Daddy's Dipsomania

Another of the movies that had been sitting on my DVR for a while that I needed to watch before it expired was Papa's Delicate Condition. Once again, having finally gotten around to watching it, it's time to write up a review and schedule it on the blog.

Jackie Gleason stars as Jack Griffith, who works as a railroad superintendent in a small town in northeast Texas in the early part of the 20th century. (The movie is based on the memoirs of silent screen star Corinne Griffith, born in 1894, but the sets look closer to a pastiche of small-town American between about 1900 and 1915.) Jack has a wife Ambolyn (Glynis Johns), and two daughters: younger daughter Corinne (Linda Bruhl) and Augusta (Laurel Goodwin). Corinne is a bit of a mischief-maker, but also unfailingly honest. Dad, for his part, eschews church, which is mildly scandalous for the early 1900s. But that's not the real focus of the movie.

Instead, the main plot driver is what's referred to as the titular "delicate condition". Dad has a tendency to drink "medicinal" alcohol, which is of course not medicinal but just to get Dad good and sloshed. And when Dad does drink, he also gets rather irresponsible with the family's money. Now, he's trying to do good-hearted things with the money, but what he does is still not fiscally imprudent, to the point that you wonder how the family can afford to live in the nice house they have. One would think Dad's spendthrift ways had been going on for years and that Mom would have taken the kids home to her father. After all, her father Mr. Ghio (Charlie Ruggles) is the mayor of Texarkana.

The first time we see Dad spending the family money unwisely, it's to "help" a man who's painted his house in a garish color that Ambolyn doesn't like get the house repainted in white. Sure, it's dumb to see Jack do this, but you can understand him wanting to make his wife happy. Next up, however, Jack stops by a drug store where the guy behind the counter has a wife who's going into labor and can't get the time off bcause of nasty boss Mr. Cosgrove (Charles Lane). Jack takes over for an hour and gets into big trouble by service a kid a banana split. To get out of his trouble, Jack comes up with a plan to have a "syndicate" of his friends buy the place. He then blackmails his friends into co-funding the scheme!

And then the circus comes to town. Corinne like the pony and wishes she could have one. Unfortunately, the only way Jack can buy the pony is if he buys the whole damn circus. And, of course, he's stupid enough to pay the two crooked proprietors cash. They run off, leaving Jack owning a circus that's heavily in debt and has lots of process servers chasing them. Yeah, he really is that dumb. It's here that Ambolyn finally has the good sense to go off to Texarkana to be with her father. Jack, having screwed things up badly, realizes that he has to go where they can't find him, and takes a job as a railroad superintendent with a railroad in Louisiana. But this is also the sort of movie that you know is going to have a happy ending. So how is it going to get there?

I can see why people think a movie like Papa's Delicate Condition has its charms. For me, however, it had a bunch of problems, which are mostly down to the script. Jack Griffiths is, if not a nasty character, one for whom it's hard to have sympathy. He's causing all his own problems, and you keep wanting Ambolyn or perhaps her father to knock some sense into Jack. The other big issue is that Jackie Gleason is miscast for a period piece like this. It's as though he's still playing Ralph Kramden and not Jack Griffith.

For some values of luck

TCM's schedule for most of the morning and afternoon tomorrow, July 21, is films with have the word "lucky" or a variation thereof in the title. One that's been sitting on my DVR is Lucky Me; not having seen it before, I once again wanted to watch a movie in order to be able to do a full-length post on it. The movie comes up at 2:15 PM tomorrow, so now is your chance to watch it, too.

Doris Day stars as Candy Williams, opening with a well-choreographed musical number singing a song about superstition, before winding up backstage at a theater in Miami. She's part of a troupe called the Parisian Pretties managed by Hap Schneider (Phil Silvers), who also appears in the troupe. They put on a sort of vaudeville revival show with song and dance acts but no overarching plot. It's a nostalgic sort of show that time has passed by. Audiences have passed it by, too, causing the show to be canceled and leaving Hap and Candy stranded in Miami together with two other members of the troup, Duke (Eddie Foy, Jr.) and Flo (Nancy Walker).

Hap, playing fast and loose with the truth, comes up with a scheme to get a free dinner at the hotel across the street involving a cop friend of theirs "arresting" them just before the check comes; however, the scheme fails when the cop in question gets rotated out on his shift so is no longer there to arrest them. Since this was a fancy hotel, they're going to have to pay their way out of the bill by doing various forms of work for the hotel. This is how we get to the male lead. One of the guests in the hotel is Dick Carson (Robert Cummings). He's a Tin Pan Alley songwriter who's had a fair deal of success writing for other people. But he wants to strike out on his own and write a complete show of his own. To that end, he also needs a backer, and thinks he might have one in Texas oilman Otis Thayer (Bill Goodwin). Otis has a daughter Lorraie (Martha Hyer) who is kinda-sort Dick's girlfriend, with the obvious implied threat that if she's not his girlfriend, he's not getting her daddy's money.

One evening at a gas station, Candy runs into Dick but doesn't know him. For various reasons, especially involving the fact that he doesn't want more people trying to audition themselves for him since he already had to deal with Flo doing just that, Dick passes himself off as a mechanic at the station named Eddie. From here, it's not too difficult to guess what happens the rest of the way. First, Dick and Candy fall in love although Dick has to keep up the ruse. Then, Candy learns the truth from a meeting between Dick and Hap, who does recognize Dick. This causes Candy to believe Dick is just trying to take advantage of her. Worse is that when they patch things up and Candy sings for Dick, Lorraine finds out. Lorraine decides that if she can't have Dick, she won't let her father back the show.

This leads to a finale at a birthday party for Otis where Dick was planning to play some of the songs for Otis. Dick decides to abandon the show, and Candy and her friends come up with an idea to put everything right. This involves crashing the party and coming up with a ruse to get Lorraine away from the party just long enough for Candy to sing some of the songs Dick was writing. Unfortunately, they can't keep Lorraine away long enough, although as you'll have figured out the film is bound to have a happy ending. You'll also know who ends up together in the last reel.

Lucky Me is, like the show the Parisian Pretties put on, a hoary old chestnut of a story. The story idea might not have been a bad one in the early 1930s, although it's decidedly dated here. It also doesn't help that Doris Day gets a subpar set of songs to sing. Day tries, and the film's weaknesses are definitely not her fault. But there's a reason Lucky Me got lukewarm reviews when it was released. Doris Day fans will probably still enjoy it, but anybody else watching it will see fairly quickly why it got those tepid reviews.

The face don't care

TCM had a night of body horror movies some months back. One of the movies that I hadn't seen was The Hand, which I recorded in part because of its star, Michael Caine. I finally got around to watching it and, as always, that means that now you get the review.

Michael Caine plays Jonathan Landsale, a cartoonist living in Vermont with his wife Anne and daughter Lizzie. However, it's become a bit of a strained marriage. Anne has an offer for a job at some new age institute down in New York City, and she thinks having their daughter studying in New York instead of middle-of-nowhere Vermont might be better. Jonathan doesn't want that, and besides, there's more space to do cartooning in Vermont and it's cheaper, too.

So the husband and wife drive down to New York to see the apartment, but get in an argument along the way while also having to deal with lousy drivers. Anne tries to pass a truck when a car comes in the opposite direction, and in the ensuing accident Jonathan's right hand is severed at the wrist. Obviously nobody wants to lose a hand, but it's even worse when you're a cartoonist and you make a living using that hand to draw things. Anne and the police stay behind to look for the hand in the hopes it can be re-attahed, but since they're in a field with thick grass, they can't find it.

Jonathan does get a prosthetic and and learns how to use it, as well as dealing with the residual nervous system sensations that amputees apparently film. Jonathan's agent suggest somebody else take over the strip, but Jonathan hates the direction the other guy wants to take it. Worse, Anne seems to be having a romantic relationship with a yoga instructor at the institute.

