Better than a Ben Mankiewicz podcast

TCM's schedule for tomorrow, January 22, is all six of the Hildegarde Withers mysteries followed by all four of the Margaret Rutherford Miss Marple movies, before prime time brings us another night of the films of Jean Arthur. I've actually got one film each from the two mystery series sitting on my DVR. But since I don't really feel like doing two mysteries in a row, today's post is going to be on The Plot Thickens, tomorrow at 11:00 AM.

We don't actually meet Hildegarde Withers for a good ten minutes or more. Instead, we get a starting scene in a park, with a woman calling up wealthy John Carter to say she want to meet him there. Carter, meanwhile, has a guest at home and some servants who would prefer the night off. There's the butler, Joe the chauffeur (a young Paul Fix two dozen years before The Rifleman), and Marie the maid who seems to be in romantic entanglements with both Joe and the butler. Everybody's out of the house when a mysterious figure comes out of the bushes in the park and shoots Carter dead during his assignation. But the body is only found the next day, with the investigation also finding a young couple, Bob (Owen Davis, Jr.) and Alice (Louise Latimer) having been at the park so they could be suspects.

It's up to police detective Piper (James Gleason) to solve this. Well, not quite of course. He's the boyfriend of teacher Hildegarde Withers, here played by ZaSu Pitts. Piper calls her up, and as usual she's excited to take part in another murder investigation, although not so excited to deal with incompetence beyond being able to sling acerbic quips at anybody she sees as not up to the task. This of course includes Piper, who is just as good at slinging those barbs back at Hildegarde. The Withers movies are as much about the interaction between Piper and Withers as they are about the mysteries.

In any case, during the investigation at Carter's house, Hildegarde finds a precious gem and learns that it had been stolen some years back in France. The New York police learn from their French counterparts that the man who had stolen it was recently freed from prison, so the assumption is that it might be the same man involved. This also shifts the action to an art museum, specificlly to the exhibit of the "Cellini Cup", an allegedly valuable Renaissance-era piece of fine silver work which also has a pearl hanging from it in one strategic spot. The two things are clearly related, but how is something that we're only going to learn in the final reel when the guilty parties are caught.

As I said, the Hildegarde Withers movies are as much about the relationship between her and Piper as they are about the actual plots. ZaSu Pitts does a good job here, although she doesn't come across quite as well as Edna May Oliver when it comes to striving for a classier attitude. Oliver could seemingly pull that off in her sleep, while Pitts feels a bit more like the Staten Islander types who would be the wives of New York cops. She's still funny, mind you, and the repartee and "mystery", such as the mystery is, do work, making The Plot Thickens an enjoyable entry in the series.

Catch-22

Many years ago when I was in high school, one of the books we read in English class one year was Joseph Heller's Catch-22. I had learned at that time that the novel had been adapted into a movie, although I hadn't seen it in part because in those days it wasn't quite as east to watch whatever classic movie you might want to. With that in mind, when TCM ran the film adaptation of Catch-22, I decided to record it so that I could finally watch the film and do a post on it.

The story revolves around Capt. Yossarian (Alan Arkan), a bombardier at one of the Americans' southern European air bases in the latter days of World War II after the invasion of Italy had already begun. Despite the romanticization of the flyboys, bombing runs were thoroughly unromantic and suffered from a high rate of mishaps. If you could get through 25 bombing runs you were lucky and could be rotated out, at least for the most part. Unfortunately for Yossarian and the fellow crews at his base, their commander, Col. Cathcart (Martain Balsam), keeps pushing the men further and further in attempt to win fame for himself. Every time it looks like crews are going to reach Cathcart's target, he ups the number of bombing raids they have to run.

Yossarian understandably wants to get out of going on these raids and get himself declared unfit to fly. There is, however, a catch. In theory, if you're insane, you would be declared unfit to fly. However, if you say you're crazy and that flying the missions is crazy, that's a sign that you are in fact quite sane, which means that you're pretty much never going to be declared unfit for service. This despite all the things Yossarian tries to do, such as showing up to inspection stark naked. None of it is going to get him out of service.

Meanwhile, other of the people around Yossarian have come up with their own ways of trying to get out of service. Capt. Orr (Bob Balaban) keeps crashing planes before he disspears over the Baltic. The base chaplain, Tappman (Anthony Perkins) pretty much no longer believes in any sort of God. And then there's Lt. Milo Minderbender (Jon Voight), who has a rather more extreme way of dealing with things. He's gone into the black market and become a sort of king of the black market, with all sorts of enterprises throughout the part of Italy the allies control. One wonders how he has any time to do his military service, and how nobody anywhere in the military hierarchy is willing to stop him.

Eventually, Col. Cathcart and his adjutant Lt. Col. Korn (Buck Henry) offer Yossarian a deal. We'll let you get out of flight service, and even recommend you for a promotion, but you have to do something for us, which is to give us all the credit and get us the publicity we crave. Will Yossarian knuckle under, or will he find some other way to cope?

I have to admit that I wasn't the biggest fan of the book version of Catch-22 when I was in high school. As a result, I'm also not the biggest fan of the movie version. There are going to be other people who like the book and not particuarly care for the fact that a lot of changes had to be made for the movie since the book is the sort of narrative it's difficult to make a movie out of. Many people, however, recognize this and think that the changes that Buck Henry (who wrote the screenplay in addition to taking on the role of Lt. Col. Korn) made mostly work. Indeed, author Joseph Heller himself did ultimately think Henry's working the novel worked for the film. There's also a whole of other stars that I haven't mentioned yet, notbaly Orson Welles as a general who shows up at the base.

Ultimately, I think that Catch-22 is the sort of movie you're going to want to watch for yourself and draw your own conclusions.

The Woman Racket

Quite some time back, TCM did a night mentioning the Moore brothers of silent film; all three of them appeared together in the 1929 movie Side Street. Another movie that aired, starring Tom Moore, was The Woman Racket. Since it sounded interesting and I'm always up for early talkies, I of course recorded it and eventually got around to watching it and writing up this post that I saved to post at a suitable distance from Side Street.

The Woman Racket was released at the beginning of 1930, which of course was right in the middle of the Prohibition era. And if you know your Hollywood movies of the time, the speakeasies that served alcohol also had gambling and or a floor show. Singing at one of these floor shows is Julia (Blanche Sweet). But wouldn't you know it, this just happens to be the night that the place gets raided by the authorities, forcing everybody to try to flee to keep the cops from nabbing them. Julia does the same, but she is in fact nabbed by one of the cops, Tom (Tom Moore).

Despite Tom's seeming to be an honest cop, he immediately falls for Julia and basically offers to keep her from being arrested if only she'll date him. And she's so willing not to be arrested that she's OK with becoming his girlfriend. It goes farther, and the two get married with Julia quitting her job at the speakeasy. It's only then that she learns that trying to be the wife of a cop, or more importantly on a cop's salary, isn't exactly a bed of roses.

Julia was used to having the better things in life considering how well she was paid at the club. Tom wants her to be happy, and scrimps and saves to buy Julia a stylish dress from the vintage clothing store. Julia, being bored out of her mind having to stay home while her husband pulls the night shift, decides she's going to put on that dress and pay a visit to her old stomping grounds. There, she finds that her old boss has gone into business with Chris (John Miljan), who is a fairly slimy dude. Tom discovers that Julia has gone out, and it's basically going to be splitsville as Julia wants to go back to work at the club.

Worse, Chris almost immediately starts trying to put the moves on Julia himself, even though she doesn't really want it. So she basically threatens Chris with the idea that she could go back to Tom and tell Tom that she's got the goods on Chris, who is much more intertwined with the underworld than her old boss was. Chris decides that he's got to do something about Julia, so he engineers a way to get her framed for murder. But will Julia fall for it?

