Darby's Rangers

Another of the movies that will be airing as part of this year's TCM Memorial Day weekend marathon of war movies is Darby's Rangers. It shows up tomorrow, May 23, at 3:45 PM.

Darby's Rangers is based on a real person, Maj. (later promoted to colonel) William O. Darby (James Garner in his first starring role). As the movie opens, Darby is stuck in an office in Washington with his adjutant, Master Sgt. Saul Rosen (Jack Warden, who also narrates the movie). There's a war going on, this being 1942, and Darby as a West Point graduate wants to fight. However, as Gen. Truscott informs him, Darby has excellent skills as a planner, and planning is in fact something that the war effort needs just as much as people who can do the actual fighting. Darby's idea is to have the army have its own form of Rangers, who would do much the same sorts of commando work that the Marines do. They can't use the Marines in Europe because the Marines are stretched too thin in the Pacific theater.

So Darby suggests his idea to another general, and is able to convince that general to give him the role of commander of the first batch of Rangers, who are going to go off to Scotland to train with the British since at the time it was considered that the British had the best commandos going. This also gives us the opportunity to meet some of the supporting characters. Hank Bishop (Stuart Whitman) meets bus conductor Wendy Hollister (Joan Elan) in London; she just knows she's going to get Hank to propose to her even though he doesn't know it yet. There's also Sutherland, who beds a girl in every port, or the army equivalent; Rollo Burns (Peter Brown); and some others. They all wind up in Scotland, and since the base where they'll be doing their training is short of barracks, the men are billeted with local families which also provides a couple to meet women they're going to fall in love with, notably Burns meeting the daughter of the Scot training them.

Eventually the training is done, and it's time for the Rangers to go off and do actual fighting, which starts in French North Africa in what is now Algeria. The Rangers serve with distinction, which puts them at the forefront of the next phase of the war, the invasion of Italy. As you may recall from your history or from having seen enough other war movies, the invasion started in Sicily as that's the closest point in Italy to Africa. After taking Sicily they established a beachhead in the southwestern most part of the boot of Italy, only to get bottled up by the Germans. So the Allies decided they were going to try to jump ahead of the German position by doing an amphibious invasion at Anzio.

This being a war movie, some of the Rangers die, which is the opportunity to bring in another character, Lt. Dittman (Edd Byrnes), a commander who's come straight from West Point and is just as by the books and humorless as you'd expect somebody who hasn't experienced combat and the stresses of having killed people and lost friends. As part of a delousing operation, he meets local girl Angelina (Etchika Choureau) and falls in love with her, which becomes another sub-plot in the movie.

If you read carefully, you might have noticed that I didn't talk all that much about the war action in Darby's Rangers. That's because there's not a whole lot of it, with a copious amount of military footage from the Army subbed in. The portions of the movie dealing with the training and then the romantic subplots take up a lot more of the film, which is fairly formulaic anyway. Darby's Rangers apparently didn't get the best reviews at the time it was released, and having watched it, it's not too hard to see why.

Accent on Crime

TCM ran a spotlight last summer on "Teens in Trouble". One of the movies they ran was an ultra-low-budget film from PRC, Delinquent Daughters. Since the synopsis sounded interesting, and I'm always up for low-budget exploitation stuff like this, I decided I'd record it so that I could eventually watch it and put up this post.

At what looks like a nice high school in one of those small cities that populated America, a group of the female students are discussing a shocking incident that occurred: one of their female classmates committed suicide by jumping off a pier! The various students have different attitudes. One, June, is sad; one is ditzy; a third, Sally, doesn't want to talk about it either with her classmates or the authorities and is incredibly truculent about it. Sally is obviously not one of the Good Girls.

This is further made clear by the fact that Sally has a boyfriend, Jerry, who owns one of those hot-rod type cars that can go just as fast as any police car. Not only that, but on the way to take Sally and one of her classmates home, Jerry stops and holds up a candy store! The kids also like to spend their evenings at a place called the Merry-Go-Round, a nightspot that is certainly not like anything Andy Hardy and his friends would have gone to to get a milkshake. Instead, it's run by the worldly Mimi (Fifi D'Orsay) and her friend Nick who is clearly connected to the local crime scene. Indeed he suggests to Jerry a good way to get rid of a car so that the police won't be able to recognize it.