Oh, but that's not the worst thing at all. Jonathan starts having something that might be nightmares, or might be some sort of dark hallucinatory premonition, in which he has visions of the severed hand doing really nasty things like strangling people to death. To deal with that, Jonathan decides a change is in order, and takes a job as an adjunct professor at an unorthodox college in rural northern California, where he's going to teach cartoon drawing to people who are about as talented as Billy Crystal's students in Throw Momma From the Train.

Unfortunately, Jonathan continues to have those horrible visions. He makes a friend in the form of fellow instructor Brian Ferguson (Bruce McGill), and then suddenly, one of his students shows up at his house in the woods. That student, Stella, doesn't know what she wants to do in life, but is more than comfortable having sex with Jonathan which ought to be a big no-no not just because Jonathan is married but because sex between teacher and student is way wrong. Then again, it also turns out that Stella had been thinking of going down to Los Angeles with Brian for the Christmas holidays, which leads to the movie's climactic finale.

The Hand received poor reviews at the time of its release, and having watched it it's not hard to see why. The movie has a glacial pace, and a lot of the time it feels like there's not a lot going on. And for what is supposed to be a horror movie, it's not as if there's that much horror, not even of the sort in a Val Lewton movie where the horror is not explicit but desiged to be in the viewer's mind. Michael Caine tries, but even he can't save this one.

However, The Hand has apparently become a bit of a cult film in the intervening years, so watch and judge for yourself.

High Aces

Another movie that TCM ran during their Summer Under the Stars salute to Christoper Plummer was a World War I aviation drama called Aces High. I'd never heard of it before and, as it turns out, this was a TCM premiere, which might explain why I hadn't heard of it. Well, that and, after having seen the movie, I understood why it doesn't get shown all that often.

Plummer plays Capt. Sinclair, a pilot during World War I, although we don't see him at first. Instead, the action opens at Eton in 1916, where the next group of students is about to be graduated. John Gielgud, in a cameo role as the headmaster, leads the students in prayer before introducing them to a former student of theirs now serving with distinction, Maj. John Gresham (Malcolm McDowell). One of the students he speaks to, Stephem Croft (Peter Firth), is the kid brother of Gresham's girlfriend.

A year passes, and Croft is now a lieutenant who is serving with the air corps precisely because he looked up to Gresham and wanted to serve under Gresham. However, what he finds isn't all that it's cracked up to be as the air base is a bunch of bombed-out houses in some god-forsaken French village not far from the front lines. Croft doesn't yet realize how stressful and difficult aerial combat is, or the high attrition rate that it leads to, with the concomitant fatalism. Sinclair is Gresham's second-in-command, and warns Croft not to look up too highly to Gresham because of what war does to people.

The pilots go up and engage in dogfighting -- this is, after all, a World War I movie -- and in one of the first dogfights Gresham saves Croft's life, which is only going to make things more difficult for Gresham who doesn't want Croft to look up to him. There's a German pilot shot down and the alleged custom that a pilot shot down is for 24 hours the personal prisoner of the pilot who did the shooting. And then there are also unsuccessful missions that result in English pilots getting shot, which greatly darkens the mood in the British camp.

One way to deal with all of this is to see the proverbial "girl in every port", which Croft is given the opportunity to do as well, although this leads to more disillusionment as well when Croft goes back to see the girl again and finds that she's seeing a French officer. Finally, the pilots are asked to take part in a more dangerous mission to deal with some German balloons that are being used for surveillance. The balloons are harder to get rid of, and defended to the point that going after them results in a lot of surface-to-air shooting.

I suppose that if you're an aviation buff, there's a good deal to like in Aces High, as there's a fair bit of aerial combat footage. But as for the movie as a whole, it didn't quite work for me. The plot feels really muddled, with too many cameos (Ray Milland and Trevor Howard also appear) leading to extraneous scenes. The various pilots at the base are also too alike that it's a bit difficult to keep track of everything that's going on.

Briefs for July 18-19, 2026

I have to admit that I haven't been watching as many movies recently with the soccer World Cup on. For a while, I was about four weeks ahead in my posts here, but it's gone down to a bit over two weeks. The tournament ends tomorrow, which I suppose is also a good time for me to hunt down my DVD of Victory and watch it again. Not a great movie by any means, but a lot of fun.

Where I've really been remiss is in not posting obituaries of people who have died, although to be fair that's become a bit of an issue ever since I started getting ahead in terms of my movie posts instead of having the discipline of writing up one new post and putting it up that day. I think the first one would be Louise Lasser, who appeared in several of Woody Allen's early films before reaching even greater fame on TV with Norman Lear's comic soap opera Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman. Lasser, who died on August 6, was 87.

British actress Joanna Pettet, who appeared in some 60s movies I've blogged about like Night of the Generals and The Group, died on August 7 at the age of 83. One of the movies that Wikipedia's deaths page mentions is the 1970s horror film The Evil, which is one of those films I kind of wonder whether I've seen since those 1970s horror films have a way of blending together. But a search of the blog doesn't bring it up. I guess I'll have to search it out and add it to the pile of movies I've got to get around to watching.

Sam Neill is probably the best-known of the current crop of obituaries, as he appeared in some highly underrated little 1980s movies like Dead Calm and A Cry in the Dark. Of course, those get a bit overlooked because in 1993 he starred in a movie you might have heard of called Jurassic Park. Neill died August 13 at 78, and apparently has a couple of posthumous releases currently scheduled for next year.

And there's Oscar-winning actress Brenda Fricker. Fricker won the Oscar for playing Christy Brown's mother in My Left Foot, although would probably be better known to casual film fans from bigger-budget Hollywood films like the second Home Alone movie or the remake of Angels in the Outfield. Fricker died on Thursday; she was 81.

Over the Edge

Teens in trouble have been a staple in movies, although during the studio era it was more an exploitation movie thing. With the end of the Production Code Hollywood started giving us somewhat less unrealistic fare. One of those more recent films showed up on one of the FAST channels, giving me the opportunity to catch the second half of it: Over the Edge. So when TCM ran it, I recorded it to be able to watch the whole thing commercial-free.

Opening narration about vandalism gives way to a new-build community called New Granada, CO, which is not fully built out yet, which seems like a bit of a problem because who would want to bring their family to a community that's still half under construction? And as such, you can understand why the teens are in such a state of discontent. One such teen, Mark (Vincent Spano) takes his BB gun out on an overpass and shoots at a police car, which is obviously a problem. Seeing this is Richie (Matt Dillin in his film debut), who races away, but gets found by the police Carl Willat (Michael Kramer), the "good kid". They're taken to the police station, and it's intimated that this isn't Richie's first go-round with the juvenile justice system.

Carl is shown as being from an upper-middle-class family where his father (Andy Romano) is a car salesman and one of the community leaders trying to bring new business to New Granada. It's community leadership that leaves him terribly out of touch about the state of the teens in town, and a sharp contrast from what Richie's family is like. Their one hangout isn't a mall like it would be in Southern California, but a youth rec center that's a construction site of its own, with a corrugated metal roof and the one do-gooder adult in the movie running it. When the Willetts drive by what was originally planned to be the sort of bowling alley/sports place that kids could hang out at and find that its use is changing to an industrial park, it's enough to hurt poor Carl.

Since Carl isn't going to have much else to do, he falls in with Richie and the rest of the teens in town. This isn't the sort of place that has the well-defined cliques of later teen movies in the 1980s, so they all go to the same house party and otherwise hang out together at an abandoned house, as well as doing target shooting with a gun that Carl's would-be girlfriend found.