The Woman Racket is an interesting enough little early talkie, although people who aren't the biggest fans of movies of this vintage may find the plot a little unbelievable. That, and the movie certainly does have technical weaknesses that aren't really the film's fault. Sweet does a good job and probably should have had more of a career in talkies. The Moore brothers were already beginning to get up there in years by the time sound came in, so it's not a surprise that they didn't become big talking picture stars. Miljan would go on for the next several year to play a bunch of elegant-looking but sleazy types and had a fairly long career as a character actor.

Briefs for January 18-20, 2026

Tomorrow is Martin Luther King Day here in the States, which as always means special, if not overly exciting, programming on TCM. This year isn't quite the parade of Sidney Poitier movies we've gotten in some years, and I don't think I see even one Harry Belafonte or Dorothy Dandridge appearance. There's also at least one totally new to me film, Uptight (1:30 AM Jan. 20) which, according to TCM's page on tomorrow's programming, is a reworking of the old John Ford film The Informer set against the civil rights movement instead of the Irish independence movement. Sounds interesting enough.

A warning as always that because of how far ahead I am in putting up posts here, I sometimes have to move stuff around when the new month's TCM schedule comes out and I see movies on my DVR that are on the new schedule. The February schedule is coming out in dribs and drabs, in part because of the way 31 Days of Oscar is being programmed this year. The Oscars will be handed out on Sunday, March 15, which means that to get to 31 days and have the final day coincide with the ceremony itself, the programming would begin on February 13 and we'd have half a month each for February and March fall in 31 Days of Oscar. In any case, I keep seeing movies come up that I'm going to need to watch and schedule posts for, which means re-scheduling stuff I've already put up. And since I generally try to avoid movies with the same star or in very close genres being scheduled too close together, I may be screwing that up.

It looks like the FXM Retro block is continuing to bring some new movies out of the vault, although for the most part I've seen them and done posts on them. The Shirley Temple vehicle Curly Top was the subject of a post back in July 2019, for example, while the Laird Cregar version of The Lodger can be seen again at 7:50 AM on January 20. A search of the blog claims I haven't actually done a full-length post on this one, despite the number of times I've mentioned it in passing, so I think I'll record it and then at some point do that full-length post. I'm also pleasantly surprised that the Retro block is still going, since it's been something like 13 years and I also would have thought it might go by the wayside when Disney obtained the Fox cable channels.

There's a couple of days of tribute programming coming up at the end of January, one for Diane Keaton and another for Rob Reiner; I'll be mentioning them again when the day actually comes. With 31 Days of Oscar not showing up until the middle of February there might actually be time for TCM to schedule a tribute to Brigitte Bardot as well, although from what I've currently seen there doesn't seem to be one yet. Then again, with all those foreign films, it might take longer for TCM to nail down the rights to what they can and cannot show.

The Secret Bride

Barbara Stanwyck was the TCM Star of the month back in early 2025, and surprisingly there were some of her films that I hadn't seen before. So I recorded a couple, and I think I'm getting to the last of the films from the tribute that I recorded. The movie in question is The Secret Bride.

Now, the marriage isn't a secret to the viewer, as it happens right at the beginning of the movie. Robert Sheldon (Warren William) is the Attorney General of an unnamed state, and he's run off to get eloped to Ruth Vincent (Barbara Stanwyck) right at the beginning of the movie. Part of the reason for the elopement is that Ruth is the adult daughter of the governor. After the wedding in front of a justice of the peace, Robert calls his office to tell them he'll be back soon. Picking up the phone is Robert's secretary/assistant Hazel Normandie (Glenda Farrell). She hands the phone to Dave Breeden (Douglass Dumbrille), who is Robert's chief investigator as well as Hazel's boyfriend. Dave tells Robert he's going to pick up somebody on a tip, but can't go into details over the phone.

Cut to a bank just as it's opening up. Being let in by the security guard is Willis Martin (Grant Mitchell). Willis is making a deposit of $10,000 in cash, but it's to the personal account that's not his, as we soon learn because he's picked up by the authorities -- that tip Dave mentioned obviously is about this deposit and both who it's from, and whose account is getting it. Willis is the executive assistant to one J.F. Holdstock, a businessman who was sent to prison on fiancial fraud crimes but was pardoned by the current governor. The clear implication is that the deposit will be seen as Holdstock having bribed the governor for the pardon. Worse is that not long after this, Holdstock is found dead of a suicide, which is an implicit admission of guilt.

Now, Sheldon is loyal to the governor, and knows that the governor didn't really engage in any wrongdoing. But there's a problem, which is that marriage to the governor's daughter. If that comes out, then nobody will believe the Attorney General is acting independently. Nowadays, a special prosecutor would be appointed and people would act like the special prosecutor is independent and unbiased. But they didn't have things like that back in the day.

It gets worse when Breeden comes to see Sheldon that evening. Sheldon has brought Ruth back to his place, and Hazel is working there as well. So when Breeden comes, Hazel goes out to the courtyard to meet him. In the courtyard, Breeden gets shot and killed! Now, we know that the angle he was shot from should exonerate Hazel, never mind the fact that we've seen it. I'd have thought that Breeden was shot from far enough away that Hazel wouldn't have had time to get into the position from which the shooter took the shot. But a small handgun that Hazel had purchased is found at the scene and is determined to be the murder weapon. So for these obvious reasons she's put on trial. Ruth saw what happened, too. But, if she were to testify, it would reveal that she's married to Robert, which would likely end his and the governor's careers because of that controversy over the apparent cash-for-pardon scheme.

The Secret Bride was released in December 1934, a few months after the Production Code really took effect, so you can guess that the good guys are going to win in the end. And the Ruth Vincent and Robert Sheldon characters are never portrayed as anything less than good. Maybe they're a bit naïve in the way they're acting, but they're clearly not on the take. So that's part of the flaw that The Secret Bride has. The movie has to get to a certain end, and the way it gets there and resolves all the plot issues is a bit too convoluted for its own good.

However, if you don't pay too close attention to the plot, you'll find that The Secret Bride is a fine example of the Warner Bros. programmer as it was in the mid-1930s. It's a brisk 64 minutes, and never stops moving -- and frankly never stops being entertaining either. It moves so fast that I can easily see audiences of the day not particularly caring about the plot holes, and remains worth a watch 90 years on.

Another spiral staircase

Christopher Plummer was honored back in August as part of TCM's Summer Under the Stars, which gave me the chance to record quite a few of his movies that I hadn't seen before. Among them was a 1975 version of The Spiral Staircase. According to the TCM schedule, it's appearing on TCM again in the early hours of the morning tomorrow (Jan. 18) at 4:30 AM. (It's theoretically possible the TCM schedule has an error and this could be the more famous 1946 version, but considering the following film stars Jacqueline Bisset as does the 1975 The Spiral Staircase, I'm presuming this is no mistake.)

The movie starts with neither Bisset nor Plummer; instead we get a blind woman walking someplace with her guide dog. It's the sort of urban landscape that involves going on a pedestrian walkway that goes under a roadway. This is as always the perfect sort of place for something untoward to happen, since the place is perpetually in shadow. And, sure enough, something does happen, which is the the poor woman gets shot to death with her poor guide dog standing watch over her until the police and coroners can come.

Cut to a shot of our heroine, Helen Mallory (Jacqueline Bisset). She's seeing a doctor whom you could be forgiven for thinking is also her husband. But she's really seeing him because she's lost her ability to speak for psychological reasons that are continually hinted at later in the film through vision-like flashbacks: she survived a house fire in which a little girl, presumably her daughter, died, with Mom unable to help her. But the big reason this and the opening scene murder fit together is that the murder is the latest in a series of murders that all have one thing in common. The murder victims all suffered from one disability or another. Being a mute (although not a deaf-mute; Helen can still hear just fine) is a disability too, so perhaps Helen should get out of the city for a while.

Thankfully, Helen's grandmother, Mrs. Sherman (Mildred Dunnock), lives out in a suitable big house in the middle of nowhere that's theoretically a wonderfully safe place to be but in a movie like this is bound to be a bigger danger to Helen than staying in the city would have been. Grandma Sherman uses a wheelchair as she's got diabetes, and lives in the house with some servants as well as her son, the respected psychologist Dr. Joseph Sherman (Christopher Sherman). Also in the house is another son, Steven (John Phillip Law), who seemingly just got out of the military and, now back with his family, is carrying on an affair with his brother's secretary Blanche.

