Father of the Bride (1991)

Tonight and next Monday, TCM is running a two-night salute to comic actor Steve Martin. As it turns out, one of the movies that they're running is on my DVR thanks to my having recorded it during TCM's memorial tribute to Diane Keaton back at the end of January: Father of the Bride, which comes on tonight at midnight (so Technically May 12 in the Eastern time zone but the evening of May 11 in more westerly time zones).

Now, as you can probably guess, this is a remake of the 1950 film Father of the Bride starring Spencer Tracy as the father and Elizabeth Taylor as the bride. Indeed, the screenwriters on the original, Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, get a writing credit here too. This time, it's Steve Martin as the father George Banks, with the late Diane Keaton as George's wife Nina. The two of them have a happy life in a Los Angeles suburb where George manages a comapny that makes athletic shoes. They've got a surprise baby who's now eight or nine (played by a young Kieran Culkin), as well as an adult daughter Annie (Kimberly Williams), who up until a few months ago was studying architecture in Rome for her master's degree. But the movie opens up with George doing a voiceover just after the wedding ended, and with the title, it's fairly obvious that the wedding is going to take place.

So we get the flashback to the day Annie returns from Rome. At the dinner table, she's got a big surprise for her father. While in Rome, she met a nice man who works as a "communications consultant". The two fell in love and have gotten engaged, which is a pretty big shock to Dad, who doesn't yet seem ready to "lose" his daughter to whom he's devoted in the way that fathers are to their daughters. Unsurprisingly, Dad also expects the worst as Annie's fiancé Bryan (George Newbern) comes over for a visit.

We're told from George's opening narration that everything's taken place over about four months, so we get the preparations for the wedding in a way that displays the truth of Murphy's Law: anything that can go wrong will. Annie and Nina want the best to the point of hiring a wedding planner Franck (Martin Short) who's an extreme parody. Franck's suggestions result in the price of the wedding going up and up to a point that seems a bit expensive even for today, not that I've priced out a wedding and reception recently. Bryan's parents are also wealthier than the Banks, which at least in George's mind creates a bit of conflict. And as in the original, there's even a point where Annie thinks of breaking off the engagement because she thinks Bryan has disrespected her.

As I said a few paragraphs ago, we already know from the beginning that the wedding is going to go ahead, and it seems as though everybody is going to live happily ever after, so the conflict of the plot, such as it is, involves exactly how we get to the joyous occasion and the reception. It's been an age since I've watched the original, but there are enough minor differences between the two versions.

I have to say that of the two, I think I prefer the original. They're both supposed to be comedies, but with Spencer Tracy leading the original, it's more of a gentle comedy. Steve Martin is certainly talented, but with his known quantity as a comedian, the result is something that often plays as a bit more zany. That's not necessarily bad, but I personally like the gentleness of the original more. The other thing in the remake that I think is a bit of a weakness is the enlargement of Martin Short's character. He's certainly a talented actor too, but Short is really overplaying his character.

Still, there's definitely a lot to enjoy about this version of Father of the Bride, and certainly anybody who's been through a wedding recently is going to like it.

I think we can guess who the beauty is

Red Skelton was TCM's Star of the Month back in 2025, and I recorded several of his movies. I don't think I got around to watching all of them before they expired, but since he worked at MGM his movies show up often enough on TCM. One such film is the star-making turn for Esther Williams: Bathing Beauty.

Bathing Beauty was made when Red Skelton was still the bigger star, so we get him first in the credits and the story is more about his character. Skelton plays Steve Elliot, a Los Angeles-based songwriter about to get married to college swimming instructor Caroline Brooks (that's Esther Williams, as if you couldn't tell). Steve talks to Caroline about starting a new life after getting married and finishing up his current job of writing a musical for producer George Adams (Basil Rathbone). George is none too happy about this, so he comes up with a way to scupper the marriage by claiming that Steve is already married to somebody else and producing that fake wife. With that, Caroline leaves him and goes back to her college back on the other coast.

Unsurprisingly, Steve wants to put things right, and follows her back to the college in New Jersey where she teaches, accompanied by singer Carlos Ramirez, who is clearly only in the script because the movie was made in early 1944 during the "Good Neighbor" policy with Latin America. However, the two men are blocked from entering campus because Caroline teaches at an all-girls' school. But this is a comedy, so we have to have a way for Steve and Caroline to end up in close proximity under odd circumstances. That happens when Steve meets one of the trustees and learns that the charter hasn't officially delared the college an all-girls' school. So Steve tries to enroll and, since the trustees can't legally stop him, come up with a way to admit him but with a plan to get him expelled for demerits.

Much of the rest of the movie deals with Steve's attempts to get back to Caroline, who is also being pursued by a botany professor Willis (Bill Goodwin), along with the comic predicaments the only male student at an all-girls' school is bound to get himself into. One such involves Steve's having to do ballet, in a skit that Skelton would reuse in the movie The Clown. There's also a whole bunch of musical numbers, including Harry James and his orchestra, along with Xavier Cugat and his orchestra. Oh, there's that Good Neighbor policy again. As you might guess with a movie like this, the film climaxes with an aquacade, along with Steve and Caroline winding up together at the end of the movie.

Bathing Beauty is one of those movies that was made in part as a morale-booster; indeed, the movie ends with a card mentioning that movies like this were also being sent overseas to entertain the troops who were off fighting the war against Germany and Japan. As such, the plot doesn't particularly matter here. Don't try to pay too close attention to the plot because that's not the point. Instead, the movie is more about the musical numbers along with the final big swimming number, along with Skelton's comic antics. The Technicolor is vibrant here, especially for that final aquacade. It's easy to see watching Bathing Beauty why it was a box office hit and the sort of movie that would get sent abroad to cheer up the troops.

If you're interested in Hollywood history, Bathing Beauty is a good entry into the phenomenon that was Esther Williams.

TCM schedule heads-up

Tomorrow is Mother's Day, and as always TCM is running a number of movies that are appropriate for the occasion. As usual, that includes another showing of Mildred Pierce, at 12:15 PM, which seems to be the one constant that shows up every single Mother's Day.

Another movie that shows up quite a bit is I Remember Mama. Indeed, it was originally scheduled to be on in prime time tomorrow night. Unfortunately, Ted Turner died earlier this week, and TCM has scheduled one of the quicker memorial tributes out there. Apparently Ted Turner's favorite movie was Gone With the Wind, which would also make sense as to why it was the first movie TCM ran when it went on the air back in 1994. So TCM is running Gone With the Wind at 8:00 PM tomorrow, along with a tribute that was given to Turner at the TCM Classic Film Festival some years back.

Three more musketeers

I've got a couple of movies from FXM that I hadn't seen before and was planning on blogging about the next time they came up. Now, as it turns, out, one, The Lieutenant Wore Skirts, is a movie I did blog about back in about 2018. But I know that I had not seen the 1939 Fox version of The Three Musketeers before. This one is getting another airing tomorrow, May 10, at 4:45 AM, so once again, now's the time to put up the post about it.

The movie informs us right from the start that this is a musical comedy version of Alexandre Dumas' famous story. Don Ameche plays D'Artagnan, the adult son of a Musketeer in the 1620s France of king Louis XIII (Joseph Schildkraut). D'Artagnan lives in Gascony in southwestern France, but is making his way to Paris in order to become one of the King's Musketeers. Along the way, he meets a couple of the Musketeers who aren't in uniform and pisses them all off to the point that he challenges them to duels in Paris.

So all three of them, who just happen to be Athos, Porthos, and Aramis, show up at the appointed place, at the same time: an inn/tavern where the proprietor seems to be off for the night and three dim-witted workers, played by 1930s comic team the Ritz Brothers, are running the place. The Musketeers challenge these men, whose characters are listed in the closing credits as Three Lackeys, to drink to every King Louis that France has had. Thanks to their incompetence, the lackeys spill most of their wine while the Musketeers get blackout drunk, prompting the lackeys to change into the much nicer Musketeer outfits. This is also how D'Artagnan finds the lackeys when he shows up, and since D'Artagnan wanted to be a Musketeer himself, he joins them, or has them join him.

Meanwhile, there's that palace intrigue going on that you might recall if you've seen a more serious movie version of the story. Cardinal Richelieu (Miles Mander) is the King's prime minister, but is trying to amass more power by having his own private security force that is working on diminishing the power of the Musketeers who, in Richelieu's mind, are too prone to random violence. There's also the matter of relations with England. Her Majesty the Queen Anne (Gloria Stuart) had been carrying on an affair with the Duke of Buckingham, and gave him a brooch to remember her by when he had to go back to England. Richelieu is pretty certain of this thanks to his spies among the court such as the Milday de Winter (Binnie Barnes).

Meanwhile, D'Artagnan and the lackeys meet Lady Constance (Pauline Moore), another of the Queen's ladies-in-waiting, who is the one who gets D'Artagnan involved in retrieving the brooch for the Queen since D'Artagnan is clearly more of a stauch supporter of the royals and not Richeliu. Along the way Don Ameche gets to sing some songs while the Ritz Brothers do their slapstick routines.

This version of The Three Musketeers is less about the Dumas story and more about the songs along with the Ritz Brothers' shtick. Whether you like the movie is going to depend in good part on what you think of the Ritzes, who are a decidedly dated sort of comedy. It also doesn't help that poor Don Ameche is saddled with some subpar songs. I'm reminded of the I Love Lucy episode where Lucy and Ethel write a song for a Camelot number Ricky wants to do, and come up with terribly inane lyrics. However, I think the movie as a whole is just more forgettable than actually bad. It's only a brief 72 minutes, so more programmer-length than ponderous prestige movie. And of course some people may actually enjoy the Ritz Brothers.

