Don't blame it on Rio

TCM celebrated director Terry Gilliam last year on his 85th birthday. They showed a couple of Monty Python films I haven't blogged about before, but unfortunately YouTube TV's glitch on how many showings of a program it saves left me with a bunch of commercial versions rather than the TCM showing. There was another of his movies I had never gotten around to seeing before, which is Brazil, so I've recently finally watched it and now you get this post.

In a not quite specified time in a non-specified English-speaking country, the country has somehow devolved into a totalitarian state, but one that has a bunch of seemingly private businesses, notably Central Services which handles things like ductwork and HVAC services. How the country never made it past antiquated-looking ducts and pipes taking up valuable space isn't mentioned. But Central Services is the target of a terrorist bombing, with this not being the first.

Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce) works for a government body in the Ministry of Information that doesn't seem to do much but push papers around. It's a job that doesn't require much imagination, so Sam finds himself having a sort of Walter Mitty existence. He's got a wealthy mom (Katherine Helmond) who has been trying to get him a promotion to the more prestigious Information Retrieval, but Kurtzmann (Ian Holm), Sam's current boss, doesn't want that. Sam is just too good an employee.

And then a glitch happens in the investigation into the Central Services bombing. Much like the original computer bug, a bug gets stuck in the teletype machine, so instead of instructing the authorities to investigate Archibald Tuttle, they're told to look up a Mr. Archibald Buttle. The botched investigation results in Buttle being killed. Worse, there's another mistake made. As part of the dystopia, people are charged for their own investigation, so the mistaken identity requires a refund check be sent to Mrs. Buttle, who apparently can't handle direct deposit.

In trying to deliver the check, Sam meets Jill Layton (Kim Greist), who has reported the treatment Buttle got to the proper authorities. Unfortunately for her, the proper authorities in this case means those people who are going to turn around and investigate her because you can't go around making the state look bad, can you?

Further complicating things is that, when Sam's own AC goes on the fritz and he calls Central Services, who should show up but Archibald Tuttle? Except that he's no longer working for Central Services, and the real repairmen show up, which is obviously a problem for him and Sam. Sam is also trying to protect Jill although she seems to have disappeared into the world of the paperless....

There's a lot to like about Brazil, but for me it's also a movie that's not without its share of issues. One is a problem for me personally that may not be a problem for others, which is that it's never really explained in a lot of totalitarianism movies how we get to the totalitarian point we did. Hollywood's (or filmmakers' views more generally) view of totalitarianism never seems to match what we get in the real world, and is always more of a way to hang the social/political/moral points one wants to make onto it.

The other issue, which I think is a more general one, is that movie runs a bit too long for its own good and has an overly complicated plot that makes it hard to figure out exactly what's going on at times. But in the 40 years since its original release, Brazil has become a cult classic, so watch and decide for yourself.

Out west with Keir Dullea

Tomorrow, August 21, on TCM's Summer Under the Stars is a day of films devoted to actress Marie Windsor. While Windsor got big showy roles in movies like The Narrow Margin (8:00 PM), some of the movies presented have Windsor in rather smaller roles. One example of this is Mail Order Bride, which you can catch at 4:45 PM.

The movie opens up in Montana, with Will Lane (Buddy Ebsen) camping out along a creek on his way to the town of Congress. A stranger (Keir Dullea) shows up and treats Will like dirt but gets his comeuppance by not recognizing a drop-off in the riverbed. Both men make their way to Congress.

In Congress, Will stops by the grave of a Mr. Carey. It seems that the two were old friends, and when the elder Mr. Carey died, he left his ranch to Will but with strings attached. Those strings were that Carey had a son name Lee who really should inherit the ranch, but isn't yet a responsible enough man to run it. Will should serve as some sort of trustee to see that Lee becomes that responsible man at which point Will is to handle the ranch over to Lee.

It doesn't take much to figure out that Lee is in fact the stranger Will met in the opening; nor does it take much to see how irresponsible Lee is, as he gets drunk, cavorts with the women at the local house of ill repute, and loses his money and cattle playing poker against alleged friend Jace (Warren Oates). Will finds Lee at one such poker game, and after the fight that breaks out, Will takes Lee home. Lee, as you might guess, is none too pleased about finding out the terms of his father's will since Lee understandably expected to be inheriting the ranch.

Will realizes that Lee needs a wife who can tame him, along with the responsibility being a husband should bring to Will. To that end, Will sets off for the nearest big city, Kansas City, to find a suitable wife from the women who have been writing to the mail-order agencies. The gives the opportunity for a bit of humor with Kathleen Freeman playing a Salvation Army missionary, with Marie Windsor getting her one scene that also is some obvious foreshadowing for what the coda at the end of the movie is going to be. Windsor plays saloonkeeper Hanna, who isn't right for Lee. But Hanna has an employee who has no prospects and is in need of a husband, so offers that woman, Annie Boley (Lois Nettleton), up to go off to Montana and marry Lee sight unseen.

Now Annie, as it turns out, also has a son from a previous marriage (played by Jerry Mathers' kid brother). If Lee isn't exactly thrilled at the prospect of having a forced bride, he's definitely not going to be happy about becoming a stepfather. Annie isn't particularly thrilled herself, although she's a bit more willing to make a go of it. Lee's plan is to fake it until Will signs the deed to the ranch over to him, and then allow Annie and the kid to have their freedom.

Once again, you might guess that things aren't going to turn out that way. That's because Jace is still in the background, trying to figure out a way to get the rest of the cattle from the ranch. They're no longer Lee's to lose in a poker game, and Jace has absolutely no respect for Will. But this is also the sort of movie that's going to have a requisite happy ending, never mind the fact that the Code hadn't been completely destroyed yet.

Mail Order Bride is a little movie that isn't exactly great, but it's also certainly not bad. It feels like a predictable story where you know where everything is going to go by the last reel, but it's pleasant enough getting there. Keir Dullea isn't exactly the sort of person you'd expect to see in a western, or at least wasn't whom I expected to see in a western. This also isn't nearly as comedic as you might thing. But it's good enough to pass the time with.

Briefs for August 19-20, 2026

I suppose the first thing I should do is mention the passing of director Mark Rydell, who died last Thursday at the age of 97. He directed On Golden Pond, which I saw ages ago but have not done a post on according to a search of the blog, which means I must have seen it before I started blogging. I came across the end of Bette Midler's The Rose ages ago on the old Fox Movie Channel, I think again before I started blogging, and haven't found it since. However, looking at the list of Rydell movies, it turns out that I do have one of his films in my list of films to blog about, Harry and Walter Go to New York which aired on TCM for Diane Keaton's day. So that will be scheduled for sometime in September.

I just noticed recently that I've been misspelling "Paul Henreid" for years as "Henried", which might explain why searches for him haven't shown everything on my blog, and why the tags are a bit screwy. So I've been going through the archive of old posts and changing the tags, although the actual posts themselves are a bit more of a pain to change.

Also having died recently is actress Peggy Webber, who appeared in Orson Welles' adaptation of Macbeth as well as driving the plot of Alfred Hitchcock's The Wrong Man. Webber was 100 when she died on Saturday.

In news of the odd, apparently grifting Meghan Markle produced a documentary on Girl Scout cookies. The interesting thing isn't that it bombed at the box office per se, but that accodring to the article it was beaten by a movie called CatVideoFest 2026. Not only that, but CatVideoFest has been going on for a decade. Then again, I'm also not in an area that would get it in its limited theatrical run.

Hattie McDaniel is being honored today in Summer Under the Stars, which means another showing of the 1936 version of Show Boat (2:00 AM overnight) which I had on my DVR from the last TCM showing but didn't get around to watching. That will be followed tomorrow by Marlon Brando. I don't think I've actually watched his version of Mutiny on the Bounty (1:00 PM) in its entirety before. There's also The Nightcomers (August 21, 2:15 AM), which I know I hadn't heard of before seeing it show up on the TCM schedule.