Meanwhile, June is continuing to get herself in trouble by hanging out with the wrong crowd at the Merry-Go-Round. Her boyfriend Rocky brings a gun to the place to try to get in good with Nick, while Sally fakes her mom's voice to tell June's dad that they're studying at Sally's house. June's dad actually calls Sally's mom to confirm, finds out this is a lie, and basically throws June out of the house, which is a sure way to get June into deeper trouble.

There's a lot more crime to come, but Delinquent Daughters is one of those morality tales where the adult criminals are going to get caught, the kids are going to learn a lesson, and the "good" adults are going to change the Merry-Go-Round into something more benign. But there are a lot of twists and turns to get there.

Unsurprisingly, if you were to rate Delinquent Daughters on a technical scale, it's not a particularly good movie with its bad acting and shoddy production values. It's also hard to figure out what audience PRC intended to bring in to ensure that the movie would turn a profit. I can't imagine the teens of 1944 watching this one, and only a small set of do-gooder parents would think of watching it.

However, watching it 80 years on, all of the things that make Delinquent Daughters a technical dud make it fun to watch just as a time capsule of how the adults of 1944 considered the teens of the day. It's also interesting to see how there's basically no mention of that pesky little war raging on over in Europe and the Pacific.

Flareup

TCM had a Raquel Welch double feature some time back. Of the films, I already did a post on Kansas City Bomber. Now it's time to do a post on the other film, Flareup.

We don't actually see Welch at first, unless that's her in the opening credits which seem obviously inspired by Maurice Binder's work on the James Bond title sequences. Instead, we see a woman named Nikki Morris, who is exiting one of the Las Vegas resorts and getting in a taxi. She's tailed by a man who follows Nikki to a meeting with her friends Michele (Raquel Welch) and Irish for an outdoor lunch by the pool. The man stalking Nikki is her ex-husband Alan (Luke Askew), who wants to patch things up with Nkki, although she obviously doesn't for good reasons: the guy is a creep. What she didn't expect, however, is that Alan was going to pull a gun out and shoot her, and then try to shoot at Michele and third friend Iris.

The police for fairly obvious reasons want to talk to Michele and Iris, warning the two women that they're both in danger and need police protection until Alan can be caught, although Michele doesn't really want the protection. That night, as Michele goes to the hospital to find out how Nikki is doing, she learns that Nikki just died. Alan learned that too, and he shows up outside the hospital where he shoots Iris and her police protector, although Michele is able to escape, which makes sense considering Raquel welch is clearly the female lead hear.

Michele goes to the go-go club where she dances for a living (sorry, she's not topless like some of the other women). She's got a sympathetic boss in Lloyd. He has a past working in burlesque, so he knows a Jerry Benton who runs the Losers Club in Los Angeles, which is a similar sort of club. Just mentiod Lloyd to Jerry and Jerry will be happy to give you a job. It's also a good way to get out of Vegas unseen.

Jerry turns out to be a female Jerri (Jean Byron), who does indeed offer Michele a job without even an audition. Joe (James Stacy), the valet parker, recognizes that something is wrong with Michele, and starts being nice to her to the point that she shows up at his apartment when she has nightmares about what happened in Vegas.

And that's not the only way in which what happened in Vegas does not, in fact, stay in Vegas. Alan kills a fourth person, this time one who offers him a ride. It's an excuse for Alan to get a car to get to Los Angeles since he was able to threaten someone at the go-go club to tell him where Michele went. Alan blames Michele for the breakup of his marriage, and he plans to get revenge by killing her.

Flareup doesn't have much of a reputation, and it's not too hard to see way. Having said that, the movie isn't quite as bad as some people would have you believe. It's more pedestrian than anything else, but it's entertaining enough. And that's really all one looks for in a movie like this. Well, OK, it's also got great vintage location shooting in Las Vegas and Los Angeles that will probably be of interest to anybody who's from either of those areas

Another penthouse

It wasn't uncommon for studios back in the studio era to remake their old properties. They had the scripts lying around, and since there wasn't much opportunity to see those old films until television came along, a lot of movie goers might not remember the original. Another example of this is Society Lawyer.

