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.

No Kinks music here

Anouk Aimée is another of the people who left us in 2024 and whom TCM included in the late December "parade of the dead" night where they show one movie from each of several people who died in 2024. The movie they showed in her honor was one I have to admit I hadn't heard of before: Lola. But it sounded worth recording, so I did and eventually watched it to do the post on it here.

We don't see Lola for several minutes into the movie. The movie starts with opening credits and a man driving into Nantes, a port city on the Atlantic coast of France, looking like one of those stereotypical Hollywood movie rich guys, with a convertible and a white suit. This is a bit of foreshadowing. Another man, Roland (Marc Michel), is a man who hasn't been able to make much of his life because he's a dreamer. He wakes up late from his lunch break, and when he goes back to work is informed that he's being fired for chronic tardiness.

Meanwhile, there's a US Navy ship docked in Nantes, and the American men on the ship like to go into town to blow off some steam and enjoy themselves. One of the things they do is to go to a bar that looks like it would be a nightclub if only it were nighttime. The sailors dance with the girls working there as if the girls are taxi dancers. One of them is Lola (Anouk Aimée), who is being pursued by Frankie, and American sailor. But we know this isn't going to be a lasting relationship since Frankie's ship is going to be leaving port soon. Besides, we learn that Lola has a young child. It turns out that she was knocked up some years back by Michel, the one true love of her life. But he was too poor to raise a child, so he left town until he could make something of himself, at which point he vowed to come back a rich man.

Roland goes looking for a job and is told there's a hairdresser who has something possibly waiting for an obliging young man. Roland goes, and the manager of the salon tells him something that makes the job offer seem like it's clearly not quite legal. Well much more illegal than that. Roland's job would be to take a boat to Amsterdam, and then go from there to South Africa, where he'll meet somebody in Johannesburg. Roland is being given an attache case which he is expected to give the man in Johannesburg in exchange for another case that's going to look the same and which Roland is to bring back here. Now, it's obvious that Roland is being asked to smuggle something. But he needs the job and this will give him a sense of adventure as well as getting out of Nantes. On the way back to his apartment he bumps into Lola. It turns out that he knew Lola when both were younger, and he's still in love with her. Lola liked Roland as a friend, but her real love was, and still is, Michel.

The movie amiably wanders around Nantes, winding its way toward a resolution of everybody's stories, and does so in a pleasantly brief 90 minutes. Directed by Jacques Demy, Lola is a sort of precursor to Demy's later The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Personally, I prefer the later movie, since the plot feels more cohesive. Lola isn't bad by any means, and it's got lovely black-and-white cinematography of Nantes. Lola is definitely worth one watch if you haven't seen it before.

This Side of the Law

In addition to foreign films and silents, I have a tendency to record a lot of the entries in Eddie Muller's Noir Alley series, especially the ones I haven't seen before. I like Eddie's introductions, and the movies are usually interesting even when they're not very good. The latest movie that I've seen from Noir Alley is This Side of the Law.

Kent Smith is the lead here, and as the movie opens he is in true noir style bemoaning the situation he's gotten himself into at a great old estate called Sans Souci somewhere on the California coast with the sort of clifftop paths that you know are going to lead to danger. In his case, however, his problems stem not from a femme fatale so much as a lawyer.... Flash back to a week earlier. David Cummins (Kent Smith) is an unemployed something or other who has just been picked up on a vagrancy charge. Imagine, to his surprise when, at the trial, somebody he's never seen before offers to pay the fine and everything! That somebody, lawyer Philip Cagle (Robert Douglas), has a proposition for David that could make him a tidy sum of money. And when Cagle takes David to his office, the secretary thinks David is some guy named Malcom Taylor!

Now, David isn't completely stupid, so he holds out for more money until he can learn more about the proposition and what he's being asked to do for the money. It turns out that the real Malcom Taylor disappeared just shy of seven years ago, without so much as a trace. As you may know, in the US it was historically the case that being disappeared for seven years was the point at which you could be legally declared dead, with all that comes with. (See also a movie like Too Many Husbands.) Since David looks amazingly like Malcolm, Cagle would like David to play the part of Malcolm for a few days before "disappearing" again so that he can't be declared legally dead just yet. Eventually, David holds out for a cool $5,000.

Unfortunately, he gets to the house and finds that nobody seems to have really liked Malcolm. Malcolm had a wife, Evelyn (Viveca Lindfors), but for what ever reason the two of them had a falling out. That probably has to do with the relationship that Malcolm had with his sister-in-law Nadine (Janis Paige), about which David obviously knows nothing but which Nadine seems eager to resume. That's because she's in a loveless marriage with Malcolm's brother Calder (John Alvin), who resents Malcolm because Malcolm was for some reason the favorite son back in the days when the parents were still alive. Things get worse when Nadine notices that David doesn't have a scar in a specific location where the real Malcolm would have had a scar, so she figures out that this isn't Malcolm, which sets the denouemnt in action as we see how David ended up where he did at the start of the movie.

This Side of the Law is fairly implausible, but it's also entertaining enough in the same sense that Columbo episodes are. It's not too difficult to figure out who the villain of the piece is, but the fun is in seeing how we ultimately get there. If you go into This Side of the Law not expecting much, I think you'll enjoy it.

Briefs for Feb. 24-25, 2026

I think I mentioned last week when I posted the obituary for Robert Duvall that I had Apocalypse Now on my DVR and was planning to watch it probably over the weekend and write up a post on it. In the meantime, TCM altered their schedule for an evening toward the end of 31 Days of Oscar where Tender Mercies was scheduled to run and added two more of Duvall's Oscar-nominated roles, including the one in Apocalypse Now. So I watched the movie anyhow and wrote up the post, but scheduled it to run in conjunction with the upcoming airing instead of at an earlier date.

Also dying recently was actor Robert Carradine, brother of Keith and David as well as son of John and an actor himself. His roles included a debut performance in the John Wayne movie The Cowboys as well as 1980s comedy classic Revenge of the Nerds. Carradine, who was 71, had reportedly suffered from bipolar disorder for decades and decided to take his own life.

A movie I blogged about back in 2009 is going to be back on FXM after a fairly long absence: The Ox-Bow Incident, tomorrow, Feb. 25, at 8:05 AM. Actually, somewhat surprisingly to me, FXM seems to have decided to pull a fair bit more out of the vaults than they seemed to have done on the previous occasions when they refreshed their rotation. Looking through the schedules since the start of 2026, I've gotten the impression that there aren't nearly as many repeats, with a greater range of titles than I'm used to seeing. Of course, I'm also still surprised that the schedule isn't 24 hours a day of more recent stuff. I think it's been over 13 years now since the change to FXM, and I said at the time I didn't expect the Retro block to last more than about six months.

I'll also repeat the warning that I'm far enough ahead in scheduling movies that, as with Apocalypse Now, I have to make certain that I'm scheduling the posts on the proper date, so as always check your box guide to make certain I've got the date correct.

The Merry Widow (1952)

The TCM lineup for tonight in prime time going through to the start of tomorrow's prime time lineup is Oscar-nominated movies that are remakes of earlier films. One that's on my DVR that I hadn't seen before is the 1952 version of The Merry Widow, which you can see tomorrow (Feb. 25) at 7:00 AM. So once again, I made the point of sitting down to watch the movie in order to be able to write up this review.

Now, the first thing I have to say is that I have not seen the Franz Lehár operetta on which this movie is based, nor have I seen the 1934 movie, so I'm judging this one on its own merits. I of course knew the famous "Merry Widow Waltz" both from piano lessons when I was a kid as well as its use in the Alfred Hitchcock movie Shadow of a Doubt where the widows didn't exactly stay merry for long. This version opens literally at the turn of the 20th century in Washington DC where everybody is celebrating at the various countries' embassies. Well, every embassy but one, the embassy of the fictional central European monarchy of Marshovia. Marshovia is a nearly bankrupt country, and the ambassador can't even pay the embassy's rent.

But the ambassador gets a coded cable from the king (Thomas Gomez) that there are three Marshovians living in the US, and one of them died, having emigrated to America and become an exceedingly wealthy man, leaving his widow with $80 million, a hugh fortune by the standards of 1900. Perhaps she can be convinced to come to Marshovia to dedicate a statue to her husband, although this would really just be a ruse to get her to use her fortune to help pay off the national debt.