The Last Station

I mentioned last August when Christopher Plummer got a day in Summer Under the Stars that I was interested in the movie The Last Station because of its subject matter. Naturally I recorded it, but having recorded so many of Plummer's movies, I had to space out watching them since I didn't want to put up a bunch of posts on one star's movies in close proximity if I could avoid it.

Leo Tolstoy (Christopher Plummer) was one of the best-known writers of the second half of the 19th century, writing from his estate in the country south of Moscow. However, he had some rather idiosyncratic ideas on Christianity that displeased the Orthodox Church as well as the Tsar. On the other hand, those views gained a modest but extremely devoted following to the point that there was a Tolstoyan colony on some lands near Tolstoy's estate. As the movie opens, it's 1910 and Tolstoy is past 80, so there's naturally some thought being given to what's going to happen after he dies. He's got a devoted wife of many years, Sofya (Helen Mirren), and a couple of adult children. Sofya wants to ensure that she and the family will be looked after financially after Leo dies.

Meanwhile, Chertkov (Paul Giamatti) heads the Tolstoyan organization in Moscow. It's something that comes with some political risk and he feels like he's being watched by the authorities. But he's also worried about what's going on down at the Tolstoyan estate. He and the other Tolstoyans feel that, in conjunction with Tolstoy's stated beliefs, the copyrights to Leo's works ought to go into the public domain after he dies. He's trying to get Leo to sign a new will that will do just this, while Sofya is understandably concerned that such a will not be signed. Chertkov, in order to see that his interests are seen to, and wanting to know exactly what Sofya is up to, sends a new secretary, young Valentin (James McAvoy) down to the estate partly as personal secretary and partly as a sort of spy.

Valentin finds a, shall we say, interesting situation that's not quite like the family in You Can't Take It With You, but something that's not too far off. There's that farming commune, while there are all sorts of hangers-on at the actual estate. And a lot of them want to get in Leo's good graces, in part by showing just how Tolstoyan they are, in a belief system that supposedly requires chastity. Valentin does the same thing, although as time goes on he begins to develop quite a bit of sympathy toward Sofya. Meanwhile, one of the working girls, Masha (Kerry Condon), whom you might think is almost a sort of groupie, decides to seduce Valentin: these Tolstoyans apparently need to learn about sex.

As the dispute over whether a new will is going to be signed rages on, we also learn that the marriage between Leo and Sofya is hitting a rough patch. That's partly because of Leo's advanced age; familiarity breeds contempt and all that. There's also Sofya's understandable feelings that Leo isn't looking after her. And with as busy as the estate is, matters are bound to come to a head, and sooner rather than later.

Now, you may not know this bit of history if you didn't study Russian in college like I did, but the end of Tolstoy's life involved him basically getting sick of it all and literally running away from home. However, he wasn't able to run too far as the strain of this resulted in his final illness and death in a country train station, with a bunch of assembled press holding vigil since Tolstoy was after all a prominent celebrity.

The Last Station is a movie looking at something that I don't think has gotten much attention in English-language cinema, although Tolstoy's works themselves obviously have. The movie gets high marks on all of the technical aspects, although filming was done with eastern Germany standing in for Russia. Plummer and Mirren both take the roles they're given and play them for all they're worth, which means extremely showy. I, however, was left at the end wondering why anybody became a Tolstoyan in the first place.

War Hunt

When Robert Redford died last year, TCM responded with one of their 24-hour programming tributes. This gave them a chance to show a couple of movies that I hadn't seen before. One of those was Redford's first big role (he gets an "introducing" credit), in a modest Korean War movie called War Hunt. It's getting an airing tomorrow, August 18, at 6:00 AM as part of Redford's day in Summer Under the Stars, so now is the time to schedule it.

As the movie opens, it's May 1953 in Korea, which means that the Korean War is about to end, or at least the fighting, not that the men on the ground doing that actual fighting know that it's about to end. The negotiations have been going on for ages and they grouse about it. Pvt. Roy Loomis (Robert Redford) is a man fresh out of boot camp who's been shipped over to Korea, and from there to a platoon that's pretty close to the front line, under Captain Pratt (Charles Aidman). Among Loomis' fellow soldiers are a couple of people who would go on to have well-known careers: Sgt. Van Horn (Sydney Pollack), Pvt. Crotty (Gavin MacLeod), and Sgt. Showalter (Tom Skerritt).

But the one guy everybody gives a wide berth to is Pvt. Ray Endore (John Saxon). The only person who doesn't give Endore that wide berth is young Charlie, a Korean orphan who was rescued by Pvt. Endore and now serves as Endore's private aide. Well, Pvt. Loomis doesn't really avoid Endore either, largely because he's new here and doesn't know yet just what Endore is like. The other guys in the outfit certainly try to warn Loomis.

And then one morning Endore returns to camp and wakes up Loomis with his whistling. He's also got a face covered in military-black of the sort used on a night operation when you don't want to be seen in the moonlight. Endore goes out on night patrols by himself, technically AWOL, because Capt. Pratt knows that Endore is able to get good intelligence information. The negatives, especially the big one that Endore likes to knife North Koreans to death, are things that Pratt overlooks because it's war, and war is hell and all that.

Loomis, again being new to all this, doesn't get any of it, and is concerned about the influence all of this is going to have on poor little Charlie. It's bad enough that Charlie has had the horrors of war visited upon him at such a young age; worse is that he's learning all the wrong lessons from a soldier who's showing himself to be increasingly mentally unstable. When Loomis brings up the point about what's going to happen to Charlie after the war, Endore thinks he's going to be able to stay in Korea after the hostilities end and continue to fight his own war.

And then the armistice does get signed, which means that the following night, everybody who's right at the front line with that little bit of demilitarized zone between them, is going to have to be on their best behavior. That's not something that Endore is going to like, and you can guess what he does when the sun goes down and the panic that this engenders in the other guys in his outfit.

War Hunt is a very modest, low-budget affair that somewhat surprisingly got extremely positive reviews back when it was released. It's not that I didn't like it or anything; it's more that the low-budget nature of the movie definitely reveals some of its flaws. Redford and Saxon both do good jobs with their roles, but everyone else is more or less a stock character. Perhaps it's the fact that in 1962, when the movie was released, this side of war was very little seen on screen. The heroic side is what most of the war movies delivered.

What a Woman!

Tomorrow, August 17, is given over to the films of Rosalind Russell as part of TCM's Summer Under the Stars. If I had known this ahead of time, I would have scheduled my post on Roughly Speaking to show up here, since it's airing at 4:15 PM. Instead, I'll post about another of Russell's films that TCM aired around the same time as the last showing of Roughly Speaking but is not getting an airing during Summer Under the Stars: What a Woman!.

The movie opens with the great success of a novel called Whirlwind, a notoriously steamy and scandalous historical romance novel written by an author named Anthony Street. At least, that's the author's pen name; Street doesn't want anyone to know his real identity for professional reasons. At Knickerbocker magazine, they want to cash in on the success of Whirlwind, but there isn't any way they can possibly get an interview with Anthony Street. So the next best thing is decided, which is to write about something and someone tangentially related to Whirlwind.

The book has been optioned for a movie, and Carol Ainsley (Rosalind Rusell) is the agent who has been doing the liaison work between the publisher and the studio to make certain the adaptation goes off well and is a success for all involved. Knickerbocker magazine sends one of their reporters, Henry Pepper (Brian Aherne) to get an interview with Ainsley and do a puff piece on her which really ought to be good publicity for her as well as everybody involved with the adaptation. There is, however, a snag with that adaptation: Hollywood feels it can't find anybody currently in Hollywood who's suitable to play the part of the male lead.

