Buford Pusser

Another of the stars who died in 2025 who got a one-movie salute on that night at the end of the year when TCM runs a salute to various people who weren't quite as prominent is consistent 1970s supporting actor Joe Don Baker. The movie that TCM selected for him was one of his starring roles in Walking Tall. So I watched it before it expired from my DVR, and wrote up this post to schedule for a suitable later date.

Baker stars as Buford Pusser, a real person who, as the movie opens, is giving up his career as a pro wrestler. He'd been criss-crossing the country in a trailer with his wife Pauline (Elizabeth Hartman) and two children. Pauline had been pushing him to retire, so he's returning to his roots in Tennessee to be close to his parents (Lurene Tuttle and Noah Beery Jr.) in rural Tennessee not far from the border with Mississippi.

Buford was known enough in town that his return is news, and showing up the next day is old friend Lutie McVeigh. Lutie wants to take Buford for drinks as well as show him the "entertainment" places that have sprung up in recent years, meaning the gambling joint the Lucky Spot outside of town along with the brothel that's sprung up to service the drunks. Buford isn't exactly pleased with this, and calls out the cheating that he sees going on at the casino. This causes the propietor's henchmen to beat the crap out of Lutie and Buford, as well as give Buford cuts that require hundreds of stitches.

Buford responds by showing up at the Lucky Spot after he recovers and holding up the cashier at gunpoint, which obviously leads to a trial but one that Buford wins by ripping off his shirt and showing off his wounds. The jury acquits, which makes him a hero to some as well as an enemy of the current sheriff, Al Thurman (Gene Evans), who is on the take from all the vice house owners in the county.

Seeing that nothing is being done about the rampant immorality occurring in his county, Buford decides that you can indeed fight city hall, which he plans to do by running for sheriff. He is, of course, going up against some powerful entrenched interests. The sheriff tries to get dirt on Buford in any way possible, and when he chases Buford to catch him speeding, it's the sheriff that drives off the road, getting in a fatal car crash.

Buford gets elected sheriff, and he now has to worry about the corrupt vice owners as well as the fact that the deputies are on the take. He also hasn't worked in law enforcement, so he doesn't know any of the niceties about things like constitutional rights that people under arrest have or how to properly draw up a request for a search warrant. Buford is unfazed and continues to go after crime in his community, even though it puts him in increasing danger.

It's easy to see why Walking Tall became a cult hit when it was originally released. Rural southern whites had been at the bottom of Hollywood's pecking order since the days of films that led Variety to write the "Stix Nix Hick Pix" headline all the way back in 1935. Just like blacks had the blaxploitation movies of the 1970s, here the southerners get what can easily be called for lack of a better term a "hixploitation" film. It's campily violent and gives people the thrill of being able to get revenge in a way they wouldn't have been able to in real life. This, especially because Buford Pusser was a real person. It's also fun, if a bit slow clocking in at over two hours. Walking Tall should really have been plotted to run 90-100 minutes.

Not mentioned in the movie, since nobody could have known it at the time (at least, not the people involved in making the movie), is that the real-life Buford Pusser's life was not quite as it was portrayed here, with later investigations (long after Pusser's death) revealing something darker that I don't want to mention since it would contain major spoilers. But Walking Tall is still worth watching, just like other Hollywood biopics that might be even more inaccurate.

That Lonelyhearts column again

Back in the studio era, it wasn't uncommon for studios to remake their B movies. After all, the previous versions weren't really showing up anywhere to remind people of them, and it was a budget saver on the screenplay. Paul Muni's Hi, Nellie! was remade three times within about 15 years. The third of four versions of the movie is titled You Can't Escape Forever and aired on TCM back when George Brent was Star of the Month.

Brent plays Steve Mitchell, editor of a big-city paper whose girlfriend Laurie (Brenda Marshall) is trying to make it as a reporter. However, she has issues like fainting when she covers an execution only to discover too late that the condemned man was pardoned. For this, she gets demoted to the "advice to the lovelorn" column. Meanwhile, the condemned man was believed to be working for Greer (Eduardo Ciannelli), the local crime boss, since this was an era where all of the crime was managed by gangsters, or so it seemed if you watched the movies.

A man named Crowder shows up at the newspaper having written a manuscript by hand that he claims will blow the roof off of the Greer gang. Not long after, Crowder dies in what is an accident to everybody but Steve. So Steve publishes a headling claiming it wasn't an accident, only for the autopsy to say otherwise. So this time it's Steve who gets demoted to the lonelyhearts column.

Thankfully, there's a singles' club in town meaning there's ample work for a romance columnist. But there's something odd about this place and the weddings it performs, so Steve decides to investigate, figuring he can use this as a way to get out of the newspaper building and try to get the evidence that will prove he was right all along about Crowder's death. And, as it turns out, Crowder met his wife at the club, and wasn't the first person to get married at the club and die under mysterious circumstances.

Steve and his photographer Mac (Roscoe Karns) go to the club with Laurie following along, and she sees that the club is indeed a "respectable" front for a criminal organization, and probably laundering money to boot. Furthermore, the owner of the club, Robelink (Gene Lockhart) is the brother-in-law of Greer. Robelink, for his part, got the manuscript that Crowder wrote, but he's not planning to tell anybody where it is if he can avoid doing so.

You can probably guess how all of this is going to go, which is that Greer figures out Robelink may crack and that Steve is a threat. But this is the sort of movie that's going to have a happy ending. Crime does not pay, especially during the Production Code era.

I think now I've seen all four versions of this movie. I think my favorite is Love Is on the Air, which moves the story to radio and benefits from the presence of Ronald Reagan who was well-fit to Warner Bros.' B movies. In You Can't Escape Forever, Brent comes across as a bit of a conman and mildly unsympathetic, while Roscoe Karns is obnxiously incompetent at times. But this was B material, and released in the midst of World War II when audiences wanted escapism. You'll definitely escape here.

Canine HOMe Protection System

Another of the live-action movies that TCM ran as part of their salute to Hanna-Barbera is one that was more squarely aimed at kids than the previous movie Baxter!. This time, the movie in question is C.H.O.M.P.S..

Rascal is a dog owned by Brian Foster (Wesley Eure), who works for the home-security company run by Ralph Norton (Conrad Bain) and is dating the boss' daughter Casey (Valerie Bertinelli). The opening scene has Rascal being chased by a dog owned by neighbor Mrs. Flower (Hermione Baddeley), who doesn't have all that much to do with the plot other than her dog whistle causing a major plot point. Brian is a bit of a tinkerer, and in his garage/laboratory, he's working on an animatronic but hyper-realistic dog that could be used in building security the way a German Shepherd or Doberman might: the hope is a dog that can guard but have more strength and energy than a real dog.

The prototype, named "Chomps" for "Canine HOMe Protection System", shows potential, but also has some glitches since it's activated by numerical voice command to the point that anybody who knew about such a thing could just start calling out numbers to get the dog to stop. And who's going to remember all of the numerical commands out in the real world? Also, Brian hasn't bothered to file for a patent on his invention, something which would obviate much of the plot of the movie. The other issue is that, as I implied above, Mrs. Flower's dog whistle also causes Chomps to go haywire.

Brian thinks he's finally gotten Chomps to work, and wants to show him to Mr. Norton, who obviously (and understandably) doesn't believe that this sort of invention can actually work. But Chomps actually foils a crime where there's a TV reporter watching, leading Norton to be more interested in the idea. Norton, however, isn't the only one interested. Since Chomps shows up on a live TV news report and Norton is stupid enough to use the incident for publicity purposes without having all the IP rights to Chomps locked up, Norton's rival Gibbs (Jim Backus) also wants Chomps. And Gibbs has a plant, Ken Sharp (Larry Bishop) in Norton's business. Sharp has hired a couple of small-time incompetent crooks, Bracken (Red Buttons) and Brooks (Chuck McCann) to get Chomps.

