A younger acquaintance

Another of the movies that had been sitting on my DVR for quite some time that I kind of knew a bit about going into it was Rich and Famous, which is not to be confused with the Alfred Hitchcock movie Rich and Strange. Instead, it's based on the same stage play as the Bette Davis movie Old Acquaintance, although the two versions have some differences between them.

The movie opens up at Smith College in 1959. Liz (Jacqueline Bisset) and Merry (Candice Bergen) are best friends and roommates, although Merry is about to drop out in order to elope with Doug (David Selby), which causes a bit of tension as it's implied that Doug and Liz may have dated in the past. In any case, Merry and Doug do run off, and since this is still the first reel, you know that happily ever after isn't going to be a thing. You also know that the movie is going to move quite a bit ahead in the future or else we wouldn't have that mention of 1959.

Sure enough, 10 years pass as Liz shows up on a college campus in Los Angeles to do a speaking engagement. Liz has become a famous writer thanks to her one novel as well as a bunch of essays of the sort that wind up in magazines for the smart set, or the people who think they're the smart set. Merry lives in Malibu with Doug and their daughter, and know a bunch of Hollywood types. Indeed, Merry, inspired by Liz's success as a writer, decided that she too should try her hand at writing. But where Liz wrote a critically-acclaimed and award-winning book, Merry writes something that Liz considers not very good writing, and incredibly trashy subject material about all of Merry and Doug's thinly-disguised Hollywood friends. Merry gets Liz to present the novel to her agent Jules Levi (Steven Hill).

As you can guess, Merry's novel becomes a trashy hit, while Liz is still suffering from writers' block as she tries to complete that second novel. On the other hand, Merry and Doug's marriage is falling apart and Doug loves Liz, something that's really going to piss off Merry when she finds out about it, which she's going to in the mid-1970s when she's in New York to do a TV appearance with Merv Griffin.

The final segment of the film comes in 1981 when Merry has finally written a novel that not only gets some critical acclaim, but short-listed for the same award that Liz won all the way back in the 1960s. Liz is on the committee to select this year's winner, and unsurprisingly Merry tries to use her friendship with Liz to get Liz to select her book as the winner. Liz's personal life, meanwhile, is going down the tubes. She's supposed to do an interview with Chris (Hart Bochner), a writer for Rolling Stone, but they end up having a bit of a romantic relationship that's complicated by the fact that Merry's daugher Debby (Meg Ryan) wants to leave home and spends some nights first on the couch in Liz's hotel suite followed by the couch in Chris' suite.

Rich and Famous is a mess of a movie, and it's easy to see why it was neither a critical nor box-office success when it was originally released. Parts of it rise to the level of trashy fun, notably Bergen's horrendous accent in the more melodramatic scenes. But it doesn't rise to the final scene of the original Bette Davis/Miriam Hopkins version.

Rain Around the Soldier

Another of the actors honored in this year's Summer Under the Stars was Steve McQueen, which gave me the chance to record one of his films that I hadn't seen before: Soldier in the Rain.

McQueen plays Sgt. Eustis Clay, an army drill sergeant somewhat reminiscent of William Holden's operator character in Stalag 17 except that, where Stalag 17 was set in a World War II POW camp, Clay was part of the peacetime draft and seems to be counting down the days until his time in the Army was finished. He's got much bigger schemes planned for when he gets out of the army. Clay serves under MSgt. Maxwell Slaughter (Jackie Gleason), a career soldier who, based on the time the film was released and Gleason's age, was probably drafted in World War II and never found anything better to do than stay in the Army after the war. He's trying to make life as easy for himself as possible before he hits his 20 and out.

Slaughter likes Clay for whatever reason, although Clay looks up to Slaughter more than he probably should. Not that Slaughter is a bad influence; it's that Clay seems like a bit of a naïf and that nobody should look up to another human being the way Clay looks up to Slaughter. Slaughter is married to the Army, and doesn't have a wife or kids, so Clay finds a young local woman off-base, Bobby Jo (Tuesday Weld) and introduces her to Slaughter.

Slaughter eventually develops a liking for Bobby Jo becaue she turns out to be brighter than she looks, although she seems much too young for Slaughter: she's presented as a high school student who's barely legal. You'd think Slaughter's superior officers like Lt. Magee (Tom Poston) would put the kibosh on such fraternizing, but apparently no.

As I said earlier, Clay is a smooth operator type who among other things is trying to pass off PFC Meltzer (Tony Bill) as a sprinter who's going to be able to run the first three-minute mile, at a time when the mile record would have been around 3:55, not that the mile is run much any more since metric distances are more generally run. This is presented as one of the comic schemes Clay is involved in, although it also leads to a traffic incident that Slaughter has to bail Clay out of.

Slaughter will have to bail Clay out for the film's climax, a much more dramatic scene when Clay finds out his dog died. A couple of MPs decide to beat the crap out of Clay at a bar for some reason, and Slaughter has to save Clay's butt.

Soldier in the Rain is one of those films that's more episodic than having a traditional full-movie arc, and it's a movie that doesn't really work. It's partly because the episodes don't quite fit together but more because Steve McQueen took his character in a direction that doesn't work. McQueen plays Clay much too broadly, as a sort of Southern stereotype. It's supposed to be broad comedy, I suppose, but McQueen's performance makes it look almost as though McQueen is a lousy actor, which isn't the case. Supposedly this was because McQueen felt like Gleason was stealing scenes or at least coming out on top, but it doesn't work and the director probably should have spotted it. In any case, it makes the movie rather grating whenever McQueen is on screen, which is a lot.

At least I've gotten Soldier in the Rain off of my list of movies to watch. But, as always, watch and judge for yourself.

Waiting for a star to fall

Another of the movies that I had sitting on my DVR for a while that I finally got around to watching was Boy Meets Girl. Considering the cast involved and the fact that this was made at Warner Bros., I was kind of surprised that I hadn't seen this one before.

As the movie opens, agent Rossetti (Frank McHugh) is taking his client, cowboy star Larry Toms (Dick Foran) to Royal pictures to talk about a comeback. Rosetti thinks that Royal's writing team of Law (James Cagney) and Benson (Pat O'Brien) has a script ready that would be perfect for Toms, although it turns out they've been lying because they're the sort of people who always seem to be trying to come up with some angle. It's the sort of role that had this been a 1940s picture would have been perfect for Jack Carson, except that this is also the sort of movie that wouldn't have been made after the US entered World War II in December 1941 since it's very much a product of its time.

Studio producer C.F. Friday (Ralph Bellamy) is none too happy with this. Meanwhile, he orders the studio equivalent of room service, which is brought up by commissary waitress Susie Seabrook (Marie Wilson). She faints in Friday's office, which as it turns out is because she's pregnant, which is rather shocking since she's not married and once the Production Code kicked in the idea of an unmarried woman being pregnant and it not being a big moral failure is something you don't expect. In any case, when they find about the pregnance, Law and Benson have a brilliant idea, which is to promote Susie's unborn child as the next big star, to be paired with Larry in a series of movies. Meanwhile, showing up at Friday's office when Susie is recovering from fainting is an English extra, Rodney Bowman (Bruce Lester), who is going to show up later in the plot.

Susie's kid Happy does in fact become a star, bigger than Larry. This ticks Larry off, so Rossetti plans to get Larry and Susie married off so that Susie and Happy will retire. But this is bad news for Law and Benson. They need to come up with a way to break up the relation. Their plan is, at the premiere of the next Errol Flynn movie, they'll have some guy show up claiming to be Happy's father who didn't really die at all. Their plan hits a snag, though, when they hire extra Rodney Bowman to play the part of the man claiming to be Happy's father. They don't know that Happy and Susie have already met.

So Law and Bowman have to come up with another plan that will save the studio. Their plan is to make it look like the British Teddington Studios (an in-joke, as Teddington was in fact Warner Bros.' British arm to make pictures satisfying the British quota system) is going to be buying Royal Pictures in order to get Happy under contract. This brings everybody back to Royal Pictures, and things are concluded more or less happily.

Boy Meets Girl is a movie I had a lot of problems with, mostly down to the script. The screenplay requires everybody to be incredibly loud and obnoxious, as well as dishonest with trying to scam one another. This is supposed to be a comedy, but the characters just aren't very sympathetic in my book. Still, everybody here is professional and do the best they can with the material. Maybe audiences of the late 1930s would have appreciated Boy Meets Girl more than I do in 2026.

Somebody at least had a navy

During World War II, the US military worked with Hollywood to put out a bunch of rah-rah stuff focusing on various sections of the military to promote themselves as well as build morale. A lesser known section that got such a movie was the dirigibles, in the movie This Man's Navy.

Wallace Beery plays dirigible pilot Ned Trumpet, who's such a serial fabulist that you wonder how he wasn't pensioned off when he hit his 20 years since it's not as if anybody would want such a story-teller in a position of command, I don't think. Maybe Pearl Harbor hit before the 20 years and they still needed him. In any case, one of the things he makes up is the wife and kid he supposedly has, somthing you'd think that records would easily disprove. Part of the responsibilities of the dirigible unit is to patrol for submarines, since the U-boats didn't really have the sort of missiles that could take out things in the air.

Anyhow, another part of Trumpet's duties, serving with his friend Jimmy Shannon (James Gleason), is to teach the new recruits both in blimps and balloons. When talking with a recruit in the basket of a balloon and discussing hand-to-hand combat, Trumpet gets knocked out of the balloon. Fortunately he's got a parachute on him, and he lands on a ranch owned by Maude Weaver (Selena Royle) and her son Jess (Tom Drake). Jess isn't serving in the war because he had an accident with one of the horses that left him with bad legs using crutches. But Trumpet sees an opportunity. Jess could become the sort of foster son he never had, which would satisfy all the people in the Navy who think he's been lying about having a son. Meanwhile, this would enable Jess to get surgery courtesy of the military and possibly be able to serve if he doesn't need the crutches any more.