Carol, as the woman who's the go-between between Hollywood and the publisher, so technically also the writer, has access to information on who the real Anthony Street is, although she's supposed to avoid using it if at all possible. But she feels she has to, and she finds out that Anthony Street is actually a professor at Buxton College, one of those small liberal arts colleges that populated Hollywood movies of the era. Carol sets off for Buxton, PA. Henry, who by now is acting a lot like the Melvyn Douglas character in Theodora Goes Wild, gets wind of Carol's travels and follows Carol to Pennsylvania and starts acting obnoxious enough that you wonder why anybody would like him.

As for "Anthony Street, he's really college professor Michael Cobb (Willard Parker), who teaches a course on Elizabethan literature and most definitely doesn't want it known that he wrote the novel. Indeed, his boss is shocked and not entirely happy to find it out. Worse, Carol realizes that Cobb based the physical description of the male lead on himself, and that he would be the perfect person to play that character in the movie, which one supposes would also make a great human interest story. Carol convinces Cobb to come to New York with her and make preparations to train in acting.

Meanwhile, Cobb acts like he's falling in love with Carol, which further complicates the story and sends it to a place where it really starts to lose steam, unfortunately. Cobb, as it turns out, isn't much of an actor, but by now there's too much invested in the movie for him to back out. Henry is still around, continuing to be an obnoxious snoop. Cobb pursues Carol even though she's not certain she wants to marry him, never having been the marrying kind. Eventually the movie gets to the Washington, DC, mansion of Carol's senator father for the finale, which is another plot twist that makes the movie lose steam.

I didn't exactly hate What a Woman!, but it's definitely a movie that's got its fair share of script issues. It was released in late 1943, so at the height of World War II. I can imagine audiences of the day wanting the sort of romantic escapism the movie provides. Eighty years on, however, the characters are a bit too unrealistic for any of this to work well. Besides, everything could have been handled with a Zoom chat and Carol would have been able to prevent Henry find finding out the author's real identity.

Nazi Heist Plot Movie #59486748578267

I mentioned some time back that TCM ran a double feature of movies starring Telly Savalas. The first one, which I already did a post on, was Crooks and Coronets. The second was Inside Out, and now is the time for the post on that movie.

The movie starts off with a prologue set in 1945, the dying days of the Nazi German regime, if you didn't figure that out from the title of the post. A bunch of Nazis are transporting cargo, when they're stopped at a checkpoint. Except that the checkpoint is a ruse for SS agents to shoot the people driving the truck, and take it to a train depot. There, they commandeer one of the trains for, well....

Cut to London in the present day, or, well, 1975 when the movie is set. Harry Morgan (Telly Savalas), is a former US Army officer who served in World War II but has fallen on a bit of hard times, making a living doing scammy things but not enough of a living to keep himself out of debt. He gets a letter from a German he knew, Ernst Furben (James Mason), who meets him to propose a business deal. Apparently, Ernst knows that that train we saw in the opening was supposed to transport looted Nazi gold to the Balkans but never made it there (didn't we see something like this in Charade?) -- the gold just disappeared as far as everyone knows.

Ah, but Ernst knows a way to find out where that gold is. Apparently, the man in charge of the shipment is notorious Nazi prisoner Reinhardt Holtz (Wolfgang Lukschy), who is an obvious stand-in for Rudolf Hess. Holtz is being kept as the only prisoner in a prison co-run by the British, Americans, and Soviets on a rotation basis, which is part of where Morgan comes in. Morgan served in the war with MSgt. Prior (Aldo Ray), who never rose far in the military but is a career officer, is the American who is in charge of day-to-day operations when it's the Americans' turn to oversee the prison. Since Prior and Harry knew each other, perhaps Harry can corrupt Prior to get people into the prison who can get the information out of Holtz as to where that gold really ended up. As if the gold is still where it was 30 years earlier.

Now, at this point, we get the standard second act of a heist movie which involves the protagonist organizing all the other people who are going to be in on the heist. This involves master thief Sly Wells (Robert Culp), currently based in Amsterdam, as well as several Germans. They're able to blackmail the doctor who is the one person who gets to see Holtz on a daily basis, with the plot ultimately being that they're going to drug Holtz, kidnap him, and replace him for a day with the doctor. While under the influence of those drugs, 36 Hours-style, they'll get Holtz to reveal the location of the gold.

Amazingly, this part of the plot goes off without much of a hitch. But when Holtz tells them where the gold is (they're dressed like Nazis and he doesn't realize they're not real Nazis), they discover that the location is in what is now East Berlin. Oops. Good luck getting behind Communist lines. And better luck getting the gold back to West Berlin and then out of West Germany.

Frankly, the heist plot in Inside Out is ridiculous and something that would never work in real life. But this is a movie, and thanks to a cast of professionals who look like they're enjoying themselves, they turn Inside Out into something that's at least 90 minutes of passable entertainment. That is, at least as long as you can suspend disbelief.

Youngblood Hawke

I've always enjoyed the potboilers of the 1950s and 1960s. Even if they weren't particularly good, they're interesting, and some of them can be fun. One that's a fairly minor entry in the cycle is Youngblood Hawke.

James Franciscus stars as Arthur Youngblood Hawke, who as the movie opens is driving a coal truck in his home town in Kentucky and convinced that somebody is trespassing on the family land. He gets home and tells his mother Sarah (Mildred Dunnock) about this, and she's even more ticked about it. It seems that some years earlier, before Dad died, Dad's brothers dishonestly got the mineral rights on Dad's land, which is why they're rich and she and Youngblood isn't. She could use a good lawyer, and Youngblood could have been one, except that he decided to go to college to study creative writing in hopes of starting a writing career.

And then Youngblood gets a letter in the mail telling him that a publishing house in New York liked his manuscript and is thinking about publishing it, even though he submitted it unsolicited without an agent, which seems like a very bad idea. But in any case Youngblood goes to New York and gets treated like royalty by the publisher Jason Prince (Lee Bowman), who read the book along with his wife Fannie (Eva Gabor). If Youngblood signs the contract, he'll be working with editor Jeanne Green (Suzanne Pleshette). Youngblood wants more than the "standard" advance for a first-time writer, since he's been busy working on his second novel. A compromise is reached where that extra money is to be paid out in several monthly installments. Jeanne gets Youngblood a place one floor above her in her apartment building, and she proceeds to fall in love with him.

It's the first love in an exceedingly complicated life for Youngblood. At a Christmas party, he's introduecd to wealthy Frieda Winter (Geneviève Page), who loves studly young Youngblood albeit with the catch that she got her wealth by marrying a wealthy man (Kent Smith). She does things like secure Youngblood the use of a clients swanky Manhattan apartment while the client goes out to Hollywood to make a movie, something that ticks off Jeanne. Jeanne, for her part, has been thinking about going to another publishing company.

Where Youngblood's first book was at most a modest success, his second book is a big hit, and starts to give him a swollen head. Youngblood is approached by aging actress Irene Perry (Mary Astor) who wants him to adapt the first novel into a stage play with her as the lead actress. He also gets the idea of "investing" his money in various ways, including building out on Long Island along with starting his own publishing company. But this gets him into debt, and those debts are eventually going to be called in.

Youngblood is told, much like Fyodor Dostoevsky when he wrote The Gambler, that he has to deliver his next book by a certain time or else contractual clauses are going to leave him in a very bad state. Youngblood works himself into a very parlous state, while all his romantic relationships resolve themselves to varying degrees of satisfaction.

I called Youngblood Hawke a minor entry in the potboiler cycle largely because it's both not particularly good and not memorably bad. It's just there, as it were, and lingers on for over 130 minutes. Everybody does well enough with the material they're given; it's more that it's not very good material. Poor Suzanne Pleshette is used, and the whole mining rights subplot is never really examined as much as it should be.