Helen gets to the house just before a big rainstorm is about to hit, which is a big plot point because the house is isolated enough that power outages are not infrequent. Indeed, they happen often enough that the house has a generator, but just rarely enough that the generator doesn't get used enough to be checked as frequently as it should be. The manor also has a couple of outbuildings, and a strange man who may or may not be the unseen murderer from the opening scene is found in one of them. However, we learn quickly enough that he wasn't the murderer, as he himself gets bumped off. And, as you might guess, this spells danger for Helen as it's not going to be the last killing in the story.

It's been quite a few years since I've seen the 1940s version of The Spiral Staircase, so I can't quite come up with a good list of the ways in which the plots of the two movies differ. This 1970s version feels a bit convoluted, which I'm guessing is based on the fact that it had a fairly small budget without being part of the studio era where lower budgets could be covered by regular studio overhead. As a result, this remake is always a bit of a mess. It tries hard, but at times comes across as though it's trying too hard. You can see why the cast would want to make a newer version of The Spiral Staircase, but ultimately it feels like less than the sum of its parts.

George C. Scott does one of those edgy 60s comedies

The 1960s saw Hollywood make a lot of comedies dealing more or less with sexual mores. Some of them seemed to be trying to appeal to the younger generation with the inclusion of new young names, while others just seemed to be established actors making something that felt new to Hollywood. An example of the latter, to me, would be Not With My Wife, You Dont!.

The movie starts off with the sort of animated sequence you might think of in a subversive Frank Tashlin movie of the 1950s, with the green-eyed monster of jealousy introducing various forms of animal jealousy, until the scene shifts to the main action of the story. Tom Ferris (Tony Curtis) is a colonel in the United States Air Force, currently serving as adjutant to General Parker (Carroll O'Connor). Parker is coming to London for a conference, and it's Col. Ferris' job to do all the advance legwork. At the meeting at the US Embassy, whom does Col. Ferris see but Col. Tank Martin (George C. Scott). It turns out that the two had a past together. And then that night at the ball for all the bigwigs, Col. Ferris and his wife Julietta (Virna Lisi) kind of get into it, which isn't exactly the best thing. But it turns out that Martin's presence is part of what's wrong.

This gives us the obligatory flashback, which tells us how Col. Ferris met Julietta quite a few years back in Korea. Julietta was serving as a nurse for the Italian Army, and she, Ferris, and Martin all meet together one night at the base watering hole, where the two men compete for the affections of Julietta since she's so pretty. Eventually, there's a big fight between the Americans and some Australians, and it's Ferris who winds up with Julietta. This extends to when Ferris is shot down and winds up in hospital where Julietta, being a nurse, tends to him, while Ferris tries to keep Martin from seeing her. Apparently their friendly rivalry is no holds barred. It extends to Ferris lying to her when Martin gets shot down as well and is at first presumed lost; Ferris destroys the telex revealing that Martin is in fact alive so that Julietta won't find out.

With that in mind, Martin sets about pursuing Julietta again once she sees that he hasn't died. And she might seem a bit receptive, in part because Ferris seems much more focused on his career than on his marriage. He's got a little black book that he uses to keep all the information on just what Gen. Parker wants, and there doesn't seem to be anything in it for a woman like his wife. So Martin convinces Gen. Parker to have Ferris transferred to "survival training" in Labrador, giving Martin a chance to start putting the moves on Julietta. Ferris discovers the ruse, but is he going to be able to get back to Julietta in time?

To be honest, this wasn't my favorite movie. The more I see 1960s comedies, the more I'm finding that there's a lot here that's not my favorite genre as a whole. A lot of them feel like they haven't aged very well. I've kind of talked about that regarding what I've referred to as the "generation gap" movie, which is the sort of movie I had in mind when I mentioned the movies movies with new stars in the introduction to this post. The cast here all try, and I think they do the best they can with the material they're given. But the material isn't the best. It's not anywhere near as bad as some of the comedies of this era (see Doctor, You've Got to Be Kidding for one particularly dire example). But it's certainly not one of my favorites.

Kansas City Bomber

Now that we're well into the NFL playoffs, I thought about how football was always a big subject for Hollywood movies back in the day. Some other sports for various reasons garnered much less interest. One such niche sport would be roller derby, which was the subject of the early 1970s movie Kansas City Bomber.

Raquel Welch stars as K.C. Carr, and as the movie opens she's the star player for the Kansas City Bombers of the roller league. However, the sport seems rather more like pro wrestling in that, while it has specific rules and objectives for scoring, the matches as presented in the arenas are more about the ancillary entertainment, mock violence, and drama between characters on various teams. That, and the sport has lost enough popularity that the arenas where it plays look rather seedy. The current match culminates in a dispute between Carr and a teammate who challenges her to the roller derby equivalent of a duel: a five-lap race in which the loser has to leave Kansas City "forever".

Carr surprisingly loses, considering that it's her looks that would make her a star in a league like this compared to the other skaters. But then, a lot of this stuff is choreographed; besides, it's a blessing in disguise for Carr, who is immediately picked up by the Portland Loggers. They're owned by Burt Henry (Kevin McCarthy), who is a big thing in the league, and is even working on getting a new franchise set up in Chicago. Also, it will allow K.C. to be closer to her two kids (one of them played by a very young Jodie Foster, who are currently living with K.C.'s mom.

But K.C.'s being on a new team isn't exactly a bed of roses. She doesn't have a place to stay so winds up rooming with Lovey, a nice player who eventually gets traded and thinks K.C. might have had something to do with it. K.C. might not have, but then Mr. Henry is obviously trying to pursue her romantically. Also, some of the other players start showing their resentment of the attention K.C. is getting much more openly. Jackie (Helena Kallianiotes), who is probably nearing the end of her career and looking like it, has taken to drinking, even hiding a flask of liquor in one of her skates. There's also "Horrible" Hank, who is one of the male enforcers during the men's rounds of the league. (As I understand it, in real roller derby the teams have both men and women, but the rounds are not mixed-sex.) He too is nearing the end of the line, and confides in K.C. while developing an interest in her that piques Mr. Henry's jealousy.

Eventually, the rivalry between K.C. and Jackie heats up to the point that they too are going to have the sort of duel that we saw at the beginning. Mr. Henry engineers this with the idea that K.C. should lose again, so that he can take her with him to Chicago and make her the big star of the new Chicago team as well as the league as a whole. K.C., for her part, is beginning to see through Mr. Henry....

I was somewhat surprised when I read up on Kansas City Bomber to find that it got a fair number of positive reviews. I can see where the screenwriter was coming from, considering movies on a similar theme like Easy Living regarding football. But the screenplay apparently got edited quite a lot into what we see here, and what we see here doesn't really work, being dull and slow between the action scenes. And frankly, a pro wrestling version of roller derby doesn't work for me anyway. Welch apparently like her work here, and I agree that it gave her a chance to expand her range. And she's not what's wrong with the movie. But that doesn't make Kansas City Bomber good.

I'm Still Alive

I've mentioned on a bunch of occasions how I feel Warner Bros. had the best B movies. MGM always had great production values, although often times that the opposite of what the B movies needed. And then there's RKO, whose B movies mostly feel a decided step down. One RKO B movie that's surprisingly good, however, is I'm Still Alive.

Kent Taylor stars as Steve Bennett. He's the sort of adventurer pilot who, needing to settle down if only a bit, has become a stunt pilot for Hollywood movies. It's a small community where he and other pilots like his best friend Red (Howard Da Silva) all spend their nights at the same bar. It's also a physically demanding job, so after his latest stunt, he just wants to lie down and rest in his room where the production is doing location shooting. However, that production's star, Laura Marley (Linda Hayes) is quite the diva, and gets in a heated argument with the director that disturbs Steve to no end.

