Bengazi

Another of those movies I had on my DVR that I wanted to watch before it expired was that late-era RKO film Bengazi, having recorded it because, as always, it had a synopsis that sounded interesting. I wish the film had turned out to be as interesting as the synopsis.

The movie begins with a couple of guys cutting some barbed wire to get at a British military installation out in the Libyan desert so that they can steal one of the trucks. One is John Gillmore (Richard Conte), who had a past in America that he apparently doesn't want to go back to. The other, Selby (Richard Erdman), had spent some time in prison. As for having stolen the truck, this unsurprisingly ticks off the British authorities, who send Inspector Levering (Richard Carlson) to investigate.

Gillmore isn't really working with Selby so much as he is with nightclub owner Robert Donovan (Victor McLaglen). They've learned that back during the unpleasantness of the war a dozen or so years earlier, a bunch of gold had been buried out in the desert to keep it safe from opposing militaries, and that this gold had never been recovered. So obviously, being able to get it would be a financially profitable deal, although trying to get it is going to be dangerous what with the legal ramifications even if you had your own truck instead of stealing one off the British army. And then getting out of Libya with the goods is going to be more difficult.

Complicating matters is that a young woman shows up. That woman, Aileen Donovan (Mala Powers), is the estranged daughter of Robert, and pissed that her father pretty much up and abandoned her and Mom ages ago. She also hasn't quite figured out how she's going to get back out of Libya either since she only had the money for a ticket there. But her presence is something that perhaps Levering can use as leverage against her father and Gillmore.

Anyhow, the three men set out for the desert to where the gold is supposedly buried, in the ruins of a mosque. They get there, but what they don't realize is that the Bedouins who do their nomad thing through that part of the desert aren't exactly thrilled with these criminal adventurers coming for what they think is their gold. They kill Selby and take the truck, while Levering is surveilling the area by plane looking for Gillmore's party.

Eventually, the plane does find our antihero, but the plane is shot so they can't escape by air. They also don't have all that much in the way of ammunition to hold off the Bedouins, so we get a very talky third act that leaves one to wonder how we're going to get an ending that isn't too tragic while also satisfying the Production Code.

Bengazi sounds like an interesting idea, but boy is it boring. It also doesn't help that Victor McLaglen's character is enough of a jerk that we don't want to be on the side of the people going out in the desert. The ending is also one that to me defied logic. The only saving grace is that, for the dying years of RKO, the print wasn't as dire as something like Glory. But, as always, watch and judge for yourself.

Briefs for end of September, 2026

I suppose I should apologize for not talking much about any upcoming spotlights or other programming features apart from the TCM Star of the Month. I as always am a couple of weeks ahead in scheduling posts here, so actually doing something like a briefs post always seems to get put off. And I still have a bunch of movies that I've watched off the DVR without having written up the post on them to schedule in the first place.

This is also the appropriate place to point out that you need to check your box guide whenever I put up a post on a movie that's supposedly coming up on TCM or FXM. TCM's full October schedule is now available, and I had to juggle a couple of things. I had written a post on the Vincent Price movie The Bat a month or so ago when I thought it was about to expire from my DVR but when I didn't yet know for certain that it was going to be part of the Halloween lineup. So currently I think the post is scheduled for early on October 30.

By the same token, when I looked through the October schedule, I saw that the Tom Hanks movie The 'Burbs is scheduled in prime time on, IIRC, October 7; I haven't yet downloaded a copy of the October schedule and I can't connect to the site I normally use. But when I went to watch it to do a post, I saw the opening scene and thought that this looked suspiciously familiar. Sure enough, as it turned out I had done a post on The 'Burbs in late 2021. Time to reschedule more posts then....

I've also posted in the past how it seemed to me that FXM really refreshed its schedule on October 1. That doesn't seem to be the case this year, although over the past year it seems as though there have been more films pulled out of the vaults for the Retro block, with films not showing quite as often. But that also means that I don't see anything suddenly showing up in October that hasn't been on FXM for years.

Finally, in some happier news, they're still finding "lost" movies. Needless to say this is one I'd never heard of, and won't be getting to see until the point that it shows up either on YouTube or one of the streaming platforms.

The Black Arrow

Another of those one-night salutes that TCM likes to run was to actor Louis Hayward, this time spotlighting his work in historical action pictures. One of the movies that I hadn't seen before was The Black Arrow, so once again I recorded it in order to be able to watch another new-to-me old movie and write up a post on it.