Another pirate movie

Some time back I did a post on one of the MGM historical mystery shorts, Captain Kidd's Treasure. I mentioned at the time that I had a different movie Captain Kidd, on my DVR, uncertain whether I had seen it before. I watched it, and in fact had not seen it, so now we get a post on it.

Charles Laughton stars as the famed pirate William Kidd. As the movie opens, it's 1699, and Kidd is on a ship not far off the coast of Madagascar, having turned to piracy because his privateer work has come to naught leaving him heavily in debt. (At least, that's the real-life William Kidd, the movie legends play fast and loose with the facts.) Kidd and his men sink a British ship called the Twelve Apostles, and bury the treasure on one of the islands off of Madagascar. However, one of Kidd's men chafes a bit under Kidd's leadership, and gets shot for his trouble simply because Kidd is that brutal of a man.

Kidd returns to London, with a crew including Orange Povy (John Carradine) and Jose Lorenzo (Gilbert Roland). Kidd's plan is to ingratiate himself with the king, William III, in the hopes of getting a new ship and going out ostensibly in the King's service, but with the real intention of returning to piracy as well as getting to that island to get the booty from the Twelve Apostles. To that end, he needs to pass himself off as a gentleman, hiring the valet Shadwell (Reginald Owen).

The King buys Kidd's assertion that the captain of the Twevle Apostles was an actual pirate, and grants a commission to Kidd. Kidd goes to various prisons to round up a crew, seeing as most other men wouldn't want to go to sea if they could avoid it and condemned prisoners would be more likely to take up the job with the prospect of a pardon coming at the end of the tour at sea. They've got nothing to lose, after all. However, one of the prisoners seems a bit odd. Adam Mercy (Randolph Scott) is, among other things, able to write, and doesn't talk like the people of the social classes that make up the rest of the crew.

Out at sea, Mercy both ingratiates himself to Kidd and tries to spy, telling Kidd when he's caught out that His Majesty obviously wanted a representative on board to make certain everything is on the up and up. If something were to happen to Mercy, it could be bad news for Kidd. How much of that story is true is, well, something you'll have to watch to the end of the movie to find out. Meanwhile, Kidd is already plotting to kill the other men who were with him when they buried the treasure off of Madagascar.

In the Indian Ocean, Kidd's men destroy another British ship, although this one comes with more booty than just the traditional treasure. There's a good looking woman, Lady Anne (Barbara Britton), whose father was on board as the ambassador to one of the rajes in India looking to curry favor with King William. Lady Anne has the feeling she's seen Mercy before, while Kidd gets a stronger feeling Adam isn't what he seems or has claimed to be. Now, we know that the real-life Captain Kidd was hanged for his crims, so he's likely not going to get away with his perfidy here.

I have no idea how much of this version of Captain Kidd is real. From what I've read of Kidd's life, some names from Kidd's real life are used here, but that seems to be the extent of the basis in reality. But regardless of that lack of reality, Captain Kidd is entertaining enough, thanks to a production that knows how to get a lot out of a little, along with a pretty good cast. Laughton overacts, although that works here because Kidd is in many ways a larger-than-life figure. Scott isn't exactly British, but is OK with what he's asked to do here.

There are higher quality seafaring movies out there, but if you're looking to be entertained, Captain Kidd will fill the bill.

Här har du ditt liv

I've mentioned a couple of times how I have a tendency to record enough foreign films that I don't quite get around to watching all of them until they're just about to expire from my YouTube TV cloud DVR. One night of TCM Imports included a pair of Swedish films, and I finally watched one of them: Here Is Your Life, from director Jan Troell.

The movie opens up around 1916. Olof (Eddie Axberg, who would appear in Troell's later films The Emigrants and The New Land) is a boy of around 14 in northern Sweden who has been forced to enter the working world because his father has some sort of terminal illness. Olof gets a job with a bunch of rather older men in forestry, specifically getting logs downstream to the lumber mills. It's difficult work and the sort of thing that led to industrial accidents and workers dying. Olof eventually takes a job in the mill part of forestry, and this time one of the workers is even younger, a boy named Oskar who really shouldn't be doing this work except that a good portion of rural Sweden was still poor enough that families had to send their children into work like this. Poor Oskar gets seriously injured when a pile of logs falls on him, and he later dies in hospital although we don't see the actual death.

In any case, all of this gets Olof to take a new job, especially since he's been doing some reading and shows some aptitude for intelligence even though he obviously hasn't had a lot of traditional schooling. That job is in a small town at a movie theater, although it's not a custom-built theater but the sort of space that would have been converted from something else into showing movies. Olof's job is to put up handbills for the coming attractions, as well as take tickets and sell snacks. If he's good enough, he might even be able to get a promotion to become a projectionist. This is also where Olof meets his first girl, although his love life, such as it is, isn't going to be straightforward. Olof also meets a socialist, although my reading of the timeline of the movie is that the October Revolution of 1917 in Russia had not yet taken place.

Olof's next job is indeed as a projectionist, although it's not with the theater he started at, but with an itinerant theater that sets up shop wherever it can. One stop is with a traveling circus, and it's there that Olof meets the woman who runs the shooting gallery. This too is going to be a complicated relationship. Olof eventually gets another job with Swedish Railways, which is a state-owned enterprise. That's worth mentioning since Olof is getting more heavily into socialism and workers' rights, railing against capitalism. He and his friend at the railway discuss getting the workers to strike as an anti-capitalist move, even though the railway is technically a socialist outfit. Olof goes on like this, until the movie ultimately ends with no clear resolution.

Then again, Here Is Your Life isn't a traditionally-plotted movie, but a coming-of-age story about one character, which is partly why I didn't mention the actors playing the other characters. Max von Sydow does appear, although I didn't recognize him. Axberg does a good job, and the cinematography is also quite good. However, I have to criticize the film for having a very slow pace and a way-too-long running time, at 160-some minutes. Either the movie should have been written to run into something under two hours, or it should have been conceived as something episodic like a TV miniseries. The adventures of Olof might work as a multiple-part miniseries, or what would nowadays be a limited series, but not as quite so well when it's one movie running close to three hours.

The Day They Robbed the Bank of England

Some time back, I mentioned how I had recorded The Day They Robbed the Bank of England off a TCM showing. Unfortunately, there was a technical issue with the recording such that the sound was not in sync with the video, making it unwatchable. It eventually aired again and the DVR picked it up. This time there didn't seem to be any issue with the synching, so I was able to watch it and write up this post.

The movie opens with an expository presentation about how the Bank of England had some hidebound traditions about guarding the currency, and the use of royal guardsmen to accompany the gold bullion that ended up in the vaults. We then go back to London at the turn of the century. Ireland was still controlled in its entirety by the UK government, although even at this time there were people advocating for Home Rule, which was a sort of autonomy (see the Clark Gable movie Parnell), as well as people who might be more willing to engage in violent means to achieve complete Irish independence from the UK. O'Shea (Hugh Griffith), the leader of one such revolutionary cell, has come up with an audacious plan to help the Irish independence movement.

O'Shea's plan is to rob a bunch of that gold out of the vaults. For one thing, that gold is worth quite a bit, and that would definitely finance the independence movement. But there's also the big political statement it would make if Irish revolutionaries could steal gold right out from under the government's noses. But they need expertise and people who wouldn't be suspected by the British. To that end, O'Shea sent Iris Muldoon (Elizabeth Sellars) over to the US to recruit, and she's picked up Charles Norgate (Aldo Ray), a mining engineer. This is a profession that has multiple advantages. One is us an explosives expert, while a second is in dealing with tight spaces and the spatial relations of mapping things underneath the bank. There's no real way they're getting past the guards, so they're going to have to tunnel.

Of course, simply tunneling right now isn't good enough. Norgate begins what is essentially a circa-1900 version of a phishing operation. He tries to get information from the bank officers, although you couldn't just open up a bank account at the Bank of England in those days. He also befriends Lt. Finch (Peter O'Toole in an early role), an officer in the guards who guard the vaults, although of course Finch doesn't really have a clue of Northgate's real intent. Northgate also passes himself off as an architect to get people to give him information about the construction of the bank and the vaults, although the actual plans of the vaults are kept under lock and key.

To get those plants, Northgate gets help from Walsh (Kieron Moore), another member of the cell. Walsh has a thing for Muldoon, not realizing that she and Northgate had a romantic relationship during their time in the States. They've got other reasons to be in conflict, so when the time comes to actually go into the sewers and get to the location from where they're going to dig into the vaults, there's debate over how to proceed. This gets more complicated when there's a twist of the Home Rule bill being reintroduced to Parliament. Go ahead with the robbery now and there's no way the bill is getting passed.

The Day They Robbed the Bank of England is one of those heist movies where there's quite a bit of time spent on building up the preparation of how the heist is going to be carried off. And, much like the later The Great Train Robbery, it's got the added interest of being a period piece. Unfortunately, The Day They Robbed the Bank of England doesn't quite have the budget or location shooting of the later movie, so while it's certainly adequate, it also feels like there's something missing. I think you'll enjoy it, but at the same time it could have been better.

Audrey Hepburn, Native American?

Another of those movies that I recorded quite some time back and didn't get around to watching until not long before it expired from the DVR was the 1960 western The Unforgiven, which is of course not to be confused with the Clint Eastwood film Unforgiven. Anyhow, having watched it, I wrote up this post and saved it in drafts for some time when I didn't have other westerns coming up on TCM to do posts about.

The action opens with a panoramic view of a ranch somwhere in west Texas where the nearest civilization is Wichita, KS, or at least where Ben Zachary (Burt Lancaster) returns from. Before that, however, we see the only two people on the ranch at the current time are Rachel (Audrey Hepburn), adopted kid sister of Ben, and their mother Mattilda (Lillian Gish). The camera also pans to a grave stone, which is that of the patriarch, Will Zachary, who was killed by the Kiowa.