Gibbs offters to buy out Norton, but Norton also has another much more lucrative offer to merge with a major defense contractor, pending an experiment with Chomps. Unfortunately, Norton unwittingly brings Rascal to the experiment since Chomps was designed to look like a real dog and Brian used his own dog Rascal as the model. At the same time the defense contractor trial is set to take place, Sharp has his two hired burglars trying to get the plans to Chomps while Gibbs has secretly shown up to where the trial is taking place. Can Chomps save the day? Of course he can, since this is the sort of movie that couldn't possibly have anything but a happy ending.

Frankly, C.H.O.M.P.S. is a dumb movie, but it's endearingly dumb because it's so unbelievably amateurish. The plot is paper-thin, the acting on par with the sort of sitcom that's churned out in one take, characters like the two burglars are impossibly stupid, and Chomps is repeatedly shown in slow-motion in a way that looks obviously phony and bad. I can see why it didn't get very good reviews on its release. But is has a bit of charm.

Dancer, Texas Pop. 81

TCM did a spotlight some months back on films set in Texas. One of the more recently films that I had never even heard of was Dancer, Texas Pop.81. But it was another of those movies where the synopsis sounded interesting enough, so I recorded it and eventually got around to watching it.

The movie opens with four adolescent boys sitting in the middle of the road and one of them doing a voiceover about the town of Dancer in west Texas and how Rand McNally doesn't have it on their maps apparently because it's so small. The four young men are about to graduate high school in what is Dancer's largest graduating class in years: five of them, with one girl in the graduating class. (You'd think they'd go to a larger school, but questions about things like groceries are never quite answered.)

The young man doing the narration is Keller Coleman (Breckin Meyer), who lives with his grandfather because his parents have died. So Keller and the other three boys made a pact years before, when they were maybe 10 or 11, that they would get on the first bus out of town and go to Los Angeles to try to find a more successful life for themselves, something millions of small-town people in America have done for generations. The other three young men are:

Terrell Lusk (Peter Facineli). He's the son of one of the richer families in town, as his father works in the oil industry. Mom expects Terrell to go straight into management at Dad's business and is quite insistent on it, to the point that you can see why Terrell would want to get out of town.
John Hemphill (Eddie Mills). John's father runs a ranch, so there's definitely a career waiting for John if he wants it. And he could even go off for a few years to study at the nearby ag school.
Squirrel (Ethan Embry). Squirrel is the one who really has no prospects, as he's got an alcoholic father (Keith Szarabajka) who's screwed up his life so much that he lives in a trailer that's not even level.

So as we see, all four have good reason to leave. But there's also things that could lead each of them to stay: Keller's grandfather is doted on by the town's elderly widows to the point that Grandpa can't give the various Tupperware bowls back to the right people. Terrell and John both have jobs waiting for them if they want, while Squirrel could be seen as basically abandoning his father to die if he goes off to Los Angeles, even though you couldn't really blame Squirrel for doing so. Additionally, town members put subtle pressure on the four young men to stay, to the point that some of them place bets on how many of them are going to get on the bus. All of this leads up to the point where the bus does pull in to town and... how many of them leave?

There's a lot to like about Dancer, Texas Pop. 81, certainly for anybody who grew up in a smallish place. I went to a large high school, but it was a "consolidated" school district and I grew up in one of the outlying areas that was small even if it was a lot closer to a fairly large (and giant by Dancer standards) place, so I get a lot of the vibe here. The movie, however, does have some problems, mostly relating to the fact that although this is supposed to be a town of 81, the way the peripheral characters act and the number of them implies that this is a rather larger place even it if it a small town. (Wikipedia says it was filmed in Fort Davis, Texas, a town of about 1,000 people.) The relationships between the four young men also seem more Hollywood than small town. But overall, if you want a more loving look at small towns than you normally get from Hollywood, I can certainly recommend Dancer, Texas Pop. 81.

Briefs for October 18-19, 2026

As I've intimated on several occasions, I live not all that far from Woodstock, NY, where the infamous concert was conceived, but rather farther from where the concert was held, which is in Bethel down in Sullivan County probably a good 90 minutes from here if not more. Woodstock being an arty tourist trap, I'm sorry to say, they have an annual film festival that was held this week. Forgive me for not mentioning this earlier, not that I was planning on attending anyway. Just for kicks I looked at the prices of the festival tickets a few weeks back, which were way out of my league. And I can only imagine how much virtue signaling there's been. Somewhat surprisingly, the local paper's website hasn't put up any articles about the festival since the opening festivities.

YouTube TV's cloud DVR saves multiple airings of a program if you've got it set to "record", so if you watch something like Noir Alley you'll see both editions of it when you click the movie title. Sometimes when a movie is run weeks or months apart, the two will have different running times. I recently watched one such film where one of the airings was an hour longer than the other. It turns out that TCM was re-running Some of the Best to fill out the longer time slot. I actually watched a bit of it again, curious to see what movies MGM picked for which year since, as presenter Lionel Barrymore informs us, they only have time to highlight one movie from each of MGM's first 25 years. What I found interesting this time is how MGM fudged the years. James Stewart won the Best Actor for 1940 for The Philadelphia Story, which presumably got a 1940 release in Hollywood to be Oscar-eligible. IMDb says it got a December 1940 release in several cities, but the main page for the movie lists a January 1941 release, which I'd guess was broader national release, not that movies in those days were released in large nationwide premieres the way they've been since Jaws really ramped up the idea of the summer blockbuster. Similarly, Dinner at Eight only got a broader US release in January 1934 even though IMDb says the Hollywood premiere was in August 1933.

Tonight's TCM Imports is a pair of Carl Theodor Dreyer movies that I think show up often enough but for some reason I've never actually recorded and watched. The first one is Day of Wrath (2:00 AM) from 1943, which is of course smack dab in the middle of World War II, something that always makes me wonder how such a film could be made considering Denmark was occupied by the Nazis at the time he made it.

So This Is Love

I've commented before on how there seemed to be a vogue of musical biopics in the decade or so after World War II. One that I hadn't seen before it showed up on TCM is So This Is Love. Unsurprisingly, not having seen it, I recorded it so that I could do my usual thing here of watching it and then writing up a post on it.

So This Is Love tells the story -- or the first half of the story -- of Grace Moore (Kathryn Grayson). Moore was a multitalented singer who transitioned into becoming a film and radio star before her untimely death in a plane crash in 1947, half a dozen years before this movie was made. But as the movie opens, Moore is backstage at the Metropolitan Opera, about to make her debut there in 1928. Grace talks about how this was always her dream, so as you might guess, we get another highly original flashback here....

The flashback is to about 1906, when Grace would have been eight years old, living in the small town of Jellico, TN with her parents (Walter Abel and Ann Doran). She's a precocious and somwhat mischievous girl, as we see her having gotten atop a circus elephant of her own initiative to advertise the circus coming through town! Her "trouble" raising gets to be too much, and Mom gets Grace enrolled at a Washington DC finishing school.

There, Grace and the other students meet singer Mary Garden, and Grace is forward enough to get an invitation to do a guest spot in a year's time. But Dad finds out about the singing, and is not pleased about it, coming up to Washington to get Grace. Grace learns what her dad is planning, and runs away to New York to pursue her musical dreams. But New York is a big, tough place, especially for someone who hasn't worked professionally in any of the entertainment fields before, and she almost fails.

She does finally get a job, with the help of promoter boyfriend Buddy Nash (Merv Griffin). But just as she's about to get an audition for a better role, she develops a severe case of inflamed vocal cords. the cure for this is complete rest without talking. Buddy, meanwhile, has been putting pressure on Grace to marry him, but with the expectation that she more or less give up her career to have children. So after the three months of enforced silence at a cabin in Maine, Grace learns that Buddy has gotten married to another woman.

Grace returns to New York and is able to get roles in musical comedies, but still harbors the dream of appearing in serious opera. As we know from the beginning of the movie, as well from Moore's real life, it's a dream that comes true. It all happens fairly quickly to wrap the movie up too.