So now we get a sequence of the recruits going through training, which is part of the propaganda that movies like this were designed to be at least from the point of view of the military. At the end of the training, Jess decides that he's going to take up training at Pensacola, which is an air station for regular planes, not blimps. Poor Trumpet is disappointed, especially because he's got his own problems. However, he is given the chance to redeem himself when the Navy sends him over to British India to work with the British to send blimps from India to western China from where the Chinese are fighting against Japan.

And then things get terribly unrealistic. Weaver is on a mission, when his plane crashes. Trumpet gets the idea that because of the dark and the fog, he can actually get a blimp through to pick up the stranded pilots before the Japanese get to them. This even though planes can fly much faster than blimps. But considering the sort of movie this is, we know that Trumpet is going to be able to save the day even though the Japanese are going to be shooting at him all the way back to India and frankly should be able to destroy the blimp the way it's a sitting duck.

I'm sure air buffs will enjoy seeing the blimps in action, although the story is a fairly weak one. Wallace Beery's character is rather a blowhard and if there weren't a war on it would be hard to be sympathetic to him. Tom Drake is also not the most charismatic actor out there. But once again audiences of the day probably enjoyed the morale boost that came with the depiction of the military.

Another Two for One repeat

I mentioned last week how TCM is re-running the spring season of Two for One in the fall, and how this is giving me the opportunity to put up a couple of posts on films that I recorded the first time around and am now able to watch to do these posts. The guest for tonight, Sept. 19, is actress Sheryl Lee Ralph, and one of her selections is one of her first movie roles, in support of Sidney Poitier in A Piece of the Action at 10:00 PM.

An introductory sequence shows Dave Anderson (Bill Cosby), master safe-cracker, getting into the Chicago headquarters of a loan corporation where they keep the safe full of cash. Dave gets into the safe, steals a large sum of money, and is able to get away by jumping out a window into a truck below and driving off.

Cut to a completely unrelated crook, Manny Durrell (Sidney Poitier). He's studied the movements of illegal bookmker Mr. Bruno (Titos Vandis), and uses that to set up what looks like a police raid of Bruno's upscale home where the books and a lot of cash are kept. Bruno fills a briefcase full of cash and gives it to the maid to take to a trusted source. In fact, the maid is working for Manny and she's the one with the cash that Manny is bilking out of Bruno, which would also explain why she didn't get pinched while leaving the house when the police were surrounding it. Those fake police were also working for Burrell.

Meanwhile, during the raid, Bruno calls his mole in the police department to find out what's going on. That mole talks to Det. Joshua Burke (James Earl Jones), which is how Bruno learns it's a fake raid and is going to get whoever is responsible. Meanwhile, Burke is set to retire in a few months. When he does, the first thing he does is write a couple of anonymous letters, to Manny and Dave, as well as a third. Manny and Dave's notes inform them that somebody knows about those jobs we saw at the opening, with a threat to send the two of them to prison if they don't meet the writer at a certain hotel suite. The two men are then directed the next day to a restaurant where they'll learn what their "punishment" entails.

In fact, they don't meet the letter writer, but the recipient of the third letter, Lila French (Denise Nicholas). She runs a community center that is trying to help inner-city youth by doing things such as finding them jobs, even though these are clearly embittered youths. (Sheryl Lee Ralph plays one of the youths.) The letter writer has put Dave's name to the letter, saying that Dave and Manny would be happy to "volunteer" an extremely generous amount of time to the center, which they're forced into doing although Lila doesn't seem bright enough to figure out there's some sort of blackmail going on here.

At this point, the movie really starts to sag as the inner-city youths seem like a bunch of stock character types; I will admit however, that I have no idea whether inner-city adolescents would in fact have acted like that. They come across as being as much of a stereotype as the Sweathogs on Welcome Back, Kotter. But Dave and Manny have an obligation to help them get jobs since that will keep them out of jail. They also use their in at the improvement center to try to figure out who exactly is blackmailing them. Meanwhile, Bruno is busy looking for the people who robbed him out of all that money, and he's going to figure it out in time for the movie's climax....

A Piece of the Action is another of those movies that sounds like a good idea on paper, but doesn't quite work in practice. One is that I've already mentioned how the young people don't quite seem real here. There's also the fact that it's trying to be a drama with some comedy when it should really be a comedy with some drama. I have a feeling that Sidney Poitier, who also directed, wanted to have the movie serve as social commentary on the issues of the inner city. But the biggest flaw is that the film sags at a massive 135 minutes, which is really much too long for the material. It's the sort of film that should really be clocking in at an hour and a half or so.

Still, I'm sure there are people who will enjoy A Piece of the Action more than I did, since it's one of those movies that has its heart in the right place.

Over the Moon

Merle Oberon was TCM's Star of the Month some time back, which gave me the opportunity to record a couple of movies that I hadn't seen before. One of them was Over the Moon, an early Technicolor movie out of Britain.

Oberon stars as Jane Benson, a young woman living in Yorkshire at a time when Yorkshire was a bit of a backwater. She's helping take care of a rich distant relative since she doesn't have all that much money of her own. She's got a local doctor, Freddie Jarvis (Rex Harrison), interested in her to the point that he's about to sell his local practice for £5,000 in part so he can pay for a honeymoon in Monte Carlo before trying to get a practice in London after the wedding.

And then the relative dies. He had owned coal mines and, unbenknownst to anybody, bequeaths his entire estate to Jane, a sum of £18 million, which was vast for about 1938 when the movie started production. (Despite the political situation in Europe at the time, especially considering the movie didn't get released in the UK until after World War II started, there's no mention of politics in the movie.) This new-found wealth causes problems. Jane has never had any wealth, and would like to live a little, if not a lot. After all, being worth eight figures in 1938 pounds sterling is nothing to sneeze at. But Freddie is displeased with it, because he's got the good sense to realize that this sudden wealth is going to cause issues in their relationship.

Meanwhile, a couple of grifters show up in Yorkshire claiming to be distant relatives of Jane's from London. They claim they're going to look out for her interests, but it should be clear to any normal human being that these are not people to be trusted. But they plan to take Jane down to Monte Carlo in search of that wealthy husband and have just the man for her. As for Freddie, he goes off to Switzerland to work at one of those alpine private clinics for the wealthy that were a thing in the pre-war years. He becomes quite the hit with the ladies, although he's oblivious to the extent to which they moon over him.

When Jane gets to Monte Carlo, she has not two, but three men pursuing her. Two of them are the con-artist partners of the women claiming they're trying to "help" Jane, while the third is man with a phony name (Robert Douglas) who is in fact the son of one of Britain's wealthiest men and worth even more than Jane. He knows that wealth brings as many problems as it solves and is there to warn her. Surprisingly, nobody recognizes him as the son of an extremely wealthy man.

The Strange World of Planet X

Some time back, I did a post on a British sci-fi movie that got picked up by Warner Bros. for distribtuion in the US, Satellite in the Sky. Another movie with a similar provenance, albeit with a much smaller budget, was Cosmic Monsters, also known as The Strange World of Planet X.

Alec Mango plays Dr. Laird, who is doing experiments for the British Ministry of Defense in one of those old manor houses in a small countryside village where the basement has been converted into a laboratory with suitably photogenic equipment. However, something goes wrong with the experiment, leading to an explosion, which really gets the attention of the military types in London. To that end, they send a computer expert, although this is the primitive sort of computing since it's the 1950s, named Michele Dupont (Gaby André). The problem, at least in Dr. Laird's estimateion, is that Dupont is... a woman! Shock! Horror!

Anyhow, also in the group of scientists is an American Gil Graham (Forrest Tucker), who is probably there to make distribution of the movie in America more palatable for American audiences. Anyhow, the merry band of scientists -- or not so merry band because the next experiment also goes wrong and has the scientists bickering at each other -- continues the experiments in electromagnetic fields. As I said, the experiment goes wrong, causing a briefcase to go flying across the lab and nearly clocking Michele. Gil saves her. If the experiment that caused London to send Michele to the lab got the attention of the folks in London, this one really does, because it gives them the impression that something about the apparatus could be weaponized.

Not that anyone in the general public knows what's going on in that laboratory, but this second failed experiment also gets their attention, since it caused lightning storms, a seeming meteorite, and other such fun stuff. Graham also determines there's something not a part of their experiment that may still be providing power to the apparatus.

And then a "Mr. Smith" (Martin Benson) shows up in the village. He's clearly an outsider, since there's so much about local life that he doesn't know, although he knows enough about electromagnetism that it's obvious to anybody who knows about the experiment why he's shown up in town. But what does he really want?

As I said, Cosmic Monsters is a fairly low-budget affair, and has a lot of the tropes of American B sci-fi of the era. The exception is that, having been made in Britain, there's something just slightly enough different as to make it noticeable. It's interesting, but not nearly as good as another country life sci-fi from the Britain of the era, Village of the Damned.

The Last of the Mohicans (1936)

One of those books that's relatively well-known as a book, and which has had multiple adaptations to film, is James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans. Surprisingly, I had never read the book or seen any of the film adaptations until TCM ran the 1936 version of The Last of the Mohicans. With that in mind, I recorded it and finally sat down to watch it.

In 1757, it was the second year of the Seven Years' War, which was fought on multiple continents among all the great European powers. The North American portion of that conflict is generally called the French and Indian War, fought because France and Britain disputed the boundary in the Mississippi River watershed among other things. France used its allies among the various native groups to harass British settlers, especially in the more northerly colonies since native tribes could come down from French Canada as well. The British have set up Fort William Henry at what is now the southern end of Lake George in New York, with Albany being the gateway to the Adirondacks as well as the Mohawk valley. The British want the settlers to help them fight against the French, but the settlers understand that their real conflict is not with the French but the Indians and want British help to go after the Indians.