And then a strange old guy named Abe Kelsey (Joseph Wiseman) shows up, claiming that Audrey was actually stolen from the Kiowa and adopted by the Zacharys, which might have something to do with why they wanted to kill Will and why Mattilda is ticked with the presence of this man. Meanwhile, the family is working with another family in the area, the Rawlins family. They're headed by patriarch Zeb (Charles Bickford), and have a son Charlie (Albert Salmi) who is thinking of courting Rachel. Kelsey shows up again now that Ben Zachary is back, and this time Ben ticks off Kelsey. Enough so that he starts telling anybody else who will listen the story of Rachel's supposed provenance. That, and he gets a couple of Kiowa to show up at the Zachary place, looking to buy Rachel from the family, a sort of bride price if you will, except that this man says he's actually Rachel's brother.

Best, I suppose, that they marry Rachel off now, and give Charlie permission to court Rachel. For this Charlie gets himself shot by the Kiowa, not that he's actually guilty of anything. But it gets the rest of the Rawlins family pissed at the Zachary family, especially Charlie's mom who gets to have one of those big emotional scenes cursing Rachel and the rest of the Zacharys. Making matters worse is that a posse goes out to catch Kelsey, and when they catch him and bring him back, Mattilda and Ben basically engage in vigilante justice which gets Zeb to believe that the story about Rachel is actually true.

The Kiowa show up again demanding Rachel, who really ought to be allowed to make the decision herself since she's now an adult. But instead Ben and brother Andy kill one of the Kiowa, who respond by laying siege to the Zachary homestead. It's a siege they ought to be able to win because they've got time and numbers on their side. But the Zacharys seem willing to fight to the last man, and woman.

The Unforgiven was produced by Burt Lancaster's production company and suffered a troubled production including Audrey Hepburn falling off a horse and the original director being replaced by John Huston. Huston and Lancaster apparently clashed over the artistic vision of the movie, and I think it shows somewhat in a movie that takes some odd twists and turns tht don't always work. Everybody's professional and the movie is visually nice to look at for the most part, but there's always this feeling that something isn't quite right here.

Still, even though The Unforgiven is a bit of a misfire, it's an interesting misfire.

High School graduation

Tonight's lineup on TCM is a night of movies set in and around the end of one's time at high school. One of the movies happens to be on my DVR, so I watched it to be able to put up this post. That movie is Andy Hardy's Private Secretary, airing early tomorrow (May 5) morning at 4:00 AM, or still in the overnight hours depending upon your perspective and time zone.

Mickey Rooney returns as Andy Hardy, together with his father Judge Hardy (Lewis Stone), mother (Fay Holden) and English teacher Aunt Milly (Sara Haden), although his sister is absent from this installment of the series. As the movie opens, the Judge is ruling from the bench, called into his chambers because of a check with insufficient funds. As it turns out, that check was written by Andy, although Andy of course wasn't really trying to pass bad checks. Instead, Andy was trying to make up for insufficient funds elsewhere, but didn't have the money to rob Peter to pay Paul, as it were.

The original check was for the senior class' funds at Carvel. Graduation is coming up, and to deal with the expenses, the senior class has imposed a head tax on the seniors, not taking into account that perhaps there were students in Carvel who aren't so middle class like the Hardys and all their circle of society. Two such people are the Land twins, Kathryn (Kathryn Grayson) and Harry (Todd Karns). Indeed, the Lands are sort of not part of anybody's social circle in Carvel. Judge Hardy decides he's going to investigate of course, along with making certain that Andy starts to involve the two Land kids in the rest of his group of friends.

The Lands are not well off and new to Carvel because of the war raging over in Europe (the movie was released in early 1941, before the US was attacked at Pearl Harbor). Dad Steven Land (Ian Hunter) is a very bright man who can speak nine languages, and used those talents to set up a travel agency that facilitated rich people's travel once they got to wherever in Europe he was based at the time. But of course, World War II began in Europe and nobody wanted to travel and there weren't so many places safe for the Lands, so they returned to the US more or less broke.

Judge Hardy has influence, so he talks to one of his friends at the State Department. Steven Land's linguistic skills include Portuguese, and with the Good Neighbor policy, the State Department can use a man like Steven as part of one of their trade delegations. The only problem is, the delegation is leaving this Thursday, which is the day before the high school graduation. Kathryn and Harry are for some reason expected to follow their father to South America, which means they'd have to leave Thursday as well. Can't something at least be done to have the kids follow later, or better yet, start a life as adults here in the US?

Andy thinks he's doing a good deed by editing the telegram to Washington saying that the Lands are perfectly ready to leave for South America on Saturday. But since there's an entire delegation, and they're all leaving in unison, that's taken as an admission that Steven won't be taking the job, which promptly gets filled before Judge Hardy finds out what happens.

Meanwhile, there are Andy Hardy's own problems. He's on all the committees surrounding the graduation, with the result that he's stretched himself too thin. He needs help, and since Kathryn has been taking business courses it's suggested by Judge Hardy that Andy hire Kathryn on as a sort of secretary. Andy's traditional girlfriend Polly Benedict (Ann Rutherford) finds out and is none too pleased. But in addition to needing an assistant, Andy is doing so many extracurriculars that he neglects his studies to the point that he fails his English exam. This means that he's in danger of not graduating with the rest of his class.

Of course, this being a Hardy Family movie, you know that all of the personal problems are going to be resolved with all of the good people -- and there really aren't any bad guys in a movie like this -- getting the positive outcome they deserve. It's the sort of feel good movie that audiences were going to like in an era where there was still that war raging on "over there" without America, even if there was the worry that America was going to get involved. But in addition to that, Andy Hardy's Private Secretary was an opportunity for MGM to introduce its new star, Kathryn Grayson. She was more of a singer than an actress at this point, so MGM included a bunch of operatic musical numbers in the plot for Grayson to show off that operatic voice. What you think this does to the movie is probably going to depend on what you think of opera music in general.

With that in mind, I think I'd say that Andy Hardy's Private Secretary isn't particularly better or worse than the other movies in the series that I've seen; it's just got such different music that it'll influence your choice of which Hardy Family movie to watch.

Sky around the satellite

TCM's lineup for the daytime portion of tomorrow, May 4, is a bunch of 1950s science fiction. One of the movies is a film that's been sitting on my DVR, so once again I made the point of watching it in time for a post here on its upcoming TCM showing. That film is Satellite in the Sky, which airs at 7:30 AM tomorrow.

Satellite in the Sky is set in the UK, although Warner Bros. distributed it here in the US which gives the movie a bigger budget to work with. If you recall the movie The Right Stuff, before man got into outer space there was a bunch of test pilot stuff in planes that could break the sound barrier. The UK's scientists are doing similar stuff and have lost a couple of pilots, to the point that one of the commanders, Michael Hayden (Kieron Moore), plans to go up himself to make certain everything is safe in preparation for the first manned spaceflight.

Hayden's flight is successful, witnessed by the assembled press who kinda sorta know there's thoughts about going into outer space. Some of the reporters, however, aren't all that excited about the prospect because of their risk aversion, notably Kim Hamilton (Lois Maxwell). Worse, what the press doesn't know is that there's more to the mission than going into outer space. In a shocking bit of exposition, two of the higher-ups discuss these secret plans while they're in the same room as the reporters! Massive breach of security. And it's not going to be the last.

Anyhow, the War Department has the idea of testing a new sort of nuclear bomb in outer space. Prof. Merrity (Donald Wolfit) is the physicist in charge of developing it, and he's going to be on the mission to deploy the bomb since so few people know about it that he has to be the one to attach all the fuses and whatnot. Can't have it going off on earth, don't you know. Indeed, Hayden, who is the commander of the mission, isn't told about the presence of the bomb until the night before.

Meanwhile, there's a bunch of drama before the rocket takes off. In another even more shocking breach of security, Kim is able to waltz right through an unlocked gate that doesn't have anyone guarding it, and down to where the rocket is on its sloped underground launching pad. She's even able to climb into the ridiculously spacious rocket ship unseen: everybody's gone home for the evening, it seems! And then there are the two crew members who have issues with their love life: Jimmy (Bryan Forbes) was planning to propose marriage to his girlfriend who suddenly has to leave for a fashion show; Larry Noble has a wife who's fed up with his having to be away all the time because of the mission.

The next morning comes, and the rocket ship takes off just fine, which is shocking considering the extra weight that's it's carrying in the form of Kim Hamilton. Nobody's wearing any sort of pressure suit or personal oxygen system, either. Oh, and even though the ship has escaped the earth's gravity, it still has its own gravity that allows Kim to find a thermos of coffee and pour it for everybody. But the time comes to release the bomb. The plan is to set the fuse and then have the rocket head back for earth with the bomb exploding in space. But in the physics of Satellite in the Sky, the absence of gravity in outer space means that magnetism takes over in their theory of unified forces, so the bomb clings to the ship. One astronaut goes out to push the bomb away, which should give the obvious answer, but the bomb comes back. And the astronauts aboard bicker about what to do.

Satellite in the Sky is another of those movies where you can see what the filmmakers were going for, but they come up with a script that goes badly wrong in part because of the plot holes, and in part because they rely on so many tropes that it's unoriginal. It's also slow even at only 84 minutes. I'm glad I finally got the chance to watch Satellite in the Sky, but it's not particularly good.