Walter Pidgeon plays the title character here, playing a character named Christopher Durant who's nominally a society lawyer in that he works for the high-class sort of law firm. But he's known to get terribly drunk at parties he hosts, which seems to me to run the risk of ethics violations. Also, he's taken on the defense of Tony Gazotti (Leo Carrillo), who is the nightclub-owning sort of gangster but still, someone with the sort of connections a firm of the sort Durant works for wouldn't want to associate with.

Durant's personal life is also a bit difficult in that he's got a fiancée Sue Leonard (Frances Mercer) but the two are about to break up partly because of those gangster ties. The other part of it is that for Sue, there's another man in the form of Phil Siddall (Lee Bowman), who himself has an ex-girlfriend Judy Barton (Ann Morriss). Ann seems to have fallen for the wrong sort of man and wants to rub Phil's face in it. So she invites him to a swanky party, only for her to get murdered at the party by an unseen assailant who drops the gun to make it look like Phil was the only one there. Even more stupidly, Phil picks up the gun so he'll be caught with it and anyway, his fingerprints would have been on it!

So obviously Phil is held for booking, and Sue is out of her mind not knowing what to do about her boyfriend facing a murder rap. So she goes to Durant for help getting Phil off. After all, if Durant can get someone like Gazotti off, surely he can prove Phil's innocence. Meanwhile, someone's calling Durant up telling him not to take the case.

Gazotti, for his part, has an idea that the murder was committed at the behest of a rival underworld type, Jim Crelliman (Eduardo Ciannelli). So Gazotti is willing to help Durant with what one would guess is the ulterior motive of getting a rival out of the way. Gazotti has a nightclub singer Pat Abbott (Virginia Bruce) in his employ who also lived in the same building as the murdered woman and who might be able to help Durant. However, there are any number of red herrings and Pat herself may or may not be a 100% trustworthy character. Pat and Durant both continue to face threats until the case is solved, which it be since this one was made in 1939, well after the Production Code started being strictly enforced.

Society Lawyer is a remake of a pre-Code called Penthouse, which I blogged about all the way back in 2012 and frankly don't think I've seen since, which might explain why I didn't notice the connection until looking up the reviews for Society Lawyer. The remake is more than adequate, although it's only a programmer and once again not meant to be anything special. Just another movie that kept the audiences of 1939 entertained until the next movie came off the assembly line. Not that it's bad by any means, however.

One other thing is worth mentioning, and that's Durant's butler played by Herbert Mundin. Mundin was a character actor whose credits include a fun turn in The Adventures of Robin Hood where he's the love interest of Una O'Connor. Unfortunately, Mundin was killed in a car accident before Society Lawyer was released, obviously ending his career.

Rock Hudon Romantic Comedy #8857432896578234768902

Another of the stars in the 2025 Summer Under the Stars was Gina Lollobrigida. She made a pair of movies with Rock Hudson. I already did a post on the first of them, Come September. The second is Strange Bedfellows, which, being a Universal movie, hadn't shown up on TCM before. (That would also explain why I hadn't heard of it.) In any case, I recorded it and recently got around to watching it to put up this post on it.

The movie starts off with an opening scene told in narration. In London in what would be the late 1950s, Carter Harrison (Rock Hudson) is an American working for the American-Allied Petroleum company in London. He's the sort of stereotypical conservative businessman type, but on his first day in London he meets bohemian Italian artist Toni Vincente (Gina Lollobrigida). They go to bed together that night, already married. And then they wake up the next morning to find out that they have nothing in common and that Toni can have a rather violent temper. So the two separate, which is also a bit unsurprising considering that Carter's work takes him to all sorts of oil-rich sheikdoms and similar places.

Fast forward to the present day. Although the husband and wife haven't seen each other for seven years and don't really have any intention of ever seeing each other again, they also haven't really bothered to go through the motions of getting a divorce. At least not until now, when TOni starts the proceedings which is also going to have them meet, at least with their solicitors in tow. But there's also a catch that comes up.