Alice (Binnie Barnes) and Cora (Heather Angel) Munro are the two adult daughters of Col. Munro who is stationed at Fort William Henry. The want to go from Albany to the fort to be with him, and set out with British officer Maj. Heyward (Henry Wilcoxon) to get to Lake George. It's a dangerous overland trip, and sure enough Magua (Bruce Cabot), a Huron Indian guiding the British, turns on them. The British are saved by Natty Bumppo (Randolph Scott), better known as Hawkeye. Hawkeye is working with a rival but dying tribe, the Mohicans, and he's traveling with the Mohicans Uncas and Chingachgook.

When everybody gets to Fort William Henry, it's soon besieged by the French, with Magua planning to take the Hurons and murder the defenseless settlers. Hawkeye learns of this, and defies direct orders from the British and removes the settler militia to go defend the other settlers. This can be seen as insubordination, or worse, desertion, and is an act that could carry the death penalty. Except that there are more pressing matters to deal with before there can be any court-martial.

Magua has fallen for Cora, although she and Uncas of the Mohicans also have a thing. Meanwhile, Alice and Hawkeye are in love with each other. So Magua kidnaps the two women in order that he can have the bride he wants on one hand and an important hostage on the other hand. News comes that the Huron are planning to burn Alice alive at the stake. Hawkeye and Maj. Heyward both know that the one real way to save Alice is for one of them to sacrifice himself and take Alice's place at the stake, leading to a climax that certainly would have excited audiences of 1936.

The one big weakness of this version of The Last of the Mohicans is that it's the sort of movie that hasn't aged terribly well. It's got Hollywood's inaccurate view of the native tribes, something that's probably going to bother at least a certain portion of audiences in 2026. The "location" shooting, in various parts of California away from Hollywood, is about the best Hollywood could do in those days since location shooting someplace more distant would probably have been a logistical nightmare. On the plus side, Randolph Scott gives another fine performance showing that he was a pretty versatile actor before he decamped to westerns in the last 15 or 20 years of his career.

I still haven't read the book, and also haven't seen the Daniel Day-Lewis version of the movie, so I can't compare. But this version of The Last of the Mohicans stands on its own as a pretty good movie with some flaws.

Teenage Doll

Tomorrow afternoon, Sept. 16, sees a lineup of movies starring actresses who were discovered young. One of them who didn't exactly go on to big things was June Kenney. She appears in the trashy Teenage Doll, which concludes the afternoon at 6:45 PM.

The movie opens with credits of a woman falling from the roof of a building to her death, much like Eva Marie Saint's brother in On the Waterfront. The young woman is a member of a girls' gang called the Black Widows, led by Helen (Fay Spain). She suspects that the dead woman was pushed by one of her fellow gang members. Or at least, that's a convenient excuse, since what would any normal person be doing in this sort of place at this time of night. And with the police coming, Helen needs to think fast. Thankfully, she's got just the idea of how to deal with this.

The Black Widows are sort of the women's arm of a fellow gang called the Tarantulas. The one exception is Barbara Bonney (June Kenney). She's closer to a "good girl" who's new to the area and somehow fell in with the wrong gang, pun intended. But she also had a relationship with Eddie Rand (John Brinkley), which is more of a problem. Eddie isn't a member of the Tarantulas, but a rival gang called the Vandals. As such, it would be convenient for Helen and the rest of the Black Widows to turn Barbara in to the police and make her the scapegoat. And Helen is none too circumspect about it, telling Barbara right out that this is what she plans to do, so Barbara should just give up right now.

At this point, the movie develops by going to the back-stories of several of the girls and how their lives probably made them want to join a gang. Helen has a mother who works all night because Dad is supposedly on disability, but he's seeing other women on the side. Another lives with her kid sister, and has decided to go out on a date with her boss because she knows it will be financially remunerative. A third, a girl of Mexican heritage, is supposed to be working at the family business but steals money from the cash register. Barbara has "good" parents, although Barbara's mom had a boyfriend during Prohibition who got killed in one of the gangland killings of the 1920s and doesn't want Barbara to end up like that. Barbara's father is at heart not bad, but it stupidly strict and ignorant of what his daughter does.

Barbara, being in danger, runs out to the Vandals' headquarters in the hopes that Eddie can help her, although if anything her actions are simply putting herself and the Vandals in greater danger because it's obvious that the Black Widows and Tarantulas are going to find them. It all leads up to a finale that I suppose satisfies the Production Code while at the same time being suitably lurid for the teen audience.

Teenage Doll was produced and directed by Roger Corman early in his career. Objectively, it's another of those movies that's not very good. But Roger Corman knew what to do even on a limited budget, and he's able to take material like this and turn it into something entertaining because of just how trashy it is. June Kenney never became a big star, and frankly it's not that hard to see why. Still, Teenage Doll is dumb fun, and definitely worth a watch.

Latin Lovers

Tonight's second night of Ricardo Montalbán's turn as TCM's Star of the Month kicks off with a movie of his that I had never gotten around to watching before, but was on my DVR: Latin Lovers, tonight at 8:00 PM.

Although Montalbán is Star of the Month and the male lead here, we don't actually see him for a good half hour or so. Instead, the movie kicks off with female lead Lana Turner. She plays Nora Taylor, a woman who went from rags to riches when he struck oil during Nora's childhood, before dying fairly young. Nora manages the money -- all $37 million of it -- by figuring the best way to keep your money from drying up is work and investment. Deep down inside, however, she's worried that men are only going to be interested in her for her money, and is seeing a psychologist about it (Eduard Franz, whose scenes with the character's wife are the comic relief in the film). This, even though he current boyfriend Paul Chevron (John Lund) is also worth eight figures.

Paul is planning to tell Nora he's going to marry her, but his hangup is being too forward, so after going to an analyst of his own (Beulah Bondi in a cameo), he decides instead that he's going to give Nora time to consider the proposal while he goes down to Brazil to look at polo ponies, since that's what rich people do. Now, all of this happens before we meet the Montalbán character, so we know that Paul isn't going to return from Brazil to a Nora who says yes and they live happily ever after.

Instead, Nora hears that it's apparently a thing for rich guys to go to Latin America and fall in love with the beautiful Latin ladies, a fate that Nora doesn't want to have happen. So she decides she's going to take her secretary Anne (Jean Hagen) and go down to Rio and get a suite of rooms on the same floor as Paul, who has no idea about any of this. The other question of who's running their respective businesses also never gets adequately answered.

Here is where Ricardo Montalbán comes in. He plays a rancher named Roberto Santos, living on the old family ranch with his impossibly young grandfather (Louis Calhern). Paul goes out to the ranch for business; Nora goes with him; she meets Roberto and immediately falls head over heels for his Latin good looks. Since Montalbán is billed above John Lund and he's not a wooden drip like John Lund, we know who's going to end up with whom at the end of the movie. The question, of course, is how we get there.

And there are a lot of complications considering that Nora is this close to being engaged to Paul. She's also worried about what's going to happen when Roberto finds out about her wealth. Then there's his stereotypical Latin attitude toward gender roles. At least in this case, part of his defense is that Nora was stupid enough to show up way late to a meeting at the Santos ranch and then expect him to drop everything for her. She deserved some of the treatment she got.

Latin Lovers is a competently made film that's not exactly bad so much as it is predictable and modest in its aims. It's the sort of thing that would have entertained audiences in the days before television, although by 1953 when this one was made I can't help but think audiences might have been interested in authentic location shooting. Think Three Coins in the Fountain from a year later. Latin Lovers is OK, but ultimately unmemorable.

Rogue's March

I think I've stated on several occasions that I'm not the biggest fan of Peter Lawford, as his performances are generally fairly wooden. However, I had another of his films on my DVR, Rogue's March, so I watched it to put up another post here.

The movie is set in the late Victorian era, when Britain has control over India although the Russians would like to have access to a warm-water port. To that end the Russians have been supporting the Afghans who are on the border of the British possessions just across the Khyber Pass. Lawford plays Dion Lenbridge, a captain in the Royal Midland Fusiliers, who has a family tradition of serving in the regiment as his father Henry (Leo G. Carroll) is a colonel in the regiment. Dion also has a girlfriend Jane (Janice Rule) he's planning to marry.

Except that the Russians bugger things up. The Russian embassy in London has one of Dion's underlings as a spy, and that underling has absconded with some documents that the Russians are supposed to copy before returning them to where they're kept under lock and key and for which Dion is responsible. This being the days before tiny cameras that could take photographs of the documents, they have to be taken for a substantial amount of time to be copied. Unfortunately, the Russians don't have enough time as the Fusiliers are called to service on the restive frontier between British India and Afghanistan.

That call-up screws up Dion's plans for marriage, but far worse is that the missing documents get Dion arrested and court-martialled for the missing documents. Not helping is the fact that the Russians kill the real culprit, leaving Dion with no defense. He's tried and convicted, but for whatever reason not sentenced to death. Now, of course, since this all happens within the first 15 minutes or so, we know this isn't going to be the end of the movie. Indeed, Dion escapes from prison somehow (not enough detail is paid to the how here). He also has the brilliant idea of reenlisting in the army, albeit it in a different regiment under a different identity and starting off as a private. He figures this is the last place the authorities will ever look for him, and besides, the regiment he joins up with is likely to be sent to Singapore, far away from where his old regiment is and even farther away from Britain.

But, woudln't you know it, things heat up in India, and while Dion's new regiment is on its way to Singapore, they get orders that they actually have to go to India. Dion is for understandable reasons worried that he's going to be found out, but there's not much he can do. At least, not until the Afghans actually attack and Dion sees his chance to serve with distinction. Worse, this Afghan attack is engineered by one of the Russians who was at the embassy in London and responsible for ordering the taking of those documents for which Dion was court-martialled in the first place. That Russians' confession allows us to have the requisite happy ending.

Rogue's March is very much a programmer, and definitely not nearly as good as it could have been. This is a movie that cries out for color cinematography, but we get flat black and white, allegedly filmed partly at the real Khyber Pass. It also doesn't help that we have Peter Lawford again, who doesn't exactly impress, in a by-the-numbers story that has an implausible set-up and ending. There's a reason I hadn't hear of Rogue's March before, and a reason why it's not very memorable.