The face that launched a thousand ships

A movie that for some reason I thought I may have watched ages ago, before I even started this blog, was the 1950s version of Helen of Troy. I had never blogged about it, and having watched it, am not 100% certain that I even had seen it before; perhaps I may have watched the 1950s version of Alexander the Great on TCM instead. In any case, Helen of Troy is getting an airing on TCM tomorrow, May, 3, at 7:45 AM, so now's the time for me to watch it and write up a review of it.

The movie is based on Homer's Iliad, although liberties are taken. We're introduced to Troy as the city that guarded the entrance to the Dardanelles between what is now the Turkish Mediterranean and the Black Sea. Troy grew wealthy by charging a toll for safe passage through the straits, although this ticked off other civilizations and mean that Troy didn't have ships of its own. Particularly the Greeks, led by Spartan King Menelaus (Niall MacGinnis), were unhappy.

Meanwhile, in Troy, there's debate over what to do, with King Priam's (Cedric Hardwicke) son Hector wanting to go on the offensive and attack the Spartans first, while younger son Paris (Jacques Sernas, credited as Jack) disagrees and thinks they should offer peace. You can always try war later, so Paris gets on a boat bound for one of the Greek harbors. Except that the ship is overcome by a storm, with Paris going up to fix the mast and going overboard when the mast snaps. He washes ashore and is rescued by a gorgeous woman who turns out to be Helen (Rossana Podestà) although she doesn't reveal her true identity who is AWOL from the palace with an old governess and her slave servant Andraste (Brigitte Bardot in one of her first international roles). Unsurprisingly, Paris falls for this lovely woman, although everybody realizes there's a problem if the Greeks were to find the guy.

Paris does make his way to the Spartan council, where Menelaus is meeting with Agamemnon (Robert Douglas), Achilles (Stanley Baker), Odysseus (Torin Thatcher), and others. Paris proves who he is by being good at combat, but then who should show up to the council but Helen? Menelaus is no dummy, and realizes that Paris and Helen have already met somewhere before. Menelaus is also insanely jealous because Helen doesn't really care for him on the grounds that she's been basically forced into a marriage and he tries to keep her captive in a gilded cage. So although Menelaus feigns talking peace, he actually plans to keep Paris hostage and ransom him to Troy.

Helen's servants inform Paris of this and effect an escape, leading to Menelaus getting even angrier, and sending soldiers to find Paris and kill him. They do find him, but there's a problem in that Helen has escaped the palace to make certain Paris gets to the Phoenician boat that's supposed to take him back to Troy. Whether the soldiers can kill Helen along with Paris is an open question, but one that Paris obviates by taking Helen in his arms and jumping off a cliff to the ocean below much like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Paris takes Helen back to Troy.

When Menelaus learns of this, he vows to go to war with Troy, using Helen as the reasonable excuse, but with as much of an intention to loot Troy and let a bunch of people bring the treasures of war back to Greece with them. Unfortunately Troy is in an easily-defensible place, and has a bunch of land behind it that's going to make it hard to surround. So instead, after the first attack is repulsed, the war becomes a largely frozen war of attrtition. Can the Greeks wait out the Trojan subjects' increasingly poor morale? Well, as anybody who knows their history will remember, the Greeks eventually came up with the Trojan horse that had a couple of commandos inside who could open up the city gates while the Trojans, drunk having thought they won a big battle, are hung over.

This version of Helen of Troy is pretty impressive to watch from the point of view of all the technical parts of the production; it was filmed largely in Italy with wide-screen color photography and what generally look like very high production values. The story and the acting, however, leave a bit less to be desired, in part because the two leads were not native English speakers. Still, I think the good parts of the spectacle ultimately outweigh the shortcomings of the story.

House Around the Woman

I've mentioned a couple of John Nesbitt's Passing Parade shorts before. They're interesting, although definitely the sort of thing a lot of people today are going to find old-fashioned. One of the shorts that I hadn't seen before until it showed up in the space after one of the features I watched to fill out the time slot is The Woman in the House.

John Nesbitt, giving his stentorian narration once again, discusses fear and how it's normal to have, especially in the time in which the movie is hitting theaters: it premiered in May 1942, about five months after the attack on Pearl Harbor that brought the United States into World War II. One particularly odd fear is called "anthropophobia", the fear of people, and a dramatized case study of one sufferer of it is shown. That woman is Catherine Starr (not a real name if there's even anything about this story that is real, which I doubt; Starr is played by Ann Richards), a woman who hasn't left her house in 40 years.

Apparently Starr was a schoolteacher in a small English village who was enagaged to be married to a British army officer in 1901. However, a small dispute over the wedding leaves her fiancé to say that he's going to leave the house and she'll never see him again. He has to go with his regiment down to South Africa where the Boer War is being fought. Some time later, she gets a letter of the "we regret to inform you" type that her fiancé died, not in battle, but of malaria in Africa. As a result, Starr can't bear to face the world, although apparently she has money saved up for 40 years of living.

Back in the present day, or late 1941 in the UK, there's that little war going on, and the Blitzkrieg with Nazi airplanes trying to bomb British targets. Starr's village is targeted, which meand that she's going to have to be taken from her house by force to a bomb shelter. Can't they just let her die in peace? But this is just what poor Catherine needs, as she finds a couple of children in the bomb shelter who need a bit of first aid. And don't you know it, but service to others is the best way to overcome one's fear.

Oh boy is the service propaganda on display here. Yeah, there's a war to be fought, but making a short like this with such an obvious agenda came across to me, at least, as a bit cringe-inducing, largely because the message feels shoe-horned in. This isn't one of those service movies or a film set in one of those occupied people where the locals were bravely fighting the Nazis. Instead, it's ostensibly about psychiatry, and then it turns into "how dare you have a mental illness -- do your part".

I don't know if the Passing Parade shorts got put out on a box set, but this isn't the first one I'd watch off of such a box set.

TCM Star of the Month May 2026: Gregory Peck

Gregory Peck (r.) and Dean Stockwell in Gentleman's Agreement (May 2, 12:15 AM)

Today is the first day of a new month, and that means it's time for new programming features on TCM. This includes a new Star of the month, that being Gregory Peck. His movies will be airing on all five Fridays in prime time, starting tonight at 8:00 PM with his Oscar-winning performance in To Kill a Mockingbird. Note that the running times for tonight's movies may cause a bit of a problem with the starting time for following movies: Spellbound starts at 10:15 PM in a two-hour slot, but is 118 minutes plus presumably an intro and outro. The fourth movie, which may or may not have an intro, is The Yearling at 2:30 AM, which is listed as 134 minuts and is in a slot that's two hours and 15 minutes. So it would fit without the intro and outro, but since it's often been the case to have four movies in prime time with host intros....

Gregory Peck and Dean Jagger in Twelve O'Clock High

It looks as though two of the nights of the salue are more genre-specific. The May 8 schedule has Peck in several westerns, while May 22 is the start of TCM's annual Memorial Day marathon of war movies. As such, it's appropriate that that night of the Peck salute includes a bunch of the war movies he made, although not among them this year is Twelve O'Clock High.

Audrey Hepburn, Gregory Peck, and Eddie Albert in Roman Holiday

In fact, looking at the TCM schedule, it's a bit surprising what movies aren't airing this month. In addition to Twelve O'Clock High, you also can't see Roman Holiday on TCM this month. There is, however, a showing of The Boys from Brazil (May 29, 10:00 PM) that I've wanted to see for a while, as well as Peck in the 1950s version of Moby Dick (May 30, 5:00 AM).

Not home in Indiana

Another of the people honored in TCM's Summer Under the Stars in August 2025 was Shirley Jones. This gave me the chance to record a pair of her films. One is a supporting role in the horrendously bad The Happy Ending, which I gave up on halfway through and may or may not get to before it expires off the DVR, that's how bad it is. And it's not even bad in a good way. The other film was one from early in her career, April Love.

Pat Boone is the star here, and he does sing the title song "April Love", although not over the opening credits; instead, the opening credits are over establishing shots of what is supposed to be bluegrass horse country in Kentucky. We then get Boon, who plays young Nick Conover, in a mail truck looking for the Bruce farm. It seems Mr. and Mrs. Bruce are his uncle and aunt, and he's going to be spending some time working on their farm. Not that it's much of a farm anymore, not since Jed Bruce's (Arthur O'Connell) son Jed Jr. died in Korea and Dad lost his zest for living and raising harness racing horses.

It was also Aunt Henrietta's (Jeanette Nolan) idea to bring Nick to the farm. Nick's father presumably died; Nick's unseen mom has to work to support Nick and can't be the necessary presence in the kid's life. As a result, Nick fell in with the wrong crowd, went joyriding in a stolen car in Chicago, and got probation. As part of the plea deal, Nick lost his driver's license and is getting sent away to this farm. So you can understand why uncle Jed isn't exactly thrilled. If Nick were played by someone other than clean-cut Pat Boone, you might wonder whether the plot would have Nick engaging in predations on his aunt and uncle.

While Jed is showing Nick the work he's going to have to do, including some obvious foreshadowing involving a horse that won't let anybody ride him now that Jed Jr. is dead, one of the neighbors shows up: young Liz Templeton (Shirley Jones), whose father still raises harness horses. Liz is good with horses, too, and can even ride a sulky. She falls for Nick and invites him over, although she and the rest of the Templeton's don't know just why Nick is here. And why he doesn't want to get behind the wheel of a car. Liz has a big sister Fran who interests Nick's eye, although she already has a boyfriend in college kid Al.