Carter's PR man with the firm, Richard Bramwell (Gig Young), informs Carter that he's up for a promotion to an executive position when he gets back to Boston. However, this being a conservative business, the president J.L. Stevens (Howard St. John) would like a family man in the position. Carter getting a divorce might be a problem, but then having Toni as she is would also cause issues. In addition to the bohemian artist type, she also involves herself in the sort of social causes that would make conservative executives blush. Since this is the 60s, there's nothing environmental here; it's more helping the third world and more importantly, freedom of expression, complaining about the American museum not wanting to display a supposedly controversial sculpture (never actually shown). Harry Jones (Edward Judd) is the point man for the organization, and you get the impression that he'd like to romance Toni if that divorce ever went through.

So Carter is trying to convince Toni that he really loves here, while Bramwell is working on a scheme that might prevent Toni from going ahead with the anti-American protest. Bramwell's scheme involves another oil-rich region where the restive natives are busy killing UN diplomats, and saying that Carter is going to be sent there to negotiate following a briefing in the Bahamas. That fake briefing is just a ruse to get Carter and Toni on vacation together before the board meeting in Boston. Harry, as you might well guess, figures that there's something hinky first about Carter trying to repair his relationship with Toni, and then all this stuff about Carter having to go on a potentially fatal diplomatic mission. So he sets up a ruse of his own to try to determine what's really going on.

This is the sort of romantic comedy where you have to figure that the Rock Hudon and Gina Lollobrigida characters are going to end up together at the end, so the question is how exactly they get there. There are parts of Strange Bedfellows that are good, but the resolution relies on stuff that's way too much a series of coincidences that feel more forced than funny. It's a bit of a shame considering the cast who all put in respectable performances. It's not really their fault that the scrip is letting them down.

Sister Carrie

Jennifer Jones was honored last August in Summer Under the Stars, which once again gave me the opportunity to record some movies I hadn't seen before. One of those was Carrie, the adaptation of the Theodore Dreiser novel Sister Carrie.

Jones stars as Carrie Meeber, daughter in a small-town Missouri family at the turn of the century who have already had one daughter go off to Chicago for better economic opportunities. It's Carrie's turn, as her parents buy her a one-way ticket to Chicago. One the train, she's keeping to herself, except that she's pestered by one of the male passengers, Charles Drouet (Eddie Albert). Charles is a traveling salesman and is immediately taken by Carrie although he's really much too forward about it, especially for circa 1900. And he doesn't seem too happy when Carrie gets off the train in South Chicago, since that's considered the slum area.

Life with her sister isn't the greatest, since money is tight and Carrie's brother-in-law is tough in a sensible way: you have to be a bit strict to survive in such conditions. Carrie has a job as a seamstress in what is essentially a sweatshop, but injures her hand in an industrial accident and gets fired, this being the days before workers' comp and other such benefits. Carrie goes to see Charles, who takes her to Fitzgerald's, an upscale restaurant managed by George Hurstwood (Laurence Olivier).

Carrie, having lost her job, winds up moving in with Charles, which is rather scandalous. Just as scandalous is the idea that Hurstwood is also smitten with Carrie. The thing is, Hurstwood already has a wife Julia (Miriam Hopkins) and two teenaged kids. The restaurant manager job is a good one that puts the Hurstwoods on the cusp of being upper-middle-class, with the prospect of marrying off the kids to people of better economic status. But if it were to be found out that George is lusting after someone young enough to be his daughter, well that might be a problem.

And then George does something profoundly stupid. At the end of the day at Fitzgerald's, George makes a mistake with the time lock on the restaurant's safe, leaving him with about $10,000 that he can't get in the safe. Now, the right thing to do would be to contact the owner of the restaurant, although that would have been a bit time consuming for 1900. Instead, George decides he's going to run off with the money, but not before picking up Carrie and bringing the two of them to New York. George also rather stupidly blows through the money in double-quick time. Sure enough, Fitzgerald sends men to New York to look for Hurstwood, who can't really keep a job in the restaurant business once his past is discovered.