So This Is Love is the sort of movie that Hollywood liked to make back in the Studio Era, but the sort of film that I can't imagine a studio putting money into today. The movie is competently made, although it's clearly a vehicle for Kathryn Grayson and not a "serious" biopic. Ending the night of Moore's met premiere isn't the best choice, although I read the suggestion that this might have something to do with the movie being made at Warner Bros. and Moore's Hollywood career not being at Warner Bros. (In that regard, it would be like The Will Rogers Story overlooking Rogers' sound era movie career with it having been at Fox.) Grayson does well, but there's nothing terribly original here and Grayson's vocal stylings are definitely an acquired taste.

Maynila, sa mga Kuko ng Liwanag

Another of the foreign films that was just about to expire from my Youtube library that I had to make an express point of watching before it expired is Manila in the Claws of Light. (Youtube's library calls it Manila in the Claws of Neon, but every other source uses "light" instead of "neon".) As always, having watched it, now I can write up the obligatory post on the film.

Julio Madiaga (Rafael Roco, Jr.) is a laborer in Manila, in a time when the Philippines was poor enough that the construction laborers were the sort of men who migrated from the even poorer outlying islands to the big cities. Julio had been a fisherman living with his siblings after the death of their parents, something we see a bit of in flashbacks. But the flashbacks reveal the much bigger reason that Julio left for Manila.

Back on his home island, Julio had a girlfriend Ligaya (Hilda Koronel), whose family seems to be poor but not quite as poor as Julio's family. They also don't think a fisherman is a good choice of boyfriend for Ligaya. So when Mrs. Cruz shows up from Manila looking for people to work in the factories of Manila, Ligaya's mother signes her up. It'll be a chance for Ligaya to make a better living, possibly send some remittances home, and complete her education. Except that this isn't why Cruz came to a small village like this. Ligaya sent a couple of letters home, but then everything stopped.

So Julio went to Manila to look for Ligaya. Of course, having no idea where Ligaya is, Julio does the next best thing, which is to find where Ligaya sent the letter from and look for Mrs. Cruz is. Meanwhile, Julio is also learning that life as a construction worker isn't all that it's cracked up to be, as the contractors building the buildings are notoriously scammy and not paying the workers what they're really worth. Presumably there's such a glut of people coming in from the outlying regions that it's a buyers' market for labor.

Julio eventually spots Mrs. Cruz, and ultimately learns that Mrs. Cruz works for what we might call human traffickers, except that it's all domestic here and not crossing international borders. The young women are brought to Manila to brothels and service rich men, usually multiple men in one night. Ligaya's story is, however, a bit atypical in that she has a different sort of sadness from the other women. She was noticed by Ah Tek, a Filipino of Chinese descent who took a liking to Ligaya and protected Ligaya from the worst predations of the traffickers. There's a quid pro quo, of course, which is that Ligaya is supposed to marry him and live with him. But, Ah Tek is extremely possessive of Ligaya, and doesn't let her leave the house, which is why it's a bit of a shock when Julio is able to find Ligaya in a church. She wants to escape, but there's a catch, which is that Ah Tek knocked her up and keeps the baby with a nanny so that Ligaya could only escape without her baby.

Manila in the Claws of Light isn't a bad movie, although I have to say that it's overlong. It's a story that could have been told in 90 minutes but runs over two hours. It's also the sort of movie that Hollywood could never have made, in part because even the socially conscious Warner Bros. of the 1930s would have found it too depressing. That, and as poor as America was during the Depression, it was never this poor. I don't know if I'll be watching Manila in the Claws of Light again, but I'm glad I watched it once.

James Bond mines for coal

Another of the movies that was just about to expire from my DVR that I was glad to see show up on TCM was The Molly Maguires. I think I'd come across it on one of the FAST channels that's part of Pluto's set of channels, the movie having been made at Paramount and Pluto being owned by Paramount. I'd wanted to watch it so when it wound up on the TCM schedule I made a point to put it on the DVR.

It's Pennsylvania in 1876, in one of those coal-mining towns that nobody ever really gets out of, or didn't in those days, although it's the sort of town that immigrants came to because the work was less bad than what they faced in their home countries. In this case, the immigrants are Irish, and we see before the opening credits just how hard the mining work is. They have to set charges to open up new tunnels to dig out more coal, although in this case they're actually setting the charges to blow up the mine as a part of protest as to how brutal their conditions are.

Into all of this comes James MacParlan (Richard Harris). Nobody knows him, and he walks into a bar talking to the miners asking about how to get a job. They don't trust him, and for good reason, when they see his hands and realize he's the sort of person who hasn't done a day of manual labor in his life, because look at his hands. He gets in a bar fight, observed by Black Jack Kehoe (Sean Connery), and gets arrested for it. The arrest is a ruse, however, as we learn MacParlan's real reason for being here. MacParlan is working for the Pinkerton detective agency, and they want to learn who's responsible for the sabotage. They've heard of an organization called the Ancient Order of Hibernians and their support for the Molly Maguires who they think are behind the sabotage. MacParlan's job is to get work at the coal mine and figure out who's leading the Molly Maguires to commit all this sabotage.

Now, any number of the miners are suspicious of him, to the point that he finds it hard to get a place to stay, under the fake name McKenna. Eventually, a poor spinster living with her father, Mary Raines (Samantha Eggar), takes him in. As you might guess, the two begin to fall in love, although things are going to be difficult because of his job being to take down the Molly Maguires and not being able to be honest about why he's in town.

Still, Kehoe and the other miners suspect him, even after he claims he fled here after murdering a man (a lie, of course, but he has to have some back story). Still, there's the old line about keeping your friends close and your enemies closer, so they bring him into the fold if only to be able to catch him out at working for the bosses. There's also the sabotage from the miners, as well as the revenge from those members of the police who are violent enough that simply taking the guilty and imprisoning them isn't enough. Will MacParlan be able to catch out the Molly Maguires before they discover he's a spy?

The Molly Maguires is the sort of movie that I don't think would have been able to be made under the Production Code, or at least would have had to be severely sanitized. A movie like Black Fury comes to mind: well-made, but a bit tame and studio-bound. The Molly McGuires has the benefit of location shooting, along with excellent performances from Connery and Harris.

I'm very glad I got around to watching The Molly Maguires, and am not sure why it isn't as well known at it should be considering the presence of Connery and Harris.

Anastasia

I've been mentioning a couple of times how FXM runs most of the movies it runs multiple times, although currently it feels as if there are a few more movies in the rotation than normal. One movie that only seems to have gotten one ainig that that I haven't seen on the schedule in months is Anastasia.

Russian Tsar Nicholas II abdicated in March 1917 after the first of the 1917 revolutions in Russia, but stayed in the country with his family. After the Communist October Revolution, the Tsar and his family were placed under house arrest in western Siberia, and ultimately murdered in the summer of 1918. However, the Communists initally only announced the death of Nicholas.

In 1928 in Paris, it was well known among the Russian émigré community that there had been at least one woman claiming to be Anastasia, the youngest of Nicholas' children, who had shown up in various parts of Europe. General Bunin (Yul Brynner) leads a group of émigrés who is trying to get at the money that Nicholas had deposited in a bank in the west, since the western countries weren't about to hand this money over to the Soviets. But to do it, he's going to need to find somebody descended from Nicholas to get the trustees to release the funds, and time is running out.

Enter Anna Anderson (Ingrid Bergman), who has previously been in Berlin and Bucharest claiming to be Anastasia but having spent time in various institutions with a substantial case of amnesia. Now, in this version of the story, Bunin considers Anna a fraud, and we're in on that knowledge. (DNA evidence from after the fall of the Soviet Union confirms Anastasia did not survive the killings.) In the 1920s, there were a lot of skeptics, but no way to confirm that Anna was in fact not Anastasia beyond intuition. So Bunin plans to train Anna to pass herself off better as Anastasia, in the hopes that this time people might actually believe that she is in fact Anastasia.