Kanał

Having finished with Summer Under the Stars, we get to that part of the year on TCM where Saturday nights see a repeat of the Two for One interviews that ran during the spring. That also means the chance for stuff I recorded during the spring airings to get a mention new since the movies will be airing again. The guest presenter for tonight is Bill Hader, whom you may recall having done Essentials Jr. for a couple of years back in the 2010s. He selected two foreign films, both of which I recorded, so we'll start off with the first one, Kanał at 8:00 PM.

Kanał is the Polish word for "sewer", and the movie tells us about an episode from the Warsaw Uprising that is in part set in the sewers under the streets of Warsaw. For those who don't know the precise history, Nazi Germany attacked Poland from the west on September 1, 1939, and conquered the western half of the country including Warsaw by the end of the month, while the Soviets overran the eastern half and annexed it. Recall that the Soviets and Germans were allies under the Molotov von-Ribbentrop Pact until June 1941 when Germany invaded the Soviet Union. By the summer of 1944 with the D-Day invasion it was clear that Germany was going to lose the war, so on August 1, 1944, the Polish Underground started an uprising called the Warsaw Uprising.

As Kanał opens, it's late September, 1944, and equally clear that the uprising is doomed to failure. A narrator tells us that we're witnessing the last hours in the lives of several participants in the uprising. Lt. Zadra (meaning "Splinter", all of the characters have nicknames instead of real names) leads a platoon of soldiers to a house in a portion of Warsaw near the front line but not fully bombed out yet from where he's hoping to moiunt a defense. Among the soldiers are Korab; a record-keeper; a female guide (not uncommon in the uprising) named Stokrotka (Daisy); and others, with Vladek Sheybal playing a composer we presume wasn't intending to fight in the uprising but got caught up in it.

Unfortunately, the house is in a position that's quickly going to be indefensible too, so the decision is made to retreat, except that the only way to retreat is to go underground into the sewers and come out in a different section of Warsaw. This requires knowing where the various sewer lines lead, as they're not particularly well-mapped. Complicating matters is that Korab has picked up an injury and cannot keep pace with the rest of the soldiers. Stokrotka offers to stay behind and help Korab as everybody else can move faster and she knows the sewers like the back of her hand.

The sewers are, of course, dark and filthy, looming around the Poles almost like as much of the enemy as the Germans are. There's also always the possibility of the sound the Polish soldiers make with the movements carrying to the manholes where Germans might be able to hear them, while the darkness could lead them to get lost as well as inducing panic. It's unrelentingly grim, even if we didn't know that the uprising was dommed to failure.

Kanał is a movie that's very well made, although it's a bit tough to rate because of how uncomfortable it can be to watch. It's also complicated by the fact it was made under Communism back in 1957. One aspect of the uprising was the hope that they could hold off the Germans long enough to make a Soviet advance quicker and therefore liberate the city more quickly. However, the Soviets felt that it was more convenient to let the Poles be the ones losing forces to try to stop the Germans. The increased the enmity the Poles felt towards Soviets, but was something that couldn't be mentioned in 1957.

At least Mickey Rooney doesn't strip

A movie that Eddie Muller presented on Noir Alley some months back that I was surprised to see I hadn't blogged about before considering it's an MGM movie with Mickey Rooney is The Strip. It's schuled to air tomorrow, Sept. 12, at noon as part of TCM's Saturday Musical Matinee with Dave Karger, so I watched the movie so that I could put up a review here.

The Strip, of course, refers to the "Sunset Strip", that portion of Sunset Boulevard in what is now West Hollywood, not quite as far west as where Joe Gillis got the swimming pool he always wanted. At the time of the movie, it was in an unincorporated area of Los Angeles County, meaning that the only government was the county (and therefore the sheriff's department, not the LAPD) with no municipal government. After an opening narration informing us of all this, the police come to the apartment of one Jane Tafford (Sally Forrest). She's in very bad shape, but not as bad shape as Delwyn "Sonny" Johnson (James Craig). He's quite dead.

Stanley Maxton (Mickey Rooney) knew both of them, and he's known to have plans to leave the Los Angeles area, so that makes him a natural suspect in the murder and the attempted murder. He's brought in for questioning, and he tells us his story in that most original of all Hollywood plot devices, the flashback. Stanley was originally from Los Angeles before being drafted to fight in Korea, where he got injured enough to wind up in a series of Army hospitals before his last stop in Kansas City. His buddies at the hospital know he was a drummer in the before times, so now that he's getting discharged they spring to buy him a drum set to start life again in Los Angeles.

Unfortunately, on the way west, he gets in a car accident caused by the other driver, which also destroys his drums, which probably shouldn't have been on the passenger and back seats of a convertible anyway. That other man is the aforementioned Sonny Johson, who offers to pay for the drums as well as offering Stanley a good job out in Los Angeles.

The only catch is that the job isn't exactly legal, since Sonny runs the numbers racket for a good portion of Los Angeles. It makes Stanley good money, but brings him to the attention of the police. It's in trying to escape the police that Stanley first runs into Jane, who works as a cigarette girl at Fluff's (William Demarest) nightclub on the Strip. Jane, however, has dreams of becoming a movie star. Part of the policy Fluff has is wanting to meet the prospective dates of his female employees, knowing that the wrong guy can be a bad influence and bring the police his way. Not that Stanley is a bad guy; Fluff, on learning that Stanley plays the drums, would like Stanley to give up his job and become a drummer in the house band which is a prestigious job considering the bandleader is Louis Armstrong.

Stanley and Jane start a romantic relationship, although Jane isn't ready to settle down since she still wants that chance at stardom. Stanley knows that Sonny has an in with any number of Hollywood types, so he introduces Jane to Sonny, telling Sonny in no uncertain terms that Jane is his girl, not Sonny's. Yeah, right. You know that Sonny is going to waste no time putting the moves on Jane while Stanley becomes incredibly jealous, leading to a shooting that we know is going to happen since all of this is in flashback and we were already informed of the shooting at the beginning of the movie.

There's nothing original to the plot of The Strip, although it holds up reasonably well thanks in part to Mickey Rooney's performance. That, and all the jazz music going on here, which is probably the real highlight of the film.

Baxter! (1973)

TCM did a spotlight on Hanna-Barbera a while back. They're best known for their cartoons, but the company actually helped produce a couple of live-action movies too. One example of this was Baxter!.

The movie opens on a plane that's flying from Los Angeles to London. Roger Baxter (Scott Jacoby) is an adolescent flying with his mother (Lynn Carlin) to what is going to be his new home, although how she was able to get a nice place in London isn't quite mentioned. Roger's parents are getting divorced, and Roger is none too happy with the move, in part because his mom doesn't really care about him, or at least that's the impression he gets -- she seems to be more concerned with her own appearance.

Compounding the problem is that Roger has a speech defect. Like Kay Francis (who was rather too dead to essay this role herself), Roger can't really pronounce the letter R, which is a problem considering his name starts with one. That might have caused problems with the relationships within the family, but worse is that it's left him an introvert. How is he going to make new friends in London? And yet he does.

On the way up the elevator to their apartment, Roger and his mom meet the people who live one floor above them, Chris (Britt Ekland) and her French chef boyfriend, who just happens to be named Roger as well (Jean-Pierre Cassell), although his "Roger" is pronounced in the French way, "Ro-ZHAY". But it's enough of a connection for the boy to take to the couple, and since the elder Roger isn't a native English speaker, he has less of an issue with somebody having difficulty speaking the language properly. They even invite him for a weekend out in the country. There's also a girl about his age living across the street, who spies on him because he has a tendency to step out on the balcony wearing just his tighty-whiteys.

And then, at school, Roger gets sent to the speech therapist, Dr. Clemm (Patricia Neal). She's not just a speech therapist, but the sort of person who's seen enough children to know that the problems that show up in her office aren't always just physical problems. Considering how Roger's mom drinks too much and treats him like crap, while his dad is busy playing poker back in Beverly Hills, it's no wonder why young Roger is so badly adjusted.

He seems to be making progress, at least until he gets caught out in a cold rain and winds up with a case of pneumonia that sends him to the hospital. Dr. Clemm checks up on him, which is certainly understandable. But it leads to her understanding that Roger needs time away from his mom, who wants to bring him home as soon as possible, a sentiment that is also not unreasonable even if the movie paints Mrs. Baxter as being obviously in the wrong. This leads to things going even more badly for poor little Roger.

Apparently, Baxter! didn't do very well at the box office. Despite the small number of reviews on IMDb being almost entire positive, it's not hard to see why the movie wasn't very successful. It meanders, and while a lot of the characters are naturally unlikable, Roger came across as a bit too obnoxious for his own good at times. The production values also feel more like a 1970s TV movie of the week, ending with one of those nonsense freeze-frames that were in vogue in movies of the early 1970s.

The Yellow Canary

With the return of Noir Alley at the beginning of September, Eddie Muller presented a movie that wasn't quite noir, but was new to TCM largely because it was a restoration. That movie was The Yellow Canary. I forgot to record anything over the Labor Day weekend, so I had to watch it off of the Watch TCM app, where it's still available until October 5, so you've got a little while longer to watch it.

Pat Boone is the star here, and he made this movie in part because he wanted to broaden his acting chops and play something not as wholesome as before. Here he plays popular jazz-styled musician Andy Paxton, about to promote his new songs at a concert in Los Angeles. He's married to Lissa (Barbara Eden) and they have an infant son, but it's not quite a happy marriage. Andy is expecting his assistant Bake (Steve Harris), who himself has a troubled past, to smuggle a certain woman into the dressing room who is not his wife. As for Lissa, she's about to file for divorce because of Andy's constantly not being home nights and not from bein out on the road touring.

But they still have to be civil, so, before going out to a restaurant after the show, they stop off at home to check up on the kid. Lissa is shocked by what she finds, which is that the nurse has been murdered and the child kidnapped! The kidnapper has left a note referring to Andy as "Canary" and warning him not to call the police about the kidnapping.