The ambassador and his aide, Popoff (Richard Haydn), visit the widow, Crystal Radek (Lana Turner), who has a very capable secretary in the form of Kitty Riley (Una Merkel). Eventually Crystal does agree, and the two women head off for Marshovia, where the King has planned a big reception at the train station, except for the fact that the train is late getting there so everybody has gone a block or two away to party when the train arrives, leaving Crystal and Kitty to hear the joyous singing and see the dancing only from a distance and make their way to the palace by themselves.

The king has a military officer, Count Danilo (Fernando Lamas), whom he knows to be quite the ladies' man, and Danilo's singing has already impressed the two women. So the king comes up with a detailed schedule of how Danilo should seduce Crystal so that she'll marry him, at which point Danilo can use the estate to pay off the national debt. Mind you, this is supposed to be a light comic operetta. And the king can order Danilo to do this. Some of the king's ladies-in-waiting aren't thrilled, so they put the copy of Danilo's agenda in the envelope that accompanies the flowers Danilo is going to give Crystal. The point is that Crystal will find this and understand that the wooing is a sham.

Things get complicated when Danilo goes to see Crystal but Kitty answers, and Danilo gets the mistaken impression that Kitty is in fact Crystal. But when the two women see the agenda, they get fed up with Marshovia and leave for Paris, where Crystal gets a bunch of suitors. Danilo eventually follows, and Crystal is willing to let Kitty pretend to be her. Meanwhile, the real Crystal meets Danilo but hides her real identity and kinda-sorta falls in love with Danilo except for the fact that Danilo is on a mercenary mission. Crystal, calling herself Fifi, completely bowls over Danilo, who falls in love with her but can't go further because the King requires him to marry Crystal. And, of course, he can't find Fifi either, until the film's climax....

This version of The Merry Widow was made in Technicolor and is lovely to look at. It's not a surprise that the film's Oscar nominations were in the color technical categories, from the era when set and costume design had separate awards for color and black-and-white movies. Fernando Lamas does most of the singing here, and there's quite a bit of singing and dancing. This may slow the movie down for the sort of people who, like me, aren't the biggest fans of musicals or opera. I also have to admit that I find the plot of a mercenary marriage a bit mean, although the way the screenplay here gets around the Production Code more or less works.

Furious Island

I'm not certain if TCM ran a morning/afternoon salute to Margaret Lindsay some time back, but I inadvertently watched two of her movies in close succession. I put up a post on Broadway Musketeers some time back, so as is my wont now I'm writing up a post on Isle of Fury now and saving it in drafts to post at some point in the future.

The movie opens with one of those title card intros that were not uncommon through the 1930s, talking about the Pacific Islands being a good place to escape one's past. One one such island, Tankana, Val Stevens (Humphrey Bogart early in his career and with a ridiculous moustache) is about to get married to Lucille Gordon (Margaret Lindsay) against the backdrop of a raging storm. As with White Shadows in the South Seas, Val is part of the lucrative pearl trade, although he's rather kinder to the locals to the point that he offers to go down and do the work himself to show them there's not really any danger, although that's a plot point to be discussed later in this post.

More importantly is that the storm leaves one of the passing ships in distress, so the people on the boat have to be rescued: Tankana is one of those islands that doesn't have a harbor for the big ships; instead, a small tender has to go out to where the big ships anchor and pick up and drop off people. The two people who are worth mentioning among those brought to the island in the storm are young Eric Blake (Donald Woods), and Captain Deever (Paul Graetz), who it's not really discussed why he wasn't the last man off the boat. Deever looks like the sort of "this man has a shady past" trope you'd expect from an old Hollywood movie, while Blake is closer to leading man handsome. He, too, isn't entirely open about why he's on the island.

As you might guess, with Lucille tending to Blake, the two begin to develop feelings for each other. This, even though Lucille took those vows to be faithful to Val. Blake and Val also start to become friends in part because Blake helps save Val's life when Val goes under the sea to harvest pearls, only to have to face... a giant rubber octopus! So that's why the locals didn't want to do the work. They really were in danger.

There's more danger for Val because he has the pearls and the cash locked up in his warehouse, and that's a logical point for shady characters who would like the money themselves to attack. Captain Deever, meanwhile, is constantly in the background eavesdropping, with everything about Val's past and the reason for Blake and Deever being on the island revealed in the finale.

I didn't notice on watching the opening credits, but Isle of Fury is actually based on a novel by Somerset Maugham, which probably helps explain the inclusion of one character I didn't mention, alcoholic Dr. Hardy (E.E. Clive) who serves as a sounding board for the other characters. The material isn't bad, although this is decidedly a B movie from the time when Bogart was working his way up the ladder. Bogart supposedly didn't like it, which I'd guess would have had to do with the octopus scene. It is, also, a B movie so the plot feels rather rushed at just 60 minutes. If Warner Bros. could have come up with a script of a programmer length closer to 80 or 90 minutes they might have been able to get a pretty good movie rather than a B curiosity. But even as just a little B movie Isle of Fury is worth watching.

David Niven's crisis

Yet another of the movies that I recorded off of TCM because of how it sounded interesting, but only got around to watching not long before it expired from my DVR, was the previously unknown to me Guns of Darkness. As always, having watched it, it's once again time to write up a review.

David Niven stars as Tom Jordan, who is working as a manager at a British plantation in the fictional Latin American republic of Tribulación. There's some hints that Tom was a bit of a screw-up in his previous professional life which is why he's working a job like this. It doesn't exactly please his wife Claire (Leslie Caron) either. She'd like to have a family but hasn't been able to have kids to this point, and she's getting to the point that she's thinking of packing up and heading back to Europe.

All of this is happening against the backdrop of a New Year's Eve party all the expats and some local elites are at. What none of the expats know, however, is that outside a bunch of rebels are planning to overthrow the current government of El Presidente Rivera (David Opatoshu). The coup is successful in that Rivera winds up out of power, but somewhat unsuccessful in that Rivera escapes, if with an injury.

Amazingly, the following morning none of the expats seems to have learned that there was a coup the previous night! And they should be relatively close to the capital city considering that one of last night's party guests, Hernandez (Derek Godfrey), shows up on the balcony with the new leader to serve as the Minister of Justice in charge of finding Rivera. The expats, meanwhile, all go to work the next day and act as though they're just going to keep going to work every day with the new regime not even resulting in a temporary disruption as order gets restored!

Eventually they learn about the coup and suffer some inconveniences themselves as there are roadblocks looking for Rivera and some summary justice as the new authorities deal with the people who aren't quite on board yet with the new regime. But if everybody suffers minor inconveniences, the Jordans are about to suffer a major one. Rivera was shot and needs medical treatment, and he's found hiding in the Jordans' car! He doesn't just want medical treatment, he wants Jordan to help him escape across the border where a neighboring country will presumably accept him into exile.

Husband, wife, and ex-president set out, and find that the road to the border, or at least the one that the authorities aren't watching, involves crossing a dryish riverbed. Unfortunately it's not quite dry, and what moisture there is left has turned the area into quicksand! Worse, as part of getting across, they're spotted by a young boy who Rivera is convinced will rat them out to the authorities. So he want to kill the boy, which is brutal but understandable and even logical. Jordan doesn't want to. The road ahead is going to require them to go on foot and go through difficult terrain to keep from being found by the new president's men.

Guns of Darkness is another of those movies where there's the basis of a pretty good movie in the plot, and you can see why the stars involved might want to take on this project. The finished product, however, is surprisingly inert. The conflict between Mr. and Mrs. Jordan doesn't feel authentic, and it doesn't seem at all likely that someone as injured as Rivera would be able to make it as far as he does. So it's all a bit of a tepid misfire, but one of those movies where you'll want to watch and judge for yourself.

This movie should have been a comedy

Sometimes, a movie gets made where you think it's going to be in one genre, but winds up being something else. Another example of this that I recently watched off my DVR was The First Hundred Years. (That, in and of itself, is a rather odd title for the movie since it doesn't seem to have anything to do with 100 years of, well, whatever.)