Part of the plot involves the good influence that Nick and Uncle Jed wind up having on each other. Nick fixes up Jed's broken-down old tractor, while Nick rescues the horse when it falls during an escape. The horse starts letting Nick get in the sulky to race him. There's also the Nick/Liz romance. And then there's the plot about Nick's probation. After fixing another old car on the farm, Liz and Fran make comments that lead to a drag race between Fran's sports car and Nick's old jalopy. Fran gets some dents in her car, and the insurance claim reveals that Nick has been violating his probation. Oh dear, he might be hauled off to prison instead of being allowed to race in the grand prize race.

April Love is harmless stuff, being a remake of a World War II-era movie Home in Indiana. The update brings nice color photography and Cinemascope, along with the songs for both Boone and Jones to sing. Other than that, the movie is old-fashioned and totally inoffensive. Nick is technically a criminal, but at heart he's really got a good heart. There's no antagonist here, and the Templetons don't seem to care when they learn about Nick's past, that's how clean-cut the movie is.

If you want something clean cut and to be transported to a past that doesn't exist any more, you could do a lot worse than to watch April Love.

End of April 2026 briefs

It's hard to believe that it's already the end of April. Then again, my current pattern of writing posts well ahead of time leads to not paying quite so close attention to how far ahead I'm scheduled, or to writing up other administrative posts like this. So once again I'll mention with the full TCM May schedule out that I've seen several movies on it that are on my DVR and will require my juggling other movies around to do the posts in conjunction with the upcoming TCM airing. As always, check your local schedule.

I learned something disappointing about YouTube TV's "DVR" (technically the cloud library) recently. While it in theory adds every showing of a title you've added to the library, the "select a version" option only shows the most recent half-dozen showings. What this means is that when TCM shows something that's popular enough (and usually more recent) to be in rotation on one of the commercial channels, all those commercial channel airings are going to wind up in the six most recent showings, crowding out the TCM showing which there doesn't seem to be a way to access. No; I specifically added the TCM showing to my library precisely because it's less likely to be edited, and certainly not larded up with commercials and pop-ups. I don't know if the metadata encoded with the programs would allow for a chance to only record the TCM showing.

Apparently the TCM Film Festival starts today and runs through Sunday, April 3. Not that I'd had any plans of going since I can't really afford it and have my elderly father to look after anyway. I don't think TCM on-air really does all that much any more either in terms of being "live" from the festival between movies, but then I've been watching a lot less live TCM. Now, the FAST services, I have to admit I've been watching a lot of stuff live that way.

Sissy Spacek, Beatnik

If you've watched enough Hollywood movies from the late 1950s and early 1960s, you may know that Hollywood had what feels like a rather stereotypical view of the beatnik. And then many years later they had the chance to show the original beatniks, only to come up with something that feels rather tepid. That movie is Heart Beat, which I recently got the chance to watch.

Sissy Spacek provides the narration, giving a stereotypical talk about 1950s suburbia and introducing us to a pair of men. One is the well-known writer Jack Kerouac, who would go on to write On the Road and get it published in the late 1950s, although as the movie opens it's the late 1940s and Kerouac (John Heard) is still living with his mother in a New York City apartment. The second man is Neal Cassady (Nick Nolte), who came from Denver where he spent a lot of his adolescence in reform school since his alcoholic father abandond him. Indeed, in this telling of the story when Cassady gets out of prison he immediately steals another car and heads to New York, which is where he meets Kerouac. The two then head west for San Franciso together with a girl.

In San Francisco, the pair meet Carolyn Robinson (that's Sissy Spacek), who's studying art at the art institute and is engaged to a guy named Dick who doesn't play all that much part in the rest of the story. Jack, Neal, and Carolyn become an inseparable threesome living in a tenement apartment and working what odd jobs they can to make the rent, although Neal ultimate gets a better job with the railroad. Eventually Jack decides to head back to New York to try to sell his manuscript to On the Road which he keeps rolled up in what looks like a grocery bag. Neal has by this time knocked up Carolyn, and Jack suggests to Carolyn that she probably shouldn't marry Neal because she's not going to be happy.

With kids and responsibility, Neal and Carolyn move out to the sort of early-1950s tract housing that was being builty to accommodate the families creating the Baby Boom, and Neal has a tendency to shock the neighbors. After several years, Jack shows up again, and takes a "room" in the attic of the Cassady house with the three living in what again seems like somewhat of an open relationship, something that really shocks the neighbors. Jack heads back to New York again, and with help from Ira (Ray Sharkey), someone supposedly based in part on Allen Ginsberg who wanted nothing to do with this movie, gets On the Road published and becomes a sensation. The fact that the main character is rather based on Neal, however, causes problems for Neal, who eventually gets busted for marijuana possession.

The last act of the movie involves Cassady's itinerance, driving a converted school bus with a bunch of hippie-like characters; Cassady would die fairly young not having published much in his lifetime, although the movie doesn't mention Neal's death.

Once again, I can see why any number of people would have felt influenced by works like On the Road and would want to make a movie based on Kerouac. (I, to be honest, have not read On the Road and have never been terribly interested in the counterculture.) The movie we get in Heart Beat, however, feels rather anodyne. These people lived what in many ways turned out to be wild lives, yet everything feels rather sanitized. I think the actors do the best they can with the material, but it doesn't work as well as one might hope.

Ann-Margret is 85!

Today marks the 85th birthday of actress Ann-Margret, who was born in Sweden but became an American citizen before the age of 10. TCM is honoring the occasion with four of her movies:

8:00 PM Bye Bye Birdie
10:00 PM The Cincinnati Kid
midnight Once a Thief
2:00 AM Made in Paris

I haven't seen Made in Paris, so I'm planning to record that. However, I had Bye Bye Birdie on my DVR, so I watched that in order to write up a post on it for tonight's airing. Bye Bye Birdie is, of course, based on a musical, and before that, derived from an idea that a Brodway writer had when popular singer Elvis Presley was drafted into the Army.

Jesse Pearson plays Conrad Birdie, a singer popular with the teenaged girls because of his sex appeal who gets drafted into the army, causing an uproar amongst the girls of America. Songwriter Albert Pearson (Dick Van Dyke), hearing about the story, hopes he can write up a song quickly for Conrad to sing before Birdie goes off to the Army. Meanwhile, Albert has a complicated personal life. He's got a girlfriend Rosie (Janet Leigh) who should be his fiancée by now. But Albert's mother Mae (Maureen Stapleton) helped found the family music publishing business and consistently guilts the devoted Albert into not leaving. Rosie unsurprisingly wants Albert to choose between her and his mother, and it seems he's choosing his mother.

Meanwhile, The Ed Sullivan Show (with Sullivan playing himself) has the idea of putting Birdie on the show before he enlists, and even have Birdie kiss one of his legion of fans. Rosie has the membership rolls of the Conrad Birdie fan club somehow, and randomly picks a girl from the small town of Sweet Apple, Ohio. That girl is Kim MacAfee (Ann-Margret), who has a happy life with her kid brother, her parents (Paul Lynde and Mary LaRoche), and a boyfriend in Hugo Peabody (Bobby Rydell). Kim gets the call from New York, and she's naturally thrilled about having been chosen to represent the town of Sweet Apple to America, and get a kiss from Birdie.

Not everyone is thrilled, however. Hugo is ticked, fearing that he's going to lose Kim to Birdie. Dad also doesn't like it so much. He's still responsible for Kim, of course, and doesn't care for Birdie's music or the way in which Birdie drives everybody wild. But he warms to the idea when Albert suggests that perhaps Mr. MacAfee could get on TV too. Meanwhile, the subplot involving the long-simmering relationship between Albert and Rosie keeps rearing its head although one would think in a musical like this that Rosie and Albert are going to have a happy ending.

And then there's a twist. TV production is a complicated thing, and in the case of the Ed Sullivan Show part of that includes making certain everything times out properly considering that it's live TV. There's time planned for Birdie and Kim, although that gets cut into by Mr. MacAfee's desire to speak as well as MacAfee trying to promote the mayor, too. Worse is that the Russian Ballet which is also scheduled to appear that night decides it's going to do a number that would take up almost all the time allotted to the Birdie segment.

Bye Bye Birdie is the sort of movie that fans of musicals are going to like. If you're not that much of a fan of the artificiality of musicals, and I include myself in that genre, then it may not be quite as appealing. For the most part, everybody does well, although the material is such that at times it felt much too forced for me. Still, as I said, I can understand why some people are going to love Bye Bye Birdie.

A century before noir

Hedy Lamarr was honored in last year's edition of Summer Under the Stars, which allowed me to record a movie that I hadn't seen before, largely because it was an independent production that has fallen into the public domain: The Strange Woman.

We don't see Hedy Lamarr for a bit, because the movie opens up when her character is a kid in 1820s Bangor, Maine. Jenny Hager is the daughter of alcoholic widower Tim Hager, who is a scandal in town as he tries to get drinks off of shopkeeper Isaiah Poster (Gene Lockhart). Isaiah, for his part, is a widower himself with a son Ephraim. Out at the river, a bunch of kids are standing on the bridge when Jenny dares Ephraim to jump into the river, even though Ephraim can't swim and is afraid of the water. So Jenny pushes him in. When an adult, Judge Saladine (Alan Napier), shows up, Jenny drags Ephraim out of the water and claims she saved Jenny.

Jenny is already a wanton kid, and she's going to be a wanton woman, looking to marry rich. Matters come to a head one night when the now adult Jenny (that's Hedy Lamarr) pursues the sort of man Dad doesn't like. Dad tries to beat Jenny, so she beats him to death and runs off to Isaiah's house looking for help, in part because he's the richest man in town, and in part because this is a scheme. She claims Dad has suffered some sort of attack while trying to beat her, winning the sympathy of Isaiah and the Reverend Thatcher (Moroni Olsen) who both know Jenny needs to be married off. The only man around seems to be Isaiah, now that Ephraim is off to college, so Jenny marries Isaiah, which was sort of her plan all along because she wants that money.