Worse, when Steve confronts Laura, Laura's dog runs out and into the back seat of Red's car, so when Red and Steve drive off they unintentionally dognap the dog until the police come looking for the dog, which might get Steve in legal hot water. Laura would also like a personal apology, so Steve goes over to her Hollywood mansion to give her the smallest legally acceptable apology alogn with a piece of his mind. And then in a bizarre plot twist, it turns out that Laura has given her cook the night off and wants pancakes. She's utterly unable to make pancakes, while Steve knows just how to do it.

It's the start of a beautiful relationship that lasts until the two decide to get married. At this point there's a bit of a problem. Laura is the bread-winner in the relationship, but is also worried about Steve's safety when it comes time to do another stunt, to the point that she hopes he can find some other sort of work. (Even though she knew what she was marrying into, her behavior is plausible and you can hope that Steve will eventually age out of stunt work in favor of something like stunt coordination without actually doing the dangerous stuff himself.) Steve, being in love with Laura, sincerely tries to get "honest" work but isn't quite successful at it. Laura tries to get Steve a job as an actor, but he's not cut out for it. When another stuntman has a stunt that would be up Steve's alley, Steve offers to do it but is turned down. That other stuntman dies in the stunt.

Here, however, the movie turns a bit nuts as Steve responds to all this by leaving Laura behind in Hollywood and going all over the country doing aerial stunts for the carnival crowd. Laura still loves Steve and wants him to come back to Hollywood, but is she going to be able to get him to come back? And if so, what sort of agreement are the two going to come to in order to be able to have some sort of happy life?

Despite the bizarre plot turn, I'm Still Alive is surprisingly good for an RKO B movie, and definitely one worth looking out for the next time it shows up on TCM. One other interesting thing worth mentioning is that silent film director Fred Niblo has a cameo as the director of one of the movies Steve works on. So while there's a reason I'm Still Alive would only be known by die-hard fans of any of the film's stars or of movies about aviation, it's one that's not without its charms.

The Commitments

TCM's spotlight on the working class continues this week with a movie that came out when I was a sophomore in a small college town and never got to see on its original release. That movie is The Commitments, airing overnight tonight or early tomorrow (Jan. 14) morning at 1:45 AM. (Note that for those of you on the west coast if you have TCM's east coast feed, this will still be the evening of Jan. 13.)

Barrytown is a working class district in Dublin, Ireland, and at the time of the movie's filming and setting in 1990 Ireland was a relatively poor backwater, this being the days before the Celtic Tiger. If Ireland as a whole was poor, Barrytown is even poorer, and a bleak, gray cityscape with a mix of crappy old-build row houses and decaying public housing. Living there is Jimmy Rabbitte (Robert Arkins), a young man who's been on the dole for months but has a thing for American soul music of the 1960s and dreams of being interviewed by the great media personalities of the British Isles. He lives with a father (Colm Meaney, one of the few people here who was a name outside of Ireland thanks to his role on Star Trek: The Next Generation) who is an Elvis fan, mother, and kid siblings.

Jimmy takes out an ad in a local newspaper about wanting to put together a band to play soul music, looking for musicians to audition for the combo. In a sequence that's typical for this sort of movie, we get a comic scene of people auditioning for the band who are not at all the sort of musician Jimmy wants. Or, even worse, people show up thinking the ad is a ruse and that it's really code for something else like a place to get illicit drugs. Eventually, Jimmy gets most of a band together (the band members are mostly played by musicians completely unknown to me and not really professional actors), with the exception of a trumpeter. Showing up on a moped to audition is the much older Joey Fagan (Johnny Murphy), who has all sorts of claims about having worked with various famous names in soul back in the day as a session musician, only quitting to look after an ailing mother.

The band rehearses and goes into debt to get extra instruments, and eventually gets its first gig at a local Catholic parish hall that's holding a rally against illegal drugs. The gig goes well enough at first, although in a bit of humor again the amp blows sending one of the members to the emergency room. But the band starts to get more gigs, and eventually playing gigs. But as the band begins to get more known around town, the various members' egos begin to grow, with all sorts of conflicts between various members since it's to be expected in a 12-member band that they're not all going to be a dozen best friends.

Matters come to a head when the band's lead vocalist, Deco Cuffe, mentions that he's got an offer for a contract with a label, although it's not for the band as a whole. Also, Joey Fagan's stories lead him to say that he knew Wilson Pickett, who is on tour with a stop in Dublin. Perhaps he might be able to get Pickett to jam with the band. Surely everybody else has to be thinking that this is BS, but then they're desperate enough for success that they seem willing to go along with it.

The Commitments is, in some ways, an extremely formulaic movie, at least in the sense that it's got a lot of the tropes of movies about commercial musicians and you can probably guess mostly where the movie is going to end up, especially if you remember the old Bryan Adams song "Summer of '69". And yet the movie became a sleeper hit upon original release, and has a reputation of a bit of a cult classic today because of what the movie represents for the people of working class Ireland. Having watched it, it's easy to see why. Despite the plot, The Commitments tells a familiar story in an extremely entertaining way, combined with some pretty darn good musicianship. The singer playing Deco was only 17 at the time of filming, but then there were some surprisingly young white soul singers back in the 60s too. If you've heard the Box Tops' song "The Letter", lead singer Alex Chilton was a teenager. Over in the UK, Steve Winwood had just turned 18 when he recorded "Gimme Some Lovin'" with the Spencer Davis Group.

The Commitments is charming, and one that's absolutely worth watching if you haven't seen it before.

Shelley Fabares is nowhere to be found

I'm getting near to the end of writing up reviews of the movies I recorded when George Raft was TCM's Star of the Month back at the beginning of 2025. This time, it's a film from the beginning of his descent into the realm of B movies: Johnny Angel. It will be on TCM tomorrow, January 13, at 11:30 AM.

Raft actually does play a character named Johnny Angel, and that seems to be the character's real name. Johnny is in the merchant marine, captaining a ship for the Gunderson Line run my George Gustafson (Marvin Miller) out of New Orleans during World War II. Johnny's boat plies the Gulf of Mexico, and as the film opens he and his crew spot another ship that appears to be adrift in the fog. Johnny boards it and finds that it was the ship that his father, also a ship's captain for the Gustafson Line, captained, except that there's nobody left on board, which is an obvious mystery.

Johnny tows his father's boat back to New Orleans, where we find that the shipping line isn't in as good shape as one might have hoped for. George is the latest in a line of Gustafsons, but he's got a wife Lilah (Claire Trevor) who seems to have married him for his money. The fact that Lilah used to be in a relationship with Johhny complicates matters. That, and a secretary Miss Drumm (Margaret Wycherly) who was George's governess back in the day and still seems to have a lot of influence. None of the three have any clue about what might have happened to Johnny's dad; worse, they don't much seem to care.

So Johnny goes back about his father's ship, which is where he finds a woman's shoe and a newspaper that looks like it was printed back in France. So with the help of cabbie Celestial (Hoagy Carmichael), Johnny goes looking for anybody who might have knowledge about a French woman who would likely be new to New Orleans. The fact that there's a war on would at least explain why such a woman would be seeking illicit passage aboard a cargo ship like the ones the Angel father and son captained.

Johnny and Celestial go to the various clubs and other spots where someone new in town might go to look for a cheap place to sleep and get a starter job, so you know they're eventually going to find a woman who might just be the one who was aboard Dad's boat. They do indeed find such a woman, Paulette (Signe Hasso), and she has a story to tell that would be incredibly improbable in real life, but par for the course in a Hollywood movie. Apparently she and her father were transporting Free French gold across the Atlantic for safekeeping, when some people who somehow learned of this come aboard the boat, killing everyone but Paulette who was able to hide or something. (Why there was no blood on the boat is a good question.) So Paulette is out to find that gold, and the people who took it. Johnny, for his part, is willing to help Paulette. But Mr. Gustafson puts a crimp in those plans. Is he in on the heist, or just stupid?