The Black Arrow opens late in the Wars of the Roses, which were of course fought between the English royal houses of Lancaster and York. Louis Hayward plays Richard Shelton, who had been fighting for the Yorkists before returning to his ancestral home in Yorkshire, Tunstall Castle. Unfortunately, he comes home to the sad news that his father Harold has been killed. Sir John Sedley, who lived in the next castle over, if you want to put it that way, was a Lancastrian who killed Harold and was executed for his troubles.

Since there's basically a civil war going on, Sir Richard's uncle and Harold's half-brother Sir Daniel (George Macready) gets the spoils of managing Sedley manor, as well as making Sedley's daughter Joanna (Janet Blair) his ward, although his plan is ultimately to marry her. Sir Richard and one of Sir Daniel's associates are sent through the dangerous forest to fetch Joanna and bring her back to Tunstall. I say dangerous because, like in the Robin Hood stories, there are men lying in ambush in the forest just waiting for the wrong person to try to pass through. Sir Richard is more or less innocent in that he wasn't around for any of the back story, but none of the others were, and one Sir Daniel's associate Appleyard is killed by an arrow to which there's a letter attached.

That letter argues that the arrow for Appleyard is in revenge for the killing of Sir Harold and the taking of the Sedley estates, signed by a "John Amend-All" and naming in addition to Appleyard two more of Sir Daniel's associates who have arrows coming for them. More ominously, the last name on the list is Sir Daniel himself, who if this letter is to be believed is actually the person who killed Sir Harold, not Sedley!

Sir Richard doesn't know what to believe, and Joanna doesn't exactly like him at first for fairly obvious reasons. But Richard plans to do some investigating. We learn fairly quickly that John Amend-All's letter is more or less accurate and that Sir Daniel did in fact kill his half-brother and put the blame on Sedley, with the intention of taking over the Sedley lands. Not only that, but John Amend-All turns out to be Sedley himself, who survived the execution thanks to a well-placed Bible stopping an arrow to the heart.

So Sir Richard throws in with Sedley. Also, as you might guess, he's going to fall in love with Joanna along the way. However, there's the slight problem that she's stuck at Tunstall and Sir Daniel clearly knows by now what Sir Richard is up to and that this means danger for him. So of course Sir Richard is now persona non grata at Tunstall. Yet, at the same time, we can expect that a movie like this is going to have a more or less happy ending. How it gets there is what you're going to have to watch.

The Black Arrow starts off slowly, which isn't exactly a good thing for a movie that only runs a shade under 80 minutes. It does pick up, and reaches the point that it's the sort of movie that would have pleased the movie-going public of the late 1940s without exactly being any great shakes. The Black Arrow is one of those movies that's probably best to watch with some friends and your favorite snacks.

Devil and the Deep

Not too long ago I picked up a box set of early Cary Grant movies, made when he was at Paramount. Technically I think it's two box sets, one of comedies and one of dramas, repackaged. In any case, the set had several movies I haven't yet seen, and some I'm glad to have on DVD now, like Hot Saturday. I decided to watch one of Grant's earliest films off the colleciton, The Devil and the Deep.

This is so early in Grant's career that although he gets fourth billing, he's written out after 10 or 15 minutes. Grant plays Lt. Jaeckel, who serves on a submarine under Cmdr. Charles Sturm (Charles Laughton in his first Hollywood film getting an "introducing" credit) based out of a port somewhere in North Africa. As the movie opens, Jaeckel has a note from Sturm's wife Diana (Tallulah Bankhead); apparently they danced together at some function. But the note is dropped on the floor and Cmdr. Sturm picks it up, leading Sturm to suspect that perhaps Jaeckel is seeing his wife on the sly. Now that would be a no-no under military regulations, but worse is that Cmdr. Sturm is insanely jealous as Diana well knows.

Cmdr. Sturm uses his rank to get Jaeckel reassigned to a different sub, which is why Cary Grant is written out of the movie so early. (To be fair, Paramount wouldn't have known at the time that Grant was going to go on to become a big star.) More important in terms of the movie is that at home that night, Cmdr. Sturm pretty much threatens his wife, showing why she considers him insanely jealous. Diana runs out of the house for her own safety, although she doesn't realize that she's running into danger as there's some sort of street festival going on and a crowd of lusty Arab men is not the safest place for a western woman to be. Fortunately for her, there's a western guy there, Sempter (Gary Cooper). He pulls Diana aside into one of the shops in the bazaar and, to satisfy the merchant, buys Diana some cheap perfume, which is obviously going to be a bit of foreshadowing.

