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.

Round Midnight

Another of those 1980s films that I had heard about when they came out but was really too young to have seen in the movie theater is Round Midnight. So when TCM finally aired it some time back, it gave me the chance to record it and see what I had missed on its original release.

The movie opens up with a small black and white scene of two men in a crappy hotel room in New York and one of them asking the other if this was the room where a particular jazz legend died. Now, the logical thinking is that the rest of the movie is going to be a flashback to the story of the guy who died, but that's not what actually happens. Instead, the action turns to color. The black guy in that opening scene is jazz legend Dale Turner (real-life jazz musician Dexter Gordon), who is finding life in late 1950s New York difficult for a whole bunch of obvious reasons. So like any number of American jazz musicians, he decamps to Paris.

In Paris, Dale stays at one of those crummy long-stay hotels together with a whole bunch of other blacks who have made the same decision. (I'm not a big jazz fan, so the only name I recognize from this portion of the cast is Herbie Hancock, playing pianist Eddie Wayne. Hancock also wrote the original portions of the score and won an Oscar for it.) They all perform together at a basement club called the Blue Note to the sort of white Europeans who think they're being terribly progressive by identifying with the jazz musicians. It's not much of a living, but the musicians are doing it as much for the art as they are for the money. As for Dale, he's got a serious drinking problem, and leaving his problems (and a daughter) behind in America hasn't really done anything to make the reasons why he turned to drink in the first place go away.

One of the Parisians who shows up at the Blue Note is Francis Borler (François Cluzet), a poster designer with a love of jazz who has problems in his personal life much like Dexter, although in his case the problems aren't quite as serious. Francis has a failed marriage too, although at least his daughter Berangere lives with him. He can't even afford the entry fee to the Blue Note, listening from outside. And then one night Francis gets the chance to meet Dale personally when Dale wants a beer after a show, giving Dale a chance to reveal his back-story.

Francis has idolized Dale anyway, and all this gives Francis a chance to try to "help" Dale, first by taking him to the hospital when Dall gets way too drunk again, and ultimately by taking him into his family, including a birthday celebration for Berangere and a new apartment, with Francis' helpful ex putting up some money. Francis even works to get Dale back to America (Martin Scorsese shows up here as a booking agent who works to get Dale's union paperwork handled among other things). But is it going to be a happy return to America?

For people who are jazz fans, I think they're going to love the music in Round Midnight. There are a lot of bebop and cooler jazz standards, and Hancock's original music is good too. As for the story, however, it's a bit lacking, which is a problem since the movie is a bit over two hours and really drags at times without a good story.

I also couldn't help but think about what audiences of today would say about the movie in terms of a completely different political climate in terms of race relations. Round Midnight is more or less French director Bertrand Tavernier's ode to jazz, and I can see a lot of people taking issue with all sorts of things in the story, from the formulaic look at those blacks who went over to France to Francis as a sort of white savior. It's a romanticized view of jazz, I think, and some people aren't going to be happy with it not fitting into today's presentist views.

The Forest Commandos

Back in 2017, I briefly mentioned the short film The Forest Commandos. TCM ran it some months back during the Saturday matinee block, which is how I got it on my DVR under its own title, and not tacked on to some feature movie to fill out a time slot. So I rewatched it to give it a bit more justice with a longer review rather than just a one-paragraph synopsis.

The opening titles mention that the short was filmed in Technicolor, but whether any color prints survived is an open question as the print that TCM ran was in black and white. It was filmed in 1945, right at the end of World War II, and obviously makes a lot of reference to the war. Northern Ontario has a lot of forest, and forestry products are a key element in the production of all sorts of goods. However, there's not a whole lot of transportation connections since the region is fairly sparsely populated, and the bush pilots are a key element in keeping the region connected; as such, the movie is dedicated to them.

Forests like that are also under threat both from invasive species and forest fires, and a good portion of this short is dedicated to those two, especially the latter since fire is cinematically more interesting than somebody looking through a microsope for moth larvae. One thing mentioned is the series of lookout towers that were used in those days, something very familiar to me living in the Catskill Mountains. A couple of the peaks here in the Catskills still have the fire towers on the top, not for the original use of having fire rangers look for fires and use ranging equipment and ham radio to speak ranges in other towers to determine the exact location of the fire, but now as a sort of museum to promote conservation.

As you might guess, we get the obligatory forest fire, with the second half of the short showing how the fire was fought in those days. The fire they cover also threatens a small village called Gogama, with footage of a possible evacuation filmed. Thankfully the rains come and help put out the fire.

The Forest Commandos is certainly an interesting idea, especially for audiences in the 1940s that wouldn't have had as much opportunity to see such stuff elsewhere. However, a good portion of this is presented almost in the way you'd expect a Pete Smith short to go, except not nearly as funny. It also doesn't help that there's a good deal of footage that's obviously stock footage from somewhere else, making you wonder just how much of the whole thing was staged. It's also a shame that the original color prints don't seem to be available, as the footage probably would have looked a lot more dramatic in color.

TCM's Star of the Month March 2026: George Brent

Kay Francis and George Brent in The Keyhole (Mar. 17, 11:00 PM)

We've finally gotten past 31 Days of Oscar, which means that we start getting back to regular features on TCM, such as the Star of the Month. There are still three Tuesdays to go in March, which means there's enough time to have a star for whom a fair amount of movies are available. This time, the star in question is George Brent, and his movies will be on TCM for the next three Tuesdays in prime time, as well as a good portion of the mornings on Wednesdays, including April 1.

As far as I can tell, there's not any particular guiding theme for each of the three nights of Brent's turn as Star of the Month. The first night includes at least one movie I haven't blogged about in The Keyhole, at 11:00 PM tonight. The synopsis sounds familiar, but it might be a different movie I'd seen since "private detective following a woman only to fall in love with here" isn't exactly unique.

George Brent and Bette Davis in Dark Victory (Mar. 31, 8:00 PM)

A search of the blog before today didn't yield much in the way of photos of Brent, which I suppose isn't surprising considering that Brent was disproprtionately in support of one of Warner Bros.' strong female leads, such as Bette Davis in films like Dark Victory, which kicks off the third and final night of Brent's films at 8:00 PM on March 31.

I had hoped that when I searched for pictures, I'd get one from each Tuesday night of movies airing as part of this tribute. That didn't quite work out, but as it turns out the two Brent movies sitting on my DVR that I hadn't blogged about before will both be airing on the second night of the salute. So you'll be getting one Brent post next week, while the other movie (In Person with Ginger Rogers) will have to wait for another time.

Barbara Stanwyck and George Brent in The Gay Sisters (Apr. 1, 6:45 AM)

One other movie worth mentioning is You Can't Escape Forever, which will be on TCM at 3:45 AM on April 1. I don't think I've seen this one specifically, but it's the third time Warner Bros. used this particular property about a reporter getting demoted and using a new position to go after a gangster: the original movie was Hi, Nellie starring Paul Muni, and the second time was Ronald Reagan's debut film, Love Is on the Air. The story would be used a fourth time at the end of the 1940s, in a movie called The House Across the Street.

Our Hospitality

I've got more silent movies that I need to get off of my DVR, so next up on that list is the early Buster Keaton feature Our Hospitality.

We don't see Buster for several minutes. Instead, the movie starts with a prologue, set in Kentucky in 1810, telling us about the feud between the "Canfields" and the "McKays", an obvious reference to the Hatfields and McCoys. The families have been feuding so long that they don't know any more why the feud started. In any case, the feud is about to reach a climax with John McKay and James Canfield getting into a shootout that leaves both of them dead. McKay left behind a young wife and infant son, while James had a brother who had three children. Mrs. McKay is so sick of the whole feud that she decides to take her kid and go back to her sister in New York, which as we see is surprisingly undeveloped for 1810.