Robert Mongtomery plays David Conway. As the movie opens, he shows up at the New York office of theatrical agent Harry Borden (Warren William). He's looking for his wife Lynn (Virginia Bruce), who is not an actress but Harry's second-in-command, and good at what she does. In fact, she's been doing it long enough that she started under her maiden name and still uses that professionally. Not only that, but she makes enough money that the couple can afford a ridiculous Manhattan apartment and fine cars and dresses and whatnot.

This kind of bothers David, who has long felt that he's not paying his fair share into the relationship. He's a nautical engineer, designing yachts. However, the good shipbuilding jobs are not in New York. He's here to tell Lynn he's got a promotion lined up that is going to bring in more money -- $15K a year, which is more than Cary Grant's Mr. Blandings reveals his salary to be a decade later in Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House -- but that the job requires working out of New Bedford, MA. This presents an obvious problem for the late 1930s when the best technology could do was the telephone and there was no good way for couples to have a good relationship working this far apart.

Deep down inside, the two still love each other, but just don't know how to work through the issue, since Lynn still wants to work. Understandable by 2026 standards, although in the late 1930s this would have been seen as a bit scandalous. Further complicating matters is that Lynn, being good at what she does, is prized by Borden. She also signed a five-year contract to work with him just six months earlier, and getting out of that might be problematic. Borden certainly doesn't want her to get out of it, instead actively interfering with the help of his lawyer Walker (Alan Dinehart).

The differences between husband and wife are irreconcilable enough that the two separate, with Borden really intimating that the couple should divorce. Indeed, each of the spouses is seen with another person out to dinner at the same club, with all of them (including Binnie Barnes as David's companion Claudia) going to the other man's apartment for coffee and a nightcap. Lynn is torn between what to do with her husband, and what Borden wants her to do.

And then Lynn's uncle Dawson (Harry Davenport) shows up in New York from where he's going to be leaving on a round-the-world cruise. He doesn't know yet about the marital difficulties, so Lynn and David play at still being happy together. Dawson is no dummy and realizes something is up, and he tries to get everybody to see sense, while Borden is still trying to keep Lynn professionally. (As far as I could tell, he had no romantic designs on Lynn.) This being a 1930s movie, there is a happy ending in a way that would have made sense to 1930s audiences but may annoy audiences of today.

The bigger problem I had with The First Hundred Years wasn't the ending, but the fact that it's taking itself much too seriously. It's trying to be a drama, but the material just doesn't work, and you expect comedy to break out, especially with a lead like Robert Montgomery. Think something like The Awful Truth the previous year, which was about divorce but was nothing but comedy at heart. Montgomery was certainly capable of serious drama, but this script doesn't help him. So overall, The First Hundred Years is more of a historical curiosity that we should look at as a product of what values people in the late 1930s had.

Lawrence of Arabia

It may be a surprise, but one of those movies that I never sat down to watch all in one go, largely because of the length, is Lawrence of Arabia. Partly for that reason and partly because of my reluctance to do posts on extremely well known movies, I've never done a full-length post on it here. But to rectify that, the last time it showed up on TCM, I recorded it in order to be able to watch it in advance of the next showing. That next showing is tomorrow, February 21, at 11:30 AM as part of a day devoted to epics.

Peter O'Toole stars as T.E. Lawrence, and as the movie opens, he's riding his motorcycle to his death in England in the mid-1930s. His was a well known name, so a lot of people gather for the funeral, and a couple, such as reporter Jackson Bentley (Arthur Kennedy), basically intimate that Lawrence was an SOB, but our SOB. Since Lawrence is dead, we're obviously going to get a flashback to when he was alive.

The scene shifts to 1916/1917, which is smack dab in the middle of World War I. Britain is one of the Allies while the Ottoman Empire are one of the opposing Central Powers. The Ottomans are Turks, but a fair amount of the territory they govern is Arab, such as the Hejaz which is now a province on the Red Sea coast of Saudi Arabia. Prince Faisal (Alec Guinness) is one of the potentates who is leading an Arab revolt against the Turks, and the British realize supporting the Arabs is a good way to destabilize the Ottoman Empire. They've already got an advisor there in Col. Brighton (Anthony Quayle), but aren't certain of what the situation is really like, so they want to send a second man in Lawrence, an army lieutenant (ultimately promoted to colonel) who speaks Arabic and has good knowledge of the region, to get more information.

Lawrence is supposed to meet Faisal, but first meets Sherif Ali (Omar Sharif), who will take Lawrence to where Faisal is. However, along the way, Ali and his men run into Auda Abu Tayi (Anthony Quinn), who is from a different tribe from Ali. Sadly, the two tribes have a blood feud that threatens to derail the whole uprising until Lawrence puts it to rest by carrying out an execution himself. Worse, he finds that he doesn't dislike killing people. In any case, the result of this is that many of the Arabs act like they've got a lot of respect for Lawrence.

Lawrence's plan is that the Arabs should attack the port city of Aqaba, now at the southern tip of Jordan. Of course, the port is well defended, but only from the sea, since on the other sides lies a desert that's thought to be impassable. Except that Lawrence figures they can cross it and surprise the Ottomans that way, which works. It brings Lawrence more glory, but to go any further he's going to have to get more help from the British back in Cairo.

The British seem none too pleased that Lawrence looks as though he's going native, as it were, and supporting the Arab desire for total independence which would clash with what the British and French have decided should be done with the Middle East after the defeat of the Ottomans. The Arabs, for their part, are looking to get to Damascus, while General Allenby (Jack Hawkins) of the British will be going to Jerusalem as that area even during the 1910s had a substantial Jewish population. (Not every Jew had left in the various diasporas, while Zionism had begun with some European Jews already moving to the region, which south of Beirut had a fairly sparse population.)

Lawrence keeps attacking, but there's some question of whether he's getting too big. Also, there's the question of whether the Arabs are going to be able to govern anything modern if they do take Damascus. The leaders of the revolt are tribal and suited to desert warfare, but Damascus is a fairly modern city. They could easily use western engineers, but that might keep them from being truly independent.

It's easy to see why Lawrence of Arabia won so many Oscars. The acting is quite good, as is the cinematography and other parts of the production design. Maurice Jarre's musical score is also memorable. However, I'd have to say that Lawrence of Arabia is another of those movies where, while it's very good, I'm not certain I agree with it ending up near the top on lists of all-time great movies. The movie runs over three and a half hours plus the intro/entr'acte/exit music; the print TCM ran is 227 minutes. And frankly, in the last hour or so the movie really loses steam. Some historians take serious issue with some of the ways history is presented here. Certain of the characters are composites (such as the diplomat played by Claude Rains), a movie which is often necessary when trying to distill a story like this down to a reasonable length, but apparently some of the timeline is wrong and the movie glosses over Lawrence's knowledge of the region before the war.

Mr. Chump

I've mentioned in the past how I tend to really enjoy Warner Bros.' B movies, but even they had some that weren't particularly good. One that unfortunately fits that category is Mr. Chump.

Johnnie Davis, fresh off his performance singing "Hooray for Hollywood" in Hollywood Hotel, gets a starring role even it if is just a B movie. He plays Bill Small, a trumpeter who likes to imagine what sort of return he'd get if he could play the stock market, which is a sort of minor genre of 1930s movies. Well, the stock market and trying to beat other people to the punch with a tip that might be skirting the law. Bill has charts and everything that show how he'd have huge returns with his system, if only he had the money to actually invest.

In real life, Bill doesn't seem to want to do much work, and is behind on the rent at the rooming house run by Ed Mason (Chester Clute) and his wife Jane (Lola Lane). Also living there is Bill's would-be girlfriend Betty (Penny Singleton). She, meanwhile, is also being prusued by Jim Belden (Donald Briggs). Jim and Mr. Mason are pretty much the only two employees at the local small-town bank, so Jim it seems might not be so bad a choice for Betty. Mr. Mason asks Bill about his system, and Bill mentions that he gets all of his information from a particular newsletter.