For me, the problem with Johnny Angel is that it had a plot that was too complex for its own good, especially in a B movie like this. George Raft is also not exactly the most charismatic romantic leading man out there. Still, everybody tries, and the movie is not uninteresting if at the same time not particularly great. Johnny Angel is enjoyable enough for a rainy day, but once again it's one of those movies where there are good reasons why it's not very well remembered 80 years on.

Up the Sandbox

I am not the biggest fan of Barbra Streisand by any means, although I'm willing to give all sorts of different movies a try. So, when TCM showed the movie Up the Sandbox, I decided to record it because the one-sentence description they used sounded interesting enough.

Streisand plays Margaret Reynolds, a mother of two young children living in a Manhattan apartment with her husband Paul (David Selby), who is a history professor at Columbia University. It seems like a happy enough marriage although Margaret also has to do a lot of work with two little ones. Worse, she has a doctor's appointment the next day, and the doctor informs her that she is pregnant with child #3. (Presumably she knew she had missed her period, although I think Hollywood films still weren't really talking about pregnancy that openly in 1972.)

Margaret leaves the doctor's office and goes to her husband's office to tell him the news, only to find that he's talking to another professor, but this one being a female professor. So after Margaret leaves the office without having told Paul about the doctor's appointment because this isn't something you reveal first to strangers, she confronts the other professor: are you and my husband having an affair? And the other professor says, of course we are.

Or maybe that's all in Margaret's mind. On her way home, she stops off at what seems like a public lecture, where a man who is clearly supposed to be Fidel Castro is giving a speech on the state of women in revolutionary societies as opposed to bourgeois capitalist societies. Margaret disagrees with Castro, with the result that the two wind up in a hotel room together where Castro reveals that he is in fact a woman, and a lesbian to boot, who is more than willing to have sex with Margaret.

OK, that's clearly in Margaret's mind, although the film doesn't tell us this directly. Indeed, the film never directly tells us which stuff is in Margaret's mind and which isn't even though it's often obvious as Margaret doesn't suffer the consequences that would befall her if the daydreams were real. Nobody else knows about the fantasies, which include teaming up with a bunch of black revolutionaries to try to bomb the Statue of Liberty; more mundanely telling off her parents; and visiting the Masai with one of Paul's fellow professors (played by Paul Benedict) to learn about their allegedly painless form of childbirth. In and around having these fantasies, Margaret is finding herself decidedly less satisfied with her life as a housewife.

I can see why Barbra Streisand would want to make a movie like Up the Sandbox, although I can also see why the movie was a box office flop. The fantasy sequences are fairly clearly supposed to be comedic, while the rest of Margaret's regular life is more of a straightforward drama. However, the movie never really meshes the two sets of scenes together, with the result that the movie is tonally very uneven in a way that doesn't work to the movie's benefit at all. This is in contrast to a Streisand movie like For Pete's Sake which for me worked because of the absurdity.

However, a lot of Streisand's fans like Up the Sandbox for reasons I can understand. I just didn't like it as much as they did.

Downhill Racer

One of the movies that I recorded during the TCM programming salue to Robert Redford because I hadn't seen it before was Downhill Racer. It's getting its next TCM airing tonight at 8:00 PM, so I watched it to be able to do the obligatory review on it.

As you might be able to surmise from the title, the movie is set in the world of ski racing, notably downhill as opposed to the tight turns of slalom. So we get a lot of scenes of resort towns in the European Alps, as well as footage of people racing. In the opening racing scene, a member of the US ski team breaks a leg and has to be operated on, watched by team coach Eugene Claire (Gene Hackman). The US team has a spot open, and invited to compete is David Chappellet (Robert Redford).

Chappellet being new to the team, he doesn't quite get the politics that go along with making one's way up the ladder. He doesn't have any sort of performance history, so he gets a start time that implies he'll have to deal with a rutted course which will make him go slower. So, rather stupidly, he says no, I'm not going to race this time until you give me a better number. The next time, he moves up from1 starting about 88 to starting about 77, but puts forth an oustanding effort to take fourth place overall. And he still complains about his starting position, this time not just to coach Claire.

After the season is over, Chappellet returns stateside partly for summer training, and partly for a chance to visit his father in Colorado. The two of them have a frosty relationship, with Dad not understanding why his son likes to compete, especially in a world of strictly amateur sports where there's a question of how the heck one is going to make a living. It's not an unreasonable concern.

In any case, Chappellet and the rest of the team go back to Europe, where Chappellet proves himself to be a real contender, albeit one who takes a lot of risks. Perhaps too many for the coaches, who are consistently in conflict with him. At the same time, one of the leading European ski equipment manufacturers, Machet, is willing to underwrite Chappellet with equipment. Machet has a young, pretty secretary named Carole (Camilla Sparv), and she and Chappellet start an on-again, off-again relationship as everybody goes around Europe in the run-up to the Olympics. Will Chappellet finally be able to best the Austrian and French powerhouses?

To be honest, Downhill Racer is as much a character study of the Chappellet character as it is a narrative about the competition. The competition part is nicer for the scenery than it is for the story part, which is unoriginal. The après-ski parts are I suppose not particularly more original than in any other sports movie, but they're well-enough acted and pretty to look at. Ultimately, Downhill Racer is as much time capsule as it is sports movie, but it's an interesting one that's worth a watch.

Men of the Fighting Lady

There are a pair of movies on the TCM schedule for tomorrow, January 10 that were on my DVR. Thankfully, one of them is in prime time, so I feel more comfortable putting the post for it up tomorrow morning. The first of the two movies is Men of the Fighting Lady, which you can see tomorrow at 5:00 PM.

The opening credits suggest that this is based on two stories, one true and the other one by James Michener. Because of this, to make the movie a bit more accessible, Michener has been turned into a sort of expository character, although Michener is sadly not playing himself. Instead, Michener is played by Louis Calhern. As the movie opens, he's being sent onto the USS Oriskany, an aircraft carrier fighting the Korean War toward the end of the war (the movie itself wasn't released until 1954, after the war had ended). There, he meets ship's doctor Kent Dowling (Walter Pidgeon), who has a story of a "Christmas Miracle" to tell Michener....

This being an aircraft carrier, the job of the men is to run bombing missions over North Korea. The main group among the men are Lt. Thayer (Van Johnson), a sort of second-in-command; Lt. Cmdr. Dodson (Keenan Wynn); and young Ens. Schechter (Dewey Martin). Actually coming up with the missions and flying along with the men is Lt. Cmdr. Grayson (Frank Lovejoy). Their mission is more or less the same one every day, which is to bomb a particular North Korean railhead. The reason it's the same railhead over and over is the no matter what the Americans do, the North Koreans and their allies seem to be able to repair the damage overnight.

One effect of this is that Grayson decides that the way to make the bombs more accurate is to drop them from a lower height. This increases the danger both in having to avoid mountains, but more importantly in being closer to the anti-aircraft positions. Indeed, the climax of the movie is going to come when Schechter gets hit, although before him Grayson also gets shot. In Grayson's case, he's able to fly the plane back out to the ocean, where he has to eject and be rescued -- quickly, because otherwise he's going to succumb to hypothermia what with the water temperature being only a few degrees above freezing.

There's quite a bit of stock footage here, both of the bombing raids over Korea as well as planes taking off and landing on the deck of the aircraft carrier. Those take-offs and landings are dangerous as well, and that's going to become a plot point in the movie along with planes getting shot down. The "Christmas miracle" involves Ens. Schechter, and his attempt to get back to the ship after his plane is shot.

Men of the Fighting Lady was apparently successful at the box office and garnered reasonably good reviews. These surprise me somewhat, as I wouldn't have thought a Korean War movie would be something to the public's taste in 1954. This wasn't quite the "good war" that World War II was. Also, Men of the Fighting Lady is little more than a programmer, padded out with that stock footage. It's not that Men of the Fighting Lady is a bad movie; it's more that it came across to me as pedestrian. Competently made, and the sort of thing that had it been made during and about World War II would have been seen as a morale-booster for the homefront before the following week's picture, but nothing more.