Two decades pass, and Willie grows up (played as an adult by Buster Keaton) not having learned much about the feud because his now-decesed mother didn't want to tell him about it. Why bother your kid with stuff that's long-ago history? Adult Willie gets a letter which is from a lawyer telling him that the family left some property in Kentucky that's now his, and he's going to have to come to Kentucky to claim it. So he gets on the very new-fangled technology of the steam train to head off to Kentucky. (The first steam trains did start running right around this time, but there wasn't enough track to get the characters from New York to Kentucky.) This is the chance for Buster to use some of his train-based comedy which he seemed to like and would reach a peak in The General, as well as introducing us to the female lead, Virginia (Natalie Talmadge, Buster Keaton's real life wife).

The two meet and fall in love along the train journey, although it turns out that Virginia is in fact Virginia Canfield, the third sibling in the family in the prologue of the movie. Their father Joseph, who was not the one killed, had wanted the feud to end, and would before Willie's arrival probably have considered the feud as long-ago history as Willie's mom did. But Joseph's two sons are out for blood, and immediately look for ways to bump off Willie and get Willie's inheritance. Not that it's a particularly big inheritance, as Willie finds out to his surprise.

He's invited to the Canfield place for dinner, having met Virginia, and the brothers figure out this would be a good time to kill Willie. Dad, for his part, doesn't think this is morally right, as being a guest at the Canfield place requires the Canfields to show "our hospitality". So it's the next day after Willie leaves that the two sons can go after Willie in a climax that involves a literal cliff-hanger, trains and a river flowing over a waterfall.

To me Our Hospitality isn't quite as good as later silents, but to be fair to Buster Keaton he was learning and movie technology was consistently improving. Keaton had only made one feature before this, and that one, Three Ages was structured so it could be re-edited into two-reelers if it had been necessary. In any case, although Our Hospitality is a bit slow at times and some of the train gags don't quite work, it's still Buster Keaton and he's always worth watching.

The Young Lovers

Another of the movies that I got the chance to see thanks to its being available on demand on Tubi (granted with a few ad breaks) is an early directorial effort for Ida Lupino, Never Fear. Lupino also co-wrote the screenplay with her then husband Collier Young, and the two also produced it with their production company The Filmakers.

After an opening title card informing us that as much of the movie as possible was filmed at the real locations, we get into the action, such as it is. Guy Richards (Keefe Brasselle) is a dancer who is probably better as a choreographer, but in any case is supposed to be someone who can go a good ways in that field. As the movie opens, he's trying to break in to the big time together with his dance partner Carol Williams (Sally Forrest), who is also his girlfriend and soon to become fiancée, at least when Guy can finally bring in a little more money.

The two get some successful reviews at the nightclub where they're performing, but as Guy is devising the next routine, Carol starts to feel a fever coming on that's ultimately enough for her to collapse. Guy takes Carol to the best doctor he can afford, and the diagnosis isn't a pleasant one: polio, which of course was still a thing when the movie was made in late 1949. Guy wants to do the best he can for Carol, and fortunately, Carol has a father who seems to have a bit of money too, so they can afford to put her in the private Kabat-Kaiser Institute (a real place that ultimately became part of what is now Kaiser Permanente) and get her a single room.

Carol thankfully has the use of her arms but sadly not her legs, and worries she'll never walk again. Her days are filled with physical therapy and socializing with the other patients, especially Len Randall (Hugh O'Brian), who you wonder whether he's trying to put the moves on her because he consistently seems a little too friendly, even though he certainly must know about Guy's presence in her life. Then again, Carol seems more than willing to dump Guy now that she can't walk any more, and doesn't want anyone else in her life either, choosing instead to feel sorry for herself and a miserable person to be around.

Guy, on the other hand, is a saint, and is even willing to put dancing aside to take on a job selling new tract housing to make ends meet, not that he's any good at that. He wants to stand by Carol -- even though they're not married, he's already taking the "in sickness and in health" part of the marriage vows seriously. But at the same time, he gets to the point where he just wants to shake some sense into his girlfriend.

Lupino would go on to better things behind the camera, but Never Fear is decidedly uneven. Now, part of that is down to the screenplay, which makes Sally Forrest have to play an unsympathetic character for much of the running time. The screenplay is also strictly by-the-numbers. There's also the presence of Keefe Brasselle, who was never much of an actor. On the other hand, Lupino already shows some good camera work, notably when she directs a wheelchair square dance (apparently the polio victims really did such square dancing on wheels), which is the most interesting part of the movie.

Briefs for March 15-16, 2026

Oh yeah, the Academy Awards are going to be handed out tonight. As is normally the case, I haven't seen any of the nominated films. I don't know how many of them got shown at the local dump of a sixtyplex we have around here. And as someone whose normal work shift is 6-2:30, I'm generally more up for a matinee, which takes the local independent theaters right out. Well, that and the in-your-face tedious politics.

As I understand it, the main competition this year is whether the Academy will vote for the movie that allows them to virtue signal their politics on immigration, or to virtue signal ticking off the demographic check box. Except everybody's talking about the Shakespearean-era period piece for Best Actress, and, I'd guess, the technical categories like Costume Design.

In any case, tonight being the awards presentation also means it's the final night of 31 Days of Oscar on TCM, which means they're getting back to "regular" programming and the various spotlights. There's actually going to be a Star of the Month, which I'll get to later in the week when that comes up.

I mentioned the 1930s version of Last of the Mohicans last week as the movie that TCM was going to be running during the time change to Daylight Savings Time. Sure enough, when I checked my DVR, it turned out that the recording of Last of the Mohicans was only 45 minutes when it should have been in a 1:45 slot. It's still available on the Watch TCM app until the end of the month, so hopefully I should get around to watching it.

Also, as always, I've got a backload of posts, and then sometimes after writing a post I see the advanced TCM schedule has a movie I've posted about coming up that I haven't scheduled yet so I have to juggle the scheduling of movies around to put up a post in conjunction with the upcoming airing. So whenever I put up a post that says a movie is running that night or the next day, check the listings.

It Started With Eve

A few months back, I mentioned having recorded a double-feature of Deanna Durbin movies that aired on TCM. One of the movies, It Started With Eve, is one that I had watched many years back but never actually done a review on. So I watched it again in order to be able to do this review on it.

We don't meet Deanna Durbin for several minutes. Instead, we see Jonathan "Johnny" Reynolds, Jr. (Robert Cummings). He's the son of wealthy businessman Jonathan Sr. (Charles Laughton). Except that Dad is on his deathbed, and Junior is returning home to see Dad for what is probably the final time, with some newspaper types keeping a vigil outside the family mansion and wondering whether Johnny is going to make it back in time before Dad dies. Tragically, this means that Dad isn't going to make it to his son's wedding: Johnny has only recently gotten engaged while on the sort of vacation to a place where all the rich people go. With that in mind, Dad tells his son that his dying wish is to meet his son's fiancée, Gloria Pennington.

Johnny dropped the Penningtons off at the hotel, not realizing that Dad would want to meet them; to be fair one can think that bringing the fiancée's family to an occasion like this might be too much for the old man. But it means he has to go back to the hotel room and pick them up, and who knows whether they'll make it back in time before Dad dies? Worse, when Johnny gets to the hotel, he finds that Gloria (Margaret Tallichet) and her mom have gone out late in the evening to get a custom fitting for clothes for the funeral, which again seems like a bit of a plot hole considering that stores would likely not be open at this hour of the evening.

On his way out the lobby, Johnny runs into hat-check girl Anne Terry (Deanna Durbin), who is hoping to get back to her family in Ohio. Johnny, being desperate, offers this woman he's never met before a proposition. Would she be willing to play the part of his fiancée for an hour or two until Dad dies? Johnny will pay her good money, and since Dad will never see her again, is there really any harm in this little white lie? Anne could use the money, and it won't keep her from catching her train, so she decides to accept.