This is the first time the two have met, and they wind up going out into the desert to spend an evening together. This is naturally something that would make Cmdr. Sturm even more jealous if he were to find out about the relationship. As you might guess, Cmdr. Sturm is indeed going to find out, and the perfume is going to be part of why. The reason is that Sumpter is in fact Lt. Sumpter, and he's in town because he's the replacement for Lt. Jaeckel. In Sumpter's defense, he doesn't know when he first meets Diana that she is in fact Mrs. Sturm; that only comes the next day when Sumpter goes to give his transfer papers to Cmdr. Sturm. The transfer papers bear some traces of that perfume that Sumpter bought for Diana the night before.

The sub is set to head out on a training exercise that night, and Diana goes to the sub to warn Sumpter of just how insane her husband is. She's hoping to get on the sub, warn Sumpter, and get off before the sub sets out. But when Cmdr. Sturm gets to the port, he hears from the sentry on duty that his wife is on board. So as a sign of how insanely jealous he is, he orders the sub to set out early, before his wife can get off the sub. But that's only the half of it. Cmdr. Sturm is planning to engineer a murder-suicide in which he'll sink the sub, leading to the deaths of himself, his wife, and Sumpter. Now there's also an entire crew of innocents on board the sub.

Devil and the Deep is a really interesting little movie thanks in part to it having been released in the pre-Code era. There aren't as many strong pre-Code touches as in some other movies, but it was also a time when movies still were all over the place in terms of plotting. The idea of Cmdr. Sturm being crazy enough to sink his own sub is really out there, and Laughton's oversized acting works here. Bankhead's scenery-chewing also works, while Cooper has a poorly-written character, which is one of the issues the movie has. While Devil and the Deep is certainly interesting, it's also uneven. The positives do outweigh the negatives, but there are certainly reasons why the movie isn't all that well known despite the big cast.

Take This Job and Shove It

Some months back, TCM ran a spotlight on "working class" movies. I did a post on one of the films, The Working Man, already, since it got another airing as part of a later daytime spotlight. Another of the movies was the new-to-me film Take This Job and Shove It. Having watched it, there's a reason this movie was new to me.

Frank Macklin (Robert Hays) is one of those hotshot types in the sort of corporate firm that has hotshots. The corporation is a conglomerate run by Samuel Ellison (Eddie Albert) that buys up troubled businesses, cuts out the deadweight, and turns them around, at least for some values of a turnaround for the people who still have a job at the firm. One of the businesses is a brewery run by Charlie Pickett (Art Carney) and based in Macklin's home town in Iowa. So Ellison decides to send Frank to Iowa to shape up the brewery and get production up so that it can become profitable again.

Frank heads to his old hometown, and when he gets there, everyone is at first happy to see him, since he was the sort of local boy who made good. But it doesn't take long for them to realize that things aren't going to be easy for them. After all, one of the things Frank does to increase production is to take all of the workers and put them in new roles on the production line that they haven't necessarily done before. Understandably, a lot of the assembly line workers aren't happy about it.

Complicating matters is the fact that still living in town is Frank's old girlfriend J.M. Halstead (Barbara Hershey). The see each other, and you can see why they might think about starting up their relationship again. And as the movie goes on, Frank's resuming his old friendships leads him to wonder which side he should be on in the business world. He still has a bond with those old friends, and you can make a cast that there's something to be said for loyalty.

However, the new business practices Frank introduces work to increase production and make the brewery profitable. Profitable enough, in fact, that Ellison thinks about selling the brewery to a rich guy named Hooker (country singer Charlie Rich) who sees the brewery as a sort of vanity project. He's not exactly a good businessman himself, and the brewery workers aren't necessarily thrilled with the idea of becoming employees of Hooker. Frank doesn't like the prospect either.

The idea behind Take This Job and Shove It is a good one, although once again I think it's one of those movies where the premise doesn't exactly work. I suppose it's a bit like Honeysuckle Rose in that it's showing a portion of American society that wasn't normally put up on the big screen. This was, for example, one of the first times that monster trucks broke out into the public consciousness.

It also doesn't help that the print isn't very good. It looks like it was done on videotape, with TV-style direction from director Gus Trikonis, which made me wonder wither Take This Job and Shove It was actually a TV movie. But a look at IMDb says that no, it really was a theatrical release. In any case, the final product is decidedly mediocre.