Sweet Rosie O'Grady

Last year at Thanksgiving, Dave Karger sat down with comedy legend Carol Burnett to present some of her favorite movies, paired with the parodies that Burnett and her friends did on her weekly variety show in the late 1960s and early 1970s. One parody was The Doily Sisters, which if you know your old movies parodies The Dolly Sisters, a movie I wrote about back in 2017. Unfortunately, TCM couldn't work out the rights to that movie for some reason, so they obtained a different Betty Grable musical for Dave and Carol to talk about: Sweet Rosie O'Grady.

Grable plays Madeleine Marlowe, an American who's the hit of the London stage in the 1880s. She's about to head back to America to appear in her next musical. She's also had men pursuing her, especially Charles, the Duke of Trippingham (Reginald Gardiner). For various reasons, they're not getting married in England, and they're also not traveling back to America together. Madeleine will be going to America with her dresser Edna (Virginia Grey), while the Duke is going to be following in about a month. They'll get married and live happily ever after....

Yeah, right, since all of this is happening in the opening reel. Over in America, there's a scandal sheet called the Police Gazette, edited by Tom Moran (Adolphe Menjou). His best writer, Sam McGee (Robert Young), has heard rumors of Marlowe's past here in New York before she went off to London and became big star Madeleine Marlowe. It seems that Marlowe is a stage name for a "Rosie O'Grady" who worked in the sort of theater that wasn't considered so respectable to the London audiences that flocked to Marlowe shows, making Marlowe the sort of woman a duke might not want to marry. Worse, when Marlowe gets off the boat in New York, she's tricked into getting in a carriage with McGee, who uses this ruse as a way of getting an even more scandalous interview.

Rosie, as I'll call her for the rest of the post, is unhappy. But she's also not stupid. So she decides she's going to turn the tables on McGee by starting a publicity campaign to get everybody to believe that she and McGee are actually carrying on a romance together, which is something that McGee doesn't really want. And even though the intention is that this be a fake romance, the Duke gets all the news when he gets to America, so he's not quite so happy himself and decides that he'll get together with McGee to try to turn the tables back on Rosie again.

Complications ensue, but considering who's got the top two billing spots, you can figure out where things are going to go. (Hint: Rosie does not end up with Moran.) Then again, you also might have been able to figure it out if you've seen other classic movies. Sweet Rosie O'Grady is a remake of a Loretta Young movie called Love Is News. There's also a third version of the story, That Wonderful Urge, which I have apparently not done a post on yet.

The obvious difference with Sweet Rosie O'Grady is that, as a vehicle for Betty Grable, it's got extra musical numbers, most of which are presented as numbers for her stage actress character to perform in her various stage shows. The plot works well enough again, and Grable does fine with her musical numbers even if those aren't quite so necessary to the plot. Sweet Rosie O'Grady is also in Technicolor, and the print Fox ran was quite good. Somewhat surprising for a Grable movie is that the running time isn't padded out by the presence of those musical numbers. IMDb lists the running time as shorter than Love Is News, which wasn't a long movie to begin with.

Two interesting FXM schedule notes

I was looking at the FXM schedule, for Friday, August 14, and saw two things worth mentioning. First is that FXM decided to run an entire block of Gene Tierney movies:

8:00 AM Laura
9:30 AM Leave Her to Heaven
11:25 AM Black Widow

I have to admit that I don't think I've seen Black Widow on the FXM schedule in a while. It's the least of the three movies, although that's partly because of how good Laura and Leave Her to Heaven are.

The other interesting thing is the double-bill that follows Black Widow:

1:05 PM Nightmare Alley (1947)
3:00 PM Nightmare Alley (2021)

I'll admit right up front to not having seen the 2021 version, since I don't go to the movie theater often becuase my local sixtyplex is in a dead mall and a terribly depressing place to go to. Besides, that version would have come out at the height of the covid masking idiocy. I didn't want to get panic attacks from not being able to have the mask under my nose. I was out in the woods with my since-deceased dog who, being on a retractable leash, served as my social distancing. Still I has some assholes who pointedly moved away because I was outside, without a mask, when the nonsense guidance even said no mask was needed since I wasn't going to be close enough to these other people.

No, I'm not sorry for the rant. I'll just go back and keep watching old movies.

No pizza in this one

Another silent movie that I had to make a point of watching before it expired from my DVR was Tod Browning's The Mystic, which had a copyright date of 1925 but looked like a re-release print considering that it had what really seemed like a synchronized score. (Then again, it's possible that a new score was commissioned for a video release, although there's no modern title card mentioning this.) In any case, as I always do, I made it point to watch it before it expired so that I could write up this post on the movie.

The Mystic opens in Hungary, at a traveling circus where one of the acts is a young woman named Zara (Aileen Pringle) who is part magic act, part phony psychic, working with her father Zazarack (Mitchell Lewis) and knife-thrower Anton. The show goes from village to village (although there are some surprisingly large building from the MGM backlot in this village) with the act traveling in the 1920s equivalent of a motor home. In this village however, someone who's clearly out of place has shown up and seems to be stalking Zara. Dad and Anton are worried, although Zara doesn't seem to care.

That man turns out to be an American, Michael Nash (Conway Tearle, half-brother of Godfrey). While the magic act is a small-time phony thing and presumably everybody in the village knows it, Michael is a much bigger would-be con artist. He has an idea that would fleece people out of large sums of money, but he needs a phony psychic like Zara to pull it off. He's willing to offer everyone in the act a substantial sum of money to come to America, where they'll engage in the con that Michael has planned.

But first, they need to engage in a smaller con to get the higher society of New York to believe that Zara is really what they claim she is, and this is one of the best parts of the movie, as we see all the preparations Michael goes to to make the effects of the séance seem real. There's a way for him to eavesdrop on the room, and a baseboard panel that allows someone to get into the room where the séance is being held even though the doors are supposedly locked. Even though a police inspector (character actor DeWitt Jennings) shows up with the express intention of debunking things, he's not able too and things go off well enough for the con artists.

Well enough, in fact, that they get the impression of wealthy heiress Doris Merrick and her guardian Bradshaw who is managing the trust that holds Doris' wealth. Michael's plan is to gain Doris' confidence so that he can get the bonds and other securities that comprise Doris' wealth. But things don't go quite as planned for a bunch of reasons, in part because with all that money there's bound to be jealousy over who gets how much, and in part because the authorities are on the case. Several guns are involved, and there's also Anton's prowess at knife-throwing that's finally a useful part of the plot.

Tod Browning's movies are always interesting for how shocking they try to be. Unfortunately, The Mystic is hampered by a Hollywood ending that I can't help but think wasn't Browning's idea but that of somebody at MGM. The story up until the climax works fairly well, with the best part being the special effects, and the way we more or less get to see how they were created because the creation of those effects is an important plot point. Despite the flaws, The Mystic is still a movie that's worth a watch.

The Invisible Ray

TCM unsurprisingly ran a bunch of horror films last October. One that I didn't get around to watching until just before it expired from my DVR was The Invisible Ray. Having finally watched it, I wrote up this post and saved it in drafts to post at a suitable time.

Boris Karloff plays Dr. Rukh, an astronomer living in what is probably Romania together whith his blind mother (Violet Kemble Cooper) and his wife Diana (Frances Drake), who is the daughter of Rukh's deceased scientific partner. Rukh has supposedly come across some great scientific discovery, involving looking at distant galaxies as a way of seeing Earth's own past. It's a hypothesis that brings researcher Dr. Benet (Bela Lugosi) in from the more civilized parts of Europe together with his sponsors, the British Sir Francis Stevens and his wife Lady Stevens (Beulah Bondi) together with their nephew Drake (Frank Lawton).