Except that this is a Hollywood movie and we're only ten or fifteen minutes in, so you know fully well that this isn't all that's going to happen and that there are going to be serious complications. Dad does not in fact die. Not only that, but it looks like he's going to start getting better and eventually even make a reasonable recovery. Johnny has to go back to Anne's apartment and bring her back to the house, which she's not particularly excited about at first. And then there's the real Gloria and her mother, who are understandably displeased about not being able to meet their future in-law until Johnny can come up with some sort of explanation as to what's going on. Even worse is that Dad really likes Anne. Finally, as you might guess, as the movie goes on it's going to become more and more apparent that Johnny and Anne are the ones who are right for each other, even if they don't yet realize it.

It Started With Eve is one of those movies that has a premise where you know exactly where it's going to go and that it's going to get to a happy ending, but the fun is seeing how it gets there. And with a cast like Deanna Durbin, Robert Cummings, and Charles Laughton, it's a fairly fun ride getting to the obvious destination. Charles Laughton did not get to play comedy as often in his career as he probably should have been given the chance to do. He's clearly enjoying himself here in the sort of mischievous older father role you could easily see Charles Coburn do, and his enthusiasm really makes the film a lot of fun. Durbin and Cummings are more than adequate. There's a bit of odd miscasting with Guy Kibbee as an Episcopal (I think) bishop; Kibbee just doesn't look the part although it's not as if he does anything wrong with his smallish role.

Bang the Drum Slowly

Tonight's prime-time lineup on TCM is baseball movies that were nominated for at least one Oscar. Wouldn't you know it, but one of the movies in the lineup has been sitting on my DVR. That movie is Bang the Drum Slowly, tonight at midnight. So as is always the case, I watched it in order to be able to do this review on it.

Michael Moriarty stars as Henry Wiggen, star pitcher for the New York Monarchs baseball team. Some pitchers, especially left-handed starters and knuckleballers, seem to wind up with "personal" catchers in that the combination of the two players works better than putting the pitcher with the nominally "better" catcher. Henry has a catcher who also happens to be his best friend, Bruce Pearson (Robert De Niro). However, as the movie opens, we learn that Henry is picking Bruce up from the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN: Bruce is terminally ill with Hodgkin's disease. Henry takes Bruce back to Bruce's family home in the South, although it's not to die, just to meet Bruce's family and introduce us to a made-up card game some of the ballplayers like to play that's really just an excuse to find a mark to take that guy's money from.

Henry is in a contract dispute with his team, so he gives his manager, Dutch Schnell (Vincent Gardenia), an ultimatum: I want my best friend Bruce to be signed to the team along with me, and I want the contracts to be structured in such a way that if you get rid of him or send him to the minors, you have to do the same with me. Now, this presents a serious problem in that at this point of the movie Bruce isn't really presented as Henry's personal catcher in the sense that Bruce could play every fifth day when Henry starts, allowing the regular catcher to take a breather since catcher is one of the more demanding positions physically. Bruce, in fact, is the sort of ballplayer who in a normal world would have topped out in the minors, and rarely gets to start.

And then never mind the fact that Bruce is dying, and that neither Henry nor Bruce are about to tell the team this. Also never mind the fact that the intake physical that certainly every player gets before being signed doesn't seem to have found anything wrong with Bruce. Indeed, Bruce is terrified that the team is going to find out he's terminally ill, since one of the symptoms is going to be some sort of attack reminiscent what poor Bette Davis got in Dark Victory, although not one attack like that. Cancer doesn't work that way. In any case, Bruce does get one of these episodes in the hotel room, and Henry has to call for a doctor, at which point it becomes pretty damn clear that there's something wrong with Bruce although the few people who do figure out something is seriously off are going to keep it a secret as much as they can.

The season goes on, and Bruce still doesn't seem to be getting that much worse, although the movie has a bizarre ending in that Bruce goes missing (well, back home) for the postseason, asking Henry to send him a box score. Wouldn't Bruce stay with the team? If they make the playoffs, wouldn't the contracts require Bruce to be on the playoff roster as well as Henry?

But, then, Bang the Drum Slowly isn't really about baseball per se. Instead, it's one of those movies that uses baseball as a backdrop to be more of a character study of the relationship between Henry and Bruce. Reviewers who can focus on that have generally tended to find Bang the Drum Slowly quite a good movie. I'm sorry to say I don't quite agree with that, as the movie is interminably slow and for me rather full of plot holes. Still, enough people like it that this is one you're definitely going to want to watch and judge for yourself.

If you liked Son of Lassie

Another movie that I watched off my DVR before it expired is Gallant Bess. Having watched it, now I can do the obligatory post on it here.

Marshall Thompson, who was being groomed for stardom by MGM but never quite achieved it, plays Tex Barton. Tex runs a horse ranch in California, although he seems rather young to do it since it's implied later in the movie that he's 16 going on 17 and an orphan. He's got one particular horse, Bess, that he absolutely loves, since that horse more than any other is a link to his late father. So when Bess gets knocked up he's aboslutely thrilled and goes to the nearest "town" to the ag supply place to get stuff for a pregnant mare.

While he's at the store talking with proprietor Smitty (Clem Bevans), a couple of navy recruiters show up needing one more person to fill their recruitment quota. Why, I don't know, since World War II already seems to be on and you'd think they'd just draft people. And Tex should be exempt anyway since he's all alone on that ranch and involved in agriculture. He's more important to the war effort on the home front. Yet Tex rather stupidly signs on even though it's going to mean leaving that pregnant foal that he loves behind, leaving Smitty to run the ranch.

Tex goes to a naval base where he's going to learn to become a Seabee, and becomes friends with Lug (George Tobias). One day, however, he gets a letter from Smitty informing him that Bess is sick with pneumonia. So Tex utterly stupidly tries everything he can to get leave, literally busting in to the CO's office, and then trying to go AWOL when he can't get leave. He's put in the brig, until he's informed that his unit is shipping out so everyone in the unit gets 24 hours liberty. This enables him to go home just in time for Bess to die and Tex to bury her. At this point, the audience should have lived happily ever after, but that's not what happens in the movie.

Tex has an illogical resentment towards his commander, Lt. Bridgman (Donald Curtis), to the point that he makes life difficult for everyone around him, with only Lug trying to keep Tex from doing something that will really get him court-martialled. On the island where they're building an airstrip as part of the island hopping campaign in the Pacific, Tex starts having dreams about Bess and waking up in the middle of the night, although he's also waking up everybody else in the tent so they all absolutely despise him, and with good reason. And then he thinks he hears a horse and disturbs everyone else's peace even more.

Except this time, when he goes out into the jungle, he finds that there actually is a horse, and tends to the horse, which is something that saves his life when a Japanese air raid hits the tent in which he would have been sleeping. The horse beomes the unit's mascot and even saves Tex's life when Tex gets injured in another Japanese attack. Will Tex be separated from the horse again?

Gallant Bess, at least the second half of the story set on the Pacific island, is based on a true story, although the man who wound up with the horse was a career Navy man who was in his 40s by the time of World War II. The part before the character gets sent to war is wholly made up, and frankly to the detriment of the movie since it makes the main character terribly unsympathetic. When he started waking everybody else up talking in his sleep I really wanted them to beat the crap out of him. Instead, we get all the syrup MGM could bring to a project like this.

Well, not quite all the syrup. MGM for whatever reason didn't film this in Technicolor, but instead in Cinecolor. The result is the print TCM ran does the movie no favors either as the colors are both flat and inconsistent. When the horses are crossing either green pastures or reddish dusty ground, the tone of the red or green changes from one second to the next, and not because the camera is panning ground that's changing color -- many of these are medium-to-long shots.

Gallant Bess had potential, but I don't think it quite lives up to that potential.

A fool is thanked

It wasn't uncommon for producers in the UK in the 1950s and 1960s to want to bring over an American star to make it easier to get one of the American studios to distribute the movie in the US. The latest such film I watched is I Thank a Fool.