Unfortunately, all this petty criminality goes wrong, leading to Richie "borrowing" his mom's car, picking up Carl, and going for a joyride that tresults in the police following the two and shooting Richie when the policeman sees Richie's gun. Richie dies, and poor Carl is really in trouble now, much too young to be off on his own but not really able to go home. The adults are increasingly alarmed. They already held one assembly that obviously didn't work, and now they're going to hold another. This time, however, the teens come up with a way that's bound to get the parents' attention. I don't want to say exactly what happens, but I will say I was quite surprised to see the climax that the movie had.Over the Edge is supposedly based on a real story, or perhaps inspired by a story about a new-build community where things went badly wrong with the teens. I'm not certain quite how realistic the movie is, but then I should admit that my childhood was quite a lot different from a lot of people's. That, and I'd be about 10 years younger, so a late 80s adolescence was probably also rather different from a late 70s adolescence. Over the Edge is interesting, although I do have to say that I found the acting rather variable in quality. And really, is every single adult in this town that stupid and clueless?

Still, Over the Edge is a movie that's absolutely worth watching.

Better than stepping on somebody else's toes

I've mentioned in a couple of other movies that I've blogged about here that both James Gleason and Donald O'Connor were selected to be part of TCM's Summer Under the Stars in August 2025. As it turns out, they also did a movie together, although the structure of the movie makes their common appearance rather brief: On Your Toes.

Gleason plays Phil Dolan Sr. the patriarch of a family still trying to make it in vaudeville even though it's a dying business. Queenie Smith plays Mom, while O'Connor plays a young Phil Dolan Jr. Dad wants him to keep going with vaudeville, while Mom insists he get an education. Another of the acts in the same troupe as the Dolans has a young ballet dancer of Russian descent, Vera Barnova, although her act leaves the troupe.

In any case, 15 years pass and Phil Jr. (played as an adult by Eddie Albert) has gotten something of an education, trying to make it as a songwriter and, if possible, a "serious" composer. In a hotel lobby he runs into grifting Ivan Boultonoff (Leonid Kinskey), a composer for a Russian emigre ballet company managed by equally grifting Sergei Alexandrovitch (Alan Hale). Ivan offers to give Phil music composition lessons, although it's as much a way for him to hear Phil's ideas, and liking them, get them to Sergei. That, and get the main credit for the music since the orchestrations are going to be his. Phil's recompense, as it were, is going to be dancing a minor role in the current show.

And wouldn't you know it, but the prima ballerina of the company is none other than... Vera Barnova, also all grown up (and played by Vera Zorina). The two meet again and rekindle a friendship, although it's expected that Vera is going to have a more serious relationship with one of the male dancers. But having a friend in the prima ballerina is a valuable thing to have. With that in mind, when things go south with a male lead, Phil's vaudeville dance experience comes in handy as he knows all the dance moves for what's going to be an experimental jazz ballet.

What Vera and Phil don't know is that, for various reasons, a group of Russian agents have been brought in to assassinate the original Russian lead dancer as part of the climax to the jazz ballet. Vera and Phil do eventually learn of this plot, but it's mid-performance, forcing them to try to keep dancing long enough for the authorities to stop the murder from going forward and catching the responsible guilty parties.

On Your Toes is based on a Rodgers and Hart musical that, to be honest, I hadn't heard of before seeing the movie. Having read the reviews of the movie, it seems that enough was changed from the original stage musical -- or at least enough of the traditional songs removed -- that fans of the stage musical aren't fans of this movie adaptation. At the same time, the ballet numbers we get in the movie are apparently faithful renditions from the original stage musical, and are considered highlights. For me, not having seen the stage musical, I don't have that issue. I do have other issues with it, however, such as the grifting nature of Ivan and Sergei that it makes them both more unsympathetic than humorous.

So, On Your Toes may not be for everybody, but some people are really going to like it.

Caesar's Wife

Somerset Maugham was an exceedingly prolific writer. Or at least it seems that way; maybe it's more that his works are the sort of things that were considered suitable for turning into movies. Some of the famous ones include The Letter and The Razor's Edge, but there's a ton more out there. A movie that I didn't realize was based on a Maugham play until I sat down to watch it is Another Dawn.

Errol Flynn is the star here, playing Denny Roark. He's a pilot with the British military in one of their possessions in Arabia, serving under Col. Wister (Ian Hunter). For some reason, Denny's sister Grace (Frieda Inescort) also lives in the area, which I'd have thought unlikely. In any case, as Denny returns from a mission having survived by the sking of his teeth, he gets some good news from Wister who, in addition to being his commanding officer, is also a friend. Wister has to take two months' leave for reasons, and is going to be going home to England for the time. Denny is getting a temporary promotion to commander, which is good career advancement for him.

On the same boat as Wister is Julia Ashton (Kay Francis). She's an American going to England for reasons, and is being pursued on board ship by a businessman in whom she has absolutely no interest. Wister saves Julia from this guy's advances, and the two become friends, although this being prim and proper England under George V, it's not going to go any further just yet. Wouldn't you know it, however, but Julia is staying with the same friends in England that Wister is staying with, so they keep seeing each other.

Wister immediately falls in love with Julia, but the feeling isn't mutual. It's not that Julia has anything against Wister; instead, she was engaged to the sort of pilot who in those days would have been considered an explorer. He went out one evening on an experimental flight and never returned, with no evidence of his plane ever having been found. Presumably, he crashed into the Irish Sea and the plane sank with him drowning. But Julia is still in mourning for her late boyfriend and can't love anybody else. However, since Wister is so nice, and she knows she can never love anybody, she agrees to make Wister happy by marrying him. She does consider him a friend, after all.

Wister and his new wife get back to the Arab sheikdom where he and Denny are stationed. Julia gets off the train and Denny sees her, treating her like a perfect gentleman because he doesn't realize who she is: Wister hasn't seen any need to wire ahead that he's returning with a wife. Denny, like his commanding officer, falls in love with Julia, which is obviously going to be quite awkward when he finds out that this woman is married to his commanding officer. But how is the love triangle going to be resolved?

One subplot in Another Dawn, which is frankly not well handled, involves Wister's manservant Wilkins (Herbert Mundin). Wilkins goes back to England with Wister, and is given a give by some of his fellow soldiers. That gift is a box of white feathers which, if you've seen the movie The Four Feathers, you'll know means his fellow soldiers consider him a coward. It's so obvious that this is foreshadowing for something that happens later in the movie, and frankly, it's a subplot that doesn't do very much to advance the movie.

As for the rest of Another Dawn, it's the sort of drama where you can see why one of the studios of the 1930s would want to acquire it and turn it into a movie. There's a fairly good love triangle story at its heart, and the sort of story that would have given a studio ample opportunity to open up the action what with the exotic setting (not that there would have been any location shooting, of course). The cast does a good job with their roles, although the movie is ultimately just a programmer. A competent programmer, but a programmer nevertheless. I think that's why Another Dawn is not as well remembered as some of the other movies based on stories by Somerset Maugham.

Before RCA got the trademark

Rin Tin Tin was a German Shepherd rescued during World War I, and his popularity in movies naturally led competing studios to make dog pictures of their own with similar-looking canine actors. One such silent was His Master's Voice, starring a dog named Thunder.

The structure of the movie is a bit interesting. Thunder is much older and has a son, Flash, and the two can talk to each other as it were through the use of title cards, not that the humans would have known this. Anyhow, Flash asks his dad how his dad's master became the hero he is, which goes back to the Great War. So, once again, we get a flashback....

Before the US entered the war, Bob Henley (George Hackathorne) was an architecture student in one of those small towns, with a girl Mary (Marjorie Daw) he was interested in, although piece of work Jack tries to steal Bob's girl because he knows Bob is a coward who won't stand up for himself. Even worse is that when there's a contest to design a new library for the town, Jack "offers" to take Bob's design into the office to submit it, even though it should be obvious that Jack is going to submit it under his own name.

As for that war that's about to come to America, Bob has no desire to fight, and his mom has no desire to let him go off to Europe. But the draft board comes, and not only drafts Bob, but finds that Thunder would be great for service with the Red Cross. Now, you'd think this would be a perfect opporunity to have Bob be Thunder's handler and work in the ambulance corps or some such, but the US military being assholes, they split Bob and Thunder up.