Bunin can't get the proper people in Paris to believe Anna's story, so the only other option is the long shot of going to Copenhagen, where the Dowager Empress Maria (Helen Hayes), mother of Nicholas and grandmother of Anastasia, lives after having to been able to escape Russia before the Bolsheviks took over. She understandbly doesn't believe Anna's story at all. But a member of her retinue, Prince Paul (Ivan Desny), either does believe it or is going along with it because he has a romantic interest in Anna. Meanwhile, there's also some suggestion that perhaps Anna and Bunin are also developing a romantic relationship. If Anna isn't Anastasia, perhaps she can live happily ever after some other way.

Ingrid Bergman won the Oscar for Anastasia, but after having watched the movie again (I first saw it ages ago, probably before I started this blog since a search of the blog claims I haven't done a post on it), I have to admit that I'm a bit surprised by the Oscar win here. I suppose you can argue that having to play an amnesiac pretending to be royalty is a demanding role, but it doesn't seem all that great a role to me. Then again, the other nominees aren't a particularly strong lineup. (Looking at the other nominees, I think I would have voted for Deborah Kerr in The King and I.) I'm also not certain what the Academy boters would have thought of Bergman at this point. She had been forced to leave Hollywood after her marriage to Roberto Rossellini, and this was her first role back in Hollywood. I wonder if perhaps they had more sympathy than objectivity.

Anastasia is certainly competently made, and a good example of the studio system making an opulent movie to compete with television. But I can't help but think it could have been better.

Michael York and Germany don't mix

Another of the movies that I forgot to record off of TCM and had to watch on the Watch TCM app before it expired was Zeppelin.

The year is 1915, which means that the UK and Germany are at war during the Great War. As you may recall, back in that war the Germans hoped that their relatively new airships would be able to bomb London from the air, since planes were not advanced enough to drop bombs until the next war. The British are well aware of what the Germans are doing, setting up the sort of searchlights that you've seen in a hundred other movies about the two world wars.

Stationed in London is British army lieutenant Geoffrey Richter-Douglas (Michael York), who, as you might be able to discern from the name, is of mixed heritage, both Scottish and German. Now, for various reasons, including the fact that his girlfriend is a spy, both the Germans and the English have reason to believe that Geoffrey might be useful to their side in intelligence gathering. With that in mind, Geoffrey's commanding officer suggest that he fake a defection back to Germany.

The reason for this is that the British have reason to believe the Germans are working on a more powerful zeppelin than what they've been trying to deply up to this point. Geoffrey's mission would be to get the information on the new Zeppelin, code named LZ36. He flees to Germany, even getting himself shot in the process, which also helps in that the Germans might be more likely to believe that he's sincere about his defection should anyone question him.

And as you might guess, people are going to question him. Working on the LZ36 is Prof. Altschul (Marius Goring), who has a much younger trophy wife named Erika (Elke Sommer), although she's no dummy herself and is actually working on the zeppelin, not just married to the professor. Erika thinks Geoffrey might be a spy. Some in German intelligence think so, too, but need him in part for his knowledge of the Scottish coastline which is going to be necessary for their mission. Besides, if they take him aboard the LZ36, they can keep their new friend close and enemies closer, as the phrase go.

As for that mission involving knowledge of the lay of the land in Scotland, it's a fairly audacious mission. One is to bring paratroopers armed with mustard gas over to Scotland; the other is a morale-sapping mission to invade the castle where a whole bunch of historical documents have been moved to to get them out of London where the documents would be in greater danger of being destroyed. Crazy, I know, but some of these war movies have even dafter missions.

Zeppelin isn't exactly great, but it's definitely modestly entertaining. It's definitely worth watching if it shows up again, but I'm not certain I'd pay the Warner Archive prices for it.

The Thin Man Goes Home

Myrna Loy is the Star of the Month on TCM for October, presumably because of her well-known association with the horror genre that's appropriate for Halloween. Or maybe not. Anyhow, six of her movies were part of the Thin Man series with Willam Powell, and unsurprisingly TCM are showing all six of them in a row, tonight in prime time. The fifth movie in the series, The Thin Man Goes Home, comes up overnight at 3:30 AM.

Nick Charles (William Powell again) grew up in a typical-for-Hollywood small town called Sycamore Springs, where his father Bertram (Harry Davenport) is a prominent research doctor hoping to get the money to build a new hospital with more laboratory space for him. You'd think Dr. Bertram would be old enough to retire, but he still works and his wife (Lucile Watson) is alive, the two of them living with maid Hilda who seems obnoxiously nervous all the time.

Nick and Nora (Myrna Loy, again) are returning with Asta, but not with their son who was conceived at the end of the second or third movie, the excuse being that the son is in kindergarten and Nick and Nora don't want to disturb that. Just running off and leaving him with the hired help, is, however, perfectly OK apparently. Nick has father issues, or perhaps it's Dad who has Nick issues, as Dad isn't too happy about Nick's drinking and being a police detective. But in one of this film's running jokes, Nick has given up drinking for the duration, since the film was made in 1944 at the height of World War II.

And with the war on, it's unsurprising that the murder that Nick winds up investigating is going to involve the war effort, although that's not totally revealed until the end of the film. The first night Nick and Nora are in Sycamore Springs, a man shows up at the house and wants to see Nick, only to get shot for his troubles. Obviously not by Nick, although that might make for a more interesting movie. The man in question is Peter Berton, a young but not very talented artist. In fact, Nora buys one of Berton's paintings not knowing it's by the guy who got shot in Dr. Charles' living room.

As you might guess, there are several suspects. Berton was seeing a young woman, Laura Ronson (Gloria DeHaven) although Laura's father Sam (Minor Watson) doesn't exactly like Peter as a suitable romantic match for Laura. Meanwhile, when Nick goes to the auto camp where Peter is staying to investigate Peter's death, he gets hit over the head by Crazy Mary (Anne Revere). He doesn't seem to suffer much of a concussion, however. Then there's Crump (Donald Meek), the art store owner who deals Berton's paintings, as well as the Draques, who had purchased one of Berton's paintings. There's a fairly convoluted mystery that Nick solves, bringing together all of the suspects for the final reveal that this time is a bit self-referential as Nora explains to the local police how Nick brings everyone together and how these reveals generally go.

I found The Thin Man Goes Home a rather weak entry in the series. Part of it is that the murder doesn't happen until a third of the way into the movie, and it seems unlikely that anybody would be able to put all the pieces together to solve this one. The humor isn't as funny as you might expect from a Thin Man movie, with the portion before Nick and Nora arrive in Sycamore Springs as well as every scene involving Hilda being particular weak points.

Still, the movie was a success because fans were so happy to see Nick and Nora Charles back together, and it is still William Powell and Myrna Loy.

Another movie with 1960s views of Italy

Back in the 1960s, international travel was nowhere near as easy as it is today, so one of the drawing cards of certain Hollywood movies was to film in "exotic" locations in Europe that the viewers in America would enjoy seeing, especially if people could look glamorous in such locations. The movies are of varying quality, with an example of one of the lesser movies being Three Bites of the Apple.

Chelsey Tours is one of those British companies that ran guided bus tours of Europe, making it easier for people to see a checklist of the important sites for a modest amount of money. Not that I'd want to be stuck with such touriss for a week or more. Working for the company as one of their guides is Stanley Thrumm (David McCallum). As the movie opens, the tour bus is arriving in France, on its way to Italy. They get stuck in a small town in Italy when Mrs. Tomlinson (Avril Angers) gets sick and her husband (Harvey Korman) buys her some medicine. So they have to stay in a small town for a few days longer than expected.

This gives Stanley the opportunity to walk into a building that happens to be a casino. Due to a comedy of errors a chip gets put on a number and, wouldn't you know it, that's the number that hits. Stanley feels that, being honest, he didn't intend to make the bet, so he's OK letting it ride in the hopes that it will lose and he'll be even. Instead, the number hits two more times, leaving Stanley with gambling winnings just shy of £12,000, which was a huge sum for the mid-1960s. At the casino, Stanely meets a glamorous young fellow gambler, Carla (Sylva Koscina, obviously being groomed for American stardom that never came.