The American star in question was Susan Hayward. She's playing Christine Allison, a Canadian who moved to the UK in part to become a doctor, and in part to follow her boyfriend. Said boyfriend is, as the movie opens, terminally ill in hospital, and Dr. Allison hastens his entrance into the next world by giving him an overdose of something when the duty nurse could easily have given him the proper dose and let him die "naturally". Even though it's a mercy killing, it's still technically medical malpractice, which means that a trial is necessary. Stephen Dane (Peter Finch) prosecutes the trial, with Allison being found guilty of manslaughter, sentenced to prison, and stricken from the doctors' register.

Fast forward 18 months. Christine is released from prison, but in need of a job, since she can't legally go back to being a doctor. But wouldn't you know it, there's somebody who could use a person with a physician's skills, and that person just happens to be... Stephen Dane! He's got a wife who might be suffering from a mental illness, and he needs somebody with medical skills to be a companion for the wife. Why am I thinking of The Chalk Garden here?

In any case, Christine takes the job and meets Stephen's wife Liane (Diane Cilento), who certainly seems to have some problems. One of those problems involves anything that spins like a circle, which is played up at several points during the movie. Liane's mental problems started back in her native Ireland, when she and her father, Capt. Ferris, were in a car accident in which her father died. Dane rescued her, at least metaphorically, and brought her over to the north of England to live. But she has those apparent mental problems, and Stephen doesn't want to have her committed to an asylum, which is also where Christine is convenient. A regular doctor would have the power to have Liane committed -- but of course Christine is no longer legally a doctor.

Christine quickly gets the impression that things are not quite what they seem, in no small part because Stephen seems to be terribly controlling and doesn't want Liane to go out on her own. All sorts of little things happen, and there's also the impression that one of the workers in the stables, Roscoe (Kieron Moore), might be trying to get involved with Liane. But things really take a turn when a man shows up claiming to be... Capt. Ferris (Cyril Cusack)! Now Christine really believes that Stephen has sinister motives, to the point that she's willing to help Liane run away to Ireland to see her father. This isn't quite the reunion you might thing, and Stephen is close behind, leading to shocking complications.

I Thank a Fool is a melodrama that starts off with the interesting premise of euthanasia, which would have been an even more controversial topic back in the early 1960s than it is today. But it devolves into something that at times is ridiculous and implausible. I'm guessing Susan Hayward took the role in part for the chance to take a working vacation in Ireland (the Ireland-set scenes were filmed at least in part in Ireland). She does the best she can with the material, and she's not bad. Peter Finch is reasonbaly good as the morally ambiguous man, and Cusack is professional too. But the script. Oh boy are the plot twists a mess.

So watch I Thank a Fool for some acting performances, or for the location shooting. But don't expect the best of plots.

TCM's Robert Duvall tribute

Robert Duvall died last month, and TCM altered its schedule slightly to include three of Duvall's Oscar-nominated roles tonight. Those films are:
8:00 PM Tender Mercies, in which Duvall plays an alcoholic country singer; (the night's original lineup was movies with alcoholics)
10:00 PM The Great Santini, with Duvall as a martinet of a father in an Air Force family; and
12:15 AM Apocalypse Now, which saw Duvall pick up a Supporting Actor nomination.

As I happened to have Apocalypse Now on my DVR, I decided that I was going to watch this one to put up the post on it in conjunction with the tribute, instead of doing it fairly quickly after the announcement of Duvall's death as had been my original intention.

Duvall having picked up a Supporting Actor nomination, the star of the movie is actually Martin Sheen. He plays Ben Willard, a captain in the US Army who, as the movie opens, is in Saigon in late 1969/early 1970 during the Vietnam War where he's spending leave drinking heavily in his hotel room and trying to forget nightmares. Voiceover has Willard speaking after the fact, but the action on screen is actually the beginning. His sojourn in Saigon is interrupted by a couple of men who have orders to take Willard to see Lt. Gen. Corman (G.D. Spradlin). Spradlin tells Willard about a colonel named Kurtz (Marlon Brando). Kurtz had a rising career in the army, but it seems that in about 1964 he did an intelligence mission to Vietnam that soured him on the whole thing. He went to Fort Benning and paratroopers' school, returned to Vietnam, and then went native, basically deserting to fight his own war, or at least that's what the official US channels think. Kurtz is a danger to them, and somewhere in the jungle in the borderland between South Vietnam and Cambodia, and it's Willard's mission to find Kurtz, and terminate him with extreme prejudice. It's a top secret mission, and nobody is actually supposed to know why Willard is headed where he is.

Willard heads out to the river system where a small patrol boat is going to take him as close as they can safely get to where Kurtz is suspected to be. For part of the journey, they're supposed to have air support, commanded by Lt. Col. Kilgore (that's Duvall). The boat on which Willard is traveling has a motley crew of men who seem to have been deeply affected by their experiences in the war, although they're not all going to show the effects at the same rate. It's obvious, however, when they intercept a Vietnamese boat carrying goods to a farmers' market.

Willard sees more and more surreal things on his way up to the edge of where the US has any control, such as a USO-type show with Playboy playmates, but eventually gets to people who know where Kurtz are. Along the way, he's been reading up on Kurtz from the classified material the general gave him, and begins to gain some sympathy. He also learns that his is not the first mission to try to assassinate Kurtz. The other guy, Colby (Scott Glenn), is officially MIA, but the classified information suggests he may have joined Kurtz. There's also a photojournalist (Dennis Hopper) who has also turned to Kurtz' side.

As I said, they do eventually find Kurtz, but as to what happens when they do, you're going to have to watch the movie yourself for that.

Surprisingly, I'd never actually seen Apocalypse Now in its entirety before this. I think that's a lot to do with my not being of the generation to be terribly interested in the Vietnam War and movies about it. I'm much too young for the 1960s protest era, and by the time I got old enough to appreciate classic cinema, there would be other Vietnam movies like Platoon that were the big ones.

I have to say that for me, Apocalypse Now is another of those movies that's very well made, albeit a difficult watch. However, I think I'd put it with movies like Raging Bull, Lawrence of Arabia, or Au hasard Balthasar where I see why they're good, but for me not good enough to put all the way at the top of all-time great film lists the way a lot of critics do.

Prosperity

MGM had a big star in the early sound era with the presence of Marie Dressler. As was often the case in those early sound days, studios would put their players in all sorts of movies to keep them in the public eye. In this case, that meant a series of comedies with Polly Moran. One that I haven't blogged about before is Prosperity.

One thing belying the movie's early sound provenance is the use of title cards to introduce a couple of scenes, with the opening here telling us the movie starts in 1925, "when money talked and was on speaking terms with everybody". Dressler plays Maggie Warren, who owns the family bank in one of those small cities that populated Hollywood movies of the era. She's got an adult son John (Norman Foster), who is being groomed to take over the bank when Mom retires. John, for his part, is about to get married to his girlfriend Helen Praskins (Anita Page). She just happens to be the daughter of Lizzie Praskins (Polly Moran), who is the largest depositor of the Warren bank.

Maggie and Lizzie are constantly at odds with each other for whatever reason, starting with the preparations for their children's wedding, a scene which goes on rather too long. But the two kids get married and have a coupld of kids, and would be ready to live happily ever after, if only it weren't for that damn crash of 1929 which led to the Great Depression, and money not talking to as many people. A lot of banks failed, but Maggie's prudence has kept the Warren bank open.

That is, until Lizzie gets all panicky at the idea of her money not being safe in the bank. She not only wants to withdraw it, but makes the request in a way that everybody else knows what she's doing, leading to a run on the bank which renders the bank illiquid because the money is in Mr. Jones' business and the Smith family house, and all that other stuff Jimmy Stewart reminded us of in It's a Wonderful Life. The bank is forced to close, although Mom is able to hold on to some bonds in the hope of re-opening the bank if enough people can pay back those loans.