Rukh's experiments appear to show that a meteorite hit Earth in what is now Africa some time in the planet's distant past, and that this impact produced something that people in the movie call "Element Radium X". Now, at the time the movie was made, radiation therapy was in its infancy; people knew about radium and how the Curies discovered it as well as how it killed Marie. But the movie extrapolates from that into a bunch of stuff that's factual nonsense albeit entertaining nonsense. In any case, since the source of Radium X is in Africa, everybody goes off to Africa to find it.

During the expedition, Dr. Rukh separates from everybody else mostly because the rest of the cast is as much interested in doing charity work performing medical services on the natives while Rukh is obsessed with finding that Radium X. Rukh does find the meteorite, but it comes at a cost. He gets some form or radiation poisoning which results in his having a "deah touch" in that if he touches anybody else, it quickly kills them. Benet is the only person he can tell, and Benet comes up with some sort of, if not antidote, at least a treatment that will temporarily stop the effects of Radium X.

Meanwhile, Rukh also learns that during the expedition, his wife has fallen in love with Drake, which is none too surprising considering that she pretty much only married Rukh out of convenience sinces she was stuck in eastern Europe when her father died. But apparently another effect of Radium X poisoning is insane jealousy.

Everybody returns to Paris, and Dr. Rukh's plan is to kill the rest of the people in the expedition as a form of revenge. After all, all he has to do is stop taking Benet's antidote and he'll just be able to touch them and render them really quite dead. He even fakes his own death to aid in this. But Benet is no dummy, and after a couple of murders he figures out what's going on and comes up with a way to lure the supposedly dead Rukh out of hiding for the climax....

In terms of science, The Invisible Ray is a bunch of nonsense. But it's very entertaining nonsense, thanks in large part to the acting of Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi. Thanks as well to the Production Code, you know where the movie is going to end up, but it's still an enjoyable watch.

Kirk Douglas, Mafioso

Kirk Douglas played a gangster in Out of the Past. Twenty years later, he would go back to the world of organized crime, this time as an Italian-American in the more modern Mob. That film, The Brotherhood, ran on TCM some time back, so I recorded it and watched it.

Vince Genetta (Alex Cord) is on an Alitalia flight to Palermo, on the Italian island of Sicily. He gets off the plane looking for his brother, Frank (Kirk Douglas), who has of course sent representatives to pick Vince up. Well, not quite, since Frank doesn't know Vince is coming but has been expecting someone from America. And the men Frank has sent to the airport call Frank up to warn him of this visitor before taking Vince to a pre-determined rendezvous point.

Of course, as my introduction gave away, although it wouldn't take too much guessing even if you didn't know the plot of the movie, Frank is a member of the Mob who has fled America for the ancestral home of Italy out of a fear that some rival mobster is going to put a hit on him. Frank is happy to see his brother, although as his wife Ida (Irene Papas in a criminally underused role) points out, it's not out of the realm of possibility that Vince could be the one the Mob sent over to get Frank. At this point Frank starts to think back to how things arrived at this point....

Vince was a college man who also served some time in the Army. He's finally been demobbed and, on meeting Frank again, informs Frank that he wants to go into "the business", meaning that he wants to be part of the Mafia family branch that Frank is the head of ever since Dad was rubbed out in a hit. Vince is also going to be getting married to Emma Bertolo (Susan Strasberg), head of another Mafia Don, Dom Bertolo (Luther Adler).

Frank is one of those people who believes in the old style of mobbing up, which means things like flashy hits, or at least stylized enough that they serve as a clear warning to other people who might cross him. As an example he has a couple of goons kill a guy in a brownfield site and stuff a bird in the guys mouth: don't be a stool pigeon. However, Mafia ways are changing. The Italians are beginning to work more with the Irish and the Jews, making democratic decisions among a board meeting of sorts. They want to diversify, doing things like buying up small defense contractors in new technologies like electronics, with the plan of bilking the government out of what would be tens of billions today. (Perhaps opening learing centers might have been more efficient.) Frank isn't so sure of this, because directly scamming the feds seems to him like a bad idea.

Frank's old ways alarm the other bosses, while Vinnie sets out to work as an accountant who can come up with two sets of books to minimize what they pay to the government, getting him in good with the other bosses. But Frank's really going to alarm the others when he comes into more direct conflict with them, learning about just how his family's branch of the Mob has become less influential. Now, as we already know from the beginning, Frank has decamped to Italy, which means something is going to happen to make Frank think that's a good idea. What that something is, and what Vince's role with his brother is, are things that I don't want to spoil.

The Brotherhood is another one of those movies that's got a really good idea behind it, but where the execution falls a bit flat. I think part of that is the flashback structure: we already know Frank is on the outs as the movie opens, which is a bit too much to reveal, I think. It also doesn't help that Alex Cord is a fairly wooden actor who's being asked to play a cipher. Kirk Douglas tries, but he's also not a particularly sympathetic character here. I'm glad, however, that I got the chance to see The Brotherhood, even if it's not the best film out there.

The attic around toys

I think I've mentioned quite a few times in the past that Southern Gothic is not one of my favorite genres of movies, in part because of how "loud" the movies are, and even more because they tend to be full of characters for whom it's difficult to have any sympathy. In any case, another Southern Gothic movie was on my DVR and getting a TCM airing at the end of Gene Tierney's day in Summer Under the Stars: Toys in the Attic, early tomorrow (August 10) at 4:15 AM.

Carrie (Geraldine Page) and Anna (Wendy Hiller) Berniers are a pair of sisters living together in the old family house in New Orleans, neither of them ever having apparently married. They've got an itinerant brother Julian (Dean Martin) who's gone north, supposedly to earn money, although the source of the money is a big point of discussion over the course of the movie. In any case, Julian is expected to return to New Orleans as the movie opens together with his new bride Lily (Yvette Mimieux).

Except that Julian is already in New Orleans, holed up at a hotel with Lily with the hotel owner expecting him to pay off a substantial bill. Julian has business to attend to with Cyrus Warkins, the nature of which will be revealed later in the movie. But the business ends with Julian in possession of a very thick envelope full of cash, which Julian in an incredibly stupid move does not deposit into a bank account.

Julian arrives at the old family home, bringing a whole bunch of gifts since one of the things the two sisters had hoped for was to be able to take a trip to Europe together. However, the sisters wonder about the source of the money, with one theory being that Julian was paid to marry Lily. Lily, you see, is the sort of woman who acts as though she's never going to grow emotionally beyond being an adolescent: she's physically marriageable, but not mentally. The two Berniers sisters even ask Lily's mother Albertine (that's Gene Tierney) directly about it.

There's also the suggestion that Julian earned that money by selling a factory up in Chicago, which he may well have done although he probably didn't earn that much money. He's also been way too profligate with the money he does have, the way that some poor people who win the lottery spend themselves into bankruptcy.

Meanwhile, Julian has also been seeing Cyrus' wife Charlotte, who as it turns out also has something to do with the money that Julian got although that's only going to be revealed later in the movie. But continuing to see her after Julian's got married to Lily is now going to be twice the issue: where it might only have been a problem with Cyrus, now there's Lily to worry about too. And Carrie, who seems to look up to Julian much more than Anna does. This warped relationship is ultimately going to lead to the climax of the movie....

There's a lot in Toys in the Attic that I can't really mention since it would give away too much information. But let's just say that Toys in the Attic is an overheated movie. Julian comes across as a dishonest grifter. Lily and Carrie are both obnoxious blankety-blanks who deserve to be slapped. Anna is the closest to a sensible person, but even she is not quite a prize. The crazy plot and unlikable characters make Toys in the Attic a difficult movie to warm up to.