Love Story meets Barefoot in the Park meets the 1920s

Richard Chamberlain died last year and TCM eventually got around to running a night of his movies as a tribute. One that I hadn't seen before was Joy in the Morning, so as always I recorded it in order to be able to watch it later and do the obligatory post on it. Having finally seen it, I can now write up that post.

The movie starts off with a pre-credits sequence, set against a backdrop of the radio broadcast of the Gene Tunney/Jack Dempsey title fight, which places things around 1927. Carl Brown (Richard Chamberlain) is making out with his girlfriend Annie McGairy (Yvette Mimieux) beneath the stairs of one of those old New York tenement buildings. This is the sort of thing that's scandalous if they get caught, and on top of that, Annie has an unseen stepfather who treats her badly, so Annie decides to run off and elope with Carl.

Carl is a law student at one of those smaller schools that certainly populated movies of a previous era. For college students of the 1920s to be married was just as scandalous as making out under the staircase, so Carl takes a job as a caretaker at the school to help defray expenses, with he and Annie living in a caretaker's cottage on campus. But the dean of the school, Dean Darwent (Sidney Blackmer), isn't so sure Carl can make things work. And besides, one of the student loan programs they have set up isn't for married students, which puts a crimp in the Browns' finances. Things get much worse when Dad (Arthur Kennedy) finds out not only about the marriage, but to whom Carl has gotten married. Apparently the Browns and McGairys had a history back in the old country, so when Dad learns what his son is doing, he withdraws his financial support. Carl's mother also writes a nasty letter about what type of woman she thinks Annie is.

To help further defray expenses, Annie gets a job doing babysitting work for single mother Mrs. Karter (Joan Tetzel), who is carrying on with a much older married man Mr. Pulaski (Oscar Homolka), one more thing that's scandalous. But Pulaski's Christmas present to the young married couple is to offer Carl a job as night watchman, although he's going to have to sleep away from Annie, which puts a further strain on the marriage. Annie seeks companionship with the local florist, who fortunately for the marriage is gay and has no designs on Annie. But being gay in the 1920s was also scandalous, and all the busybodies in town learn of a life for the married couple that's not quite conventional in a way that the busybodies think they should be able to gossip about.

Finally, Annie gets pregnant, which ought to be perfectly respectable considering that she's married, and there's no suggestion that anybody other than Carl is the father. It's just that he's got so much financial difficulty, and there's the possibility that he might flunk out of law school, that could push the marriage over the edge.

Joy in the Morning is one of those 1960s melodramas that the producers at the time probably thought was mildly daring as it pushed the limits of the Production Code. In retrospect, however, it's just one of those movies that's funny when it isn't supposed to be. It's turgid, trying to shoehorn a whole bunch of social issues into the plot, while at the same time laughably acted by the two leads. And the music (by Bernard Herrmann, with a bad MOR title song sung by Chamberlain) totally doesn't fit the movie. Joy in the Morning turns out to be a howler, with that badness possibly being the only real reason to watch.

Rozmarné léto

I'm still trying to get through the backlog of foreign films I've got on my DVR, although I have a feeling a reasonable number of them are going to expire before I get around to watching them or writing up the reviews. Once again, with that in mind, I watched a Czech film, not having done a review on a Czech film in a while: Capricious Summer.

It's early summer in a small village in southern Moravia. The village had some sort of riverside resort that people used to come to back in the day, before the war and then the Communist takeover. So now there's still a lake, a dock for swimmers to climb into the water, and a changing area, but not all that much else. A group of middle-aged men who are locals spend their days idling their time away there, to the point that you might wonder how any of them live. Except that it turns out that one, Roch, is the local parish priest; Hugo is a retired army major; and the third, Antonín, runs the place if you will with his wife Kateřina. But for the most part all they do is swim and talk.

That is, until the village is shaken up a bit by a traveling circus. Or, more precisely, a one-wagon circus act of Arnoštek (director Jiří Menzel doing some acting here) who is part magician, part tightrope walker and his assistant Anna. Arnoštek does tricks on the high wire in exchange for donations from the people, taken by Anna. I suppose for one night seeing the tightrope walker might be interesting in this sort of small village that doesn't get much of interest coming to it any more, but the wagon stays for more than one night. And in any case, Anna is more interesting than Arnoštek because she's actually good-looking.

Somehow Anna winds up in the river, and Antonín rescues her. He's already been revealed to have a past with women and that he basically drove every other man away from Kateřina, leading to an unhappy marriage. With that in mind, it's unsurprising that Antonín winds up sleeping with Anna, but also getting caught by Kateřina.

The circus act stays in the village a few more days, at least until some old man gets fed up with it and tries to warn Arnoštek about the danger of being up on the high wire. And if Arnoštek won't listen, then the old guy will make him listen by sabotaging the act. In any case, the act being in the village for multiple days gives each of the other two men the chance to spend a little time with Anna, even if this is going to cause problems for each of them too.

Capricious Summer is the movie Jiří Menzel made following Closely Watched Trains, a movie that I think I stated before that I don't find as good as a lot of other people do. I have similar issues with Capricious Summer, although at least in this case it's due in part to the story really being as meandering as the river that brings the men together. The color cinematography of a backwater (and, thanks to Communist misrule, decrepit) Czech village is nice to look at, but it doesn't really save a mediocre story. Still, as always, watch and judge for yourself.

Let's remake Three on a Match and subject it to the Production Code!

Quite some time back, I saw TCM running the 1938 movie Broadway Musketeers, with the brief synopsis on the TCM schedule making it sound suspiciously like the early Bette Davis film Three on a Match. Intrigued, I recorded the movie so that I could get around to watching it and see what it was really like.

The opening didn't seem like what I'd remembered from Three on a Match. Isabel Dowling (Margaret Lindsay) is a bored rich housewife married to businessman Stanley (John Litel) and with a child Judy. One night they come home from a party with Isabel mildly worried about Stanley's having to go away on business all the time, and talking to his client's wife; you can guess what Isabel thinks that means. Stanley suggests Isabel and the kid accompany him on his next business trip to the west coast. Isabel, still bored, turns on the radio....

The scene cuts to singer Fay Reynolds (Ann Sheridan) singing the same song that Isabel was listening to on the radio. Fay is a well-known burlesque singer. Well enough known, in fact, that a couple of plainclothes cops are in the audience waiting for Fay to do something obscene enough for them to be able to arrest her. Now, since this is a movie made after the Production Code started getting enforced, that's not a whole lot. Fay takes off her wrap to reveal what looks about as revealing as the top half of a bikini, although it matches the wrap in having rhinestones. Still, it's enough, and Fay winds up in jail on $300 bail.

Showing up to try to bail Fay out is Miss Connie Todd (Marie Wilson), who is a respectable secretary, although not exactly earning a lot of money. Certainly not enough to bail Fay out. But Isabel does, and she also shows up, pleasantly surprised to meet Miss Todd. As it turns out, the three women all know each other, because they grew up together in an orphanage. The go back to take a look at the old place before celebrating at a restaurant they did when they were young. At this point, the movie really does begin to sound more like Three on a Match.

The similarity is going to get a whole lot more obvious by the climax. Stanley goes off on that business trip and Fay invited Isabel and Connie to see her circle of friends. At one of these swell parties, professional gambler Phil Peyton (Richard Bond) shows up, and he and Isabel become a bit of an item, which is a problem since Isabel is already married. The two get in a car crash together, and Fay tries to repay Isabel's favor by suggesting to Stanley that Phil is really her boyfriend, not Isabel's. Stanley knows better and divorces Isabel, while constantly meeting Fay and eventually marrying her.

Isabel gets a large divorce settlment and marries Phil, who promptly proceeds to lose the settlment money gambling, and then writing bad checks, which gets him in trouble with the casino owner. Now, if you've seen the movie Three on a Match, you know that Isabel is going to get involved with the trouble, although not by choice....