Unsurprisingly, Bake, along with Andy's bodyguard Hub (Steve Forrest), who is himself a former police officer, prevail on Andy to call the police, who send in detective Lt. Bonner (Jack Klugman). Bonner is no dummy, and he knows that paying the ransom is a bad idea because it will only encourage other would-be kidnappers to do the deed for the ransom money. But Andy has a hysterical wife, and eventually sets out to liquidate some of his assets so he can get the cash necessary for the ransom. Perhaps the cops will be able to arrest the kidnappers at the pick-up.

And then, things happen that suggest to Andy and Lissa that the kidnapping might be an inside job. Well, not Andy or Lissa since they both had the iron-clad alibi of having been at the show all evening when the kidnapping would have occurred. But apparently Bake stepped out for a bit, long enough in fact to do the deed. (The movie doesn't address how someone would have gotten from the theater, to Beverly Hills, and back before the show ended.) Things get worse for Bake when his past catches up to him and he gets arrested on a forgery charge. Hub, for his part, uses his police past to do some investigating of his own with Andy. But who did the kidnapping, and why? And will the Paxtons get their kid back and reconcile their marriage?

The screenplay to The Yellow Canary was written by Rod Serling of The Twilight Zone fame, and in his outro Eddie Muller suggested that this wasn't Serling's finest 93 minutes. I'd say that's true, since the movie feels formulaic at times. But it's not exactly bad. There's a lot entertaining about it, from the familiar faces to watching Pat Boone try to play less-than-nice. It's more pedestrian than anything else, but The Yellow Canary is still definitely worth a watch.

In which Paul Henreid buckles swashes

It's been longer than I thought since I had a post on a pirate movie. With one of them about to expire fro the DVR -- The Spanish Main, I watched it so that I could write up a post on it and schedule it here. And then after writing up this post, I saw that TCM scheduled it for early tomorrow (Sept. 9) at 3:15 AM as part of the TCM spotlight of swashbuckling movies, so now is when it finally gets scheduled.

Paul Henreid stars as Laurent van Horn, a Dutch ship's captain who is taking a bunch of Dutch to the Carolinas circa 1720 to settle. A storm blows them wildly off course, since they're rescued in the Caribbean and taken to the colony at Cartagena, which is modern-day Colombia. That also happens to be part of a ring of colonies that control much of the Caribbean coast all the way up to the Gulf of Mexico. Non-Spanish ships are in decided danger there, even if they're blown off course. The local colonial viceroy, Don Juan Alvarado (Walter Slezak), takes van Horn and puts him in prison with plans to hang him. But several of the prisoners are able to effect an escape.

Fast-forward five years. There's a ship predating what the Spanish think should be their sea, one called the Barracuda, and the captain of that ship has been given that name by the Spanish since they don't know his real identity. As for van Horn, he's working as a navigator that's taking Francisca (Maureen O'Hara) to be married off to a man she's never seen before in what is clearly a political marriage. Her father is the viceroy of Mexico, while her husband-to-be is... Don Juan Alvarado, still viceroy of Cartagena. The Barracuda shows up to pirate the Spanish ship, and it turns out that the captain of the Barracuda is actually van Horn! Francisca decides to do a noble thing, which is to surrender herself to van Horn and let him marry her with the proviso that he'll not kill the people on the ship she was on or its escort. Of course, the other reason she had is that she finds van Horn so damn handsome.

The Barracuda puts in at Tortuga, where we learn that among the pirates is Anne Bonny (Binnie Barnes), whom you get the impression has really been pining after van Horn. It's not all a bed of roses for van Horn, as there are a bunch of pirates there, and not all of them get along so well with each other. There's a bigger problem, however, considering that Don Juan Alvarado is understandably displeased about having lost his betrothed and will stop at nothing to get Francisca for himself. The fact that she's actually married to van Horn, and the marriage is as far as we can tell licit under Catholic canon law, complicates things.

Don Juan is no dummy, and uses those pirates who don't care for van Horn to go after him. Francisca, you might think, would be just the wedge to get van Horn, but remember that she's never seen Don Juan so she has no allegiance to him. And as is unsurprising for a film like this, Francisca has also been falling in love for real with van Horn. All of this leads up to the climactic swashbuckling fight as Francisca and Anne try to break van Horn and his fellow prisoners out of jail before they can be executed.

There's nothing particularly new to the plot of The Spanish Main, but it's a movie that succeeds largely because it's not trying to do anything serious in a genre that's more about entertainment value than making big statements. Paul Henreid actually does OK as a pirate even though that's not the sort of character you'd expect him to be playing. Maureen O'Hara is as gorgeous as ever in Technicolor, Walter Slezak is suitably villainous, and Binnie Barnes hits the right slightly saucy notes as Anne Bonny.

Sit back, watch The Spanish Main, and be entertained.

Buzzin' Around

A short that I recorded from the Saturday matinee block on TCM as opposed to it randomly showing up after some movie to fill out a time slot was one from the end of Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle's life when he signed a contract to make shorts at Vitaphone to be distributed by Warner Bros. That movie is Buzzin' Around.

Arbuckle plays Cornelius, a rural inventor who has been working on a formula for a coating that, if applied to china, will render it shatter-resistant, as shown in a sight gag of dropping a pitcher and having it bounce, not just land without breaking. He's just received a letter from a china-shop owner who seems interested in the idea, and would like him to come and give a demonstration. However, in a mix-up, Cornelius takes a jug of moonshine that his friend Al (Al St. John) likes to drink from.

Not that Cornelius is going to be able to get to the china shop anyway. The title of the short comes from a scene early in the film when a beehive falls into the back of Cornelius' car as he's about to set off for the city and the china shop, with Cornelius swallowing one of the bees. But that's by far not the only issue Cornelius faces. There's a sight gag involving parallel parking, along with Cornelius' fender getting caught up with the fender of a much nicer car. This latter incident leads to a dispute that continually escalates until a policeman gets involved, with Cornelius finding a way out of it.

Eventually, Cornelius does make it to the shop, and of course his formula doesn't work considering that he doesn't have the formula with him and his friend Al is trying to get it to the shop before Cornelius can do any damage. And then the owner of the shop who was the one who wrote the letter shows up, revealing one last joke....

Fatty Arbuckle's career had, of couse, been destroyed a decade earlier by the incident where actress Virginia Rappe died in a hotel room he was renting, and his subsequent trials for his responsibility in her death. What a short like Buzzin' Around reveals is that Arbuckle's style of comedy had clearly gone out of fashion in the intervening decade. The comedy is way too broad and not particularly funny. This short was released in early 1933 and later in the year Arbuckly would suffer a fatal heart attack. But in any case, I don't know that he would have had a successful revival if he kept making shorts like this one.

TCM Star of the Month September 2026: Ricardo Montalbán

Ricardo Montalbán in Mystery Street (Sept. 7, 10:00 PM)

We've been into a new month for some time now, but it's finally time to get to the new Star of the Month. This time around, it's Ricardo Montalbán, since the second half of September sees the start of Hispanic heritage month and Mexican-born Montalbán certainly fits that bill. Montalbán's movies will be airing every Monday in prime time.

Unfortunately, I did not notice until too late that only on this first Monday in September, Montalbán's movies would actually start on Monday morning, meaning that by the time you see this post you'll probably have missed some of the movies, especially the ones I was thinking about putting up pictures of. For some weird reason, TCM decided to run one of Montalbán's later movies, The Singing Nun, this morning at 10:00 AM in and among a bunch of stuff from the late 1940s:

On the other hand, this month also sees what I think is the TCM premiere of a role that a lot of people who aren't so much movie fans think of when they think Montalbán: that of Khaaaaaaan! in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, at midnight on Sept. 29, so still on the 28th in more westerly time zones.

The Brighton Strangler

Another of the movies that had been sitting on my DVR for quite some time was The Brighton Strangler. Recently, I finally got around to watching it.

The movie was released in the US in May, 1945, just after the war in Europe ended, so was clearly filmed and set during the war. It's London on New Year's Eve, and a man is just about to strangle a woman to death before being shot by the police. The curtain comes down, which means not that it's the end of our movie, but the opening scene is actually of a play about a strangler in Brighton. That strangler, Edward Grey, is played by a man named Reginald Parker (John Loder). It's getting close to Christmas, and Parker has already decided he's tired of playing this character. So his fiancée Dorothy Kent (Rose Hobart) is writing a new play for him before she goes off to Canterbury for Christmas, with him to follow after closing night.

However, on closing night, after one final successful performance, there's another round of the Blitz. Parker isn't able to make it to a bomb shelter before the bombs start falling and, wouldn't you know it, but one of the bombs hits the theater. Now all of this is 15-20 minutes in, so we know he's not going to be killed. Instead, he's only concussed. On coming to, he sees that he has a baggage claim check in his overcoat pocket, since his baggage was sent ahead to the train station for him to pick up before getting his ticket to Canterbury.

Unfortunately, the concussion has screwed with his memory. He picks up the baggage, but before being able to get his ticket, he overhears a snippet of a conversation between a British WAC, April Manby (June Duprez), and the American flyboy she's eloped with, Bob Carson (Michael St. Angel). She's going home for leave without him because her parents aren't going to be excited about her marrying an aviator. More importantely, she mentions going home to Brighton, which jogs Parker's memory. Except that it jogs his memory of the play, so he buys a ticket to Brighton and gets in the same car as April.

April sees that Parker has been injured, so tends to the injury and asks him his name... and he gives the name Edward Grey, going to Brighton because he used to have family there. April takes pity on him and offers to invite him for Christmas dinner which is also convenient for her since she can't really bring her husband. But Parker-as-Grey gets to Brighton, and the first thing he thinks of doing the next day is to find the barrister who screwed up Grey's trial, which is what led to Grey's becoming a strangler in the play Parker had starred in. Clearly a case of life imitating art.