Over in France, Bob is about to desert since he's still a coward who is unable to fight. But then he sees Thunder, and the two being reunited, Thunder becomes Bob's mascot in the trenches. Bob gets sent on a dangerous mission, and at least this time it's not his cowardice that lets him down, but in fact getting injured by German fire. Thunder is there to save the day, however, as well as let Bob take credit for heroism. It even makes Bob able to stand up to Jack when he returns home, so that we can have our requisite happy ending.

To be honest, the story in His Master's Voice is kind of sappy. But the production is actually fairly well handled, for a movie that clocks in at a bit under an hour. That short running time, however, makes things feel a bit more like a skeleton of a story than something that's fully fleshed out. His Master's Voice is another of those movies that's certainly not bad, but not great, and memorable more for the fact that the dog is a main character here.

A different affair from Summertime

Another of the movies that had been sitting forlornly on my DVR waiting to be watched before it expired is The Venetian Affair. So, as is once again the case, I sat down, watched it, and then wrote up this review.

As you might have figured out, the movie is set in lovely Venice, Italy, although the story itself isn't quite so romantic. Instead, it starts off with some sort of international conference on disarmament, this being the days of the Cold War. Except that one of the participants in the conference blows the thing up, killing a dozen high-level diplomats!

Bill Fenner Robert Vaughn is an American journalist working in the New York bureau of the International Wire Service. This is a big story that needs more than one correspondent, so he's called to Venice where he's going to work with his colleague, Mike Ballard (Roger C. Carmel). Or, at least, that's what he thinks. At the airport, he's met by Frank Rosenfeld (Ed Asner, still early enough in his career that he's being referred to as Edward). Rosenfeld is a CIA station chief, and already knows Fenner because Fenner used to work for the CIA himself.

And, indeed, that's part of why Fenner was called in. He's got spy knowledge but, no longer being a spy, he can do things that the known spies can't really do. One of those things is to get close to Dr. Vaugiroud (Boris Karloff), who has written up a report on the investigation into the bombing at the conference. That report may itself be a bombshell, pun intended, so if the Americans can get their hands on the one copy of the report, never mind just knowing its contents before publication, so much the better. Fenner sees Vaugiroud at a press conference and learns the Americans may be coming out on the bad end of the report.

But that's not the only reason Fenner was brought over to Italy. It seems that one of the people who has more knowedge of what's going on that she's let on is one Sandra Fane (Elke Sommer). Sandra just happens to be the former Mrs. Bill Fenner, with the two divorcing in part because of Bill's character, and in part because of Sandra's politics.

There are, of course, people around who don't want the Americans to get the report, and they're more than willing to kill to get at the report. Not only that, but they're willing to do things that some might consider even worse, like mind control. So everybody flits around Venice for a good 90 minutes or so until it's decided to wrap up the story by blaming everything on the Communist Chinese, who were at this point still pariahs in the eyes of the First World.

I think I've stated before that the dark and cynical spy movie of the 1960s is not my favorite genre of film. And to be honest, The Venetian Affair might be even worse than other movies in the genre that I've seen like The Ipcress File. There's just no reason to care about any of these characters, and the movie is also very slow. I suspect it was an opportunity for the Americans involved to get a working holiday in Venice, which has always been a photogenic place. They just got lousy work to do.

The Lodger (1944)

I mentioned a few months back that one of the movies that's back in the FXM rotation is the 1944 version of The Lodger. I'd seen it before, but surprisingly, a search of the blog claims that I haven't done a post on it. With that in mind, I decided I'd wait for it to show up again on FXM so that I could re-watch it and do up a post to go with the FXM showing. That next showing is tomorrow, July 13, at 7:15 AM.

The Lodger is based on the same source material as the Alfred Hitchcock movie of the same title, a 1913 novel by Marie Belloc Lowndes; that novel was also the basis for the Jack Palance movie Man in the Attic. As you may know, the material is based on the famous Jack the Ripper serial murders of 1888, although, as the identity of the real Jack the Ripper was never determined, what happens to the stand-in character here is obviously different from whatever happened to Jack the Ripper.

In a portion of the Fox backlot that stands in for London, a drunken music-hall player heads for home, only to get waylaid and murdered by an unseen person. This is presented as not being the first of the Jack the Ripper murders, so the whole press already has been been reporting breathlessly for some time on the murders and everybody has been waiting for the next one to happen.

At about the same time, even though it's late evening, a man walks up to a middle-class house not quite where the murders have been occurring but close enough to get there at night. The man, taking the name Slade from a nearby street sign (Laird Cregar), says that he got the address of this house from an estate agent who told him that the house was letting out rooms. In fact, that is true; man of the house Robert Bonting (Cedric Hardwicke) has suffered some financial reverses and he and his wife Ellen (Sara Allgood) need to rent out the upper rooms to make ends meet. Slade is presented as someone we're obviously supposed to suspect of being Jack the Ripper, and he takes the rooms.

Things get worse when the Bontings' niece, Kitty Langley (Merle Oberon) returns from France. She had been working there as a singer in a revue, but she's about to take on a new job as the lead in a London music-hall revue. However, she's also the same exact sort of actress whom Jack is believed to be attracted to. Slade seems to be OK keeping to himself, although Kitty takes an interest in him, trying to invite him to see her new show. This also serves to increase the suspense, as Kitty seems to have no clue that she might be in any sort of danger. Her aunt and uncle, however, begin to suspect that Slade and Jack the Ripper might be one and the same.

Meanwhile, an old acquaintance who used to work in the same theater where Kitty is now performing shows up briefly; after leaving she too gets murdered by Jack. This brings in Scotland Yard in the form of Detective Inspector Warwick (George Sanders). He too takes an interest in Kitty, although you might think this is a bit unprofessional. In any case, the police do have to be around to keep Kitty safe, since she is in their eyes an obvious target for Jack especially once her aunt and uncle bring their suspicions to the police.

This version of The Lodger effectively brings all of this to a successful climax. The one objection might be that, because of the Production Code we know the Jack the Ripper mystery can't be left unsolved. Be that as it may, the cast does a good job, especially Laird Cregar, who died much too young. There's a fair bit here that bears similarity to Cregar's final film, Hangover Square, another smallish picture that's very well done. Both of them deserve to be seen more often.

The Mayor of 44th Street

I mentioned some time back that I somehow wound up with several movies on my DVR which all star George Murphy. So I've been watching them and writing up these posts to save in draft and then schedule them after a suitable break between them. This time, the movie that I watched is another RKO programmer, The Mayor of 44th Street.

Murphy plays Joe Jonathan, a booking agent who works with a whole bunch of musical acts (which conveniently is also a way for the movie to pad things out) serving the sort of nightclub that started going out of style in the years after World War II and espeically once television came along. It's the sort of business that's ripe for having the Mob try to push in and force people to book specific acts or pay protection money to keep the Mob away.

One such gangster is Bits McKarg (Rex Downing) who, it turns out, is actually just a teenager leading a whole bunch of teens who basically heckle the sort of bands that they don't like, although they're really no more harmful than the Dead End Kids were, whether it was in the Dead End Kids days or even when they became the Bowery Boys. But Bits looked up to the movie gangsters of the 30s, and wants to be a tough guy, and his gang of youths is going to be useful later in the movie.

The more important gangster is Ed Kirby (Richard Barthelmess in his final role before retiring). Ed and Joe had a past together, but Kirby got sent up to prison some years back. Cop Tommy Fallon (William Gargan) shows up at Joe's office one day to tell him that Ed is applying for parole. This is something that troubles Joe, but even more so troubles his long-suffering girlfriend and dance partner Jessey (Anne Shirley). The obvious fear is that Kirby, if he gets out of prison, is going to come back to Joe and cause a whole world of trouble.