As part of Maggie's prudence and sense of honor, she liquidates her house and a lot of her personal belongings to make her customers whole. This forces her to move in with her son and daughter-in-law. As in The Mating Season, the young couple has both mothers-in-law living with them, which causes a lot of tension as Lizzie treats Maggie like dirt. In one scene of obvious foreshadowing, Maggie keeps rat poison around and Lizzie, worried about her grandkids getting into it as well as wanting to spite Maggie, dumps the poison and puts her "Prune-o-Lax" laxative into the bottle to keep anybody else from stealing it.

John Warren isn't as prudent as his mother, and gets swindled out of the bonds by a Mr. Holland, played by ubiquitous MGM villian John Miljan. This leads to the climax where John has to get the bonds back, while Maggie has finally drunk the rat poison in an attempt to commit suicide. It also leads to a happy ending and Lizzie realizing the error of her ways.

Prosperity was a hit, in no small part because of the pairing of Dressler and Moran, who are quite good at playing off of one another. However, modern audiences may have some issues with the movie since it's very much a product of the early 1930s (and the technical issues from movies of that era). That, and the fact that Polly Moran's character is just so nasty to everybody around her. If I were introducing people to Marie Dressler, I'd pick some of her other movies first.

Paris, Texas

Another of those movies that would probably have been on my "Blind Spot" list if I took part in the "Blind Spot" blogathon is Paris, Texas. I've stated before that I don't take part mostly because it requires me coming up with a series of movies that I'm going to be watching over a full year. Since I generally don't know what's going to be showing up to watch that far in advance, I don't take part and just get around to watching the movies I haven't seen before when they do show up. In the case of Paris, Texas, that was quite some time back that TCM ran it and I recorded it. Once again, I watched it before it expired, and then wrote and scheduled this post.

A man walks through a desert in west Texs with just a gallon jug of water in his hands. Stupidly, he discards the jug upon emptying it. He makes it to a building that has what looks like an honor bar: take a drink and pay for it. The man takes some ice, but eventually faints on the floor. Thankfully, there was another person in the bar who takes the man to the closest thing there is to a doctor. When said doctor goes through the man's things looking for some ID, he finds a card with the name and phone number of a Walt Henderson (Dean Stockwell).

Walt lives in the Los Angeles area, where he works as a graphic designer designing billboards and lives with his wife Anne (Aurore Clément). Walt isn't exactly pleased to get the phone call, since taking time off work is going to be a hassle although that's really the least of the issues. Walt knows that the man in Texas is actually his brother Travis (Harry Dean Stanton). Travis dropped out of life four years ago, and worse, put his kid in a taxi and sent the kid to Walt and Anne's place because Travis' wife Jane similarly dropped out of life. The kid was almost too young at the time to remember his biological parents, and Walt and Anne have raised the kid, Hunter, as their own, not having any biological children themselves. So how is the kid going to deal with having this stranger back in his life?

Of course, simply getting Travis to LA is going to be tough. Travis goes on about Paris, since his and Walt's parents joked about conceiving Travis in Paris. Travis has a photo of a plot of land that he claims to own, and Walt doesn't get what this has to do with Paris since Walt doesn't yet realize that there is a town in Texas also called Paris which is where the land is. Also, Travis keeps trying to run away and doesn't talk for the longest time.

Eventually, however, they do get back to Los Angeles, and Travis starts talking. At this point, you'd think Walt and Anne would start talking with Travis about whether he might try getting a job and reintegrating into normal human life. Instead, Anne tells Travis about a bank account that Hunter has, one which gets regular deposits by wire transfer in the days when there was no internet to do such electronic transfers. The money is presumably coming from Hunter's mother Jane, and those transfers are coming from a bank in Houston, so Travis takes Hunter and drives off toward Houston in the hopes of finding Jane since apparently not so many branches could do these transfers at the time.

Travis and Hunter basically set about stalking the bank, and find a woman who looks like she could be Jane (Nastassja Kinski) and start following her, eventually coming to a nondescript building in a crappy part of Houston that serves as the home for the sort of business you wouldn't want your mother to be working for. But is this woman really Jane? And if so, will Travis be able to make real contact with her?

Paris, Texas is a movie that certainly has an interesting premise, although it's another one that I found myself thinking is full of characters who certainly wouldn't be acting that way in real life. It's also one that definitely goes way too slowly at times. The running time is about 145 minutes, and is the sort of story that I think could easily have been edited to get down to under two hours. Still, I can understand why there are a lot of people who would find Paris, Texas to be interesting for how different it is from traditional Hollywood fare. Definitely watch and judge for yourself.

The Calico Dragon

One of the non-Popeye cartoons that TCM ran in the Saturday matinee block when they had cartoons was an old Hugh Harman-Rudolf Ising Happy Harmonies entry called The Calico Dragon.

As always, this being a one-reeler, it's not like there's a lot here. A little girl (I couldn't find the name of the actress voicing her) is in bed reading a fairy tale called "The Princess and the Dragon" to three of her stuffed animals: a human doll, a Scottish terrier dog, and a polka-do horse. After reading the story, the little girl goes to sleep.

At this point, the dolls come to life in what is presumably supposed to be a dream sequence, although it doesn't matter either way since this is a cartoon. The three characters head off to a mythical medieval-type land where there are still castles, and dragons for brave princes to fight. This particular dragon has three heads, and the main sight gag is how the three necks get knotted together, which is the way to kill the dragon. There's also the recurring theme of the cowardly dog.

One thing that will be immediately noticed is that, although The Calico Dragon is in color, it's not very vibrant color. That's because Disney had the exclusive contract to use the newer three-strip Technicolor in animation. Other animation had the choice of black-and-white (not uncommon through the late 1930s), two-strip Technicolor (as with this one), or other inferior color processes. Granted, it's not such a big deal in animation. After all, if the human and animal forms aren't supposed to be extremely lifelike, is it such a big deal if the color isn't either?

The Happy Harmonies shorts are also fairly tame. It wasn't until things like Merrie Melodies over at Warner Bros. in the early 1940s, or the Tom and Jerry shorts MGM put out, that cartoons started to get the stereotypical cartoon violence that we all think of today. In the 1930s, most cartoons were a lot less cynical and had a lot more singing and dancing.

I looked it up on Amazon, and I didn't see any Happy Harmonies box sets for sale, which rather surprises me. Considering that many other series got Warner Archives-type box sets, one would think that Warner Home Video might have released such a set. But apparently they only got a laserdisc release back in the early 1990s.

Your semiannual Daylight Savings Time reminder

Tonight is the night where most of us in the US move our clocks one hour forward. The big thing if you will in terms of a movie blog like this is that it means our favorite channel TCM has a prime time lineup which needs to be one hour shorter than normal, even for the people in Arizona who don't move their clocks ahead.

My reading of tonight's TCM lineup is that TCM does have a set of movies that fit the nine hours between 8:00 PM and 6:00 AM, but, there's still an issue with the timing:

8:00 PM The Flight of the Phoenix (142 min), in which James Stewart and others try to fix their plane stranded in the Sahara;
10:30 PM the 1962 version of Mutiny on the Bounty (185 min), starring Marlon Brando as Fletcher Christian;
1:45 AM the 1936 version of The Last of the Mohicans (91 minutes); and
3:30 AM The Flame and the Arrow (88 min), a medieval Robin Hood-type story, and not the "Roman Rebels fight against barbarians" plot the TCM synopsis gives.

Now, there are several problems on the TCM page. Unfortunately, they switched their schedule some time back to not giving the actual running time of each movie, but the length of the time slot. And somehow the TCM schedule page still lists The Last of the Mohicans as "2 HRS" even though it's clearly in a shorter time slot. Worse, the TCM page does say "1:45 AM EST" and "3:30 AM EDT", when the latter would clearly be 4:30 AM. For some reason, the TCM schedule page still lists the 1951 The Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Story as coming on at 5:00 AM, which it seems to me is pretty clearly the movie that's not going to be shown tonight.