Things get even worse when George's son is about to get married. Julia wants to sell the house, but George has to co-sign to sell. The thing is, he's still married to Julia, despite having told Carrie that he'd gotten a divorce. And by this time Carrie has gotten knocked up. But while George keeps going downhill, there's a third act for Carrie. She lies about her past and says she's been on the stage in Chicago, which gets her a job as a chorus girl with the opportunity to move up in the world. She splits from George hoping that George's son will forgive him, and eventually becomes reasonably big in the theater world, big enough to have a name in noticeable letters on the posters. Both Charles and George see that name, and show up (at different times) at Carrie's dressing room....

I haven't read Sister Carrie, so I can't be specific on what was changed from the book to the movie, although when Alicia Malone presented Carrie on TCM she mentioned that the book had floated around Hollywood for quite some time while people tried to figure out how to make it conform to the Production Code. The movie was not a success at the box office, and having seen it, I think I can understand why. This was supposed to be a prestige production, and the leads all give good enough performances. But at the same time, it feels like there's something a bit off with the movie, like the various characters don't really have the appropriate emotional connection with each other. There's just something flat about the final product.

But give Carrie a try and see for yourself if you like it.

Die Austernprinzessin

Another of the silent films that's been sitting on my DVR until close to the time that it was going to expire is one that comes from Germany: The Oyster Princess.

Directed by Ernst Lubitsch, an early intertitle (the print TCM ran had intertitles in English only, although a few things like a calling card were still in German with an English subtitle) informs us that this is a grotesque comedy in four acts. The first act is set at the mansion of Mr. Quaker (Victor Janson). He's an American "Oyster King" having made a fortune in oysters, and for whatever reason having brought hs daughter Ossi (Ossi Oswalda) over to Germany, which to me presented a bit of a problem. The movie was released in June 1919, which is only seven months after the end of the Great War, making me wonder about the timeline of everything here. But put that aside. Ossi is a spoiled brat, who is willing to break everything in the mansion she and her father live in if that will help her get her way. She's having another of her tantrums because she just learned that one of her fellow socialites has just gotten married to a count. If a count is good enough for that young lady, then certainly somebody of a similar social standing, or higher, is needed for Ossi. And get her one now! Or even yesterday, if not sooner.

Cut to a matchmaker, the early 20th century equivalent of a dating service, never mind apps like Tindr (somebody should have directed Ossi to Farmers Only). The matchmaker has lots of contacts, but all of them have one flaw or another or else they wouldn't need such a service. An example is Prince Nucki (Harry Liedtke), who is heavily in debt and disinclined to marry. We then see he apartment, where he lives with Josef, whose real relationship to the Prince is never quite explained. In any case, a representative from the matchmaker shows up, and the Prince decides to send Josef over as a sort of go-between. But there's a mix-up when it turns out that the only calling card Josef has is one from Prince Nucki himself, leading Ossi and her dad to think this is the actual prince.

Ossi, being an impetuous young woman, decides to run off and elope with the man she thinks is Prince Nucki, returning home to a huge reception that you wonder how her dad could arrange on such short notice. But since this isn't designed to be a realistic movie, don't worry about things like that. Meanwhile, the real prince is visited by several of his friends, who suggest they the all go out on a "spree", which means painting the town red. As they walk through a park the next morning, one by one the friends pass out on the park benches, leaving only the prince himself, who drunkenly ends up in a carriage and winds up at...

A meeting of the women's temperance association. The association is staffed by all the daughters of the business magnates, with Ossi heading this morning's meeting. They basically sober up the drunks, who look for the most part like you'd expect chronic drunks to look. Until, of course, the much more handsome prince shows up. The two start to fall in love, Ossi not realizing this is Prince Nucki, while the prince, thinking he's supposed to be engaged to somebody, not knowing this is the woman he's engaged to.

Jacqueline Stewart, in her wraparounds, mentioned how The Oyster Princess was one of the earliest movies to display the "Lubitsch touch". Lubitsch at this early date is already in fine form, with the sort of movie that I think would have been easy for audiences around the world to follow, with none of the arthouse stuff that foreign films of a later era would get a reputation for. The comedy works, plot holes aside. It is, however, still a silent film from 1919, so there's going to be a fair bit that might seem a bit old-fashioned to people who aren't that used to watching silent cinema.