At this point a couple of things happen. One is that Bill gets a chance to work with a traveling band, which might give him some money to pay off his bills. The other is that Mason and Jim both decide they might like to try Bill's stock market system. The only thing is, they get the money by borrowing some of the bank's bonds, which is as always a fairly serious embezzlement issue. And wouldn't you know it, but when other people try Bill's system, it goes wrong, leaving the two bank employees with a hole in the bank's finances and a couple of bank examiners about to visit. It's prison time for sure.

With that in mind, the scheming Jim comes up with an idea to get Bill to be the one holding the bag. He joins the scheme seemingly naïve to what's happening, but he's got some tricks up his sleeve of his own, claiming he can win back the money by going out of town for a couple of weeks. He returns to the news that the bank is about to be sold, which is sure to bring in bank examiners....

Johnnie Davis didn't have a particularly long career in Hollywood, and watching a movie like Mr. Chump it's easy to see why. Davis doesn't have much of a range of emotion, and isn't quite as appealing as Warner Bros. might have hoped. It also doesn't help that the story in Mr. Chump feels terribly old-fashioned. Then again, Mr. Chump was the sort of B movie that was probably never thought about in the sense of people watching it years later.

Savage doctor

Another of the spotlights that TCM did some months back was movie adaptations of pulp literature. One of the movies they showed that I had never heard of -- and somewhat surprisingly, I'd never heard of the book series either, which had some 180 books in it -- was Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze. Since it sounded interesting enough, I decided to record it, and finally got around to watching it recently.

Savage, played here by Ron Ely, was a 1930s superhero in the MacGyver or Thunderbirds mold, in the sense that he didn't have the sort of superhuman powers that other superheroes had. We first see him at some sort of fortress in the high arctic, where he's engaging in meditation before being summoned back to New York. Unfortunately, his forced return to his New York headquarters is due to bad news: his father died suddenly in the little-known Latin American country of Hidalgo. Worse, when he has a conference with his associates to talk about this, somebody tries to shoot him through the window but misses only because of the special glass Savage has installed that screws up the refraction and makes things appear where they aren't.

Doc and his men chase after the sniper, who eventually falls to his death. OK, so they won't get any information by interrogting him, but they are able to discover that the sniper is of some native tribe and has a tribal tattoo on his death. It looks like the sort of thing that may have come from one of the indigenous peoples of Hidalgo, so Doc and his team decide they'll head down to Hidalgo to claim Dad's body and figure out for themselves just how implausible the official word on the elder Savage's death is.

Once down in Hidalgo, they're welcomed by the official authorities in a way that make it seem like they want Savage to have a nice time, but where it's clear that they've obviously got a lot to hide. The unofficial authority is Captain Seas (Paul Wexler), who lives on a superyacht, the Seven Seas and travels the world doing mobile business of some sort. Captain Seas invites Savage and his men aboard for dinner, although it's clear that some sort of danger is going to await them even though they know they're going to have to take Seas up on his offer anyway. There's danger on land anyway, in the form of the "green death", a humorously badly animated glowing green snake-like creature that has a venomous bite.

Further investigation reveals that Doc's father received some land grants in the jungle, and that somebody else wants this land, probably because there are vital resources that can be extracted from the land. The deeds to that land have mysteriously gone missing, so Savage and his men set out for the jungle, leading to the ultimate showdown between them and Captain Seas' forces of evil.

It's fairly easy to see why Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze was a box-office disaster. It's played like the old Batman TV series of a decade earlier, which apparently goes against the spirit of the original books. Those were supposedly earnest rather than campy, sort of what you might expect if Thunderbirds had been live action: an extremely wealthy person using his wealth to fight injustices that governments couldn't right. Instead, we get campy, which is fun at times for how bad it is, but not what fans might have wanted. (As I understand it, the books were still in print at the time.) It doesn't help that Ron Ely isn't much of an actor.

So sit back and watch Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze to have a little bit of fun, but beware that you're not getting a particularly good movie.

A British exploitation movie

Not too long ago I did a post on the exploitation movie Mad Youth. A movie that tries to make similar warnings, only coming from Britain, is Good-Time Girl.

A very young Diana Dors shows up in the framing scenes at the opening and closing. She plays Lyla Lawrence, a teenaged girl who is brought before Judge Thorpe (Flora Robson) for getting into the sort of trouble that teenaged girls on the way to bigger trouble get into: being out way too late and hanging with the wrong crowd and stuff. Judge Thorpe decides that the best thing for Lyla would be to give her a cautionary tale about a girl who was in Lyla's situation not too long ago, but who didn't straighten her life out and suffered serious consequences as a result. Cue the inevitable flashback....

Jean Kent is the real star of this movie. She plays Gwen Rawlings, a 16-year-old girl who lives a lousy life in the years just after World War II. She's needed to get work to help the family make ends meet, working at Pottinger's pawn shop and dreaming of better things, such as getting away from her nasty father. Since people pawn nice things at the shop, Gwen decides one day that she's going to "borrow" one of the pieces of jewelry. Unfortunately, she gets caught out before she can return it and gets fired, which also results in a beating from Dad. So, she runs away.

Gwen gets a room on the top floor of a rooming-house opposite Jimmy (Peter Glenville), who works at the sort of club you wonder if it's really fully legal. In any case, Jimmy comes across as a bit of a shady character but claims he can get Gwen a job based on her looks. Max Vine (Herbert Lom), isn't quite trusting of Gwen's insistence she's an adult, but also recognizes her legs can get her tips. Red (Dennis Price), who plays in the band, kind of takes Gwen under his wing although he's married. Jimmy gets jealous, leading to his framing her for a crime she's technically guilty of if only out of ignorance, in pawning some stolen jewels.

For this, Gwen gets sent to the British version of reform school and finds that it's got the same sort of hierarchy you'd seen in the women's prison in Caged or in a boys' reform school. In any case, the place sucks and she thinks about running away. Eventually, she does escape, and goes looking for Max who has opened a new club. This isn't the best idea, although it's not as though she's got too many other options. She gets in a car with one of the patrons for a drive, but this results in a hit-and-run, and a downward spiral that we know is going to end badly or else Judge Thorpe wouldn't have a story to tell Lyla at the beginning of the movie.

Although Good-Time Girl has all of the plot stylings of an exploitation movie or Hollywood B morality tale, it's actually a surprisingly good movie. It's on par with a Hollywood programmer: better than a B movie, but clearly not an A film. The quality stems from the movie being a straight drama without trying to be lurid or over-the-top in the way that the Hollywood exploitation movies were. It's also got a pretty good performance from Kent. Definitely catch Good-Time Girl if you get the chance.

Robert Duvall, 1931-2026

Robert Duvall in his Oscar-winning role in Tender Mercies

The death was announced yesterday of actor Robert Duvall, whose long career included a string of memorable performances, several Oscar nominations, and one win for the film Tender Mercies. Duvall was 95 years old.

Duvall started his movie career as Boo Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird, but it was really in the 1970s that Duval started to get his best roles, in the first two Godfather films, or in The Conversation, where he played the director of the business that hired Gene Hackman.

Robert Duvall in the middle, with Harrison Ford and Gene Hackman, in The Conversation

More good roles came, including his first Best Actor Oscar nomination for The Great Santini; in all Duvall received three Best Actor nominations and four Supporting Actor nominations, although he only won for Tender Mercies.

The Great Santini

The Great Santini and Tender Mercies are both showing up in the latter half of 31 Days of Oscar. In the meantime, there's also an early role as Maj. Frank Burns in M*A*S*H which will be on FXM on Feb. 22. (Bud Cort, who died last week, also has a small role.) I've got Apocalypse Now on my DVR and plan to finally get around to watching it and putting up a review in the near future. I assume TCM will have a programming tribute sometime after 31 Days of Oscar, more likely in April.

Mrs. Brown, You've Got a Lovely Daughter

When the British invasion came along in the 1960s, it was a thing for some of the singers or bands to get involved with narrative movies, although the narrative stories aren't always the most inventive. The Beatles were of course probably the best of the lot with A Hard Day's Night, while the Dave Clark Five made Having a Wild Weekend aka Catch Us If You Can. Herman's Hermits were big for a few years in the 1960s and made Hold On!, but when they had a #1 hit in the US with a song called Mrs. Brown, You've Got a Lovely Daughter, somebody had the insane idea of making a movie with that title.