One other thing that might be an issue for some is the box guides. The last time I checked, the YouTube TV guide lists The Last of the Mohicans as running from 1:45 AM to 3:30 AM and The Flame and the Arrow as running from 3:30 AM to 6:00 AM. In a grid view, this means that The Last of the Mohicans is currently in a 45-minute slot.

For Keeps?

One of the "Stars of the Month" last summer on TCM was not a traditional star, but "Ladies of the 80s". One of the movies that I hadn't heard of before was For Keeps?. Since the synopsis sounded interesting, I recorded it and eventually got around to watching it.

In an aspirational-class part of Kenosha, WI, Darcy Elliot (Molly Ringwald) is a high-school student hoping to become a journalist and living with her single mom Donna (Miriam Flynn). Darcy is about to go off to the University of Wisconsin for a weekend to meet with people about her journalism work, but what Mom doesn't know is that she's being taken there by her boyfriend Stan Bobrucz (Randall Batinkoff).

Stan is a good kid who is hoping to get a scholarship he's applied for at Caltech, where he's going to study to become an architect. That's something his father (Kenneth Mars) has wanted for him. Dad owns a shoe store which has done a good enough business to provide a reasonably nice house although none of these people are wealthy. But Stan works part time at the family business and Dad wants better for Stan and the two younger kids, who are also stereotypically bratty and obnoxious).

Stan and Darcy being teenagers, they have all sorts of hormones flowing through them, which means they also have a desire to have sex. So on the way to Madison, the two stop and set up Stan's design for a tent with a sort of window in the roof, and make love there. Darcy has been taking birth control, not because any of the adults know she's sexually active, but because she has out-of-balance hormones that are being regulated through the Pill. If you watch any old movies, however, you know that it's only going to take the one time of having sex, and....

Darcy has no period for a couple of months, which is how she's certain she's pregnant. She's not certain what to do, in part because Mr. Bobrucz is a devout Catholic for whom abortion is an absolute no-no. Darcy's mom has been thinking for a long time -- and saving up for -- a mother/daughter trip to France, and dammit, not even a pregnancy is going to stop that, who cares what Darcy thinks. And then there's the question of how the two of them are going to be able to finish high school, let alone go to college, a question which only gets worse when Stan's father wants to disown him.

So Stan and Darcy decide that they're going to show everybody that all of the stereotypes are wrong, and that a young couple like this can make it and keep the baby. They get married and take extra jobs as well as eating into their savings to get a place of their own, with Darcy eventually going to night school instead of regular high school so that somebody will always be there with the baby. However, there are still a ton of challenges for such a young couple, and everything works against the two of them, even threatening to destroy the marriage. However, the parents mostly soften their hard edges at least a bit. That may not be enough.

For Keeps? has a plot that sounds like it should be a serious drama, although the movie is intended to be closer to comedy than drama. Not that the subject matter can allow for a film like this to be straight comedy, of course. For the first two-thirds of the movie, it does a mostly good job of being mostly a comedy with some drama mixed in. But around the point where the marriage between Stan and Darcy starts failing, For Keeps? seems to lose its way a bit. It's as though the screenwriters had written themselves into a corner and didn't really know the best way to write themselves back out of it, making the last section of the movie somewhat of a mess. It's not that For Keeps? is a bad movie by any stretch of the imagination; it's more that it feels like something is missing at the end.

Still, For Keeps? is an interesting take on a tough topic, and the way people thought about it back in the 1980s.

Jeepers Creepers

Actor Dick Powell made Murder, My Sweet in no small part because he wanted to be able to show himself to be more than a light comic actor crooning away in pictures. Powell of course had that reputation going back to some of the great early musicals like 42nd Street, but watching a late 1930s musical like Going Places makes it so much easier to see why Powell wanted to do "serious" work.

Powell plays Peter Mason, who works as a clerk in a creaky old New York sporting-goods store under Franklin Dexter (Walter Catlett). It's one of those places that comes across as old-fashioned even by the standards of the 1930s, with one of the few customers being Col. Withering (Thurston Hall), who goes on fake safaris and buys stuff from the store to display as his catches to the society set who attend his lectures.

The store needs more business, but it's also the sort of store that finds advertising to be terribly gauche. They hit upon an idea, however, which is to have a famous horseman endorse their goods and mingle with the society set that would attend polo matches, the summer racing season at Saratoga, or in the case of this movie, a steeplechase in Maryland. And they even have just such a horseman under contract, Peter Randall. Unfortunately, Randall is currently racing down under, but since information traveled slowly in those days, they can just have Peter Mason impersonate Randall and none of the Maryland horse set will figure out the ruse. (Yeah, right.)

The first thing Peter and his boss find when they get to Maryland is a wild horse that only responds to the musical stylings of extremely musically talented groomsman Gabriel (Louis Armstrong) singing the standard "Jeepers Creepers" which here is the original. One of the next things the find is Col. Withering, who knows the ruse but has his own reasons for not revealing it: namely, that his sister-in-law who funds the safaris, has been threatening to cut him off. Another of the rich set is Ellen Parker (Anita Louise), and she and Peter immediately hit it off. But that's because Ellen thinks of Peter as the horseman, not as a lowly clerk there to imitate the horseman and advertise the store. Ellen is also pursued by Col. Withering's nephew Jack (Ronald Reagan).

Eventually the big race comes up, and there's going to be a lot of betting on who's going to win. Trying to influence the betting, albeit in a decidedly less-than-legal way, are the professional gamblers Maxie (Harold Huber) and Droopy (Allen Jenkins). Eventually Peter winds up having to ride the wild horse we saw at the beginning, even though he's barely able to ride a horse at all.

As I said at the beginning, watching a movie like Going Places, it's obvious why Powell had started to chafe having to make all these musicals with increasingly lesser music and even worse plots. Still, Warner Bros. had a lot of talented musical people, so the song and dance numbers mostly work for those who enjoy musical movies. Going Places is not a great movie by any means, but I suppose it could have been much worse considering some of the much more dire horse racing movies I've seen.

24 Hours to Kill

Mickey Rooney was TCM's Star of the Month back in December 2024, and as I've mentioned I recorded several of his movies. One that I failed to record, or else I would have recorded it then and written up a post for a subsequent airing that I did in fact record, was 24 Hours to Kill. At any rate, having watched what I'd recorded from the Star of the Month tribute, I eventually got around to watching this one to to write up this review.

Mickey Rooney plays Norman Jones, who works as part of the crew for an airline that flies between Europe and Asia, although notably not having any flights to Beirut for reasons that will become clear not too far into the movie. The current flight is piloted by Jamie Faulker (Lex Barker), who has a back story of his own in that he's got a wife, is carrying on an affair with one of the stewardesses, and the stewardess isn't certain whether the relationship should continue.

One of the engines in the plane goes out, which sucks, but airplanes in the jet era have been designed to work with one of the engines going out. However, a second engine goes out as well, which is going to necessitate an emergency landing. This landing is in... Beirut, and is also going to require a 24-hour stopover so that the plane can be repaired and the flight can continue. Remember, the airline doesn't fly to Beirut so it's not as if they've got another plane there that can take off instead and require less flight juggling.

Now here is one of the first plot holes: the bad guys seem to figure out almost immediately that Jones is on the flight as they start following him to the hotel. Malouf (Walter Slezak) has sent them to the airport to figure out where the crew is going to be staying during the stopover. As you might well guess, Jones and Malouf have a past together, one that Jones has been trying to escape. You'd think he should just hole up in the hotel room, but no. Worse, he's dishonest with Jamie as to what that past entailed.

Jones had worked for a different airline in the past that did in fact fly to and from Beirut, and he worked with Malouf to smuggle stuff into and out of Lebanon. Norman claims that Malouf tried to double cross him, which is why he quit the airline and started working for one that expressly didn't fly to Beirut. (Another plot hole: couldn't Malouf have someone go after Norman outside of Lebanon?) In fact, Norman is the one who double-crossed Malouf. So Malouf wants his henchmen to force Norman to pay up. They're also willing to go after other members of the crew in order to put pressure on Norman, leading to an abduction and the climax....