Of course, Ephraim returns, and things get awkward because Jenny also has feelings for Ephraim that are mutual, not that Dad knows any of this. Dad by now owns not just a bunch of ships, but also forest inland, and has to deal with the lumberjacks who get rowdy when they come to town because they're in need of women. Isaiah is so concerned with the running of the town that he basically works himself to a heart attack, although this doesn't kill him as much as Jenny would be happy that it does. Jenny is looking for a way to inherit Isaiah's property, so when Isaiah decides to go up to the lumber camps, Jenny manipulates Ephraim into doing the same sort of thing Montgomery Clift may or may not have done to Shelley Winters in A Place in the Sun. And then Jenny, having inherited Isaiah's property, throws Ephraim out of the house!

Jenny then starts to seduce her business manager John Evered (George Sanders), who is also in love with Jenny's best friend Meg. Meanwhile, Ephraim has become a terrible drunk and confesses to Evered what he did to his father. Whether or not Evered truly believes this is a good question, considering how completely drunk Ephraim is.

Now, the movie was made in 1946, which means there's the little matter of the Production Code. Jenny isn't going to be able to get away with what she's done up to this point, so there's the question of how she's going to expiate her sins and how the rest of the movie is resolved. The screenwriters have sort of painted themselves into a corner by this point, and there's not really a good way to get out of it.

I knew The Strange Woman was going to be interesting when I saw in the opening credits that it was based on a book by Ben Ames Williams, who might be best known for Leave Her to Heaven. Sure enough, the movie is never less than interesting, although the plot is wildly implausible at times. There's also the question of whether the movie is truly noir. Hedy Lamarr's Jenny certainly is the sort of femme fatale who would appear in a noir, although I don't quite think the historical setting is a noir setting. It's perhaps closer to the historic melodrama of a movie like Forever Amber. In any case, it's definitely worth watching.

Cynthia

Somehow I also wound up with a whole bunch of movies that starred the reliably bland actor George Murphy on my DVR, and it's not as if he was ever TCM's Star of the month. One of those movies is Cynthia, a light family drama trying to restore some sense of normalcy following World War II.

Cynthia is played by an adolescent Elizabeth Taylor, although we don't see her at first. Instead, we meet her parents, Larry Bishop (Goerge Murphy) and Louise (Mary Astor) when they were college students before they got married and Cynthia was born. Louise was a musician and Larry a med student in 1930 both hoping they'd be able to go to Vienna to study their respective fields, with Larry making money in the summer by working at the hardware store back in his home town of Napoleon, Ill., one of those small midwestern towns that consistently shows up in movies like this. But the two fall in love and get married, which in and of itself is not a big deal. However, Larry knocks up Louise, and the two need to support themselves somehow, which necessitates moving back to Napoleon.

Worse, Cynthia has been a sickly child, with the result being that she's been sheltered her whole life, and her parents feeing trapped in Napoleon. Indeed, stupid Larry, despite having three years of college education, hasn't even bothered to get any better job than still working at the hardware store, and the family have been living in the same rented house for the past 16 years or so.

Cynthia too is getting to the age where she sees all the nice experiences that the other kids her age have had the chance to do, like going to school dances or performing in the school play. This latter even though Cynthia seems to have some musical talent that she inherited from Mom and takes lessons from a local music professor Rosenkrants (S.Z. Sakall). Matters reach a head for the family when the guy who owns the house decides he needs to sell, which may necessitate the Bishops having to move out if they can't come up with the down payment.

And then one day Ricky Latham (Jimmy Lydon), who dropped out of school to join the navy and presumably fight World War II, returns to town in the hope of finishing up his high school, which is another plot point that makes no sense. The guy would have to be at least 20 now, much too old for Cynthia or high school in general. But he takes a shine to Cynthia, and she might get to go on her first date to the big high school prom. That is, if she's healthy enough to do so. She hasn't really been sick for a year now, but suddenly, with all this activity, she might be coming down with another flu....

Cynthia is one of those MGM movies that you can see fitting in with what Louis B. Mayer wanted to do: good family values in a wholesome package, with some added post-World War II escapism. If these are the worst problems a family has, things can't be too bad, much like the Andy Hardy series that was by this time winding down. Unfortunately, for me the whole thing strained credulity. Cynthia really couldn't be that sickly, and the people around the Bishops, especially Larry's sister (Spring Byington) and her doctor husband (Gene Lockhart), couldn't be that impolite. Everybody tries, but Cynthia is another of those movies that ultimately falls under the weight of a saccharine script.

Were the first 58 psyches any better?

British actress Samanta Eggar died last year, and when she died, I mentioned a couple of her movies that were coming up on TCM over the following few weeks. I didn't realize at the time that I had a lesser known movie of hers on my DVR, in part because she's technically the supporting actress here. That movie is Psyche 59.

The star here is Patricia Neal playing Alison Crawford, and as the movie is opening she's on a horse ride through the parks of London with family friend Paul (Ian Bannen). You could be forgiven for thinking the two of them are married, since Paul is around enough and Alison's two kids treat Paul like a second father. In fact, Alion is married to Eric (Curd Jürgens credited once again as Curt). Alison is also wearing the sort of sunglasses that lead the viewer to believe that she's blind. In fact, she is.

But, this is that weird sort of movie blindness that occurred in some sort of accident and isn't a real physical blindness but the sort of pyschological issue where her brain just won't process the images the optic nerve is sending it because reasons that make no sense with our more modern understanding of science, but bear with it because we wouldn't have a movie otherwise. As to what the accident is, Alison has blocked it from her mind and nobody else bothers to tell her what happened to see if anything will jog her memory because, again, if any of them did that, we'd have a lot less of a movie.

Alison and Eric's marriage seems to be reasonbly OK, although there is a bit of a strain in the family relationshpi in the form of Alison's younger sister Robin (Samantha Eggar). She for whatever reason hasn't been able to have a successful long-term relationship, and with her current marriage breaking up, she's hoping to stay with Alison and Eric for a while. Eric's reaction to all of this is to treat Robin as though he might be up for an affair with her, or that he might have had an affair with her at some point in the past. Alison can't see any of this, but she's no dummy just because she's blind.

To get away from all of this, Alison and Robin decide to go visit their elderly mother, who lives in what would be a nice old house by the sea if only she could keep the house up at her age. Another thing that isn't so nice about it is the fact that it rekindles old negative feelings that Alison and Robin had for each other, and that they had toward their mother. Well, Alison and Mom especially; Robin seems a bit oblivious to this. The two men stay behind in London for a few days, which gives them the chance to have a conversation in which Eric reveals that yes, he really did have an affair with Robin when she was about 17 or so, and that it wasn't the only woman other than Alison that he's had.

Eventually Eric and Paul join the women out in the country, but things get worse in some ways and better than others. Robin starts riding a horse wildly, accidentally knocking Alison down. This, however, restores Alison's vision! She, however, decides not to tell anybody at first. Robin has a jumping accident and learns the truth about Robin and Eric as a result of what she sees. This leads to the climax that the screenwriter obviously hoped would be shocking to viewers of the time.

Psyche 59 is another of the movies where it feels like there's an interesting build-up but, once the movie gets to the climax, the writer can't quite figure out how to make everything that's come before work together, with the result that the finale is a slow fizzle. But, it's easy to see why the cast members would want to make the movie, as the original treatment must have sounded like it was better than the finished product turned out to be. One plus is the black-and-white cinematogrphy, although unfortunately, cinematography alone isn't enough to save a movie like Psyche 59.

There's a reason why I hadn't heard of Psyche 59 before, and after you watch it, you'll probably understand why you hadn't heard of it either.

For some values of "gangster"

One of the movies Eddie Muller selected for Noir Alley last summer that I hadn't heard of was The Gangster. Since I generally enjoy Noir Alley, and the synopsis sounded interesting enough, I decided to record it.

The reason I hadn't heard of this one, I guess, is because it was made by the King Brothers from Monogram, who in this case moved up a step or so when Monogram started Allied Artists to put out stuff that was intended to be more prestigious. Here the star is Barry Sullivan, playing a gangster named Shubunka. He wakes up in what looks like a pretty nice apartment, before he starts with a voiceover of the sort that sounds like we're about to get Yet Another Flashback. That at least would give him the opportunity to explain how he got that horrible scar on his face. And sure enough, the scene flashes back to some point in the past, although it's not quite mentioned how far....

Shubunka lives and works on Neptune Beach, which is one of the places New Yorkers go to get away from the big city in the summer when it gets hot. Now, there's a Neptune, New Jersey, but it's far enough away from the city that people wouldn't day trip there, and certainly wouldn't be taking public transportation in and out of Neptune to get to places in New York City. But that's the first of many things that utterly bend both reality and the coherence of the film's plot.

Shubunka works out of an ice cream parlor that seems to have only one soda jerk, Shorty (Harry Morgan when he was still being called Henry), one cashier Dorothy (Joan Lorring), and an owner Jammey (Akim Tamiroff) who is paying Shubunka some sort of protection money. A totally bizarre subplot involves Shorty's love life, or lack therof, and his attempt to woo another business owner in the area, the widow Ostroleng (Fifi D'Orsay). Shubunka has a girlfriend in the form of dancer Nancy Starr (Belita) who works out of the ballroom at the swanky hotel about a block away, which in real life wouldn't be near the sort of slums Shubunka works out of, or physically fit into the amount of space the set allows it.