The Last Run

Other than Noir Alley, it's not all that common for TCM to run a movie twice within the same month. But there is an example of it coming up, as TCM ran The Last Run a week or so ago and is running it again at the end of the daytime schedule, or 6:15 PM.

George C. Scott plays Harry Garmes, who is living in the south of Portugal and doesn't exactly have the best life. His son died tragically young several years ago and, as a result, his wife more or less left him. As the movie opens, Harry is souping up a car, in preparation for a job. Harry had worked in the past as a driver for various criminal elements, now living off of what he'd been able to save up. But he's willing to take up one last job, in part in the hopes that he'll be able to have a better retirement. His one friend is the retired prostitute Monique (Colleen Dewhurst).

Anyhow, the job is to drive all the way to France to pick up the escaped American convict Paul Rickard (Tony Musante) and bring him back to Spain. This was the era when Franco still ran Spain so extradition wasn't anywhere near what it is today with the EU. In Spain, Harry is to rendezvous with the people Paul had worked with and dropped him off. Paul, he's been warned, is a bit of a loose cannon. And it doesn't take all that long to discover that Paul is indeed a bit of a problem.

For one thing, he has no compunction about using violence, even when the smarter and more jaded Harry understands that tactical violence would be strategically ill-advised. There's also the fact that Paul wants to bring along his girlfriend Claudie (Trish Van Devere) even though this will enormously complicate things. She doesn't have any sort of criminal record so it would be easier for her to travel solo, but no; Paul wants what he wants, and why should he care how this is going to inconvenience the people around him.

The three of them have no issue getting back into Spain and making it to what is supposed to be the drop-off point. Except that when the time comes for the transfer, they learn it's a trap and that the men who were paying Harry to deliver Paul in fact want to kill Paul for reasons that are never really explained. In any case, it means that the three are going to have to try to make it back to Portugal unseen by the men who had hired Harry. After all, they still want Paul dead. And since Harry helped bollix that, they'll have no issue with killing Harry too. Harry's idea is to get the three of them back to Harry's home in Portugal, and then come up with a way of getting Paul and Claudie to Africa where they can start a new life. Harry, for his part, does have the option of going back to America. But there's also the issue that Paul doesn't always trust Harry, and with good reason; how is Paul supposed to know whether Harry is really working with the men trying to kill him or not?

The Last Run is another of those movies that has a good idea behind it, but that is ultimately beset with a poor script. The whole thing has a "been there, done that" feel to it, along with a relative lack of character development. One doesn't really care all that much about Paul. Perhaps the movie's problems are also caused by the fact that John Huston who was originally set to direct dropped out halfway through production. The one bright spot is the location photography, but that's not enough to save The Last Run.

Only You

Over New Year's, all of the TCM presenters got together to present some movies that they hadn't seen before deciding they'd show this night's lineup and talk about it. Among the movies they ran was one that was new to me, too: Only You.

The movie starts off with an establishing sequence of a couple of kids playing at a ouija board: Faith Corvatch, her brother Larry, and Faith's best friend Kate. They spell out the name "Damon Bradley". Some years later, before becoming an adult, Faith goes to a carnival where a fortune teller tells her she's going to meet a man named Damon Bradley and marry him.

Of course, that's all nonsense. Fast-forward to where they're all adults. Kate (Bonnie Hunt) has gotten married to Larry (Fisher Stevens), while Faith (Marisa Tomei) is engaged to be married to a podiatrist named Dwayne. But we wouldn't have a movie if something didn't happen here. Faith finds out that Dwayne, who doesn't know Faith's superstition about Damon Bradley, in fact had a classmate named Damon Bradley. Said Damon Bradley is supposed to be flying to Italy that day. So Faith, being a completely rational woman any guy would want to marry, figures that the thing to do would be to jilt Dwayne and get on a plane to Italy in the hopes of finding the Damon Bradley who she believes she's fated to marry. Not only that, but she's able to get Kate to join her and leave her husband in the lurch, because reasons.

That's not much to go on, and as you might expect Faith doesn't find Damon. But it's the sort of situation that's ripe for somebody who'd want to scam her. So sure enough, she just magically runs into a guy who identifies himself to her as Damon Bradley (Robert Downey Jr.) This is of course a lie. The guy is actually named Peter, but, having seen Faith, fell in love with her, so when he overhears that she's looking for a guy named Damon Bradley, decides to claim that's his name. And for the period of time that Faith believes Peter is in fact Damon, she too is in love with him.