Stanley likes Carla, although that's going to be complicated by the fact that another of the tourists, Miss Sparrow (Tammy Grimes), is interested in Stanley to an extent that would really be unprofessional for Stanley to get involved with. More pressing is the thought that it's going to be tough to get those gambling winnings out of Italy because of capital controls and the thought that the money might be taxed to a substantial extent. Stanley comes up with a plan that perhaps Carla can help him get the cash out of Italy.

Carla starts thinking about a way to get the money for herself. She's got an ex-husband, Remo (Domenico Modugno), who might be able to help, although he's also going to get in on the deal for his own interests and not so much Carla's. Stanley seems to be oblivious to all this as he brings Carla on the tour. Miss Sparrow gets jealous of Carla and threatens to bollix everything as the tour goes through various scenic spots in Italy and into Switzerland.

The plot of Three Bites of the Apple doesn't really work, and it's remarkable that a guy like Stanley could seem so stupid. The movie also tries to inject comedy into the proceedings, which also doesn't really work. I couldn't help but wonder whether the studio and second-tier director cared more about showing scenery than moving the plot along and making the story work.

Harry and Walter Go to New York

One of the movies that TCM ran on Diane Keaton's day in Summer Under the Stars was Harry and Walter Go to New York. As is my wont, a made a point to watch it since I had never seen it before, which would give me the opportunity to put up a post on it.

The movie opens up in Sudbury, MA, in 1892. Harry Digby (James Caan) and Walter Hill (Elliott Gould) are a vaudeville double act doing a musical number, although they also do other stuff like a phony clairvoyant bit. In between the two acts, the action shifts to New York. Adam Worth (Michael Caine) is a gentleman thief who likes to rob banks, keep the cash, and then sell back the bonds. Indeed, he's about to sell the bonds back that he robbed from a bank in Massachusetts. Unfortunately, the bank president brought some police with a Massachusetts bench warrant.

As for Harry and Walter, their clairvoyant act is an excuse to pilfer cash out of the paying customers' wallets. Multiple men figure out that they've been robbed, and they too bring in the police. So as you can guess, Harry and Walter also get sent to prison, and it's the same prison where Adam is sent. Why else would the characters be introduced in this way? Anyhow, Adam has the sort of pull that Noël Coward's character in The Italian Job does, and is able to get the plans to a bank in Lowell, MA, that he's planning to rob just to show that any bank can be robbed.

This gives Harry and Walter an idea. When the reformer Lissa Chestnut (Diane Keaton) shows up with a newspaper photographer, Harry and Walter plan to get a picture of the plans, so that they can rob the bank themselves. Not that they know anything about how to carry out a bank robbery. And not that Adam is going to be happy with them if he finds out, which he is because in their attempts to get the photo they burn the plans. But they're able to escape prison with the help of some nitroglycerin, while Adam gets pardoned and goes back to New York. Unfortunately Harry and Walter have to go to New York themselves to get the picture they took of those plans, meaning they run into Adam again who is really pissed.

Eventually everybody gets to Lowell for the climactic bank robbery. The bank is next to a theater, and Harry and Walter plan to blow the door off the vault during the big musical number near the end of the show so that nobody will hear the explosives. Of course, the plans don't quite go off as planned, forcing Harry and Watler to take more drastic action while both Adam and the bank president Crisp (Charles Durning) are on their tails.

With a cast like this and a wacky heist plot, you'd think you're in for a fun little caper movie. Unfortunately, the movie totally fails. Caan and Gould are both irritating in their comic mugging, and the plot is full of incongruencies, with no good reason for Harry and Walter to wind up in the same cell as Adam as one example. It also goes on much too long, at 111 minutes.

The Man I Killed

Well, OK, I didn't kill a man. But The Man I Killed is the title of the play on which our next movie was based, as well as an alternate title for the movie itself: Broken Lullaby.

The Great War ended on November 11, 1918. As it was the so-called "war to end all wars", the first anniversary of the armistice was marked in a way that it's not marked today, at least not in the US. As the movie opens, a memorial Mass is being celebrated in Notre Dame cathedral in Paris, with a whole bunch of military men in attendance. One man remains after the Mass, on his knees in prayer and seemingly distraught, noticed by the priest who officiated the Mass.

The young man in question is Paul Renard (Phillips Holmes), a former music student who was drafted by the French. His confession is that he killed a German soldier and can't get the face of the soldier he killed out of his mind, which has greatly reduced his ability to function in life. Worse, he saw the soldier's last letter so he knows the soldier's name, Walter Holderlin, as well as the fact that Walter was a fellow musician who had actually studied in Paris before the war and didn't hate the French the way that most German people did.

Paul decides that the way to expiate his perceived sins is to go to Walter's grave since he knows where Walter lived, as well as meet with any of Walter's surviving family to apologize for what he did. When he gets to the town where Walter is buried, we learn that Walter's father is a physician (Lionel Barrymore), who hasn't gotten over the fact that his son died. Ditto Mom (Louise Carter). Worse, Walter left behind a fiancée, Elsa (Nancy Carroll), who happens to spot this strange man who has been attracting gossip and rumor in town as Paul is putting flowers on Walter's grave.

Paul eventually sees Dr. Holderlin, who understandably doesn't want to see any Frenchman since he considers all of France responsible for his son's death. But when Elsa mentions Paul's having left flowers on Walter's grave, that gives Paul the chance to explain himself. In the film's critical moment, Paul is unable to bring himself to tell the actual truth, since that would destroy Walter's parents. Instead, he lies that he knew Walter at the conservatory and that as a result he doesn't really harbor any ill feelings toward the Germans.

The Holderlin parents warm to Paul, with Elsa doing so even further. And yet, among the rest of the townsfolk the gossip only continues to grow. And certainly, at some point Paul isn't going to be able to keep up the lie. After all, if Paul and Walther had been at the conservatory together for that long, he'd know Walter well enough to answer some of the questions about the past that are bound to come up. So what's going to happen when the truth finally does come out?

Broken Lullaby answers that question in an interesting way, which I won't spoil beyond saying the solution is one that is a big reason why the movie wasn't a financial success. Phillips Holmes is also a bit too over the top at times, although Carroll and Barrymore do a good job with an intriguing presence and interesting script. Broken Lullaby is definitely an unconventional Hollywood movie.

Not yet

I've mentioned on several occasions how I wound up with a substantial number of foreign films on my DVR that I don't always get around to watching before they expire. One that I did in fact watch is Akira Kurosawa's final film, Madadayo.

Tatsuo Matsumara plays Hyakken Uchida, a teacher of German at an all-boys school during the height of World War II. He's getting on in years a bit, but not yet so old that when he announces he's retiring to focus on his writing and the fact that he can live modestly off the proceeds of his writing, it's a shock to everybody. But retire he does, and he and his wife downsize.

Uchida is apparently one of those teachers who had an impact on his students, because all of those past students seem to admire him, to the point of coming to his house at the height of the war just to celebrate his birthday with a less-than-suitable feast because, well, you know there's a war on and the Japanese are inexorably losing. Part of that losing the the Americans' ability to carry out air raids on the Home Islands of Japan, and in one of those raids, the Uchidas' house is destroyed.

They're forced to move into a shack that's open to the elements, at least until the end of the war, when his still-admiring students look into finding a plot of land where they can move their professor and get him a better house. Also after the war, the students organize a better birthday party, which they call the "Not Yet" party (the film's title "Madadayo" means "not yet") because when they ask Uchida whether he's ready to die, he responds "Not yet!". The students are able to get a nice house built, as well as impressing on a neighboring landowner not to sell out to somebody who wants to build a house tall enough to block the sun from Uchida's house.

Madadayo is more a series of vignettes than a movie with a full plot, so the next portion of the film focuses on a stray cat that shows up at the Uchida place and basically adopts the professor and his wife. Uchida loves the cat, and is devastated when the cat goes missing in a rain storm, never to return. But everybody in the neighborhood drops everything to look for the cat in the hopes of finding it and bringing Uchida out of his depression.