But, as always, watch and judge for yourself.

Die Mörder sind unter uns

Every now and then, Eddie Muller dips into foreign films for his Noir Alley segment, leading to films that I'm likely not to have seen as well as a glut of foreign films on my DVR that I have to get through before they expire. One such foreign film was one of the earliest to be made in Germany after the end of World War II, The Murderers Are Among Us.

It's Berlin in 1945, not long after the defeat of the Nazis, with the city largely in ruins and people having to resort to various means, not necessarily ethical, to survive. Among the people returning to Berlin is Dr. Hans Mertens (Ernst Wilhem Borchert), who had worked as a doctor before the war but who was clearly scarred by his war experiences that will be revealed later in the movie. He gets an apartment in a building that was less badly damaged than some others: it seems to have four walls, but a lot of the windows are broken.

What he doesn't know is that the previous occupant of the apartment is still alive. Susanne Wallner (Hildegard Knef) was sent to a concentration camp for reasons not mentioned, although I'd guess it's political rather than being Jewish. She survived the war and expects that she might be able to return to her old apartment, only to find that Mertens has taken the apartment. With the housing crunch, it's not as though there are a lot of apartments out there, so the two agree to live together.

It's not long before Susanne finds a letter addressed to a Mrs. Brückner, which was written by Mr. Brückner and is only to be delivered to her in case of the husband's death. Obviously Mertens had served with Brückner in the war and was supposed to give that letter had Brückner died, only for Mertens never to hear of Brückner's death. With the war over, Susanne figures that Brücker probably died and that perhaps it would be a good idea for her to deliver the letter to Mrs. Brückner by hand.

However, what Susanna finds is that Mr. Brücker survived the war, and is making a reasonably good living in what is effectively the scrap metal industry, taking old military helmets and turning them into cookware. (One would guess that Brückner was of a fairly high social class before the war although this isn't quite mentioned.) Susanne returns home and tells Mertens that Brückner actually survived, something that will probably relieve Mertens.

However, Mertens is decidedly unhappy about this. It turns out that Brückner was involved with whatever it is that gave Mertens that emotional scarring, and in a bad way. Mertens, upon learning that Brücker is actually very much alive and doing quite well for himself, decides that Brückner needs justice, and that the only way for that justice to be meted out is if Mertens does it himself.

The Murderers Are Among Us is an interesting movie, partly on its own merits and partly for the atmosphere in which the movie was made. Germany was of course occupied in early 1946 when the movie was made, and for better or worse the occupying powers influenced how the film was made. This means that the director couldn't get the ending he wanted. However, the movie is filmed on location in Berlin, with all the ruins and deprivation that the city was facing in 1946. That alone is worth the price of admission. Never mind that the movie is pretty good despite the problems the ending has.

The Murderers Are Among Us is absolutely worth a watch.

Good Morning, Eve!

One of the shorts that TCM ran as part of the Saturday morning block was the early three-strip Technicolor short Good Morning, Eve!.

Leon Errol stars as Adam, looking much too old and certainly not the stereotypically handsome sort or Adam you'd see in other Bible-themed movies. Of course, he's in the Garden of Eden with Eve (June MacCloy), and is tempted with a bite of the apple.

This time, however, the apple sends them out of paradise, if you will, by going on a tour of history. This is an excuse for some sight gags since Adam and Eve are people out of place, as well as an excuse for musical numbers since that's the sort of thing audiences back in 1934 would have loved.

Adam and Eve make a stop in ancient Rome under Nero (Vernon Dent), who is holding some sort of musical competition that allows Adam and Eve to enter since Nero is bored of the traditional competition where he's always declared the winner. There's also a rural-style quartet from the days before it was commonly called country music.

Second is a stop in the England of King Arthur, four years before Warner Bros. made The Adventures of Robin Hood. Finally, Adam and Eve make it to the present, and a beach full of nubile young women in bathing suits, before the ending that reveals....

There is naturally very little plot to Good Morning, Eve!. The humor is dad joke level, but the audiences would have been OK with such dumb humor around the musical numbers. What is the most interesting about the short is that it's one the earliest live-action examples of three-strip Technicolor, coming after maybe Service With a Smile and La Cucaracha as far as shorts completely in the new process. The print TCM showed is excellent, with stunning color:

Briefs for August 7-8, 2026

A bit of the TCM schedule for September is available, and it looks as though there's already one movie on the schedule that I'd written up a post for recently and scheduled for in between now and when it's going to air, so I've got to move a bunch of stuff around since if I can schedule a post on a movie in conjunction with when it's going to air (or, less frequently, FXM), I like to do that. Once again, however, as always, check a listings site yourself, since my writing up posts some time in advance tends to make me do double takes over whether I've scheduled them on the right day.

Today in TCM's Summer Under the Stars is a day of movies with Basil Rathbone, while tomorrow is given over to Steve McQueen, including the first version of The Thomas Crown Affair at 6:00 PM. It got a remake in the 1990s, of course, and apparently there's going to be a third version coming out next year, starring Michael B. Jordan. Not that I'm likely to watch it since I don't go to the movie theater very often. As I think I've stated, our local sixtyplex is in a dead mall which I think is down to about the theater and Target, which was only attached to the mall at some later date. It's depressing to go there, and the service roads are badly maintained.

There's actually a couple of movies in the FXM rotation that I've got on my DVR but haven't watched or written up posts about, and they're coming up in the near future: Wee Willie Winkie at 7:20 AM August 9 as part of a morning of Shirley Temple movies, and Daniel Day-Lewis in Lincoln a couple of times next week. I have to admit part of the reason I haven't gotten around to watching them is that I'm always a couple of weeks ahead in my post scheduling, and besides, FXM repeats stuff often enough that I can keep seeing it if I missed the previous airing. The one FXM movie on my DVR that doesn't seem to be repeating is Anastasia, which I've mentioned in passing a few times but never actually done a full-length post on.

Today is the birth anniversary of actress Billie Burke (born 1884), who is probably best known for playing Glinda, the good witch, in the Judy Garland version of The Wizard of Oz although I always think of her as Lionel Barrymore's wife in Dinner at Eight. It's also the birth anniversary of Ann Harding (born 1901). That reminds me that I really need to get around to watching the 1930 version of Holiday, if it's still available on demand at Tubi. I noticed that among the films to put in my Tubi library ages ago, and rarely get around to watching anything from it.

The Arnelo Affair

I mentioned a few months back that I somehow wound up with a whole bunch of movies starring George Murphy on my DVR, not from a programming theme of his movies. Another of the movies was The Arnelo Affair, which I watched and wrote of this post that I could schedule at a suitable time after other posts on Murphy's movies.

Murphy is technically the second male lead here, and we don't see him at first. Instead, we see the female lead, Frances Gifford, who plays Ann Parkson. Ann is in a car with Tony Arnelo (John Hodiak), and in a voiceover talking about how much she regrets this. And how she wishes her husband had never brought this guy home. So, as you might be able to guess, we're about to get Yet Another Flashback, to the time when Ann's husband Ted (that's George Murphy) brought Tony Arnelo home.

Ted is a Chicago lawyer who's trying to advance his career, and one of his clients is nightclub owner Arnelo, whom Ted is representing in a bunch of tax-related stuff. Ann and Tony have a kid, Ricky (a young Dean Stockwell), and a seemingly wonderful life, except that Ted is spending a lot of time on his work, to the point that he can't take Ann out for a night out on the town with friends like upstairs neighbor and couturier Vivian Delwyn (Eve Arden). But Tony shows up, and he immediately starts telling Ann how striking she looks. When he learns that Ann has a hobby of interior decoration, Tony offers her the chance to make a bit of money by decorating some of his places.