The big drawing card for 24 Hours to Kill is that it was filmed mostly on location in Beirut as it was back in the mid-1960s when it was a relative oasis in a dreary Arab world, before the civil war that started in 1975 destroyed the country. The locations are relatively nice, except that the film used the Techniscope process that isn't quite as crisp as some other formats. Much worse, however, is the plot which is slow and full of plot holes, making 24 Hours to Kill rather a disappointment.

Not the champ

Tomorrow's lineup in 31 Days of Oscar is movies set in Mexico. Among the movies being shown is the 1931 version of The Champ at 10:30 AM, which I blogged about back in 2010. There was a remake of The Champ in 1979, which will be airing at 3:45 AM on March 11 as part of a prime-time lineup (starting on the evening of March 10) of movies with people who have drinking problems. In between those two there was another version which isn't being shown because it didn't get any Oscar nominations. That movie is titled The Clown.

Red Skelton plays the titular clown, a man named Dodo Delwyn. He used to be big, but as you can guess he has a drinking problem and can no longer get good jobs as a result. He's reduced to a job on Coney Island as a clown making the guests getting off amusement park rides part of his act. He ticks off one such person to the point that man fights back, and Dodo's boss not only blames Dodo, but gives Dodo reason to believe he's accusing Dodo of having gone back to the drink. There goes your job.

Dodo, meanwhile, has a son who admires him in the form of Dink (Tim Considine) and basically takes care of Dodo every time Dodo goes on another drunk, which is about to happen soon now that Dodo is once again out of a job. Now, in a lot of movies this single dad with a son relationship would be down to Mom having died, thank you Production Code. That's also the lie Dodo has been telling Dink. But here, the reality is that Dodo's wife Paula (Jane Greer) couldn't handle her husband's alcoholism and more or less abandoned his fate, divorcing him and marrying another man and having a daughter by that man. How she didn't get custody of Dink is never well explained.

It doesn't take much to guess that Paula is about to meet Dodo again. That happens when Dink goes to one of Dodo's old agents from the talent agencies who gets Dodo a temporary job that Dodo considers do degrading that he doesn't want Dink to see the act. Among the people in the audience is Paula, who wants to see Dink again. She knows that she and her second husband can offer Dink so much more than Dodo can, and tell Dink they'd be more than happy to bring him into their new family, although for obvious reasons Dink is none too happy about this because he still loves his father and considers Dad his hero.

It's going to take a lot for for Dad to hit bottom, which even includes smacking poor Dink. But just as Dodo hits bottom, his old agent realizes there's a new technology out there: television! This would be a great chance to show Dodo to a new audience and possibly get Dodo a stable job if only Dodo can remain sober. The worst that could happen, one supposes, is that the show flops on its opening episode and gets treated as a one-off special rather than a series. But Dodo seizes the lifeline. If you've seen either version of The Champ, however, you know how this movie is going to end....

The most surprising thing about The Clown is the opportunity it offered Red Skelton to do straight drama, since he was mostly known for his physical comedy. Of course, as a clown, that also provides lots of chances to put that physical comedy into the movie in a way that integrates seamlessly into the plot. Skelton shows that he really did have the acting chops necessary to do at least melodrama; I don't know if anybody would have ever taken him seriously if MGM had put him in a straight drama like The Bad and the Beautiful the year before, or Executive Suite a year later. But in The Clown Skelton is by far the highlight in what feels like another of those movies MGM was churning out while trying to fund the Freed Unit musicals.

Sadly not a drama

Another of the movies that I recorded and was getting close to expiring from the DVR was the later Gene Kelly musical It's Always Fair Weather. It's on TCM tomorrow, Mar. 3, at 10:00 AM, so I've watched it in order to be able to put up this review.

The movie starts off with an introductory sequence set at the end of World War II. Soldiers are being demobbed, and three of them are spending their first day back on American soil at a bar in New York: Ted Riley (Gene Kelly), would-be artist Doug Hallerton (Dan Dailey), and Angelo Valentine (Michael Kidd). They have way too much to drink and go on a drunken dance sequence, this being a Gene Kelly musical after all. At the end of the day, the three "best friends" who made their way through Europe together vow that they'll meet at the same bar ten years from now, or October 11, 1955.

To remember this vow, each of them takes a third of a one-dollar bill and writes the date one it, so sure enough, when the main action of the film opens up on October 11, 1955 (oddly enough about a month after the film was released), they all see that they have a reminder of the day. Doug wanted to go back to Europe to become the great American artist, but wound up using his art skills to go into the more lucrative field of advertising. He's based out of Chicago, where he's in an unhappy marriage, but created the ad campaign for a New York-based slice-of-life show hosted by Madline Bradville (Dolores Gray), so he was going to be in New York anyway and shows up at the bar.

Angie had been hoping to become a quality chef, but life didn't work out that way for him either. Instead, he got married (and as far as we can tell is happily married) running the sort of hamburger joint up in Schenectady that Thelma Ritter ran in The Mating Season. And as for Ted, he's a native New York who had been hoping to become a lawyer and marry his sweetheart. However, in the opening scene on October 11, 1945, he's learned that that sweetheart couldn't wait for Ted to come home and married another man, leaving Ted embittered. Instead of becoming a lawyer, he got into the fight game, training a second-class boxer who probably had pretentions of greatness at one point but is now being asked to take a dive.

Doug has an expense account, so he offers to take his two old friends to a swanky restaurant where the three find out that they really have nothing in common other than their service in the war. Ted and Doug think Angie is a hick; Ted and Angie find Doug snobbis; and Doug and Angie see Ted's act as kind of scammy, which in many ways it is. Especially when they run into some of the staff from the show who are having a business meeting in the same restaurant. This includes segment producer Jackie Leighton (Cyd Charisse), on whom Ted immediately starts putting the moves, only to discover she's much too smart for that stuff.

Except that there's a bit of a problem, which is that the show goes live, and the subject for the show's "surprise" segment won't be able to do it. So Jackie figures a surprise segment of having the three soldiers appear together on live TV for their 10th anniversary reunion would be a great thing. Except that she doesn't quite realize that the three men, having met each other, don't really want to see each other any more. So they're going to have to engage in some minor deception to make the reunion work. Meanwhile, Jacke and Ted learn about the fixed fight, which gives some extra motivation to what goes on later that evening.

It's Always Fair Weather is another of those movies with a really good premise, that unfortunately doesn't quite work in the execution. For me, I think that's for a different reason than a lot of the other reviewers I've read. Everybody else loves the Gene Kelly dance numbers, but I found myself thinking that this is the sort of plot that shouldn't have been set to the genre constraints of a musical. It's the sort of thing that could be a drama, either serious or somewhat lighter considering the finale is clearly being played for its comic effect.

I missed Georges Méliès' birthday back in December

One thing that mildly irritates me about YouTube TV is the way the DVR takes some of the documentaries about the movies, as well as the collections of shorts packaged together, and doesn't show them when I look for movies to watch. To be fair, the "documentaries" weren't necessarily made for original theatrical showing so they wouldn't be movies. In any case, I only see them when I search for stuff about to expire from the DVR. TCM ran a documentary called The Méliès Mystery back in May of 2025, but I only finally got around to watching it just before it expired.

Now, I assume most people reading a blog like this are aware of Méliès' film A Trip to the Moon from 1902, which is considered one of the more famous very early movies. Méliès was one of the pioneers of cinema, making movies from about 1896 to 1913, just before tastes changed and then the Great War made Méliès' type of movies passé. He fell into obscurity and dire financial straits, which led him in a fit of desperation to burn the negatives of his films that he possessed. This was a move that he would quickly come to regret.