Peter Noone, the lead singer of the band, stars as Herman Tulley. He lives in the sort of Victorian-era terraced housing in Manchester that looks like it's ready for slum clearance and was a staple of British-set movies of the era, together with his grandmother. Grandpa died not to long earlier, and bequeathed Herman a greyhound named Mrs. Brown, whom Herman is seen training as the movie opens. To raise money to try to get the dog in a real race, Herman has sold a share in the dog to each of his bandmates.

Herman goes straight from the track to his work at an ad agency where he and one other candidate are up for a promotion although it's the other guy who gets it because Herman bad-mouths the pink hats the company is trying to promote. Herman also loses his job for it. At least he's got a nice young girl named Tulip who loves him. Meanwhile, when Herman goes to the cemetery to water the plants on Grandpa's grave, he meets a tramp who winds up being a running plot point in the movie.

Herman is able to get the money to enter his dog in a stakes race in Manchester, and the dog wins, which means that the dog is good enough to race in London. The only thing is, that's going to require rather more money than just racing the dog in Manchester. At the race-track are the Browns (played by British character actors Stanley Holloway and Mona Washbourne) whom the dog eventually gets named after; they've got a daughter Judy who is hoping to become a model. They live in London so they might be able to help Herman out if he's able to make it to London.

As you might guess, the band do make it to London, while performing several songs over the course of the movie. The intention is, of course, to put the dog into the big race, although there are quite a few complications along the way.

Mrs. Brown, You've Got a Lovely Daughter is more of a time capsule than anything else, looking at the UK in the 1960s as somebody wanted to romanticize it. The story here is minimal and one that doesn't really make much sense, while it doesn't help that the band can't act and the tramp character is a bit obnoxious. The songs are dated although some people may like them.

Our Dancing Daughters

A search of the blog suggests that I haven't done a full-length post on Our Dancing Daughters before. It's part of a series of three Joan Crawford films with similar titles, and I've done a post on the third of them, Our Blushing Brides, which is part of why I wasn't certain whether I'd done Our Dancing Daughters. All three aired not too long ago, but only Our Dancing Daughters received an Oscar nomination so it can be run during 31 Days of Oscar. That airing comes tomorrow, Feb. 16, at 6:00 AM.

Joan Crawford plays Diana Medford, who runs in a circle of fairly well-to-do friends who seem to be able to live the high life, although at heart Diana is a good girl. Also in the same circle is Beatrice (Dorothy Sebastian), along with Bea's mutual friend Ann (Anita Page), nicknamed Annikins. Ann doesn't seem to be quite so well off, and is really interested in finding a man with a fair bit of money, even being encouraged by her mother to do so.

Another mutual friend, Freddie (Edward Nugent, no known relation to actor-turned-director Elliott), organizes a party for the lot of them at a private ballroom at one of the night spots in the city. Showing up at the spot, although not originally part of the party, is Alabama college football star Ben Blaine (John Mack Brown), who has parlayed his college success into a lucrative career doing something, although the something is less important than the fact that he has money now. Ben gets brought in to the party, which is where he meets Diana. The two like each other, although Diana comfortable dancing with all the young men at the party, which sort of puts Ben off. Ann, however, is calculating, and put her attention solely on Ben even though she's just as attracted to Freddie. She's able to snag Ben.

Meanwhile, Bea has gotten married to the decent if slightly stuffy Norman (Nils Asther), and has kind of drifted away from the party scene. She invites Diana to come visit, and the meet a bunch of the guys from the old scene, although that's really no longer Bea's thing either. However, Diana, having lost the man she really wanted, decides she's going to go off to Europe to get away from it all and salve her wounds.

Bea organizes a big bon voyage party, and Ann is hoping to go with Freddie, since the two of them are carrying on an affair. Ben is having none of that, and is no dummy, so Ann lies and claims her mom is ill. Ben calls Ann's bluff and, having done so, decides to go to the bon voyage party where everyone finds.... well, let's say that the good people are going to have a happy ending and the not-so-good people are going to get what's coming to them.

Our Dancing Daughters is a well-enough made movie, having been done so at the end of the silent era when a lot of films now had synchronized scores and sound effects if not spoken dialog. Our Dancing Daughters is the sort of film that would have benefited from the dialog actually being spoken instead of in intertitles, although at the time the movie was made that would have screwed up the camerawork which, having not having to worry about the placement of the microphone, is fairly fluid.

Our Dancing Daughters may also be of interest to those with curiosity as to what Hollywood's view of late 1920s social values was. That too makes the movie worth a watch, even if the ending may be a bit far-fetched.

The Red Mill!

Tonight's theme in TCM's 31 Days of Oscar is movies set in France. One of the movies in the lineup had been running in the FXM rotation and, not having seen it before, I had recorded it. That movie is Baz Luhrmann's 2001 version of Moulin Rouge!, so with the TCM showing tonight at 10:00 PM, I decided to watch it now rather than wait for another showing on FXM.

Christian (Ewan McGregor) is an Englishman right around the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries who, being a hopless romantic, decided to go off to Paris to write the great novel that way a lost generation of Americans would do in the 1920s. He gets a crappy room in an apartment hotel in Montmartre, not far from the famous Moulin Rouge nightclub. Not that his writing is going well, and worse for him, a man falls through the ceiling into his apartment!

That man is the Narcoleptic Argentine, part of a troupe of actors led by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (John Leguizamo). They're trying to write a play, without much success, but Christian comes up with some brilliant idea by mouthing platitudes that would become song lyrics from well-known pop (and some other genre) songs of an era much later than the characters inhabit: "The hills are alive with the sound of music", "All you need is love", and so on, with a lot of music used. Toulouse-Lautrec is impressed and takes Christian with them to see Zidler (Jim Broadbrent), the proprietor of the Moulin Rouge.

Zidler is planning to use his courtesan Satine (Nicole Kidman), who has been the star of previous stage shows at the Moulin Rouge, as the star of this new show. But there's a catch. Zidler's desire is to turn the Moulin Rouge into something serious, and for that he needs money. To that end, he was hoping to get the Duke (richard Roxburgh) to sponsor the show in exchange for the services of Satine who, being a courtesan, may or may not be honestly in love with anybody. In any case, the Duke loves Satine, and certainly Christian does too.

Satine meets Christian and thinks he's the Duke. But since Christian, romantic that he is, really does love Satine, and because she likes the ideas for the play, she is more than willing to lead him on in exchange for his being the writer of the play. The idea for the play grows more fantastic as Christian is in many ways writing the love triangle that he, Satine, and the Duke are getting involved in, only setting it over in one of the princely states of British India.

The Duke is no dummy, especially because he's got operatives among the cast of the play, and figures out what's going on. He's also insanely jealous, wanting Satine only for himself, and being more than willing to kill Christian in order to get that. Meanwhile, Satine has been diagnosed with consumption. All of the threads come together at the climactic performance of the play Christian has written.

Moulin Rouge! received a bunch of Oscar nominations. I can see why, but I can also see why some people are really going to dislike the movie. The reasons for that I think largely fall on the direction of Baz Luhrmann. His directorial choices, in terms of lighting, editing, and camera movement, are all highly stylized, but also for me incredibly intrusive at times. The extremely fast-paced editing may not be to everybody's liking either. Other people are probably going to enjoy trying to figure out all of the music that's being used, as there's a lot of it. For me, that wasn't quite enough to overcome the issues I had with the direction, but again I can understand why that might not be the case for other people. Moulin Rouge! is a movie I'm glad I got the chance to see, but not one I'm looking to watch a second time any time soon.

Slaves of New York

When you think of Merchant Ivory movies, you probably think of those period pieces set in England, although as we saw from Roseland some months back there was a lot more than that. TCM did a spotlight on Merchant Ivory back in the spring of 2025, and another of those not-a-period-piece films that I hadn't heard of before was Slaves of New York.