Now, you may be asking yourself why anyone would want to stay in love with a woman who clearly shows hershelf to be incredibly shallow. And yet Peter still loves Faith, to the point that he comes up with another fake Damon Bradley (Billy Zane) and travels all around Italy with Faith and Kate so that Faith can find this fake Damon and learn that this isn't the person she should be in love with. Complicating matters it the fact that Kate is being pursued by the sort of suave European who populates movies like this, or certainly did a generation or two earlier when travel to Europe wasn't quite so easy.

You can probably guess who winds up together in the final reel, and part of what makes Only You a bit of a slog is the fact that it takes so long to get to the predictable ending. Everybody tries, and it's not the fault of the cast by any means. They're hindered by a sub-par formulaic script that frankly insults the viewers' intelligence. There's some nice cinematography of Italy, but the movie as a whole doesn't quite work.

Road to Utopia

I've got a Bob Hope box set that has a portion devoted to the Bob Hope/Bing Crosby collaborations. It includes four of the "Road" movies. It's been over three years since I blogged about the third of them, so I think now would be a good time to put the DVD into the player and watch the fourth, Road to Utopia. (The box set has two earlier collaborations between Hope and Crosby, but sadly not the final three "Road" movies.)

The movie starts off in the present, but worse than that, with Robert Benchley giving us an intro that's really not relevant to the movie. Benchley also stops the action a couple of times to make an allegedly trenchant comment about the upcoming scene, but his presence is a minus in the movie since he's not playing an actual character. Back to the present and the action of the film, Chester (Bob Hope) is an old man married to Sal (Dorothy Lamour), when their old friend Duke (Bing Crosby) shows up. This causes the three of them to think back over forty years, to when there was a gold rush in the Klondike and all three of them were there for it.

Not that this was part of the plan. Chester and Duke are partners in a double act that's part vaudeville, part carnival barker dishonesty that's gotten them stopped by the police in pretty much every town they've been in, leading them to make it all the way to the Pacific. They have to make another quick escape, but this time Chester's decided he's had enough. He wants to go back to New York while Duke wants to go to Alaska. Duke takes all of Chester's money, so Chester gets on the same boat as Duke to try to get some of the money back.

Instead, the two lose all the money, so they have to work their way to Alaska which is how they come across a map when they're cleaning the cabin of two thugs, McGurk (Nester Paiva) and Sperry (Robert Barrat). 80 years on and that sort of treasure map is a nonsense plot device, but for some reason, people really bought into it in the old days. Chester and Duke, having stolen it, think this is going to make them rich, but understandably McGurk and Sperry want it back.

And they're not the only ones who want it. Larson (Douglas Dumbrille) is the sort of person making money not from striking gold, but from serving the people trying to strike gold. But he wants in on the gold too. Sal shows up at Larson's saloon, claiming to have information about that map. But she -- and nobody else in town -- know what Sperry and McGurk look like. So as you can guess, when Chester and Duke show up, they're going to get mistaken for the two baddies. The actual Sperry and McGurk are not far behind.

Now, since we know from the film's opening that Sal and Chester are married, we know that everybody escapes, and that Sal and Chester fall in love, which complicates things back in the Klondike. Sal's job, mind you, is to get the map for Larson, but once she falls in love with Chester, she's not so sure about it. In and around all of this there's the opportunity for the leads to sing several songs.

Apparently, Road to Utopia was well received when it was released back in 1946. Perhaps that's because the movie had been held for several years so it had been quite a while since the public had seen a "Road" movie. Indeed, in the intervening years, Robert Benchley had died, that's how long it was held up. I personally found Road to Utopia a fairly weak movie, with the jokes falling flatter. Benchley adds nothing, and the infighting between the Hope and Crosby characters is wearing thin.

A younger acquaintance

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rain Around the Soldier

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Waiting for a star to fall

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

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

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

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

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

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

Somebody at least had a navy

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

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

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

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

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

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

Another Two for One repeat

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Over the Moon

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

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

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

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

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

The Strange World of Planet X

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Last of the Mohicans (1936)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Teenage Doll

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

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

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

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

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

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

Latin Lovers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rogue's March

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kanał

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

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

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

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

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

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

At least Mickey Rooney doesn't strip

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Baxter! (1973)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Yellow Canary

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

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

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

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

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

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

In which Paul Henreid buckles swashes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Buzzin' Around

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

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

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

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

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

TCM Star of the Month September 2026: Ricardo Montalbán

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

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

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

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

The Brighton Strangler

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Young Runaways

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oxford around a Yank

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

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

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

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

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

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

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