Finally, we fast forward to when Uchida is about to celebrate his 77th birthday, in the early 1960s. He has one more "Not yet" party, although this one doesn't have quite the ending as the earlier parties. But then director Akira Kurosawa was in his early 80s when he made this movie, and obviously thinking himself about themes of growing old and looking back at life.

Madadayo has a fair bit to recommend it, but it's also not a perfect movie. The relative lack of a plot may not be suitable for everyone. More importantly, and I'm not the only person to have mentioned this in the reviews I read, but the segment with the missing cat goes on far too long. Indeed, the movie as a whole is 134 minutes, which is a bit too long. There's a resonance to a film like Goodbye Mr. Chips which is also about a teacher, but I also found myself thinking about Harry and Tonto which deals with the idea that the elderly still have something to offer us and a sense of dignity that needs to be preserved.

Eva Marie Saint, 1924-2026

Eva Marie Saint learning from Marlon Brando how he was involved in her brother's death in On the Waterfront

Oscar-winning actress Eva Marie Saint died on Tuesday at the age of 102. Saint didn't actually make as many movies as one might think, even though TCM ran a bunch of them when she was star of the month for her 100th birthday in July 2024. In addition to winning the Oscar for On the Waterfront, Saint is well known for appearing opposite Cary Grant in North by Northwest. A Hatful of Rain doesn't get as much attention as it should.

As of this writing, I haven't seen anything from TCM about a programming tribute. There's enough going on in October with all the Hollywood movies and Mario Cantone hogging the channel that I'd guess a tribute is being pushed back to November.

Sayonara Sinatra

Another of the movies that I recorded the last time it showed up on TCM that's getting another showing is The First Deadly Sin. That next airing is early tomorrow morning at 4:00 AM, or at the end of tonight's prime time lineup if you want to look at it that way.

The movie starts off with some interesting intercutting. On the one hand, we have a woman on the operating table getting surgery for some sort of kidney condition. On the other, it's the streets of New York City at night, and one man comes up with what looks like some sort of hammer, and bashes another man to death with it! The two turn out to be indirectly related, in that the woman on the operating table is Barbara Delaney (Faye Dunaway), the wife of New York police detective Edward Delaney (Frank Sinatra).

Edward has a lot on his mind, because the surgery goes wrong, forcing the surgeon, Dr. Berardi, to remove one of Barbara's kidneys. Meanwhile, in the murder case, the coroner, Dr. Ferguson (James Whitmer), reveals to Edward that the wound from the weapon is circular, which is interesting in that it means the murder must have been committed with a weapon that's not all that common. It also turns out that there's a series of unsolved murders that seem to have involved similar wounds.

So Edward calls upon someone who doesn't work for the police, but is an expert in obscure weapons, Christopher Langley (Martin Gabel) at the Metropolitan Museum. He doesn't know of any weapons in his ambit that might have caused the death, but is intrigued by the case and decides to help investigate by going to hardware stores. They can't really help him, beyond suggesting that perhaps it might be the sort of ice axe that mountain climbers use. That's actually good information, since not many people use such an implement. And when Langley goes to the sporting goods store to investigate, he gets a list of people who have bought the sort of ice axe that was used in the murder.

So Edward starts doing some investigating of the sort that the police department wouldn't really approve of and would probably result in all the evidence gathered being thrown out of court. The first guy obviously couldn't have done it, since he was paralyzed in a mountain climbing accident. The second man, however, Daniel Blank (David Dukes), seems like a much more likely suspect. Then again, the way the movie is edited, it's already led us to believe that this is the killer. Meanwhile, another attempted killing goes wrong, and there's still the situation with Edward's wife, which is many ways is really extraneous to the plot.

The murder mystery part of The First Deadly Sin is reasonably well done, and the sort of movie where I can see why Frank Sinatra would want to do it. But there's that whole pointless subplot involving the Faye Dunaway character, who really has a thankless acting task here. So the movie as a whole feels like a bit of a mishmash that doesn't always work. Frank Sinatra was 64 at the time he made this, and it was pretty much his last real movie apart from some cameos. It's not a bad way to go out, although it could have been better.

Why not Anthropoid

One of the more daring operations in World War II was the plan to kill Reinhard Heydrich, the Nazi Reichsprotektor of the Czech lands. It was known enough to be the subject of two movies at the height of World War II, Hangmen Also Die and Hitler's Madman (airing today at 12:30 PM on TCM, hence scheduling this post today), as well as the much more recent Anthropoid. In between came a co-production between the west and Communist Czechoslovakia, Operation Daybreak.

One thing I didn't realize about Operation Anthropoid is that the Free Czech paratroopers who parachuted into the country from Britain in fact did so in December 1941, quite a few months before the actual assassination on May 27, 1942. The movie opens with three of the paratroopers: Kubiš (Timothy Bottoms), Gabčík (Anthony Andrews), and Čurda (Martin Shaw) being brought in to see a Czech General in exile who is telling them about the plan since Heydrich (Anton Diffring) is considered a second-in-command to Hitler who could take over the Nazi leadership were Hitler to die and is thought of as more intelligent than Hitler. The men all accept the assignment, and parachute in to ares near Prague, landing in the snow (which is what prompted me to look up more of the details of the operation).

Eventually, the paratroopers meet up in Prague with members of the Czech resistance, personified as members of General Moravec's extended family. The first plan is to shoot at Heydrich while his train is leaving the station in Prague, with Kubiš shooting from a control room at the station, but another train passes by just at the exact wrong moment, thwarting the plan. Of course, if you've seen any of the other movies, you'll know that Heydrick was really killed as a result of his car being attacked. This time is was Gabčík's job to shoot Heydrich, but when his gun jams, Kubiš throws a grenade into the car.

The Nazis are, understandably, pissed about one of their higher-ups being so brazenly assassinated. They also have that repuation of being brutal, so it's natural that their reprisal is going to be nasty. They destroy the village of Lidice, and set up a manhunt for the people involved in the plot to kill Heydrich. They're more than willing to commit torture and further reprisals, but Čurda eventually cracks and reveals details about who was in the group and where they were being kept. By this time, the rest of the members of the assassination plot had holed up in a church, but it was already too late. The Nazis were able to surround the church, and all of the plotters were killed (or killed themselves) in the church.

I found it interesting that Operation Daybreak was an international co-production, meaning that they were able to film on location in Prague. This gives the movie an air of authenticity. However, I also couldn't help but think about the fact that in real life, the Free Czechs who had been based in London were decidedly not considered heroes by the Communists who ran the country after 1948. There's little if anything in the way of Communist politics in the way of the movie, which is competent if a bit straightforward in its storytelling. The plotters don't get the time to be complex characters, for example.

Worse, though, is the print that TCM ran. It's only in 4:3, when the original aspect ratio was 1.85:1. Worse is that it had some sort of motion problem, as though there were visual frames missing but there's nothing wrong with the soundtrack. This gives large portions of the print a sort of jerky motion that for me was disconcerting to watch.

Ösz Badacsonyban

I mentioned a couple of years back that I bought a Kino Lorber box set of movies from Hungarian director Miklós Jancsó, although I haven't mentioned anything about it in over a year. So with that in mind, I put in another of the discs that has a couple of shorts, and watched the short Autumn in Badacsony.

I didn't know anything about Badacsony, but Wikipedia helpfully informs us that it is the name of both a region on the north shore of Lake Balaton, one of the biggest lakes in Central Europe, and a mountain that towers over the lake. This short starts off by mentioning some Hungarian poet I'd never heard of who lived in the region, and a romantic legend of how he met his wife by a famouse "rose stone".

But the region is better known for its wine production, and it is with that that the bulk of this 18-minute short deals. A certain Mr. Ihasz is part of a family that's been growing grapes in the region for five generations, and it's hard work because if you ever take a break from keeping the weeds at bay, they'll take over like, well, weeds. But now that the Communists are in power, everyone is able to work together and put a lot of manpower -- and womanpower on the case.

Well, Jancsó doesn't put it quite so bluntly, which is to the benefit of the short. But it's clear that Jancsó is constrained in what he can say and, whatever he might have thought about the Communists, he's not about to bad-mouth them. Ihasz goes to see the People's Committee to tell them that he has a lot to offer, and as we see, he does do a lot of work.