Bernadette Peters stars as Eleanor, one of those people who moved to New York to make it big but didn't succeed. She'd like to be a hat designer, but as the movie opens she's working at some sort of indie publication, living with a dog and her neat-freak boyfriend, starving artist Stash (Adam Coleman Howard). You wonder how the two of them are able to live in the sort of apartment they do. Steve at least has an exhibition coming up, of his Warhol- and comics-inspired pieces. This exhibition is to take place at the gallery owned by Victor Okrent (Chris Sarandon).

Eleanor's job brings her into contact with another artist, the even crazier Marley (Nick Corri) who comes across as even more of a grifter than Stash. He claims he's going to go off to Rome and build a church for the Vatican, or some such utter nonsense. In fact, the craziness of the modern art world as it was in 1980s New York is the backdrop and a major plot point for the movie.

Eleanor and Stash go to a housewarming party for a mutual friend, where Eleanor meets a guy who's come from South Africa and has a girlfriend. Eleanor and the South African decide to meet up later, although it's only as friends and nothing more than that, although of course anybody else around them would make a not unreasonable assumption that this isn't just a platonic friendship. This naturally brings more tension into the relationship between Eleanor and Stash. She, for her part, can't move out simply because she couldn't afford anything else. It makes her one of the titular "slaves": people who are forced to stay in their current lives because that's all they can afford.

But then one day one of Eleanor's quirky, one-of-a-kind hats is on display in the window of a local hair salon. Fashion designer Wilfredo (Steve Buscemi) sees the hat, and one thing leads to another with Eleanor getting to be part of a fashion show and possibly getting the money to make that move she's been thinking about. It also leads to her getting some new friends....

Slaves of New York got poor reviews upon its initial opening, and it's not hard to see why. One of the reasons, at least for me, was made evident in the opening credits, which mention that this is based on "stories by Tama Janowitz". Janowitz also wrote the screenplay, and it's the plural "stories" part that is the big problem. Either the movie ought to be clearly episodic, almost like an anthology movie, or else it needs a really tight script that draws out one story. Instead, the movie feels like it does neither of these, with a confused mishmas being the result. It also doesn't help that the movie moves slowly up until the finale, running a shade over two hours when the material would work better as something in the 90-minute range.

Fans of New York as it was back in the day, or people who know more about the art world, may enjoy Slaves of New York a lot more. Apparently it's become a bit of a cult classic in the past 35 years. But it's not quite a film for everybody.

The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm

Tomorrow, February 13 is the start of this year's 31 Days of Oscar on TCM, with the schedule looking like it's being done by themes this year. The first morning starts off with several fantasy-type movies, with different types of fantasic material. Among the movies is The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm, at 7:45 AM.

Now, as you probably know, brothers Wilhelm (played here by Laurence Harvey) and Jakob (played by Karlheinz Böhm) Grimm were a pair of brothers in the German-speaking lands in the first half of the 19th century who today are best known for their compilations of fairy tales from various parts of the German-language area. (Remember also that Germany was not a unified country at this time.) They did more, however, such as write books on German grammar and start an etymological dictionary of German, in part because it took a while for the fairy tale books to sell. The original versions of the tales, after all, were decidedly dark and not quite for children.

In this version of their lives, the two are working for a duke (Oscar Homolka) who is interested in having a biography of his family line written because the duke wishes to impress the king of Prussia. This at least gives the two brothers and Wilhelm's wife Dorothea (Claire Bloom) a place to stay while they're trying to sell their other books at Stossel's (Walter Slezak) book store. Meanwhile, a wealthier family from closer to Berlin comes to visit with adult daughter Greta (Barbara Eden), who falls in love with Jakob except that Jakob and especially Wilhelm are too much into those fairy tales.

That backstory takes up about half of the movie, with the other half consisting of three fairy tales -- lesser-known ones, which was a deliberate choice on the part of the moviemakers because they wanted stories the audience would be less likely to know the ending to, as well as many of the better-known ones already having been done by Disney. This also enabled the moviemakers to have a cast with a lot of guest stars if you will, each of whom only appeared in one of the stories. The first one, which Wilhelm tells to his own children, is The Dancing Princess. Jim Backus plays a king with a daughter (Yvette Mimieux) who loves to dance at night. Russ Tamblyn plays a man who, with the help of an invisibility cloak, is abble to discover the daughter's secret.

Later, Wilhelm wants to convince his publisher that there are people out there who would buy the books, so he brings in a bunch of kids and tells them the story of The Cobbler and the Elves about a cobbler (Harvey himself) whose elves come to life at night, aided by the special effects of George Pal.

Finally, as part of a plot point that has the brothers traveling to get information on an obscure branch of the family, Wilhelm runs into an old lady in the middle of the woods (Martita Hunt) who tells the story of The Singing Bone. Nobleman Sir Ludwig (Terry-Thomas) and his servant Hans (Buddy Hackett) find a magical dragon in a cave, with Hans killing the dragon. Ludwig tries to take credit for it, but the titular singing bone tells the real truth of what happened.

The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm was filmed in Cinerama, and the print TCM ran is in the "smilebox" format which is supposed to simulate the curved screen that the Cinerama movies were originally projected onto. To me, it's always seemed as though the smilebox is a bit too exaggerated. Yes, there was some curvature, and people would mostly be farthest away from the middle section (considering vertical sections) of the screen, but the photographs I've seen don't look as curved as what the smilebox gives us. Cinerama also had serious issues where panoramas looked good -- and the location photography here is quite good -- but not suited to the sorts of closeups needed for traditional narrative storytelling. The "real life" sequences here are by far the weakest part of the movie. Ultimately, we get a bit too much of the back-story to be really interesting to children. That's a shame, because the three fairy tales aren't that bad.

So overall, I think The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm is an ambitious project that falls a bit short of its intended goal, but a movie that's still worth watching if you haven't seen it before.

Fun with dysfunctional Canadians

Another of those movies with a title I'd seen show up on TCM on several occasions, but had never actually watched, was Jalna. Once again, with that in mind, the last time it showed up on TCM I finally recorded it. Having finally watched it, I can see why it doesn't show up more often.

Jalna is subtitled "A Drama of Canadian Life", and is based on a series of novels that were apparently incredibly popular back in the day. Jalna is the name of a farm somewhere in Ontario, one of those farms that in an old Hollywood western movie would be the big ranch whose proprietor is the big man in the region. In this case, it's three generations of the Whiteoak family, led by matriarch Granny (Jessie Ralph) who's about to turn 100 and who does not get to have a death scene as a dramatic plot point; instead her centenary is the coda to the action of the movie. The family is about to sit down to Sunday dinner: Gran, Uncles Nicholas (C. Aubrey Smith) and Ernest (Halliwell Hobbes), and adult kids Renny (Ian Hunter), Eden (David Manners), Piers (Theodore Newton), and Meg (Peggy Wood). There's one other adult who doesn't get much to do, and a bratty child who has an incredibly obnoxious scene where he plays evil pranks on pretty much everyone else in the house.

Renny is the son who's more or less managing the farm now. Piers is late to dinner because, as the little kid reveals, he's down at the next farm over seeing Pheasant Vaughan (Molly Lamont), daughter of owner Maurice Vaughan (Nigel Bruce). This pisses Meg off to no end: apparently 20 years ago Meg was set to marry Maurice in what was supposed to be a marriage that would unite the two farms and be a big deal. But then it turned out that Maurice had fathered Pheasant by another woman some time back and Pheasant was dropped off there; who knows what happened to Pheasant's mother? Meg suffered a broken heart that she's still nursing, and doesn't want any other Whiteoak to have anything to do with any Vaughan.

And then there's Eden, who doesn't want to be a farmer at all, but a poet. It should go without saying that poetry isn't exactly a lucrative occupation unless you can write things that can be used as popular song lyrics, which isn't what Eden is doing. But he gets word from a publisher in New York that they're accepting one of his books! So the family raises the money for him to go to New York, never mind the internal squabbling about this. There, Eden meets Alayne (Kay Johnson), the reader who read Eden's manuscript and got the publisher to approve it. They meet and immediately fall in love and marry, shocking the rest of the Whiteoak family. But they plan to come back to Jalna.