However, it turned out that prints of some of the films survived, and only much later it was rediscovered that for a surprising reason there were negatives in the Library of Congress that over the past several years have been undergoing a painstaking restoration process back in Méliès' native France. Today, roughly half of the 520 or so films that Méliès made in his career are known to survive, which is actually pretty good compared to the percentage of a lot of other's people's work that has been lost.

The Méliès Mystery is part biography, looking at the filmmaker's life starting as the son of a man who owned a shoe factory and expected his sons to follow in the family business, to learning magic in London, through to discovering film with the Lumière brothers, at least if you believe this version of the life story. From what I've read, some of it is legend that has been reprinted as fact like in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. As for the negatives that ended up in America, Méliès sent prints to the US in the early days of movie exhibition, but thanks to poor copyright protection everybody basically pirated everybody else's movies. I think I've mentioned in conjunction with the Griffith shorts box set that I have that companies would include their logo somewhere on the set as a sort of anti-piracy watermark, but the duplicators simply scratched those logos out! So Georges sent one of his brothers over to America and used a two-camera system to make multiple negatives, so that his company would have original prints of his own films to distribute. Those negatives went through a life of their own.

The Méliès Mystery is a well-made movie that I think would serve as a good basic introduction for anybody who doesn't know much about Méliès or about filmmaking as it was in those very early days. For people who are more knowledgeable, there may not be that much new here. But the footage from the original movies is definitely worth watching again.

Somewhere in Time

Another of the movies that's been sitting on my DVR for quite some time that I only recently got around to watching is Somewhere in Time.

Christopher Reeve, fresh off Superman, plays Richard Collier. As the movie starts, it's 1972, and Collier is a college senior drama major who has just written a play and is getting it presented on stage. Sitting in the audience is a mysterious old lady, who approaches Collier and gives him an expensive pocket watch and makes a comment that implies they've met before or will meet again.

Fast forward to the present day, in 1980. Collier has moved from the small college town to Chicago, where he's become a published playwright who has had several of his plays staged. But his personal life remains unfulfilled, and that's beginning to screw up his professional life too. So Richard decides what he needs is a break from Chicago, going back to his old college town. He's also earned enough that he can finally stay in the Grand Hotel that served wealthy tourists in the summer and, one might guess, wealthy alumni in the other three seasons.

A small museum in the hotel celebrates actress Elise McKenna (Jane Seymour), who gave her final performance at the hotel's summer theater back in 1912 before retiring like Greta Garbo. But for whatever reason, Richard is intrigued, and decides to study up on her career, leading to the startling conclusion that this must have been the woman who gave him the pocket watch several years ago. Laura Roberts (Teresa Wright) worked for Elise in her later years and literally wrote the book on her, and still lives in town, rather conveniently. Richard goes to see her, showing her the pocket watch which is a pretty good way of showing he really does have a connection. Richard also learns that Elise had an interest in time travel, and had a book by one of Richard's old college professors.

Richard talks from the old professor and learns the professor's theory that through the power of self-hypnosis, time travel just may be possible. Richard gets obsessed with doing the same sort of self-hypnosis experiment that his college professor did, but with the difference that he's going to wake up on that day in the summer of 1912 when Elise retired from the stage, as Richard now believes he's fated to meet Elise again even though in the real world she's been dead for eight years already.

After the first experiment goes wrong, Richard wakes up from a second experiment to discover that it seeming is 1912! And young Elise is there, looking just like she did in the photos at the Grand Hotel. However, meeting her is going to be a bit difficult, as the 1912 version of Richard doesn't have any relations or good excuse for seeing Elise. She's also got a somewhat complicated personal life. Her manager William (Christopher Plummer) holds a fairly tight rein over her career, as he's grooming her for stardom. When he finds that Richard is in his view harassing Elise, he's none too happy.

Needless to say, Richard continues to pursue Elise, and perhaps it really is because of Richard that Elise retired from acting, staying here to look for him. But then how did young Richard wind up being reborn in time to graduate from college in 1972?

Upon its original release, Somewhere in Time got fairly poor reviews, although in the intervening years it's developed a cult following for various reasons. The good reason for that is the location shooting on Mackinac Island, a resort located on an island between Lake Michigan and Lake Huron. James FitzPatrick did a Traveltalks short on the island, since even in the early 1940s it was known for not allowing motorized vehicles. The location shooting is lovely, and it's easy to see why people with a love for Mackinac Island would have a soft spot for the film. As for other people, I'm not quite certain why. I don't think Somewhere in Time is as bad as the critics of 1980 thought, but it's still a movie with a ridiculous premise and for me a ton of plot holes that aren't well explained. But it's definitely another of those movies you'll want to watch for yourself and draw your own conclusions.

Western Man

Gary Cooper was another of TCM's selections for Star of the Month in 2025, and once again I've got a couple of his films that I had to get through before they expired from the DVR, and then write up the posts on them to put up at a later date. Since it's been a while from the last time I scheduled a post on a western, I decided to watch Man of the West, it having turned out that I had not in fact seen the movie before.

Gary Cooper plays Link Jones, a man who, as the movie opens is acting like he might have a bit of a past. He shows up in the not-quite-so west Texas town of Crosscut, from the farther west town of Good Hope. The citizens of Good Hope need a teacher, and deputized Link to go to Forth Worth to get a teacher to sign a contract, and even gave him money to pay the signing bonus, not that they would have called it that back in the day. Crosscut is the town where the train to Fort Worth is caught, so that's why Link has come here.

He gets on a train and find as a fellow passenger Sam Beasley (Arthur O'Connell). Sam seems partly like the Roscoe Karns character in It Happened One Night, with some of Jack Carson's smooth operator types mixed in. Sam introduces Link to Billie Ellis (Julie London), a saloon singer who wants to leave Crosscut to make a better life for herself, with Sam suggesting she could make a good teacher.

Along the way, the train stops to pick up firewood, since this is a steam engine and they need fuel to keep the train going. All the able-bodied men are asked to get out of the train to help load firewood. Billie, having been bothered by some of the men on board, also gets off for a bit of fresh air and to get away from the older men still on board. One of those "older" men is really a decoy, however, as some of the men are part of a gang trying to rob the train. They do and make a successful getaway, and while the train tries to make its own getaway from the robbers, it leaves Link, Sam, and Billie behind.

Link is bright enough to know that staying by the rails isn't a good idea, since no train is going to come by soon and it's miles to the nearest town as the track goes. Instead, he has the three of them set off on foot, eventually coming to an isolated farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. Link tells Sam and Billie to stay in the barn while he approaches the farm owner for assistance.

And that's where Link's past comes in. It just so happens that Link knew full well there ought to be a farmhouse here, because he used to live here. He was living with his uncle Dock (Lee J. Cobb), who was the leader of a gang of robbers of which Link was once a member. Also, wouldn't you know it, It's Dock's gang that robbed the train, including Coaley (Jack Lord) and Trout (Royal Dano). There's varying degrees of displeasure at seeing Link. Dock, for his part, would like Link to join the gang again since Link seems to have been the only other person who had a real aptitude for the work they were doing and the rest of the gang's proceeds haven't been so high.

The other gang members are rather more violent, as we see when Link is able to bring Billie and Sam to the house. If they were unhappy to see Link, they're really unhappy to see Sam. Billie on the other hand, is a woman which means someone for them to lust over even though Link has said she's his wife as a means of trying to protect her. Tensions rise until Dock announces he wants to use Link as part of his plan to rob the bank at Lassoo, which seems rather more west than where the farmhouse is based on the landscape and (lack of) vegetation. But don't worry about geography in a western like this.

Man of the West is a fairly good western of the late 1950s psychological western mold that was more in vogue than the older straightforward westerns. It was directed by Anthony Mann, who had had a fair bit of success in directing James Stewart in similarly psychological westerns. If there's a flaw, I think it's in the climax, as it seems unlikely the gang wouldn't have known what happened to Lassoo in the intervening years since Link left the gang. But that's a minor quiblle from what is an otherwise worthy movie.