Ann being a bored housewife, she decides to take Tony up on the offer. However, she quickly learns that Tony is really interested in her for other reasons, and that she's not the only woman he's interested in. He's also seeing a local actress named Claire Lorrison who shows up one afternoon when Ann thinks she's going to be alone with Tony. Worse, Tony starts smacking Claire around, leading Ann to want to break off the relationship with Tony. Tony, for his part, is rather persistent, constantly calling Ann up.

Things take an even worse turn when Claire winds up dead, clearly quite murdered. Ann is innocent of the murder, although not necessarily of adultery, which is still an issue under the Production Code. But Tony being a nasty piece of work, he's able to blackmail Ann by making certain that the dead Claire is found with a compact that has a big letter A that can likely be traced back to Ann. But of course, since there's that Production Code, we know that the real murderer has to be caught and get his just desserts.

I can see why all the people involved in The Arnelo Affair might want to be involved with it, but the final result is something that's rather a misfire. If I had to guess why, I think that it feels like it's devoid of emotion. George Murphy isn't a very charismatic actor at the best of times, and he's certainly very much a second banana here. Tony Arnelo may be a piece of work, but Hodiak doesn't give off that vibe. And Gifford is a bit of a cipher too. The Dean Stockwell character is somewhat superfluous. And, not that it has anything to do with the movie itself, the print TCM ran looked like one of those older 16mm prints that TV stations would run of old public-domain movies.

Manhattan Murder Mystery

Tomorrow, August 6, is Diane Keaton day in this year's installment of TCM's Summer Under the Stars. Since Keaton died late last year and TCM had a programming tribute to her, this gave me the opportunity to record a couple of her movies that I hadn't seen before. One that I recorded that's part of her day tomorrow is Manhattan Murder Mystery, airing at 4:00 PM.

Keaton plays Carol Lipton, married to Manhattan editor Larry Lipton (Woody Allen) and living in a nice Manhattan apartment. One night, she agrees to go to a hockey game on the grounds that Larry will then go with her to the opera, a sign that there might be a bit of tension in their marriage. As they get home, on the elevator up to the apartment they meet some neighbors they haven't met before, Paul (Jerry Adler) and Lillian (Lynn Cohen) House. The Houses invite Larry and Carol over for a nightcap, and the two couples seem to get along moderately well.

That all changes the following night when Carol and Larry return from the opera, only to find the paramedics there. It seems Lillian has suddenly died of a massive heart attack. Not that there's much that Carol and Larry can do to console the old guy, who in any case thinks that perhaps he should take a vacation to Florida to go visit his brother and do a bit of snorkeling.

Some time later, Carol, who was already revealed to be a good cook, decides to bring over some dessert to cheer up Paul. He happily lets Carol and Larry in, but when Carol goes to put on a pot of coffee to have with dessert, she can't find the percolator. In one of the cabinets, she finds... an urn with Lillian's ashes! This surprises Carol, not only because it seems like a slightly odd place to keep a cremation urn, but also because Paul and Lillian had mentioned having bought a pair of cemetery plots up in Rockland County to be buried in. My first thought was that it's not uncommon in places with family plots for people to be cremated and have the ashes interred in the family plot/crypt.

This, however, is not Carol's first thought. She has a feeling that Paul must have been lying about the plots up in Rockland County; that, combined with a cremation that precludes any sort of autopsy, suggests to Carol that perhaps Lillian could have been murdered! So what does Carol do? She tells her and Larry's friend Ted (Alan Alda) about this, and gets the bright idea that perhaps one day while she knows that Paul is out of the apartment she can get the superintendent's key and search Paul's apartment for evidence proving that Lillian did not in fact die of natural causes.

This is understandably a crazy idea for poor Larry. But he keeps getting dragged further and further into things, as Carol discovers one inconsistency after another that only strengthens her belief that Paul in fact killed Lillian. And dammit, like a 1930s husband/wife comic murder mystery movie, she's going to investigate until she gets to the real truth!

Complicating things are a pair of possibly romantic subplots. Since Ted is more willing to believe Carol than Larry is, Larry gets the impression that perhaps there's something romantic going on between Ted and Carol. Larry, meanwhile, is working on the newest book from client Marcia (Anjelica Huston), so Carol starts to wonder whether perhaps Larry has some sort of romantic involvement with Marcia. Eventually, the four team together when the evidence that there really was a murder becomes too strong to ignore.

Frankly, the plot of Manhattan Murder Mystery is, like a lot of the 1930s mysteries, wildly unrealistic. You're going to have to suspend a lot of disbelief here. However, the movie is decidedly well made. I think it's going to appeal more to fans of Woody Allen than the more casual movie fan, but it's not hard to see why it got mostly positive reviews upon its release.

That Glenn Ford version of Cimarron again

Edna Ferber's novel Cimarron was famously made into a motion picture not long after its publication, and that version is notorious for winning the Best Picture Oscar for RKO where time has been extremely unkind to the movie. Somewhere along the way MGM got the rights to the book. After RKO closed up shop, and after MGM's own best days had gone by, a second version of Cimarron made it to the screen. That version airs early tomorrow morning, or overnight tonight if you wish to look at it that way, at 3:30 AM.

Glenn Ford stars as Yancey Cravat, and despite the opening title cards going on about the first (1889) land rush in what is now the state of Oklahoma, we don't actually get to the rush for about a half hour. Instead, we have to hear Yancey talk about how this land rush is going to be the biggest thing in history, along with meeting Yancey's new bride Sabra (Maria Schell). She seems to be from fairly well-to-do immigrant stock, and her parents are none too happy with her marriage to a man they barely know and who is going to take her away to some god-forsaken place.

We also meet a couple of other people who are going to take part in the land rush. The Wyatts (Arthur O'Connell and Mercedes McCambridge) are the parents of a large family. Dixie Lee (Anne Baxter) knows just the piece of land that Yancey wants in Oklahoma, and has no qualms about beating Yancey to it and claiming it for her own, even though there's no way she can farm that much land. And then there are the Peglers (Robert Keith and Aline MacMahon). Mr. Pegler was the publisher of a newspaper in Texas, together with his printer Jesse (Harry Morgan, oddly credited as "Henry 'Harry' Morgan" despite already having some credits as Harry). Unfortunately, in the land rush, Mr. Pegler gets trampled to death, and the Cravats wind up as owners of a newspaper.

It's one step on the way to the family becoming wealthy, but that's not going to be an easy road. For one thing, there's a lot of prejudice in Oklahoma. Some of it is towards a Jewish merchant, Sol Levy (David Opatoshu), although Sabra doesn't have any issues with him, repeatedly going to him to ask to borrow money. Somewhat surprisingly is that Sabra has a lot of problems with the Cherokees who have populated the area ever since being forcibly relocated there by Andrew Jackson and the Trail of Tears. Imagine Sabra's horror when her kid marries a Cherokee near the end of the movie.

The other problem is that Yancey just can't stay in one place. He's always searching for the Next Big Thing which in some ways would be admirable, if it weren't for the fact that that next thing isn't something that can be achieved in the same location. Heck, that's why he took part in the first land rush. He takes part in another one in what is now the Oklahoma panhandle, and goes off to join the armed forces first for the Spanish-American War and then for the Great War fighting for France. This latter even though his character would be past 50 by this point.

Yancey also has adventures involving dealing with a couple of outlaws, as well as being asked by old friend Mr. Wyatt, himself wealthy from swindling the Cherokees out of oil rights, to become governor when the territory is about to become a state. Yancey just can't do it, which brings us to another half-hour of adventure.

Part of the problem with this version of Cimarron is that it runs nearly two and a half hours, and boy does it seem slow. The story also doesn't feel all that coherent, but like a series of vignettes in a bad way. The one thing the film has going for it is some nice cinematography, but that's not enough to save it.