Sure enough, Kirby gets out of prison and goes looking for Joe. Worse for Joe is that he's made what could be seen as a mistake in taking on Bits as a sort of young man to mentor. Better to teach Bits how to do things honestly and make a good living than have Bits stay the way he was. Kirby is going to need a job to satisfy his parole officer, and the only person who can give him that chance, at least according to Kirby's lawyers, is Joe. (Can't Kirby work as a secretary to the lawyers?) Joe is dumb enough to give Kirby another chance.

It's not too hard to guess what happens next, which is that Kirby goes back to his old ways of trying to shake down everybody he sees, even though this isn't what Joe wants at all. And with Bits still looking up to gangsters like Kirby, it's going to be hard for Joe to resist the pressure, at least not without getting the crap knocked out of him.

George Murphy isn't the world's greatest actor, largely because he doesn't exactly have a ton of charisma. He's nominally the lead here, but it's more of an ensemble of second-tier stars, who more or less work well together. Nobody's going to mistake The Mayor of 44th Street for a prestige picture, but it's another of those films that works for what it does and entertained the people as the bottom of the bill back in the early days of World War II.

Ronald Colman does comedy

Another of the movies that's been sitting on my DVR for quite some time was My Life With Caroline. Recently I finally got around to watching it so that I could write up a review before it expired.

Although Ronald Colman is the star, or at least the male lead, we meet several of the other characters first, at a ski resort in Idaho that's running some sort of charity function. Argentine rancher Paco Del Valle (Gilbert Roland) is at the charity kissing booth with Caroline Mason (Anna Lee) making money for charity. After this, Paco wants to talk to Caroline's father Bliss (Charles Winninger), to tell him that he plans to ask for Caroline's hand in marriage, but that since this is the era when it was common to ask a father for that, well, Dad ought to know.

Of course, there's a minor complication. Caroline is already married, to Anthony (Ronald Colman), a successful publisher in New York City. Obviously the only way Caroline would be able to marry Paco is if her first marriage were dissolved, and Anthony has to be consulted on that matter. So a telegram is sent to Anthony, who has his own plane and is able to get to Idaho. You can see the sort of rich set this movie is about. Anthony gets to Idaho, but doesn't tell any of the other main characters that he's arrived, instead preferring to watch the three surreptitiously. Anthony then breaks the fourth wall, telling us in the audience that he's seen this all before. Caroline is just such a lovely person that other men can't help but fall in love with her. Anthony, however, understands that it's him who Caroline truly loves. And, to that end, Anthony tells us he's going to relate a very similar story that happened a few years back....

Flash back a couple of years, and Anthony is returning from another business trip. His wife and father-in-law introduce him to Paul Martindale (Reginald Gardiner), a sculptor who is "struggling" on $100K a year, and not from the earning of what his sculptures bring in. It's already implied at this first introduction that the relationship between Caroline and Martindale has progressed far enough that he's going to ask her to marry him and that the two might just run off together. And the way the story continues, you get the impression that this one wasn't the first time some guy showed interest in Caroline as Mrs. Mason either.

Eventually, Anthony figures out that Paul and Caroline are going to go off on the same train together, so Anthony maneuvers things so that at least one of them misses the train, which will give Caroline the chance to realize that yes, it truly is Anthony that she loves. And in the final scene, we'll go back to Idaho to see that Caroline and Anthony will live happily ever after, for some values of "happily ever after".

I have the feeling that a director like Preston Sturges would have had a field day with the material. Instead, this being co-produced by RKO, directorial duties were given to Lewis Milestone. The result is a movie that feels off somehow, as though it's all a bunch of conventions that somehow don't work together in the final product. What's supposed to be funny is mostly exasperating, and the characters don't feel like real people.

I guess I can see why somebody like Ronald Colman might want to try his hand at comedy, but My Life With Caroline doesn't do him justice.

Three years before, and a century after, Becky Sharp

TCM ran a night of movies dedicated to the UCLA Film and Television Archive, and I've already written about several of the movies that I recorded that night. One that I haven't mentioned yet is the 1932 version of Vanity Fair.

The interesting thing about this version of Vanity Fair is that it takes Thackeray's story and moves it to contemporary times, more or less, since it doesn't really mention the Depression. Myrna Loy plays Becky Sharp, and as the movie opens she's going to celebrate the holidays with school friend Amelia Sedley (Barbara Kent) who is much richer, never mind having a family unlike poor Becky. Becky is going to be going to a job as a governess, something Amelia absolutely doesn't have to do.

But Becky has ideas of getting rich by marrying up, and immediately starts putting the moves on Amelia's brother Joseph (Billy Bevan). Worse, she also starts putting the moves on Amelia's fiancé George, which causes Amelia's none-too-stupid mother to take notice. She sees what a threat Becky is and tells Becky in no uncertain terms that perhaps she should go become the governess for the Cawleys like she was supposed to.

When Becky gets to the Cawley place, what does she do? You guessed it: she immediately starts putting the moves on yet another man, young Rawdon (Conway Tearle) who is the son of Sir Pitt, the head of the Cawley family. Rawdon actually seems to like Becky, but Dad isn't happy with the relationship. So when Becky and Rawdon tell his dad that they've eloped, Dad cuts them off financially.

It's the start of the downward spiral for Becky, which you knew was coming if you've read the book or seen Miriam Hopkins in Becky Sharp. She and Rawdon try to continue living in a glamorous part of London, but that's going to require more money than they have, and more than they can earn through legitimate means. So they start cheating people at cards and through blackmail, while Becky continues trying to seduce legitimately rich men. This last move unsurprisingly ticks off Rawdon, who basically kicks her out once his Dad dies so he can inherit what is supposed to be him.

As Becky's downward spiral continues, she eventually runs into both Joseph and later Amelia. Joseph informs Becky that Amelia's husband George died tragically and that Amelia can't bring herself to remarry. Not that this is going to make Becky's life any happier, as the movie continues to the inveitably unhappy ending.

This version of Vanity Fair runs a brisk 75 minutes, which means that there's a lot that's going to be excised from an 800-page novel, which I'll admit I haven't yet read. Myrna Loy is unsurprisingly good, or at least as good as possible since this version wasn't made by a major studio and feels like a lower-budget movie. Director Chester Franklin tries some interesting directorial touches, especially for the finale, but the movie doesn't really rise above adequate. It's not terrible, by any means, but it's definitely not great.

Southside 1-1000

Another of the little-known movies that Eddie Muller selected for Noir Alley was Southside 1-1000. As always, not having heard of it but it sounding reasonably interesting, I decided to record it in order to be able to watch it and put up this post on it.

The movie opens up with expository narration and scenes of Washington DC telling us about the importance of sound money, especially in fighting the war on Communism. The movie was released in late 1950, not long after the start of the Korean War, and this introduction really seems tacked-on since the Korean War and Communists don't really have all that much to do with the movie. Counterfeiters, well yes those do.

Indeed, one of the best counterfeiters, Eugene Deane (Morris Ankrum), has been making his plates while holed up in San Quentin and hiding the prints in a bible. (This wouldn't be the first movie to have a theme of counterfeiters working behind bars; one of the Ronald Reagan Brass Bancroft movies had a similar premise.) In those days, it was the job of the Secret Service to find counterfeiters -- remember, before the Department of Homeland Security the Secret Service was part of the Treasury Department. They don't know who got the plates, so the attempt is made to figure out who's distributing the bills produced, and suspicion falls on a traveling salesman named Bill Evans (Barry Kelley).

Unfortunately, both he and the actual people running the counterfeit ring get the impression he's being watched, which results in his getting defenestrated for his trouble. The Secret Services realizes they need an undercover agent involved in getting the bills distributed, in the hopes that this will lead to whoever is actually running the ring. John Riggs (Don DeFore) is selected for the part. He goes to the Los Angeles hotel where Bill was last known to be staying, run by Nora Craig (Andrea King), in the hopes that he'll be able to meet the person running the outfit. The people running it are of course smart and make Riggs bide his time.