To be honest, the premise in The Brighton Strangler is a bit contrived, but this is only a B movie. You're not supposed to take it that seriously. And for what it does, it succeeds fairly well once it gets past a slow section in the middle of the movie. One other minor issue that is has is that it has to deal with the Production Code, so you wonder how it's going to get to a satisfying ending considering that the Parker character has on the one hand clearly committed murder, while on the other hand not being of sound mind or body. It's not something you'll evrer consider great, but I think it would certainly have entertained audiences back in the day as the lower bill on a movie night.

The Young Runaways

MGM was always the wrong studio to do certain types of movies, and I would suggest that adolescent social issue stuff was not up their alley. Things got even worse for the studio after the Freed Unit musicals dried up. Trying to be socially relevant just wasn't going to cut it, as you can see if you watch the late 1960s movie The Young Runaways. It's showing up on TCM again tomorrow, Sept. 6, at 6:00 AM, so now's the time to put up a post on it.

Now, as you can guess from the title, there are indeed young runaways, and we're introduced to them in a pre-credits opening sequences. (Or, maybe, sequences, since each of them has his or her own reasons for running away.) First is Deanie Donford (Patty McCormack), who is hanging out with the wrong crowd and staying out too late and lying to her mother (Lynn Bari) about it. Mom is so clueless that she's terrified of her daughter even uttering the word "sex". Deanie says "sex"; Mom slaps her. Repeatedly. It's funny, but this isn't supposed to be a comedy. In any case, Deanie runs away that night.

Dewey Norson (Kevin Coughlin) is a fundamentally good kid who has let his hormones get the better of him. He's been having a lovers' lane type of relationship with Carol Mae who informs him that despite having taken "pills" (this isn't all that long after the birth-control pill was introduced), she's gotten pregnant. Dewey isn't ready to be a father and can't handle the shame of telling his parents he's knocked up a girl, so he too runs away.

Finally there's Shelly Allen (Brooke Bundy), daughter of widowed PR man Raymond Allen (Lloyd Bochner). Both of them are also fundamentally decent people, although Dad with his high-powered career has made the mistake of never really having listened to his daughter. Worse, he makes the mistake of telling a client that he's been using his PR techniques on his daughter and that they're clearly working. Shelly, being thoroughly unhappy about having been called a commodity, decides she's going to run off too. She hitchhikes, but when the guy who picks her up puts the moves on her, it results in a car crash where Shelly has to flee without her suitcase. All three adolescents wind up in Chicago.

Deanie's story is almost entirely separate from the other two. She winds up in an apartment that two guys, Loch and Curly, are sharing. Both of them have heretofore been open about willing to share girlfriends, but this time Loch wants to keep Deanie for himself. Curly drinks too much, and this leads to tragedy. It's also the less interesting story.

Dewey looks for a place to stay and spends a night with a "guru" (Dick Sargent of all people, playing another totally non-grifting person) before getting a job at a gas station and having to deal with a former resident of the guru's settlement house who's dishonest and expects Dewey to help him. (That's a very young Richard Dreyfuss who's name is relatively high up the credits but whom I didn't recognize.) Dewey gets a small apartment of his own and meets Shelly one night out in the rain.

Shelly was taken in by two other girls who are more or less being pimped out by the boyfriend of one of them. The two girls give Shelly a place to stay, and even some clothes to wear, but it's obvious they want her to get involved in being pimped. When Shelly doesn't want this, she runs away, and everybody else is worried she's going to squeal to the police, so they try to find her to prevent that, which forms the climactic finale.

As I said at the beginning, this was made by MGM, who clearly didn't know how to handle such a topic. Imagine, if you will, that Jack Webb had been blacklisted and had somebody front for him while he wrote the sort stories you'd see on Dragnet. That's basically what you get here. It's terrible, but it's funny in an unintentional way. Oh, and there's terrible 60s music of the sort that's trying to be relevant but sounded old-fashioned even back in the 1960s. The other half of the fun is looking for all the the names in the credits. Norman Fell, with a mustache, plays Deanie's dad, James Edwards is the police detective, and Isabel Sanford gets one scene as the Allens' maid.

Oxford around a Yank

The past, wrote L.P. Hartley in The Go-Between, is a foreign country. I certainly couldn't help but think of the past as a very different place when I watched the late 1930s film A Yank at Oxford.

Lakedale College is another one of those small liberal-arts schools that dotted Hollywood pictures in the first half of the 20th century, located in one of those Hollywood-style small cities. Dan Sheridan (Lionel Barrymore) is the publisher of the local paper, but you wonder how the paper makes any money considering how it keeps missing the deadline while Dan waits for news about the latest athletic exploits of his son Lee (Robert Taylor), a star on the college's track team.

Lee's done well enough in athletics that it's giving him a swelled head, although the fawning headline press he gets from his father's paper isn't helping either. In part because of this and becaue he really is the biggest thing the town has going for it. So he's awarded a scholarship to one of the colleges at Oxford University, which you know he's going to accept because with a title like A Yank at Oxford, he kind of has to. So fairly quickly we get Lee sent over to Europe and then on a train to Oxford.

Except that Lee keeps being just as much an arrogant blankety-blank before he even gets to Oxford, pissing off his fellow train passengers Paul Beaumont (Griffith Jones), Ramsey (Peter Croft), and Wavertree (Robert Coote) without realising that these are going to be some of his fellow students. So they respond with a practical joke that gets Lee in trouble with the Dean of the college (Edmund Gwenn). And it's not the last bit of trouble that Lee gets himself into.

Lee more or less take's Paul's place on the track team, and then also starts dating Paul's sister Molly (Maureen O'Sullivan). As for Paul, he's busy seeing Elsa Craddock (Viven Leigh), who works at a local bookstore and often goes to London to hunt down rarer books for the customers. The only thing is, Elsa is Mrs. Craddock, wife of the bookstore owner. And as for Wavertree, he gets in even more ridiculous trouble. Apparently, he's got a rich uncle who got himself expelled from Oxford. If Wavertree can get himself expelled from Oxford, too, he'll be in line for a bigger inheritance.

More of the dew-eyed American look at olde England comes in the form of rowing. Not just small boats on ponds, but crew, as Lee gets himself on the team for the big Oxford v. Cambridge boat race. But things could go disastrous for everybody when Elsa decides to go see Paul on campus and Mr. Craddock gets suspicious. Having that sort of relationship is decidedly frowned upon and could get you expelled. Unfortunately the plot solution is not to pass of a relationship between Elsa and Wavertree, which would satisfy all of the students.

A Yank at Oxford might have been what audiences of 1938 wanted, but oh my goodness was this one full of The Quiet Man-style tropes for me, where everybody takes a sentimental look at a place as they think from far away it exists but in reality probably never was anything close to that. Normally I like that the past is different, and that's not really the problem here as the lazy stereotypes. Still, watch and judge for yourself.

Briefs for September 3-4, 2026

Dolly Parton of course died last week at the age of 80. I had seen 9 to 5 show up on the FXM schedule a couple of times recently, but I couldn't remember when the next showing would be. FXM put one showing in the commercial-laden portion of the schedule, but the next commercial-free showing is tomorrow, September 4, at 11:15 AM.

Tim Curry also died last week and was also 80 years old. Pluto TV in one of their emails put up Clue in their on-demand section in his honor, also putting up Steel Magnolias for Dolly Parton. Neither of those two movie seem to be getting a commercial-free showing anywhere in the near future that I could find, but then again, searching TV listings very far in the future seems to be getting more and more difficult, by design.

One of TCM's spotlights for September is Stanley Kubrick, whose movies are going to be showing on Thursdays in prime time. Eyes Wide Shut, Kubrick's final film, will be showing overnight between September 24 and 25, and I even had that one on my DVR. But I didn't get around to watching it before it expired from the DVR, so sadly, I won't be doing a review of it here until sometime later. Maybe this time I'll actually get around to watching it before it expires.

Alibi Racket

One of the TCM offerings I had on my DVR had enough time left over in the time slot to run a short, as is the case from time to time. This time, there was enough space for a two-reeler, and the short I saw was a Crime Does Not Pay short that I had actually not seen before: Alibi Racket.

Once again, your "MGM crime reporter" is on hand to tell the viewers how crime does not in fact pay, and does so by going into a story about a certain type of crime. Well, in this case not a specific type of crime per se so much as trying to make it so that crime can in fact pay. There's a gang war going on in town, and one of the gangsters gets bumped off. Now, since there are competing gangs, the obvious thought is that the prime suspect should be Leo Rinelli (Edward Norris).

But, Leo has a brilliant alibi, which is that he was at the movies the night of the murder, and made it unmistakeably clear -- obviously much too clear by the flamboyant way he got everybody around him to note the time -- that he couldn't possibly have been anywhere near the killing when it actually took place. He was expecting a phone call and took it at a very precise time; he made certain somebody spotted and noted what time he entered and left the theater, and so on. Now, since the alibi is too perfect, and since this is a Crime Does Not Pay short, you know things are going to fall apart at the end.

So police inspector Wilmer (Al Bridge) decides to investigate people around him, such as the rest of the Rinelli family. And Leo's brother Joe also has a trememdous alibi. One is that he's known not to like his brother, while he also made it perfectly clear that he had a flat tire at just the right time so that he couldn't be involved in any case. Unsurprisingly, Wilmer doesn't buy any of this nonsense, and has a wild hunch that couldn't possibly pay off except in the movies where the guilty guy has a brilliant alibi but somehow inexplicably fails to corroborate one precise part of it. And that, my friends, is why crime does not pay.

To be fair, this is just a two-reeler, not a prestige movie. And everybody involved is professional. But darnit if the coincidence that makes things unravel isn't just a little too perfect, much like Lou Rinelli's alibi itself. I've seen some better movies in the series, more because they focus on a specific type of crime that makes them more interesting.