Phaedra

Another of the movies that I recorded some time back but never got around to watching until recently was one that Anthony Perkins made when he was over in Europe: Phaedra. Now that I've seen it, I can write up the review and post it for all of you here.

We don't actually see Perkins, who plays a young man named Alexis, for 20 minutes or so into the movie. Instead, we see his father, Thanos (Raf Vallone). Thanos is a shipping magnate in Greece who is about to celebrate the launch of his new ship together with a whole bunch of people on one of the Greek islands, together with second wife Phaedra (Melina Mercouri). Thanos is divorced from his first wife (never seen in the movie), who took Alexis back with her to her native England. Alexis is a student at the London School of Economics, but he seems to have a greater interest in painting.

Thanos has a lot of business in other parts of Europe, and Phaedra is about to go to Paris on a shopping trip. Thanos decides that now would be a good time to bring Alexis back to Greece where he can be groomed to take over the family business. And since Paris isn't all that far that London, perhaps Phaedra could go over to London to meet Alexis and convince him to come back to Greece. Since Thanos is a powerful man, Phaedra more or less agrees to go to London.

Phaedra meets Alexis in London, and the two hit it off despite apparently never having met before. (I don't think the movie explicitly states how long Thanos and Phaedra have been married. She has a son, and I couldn't quite figure out if this is Thanos' biological son or stepson. The latter would make sense if Thanos wants Alexis to take over the family business.) Alexis talks about his "girl", which is actually an Aston Martin sports car. Other than that, Phaedra and Alexis don't just hit if off well, they hit it off enough that the two eventually have sex with each other, which is highly transgressive even though the two have no known blood relation. For fairly obvious reasons, Thanos would be none too happy if he found out what was going on.

Alexis decides he is going to go back to Greece after all, although he soon begins to get the impression that he did't make the right decision. He and Phaedra still have feelings for each other, but they can't exactly act on them because Thanos would find out. Worse, Thanos and a fellow shipbuilder have decided that a good thing to do would be to marry their kids off to each other as a way to consolidate their businesses. Phaedra decides she's not going to let this happen if she can do anything about it. And then the ship launched at the beginning of the movie, named after Phaedra, sinks. It's not the only tragedy that's going to happen.

Phaedra is based on a Greek tragedy by Euripides, so there's fairly good source material here. And the movie starts off promisingly enough. However, for me, the movie started to lose steam in the final third of the movie as it felt to me like it was going on too long at a shade under two hours. The other issue for me was that, when Perkins got behind the wheel of that Aston Martin, I couldn't help but think of him driving like a maniac in Rome in the movie Mahogany, which is of course a riotously bad movie.

Still, I'm glad I finally got the chance to watch Phaedra, even if it isn't the greatest movie out there.

Who knew insects could be so funny?

A movie that I didn't know much about until the last time it showed up on TCM is The Grasshopper. The synopsis made the movie sound like it might be interesting, so once again I decided to record it so that I could eventually watch it and write up this post on the movie.

Jacqueline Bisset stars as Christine Adams, a young woman who lives in a small town in British Columbia but apparently has a boyfriend who's moved down south to the States. (I don't recall seeing the boyfriend in the movie, and looking at the credits, the boyfriend doesn't seem to appear.) As the movie opens, Christine has decided she's just going to get in her car and drive down to Los Angeles were said boyfriend lives to go live with him. Unfortunately for her, her car breaks down along the way, so she takes to hitch-hiking. Danny Raymond is a comic who is riding with his agent, and the two stop and pick her up. However, they're not going to Los Angeles but to Las Vegas, and they don't drop her off at the turnoff, suggesting that everybody needs to see Las Vegas at least once.