The Private Life of Don Juan

Merle Oberon was TCM's Star of the Month late last year, and that gave me the opportunity to record a movie or two that I hadn't seen before. This time out, the movie is one she made over in the UK: The Private Life of Don Juan.

Now, as you might guess, Merle Oberon is not playing Don Juan; that honor goes to Douglas Fairbanks (Sr.) in his final film role. And, as you might also guess considering this is a movie about Don Juan, there are a bunch of actresses in the movie with a fairly similar role, that being a woman who might want Don Juan.

Fairbanks was 51 when he made The Private Life of Don Juan, and that's part of the conceit of the movie. As they say in sports, "Father Time is unbeaten", and time is catching up to Don Juan too. He and his friend/assistant Leporello (Melville Cooper) have returned to Sevilla in part to get medical advice because Don Juan is at the age where he's not as spry as he used to be. However, Sevilla is also the home of Don Juan's wife Doña Dolores (Benita Hume), who basically has a warrant for Don Juan's arrest.

Complicating things is the fact that word of Don Juan's return has reached the city, so there are young men who idolized Don Juan. One of them, Rodrigo (Barry MacKay) is even imitating Don Juan by climbing up to women's balconies to try to seduce them, a fact that needless to say gets the women's husbands irritated.

And then, something happens that may or may not solve Don Juan's problems. Rodrigo goes after the wrong man's wife, resulting in the angry husband killing Rodrigo. Except that everybody thinks this is Don Juan, which at least in theory solves Don Juan's legal issues as well as any financial issues he might have. Don Juan and Leporello go off to a small village where nobody will recognize them. But then he realizes that women are no longer interested in some random middle-aged guy who isn't known to have the reputation that preceded Don Juan wherever he went. But how can Don Juan convince people that he's still alive, and that this claimant really is Don Juan? Never mind the fact that if his real identity were to come to light, he'd still face criminal proceedings.

In any case, Don Juan does try to tell everyone that no, he's not really dead. Some writers tried to cash in on Don Juan's death by writing a pulp fiction pamphlet about the exploits of Don Juan, a book that got turned into a play. Don Juan goes to a performance of that play and tries to tell everyone that hey, he's still alive, but unsurprisingly he's just laughed out of the theater. Perhaps Doña Dolores can vouch for Don Juan....

I really like the premise of The Private Life of Don Juan, which made me think of a movie like From Noon Till Three. Douglas Fairbanks does well as an aging Don Juan, and since he's the focus of the movie, that's important. However, there's something in the movie that's a bit off. I think the story is a bit too slow, or maybe barebones, for the movie. Despite the obvious charm, there's not a lot of there there.

Vacation from Humor

I've stated before how much I generally prefer the Warner Bros. B movies. MGM had the sort of class and production values that made things like highbrow literary adaptations suitable for the studio, while for whatever reason, things like B comedies weren't particularly up MGM's alley. A good example of this is the 1938 screwball comedy Vacation from Love.

Dennis O'Keeffe stars as Bill Blair, a saxophonist in the big band led by Barney Keenan (Edward Brophy in a rather odd casting choice). He's not playing in time or tune with the rest of the band during the rehearsal. The reason for this is that he sees a picture in the paper of socialite Patricia Lawson (Florence Rice), who is about to be married. She was apparently recently in the nightclub where the band plays, and Bill immediately fell in love with her without even having talked with her. So Bill vows that he's going to see her again.

To this end, Bill drags Barney along to the house where the wedding is going to be held, commits a ruse to get somebody else's invitation, and walks in to where the wedding is taking place. When the bit about "speak now or forever hold your piece" comes up, Bill speaks up. Patricia's father (Reginald Owen) is none too pleased for fairly obvious reasons. But his daughter is an absolute ditz, and is willing to listen to what Bill has to say. Now, in this sort of movie, it's already obvious that the would-be groom in this sequence is going to be a total drip, so Patricia decides Bill is right, and is willing to run off with him and get on the boat to Europe where she and the original groom were going to be in the honeymoon suite. They get married with the vows being love, honor, and obey -- and have fun doing it.

Patricia's dad gives his new son-in-law Bill a job at his advertising agency, and Bill proves to be adept at it. Except that the job requires a lot of travel, so he's away from his wife and misses a lot of social engagements of the sort that rich people in the 1930s go to. And then, one day, Barney shows up at the ad agency's office with the band's singer Flo (June Knight). This is just about the same time when Bill and father-in-law get an important client to re-up with the agency so the four go out on the town to celebrate. Unfortunately, it's also Bill and Patricia's first wedding anniversary, so she's brought a lot of people over to celebrate. When Patricia gets so angry at Bill that she won't let him in her bedroom to explain what happened, Bill decides to take Barney up on his offer and start playing sax in the band again on the band's European tour.

Patricia follows in the hopes of getting a divorce, because French divorce laws are presented as somehow more permissive. But once again, this is the sort of movie where we know that the male and female leads are going to wind up together in the final reel, so we know that something is going to stop the divorce from going forward.

The premise behind Vacation from Love is totally nonensical. That, and the characters, certainly Bill and to a lesser extent Patricia, seem to have radical changes to their personalities over the course of the movie. It's supposed to be a comedy, but it's also the sort of material where you want to take the main characters and smack them upside the head to knock some sense into them. Thankfully, this being a B movie, it's over fairly quickly and you haven't wasted too much time.

Sterling Hayden, Frenchman

Another person who was honored in Summer Under the Stars in 2025 was Sterling Hayden. Once again, TCM ran some new-to-me movies that I had the chance to record, such as The Golden Hawk.

Opening titles inform us that in the 17th century, England and Spain were allied together against France, at least against France. There were, however, some people who engaged in piracy for their own sake of adventure.... One such pirate is Kit Gerardo (Sterling Hayden), based on the French island of Basse-Terre (part of Guadeloupe) where he romances the ladies and talks about plundering loot with the men who would be sailing under him. One such boat is the Spanish boat the Garza, sailing out of the big Spanish Caribbean port of Cartagena captained by Luis del Toro (John Sutton).

In the middle of the fight against the Garza, a captive woman jumps overboard to escape del Toro and make her way over to Kit's boat. The woman (played by Rhonda Fleming) is a Dutch maid named Jane and therefore neutral, or at least that's her story at first, even though she doesn't have a Dutch accent. (Then again Sterling Hayden doesn't have a French accent.) In any case, the libidinous Kit immediate starts trying to put the moves on Jane, who understandably suspects Kit of trying to keep her captive. So she escapes from Kit just like she escaped del Toro.

As you might guess, Kit, Jane, and del Toro keep running into each other. Jane is also known as Captain Rouge, and wants to plunder other ships herself because she claims her family used to be wealthy but had their wealth stolen from them and she's only trying to take back what's rightfully theirs. She's also not really got any allegiances to anybody but herself, which will prove useful later in the film.

Kit keeps plundering and eventually takes a woman named Blanca de Valdiva (Helena Carter, no relation to Helena Bonham Carter) who claims to be betrothed to del Toro. And yet Kit immediately starts romancing her too despite her story about being betrothed. Action shifts all around the Caribbean as Kit also continues to search for Captain Rouge while also making war on the Spaniards.

Ultimately, Kit tries to invade one of the Spanish fortresses, which is going to put him in a lot more danger, leading up to the climax in which all the relationships are revealed and, as you might guess, the heroes come out all right in the end.

The synopsis of The Golden Hawk is, to be honest, a bit bare bones. That's largely because the movie is fairly formulaic. It's an entertaining enough movie, and the cinematography is actually quite gorgeous although nowhere near the Caribbean. There's nothing much new here, and that's part of the reason why the movie isn't so well remembered today. Still, you'll probably enjoy it for one watch.