Equally shocking is that on the day Eden and Alayne come back, Piers has decided that he's going to go elope with Pheasant, and bring her back to Jalna too as his bride. Naturally, as you might guess, this causes certain members of the family to go ballistic. Things get worse as Eden can't really come up with a second volume of poetry, while Renny finds himself falling in love with Alayne, which is a big no-no. There's a whole lot more melodrama to come, even though the movie is only 78 minutes.

I found myself laughing at Jalna quite a few times, which is not a good thing since, for the most part, Jalna is not supposed to be a comedy. (The one exception is Gran's cantankerousness and her parrot.) The family dynamic is ridiculously dysfuctional, to the point that you wonder how they've stayed together so long. There are other questions, like why Renny never got married, and why none of them ever think of getting some sort of white collar job to make ends meet. The Whiteoaks, after all, seem closer to gentry farmers than, say the families in As the Earth Turns which is also a farming saga but looks much more at the more difficult side of farming.

I guess I can see why the original book might have pleased audiences in the 1920s when it was released. But the film adaptation didn't work for me.

But no affairs with married women

Another of the many movies that I recorded the last time they showed up on TCM was The Affairs of Dobie Gillis. It's finally getting another showing on TCM, tomorrow (Feb. 11) at 6:00 AM, so once again now would be the perfect time for me to put up this post I've written on the movie after having watched it.

Dobie Gillis, played by Bobby Van, is a young man about to enroll as a freshman at Grainbelt University somewhere in the Midwest. One wonders how he even got into college, considering his philosophy that some people are workers and others are enjoyers, and, well, he's an enjoyer. At the opening registration, Dobie gets a roommate in the form of Charlie Trask (Bob Fosse) who becomes his new best friend.

Dobie also seems to be a hit with the women. There's Lorna (Barbra Ruick), who winds up with Charlie. The only real reason she isn't with Dobie is because another woman got there first. Pansy Hammer (Debbie Reynolds) is in the same freshman composition class and chemistry class as Dobie, and the two of them immediately hit it off, even though the English professor, Amos Pomfritt (Hans Conried) has it in for Dobie. Pansy lives in town because she's a local and can live with her parents (Hanley Stafford and Lurene Tuttle). Mr. Hammer in particular has a dislike of Dobie, because he sees Dobie wants to get by with a minimum of work and that's not a good trait to have in a husband. But then, we wouldn't have much of a movie if Pansy weren't around or there weren't some sort of conflict.

Things go wrong first when Dobie's car breaks down on a date (although Pansy makes a mistake by not going straight up to her bedroom and changing when she gets home) and then when Dobie decides he and Pansy should just start skipping classes to go on dates, forcing the two of them to do a semester's worth of work in one day and leading to Pansy's blowing up the chemistry lab. For this, Pansy's dad sends her to an aunt in New York so she can go to school there, far away from Dobie. Dobie wants to see Pansy, but he doesn't have the money to get to New York.

Eventually Dobie does get the money, although it's in the sort of dishonest way you'd think would get him strung up on an embezzlement charge: he offers to go to New York to find a band for a fundraiser, and spends a goodly portion of the money dating Pansy instead. Worse, not long after returning to Grainbelt word comes in from New York that Pansy has gone missing! Her dad is understandably pissed, but as you might guess from a movie like this, Dobie is actually innocent and there's a happy ending to be had.

The Affairs of Dobie Gillis is an MGM musical, albeit decidedly not a Freed Unit musical, which in some ways makes the movie a bit of an anomaly. It might also be a bit surprising to some that this came out after Singin' in the Rain, when you'd think MGM wouldn't want to cast Reynolds in such a trifle. There's a lot of opportunity for the four leads to sing and/or dance, to more success than failure although Van's solo of "I'm Thru With Love" goes on too long. The problem that the movie has is the plot, which has too many plot holes and left me wanting to take Dobie and Pansy and literally try to shake some sense into them.

The Affairs of Dobie Gillis is also mildly interesting for those with nostalgia for the studio system; I for one was trying to figure out which of the campus buildings (if any) was the one used as the high school in High School Confidential some years later. There's also a set that has a ton of college pennants on it. Oddly, the design also has a pennant from Carvel High School, which you may recall was the high school from the Andy Hardy movies.

Time Without Pity

TCM ran a morning and afternoon of the films of actress Ann Todd some time back. One that I watched just before it expired from my DVR so that I could write up a review of it here was Time Without Pity.

Todd isn't the star here; that would be Michael Redgrave, although we don't see him in the opening scene. Instead, that pre-credits scene is of an older man killing a young woman named Jennie Cole. Then, after the opening credits, we see a plane landing in the UK after a transatlantic flight. Getting off is David Graham (Michael Redgrave). He's an alcoholic who has been away in Canada in some sort of in-patient treatment, which must have taken quite a long time since David missed not just that murder. David's adult son Alec (Alec Macowan) was accused of the murder of that young girl, found guilty, and sentenced to hang, with the execution being the day after Dad arrived back in Britain. We also learn that Dad's alcoholism has been going on long enough that his son doesn't care about his father, and is perfectly willing to be executed even though we know he's not guilty. Dad is convinced his son couldn't have done such a thing, and plans on proving his son's innocence.

The first person David tries to talk to is Agnes Cole (Joan Plowright), the sister of the murder victim. Agnes is a showgirl, and is convinced that Alec must be guilty. Or, at least, that's what she has David believe with the way she's screaming at him and doesn't want to talk to him at all.

Alec, having been forced to spend a lot of time away from his father, became friends with the Stanford family, specificall with the son Brian. Brian's adoptive father Robert (Leo McKern) is a wealthy automobile manufacturer, and it was in the Stanford house that the murder took place. Alec, you see, spent a lot of time there what with his father being away, and was the boyfriend of the murder victim. David doesn't let on who he is when he visits the Stanfords, (Ann Tood plays Mrs. Stanford), and Dad doesn't seem to recognize David, although the son Brian does and doesn't tell his father that David is using a false identity to visit the Stanfords.

David continues to try to find clues, all with a metaphorical clock constantly ticking down the hours until the scheduled execution. It seems ridiculous that this tyro should be able to solve the mystery when the police haven't been able to, even if we already know who the killer is since we see his face in the opening scene. It also seems ridiculous that the trial went the way it must have gone, but then we wouldn't have had a movie if these things hadn't happened.

Time Without Pity is another of those movies where I can see why somebody like Michael Redgrave would want to take the lead. The idea of having to try to prove somebody's innocence against an extremely tight deadline makes for a potentially really interesting story, as we've seen in great movies like Saboteur. Here, however, it seemed to me like it would be so unlikely for the legal system to screw up this badly, to the extent that it makes the movie not work all that well for me. Still, everybody tries, but can't quite overcome the script flaws.

Paris Interlude

Despite my writing this blog for 18 years now, it always surprises how many 1930s movies are that I still don't know about. The latest example of this came when I watched the programmer Paris Interlude.

The movie opens up in 1927, when Charles Lindbergh was making his transatlantic flight in The Spirit of St. Louis, and everybody in Paris waiting for Lindbergh to land. Especially the reporters, who wanted to be the first to get the story. Among those reporters is Sam Colt (Otto Kruger), who was a flyboy in World War I before he lost his left arm. He's become a reporter since, and at one time was a good reporter before he turned to drink and is the sort of dissolute ex-pat who was a thing back in popular culture in the years just before the Depression, although Paris Interlude was released in 1934. In any case, Colt enlists the help of aspiring writer Pat Wells (Robert Young) to help write the stories in a sort of apprentice relationship. It's not enough for Pat to make a living, and he wants to write fiction any way.

All of these characters spend just as much time at a local watering hole that has next to nothing French about it instead being a place for Americans to recreate their fantasy of what Parisian café life is about. Among these people are aimless Julie (Madge Evans), who moons over Sam because he's just so dashing and handsome, while not having any idea what to do with life. There's also fashion designer Cassie Bond (Una Merkel), and Ham (Edward Brophy), a naïve journalist on his way to the Soviet Union to cover the situation there although he never makes it for whatever reason.