Shubunka is jealous of Nancy, which is really only a plot point in that it allows him to accuse her of betraying him for what comes next, when bigger gangsters led by Cornell (Sheldon Leonard) show up. They want to horn in on Shubunka's territory, which shouldn't be so hard since Shubunka doesn't seem to have a gang at all! Cornell and one of his henchmen (Elisha Cook Jr. in another great small role) show up at an isolated part of the beach where Shubunka and Nancy are on a date to try to pressure him to leave town. They've already pressured Jammey, and Shubunka knows that they can kill Jammey and frame him.

Meanwhile, another subplot involves Karty (John Ireland). He's a bookkeeper for the garage his wife's brothers run, but he's embezzled from the company to gamble on the horses, having a scheme he's certain can win. (It's basically the Martingale, which in the real world is easily defeated by limiting the maximum wager along with payouts that offer a vigorish to the house.) He needs to pay back his loan or win more money with his wagering scheme, but Shubunka has no desire to lend him any money.

Objectively, The Gangster is an absolute mess of a movie with a bunch of disparate plot elements that shouldn't fit and all sorts of continuity issues. And yet, for some reason, The Gangster is an eminently interesting movie. Not in the "so bad it's good" sense, since it's not even bad. There's just something so off-kilter with the plot elements and the characters that you can't stop watching through to the end, as much of a mess as it is.

The Gangster is definitely another movie to watch if you can find it, although "gangster" is a common enough word in movie titles that you'll want to make certain you're getting the correct movie.

The Godless Girl

I had a fair number of silent movies sitting on my DVR in addition to some of the other genres that are disproportionately represented on the DVR. One of the movies that I had somewhat surprisingly not heard of before it got an airing on Silent Sunday Nights: The Godless Girl. But with it being a Cecil B. DeMille movie with an interesting synopsis, I recorded it in order to be able to finally watch it and put up a post on it.

The movie starts off in a high school with some interesting clubs. 21-year-old Lina Basquette stars as Judy Craig, aka The Girl. She's one of the prime movers of the school's Atheist Club, which seems like a rather odd thing for what I'd guess is a public school to have. Also, this being the 1920s, it's unsurprising that there are a lot more believers in God, and specifically, the Christian God since this is after all a DeMille movie and he certainly promoted his perception of Christianity in his films. The Boy, actual name Bob Hathaway and played by 32-year-old Tom Keene (credited as George Duryea), is the head of the Christian students' group, and boy is he irritated that atheists not only don't believe in his God, but that they might want to advertise their belief that there is no God. So he and his friends disrupt the Atheist Club meeting, leading to a riot that causes a banister to break and a female student to fall to her death.

It's not quite clear who should get the lion's share of the blame for what happened, although nobody intended for this thing to result in a death. But it did, and legally that's probably involuntary manslaughter. In any case, it's convenient for the justice system to declare it manslaughter and send both of the protagonists off to reform school, which is sex-segregated although the two halves of the reform school are right next to each other. At the school, Judy is roomed with The Other Girl, Mame (Marie Prevost), who shows Judy the ropes, and eventually becomes friends with Judy. Over on the boys' side, Bob meets Bozo (Eddie Quillan), and those two become friends as well.

Bob tries to make up with Judy, probably because he feels it his Christian duty, and tries to figure out a way to protect her, having fallen in love with her along the way. It also doesn't help that this is the sort of "reform" school that figures physical violence is the best way to reform the kids in the school. You'd think the kids might riot at some point the way they will in The Mayor of Hell some years later. And indeed, the climax is going to be set against a riot.

But first, Bob decides the best way to help Judy is to get her out of this place, which means effecting an escape. The two break out by commandeering a truck and eventually wind up on an abandoned farm, where life is idyllic for just long enough for Judy to conclude that perhaps there really is a God. But since there's that climax against a prison riot, you can guess that the young lovers are going to be caught and sent back to the reform school, which is only going to get more brutal than it was before the two escaped.

This being a Cecil B. DeMille movie, it's not exactly subtle in presenting DeMille's views and the triumph of Christian good over evil. but DeMille was a talented director and showman, and he's more than able to come up with a good story and compelling visuals to get his obvious points across, especially in the climactic prison riot complete with a fire and collapsing cell block. The print on The Godless Girl is also quite good. Unfortunately, by the time DeMille finished production sound movies, or part-sound movies, were becoming big, and the movie wasn't very successful, also being re-edited to include partial dialogue sequences. The version TCM ran, however, was silent. I don't have a copy of Kino Lorber's restoration release, so I'm not certain if both versions are available on it.

South Pacific

Tonight's lineup on TCM is a night of films dedicated to director Joshua Logan. Once again, I've got one of the movies on the schedule already on my DVR. That film is South Pacific, which kicks off the night at 8:00 PM.

This is based on the popular Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, and I have to admit that I have not seen a stage version of the musical so I don't know how much was changed between the original stage show and this movie. It's 1943 or so in the south Pacific, which of course means the middle of the Pacific theater of World War II. Japan still holds a lot of the islands, although the action is mostly on an island the the US holds. There's a battalion of Seabees, headed by Luther Billis (Ray Walston) on the island. Being flown in to the island is marine Lt. Joseph Cable (John Kerr).

The Seabees are unsurprisingly frustrated, in the sense that there aren't many women around. A lot of them have been decamped to the neighboring island of Bali Hai, which is off limits to enlisted men, at leat unless they're accompanied by an officer, which Lt. Cable just so happens to be. This will give Billis the chance to get to the island. One Polynesian woman does show up on the island a lot, that being "Bloody Mary" Juanita Hall, who's the sort of opportunist businesswoman that Jane Russell's Mamie Stover was, minus the showgirl part. There's also a group of nurses, led by Ens. Nellie Forbush (Mitzi Gaynor), although they're rather off-limits too; no fraternization and all that.

Lt. Cable's real purpose in being parachuted onto the island is because there's another island not too far away that's held by the Japanese. The Americans want to know more about what's going on on that island because of how it controls shipping in the area. The only idea they have is to get someone to go behind enemy lines and radio from there, and Lt. Cable got the job. However, he doesn't know much about the island. The one person who might be able to help him is Emile de Becque (Rossano Brazzi), a Frenchman who moved to Polynesia decades ago because he had a past in France. Since then he wound up owning a plantation. Since he's a civilian, Nellie is able to start up a relationship with him.

Meanwhile, Lt. Cable is able to get over to Bali Hai, where he's introduced to the gorgeous Liat (France Nuyen), who happens to be Bloody Mary's daughter. He immediately falls in love with her, but isn't so certain he wants to marry her, because what will his family back in the States think? Far worse is Nellie's attitude. He finds out that Emile is actually a widower: he married a local Polynesian woman, and had two kids by her, whom he is raising. When Nellie learns he's got two mixed-race children, she's horrified for no particularly good reason, or at least no reason that anyone engaging in presentism would find acceptable. The movie, however (based on a work by Michener) is trying to make the point that this sort of blind prejudice is not particularly a good thing.

In and along the way, we get a whole bunch of songs. The songs themselves are of the Rodgers and Hammerstein sort that have in somce cases become standards, so lovers of musicals will certainly enjoy them. However, the way they're presented in the movie is something that might be a problem for a lot of viewers. All of the musical numbers are tinted much the way that old silent movies had scenes tinted in various colors. This is something that to me came across as stilted and artificial and didn't really work.

On the plus side, the movie was done if not quite on location at least in Hawaii, which isn't the south Pacific but close enough to substitute adequately as well as be physically beautiful, especially in wide-screen. I can only imagine how it would have looked back in 1958 on the big screen. Fans of musicals will probably like South Pacific; non-fans (and I'd include myself here) I think will at least not actively dislike it.

The Keyhole

George Brent was TCM's Star of the Month last month, and one of the movies that they ran is showing up on TCM again, although this time it's as part of a night of movies starring Brent's co-star in tonight's movie, that star being Kay Francis. The movie in question is The Keyhole, which comes up overnight tonight, or in the wee hours of tomorrow, at 3:15 AM.

Kay Francis plays Anne Brooks, née Vallee. As the movie opens up, she's reading a note from a man named Maurice (Monroe Owsley) that is a suicide letter. Anne is married to a wealthy man, so she has her chauffeur drive her over to the apartment where Maurice is staying. It turns out that Maurice and Anne danced together in Europe as one of those Vernon and Irene Castle-like couples who demonstrated new dances in the ballrooms of nightspots where the wealthy gathered. Anne was young and naïve, stupid enough to marry Maurice, and when she learned what a jerk he really was, she left for America leaving Maurice to complete the no-fault divorce proceedings since he was intending to marry another woman. However, Maurice never married that other woman and never got the divorce. Anne married her second husband Schuyler Brooks (Henry Kolker) thinking it was a valid marriage and that she'd never need to tell Schuyler about her past. But it's not a valid marriage, and Maurice is blackmailing Anne over it because she's got money, or at least assets that theoretically can be converted to money although Schuyler is bound to start noticing at some point.

Schuyler has kinda-sorta noticed in that Anne comes home at odd hours, and doesn't seem to wear some of her jewelry any more. But the servants have no idea what's really going on. The one person who does know what's going on is Schuyler's sister Portia (Helen Ware), who is good at discreetly breaking up such unwanted relationships. She learns from Anne that Maurice is not an American citizen. So Anne should take a cruise somehwere to the Carribean, like Havana. Maurice is certain to follow her, and Portia can use her influence to get Maurice's visa cancelled. Voilà: Maurice won't be able to blackmail Anne in the US anymore, and Schuyler need not learn anything about what went on between Anne and Maurice.

However, since Schuyler knows nothing of this, he has some reason to worry that Anne might be up to no good when she suddenly declares that she'd like to go to Havana. So he goes to a detective agency to have one of their discreet, high-class private eyes get on the same boat and see if he can find out who Anne is seeing on the sly. That man is Neil Davis (George Brent), who is accompanied by a second detective, Hank (Allen Jenkins), who will be traveling under the guise of being Neil's valet.

