early directorial effort, it's obviously not yet to the level that Wilder would reach once he became an established diretor, but Mauvaise Graine is still an interesting movie and one that's definitely worth a watch.

Treasure Island (1973)

Last autumn TCM ran a two-night spotlight on Hanna-Barbera, who are mostly known for their TV animation, although they obviously put out some movies too or else that stuff wouldn't have wound up on TCM. That animation is from an era when there was a lot of fairly low-budget animation on TV. Hanna-Barbera wasn't the only studio to put out such cheap animation. Filmation was another one, and among their movies was an animated adaptation of Treasure Island.

Jim Hawkins, voiced here by Davy Jones of the Monkees, is an adolescent lad living in 18th century Bristol, which was one of the main ports of departure from England. He lives with his widowed innkeeper mother, when a sailor who keeps an anthopomorphic rat as a pet comes in. That sailor has a map which supposedly reveals the location of secret treasure on an island in the Caribbean. The sailor warns Jim about a one-legged man. Pirates also believe this old guy had the map, since they come looking for it.

Jim and the rat are saved by Squire Trelawney and his retinue, who then commission the Hispañola, captained by Alexander Smollett (Larry Storch). Jim gets a position on board working in the galley, which is where Jim meets Long John Silver (Richard Dawson). Naturally, Jim notices that Long John Silver only has one leg of his own, although Jim develops a grudging respect for Long John Silver as well. Sure enough, however, Long John Silver is the head of the band of pirates looking to get that treasure, and they eventually take over the boat as it's about to reach the island where the buried treasure supposedly is.

Jim is no dummy, stowing away aboard the dinghy Long John Silver and some of his men take to the island. Smollett and the good guys are able to escape and make their way to the island as well, although there's the question of how they're all going to be able to get back on board the ship considering that the pirates are in control of it.

There's also the question of how they're going to be able to get off the island, considering that Long John Silver and some of his men are there too. But you probably know that Treasure Island is one of those adventure stories that's going to have a happy ending.

It's been a while since I've seen any of the earlier movie versions, notably MGM's 1930s version starring Wallace Beery or the 1950 Disney version with Robert Morley. I also don't think I've read Robert Louis Stevenson's original book, so I can't really comment on just how much liberty this animated version takes with the story. Some of the liberties, however, are obvious, such as the rat, who isn't exactly going to have been a character in a live-action telling of the tale. There's also the musical numbers, not counting sea shanties.

As for the animation, it's pretty dire with many of the same visual and sound effects you'd see on Saturday morning animation from the era. Note also that the print is 4:3, which led me to wonder whether this wasn't originally a TV production, but looking it up everything claims it was a theatrical release first. So this version of Treasure Island may appear to kids, especially young boys who want a sense of adventure. But for anyone else it's mediocre at best.