Sam proposes to Julie and plans to take her back to the States, and she even tells her folks back there she's planning to come back a wife. But Sam gets an assignment covering the slow-burning Chinese civil war (at the time the movie was set, this would have been before Japan invaded Manchuria, although the movie was released some years after), forcing him to leave Julie behind. She feels she can't go back to America, so she starts working writing about the haute couture scene in Paris with her articles illustrated by Cassie. Pat falls in love with Julie but can't support her, while another American abroad, golfer Rex Fleming (George Meeker) shows up. And then news comes in that Sam has been shot down in China and is presumably dead.

Except that in a movie like this you have to expect that he's not in fact dead. So 20 minutes later into the movie, on the day that Julie is finally about to marry Sam who has sold a story, Sam arrives back in Paris looking just like he would have looked the day he was shot down in China which makes no sense in terms of plot. Wouldn't he have gotten cleaned up? But Sam's arrival makes Julie wonder just whom she should marry.

For some reason, I went into Paris Interlude thinking this movie was going to be a comedy. It isn't at all, and mostly wasn't intended to be apart from the comic relief character. It's not exactly a bad movie, but it's definitely the sort of thing that would have been what movie exhibitors wanted in 1934: something that could run for a week or two as the second feature and give audiences a movie to come to, only to fade into obscurity as something newer came to the screen. It's with good reason that I had never heard of this one before it showed up on the TCM schedule the last time it did.

Between Two Worlds

Many years ago, I did a post on the early sound film Outward Bound which I found interesting for the way in which I felt it actually tried to use sound as a character in the movie. Outward Bound was remade as a somewhat bigger movie during World War II and given the title Between Two Worlds. I'd been meaning to get around to watching it, so the last time TCM ran it I finally recorded it and eventually watched it, wrote up this post, and saved it in drafts for you to get this post today.

The movie starts off at a travel agency in some British seaside port, presumably Southampton although I don't know that the movie makes this explicit. Various people are trying to get passage to America, something which is difficult considering the war going on. Among them Henry Bergner (Paul Henried), a former concert pianist who joined the anti-Nazi resistance in his home country but had to flee to England. He's not allowed to board, and heads home to commit suicide. As he's going through the streets, we see the car that's carrying the other passengers about to set sail get bombed in a Nazi air raid.

Cut to a shot of Henry'a apartment, where we find him having turned on the gas to off himself. His distraught wife Ann (Eleanor Parker) enters the apartment, and decides that if Henry is going to kill himself, she's going to join him because she'll have nothing to live for. Henry, for his part, tries to keep Ann from joining him, but she's insistent.

And wouldn't you know it, the next thing they know is that they're on the boat that Henry had been trying to get a ticket for, which doesn't seem to make sense at first unless of course you've seen Outward Bound before. And in any case, it's explained much earlier in Between Two Worlds than in Outward Bound what's happened. Henry and Ann are dead, as are all of the other passengers on board, although they're being carried to a sort of purgatory where they'll be judged by the "Examiner" before it's to be determined where and how they spend eternity.

The next passenger to figure out what's happened in Thomas Prior (John Garfield). He's the sort of cynical reporter who always seems to have a sharp word for everybody else but has set up such a shield around himself that he claims not to feel anything. And he's more than willing to spill the beans on what's happening even though the ship's purser, Scrubby (Edmund Gwenn), wants everybody to figure it out for themselves that they're already dead.

Among the other passengers are Pete (George Tobias), a sailor reminscent of the William Bendix character in Lifeboat; a wealthy older couple; a local vicar who winds up helping the "Examiner"; gold-digger actress Maxine Russell (Faye Emerson); housemaid Mrs. Midget (Sara Allgood); and war profiteer Lingley (George Coulouris). Eventually the Examiner (Sydney Greenstreet) shows up to deliver judgment on each of the passengers.

I think I personally preferred Outward Bound in part because I have a thing for early talkies and in part because it's a much more compact little picture at almost 30 minutes shorter than Between Two Worlds. However, even I have to admit that Between Two Worlds has much better production values. Ultimately, however, I think a lot of which version are going to prefer is going to come down to their preconceived notions of the stars playing the various characters. The role played by John Garfield is much changed for Garfield's screen persona, the role having been essayed in Outward Bound by Leslie Howard. A little bit of Garfield can go a long way, and here I think he's a bit too cynical. Somewhat like his character in Four Daughters in that regard.

Sydney Greenstreet, on the other hand is excellent in his role, as is Allgood. So it's not without reason that many fans are going to prefer Between Two Worlds. Watch both and judge for yourself.

Olympia

Another of the movies that I had to watch off of my DVR before it expired was Olympia, Leni Riefenstahl's two-part documentary on the 1936 Berlin Summer Olympics. Today being the opening ceremonies of the Winter Olympics, I figured this would be a good time to put up the post on it. Apparently the original plan was to release one movie, but Riefenstahl's edit ran so long that the movie wasn't released until mid-1938, and in two parts as it ran over four hours. Stylistically there's not enough different to justify two full separate posts, so I'm doing a post that covers both Part 1 (Festival of Nations; linked above), and the second part, Festival of Beauty.

The first part starts with a long sequence of Riefenstahl's interpretation of what training for the ancient Greek Olympiad might have been like, with a bunch of nearly naked men wearing nothing more than a codpiece and running or doing throwing events. There are also women who are completely naked, albeit in a form about as artistic as Renaissance art nudes or ancient Greek statuary. We then transition to the Olympic torch relay, starting in Greece and going through southeastern Europe on its way to Germany, leading up to the opening ceremony when the Olympic cauldron is lit after all of the countries (I think 51 of them) march into the Olympic stadium.

The rest of Part 1 deals with most of the track and field events, attempting to document them to show what happened, who won and how, but without running ridiculously long. Berlin is the Olympics where Jesse Owens famously won four gold medals, and these events are shown, with pretty much no more propaganda or racial denigration than one would have gotten from a white American Hollywood production. The recreation of the German radio/public address athletes consistently refers to certain athletes as "the black man [surname]", but that's not much worse than American commentary would have been. But more on the propaganda in the summary later.

Part 2 opens with a shorter sequence of athletes training, which might be a bit controversial in that all the male German athletes retire to the sauna after their run and there's some obvious full frontal nudity. The sports covered here include very brief references to boxing and gymnastics, with more to yachting, and then rowing (showing the American men's win in the eights that became the subject of the book and movie The Boys in the Boat), modern pentathlon, the cycling road race, and the diving, with the diving being the most famous sequence because of Riefenstahl's camera use.

And it's that use of the camera for which Olympia should be rightly remembered. The opening sequences of the two parts are in many ways the most interesting in that Riefenstahl had the most freedom in composing them. When it comes to actual sports, that's a bit harder, since there's only so much you can do to film, say, an actual boxing match. So a lot of the movie has a slightly boring feel to it. To combat this, Riefenstal did as much as she could to put cameras in spots that were unorthodox for 1936, have them moving on rails to track the athletes, or put them under or over the athletes. She also made heavy use of editing, especially in the diving sequence. I think they might have mentioned the winner, but more than any other event that felt beside the point, as she was trying to show the beauty of the human form. Some sequences, however, especially in the cycling and probably in the sailing, look like they have to be recreations.

The beauty of the human body is also where one can start when it comes to discussing the propaganda nature of the movie. Adolf Hitler obviously wanted to show the Germans as a superior people, and all of those nearly-naked bodies are very clearly of a certain narrowly-defined standard of beauty. Riefensthal couldn't show Germans winning events they didn't win -- and she doesn't hide non-Germans winning as with Jesse Owens -- but beauty is clearly a German thing.

There's also the presence of Adolf Hitler. Some of this obviously can't be helped. Berlin had been awarded the right to stage the 1936 Olympics back in 1931, before the Nazis came to power, and it is traditionally the job of the head of state of the host nation to declare the games open. So of course Hitler has to be there. At the same time, one didn't need to show him later on watching the events. There's also a lot of shots of German athletes and spectators giving the Nazi salute to the German flag at various times. During the medal ceremony and anthem playing that's understandable. 90 years on, people are going to be a bit uncomfortable with other shots of it.

All in all, Olympia deserves to be remembered as a movie that introduced a lot of ground-breaking techniques to the coverage of sport, even if it will also always be remembered for director Leni Riefenstahl's involvement with Adolf Hitler.