Badacson is mentioned to be a mountain of volcanic origin, and basaltic soils are a well-known factor in many terroirs in wine-making. That and the steep slopes seem very well fit for growing grapes, and the wines produced here are portrayed as excellent. This may or may not be true; I haven't drunk much Hungarian wine since little is available where I live. And certainly, the portrayal is partly the sort you'd see in a promotional ad from the tourist board. That's further emphasised by the final act of this short dealing with the harvest festival. This act also shows how everybody works together the way Communists like to say people do to harvest the grapes and start producing the wine.

I have no idea how much of the footage here is authentic and how much is staged -- indeed, a lot of this feels like a foreign version of a Traveltalks short -- but Jancsó shows he's got a good technical command of how to make a movie on a specific subject. Unfortunately, this being the early 1950s and being early in Jancó's career, Jancsó likely didn't have access to color film stock. That, and the Communist authorities who commissioned this weren't thinking in terms of art but simply documenting a wine harvest. In any case, the scenery really cries out for color.

Autumn in Badacsony is interesting enough, although in the end it is just a documentary short. I'm definitely glad I got the chance to see it despite any shortcomings it may have.

TCM Star of the Month October 2026: Myrna Loy

Myrna Loy (l.) with Clark Gable, Jean Harlow, and Spencer Tracy in Libeled Lady (October 5, 8:00 PM)

We're into the first full week of a new month, which means that it's time for a new Star of the Month. This time out, that star is Myrna Loy, who was also Star of the Month back in December 2016 meaning that I've already got a couple of photos that I used back then and I can use again. One thing that's different about this month's programming is that Myrna Loy made enough movies that her films start in the daytime on Monday rather than other times where TCM would schedule the movies to start in prime time and continue into the following day if there were that many movies.

The movies are scheduled somewhat in chronological order and somewhat thematically. The daytime scheduling is chronological, and I'm sorry to say that by the time you read this you'll probably have missed Loy's silent movies. I'm hoping they show up on Watch TCM. The daytime programming is almost entirely 1930s films; I didn't realize just how many 1930s films Loy made.

William Powell, Myrna Loy, and Asta in a publicity still from one of the Thin Man movies

The first two Mondays in prime time feature Loy with William Powell. October 12 is a marathon of all six Thin Man movies, which is going to give me the chance to do a blog post on one of the Thin Man movies that aired back on New Year's. Those movies are technically expired from my DVR now, but I watched one before they expired and already wrote up and scheduled a post on it.

Myrna Loy, Melvyn Douglas, and Cary Grant in Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (October 20, 12:45 AM)

The final two Mondays jump ahead, with Myrna Loy mostly in the second half of the 1940s on October 19, and in the 1950s and beyond on October 26. October 26 also brings a rare TCM showing for From the Terrace and one for Airport '75.

Not always a bride

Back in June 2025 I did a post on a movie called Always a Bride. Some months back I recorded a Ross Alexander movie called Brides Are Like That. Only after watching the movie did I realize that this one and Always a Bride came from the same source material, a play from the early 1920s.

Ross Alexander stars as Bill McAllister, a wastrel playboy living with his uncle Fred (Joseph Cawthorne) presumably because both of his parents are dead. Ross went to college not to get a good education and respectable job, but to play football. Indeed, he doesn't want to work at all, which makes him a rather unsympathetic character. He's even bought an engagement ring for his would-be fiancée, but charges it to Uncle Fred's account, uncle being rich from his shipping business.

Said girlfriend is Hazel Robinson (Anita Louise). She's the child of orchard owner John (Gene Lockhart) and his wife Ella (Gene's real-life wife Kathleen). They understandably wish their daughter to marry somebody respectable, and indeed Hazel does have just such a respectable person pursuing her, in the form of a doctor named Randolph Jenkins (Dick Purcell). However, Bill is just so charming that he's able to convince Hazel to break off her relationship with Dr. Jenkins in order to marry him.

Bill's uncle and Hazel's parents both have the good sense not to want to support Bill directly financially, although Hazel is able to get her father to agree to a somewhat reasonable compromise: he'll find a job for Bill, and Bill should agree to take it. Bill is just so obnoxious, though, that he basically refuses this, instead deciding to tinker around and work on some invention that will allow apples to last longer in transit. The only thing to his credit is that he really is working on this and has been talking to another distribution company about testing the device, which is a fancy thermos box, and something you'd think wouldn't work.

Meanwhile, Bill is facing increasing financial difficulty to the point that Hazel's parents have gotten her this close to agreeing to move back in with them, unless Bill agrees to take the job Dad is offering him. But we know this is a movie that's going to have a happy ending, and Bill is going to come out OK in the end.

One thing that Brides Are Like This doesn't have that Always a Bride added was the political corruption subplot. This one is more about whether Bill will get a real job. Unfortunately, it's still a subpar movie, in large part because Bill spends the entire movie up until the final reel being an obnoxious jerk of the sort that you can't understand why anybody would want to marry him. A woman would never be able to have a stable life with him, and it's not as if he's that good-looking to overcome such stuff.

Brides Are Like That is decided second-tier material, and even if Ross Alexander hadn't had the personal problems that drove him to commit suicide, it seems clear that he wasn't going to become a big star, but the sort of person whose star would have faded with the start of World War II.

Death on the Nile (1978)

I've done posts on two of the four movies in which Margaret Rutherford played Agatha Christie's sleuth Miss Marple, and believe I have the other two sitting on my DVR. A dozen or so years later, there was a vogue started with 1974's Murder on the Orient Express of making movies of especially the Hercule Poirot stories, with an all-star cast of suspects. One that I haven't done a post on before is Death on the Nile. So when it last showed up on TCM I recorded it to watch, write up this post, and save it to be posted at some later date either when it airs again or when I haven't posted on a mystery movie in a while.

As with the other all-star extravaganzas based on Christie works, we meet the characters much the same way the mastermind in a heist movie rounds up the people he needs to help him commit that heist. One is Jacqueline de Bellefort (Mia Farrow), who is engaged to be married to Simon Doyle (Simon MacCorkindale). Jackie has a friend, Linnet (Lois Chiles), who has an estate that needs looking after in the UK. She's got a lawyer, Pennington (George Kennedy), who is responsible for part of her affairs, but hires Simon to look after the actual estate. Unfortunately for Jackie, Linnet and Simon fall in love, get married, and go on honeymoon in Egypt, with Jackie basically stalking them and Penning trying to get Linnet to sign some papers that may or may not be in her interest to do so.

Eventually, to get away from Jackie, Linnet and Simon decide to go on a cruise up the Nile, which is where we meet the other characters. Peter Ustinov plays Poirot, so we know he's not the killer when someone actually gets bumped off. Colonel Race (David Niven) is a lawyer who suspects Pennington is up to no good. Salome Otterbourne (Angela Lansbury) is a trashy romance novelist who wrote a book that led Linnet to threaten a libel suit; Salome is traveling with her daughter Rosalie (Olivia Hussey). Louise (Jane Birkin) had worked for Linnet at the estate, and was expecting to get a bonus after the marriage that never materialized. And then there's Mrs. Van Schuyler, one of those Americans of the 1930s who seems to know everybody or at least claims to, and also has a yen for stealing jewels, of which Linnet has a bunch. Mrs. Van Schulyer is traveling with Bowers (Maggie Smith), a woman who thinks Linnet's father duped her family out of their wealth. So as you can see, a lot of people have reason not to like one another and be suspects when somebody finally gets murdered.

Now, the one person who is apparently not the suspect is Jackie. She gets drunk and shoots Simon in the leg one night, but some of the other passengers give her a sedative which knocks her out for the night. So the following morning, when Linnet is found quite dead, Jackie is the one person who seems like the most natural suspect but also has the best alibi for not having done it.