Christine needs a job, and she meets a guy who runs one of the smaller night spots in Vegas. This being Vegas, the floor show involves the women dancing topless. Christine says she acted in a production of Little Women in school, to which the manager asks if she did it topless, because this is the sort of club where people only come to see women's breasts. Not that he puts it quite that way, instead using a euphemism. But Christine gets the point and eventually responds by dropping her blouse and showing her prospective boss her assets, which gets her the job. There, she meets Jay (Christopher Stone), a seemingly nice young man in the house band who, it is intimated, is gay. She's introduced to Tommy Marcott (Jim Brown), a former NFL player now working as a greeter at one of the big hotels, living off his name. Christine and Tommy have a Las Vegas wedding.

But it doesn't quite work out. A piece of crap at the casino uses Christine to try to get to Tommy, and when she doesn't play along, he beats her, with Tommy responding by beating the shit out of this guy. Unfortunately, the guy has Mob connections. So when Tommmy and Christine move to Los Angeles, and just as it looks like Tommy is going to be able to get a legitimate job in the construction industry, that old guy from Las Vegas has one of his henchmen shoot Tommy dead in a hilariously badly staged scene.

It gets more hilarious when, on the way home from the funeral, Christine has her driver stop so she can pick up two random guys sitting at a bus stop because they look like the sort of guys who can ply her with good drugs. She supposedly spends several hours threatening to jump off the roof of her apartment building. Joseph Cotten (billed much too high for his smallish role) shows up as a sugar daddy offering Christine a better life that she ultimately doesn't care for. The story finally meanders its way to an airport where rich guys like the Cotten character hangar their private planes. Christine and a mechanic at the airport who is also a would-be pilot, steal one of the planes for the film's rather ridiculous finale that also has the two of them smoking what's presumably marijuana.

The Grasshopper is one of those movies that came out not too long after the Production Code finally disintegrated and filmmakers thought they could be more daring. You get the impression they wanted to be daring, but the finished product is less daring and more ridiculous. Also, the plot, such as it is, is a mess; to be fair, one might think of The Grasshopper as more of a character study. However, it has its points of being so ridiculous that it's a unintenionally funny. Bisset also gives a reasonbly good performance early in her career.

The Grasshopper got a Warner Archive release, so you can watch it whenever you want.

Bedside

A movie that for some reason I thought I had already written a post on that doesn't seem to be showing up either in a search of the blog, or a file serach on either of my systems, is Bedside, which seems a bit of a surprise to me since I only saw the movie a few months back and would have written up the post then. So now I'm making certain I've written up that post and scheduled it on the blog.

Warren William stars as Bob Brown. He's a man who'd like to be a doctor and by all accounts he has a promising knowledge of medicine. But somewhere along the way he ran out of money to finish medical school without which he can't get that license. So instead of practicing medicine as a doctor, he's working as an X-ray technician in a clinic along with his girlfriend, the nurse Caroline Grant (Jean Muir). Caroline, for her part, is responsible and has saved up some money, and is willing to help Bob complete his medical school education. Presumably they'd get married afterwards and be able to live a secure life.

But Bob isn't the most responsible person, and the same issues that caused him to drop out of medical school the first time screw up this second attempt to finish medical school. Bob likes to drink and, worse, gamble, with the result that he gambles away the money he should be using on medical school. How's he going to tell his girlfriend that he's been stupid and lost all of the money that was supposed to go to something important?

Well, something happens that's a great stroke of luck for Bob. Working at another of those clinics late one evening, Bob is approached by a shifty-looking Smith (David Landau), who is asking Bob to supply himn with morphine and who clearly seems to know more than he's letting on. Bob concludes that Smith must have been a doctor in a previous life who screwed up by getting into his own supply of morphine (in the 1930s, it wasn't uncommon for doctors to fill prescriptions themselves and have the medicines on hand), and is now an addict who needs to keep finding a source of morphine. Smith still has his medical school diploma, so Bob blackmails him in a way: sell me your diploma or you don't get the morphine. This will allow Bob to hang a diploma on the wall, although he still technically isn't licensed, not having passed the licensing exam.

Because Bob hasn't got an official license, he's technically not supposed to be practicing medicine. So when he opens up his tony private practice with Caroline as a nurse, he needs another doctor to do the actual medical work. He finds one in Dr. Wiley (Donald Meek), and is able to keep manipulating things in such a way what it's always Dr. Wiley who's doing the doctoring. And with the help of tout Sam Sparks (Allen Jenkins), Bob gets a lot of patients.