Susan Sarandon Night

TCM is running a night of Susan Sarandon movies tonight. The night kicks off with another showing of Atlantic City at 8:00 PM, a film I'm always looking forward to, although as it turns out I've already done a post on it back in 2020. It aired on TCM in the very early days of this blog, when TCM got the rights to some Paramount films from after the batch that were sold off to Universal, and then didn't air for ages. In any case, the second film tonight is Bull Durham at 10:00 PM, and since that one's been on my DVR since this year's 31 Days of Oscar, I watched it specifically to put up this post.

The movie takes its name from the baseball team in Durham, NC, a minor-league team at what was at the time the lowest level of the minors affiliated with Major League teams, known as Single A. (Thanks to a reorganization and reaffiliation in the late 1990s, the team is now in Triple-A, the level just below Major League.) Generally, this is the sort of place that would get high turnover as most of the players are young one who are either going to be moving up or who don't realize they're never going to make it to the majors and finally going to give up the dream after a couple of seasons bouncing around. One of the up-and-comers is pitcher Ebby LaLoosh (Tim Robbins). He's got a really fast pitch, but no control over location and no sense of how to deal strategically with hitters.

That strategy is something that catchers normally deal with in conjunction with pitchers, which is you see catchers signalling pitches with pitchers sometimes calling them up. The organization realizes it needs a catcher who can show LaLoosh, given the nickname "Nuke" by his manager Skip (Trey Wilson), and in that regard it's demoted journeyman catcher Crash Davis (Kevin Costner) to Durham. Crash made it to the majors once, and had a three-week stint there, but he's really never going to make it again and ought to know better. In fact, he's close to setting the record for most home runs by a player in the minor leagues, which is something one probably ought not want since it means you're spending a lot of time in the minors.

Meanwhile, there's Annie (Susan Sarandon), who has a connection with the team in part because of her family's having funded the stadium in part decades earlier. Annie also has a thing where she's going to take a player under her wing each year, although in her parlance that means sexually. We get the impresion that Crash would be right for her, but Nuke is just so much more exciting because he's young and studly and exciting with his craziness. Crash also doesn't really want to put up with this nonsense, which is why Annie eventually picks Nuke.

Thrown into all of this is the usual motley crew of off-beat tropes that populate baseball films: the Jesus freak, the Latin player with a crazy girlfriend, and so on. They all try to come together as a team, but the start of the season isn't very successful until Nuke's pitching picks up, at which point the team goes on a long winning streak. However, there's always the looming likelihood that Nuke is going to get good enough that the organization is going to move him up to a higher level, something that naturally does happen toward the end of the movie.

Bull Durham is generally considered a sports movie for obvious reasons, although it's just as much about the interpersonal relationships, with the team's on-field performance really being in the background compared to other sports movies. As such, the actors playing the three main characters do a good job with the love triangle material that just happens to be set against a baseball backdrop. The stock baseball player character part is something I found myself caring rather less about, to be honest.

A Lady of Chance

It's been a while since I've put up a post on a silent film. One that's been sitting on my DVR for a while that I recently finally got around to watching is A Lady of Chance, which probably ought to show up more often on TCM than I think it does since it was made at MGM. In any case, having finally watched it, now's the time for the obligatory post on it especially considering that today is the birth anniversary of star Johnny Mack Brown.

Norma Shearer stars as Dolly Morgan, and as the movie opens she's working in a big-city hotel as a switchboard operator, a job that puts her in contact with any number of people. One is a rich guy obviously looking for a woman to have a fling with while he's traveling and away from his wife. But then comes Bradley (Lowell Sherman) and his girlfriend Gwen (Gwen Lee). They recognize Dolly as "Angel Face", a con artist like them except that she got caught and spent time im prison and is supposed to be on parole although she seems to have skipped it, which gives Bradly and Gwen some power over her. They blackmail Dolly into putting the squeeze on the rich guy.

However, things don't go to plan, and while Bradley and Gwen plan to take the money and run, Dolly turns the tables on them and steals the cash herself, skipping town and going in pursuit of a suitable man far away from where Bradley and Gwen might be. Except that she's dumb enough to go to Atlantic City, just the sort of place where you can expect Bradley and Gwen to show up. There's also what seems to be a convention of people in the concrete business, including young Steve Crandall (Johnny Mack Brown), who's in town from his home town in Alabama hoping to consummate a business deal. Dolly starts the con by paying for his telegram home to Mother (Eugenie Besserer), and the two start a relationship that leads to his proposing rather quickly.

Except that just before they're going to get married, Bradley and Gwen show up in Atlantic City having found Dolly. They expect Dolly to con Steve, or else they're going to tell him about her past. Once again, though, Dolly is able to fool her partners in crime, being able to skip out on them and run off with Steve to get on a train back to his home town. The only problem is that, once the two of them get back to Alabama, Dolly discovers that Steve is not rich yet. He has an invention that could earn him a nice amount of money if he could get somebody to buy into it, but that hasn't happened yet. Dolly even considers leaving, but by this time she's so in love with Steve that she returns to him.

And then Bradley and Gwen show up again. They can't believe that Steve isn't a millionaire and lives in this modest house. But, complicating matters is the fact that on the day Bradly and Gwen come to Alabama, Steve gets a letter from a New York company saying that they want to buy the exclusive rights to his concrete. So Steve is in fact about to be rich, and Bradley and Gwen find this out, making them want to stay and force Dolly into conning Steve one last time.

A Lady of Chance is a lot of nonsense, but it's well-made nonsense coming from MGM. Norma Shearer does an unsurprisingly good job with a plot that is utterly unrealistic. Johnny Mack Brown is playing another of the naïve hick types, while Lowell Sherman and Gwen Lee do well as the villians. It's certainly not the first silent I'd recommend to people who are new to silent dramas, but it's certainly watchable enough.

55 Days at Peking

This year's Summer Under the Stars concludes today with a day of films devoted to actress Ava Gardner. And concluding her day, in the wee hours of tomorrow morning at 3:00 AM (so even if you're on the west coast but only have the east coast feed it's still technically on Sept. 1) is 55 Days at Peking.

After the opening titles, voiceover narration informs us that it is the summer of 1900, a restles time in Chinese history: the Manchu/Qing dynasty was weak, having been forced to give a lot of economic concessions to the various western powers that wanted to trade with China. Originally, the Chinese government had been in a powerful enough position to bar whole families from coming over and keep the westerners isolated in special communities much like the Japanese did with the Dutch in Nagasaki. But by the end of the 19th century the west had the upper hand. This combined with a bad harvest emboldened more radical Chinese forces, in a group commonly called the "Boxers" because of their closed-fist salute. They were trying to drive the west out wholesale, and the government was in a bind because trade duties with the west and taxes on the concessions were actually bringing in a sizeable chunk of money to the Chinese treasury.

It's against that restive background that the Americans rotate in a fresh platoon of marines to the American legation in the diplomatic quarter of Peking, under the leadership of career Marine Maj. Lewis. He shows up looking for rooms at the hotel just as a Russian, Baroness Natalie (Ava Gardner) is being evicted because her visa was revoked by her brother-in-law (Kurt Kasznar) for family reasons. Maj. Lewis doesn't know much about the local politics, but he's about to learn, and fast.

The day after he arrives, the Boxers assassinate the German ambassador to China, leading to an ultimatum from Dowager Empress Cixi (Flora Robson): all of the westerners must leave. The assembled ambassadors take a vote, with all of them voting to leave except for the American who is absent because he's dying in hospital, and the British ambassador, Sir Arthur Robinson (David Niven). The other countries, however, decide that they can't afford to give up all of their concessions to the British, so they change their minds and stay. And that causes the Boxers to start besieging the city.

The westerners are badly outnumbered, but all they have to do is hold out long enough for relief to arrive, which is supposed to get to Beijing fairly soon. Except that Imperial forces are mustered to prevent this from happening, and the westerners have to hold out longer until they can somehow get someone out of the area from below and get word that relief is still needed. Against the backdrop of all this, various personal dramas play out. These include a mixed-race child, Sir Arthur's family, and the relationship between Maj. Lewis and the baroness, which is turning romantic because apparently a movie like this needs a love interest in it.

The technical aspects of 55 Days at Peking are quite good, although it's Spain substituting for China in the backgrounds. This isn't terribly important, since the besieged quarter is all sets anyhow and mostly doesn't need large vistas. The sets and costumes work well as does the music. The weakness, however, is the story, which runs over 2½ hours and sags quite a bit, especially with the baroness character who's not really needed to advance the plot. There are also enough Hollywood-style reimaginings of the history that are probably going to bother some viewers. So it's easy to see why a movie like 55 Days at Peking got mixed reviews and hurt the career of its director, Nicholas Ray.

Captain Applejack

I'm always up for a pre-code movie I haven't seen before. So when Captain Applejack showed up on the TCM schedule quite some time back, I recored it. Having watched it, it's more of an early talkie than a pre-code, but there's still a lot about it that makes it interesting.

Ambrose Applejohn (John Halliday) is the latest -- and last -- of a long line of Applejohns, living in a manor-type house in southwest England along the English Channel. It's the type of place that is isolated and subject to bad weather, reminiscent of the place in Jamaica Inn. Ambrose has an elderly aunt Agatha (Louise Closser Hale) and a ward Poppy (Mary Brian) who pines for him although he doesn't realize it. Ambrose considers this a boring life, and has been thinking about putting the house on the market so that he can use the money to travel and lead a life of adventure.

This being a place subject to bad weather, sure enough we get a storm and a bunch of people looking for help getting out of the storm because reasons. First up are the Pengards, with Mr. Pengard claiming to be a clairvoyant, although of cource clairvoyancy is a bunch of nonsense. After that is Madame Valeska (Kay Strozzi). She's a woman of mystery, and she tells Ambrose that she's being pursued by a guy and needs to be kept safe. Sure enough, a man named Borolsky (Arthur Edmund Carew) shows up looking for Valeska, and threatening to kill Ambrose if he doesn't give up Valeska.