Eventually Riggs does get to meet a man who isn't the actual ringleader, but a representative, which is another sign of just how clever these criminals are. John's story is one that it's been a bit tough for the Secret Service to manufacture, leading the counterfeiters to wonder whether or not Riggs is who he says he is. Things gets much more complicated, however, when Deane escapes. He'd been ill enough that the warden wants to transfer him to a prison on the outside, but on the train journey there he overpowers his guard and makes his way to Los Angeles. This leads to the finale, although as you can probably guess considering the opening narration -- and never mind the Production Code -- the good guys are going to win this battle.

Southside 1-1000 is a low-budget movie that certainly betrays that low-budget nature. It does so in large plot by having a plot that feels completely unoriginal and taken from plot elements that had been recycled from a bunch of counterfeiter movies before it. The plot twists aren't particularly surprising either, and Don DeFore isn't exactly the most hard-boild person to be playing a Secret Service agent. The idea is OK, but the execution could be better.

The Working Man

TCM's schedule for tomorrow, July 8, is a series of films directed by John G. Adolfi. One of them happened to be on my DVR, so once again I decided that I would watch that upcoming movie in order to be able to write up this post. That film is The Working Man, and you can see it at 5:15 PM.

The titular working man is played by George Arliss, as a man named John Reeves. As the movie opens, he's the head of the Reeves Shoe Company, headquartered in Buffalo, NY. There's a Depression on, of course, since the movie was released in 1933, but Reeves is a hard worker and sound businessman, so his company is doing moderately well. Not that his nephew Benjamin (Hardie Albright) would have you believe. He believes his uncle is getting past his prime and that perhaps it would be time to take a well-deserved retirement. After all, Benjamin has been groomed to run the company since Reeves doesn't have any kids of his own.

So Reeves goes on a vacation to Maine with old friend Davis (J. Farrell MacDonald). There, their smaller fishing boat gets boarded by a couple of swimmers from the yacht nearby. Those swimmers happen to be a brother and sister, Tommy (Theodore Newton) and Jenny (Bette Davis) Hartland, children of Reeves' rival who has recently died. Reeves doesn't tell them his true identity, but claims to be a bookkeeper named Walton. Tommy and Jenny are trust-fund babies who know nothing about the business, and when Reeves hurts his hand aboard their yacht, they give him a job at the shoe factory just to keep him quiet.

What Reeves finds shocks him. The manager Tommy has installed, Fred Pettison (Gordon Westcott), has been running the factory into the ground. Meanwhile, the siblings have been spending like there's no tomorrow, so if they're not careful they're going to go bankrupt. Meanwhile, it's revealed that the reason Reeves has no family of his own is that Hartland was once Reeves' romantic rival and won the girl they were both wooing. So Reeves begins to see Tommy and Jenny almost as foster children of his own.

Reeves finds out that one of the Hartland trustees is permanently in Europe, which would in theory give the remaining trustees the right to replace him with somebody else. Reeves reveals his true identity to the trustees, but not to the Hartland siblings, and comes up with a way to get them to have him become one of the trustees thinking it was their idea all along. Of course, this is all part of Reeves' plot to show his nephew that he can still run a business: Benjamin still thinks his uncle is in Maine with Davis.

Reeves' time as trustee starts out badly, since he dumps all their bootleg liquor down the drain and fires most of the servants, the two kids not being able to afford all this. Jenny has a bit more sense in her head than Tommy, so she's willing to try to get a job at the Reeves shoe factory to find out how things are run efficiently. That, and when the two kids see just how badly in debt they've gotten, she's able to help convince Tommy to go back to the factory to do the director's job that he's been neglecting.

Now, as you might guess, everything works out all right in the end. So a lot of the fun is in seeing how it works out, because frankly the plot is kind of nonsensical. But with George Arliss as the protagonist, you also know you're going to get a good performance that by itself makes such material worth watching. I think I've more or less mentioned the same thing regarding two other Arliss movies that are on tomorrow's schedule: The Millionaire (9:30 AM) and A Successful Calamity (1:45 PM). Indeed, I see in my post on The Millionaire that I made a comparison to A Successful Calamity.

So regardless of how grounded in reality it is or isn't, The Working Man is another good reason to see just what an entertaining actor George Arliss was.

Roast-Beef and Movies

A short that TCM ran as a TCM Extra in a time slot after something else that I watched recently was Roast-Beef and Movies.

A movie studio that's fallen on hard times is looking for new ideas and offers up to $100K for a movie they use. With that in mind, a would-be producer called Gus Parkyakaruks (George Givot, who is not the same actor who would be billed as "Parkyakaruks" in a string of movies from the late 1930s and 1940s) shows up together with two partners, one of whom is played by Curly Howard of the Three Stooges although none of the other stooges are here. Neiter is Ted Healy, who in this time frame would have been the "manager" of the Stooges, the short having been made in late 1933 and released to theaters in early 1934.

Most of the rest of the short is a sort of revue that shows the sort of "movie" that the producers wanted to make, although there's more to it than that. Eventually, the studio boss likes the idea behind the movie and offers Gus and his two partners a contract, but there's a catch that forms the humorous finale of the movie.

There are two things that are mildly interesting about Roast-Beef and Movies. One is the presence of Curly Howard (billed as Jerry Howard) without anybody else related to the Three Stooges. The other one is that the movie is in two-strip Technicolor. Now, Disney had already made a couple of animated shorts in three-strip. I'm not certain how much later the live-action three-strip shorts came out, although I've mentioned Warner Bros.' Service With a Smile from 1934 as a three-strip short with pretty vibrant color.

In any case, the reason for the two-strip Technicolor is because TCM wanted to reuse some musical dance numbers from a couple of earlier movies that had been filmed partially in two-strip. Something that was done in several movies in the early sound era was to have most of the movie in black and white, with Technicolor mostly for a musical finale; it's those numbers that are reused in Roast-Beef and Movies. Other than the Technicolor and Curly Howard, however, this short isn't particularly good.

Roast-Beef and Movies did, however, get a release to DVD as part of one the Classic Shorts from the Dream Factory box sets.

TCM "Star" of the Month July 2026: Singers in the Movies

Now that we're in the first full week of a new month, it's once again time for a new Star of the Month. This time out, we don't get a traditional one person as star. Instead, TCM has decided to do a spotlight on singers who decided to try their hand in the movies. Every Monday in prime time, leading into the daytime hours of the Tuesday schedule, there will be movies featuring people who, when they first appeared in the movies, were mostly known as singers.

Now, some of them became famous for their acting, such as Bing Crosby, whose early appearance in Going Hollywood is getting an airing at 7:15 AM July 7. Rudy Vallee is another such instance, as is, I would argue, Barbra Streisand. Streisand shows up in the 1976 version of A Star Is Born at 9:45 PM on July 13.

But some of them are certainly people best known as singers who didn't make very many movies in part because some of them aren't exactly good actors. Johnny Cash in Five Minutes to Live (July 14, 6:15 AM) would certainly be an example of that. Willie Nelson is basically playing himself in Honeysuckle Rose (12:15 AM, July 14), so he's not exactly bad, but I'm not certain how much talent he would have had in other roles.

There are also some movies I'm interested to see that I haven't seen before. I think I've only seen a bit of Ruthless People (July 20, 10:30 PM), probably back in the late 1980s when my parents would have been watching it on the VCR. Overnight, at 4:30 AM on July 21, is Paul Simon in One Trick Pony. I only know of that one because of the song from the film that was a commercial success as a single. I would have been much too young to have seen the movie in the theater, and it's not the sort of thing that shows up regularly.

Jazz Heaven

I think it's been a while since I've done a post on a movie from that year when Hollywood finally completed the transition from silent movies to sound: 1929. This time, the picture in question is one that I have to admit was new to me the last time TCM showed it: Jazz Heaven. But since I'm always interested in such early sound movies, I recorded this one and eventually got around to watching it to do this post.