So, then, who did it? Obviously, I'm not going to tell, but Poirot starts putting his little gray cells to the test, interrogating each of the other passengers with a little help from Col. Race. Poirot also gets a cobra in his cabin for his trouble, although there's the question of who would have had access to a cobra making it seem more like a bit of a red herring. There's also at least one more murder, so we'll be able to get rid of another person as the suspect. For the climax, Poirot brings everybody together and correctly solves the case.

To be honest, I found the actual solving of the case more unrealistic than some other Agatha Christie movies I've seen, although not anywhere near Manhattan Murder Mystery which I watched not too far apart from Death on the Nile. Then again, with these all-star mysteries, part of the point is to watch the stars as much as the story. Everybody looks like they're having fun here, but I think there's a reason that Death on the Nile isn't as well-remembered as Murder on the Orient Express.

Man of a Thousand Faces

TCM's lineup tonight is dedicated to silent screen star Lon Chaney, starting with an old documentary. The first feature film up is not a movie starring Chaney, but a biopic that aired a couple of months back when TCM did a spotlight on Hollywood biopics of Hollywood stars. That movie is Man of a Thousand Faces, at 9:30 PM.

The movie starts off mentioning that Hollywood came to a standstill for one day in August 1930 to honor one of their old stars. Irving Thalberg (Robert Evans, who would go on to become a producer) enters a sound studio that had been the filming location for films like The Unknown that starred one of MGM's early stars, Lon Chaney, who has recently died. (Phantom of the Opera was made at Universal, as was Man of a Thousand Faces, which I supposed made for some interesting discussion between the studios.) As you might guess, this is the opportunity for the film to go into a flashback, because as I mention over and over, it's a highly original way for a movie to introduce its story.

In the early 1890s, young Lon Chaney is living in Colorado Springs, as the child of two deaf parents, something that causes Lon a lot of grief because the other kids treat him terribly. But it also gave him the ability to communicate without having to speak, which would eventually become useful when he got to Hollywood. But before Hollywood, there was a career in vaudeville with his first wife Cleva Creighton (Dorothy Malone). They're working a crappy part of vaudeville, and Cleva gets them fired for her lack of punctuality exacerbated by the fact that she's pregnant with what would become Lon Chaney Jr., although Lon Jr.'s given name was Creighton.

Lon takes his wife back to his family in Colorado Springs, which is where Cleva learns that Lon's parents are both deaf, something that Lon couldn't bring himself to tell Cleva up to this point. And with good reason, since she believes in the stereotypes that deaf people are some sort of freak. Worse, she's worried that if Lon's parents are deaf, there's a very high possibility that her child is going to be deaf too. The kid isn't, but it's something that causes tension for the rest of Lon and Cleva's marriage as she still wants work of her own to help support the family. Helping look after the boy is vaudevillean chorus girl Hazel Bennet (Jane Greer). Cleva and her boyfriend think Lon and Hazel are having an affair, one of the things that leads Cleva to walk out on her and the marriage to end in divorce.

But this being the early 1910s, Lon is deemed unsuitable to raise a child by himself, so young Creighton is declared a ward of the state and put in a foster home. Lon is determined to get a good enough job to be able to get his son a stable home, leading him to head out to Hollywood. Having been in vaudeville, he knew how to play a multitude of characters, and he also has a way with the sort of Hollywood makeup necessary to personify those characters on screen. That latter is a very useful skill for Lon in trying to get work as an extra, although being an extra is not enough to get custody of his son back.

Eventually, Lon's old agent Clarence Locan (Jim Backus) also decamps to Hollywood, and, finding Lon, also brings Hazel along. Hazel is the one who has the perception to figure out that what the state wants to consider Lon a fit father is for him to have a mother for the child, even if it's a stepmother. The fact that she was somewhat in love with Lon back when Cleva thought they were having an affair helps, and Lon marries Hazel, getting custody of adolescent Creighton. Clarence is also able to get Lon a bigger job, which is the first stepping stone on the way to Hollywood stardom.

Now, of course, we know that Lon is going to die young in 1930 from the flashback structure in addition to this being a biopic. The final act, therefore, is concerned with Lon having a difficult relationship with his son, in part because Creighton wants to follow his father into acting and in part because Cleva shows up wanting to see her son. Lon isn't thrilled with the idea because, to be fair, she basically abandoned the kid, and because Lon dealt with the abandonment by telling Creighton that Cleva had died. It's less bad, I suppose, than telling a young boy that Mom abandoned them.

James Cagney, unsurprisingly, gives a good performance in Man of a Thousand Faces. There are some liberties taken with Chaney's real life, although they're somewhat less substantial than in a lot of other biopics. Showing, for example, that Hazel had an ex-husband who was a double amputee is surprising but, from what I've read, is actually the truth. The one flaw that the movie has is that it runs a bit over two hours, which is longer than the movie needs to be. I think it spends a bit too long on Lon's pre-Hollywood life. But mostly, Man of a Thousand Faces works and is one of the better biopics I've seen.

The Angel Levine

TCM last December ran a series of movies that dealt with themes of divine intervention. One that was new to me was The Angel Levine. Once again, since the synopsis sounded interesting, I decided to record it and eventually got around to watching it not long before it expired from my DVR.

Zero Mostel stars as Morris Mishkin, a quintessentially Jewish character, although that's not surprising considering that this is based on a short story by Bernard Malamud. Mishkin is a tailor who's got a mess of a life as his business had dried up; his daughter married out of the faith which in some ways destroyed him; and his wife Fanny (Ida Kaminska) is bedridden with a heart condition. To make matters worse, as Morris is in a delicatessen buying food for him and his wife, he sees a woman getting her coat stolen! Morris points out the thief, who promptely runs out of the deli and gets hit by a car in the middle of the street, dying on the scene.

Then, when Morris gets back to the apartment, his wife suffers another attack of her heart ailment, causing Morris to call for Dr. Berg (Milo O'Shea). It's all enough for a man to lose his faith, and Morris wonders to God why God has forsaken him. Morris can't even get help from the civil authorities in the form of the welfare office where he goes looking for help.

And then, while Morris is waiting for Dr. Berg to show up, Morris goes into the kitchen and finds -- a black man! This being New York circa 1970, when New York was on the trajectory to where a few years later Gerald Ford would tell the city to drop dead, Morris comes to the perfectly logical conclusion that this guy is somebody who's come to rob the house. But the man claims to be Alexander Levine (Harry Belafonte), an angel in training sent by God as divine intervention for Morris. Alexander has died recently (and in fact is the thief killed at the beginning of the movie), and is supposed to perform a miracle. Not that Morris believes this. And when Dr. Berg shows up, he can't see Alexander. And yet, Fanny seems to have had a sudden improvement to the point that Dr. Berg wonders why Morris would have called him.

Things continue like this, with Morris always uncertain whether Levine is or is not in fact an angel. Complicating matters is that Levine had a life of his own before he got hit by that car and killed. Levine had a girlfriend Sally (Gloria Foster), who doesn't know that he has been hit by a car and killed. But their relationship has been difficult, and Sally wasn't certain whether she wanted to continue it anyway. As for Morris, he still isn't certain whether Levine is an angel and whether he can perform a miracle, especially when Fanny has another relapse.

I have to point out that I haven't read the original Malamud story, so I can't comment on how much the story was changed when it was adapted for the big screen. What I can say is that the premise is certainly interesting, but the execution doesn't quite work. I think that's mostly the result of the screenplay. I'm not the biggest fan of Harry Belafonte, and as I've pointed out he's generally been the weak point in the movies that I've seen. THat's not the case here, however. He, Mostel, and Kaminska all do well, or at least as well as can be expected considering the script really letting things down in the second half of the movie.

One other interesting thing is that when this was shown on TCM, Ben Mankiewicz made certain to point out that Zero Mostel had fallen afoul of the Hollywood blacklist. However, while he pointed out that the movie's director Ján Kadár was Slovak and had directed The House on Main Street, he didn't point out that Kadár wound up in Hollywood because he was more or less blacklisted by the Czechoslovak communists after the Soviet invasion of 1968. Apparently some blacklists are OK for Ben Mankiewicz.