But of course people are going to notice that there's something not quite right, and even Caroline cottons to what's going on. But in a stunning twist, one night when she's leaving the clinic she gets hit by a car when getting off the sidewalk. When she's taken to the hospital, the only doctor who's around to operate is... Dr. Bob, who of cousre is not a doctor.

Bedside is in many ways nonsense, in that I can't help but thing that even in the 1930s in a big city, it wouldn't be possible for Bob to get away with this stuff. Maybe in a small town that doesn't have access to any real doctor, someone like Bob could serve the function of something between a nurse practitioner and a full MD. But the movie is interesting, thanks to the fine performance from Warren William as the cad and even more so David Landau as the morphine addict. It's a shame that Landau was soon to suffer the stroke that led to the end of his career and his early death, as Landau was a really good supporting actor in a whole string of movies in the three or four years he was in Hollywood.

La bataille de San Sebastian

Next up among the movies that's been sitting on my DVR waiting for me either to get around to watching it just before it expired or for the next TCM showing is Guns for San Sebastian. This time, that means another TCM airing, tomorrow, May 13, at 11:00 AM.

The movie has some opening intertitles that imply this is based on real history, but as far a I can tell it isn't. In Mexico in the 1740s, the Spanish still hold the place as one of their many colonies in Latin America, although there a lot of rebellious sorts among both the native peoples and those of mixed race. Leon Alastray (Anthony Quinn) is one of those mixed-race people, and as the movie opens he's been chased into some village after having been shot. But he's been fortunate enough to make into the church of parish priest Fr. Joseph (Sam Jaffe), who's enough of a radical that he's not going to give Leon over to the government. Fr. Joseph, for his secular sins against the state, is given the assignemnt of going to the God-forsaken middle of nowhere village of San Sebastian to find out what happened to that parish's previous priest.

But, Fr. Joseph is able to hide Leon out under the cart he's taking to the village. Or at least intends to, since getting to the village involves crossing a stretch of desert. Eventually, the two men do make it to San Sebastian, where the find that the church is crumbling and there don't seem to be any inhabitants left. Fr. Joseph, pious man that he is, starts ringing the bell anyway to summon any Christians who may be in the area. Except that what it summons is not a Christian, or at least not one that's coming to pray. Instead, a bandit fatally shoots Fr. Joseph.

There were villagers at one point, and in some way still are, as they eventually come out of their hiding up in the hills. The mestizos as well as the local Yaqui tribe have been engaging in predatory raids on the land in part because the locals have good grain stores and in part because the Yaqui want what they see as their land back. Every time there's a raid, the locals flee to the hills. This time, however, due to a series of misunderstandings, the locals see Leon, think he's the new priest, and think that there's been a miracle performed. So their intention is to stay in town, with Leon as their new parish priest even though Leon really doubts the existence of god. He just happens to have been bequeathed Fr. Joseph's cassock.

Leading the mestizo raiders is Teclo (Charles Bronson), who is at times in league with Yaqui leader Golden Lance (Jaime Fernández) and at times wokrking with just the other mestizos. In any case, they're enough of a threat that Leon is determined to tell the local to stop being such cowards for god's sake and start fighting back! They do so first by rebuilding their dam, and then petitioning the colonial governor to send arms so they can fight the Yaqui and Teclo themselves. Along the way, Leon falls for one of the locals, Kinita (Anjanette Comer), although this is a problem considering that he's supposed to be a Catholic priest and priests are, after all, supposed to be celibate.

The locals try to make peace with the Yaqui, but Teclo doesn't want to see that happen, so he scuppers things leading to the final showdown. Of course, there's still also the issue that Leon himself is supposed to be an outlaw still....

Guns for San Sebastian is another of those international co-productions that for me always seem to be a bit of a problem because the required dubbing in post-production always feels a bit artificial. The visuals are nice and the story is pretty good, although it does drag a bit. The movie could probably have been 90 to 95 minutes instead of the 110 that we get. Still, it's not a bad movie and definitely worth watching at least once.

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).