In a rooming house in New York City, Barry Holmes (Johnny Mack Brown) lives with his piano. That's because he's an aspiring songwriter, trying to make it in the then musical capital of America. Unfortunately, he plays his piano all night long trying to figure out the last few themes to the melody of the song he's currently working on, and this pisses off a lot of the other roomers and especially his landlord, Mrs. Langley (Blanche Friderici). She wants to throw him out right now since he's also four weeks behind on his rent, but Mr. Langley (Clyde Cook) intervenes much to his wife's consternation. It doesn't help Mr. Langley that he only works as a night watchman in a piano factory.

Quite stupidly, Barry keeps striking away at his piano even after being told to wait until 10AM. His playing wakes up his neighbor in the next room, Ruth Morgan (Sally O'Neil). She works for a pair of music publishers, Kemple and Klucke, both of whom seem to have the hots for Ruth even though they're much too old for her which provides a bit of ick factor. But more importantly, when Ruth is awakened, she goes about her morning routine by humming along to Barry's music, eventually giving Barry that last theme he needs and causing him to invite her over to help him by continuing to hum that theme.

Mrs. Langley shows up just as Ruth and Barry are talking about what a blankety-blank she is, so she gets angry enough that she decides to evict Barry right then and there and not renewing Ruth's month-to-month lease. She also plans to keep the piano since Barry owns back rent. Mr. Langley knows the rooming house across the stree takes people evicted by the Langleys, which will give Barry a place to stay, but when Langley tries to help out by moving the piano for Barry, he destroys it.

Barry needs a piano to finish up his work on the song, while Ruth is trying to get it sold to her bosses. Mr. Langley takes a risk by offering Barry and Ruth a room on an upper floor which is normally used as a remote broadcast location where the piano company airs a radio show they sponsor. Thanks to a totally coincidental mix-up, Ruth and Barry accidentally send a feed of their practice session to the radio station, with the two board ops at the station (as we'd call them today) deciding to broadcast this since it's more interesting than the lecture on birds that's supposed to go on air. The song becomes a surprise hit, and the owner of the piano factory gets a bunch of letters about it, causing him to want the two unknowns to reprise their song the next time the piano factory's show is scheduled to go out. Getting the two lovers together, however, is going to be a bit difficult because of the sort of complications you can probably predict if you've watched enough movies from this era.

By the standards of 1929, Jazz Heaven is an interesting enough movie if not spectacular by any stretch. Sally O'Neil is quite appealing here, with Johnny Mack Brown adequate. The plot, however, is fairly creaky and definitely the sort of thing that most people watching it nearly a century later would find it hard to get into. I mostly liked Jazz Heaven, but can easily see why it won't be a movie for everyone.

Born Free

Even though it's the Independence Day holiday in the United States, this being a Saturday TCM is continuing with the Two for One programming in prime time. Tonight's guest is songwriter Diane Warren, and the first of her selections is Born Free, at 8:00 PM.

Born Free is one of those movies where you probably know the basic plot synopsis already. And, to be honest, there's not a whole lot more going on in the movie beyond a basic synopsis. In the 1950s in what is now Kenya, George Adamson (Bill Travers) works as a game warden working to keep the national parks safe from poaching and keeping the locals from being harmed by wildlife rampagaing outside the parks. He lives in one of those well-appointed lodge-type houses together with his wife Joy (Travers' real-life wife Virginia McKenna) and a bunch of people working together with the responsible department for wildlife management.

One day out on patrol, George and some of his crew are attacked by a lioness and are forced to shoot in self-defence. Unfortunately, they discover the reason the lioness attacked was because she was a mama lioness defending their three cubs. It would be inhumane to shoot the cubs, so they take the cubs back to the lodge and start caring for them in the expectation that one or more zoos are going to come along to take the cubs when the time comes.

Everybody becomes attached to the cubs, whom Joy has named, with Joy becoming most attached of all. And then a zoo does come, but can only take two of the cubs. So the Adamsons keep the youngest and smallest cub, named Elsa, and continue to raise it. Elsa is relatively tame, but the freedom that the Adamsons give Elsa is the sort of thing that's bound to cause problems of mistaken identity. Worse, Elsa's lack of interest in hunting the other wild animals is going to disrupt the local balance of nature such that the wild animals can predate against the villagers.

After one such incident where Elsa more or less incites an elephant stampede, the government really starts to tighten the screws on the Adamsons giving Elsa over to a zoo. That, and there's policy that George is supposed to take a mandatory sabbatical away from his current posting. The fact that he's already survived a bout of malaria is another indication that the government policy might in fact be the right one. But in any case, it puts a pretty hard deadline on the question of what to do with Elsa.

Joy is horrified at the idea of Elsa in a zoo, so she comes up with the crazy idea that Elsa can be taught to hunt in the wild, and dammit, she and George are going to do just that so that Elsa can be integrated into a tribe. This is pretty much what the entire final third of the movie deals with.

Born Free is, as you probably know, based on a true story, with the book and movie coming out before the end of the Adamsons' story, which doesn't quite have a happy ending. The movie was filmed on location, which is a big plus, as the cinematography is mostly quite lovely apart from a few insert shots of wildlife on stampede. As for the story, a lot of people have called Born Free a family movie, a designation with which I'd largely agree. But at the same time, the story feels like one of those things that's clearly simplified like a young person's guide to history. Some people will find the story in Born Free to be a bit too pat and simple, although those people will probably not be children. Well, that is the children who can handle the fact that there are predator and prey animals and that this is shown about as explicitly as one could do in a mainstream movie of the 1960s.

Judge Hardy and Son

There were 16 movies made in the MGM Hardy family series, if you count the one from the late 1950s after Lewis Stone died. Surprisingly, I haven't done posts on all that many of them. But one of them aired on Father's Day and is getting another showing tomorrow since the plot nominally deals with July 4. That movie is Judge Hardy and Son, on TCM on July 4 at 6:30 AM.

Lewis Stone is once again Judge Hardy, who shows up at court only to find that there are no cases on the docket. That tranquility is interrupted by an immigrant couple, the Volduzzis (Maria Ousepnskaya and Egon Brecher), who have been served with a writ that they're going to have to leave their house for being unable to pay the mortgage, which seems like a surprise since Mr. Volduzzi has only been out of work for three weeks and you'd think he's old enough to receive Social Security which had been in place four four years by the time the movie was released. If they have any surviving children, perhaps she could be imposed on to do something to help them. But Mrs. Volduzzi claims their daughter is dead. Judge Hardy suspects this is a lie.

Andy is at home getting ready for the Independence Day celebrations, except that all of the innertubes in his car's tires keep bursting, leading to a bunch of financial issues yet again. He's already borrowed money from Beezy, and now he's going to borrow some from big sister Marian (Cecilia Parker) before she heads off to a cabin with friends for the holiday. Mom (Fay Holden), meanwhile, and Aunt Millie (Sara Haden) are planning to head off to their parents' house for their parents' 50th wedding anniversary.

Andy needs to do something to get more money before Polly Benedict (Ann Rutherford) returns for Independence Day. One way he hopes to do so is to help his father find that Volduzzi daughter, which involved interviewing everyone in town who has the middle initial V because a grandkid would have the middle name Volduzzi. (It wasn't uncommon in those days for people to get their mother's maiden name as a middle name.) The other idea is to win the public oratory contest by writing a speech on Alexander Hamilton. Unfortunately, he misreads the contest rules and discovers that the $50 first prize is for the best speech by a girl. A boy gets a 20-volume set of biographies of great Americans. So Andy both sees a bunch of girls his age with the middle initial V, while trying to get them to read a speech he'll write in exchange for splitting the prize money. They, not being stupid, try to blackmail Andy by making him take them to the big July 4 shinding. When Polly returns and find this out, she's going to be none too happy.