Neil and Anne meet, and the two eventually become friends, although Neil notes that Anne seems to be a more or less perfect wife, never looking for another man and trying to get away from Maurice who, sure enough, has followed Anne on the boat. The things Neil and Anne do together are completely platonic, although eventually Neil finds himself beginning to fall in love with Anne. This presents problems when Schuyler learns the truth from his siter and goes down to Havana himself so that Anne should not find out that her husband has been spying on her.

The Keyhole is an entertaining enough movie, although I have to wonder how much bearing to reality it bears. One plus is that the conflict is set up in a good enough way that it makes Anne's reasoning for why she did the things she did believable. She was on a separate continent in the early 1930s, and expected the divorce was going to go through, so what resaon is there to tell any of this stuff to her second husband? And she's acting mysteriously enough, in part to protect her husband, so he has a logical reason to suspect something is wrong. I do have to say, on the other hand, that the resolution of the film's conflict doesn't quite work for me.

One other fun thing to mention is the subplot. Glenda Farrell is inserted into the movie as Dot, a gold-digger who is clearly looking for a rich guy to fleece. She falls for Hank, not realizing he's not what he's presenting himself as, while Hank is blowing through all the expense money to keep Dot in the lifestyle she's become accustomed to. They both handle their roles well and provide a bit of needed comic relief.

People who want a look at early 1930s values will probably enjoy The Keyhole, as will the fans of the movie's stars, although there are better films out there for all of them.

The supporting player witness

It wasn't uncommon for studios to remake their B movies back in the day. After all, since there wasn't yet television to show the movies again, the B stuff would likely have fallen out of the consciousness of most of the viewing public. So when I saw the plot synopsis for the 1939 movie The Man Who Dared, I was pretty certain -- correctly, as it turns out -- that this was a remake of a really entertaining little movie called The Star Witness. Still, I watched it anyway.

Once again, the backdrop for the movie is corruption in some unnamed medium-sized city, with newspaper headlines being a good way to have plot exposition. But fortunately, the DA has somebody who's willing to testify against the corrupt mayor. The bad news is that the mayor, being corrupt and powerful, is able to figure out who this witness is, and get some of his goons to put a bomb on the guy's car to kill him.

The dead witness lived in one of those middle class residential districts with detached garages and picket fences, and living in the next house over is the Carter family, led by patriarch Matthew (Henry O'Neill). They see the people who placed the car bomb acting furtively, and trying to escape before the bomb goes off. However, one of the bombers is dressed as a policeman, so when the Carters mention what happened to the police, the bad guys already know what happened.

The Carters are a pretty big family, with the parents (Mom being played by Elisabeth Risdon); adult daughter Madge (Jane Russell); three sons including football-playing Bill (Dickie Jones); and their grandfather, Ulysses (Charley Grapewin), who fought in the Spanish-American War. (The original had Grandpa as a Civil War veteran, but by now that would put Grandpa close to 90.) So there are a lot of people to testify. Except that the bad guys start threatening the Carters, and suddenly they clam up, suddenly doubting whether they really saw what they saw. Meanwhile, the poor family are pretty much prisoners in their own home what with the police protection they're getting

And just to drive the point home, the bad guys take Dad someplace where they can beat the crap out of him before bringing him back home, simply because they can and it will encourage the Carters to keep their mouths shut. Grandpa, as the old fart and war veteran, is the one person who doesn't seem to care what happens to him since he's going to be dead soon anyway. But his intransigence only results in little Bill getting kidnapped on the way to a football game. It's up to Grandpa to save him and, by extension, save the whole city from corruption....

The Man Who Dared is a competently made B movie, although it's still decidedly a B movie. I'd also say that it's not quite as good as The Star Witness, in part because it feels a bit more rushed, and in part because The Star Witness has a bit better of a crew: Walter Huston is the DA, Grant Mitchell the father, and William Wellman is the director.

Portrait in Black

A genre that's often fun even if the movies aren't necessarily very good is the potboiler of the 1950s and 1960s. Recently, I had the opportunity to see another of those movies: Portrait in Black.

Lana Turner is the star here, and she plays Sheila Cabot, the second wife of shipping magnate Matthew Cabot (Lloyd Nolan). Matthew is an extremely tough businessman, and that toughness is driving him to an early grave as he seems to need a series of injections from his doctor, Dr. David Rivera (Anthony Quinn). However, Matthew is tough in his personal life as well as his business life; as one example he seems quite ticked that Sheila has decided to get a learner's permit to be able to drive for herself. This, after, would mean she'd no longer be forced to use the chauffeur Cobb (Ray Walston) to go anywhere.

And goodness knows she's got places to go. She's secretly carrying on an affair with Dr. Rivera! Both of them have had the thought that they could hasten Matthew's death through an air-bubble induced embolism, although that would of course be unethical malpractice, and there's a reasonable chance somebody might figure things out since there are signs that Sheila is less than fully honest about where she's taking the car. Cathy (Sandra Dee), Matthew's adult daughter from his first marriage, notices that Sheila often goes "shopping" but comes home having bought nothing.

Of course, Cathy's relationship with her dad isn't much better. Cathy's boyfriend is Blake Richards (John Saxon), who runs one of the tugboat concessions in the San Francisco harbor. But, thanks in part to Dad, as well as Dad's second-in-commmand Howard Mason (Richard Basehart), Blake's dad was driven out of business, giving Blake good reason to hate Mr. Cabot. Worse, Mr. Cabot and Mason screw Blake over in awarding the new contract to deal with the Cabot Line.

And then Matthew dies suddenly, although it's not because of any untoward doings on anybody's part. However, a few days letter Sheila receives an hand-printed letter with no return address but a postmark from Carmel congratulating her on doing away with her husband! Sheila and David are convinced that somebody knows about their affair and is going to try to blackmail them. Suspicion eventually falls on Howard Mason's shoulders, and Dr. Rivera comes up with a ridiculous plan to bump off Howard in a shooting that could easily be blamed on a disgruntled longshoreman since there a labor dispute brewing. Except that the killing doesn't quite go to plan. Oh, Howard gets killed all right, but it takes two attempts and then Cathy starts trying to put two and two together....

Portrait in Black got scathing reviews at the time of its release in 1960, and it's not hard to see why. However, 65-plus years on, it's easier to sit back and have fun at how delightfully overwrought and bad this one is. It goes from one ridiculously over-the-top scene to the next, leading up the a climax where you know Anthony Quinn's character is going to get it if only because the Production Code was still in effect and demanded it. But the movie generally swims in a sea of hatred that's brewing just under the surface, with all the characters delivering bad dialogue.

Portrait in Black is definitely recommended, but not for the reasons the filmmakers at the time would have wanted you to see it.

Mike's Murder

I've mentioned on several occasions how there are quite a few 1980s movies that I had heard about growing up, but didn't get the chance to see when they came out because of my being too young. And then there are movies I never even heard about because they didn't get much of a release. A good example from that latter category is Mike's Murder. Since the synopsis sounded interesting, I recorded it when it showed up on TCM and once again eventually got around to watching it and doing this post on the movie.

Debra Winger is the star here, although she clearly doesn't play Mike. Instead, she's Betty Parrish, a bank teller in Los Angeles who likes to play tennis, taking lessons from Mike (Mark Keyloun). They're also flirtatious, with some embraces that lead to the two of them going up to Betty's apartment and making sweet, sweet love.

On another night some time later, Mike meets up at a lower-class hash joint with his friend Pete (Darrell Larson). This scene is filmed in a way that gives one the distinct impression that something untoward is going on. That impression turns out to be right, as when Mike and Pete leave the place, they're intercepted by a couple of guys who are clearly higher up in the world of 1980s drug distributon, and that Mike and Pete shouldn't be trying to horn in on other people's territory. Worse, they say they know where Mike lives, forcing him to seek refuge with Sam (Robert Crosson), a photographer he knows.

Not long after that, Betty is driving along when whom should she meet but Mike! He wants to get in the car and have Betty drive him somewhere. It's clear again from his demeanor that something's wrong. We the viewers already know this, but Betty picks up on it too, with Mike finally explaining what's going on before having Betty drop him off at the driveway of one of those Sunset Blvd. style mansions. Not that Mike is moving in with Norma Desmond or getting the swimming pool he always wanted, the dope.

Mike and Betty play phone tag while Mike lays low. When he finally thinks the heat is off, he and Pete start getting involved with drug deals again. But Pete is stupid enough to try to skim some of other people's drugs off the top, and surely the bigwigs are going to discover this. They do, and kill Mike for the trouble. Of course, with a title like Mike's Murder, you knew this was going to happen.

Betty gets the phone call that Mike was killed, and she's distraught. She starts poking around herself, even showing up when the crime scene technicians are going through the murder, with blood still on the walls and all that. (This seems like a plot hole, since you'd think there would be police tape and that Betty wouldn't have learned of the murder until after the detectives got done with the crime scene.) Betty goes to the house where she dropped Mike off, finding out that it's owned by a gay sugar daddy Philip (Paul Winfield) who let Mike stay there basically in exchange for favors, although Mike was only at most gay for pay. She also begins to learn what a nasty character Pete is, although it's not as though he's got any of the power in the drug world.

Having seen Mike's Murder, I can see why it's one of those movies that I'd never heard of. Apparently it was butchered by the studio before release, changing the story structure significantly. That having been said, it's really not that bad of a movie despite some of the plot holes. It's slow going for the first two thirds of the movie, but the finale is pretty darn suspenseful. If you're willing to put up with that sort of structure, Mike's Murder is definitely worth a watch.