Three on a Match is a great pre-Code, and unfortunately the sort of movie that you can't really do under Production Code strictures. As Broadway Musketeers shows, you can certainly try, and I suppose Warner Bros. was saving a bit of money by remaking a property they owned, but you're not going to be able to make a movie that sparkles like the original. Broadway Musketeers isn't terrible (although it should be pointed out that the movie isn't even about Broadway, either), but definitely watch the original instead. It's so much fun.

Let's give Waterloo Bridge a happy ending!

I've mentioned on quite a few occasions how I generally find the B-movie/programmers that MGM made in the 1950s to be a lot more interesting than the Freed Unit musicals, although I think I'd extend that to more of the lush color productions that MGM was making even if they weren't musicals. Recently, I watched Gaby, and couldn't help having those thoughts about the difference in quality between the top tier and the little movies.

Unfortunately, the print that TCM ran had the opening credits both letterboxed and pillarboxed, which was a warning sign that at some point, the print would move to being panned and scanned, which would certainly give Sydney Pollack the heebie-jeebies up in heaven. Sure enough, once the credits end the print zooms in by becoming just pillarboxed. Another title informs us it's London, 1944, which of course means World War II, and in this case still before D-Day. Gregory Wendell (John Kerr) is in London with a couple of his army buddies, so they go in to the London equivalent of the USO asking questions about where they can find girls. Not that they're going to get to spend time along with young women which is what they really want, but at least they can have a dance.

On his way to the dance hall with his buddies, Gregory accidentally runs into Gaby (Leslie Caron), a ballet dancer who escaped the Nazi invasion of France and lives with her fellow dancer Elsa (Taina Elg). In the collision, Gaby drops a bunch of coins that are part of her meager budget. When Gregory helps pick them up, Gaby accidentally winds up with some of Gregory's US quarters, which is a substantial extra bit of money that she can't take. Gregory was immediately taken by Gaby's looks, so he decided to spend the evening by himself, going to the ballet just to watch Gaby. She sees him so invites him backstage to give him back his money. They spend the evening together, at the end of which Gregory proposes marriage.

However, there are all sorts of sensible obstacles to delay such a marriage. Gregory has to prove he's not married, is supposed to get references from his family, and needs his commanding officer's approval as well. All of this is going to take time, although at least Gregory as an aunt and uncle (Cedric Hardwicke and Margalo Gillmore) living in London who are both extremely nice to Gaby when they meet her. But before the young couple can get the necessary approvals, June 6 comes, with Gregory among the many Americans taking part in the D-Day invasion.

Gaby visits Gregory's aunt, only to discover that the aunt is the bearer of bad news that Gregory was killed in action in Normandy. It's going to turn out this was a mistake in that Gregory was wounded and had to hide with a French family who gave up his dog tags so that the Nazis if they found Gregory would find him without any American identification. But the same evening Gaby learns of Gregory's "death", she finds a Free Polish airman who is shaking at the French version of the USO. So she helps him in a way that clearly implies the two have sex.

But Gaby is even more of a Code-affected movie than the 1940 version of Waterloo Bridge, so it's even more circumspect about Gaby's alleged transition to prostitution. Frankly, this is a huge mistake on the part of the movie, as it makes Gaby's guilt seem non-sensical. Not only that, but Gregory's reaction when Gaby reveals the truth to him is laughable as well, as is the abrupt happy ending that follows. Jeanne Eagles in The Letter this isn't. But then MGM couldn't have Leslie Caron be the bad girl, could they?

I have a feeling that Gaby would at least look better in the full Cinemascope aspect ratio. Leslie Caron is still beautiful here. But the story is just too watered down to be a true classic.

How many in favor

Next up on the list of movies that I recorded off of TCM because it had an interesting synopsis is 5 Against the House. Recently, I finally got around to watching it; as always, that means you're getting a review of it written here and scheduled for some time in the future after I've written this.

A group of Korean War veteran friends, who are now studying law at a law school in the midwest thanks to the GI Bill, have decided to take a trip out to Nevada for a weekend or so -- the exact amount of time isn't quite made clear and I'd guess it's an end-of-summer trip before the next semester begins -- to do a bit of gambling. They have a bit of fun although, since they're at a casino, one of them, Ronnie (Kerwin Matthews), runs out of money and needs to cash a check at the cashier's. Unfortunately, they approach the cashier just at the same time somebody else is trying robbing it, getting Ronnie and his friends Roy (Alvy Moore), Al (Guy Madison), and Brick (Brian Keith) in a bit of hot water before they can prove they weren't involved with the robbers.

However, this gives Ronnie an idiotic idea. He starts coming up with an idea for the "perfect crime", a way to rob the casino nobody at the casino thinks is possible because they have such good security. And, like Walter Pidgeon at the start of Man Hunt, he's going to go back to Reno just so he can show everybody the proof of concept. However, the plan that he comes up with is not one that he can carry out by himself. He'd need some accomplices, and you can just guess who those accomplices are going to be.

At this point, we start learning a bit more about the group of friends. Ronnie comes from a well-to-do family of the sort that expect their son to go to law school. So in any case he wouldn't need the sort of money that comes from holding up a casino. Al, for his part, has been pursuing a woman while in law school. That woman, Kay (Kim Novak), is a nightclub singer, which seems like rather an odd person for a law student to be chasing after, but there you are. Al is definitely the one person who wouldn't want to take part in such a charade, especially after he finally convinces Kay to marry him.

But then there's Brick. Brick saved Al's life over in Korea, which is part of why Al is such good friends with Brick and trying to help him through law school although he's not really suited for it. Worse, Brick's experiences in Korea left him with a nasty case of PTSD for which he spent some time in an Army hospital after getting back from Korea. Al thinks that perhaps Brick could benefit from going back into the hospital and getting more psychiatric treatment, but Brick wants none of that. If anthing, he's become the movie trope of the sociopathic criminal. So when he learns of Ronnie's idea, he takes to it. Worse, he plans to go through with the plot for real and not just Ronnie's idea of proof of concept. And he'll use force to get Al and Kay to take part in the heist as well. So it's a very tense group of friends who make their way to Reno to try to rob a casino....

The idea behind 5 Against the House is quite good, but again, it's another of those movies where it's fairly easy to see why it's not so well remembered today. In addition to a cast of B actors and one A actress, the movie suffers a bit from having a pretty far-fetched plot in that it's not the sort of thing that could possibly work in real life. The cast does a good job with the material and certainly makes it worth watching even if the whole ides sems unrealistic.

Captain Sindbad

Pedro Armendáriz was one of the people honored in TCM's Summer Under the Stars back in August 2025, which gave me the chance to record several movies I hadn't seen before. One of those movies is coming up on TCM again, so as is always the case I watched it in order to be able to do a post on it in conjunction with the upcoming airing. That movie is Captain Sindbad, which TCM is showing tomorrow (Jan. 4) at 8:30 AM.

As you might guess from a movie about Sinbad the Sailor (although in this case the spelling is indeed "Sindbad", the setting is an Arabian Nights version of the medieval Arab Muslim world, in this case a fictitious kingdom called Baristan. The nominal king has a daughter, Princess Jana (Heidi Brühl) who is in love with Sindbad (Guy Williams, a few years before starring on Lost in Space). However, while Sindbad has been away on his voyages, Baristan has been taken over by evil El Karim (Pedro Armendáriz). With that in mind, Jana goes to the magician Galgo (Abraham Sofaer), who is busy trying to come up with spells to control the weather.

Unfortunately, Galgo is under the control of El Karim, who has a magic ring that he can use to force Galgo to do his bidding. So Galgo isn't going to be able to lie to El Karim about Jana's visit. Or, at least, he can try to lie, but El Karim will be able to make him tell the truth. In an attempt to get Jana to safety, Galgo turns her into a firebird to go fly off to see Sindbad, but Karim's men intrude on Galgo and, finding out what's going on, attack Sindbad themselves.