After dealing with Borolsky, Ambrose plans to retire for the night, although Poppy thinks she hears something. In the investigation, they notice that a window latch has been jimmied, and that somebody seems to have found a secret hidden panel that nobody in the Applejohn family ever knew about, which is the sort of plot point that makes no sense. Making even more lack of sense is the fact that the panel contains a parchment that whoever came in through the window didn't find. The parchment says that the Applejohns are really the Applejacks, descended from the pirat Captain Applejack who absconded with a bunch of treasure and hid it somewhere in the house. So clearly we're in the realm of nonsense plot.

After a dream sequence, the various visitors show up again. As it turns out, they were all imposters, and are actually thieves looking for the treasure that's supposedly in the house. This leads to a madcap climax, and a happy ending for our protagonists.

Captain Applejack was based on a play, and most of the movie apart from the pirate dream sequence is set in about two rooms. Indeed, the movie starts off slowly enough that I was thinking it wasn't all that good. But then the parchment shows up and things start to get really weird, especially with the pirate sequence and then the finale which seems to be trying to change the movie from drama to comedy. It ended up coming across to me as one of those early talkies where the filmmakers didn't quite know what to do and decided to through anything they could think of at the audience. The result isn't always successful, but that finale is certainly different, making the movie more fun that it probably ought to be.

What if The Exorcist were a comic heist movie?

I found myself with a couple of Zero Mostel movies unwatched on my DVR and getting to the point where both of them were getting close to expiring. I've watched both of them now and am writing up the reviews, as usual spacing them out because I try to avoid posting about movies with the same star in close proximity unless they're both showing up on TV soon. In any case, the first of the two Zero Mostel movies is The Great Bank Robbery.

A train is heading for the town of Friendly, TX, and we see several people watching the train from afar, with the implication being that they're casing the train for a possible robbery. One group is led by Papa (Akim Tamiroff), father of Juan (Larry Storch); these are Mexicans who have come across the border and, one would guess, are planning to abscond with the presumed gold on the train back to Mexico. There's also Slade (Claude Akins), a gunman who knows a bit more about the bank in Friendly which is part of why he's scouting out the train.

Riding on the train is the Rev. Pious Blue (Zero Mostel), leader of a Salvation Army-style itinerant missionary group. His companion and second-in-command is sister Lyda (Kim Novak), and they're accompanied by a bunch of older character actor types, including Peter Whitney, Sam Jaffe, and John Fiedler. They, as it will be seen, have ulterior motives for making their way to Friendly.

We then learn that the bank in Friendly has two sets of books. One is the official set, although there's a second set and extra vaults because the bank supposedly holds the loot of a bunch of famous bank-robbing outlaws. Why, however, gangs like the James brothers would rob one bank and then trust the proceeds with another, is not answered. Texas Ranger Ben Quick (Clint Walker) has a feeling something is up in Friendly and is there to investigate.

Little does he know how much is up. Rev. Blue's group is, of course, there to rob the bank as well, with their plan being to tunnel under and blow their way into the vault during the Independence Day celebration and then get away with the gold somehow. Of course, they're going to have to stay one step ahead of the law but also one step ahead of the other robbers, who are going to feel aggrieved at having what they think should be "their" money stolen right out from under their noses.

The Great Bank Robbery is played for laughs, so there's a lot of comic styling in the reverend's plans to rob the bank as well as in their planned getaway, including using Sister Lyda to seduce Ben Quick. Complicating matters is the fact that Lyda finds herself legitimately falling in love with Ben.

It's fairly easy to surmise that The Great Bank Robbery was produced in part because there had been a spate of comic westerns in the 1960s as well as a spate of comic heist movies. Unfortunately, The Great Bank Robbery, coming at the end of both of these cycles, suffers greatly from being derivative. I'm also not the biggest fan of Zero Mostel, finding his humor much too broad, which is also a weakness of this movie. Instead of being genuinely funny, the whole thing comes across as the tiresome brand of zany. Ooh, let's have the climax be a hot-air balloon trying to flee the area! The movie is directed by Hy Averbaack, who worked mostly in television, and that shows, too.

Surprisingly, the screenplay is by William Peter Blatty of The Exorcist fame. The Great Bank Robbery does not rise to that level.

Several months before Black Sunday

Today's (August 28) star in TCM's Summer Under the Stars is Brock Peters. This gives me the chance to do a post on a movie that's been sitting on my DVR and I hadn't seen before. That movie, Two-Minute Warning, comes up in the wee hours of the overnight at 2:15 AM, which is technically August 29 on the east coast although technically very late on August 28 if you're in the Pacific time zone and only have the east coast feed.

The movie starts off by sort of giving away something that's going to be the main plot point later in the movie. A man with a rifle and telescopic sight looks out a high window and sees a couple of bicyclists in what looks like a typical Southern California suburb. The man with the rifle then proceeds to shoot one of the cyclists dead. We don't see the shooter, which is a good thing as it adds suspense to the movie.

Cut to the Los Angeles Coliseum. "Championship X", the big football game is going to be held there the coming weekend. We do get Howard Cosell and Frank Gifford, although nothing closer than that to the NFL because they didn't permit the use of any of their properties for Two-Minute Warning the way they would for Black Sunday which was released a few months later. (I don't know the full production schedule for both movies. It's possible the NFL had agreed with pre-production on Black Sunday and didn't want to be involved in two movies with similar themes.) Brock Peters works at the Coliseum in maintenance and security, looking after the Dobermans who are partly responsible for security.

But, before the game, we have to be introduced to the requisite character types, much like any other disaster movie. Among them are a family man, Mike Ramsay (Beau Bridges) and his wife and kid; a husband and wife (David Janssen and Gena Rowlands); a pickpocket (a very elderly Walter Pidgeon a few years after Harry in Your Pocket); and Stu (Jack Klugman), a gambler who's heavily in debt but thinks he can make it back by betting on the big game. Oh, Stu also winds sitting next to a Catholic priest (Mitchell Ryan) at the game because the priest knows one of the quarterbacks.

The big football game has always had security although back in the 1970s it wasn't quite as tight as it is today. Sam McKeever (Martin Balsam) manages the Coliseum, and has the local police precinct run by Capt. Holly (Charlton Heston). Meawhile, since the sniper already killed that cyclist, we've got the SWAT team out looking for the sniper. They're headed up by Sgt. Button (John Cassavetes), and for obvious reasons wind up at the Coliseum too.

That's because the sniper, seen only in long shots until the very end of the movie, has holed up behind the scoreboard at the top of the Coliseum tower where the Olympic flame would have been in 1932 and 1984. Eventually Mike Ramsay looks through his binoculars and spots the sniper, who has also already been spotted by people in the control booth since they've got shots from the Goodyear blimp above. At this point, it's not known if the sniper has a particular target, which isn't entirely unlikely since there was talk of some elected officials showing up; or whether the sniper just wants to kill random people the way he did with the cyclist. And when is the guy going to start shooting?

Two-Minute Warning is a movie which has some decided problems, in large part down to the lack of character development. Nobody gets to be much more than a stock character, and we have no real reason to care about any of the fans. On the other hand, the main idea of the story is a good one, and fairly well executed. The plot device of not giving the sniper any discernable motive, and not showing him until the very end, is an inspired move that I thought heightened the suspense.

Two-Minute Warning is an overlooked and underrated movie in the disaster film genre of the 1970s, but one that works well despite the one-dimensional characters.

James Barton

I've mentioned a lot how I think Warner Bros. made some really fun B movies, while B movies from other studios aren't quite as good. This is a bit true of MGM which has the whole MGM gloss that makes the B movies look a bit artificual. In the case of RKO, it feels more like the ideas are lacking. I couldn't help but think of that as I watched His Family Tree.

James Barton, who was apparently a vaudeville dancer, stars as Patrick Murphy, a former boatswain who now runs a pub of that name in Ireland. His son emigrated to the States, and is living in the sort of small city -- this time in Iowa -- that features a lot in movies of the 1930s. Supposedly they're small, but they've got so much of everything that you wonder how the US could have so many such cities with a population about 40% what it is today. But the bigger point is that Patrick's son Charles (William Harrigan) hasn't written to Dad in a while, so Dad decides that he's going to go over to Iowa to look up his son and see what the deal is.

Charles seems to have done reasonably well for himself, with a wife Maggie and daughter Elinor who is engaged to be married to one of the wealthier guys in town. The good government types even want Charles to run for mayor against long-time mayor Holtsapple (Ferdinand Munier), who isn't quite as corrupt as the local politicians in other movies, but is definitely the villain of the piece if there is one. Apparently the election is set to come down to which candidate the fourth ward comes down to, led by Irish-American community leader Nellie Oulihan (Maureen Delaney).

And herein lies part of the rub. Charles, when he came to Iowa, changed his name the way a lot of immigrants did. Except that he made up a bogus story to go along with the name change to Murfree (not much disguise there) that involves having a family in Murfreesboro, Tennessee that goes back generations. Now this was only seven years or so after Al Smith lost the presidential election, so maybe small cities in the midwest still weren't ready for an Irish Catholic mayor. But for whatever reason, it's decided that the idea that Murfree isn't Charles' original name is something that's totally going to sink his election chances, which you'd think he would have told his backers before running. And having one's Irish father come over certainly wouldn't help in that regard.

But Patrick is Movie Stereotype Irish, the guy who's got a charming brogue and Irish jig and all that goes with that, along with being able to bring everybody over to his son's side regardless of whether the thing about Charles having changed his name is true. Mayor Holtsapple and his campaign managers see this, and realize that the only way they're going to win is to stop Patrick from campaigning for his son, using force if necessary.

I've also stated before on a couple of occasions that I find Hollywood's doe-eyed view of Ireland to be detrimental to films because of the treacly attitude it induces, but that's not the big problem with His Family Tree. Instead, it's that the script is so unintelligent and unoriginal that I found myself rolling my eyes at it all. People who are interested in seeing what James Barton was all about may enjoy the couple of scenes where he gets to do his dance routine, but the movie as a whole doesn't quite hold up.