And then things take a surprisingly dark turn for a Hardy Family movie. Mom gets off the train and returns home claiming to feel unwell. The doctor diagnoses her with pleurisy, which would certainly cause her a fair deal of pain. But the the pleurisy progresses into pneumonia, which is a much more serious illness with the rest of the family worried she might die. But then, this being a Hardy Family movie, you have to expect a happy ending.

There's surprisingly a lot going on here for a 90-minute movie. Also surprisingly, it mostly meshes well. There's nothing particularly groundbreaking about Judge Hardy and Son, but watching a movie like this you can see why the series was so popular back in the day. With the lingering effects of the Depression and the war going on in Europe, something like this was just what was needed to take audiences' minds off of their daily problems. Definitely worth a watch for MGM's rose-colored view of 1939.

FBI Girl

George Brent was TCM's Star of the Month back in March, and I recorded a bunch of his movies that TCM ran. One that they didn't show was a public domain movie from late in his movie career: FBI Girl.

Now, obviously, Brent is not the title character here. In fact, you could argue that there isn't one title character, as there are multiple "FBI girls" here. In the context of the movie, they're women who work in the fingerprints divison of the FBI, pulling the cards for various law enforcement agencies that need to match prints to identities, as a brief opening narration informs us.

Cut to a generic southern state. Governor Grimsby (Raymond Greenleaf) is the governor, giving a live speech on TV to the people who are interested in the new US Senate crime committee that's coming to the state to investigate corruption. Grimsby says he looks forward to the commission since he's got nothing to hide. Now, for a movie like this, that's an obvious clue that the governor does indeed have a lot to hide, as he informs his chief advisor Blake (Raymond Burr in his bad-guy pre-Perry Mason phase). The thing is that some 20 years ago Grimsby was involved in a murder, when he was going by the name John Williams. If the crime committee suspects anything, he'll be fingerprinted, those prints will be sent to Washington, and Grimsby will be found out as Williams, ending his career. But then he's to the point where he would be relieved to get this off his conscience.

Blake, however, is having none of that, and decides that the best thing to do would be to get one of those FBI girls to remove the Williams fingerprint file. Blake knows just the girl, as Natalie Craig's brother Paul is a small-time crook who has to repay some favors. Natalie does get the file, apparently not wanting to put her brother in danger, but she screws things up just enough that one of the male employees will be able to implicate her in the subsequent investigation. Except that the investigation is into her death, as Blake has her killed in a road accident to prevent her from talking.

Worse for Blake and Grimsby is that Natalie doesn't have the file on her when she's killed. They have to come up with another way to get the file, and FBI agents Stedman (Cesar Romero) and Donley (George Brent) are on the case and begin to suspect things. They talk to Natalie's roommate Shirley Wayne (Audrey Totter), who agrees to help, although things get much more complicated when Stedman and Donley reveal that one of the people who's going to be implicated in the case is the lobbyist Chercourt (Tom Drake). That's because Chercourt is engaged to Shirley. She doesn't realize how much danger even a lowly FBI girl like her can get into in the pursuit of justice.

FBI Girl is one of those low-budget movies that, a few years later, probably would have been the subject for an episode of one of those TV shows that glorified the work of the FBI. It's not a bad movie, although it does strain credulity in a few places -- there are just too many coincidences for the case to be wrapped up so neatly and quickly. And for as ruthless as Blake is, he's also surprisingly incompetent at times.

FBI Girl is perhaps a bit more interesting as a time capsule into the way people looked at the FBI back in the early 1950s, as well as the appearance of a very young Peter Marshall back when he was still paired with Tommy Noonan. Entertaining, but there's a good reason the movie fell through the cracks.

The Match King

Hollywood movies from the Depression era on business are certainly an interesting watch, as the impression given of the way big business was done back then is much different from what we'd think of today. That, and the stock market, although at least back then a very small percentage of the population was invested in the stock market and it wasn't really something one could do for oneself. One such movie, loosely based on a real person, is The Match King, which I recorded the last time it came on TCM.

Warren William stars as Paul Kroll, who as the movie starts is a Swedish immigrant in Chicago who is making a living as a sanitation worker. He's written to his family back home that he's made it in businesses, although that's a lie. The best he's been able to do is start a no-show scam that has a bunch of non-existent people on a payroll which allows Kroll to rake off a bunch of payroll.

However, word comes from his native Sweden that the old business in his home town, a match factory, is in financial difficulty. Since Paul has made it in America, at least according to his letters, the townsfolk would like to know if he could come back and help save the match factory. Of course Paul isn't really in a position to do this. So he engages in another lie. He's been cheating on his best friend by having a relationship with Babe (Glenda Farrell in a brief performance), so he decides now is the time to tell Babe they should run off together. Except that he runs off with Babe's money, which he uses to get over to Sweden.

Paul, of course, doesn't know how to run a match factory or how to save it from its financial difficulties, so he has to continue resorting to confidence schemes. He's able to convince Swedish banks to extend him credit to keep the current match factory open as well as to acquire another in an attempt to corner the market on safety matches. The one person who has any inkling things might not be on the up and up is assistant Erik Borg (Hardie Albright).

Unfortunately, Paul's scheme turn out to have some of the qualities of a pyramid scheme in the sense that he has to keep going because, once the merry-go-round stops, the whole thing is going to come crashing down. So he turns to foreign countries, like Germany, where he finds a girlfriend Ilse (Claire Dodd) and then the one love of his life, actress Marta Molnar (Lili Damita). He keeps pursuing her, to the point that he puts off all sorts of important match-factory business. It's not that the feeling isn't mutual, although what Marta really likes is a violinist named Trino. So Marta decides to run off from Berlin to Salzburg, with Paul eventually figuring out where she's gone and following her.

But there's still that pesky match factory, and all sorts of notes are going to come due. There's also a man who's invented a match you can strike over and over, which would seem to violate the laws of physics. In any case, Paul has to resort to increasing ruthless things to keep his schemes going and the creditors at bay. As you might guess, there's only so far all of this is going to be able to go before the walls come crashing down.

The Match King is an interesting if not great movie. One problem for me is that Warren William's character is rutless to the point that it's fairly unsympathetic. He has one man committed to an insane asylum and lets another man die. That's certainly shocking enough to make the movie worth watching, but damn if you don't want to beat the crap out of William. One other issue is that, despite the number of interesting character actors and actresses in the movie, most of them only get a few scenes because of the way the movie is plotted. Still, the plusses of The Match King outweigh the minuses.

Notes on the early July schedule

TCM got the rights to the Looney Tunes (or maybe the Warner Bros. cartoons more generally; I'm not certain) shorts some months back, which is why they did a "Star of the Month" simulation for Bugs Bunny in the short month before 31 Days of Oscar began. Tonight sees a lineup of shorts where they recycle songs from earlier Warner Bros. movies, a practice that was not uncommon as other studios did it often enough too. The night also features the movies from which the songs are apparently taken, although I can't confirm the accuracy of this as I haven't seen the shorts in question. It was only about four months back that I posted on Going Places, which is on tonight's lineup at 10:00 PM for the song "Jeepers Creepers".

Charles Laughton gets a birthday salute a day late tomorrow, which includes a couple of excellent lesser-seen movies. Payment Deferred kicks off the day at 6:00 AM, while the afternoon ends with This Land Is Mine at 4:00 PM and Hobson's Choice at 6:00 PM.

The "Summer of Darkness" noir series continues on Friday evening with some very good 1940s noir where I thought I'd already blogged about all of them. A search of the blog claims I haven't done a post on Thieves' Highway (Jul. 4, 12:45 AM; still the evening of July 3 in more westerly time zones) before, although I've definitely seen it on the old iteration of the Fox Movie Channel. So I suppose it's time to record that one. I was thinking of the "Summer of Darkness", however, more for some of the neo-noir that shows up, such as this week's TCM premiere of Against All Odds (July 4, 2:30 AM). People of my age will remember not the movie -- we would have been too young once again to see the original theatrical release -- but the Phil Collins title song.