Sindbad and his men survive, and return to Baristan to find out what's happened. Sindbad needs to find a way to see El Karim without Karim knowing who he is, eventually settling on the idea of petty thievery since the trial will have to be held in the presence of Karim. Karim is no dummy, however, and figure out quite quickly who this is, imposing a death sentence. In the ensuing mayhem, Sindbad and Karim get into a sword fight that results in Sindbad's stabbing Karim in the chest. Except that nothing else bad happens to Karim. This is because Karim has some sort of magic power in the form of a special spare heart that's beating at the top of a tower quite some ways away and guarded by all sorts of horrors that one can only dream of. Destroy this heart, and you'll destroy Karim. (At least in a traditional heist movie, the heisters usually have detailed knowledge of the place they're going to heist and the security systems.)

Sindbad and his men set off for that tower, although they're up against a deadline in that Karim has told Jana that either she marry him or else she'll be put to death. She chooses death, but gets a stay of execution when Karim figures out that Sindbad is at the tower and Karim has to leave for the tower to stop Sindbad. Thanks to Galgo's magic, Karim can get there in time for the finale.

Captain Sindbad is another of those movies that would probably seem like a grand adventure to young boys. For anybody else, however, it's fairly easy to see that the movie is cheap (an international co-production by the King Brothers filmed in Germany and distributed by MGM in the States) and a mishmash of ideas. That doesn't mean it's a terrible movie; it's more mediocre if you're one of those people who's not in the target demographic. But if you can suspend disbelief and think back to your childhood days, you might find Captain Sindbad entertaining.

Ship Ahoy

Red Skelton was TCM's Star of the Month in April 2025, which means I'm getting to the point where the movies TCM ran as part of that salute are about to start expiring from the DVR. So to get around to finally watching them before they expire, I watched Ship Ahoy.

Ship Ahoy was made early enough in Skelton's career that he's not quite the star here, although he's technically the male lead. The star is tap-dancer Eleanor Powell. She plays Tallulah WInters, who is a dancer with Tommy Dorsey's orchestra (Dorsey and most of the rest of the orchestra play themselves). After a performance in New York, Dorsey reminds his troupe that they have to be on time for the ship that's about to set sail for San Juan, Puerto Rico, where they're booked for a series of performances. Meanwhile, showing up backstage is Skip Owens (Bert Lahr), who has the hots for Tallulah's friend and singer Fran Evans (Virginia O'Brien), although she doesn't show any interest in Skip. Not that Virginia O'Brien ever showed any interest with her face.

Before Tallulah can leave the theater, she's waylaid by a couple of agents, who take her to an office where they tell her they have a national security job for her. Apparently the government has developed a magnetic mine which they need to get to Puerto Rico. But they can't use any of their regular agents to deliver the mine since there's that war on and enemy agents are sure to be following the regular agents. So could Tallulah hide it somewhere in her luggage and transport it?

Unfortunately, what Tallulah doesn't know is that these aren't US government agents transporting the mine, but agents working for the Axis powers. This is revealed almost as soon as Tallulah leaves, so it's not as if I'm revealing much here. The agents got the idea for this from a comic book written by Merton Kibble (that's Red Skelton). So the scene immediately cuts to Merton's apartment, where we learn that Skip Owens is also Merton's personal assistant. Merton is an inveterate hypochondriac, and asks Skip to call his doctor because Merton is afraid he's about to panic or something from having to try to write three comics at the same time. Skip uses this call as an excuse to tell a little white lie, or a fairly big one: Merton should take some rest, which means a sea cruise (even though Merton gets seasick). This is really a ruse for Skip to show up on the same boat as Fran.

Now, if you've seen any movie like this, the rest of the bare bones of the plot shouldn't be too hard to figure out. Merton and Tallulah run into each other, and fall in love, although they're going to fall back out of love before all the misunderstandings are resolved in the final reel. Merton is also going to be instrumental in foiling that fiendish enemy plot, albeit not without facing down some personal danger. That foiling the plot is going to involve a fair bit of comedy. And with the presence of Eleanor Powell and Tommy Dorsey, there's going to be dancing and singing involved too. Frank Sinatra was still with Tommy Dorsey's orchestra at the time, so he gets to perform a musical number very early in his career.

Ship Ahoy is the sort of movie that Hollywood was putting out during World War II: patriotic, but also fairly light-hearted to help the audiences on the home front escape from what was going on out in the real world. Skelton is funny enough here while people who aren't his biggest fans will find he's not overused since he's in a supporting role. Powell shows she was an excellent tap dancer, including a notable scene where she tap dances out a message in Morse code. As for the story? Well, once again, don't pay too much attention to it.

The Mild West

Since I've got a post up on the new TCM Star of the Month, I figured it would be a good thing to complement it with a post on one of the many shorts that's sitting on my DVR. This time, that short is The Mild West.

This one starts off in the Hollywood version of an Old West saloon, run by Lulu (Janet Reade). Lulu is also a singer, belting out a couple of numbers. Meanwhile, various western movie tropes, or at least tropes for saloons in western movies, show up, including a running joke about how you're not supposed to shoot the piano player. Eventually Lulu's rival Baby Doll (Olive Borden) enters, as does Gentleman Joe. Joe starts playing poker against the house, and wins enough to break the bank. Lulu tries to win the money back, but fails to the point that Joe gets the business, and Lulu. Joe can see the future, announcing that he's bought up all the land in anticipation of the days of automobiles and talking pictures.

Fast forward to the present day, or 1933 when the short was made. Lulu and Joe are obviously much older, and seem to be happy in their dotage. That is, until Baby Doll shows up. She went east and became some sort of success in New York. More than that, she looks like she hasn't aged a day, something she attributes to plastic surgery. She also claims she's going to win Joe from Lulu, which it seems she's spent her whole like thinking about. Sure enough, Joe runs off with her.

So Lulu follows him to New York with the intention to get beauty and plastic surgery treatments of her own to try to rival Baby Doll. And wouldn't you know, but the beauty place she goes to is staffed by the sort of women who break into a Busby Berkeley dance. Lulu gets the plastic surgery, and it works in more ways than one.

The Mild West is an odd little short. People who aren't fans of either 1930s music or movies. probably aren't going to care for this one. I'm not the biggest fan of the music of that era, and the songs are forgettable. But the plot and execution are just offbeat enough that there's something interesting about watching this one.

TCM Star of the Month January 2026: Jean Arthur

Jean Arthur with Cary Grant and others in Only Angels Have Wings (Jan. 15, 10:15 PM)

We're into a new month, and somewhat surprisingly, that means we've already got our new Star of the Month on TCM. For January 2026, that star is Jean Arthur. Her movies will be on TCM on Thursdays in prime time in January, and that means all five Thursdays, including tonight despite it being a holiday.

There doesn't really seem to be any particularly strong grouping of what movies are showing on what night, with the exception that January 29 is the closest to westerns, starting with Arthur's final film Shane at 8:00 PM on January 29. The final two films that night, The Silver Horde (Jan. 30, 2:30 AM), followed by Danger Lights (Jan. 30, 4:00 AM), are both set in the sort of remote location that might be reminiscent of a sub-class of pioneer westerns, but they're both contemporary and not quite westerns.

James Stewart and Jean Arthur in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (Jan. 1, 10:15 PM)

Tonight is several films from the second half of the 1930s, but not by genre, as the night kicks off with the comedy Mr. Deeds Goes to Town at 8:00 PM to be followed by the decided non-comedy Mr. Smith Goes to Washington at 10:15 PM. The second night also has several 1930s movies of various dramas. Public Hero No. 1 (Jan. 9, 3:00 AM) is worth mentioning for its take on John Dillinger not long after he died. I had this one on my DVR but didn't get around to watching it before it expired, and also watched it quite a few years ago, but according to the blog I haven't done a full-length post on it yet. So maybe this go-round I'll finally rewatch it and do a post.

January 22 brings several movies from the 1940s, but there are a couple on January 15 as well mixed in with stuff that predates some of the offerings on the first two nights. If You Could Only Cook (Jan. 16, 12:30 AM), for example, is a fun little comic mystery with Herbert Marshall that predates most of what's on tonight.

In any case, all of the Jean Arthur stuff is worth a watch and I'm glad to see her get the Star of the Month treatment again.