What happens when you DVR the wrong movie

June Allyson was part of this year's Summer Under the Stars. One of the movies I thought about putting on the DVR was The Girl in White. Unfortunately, I recorded the wrong title, instead getting Two Sisters from Boston. They're both on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive collection, so I sat down to watch Two Sisters from Boston to do a post on it.

June plays Martha Chandler, one of the two titular sisters along with Abigail (Kathryn Grayson, so you should know from seeing her name in the cast what sort of movie you're getting) at the turn of the last century. Their family is one of those Boston Brahmin types like in The Late George Apley, very proper and doing things like sponsoring musical recitals. They've also helped support Abigail in her desire to become an opera singer in New York.

But word comes to Martha and Abigail's uncle Jonathan (Harry Hayden) that Abigail has been seen working in a burlesque house in the Bowery! That's bad enough for any patrician family, but Uncle Jonathan is running for mayor, and if the news comes out it would torpedo his candidacy. So they go to New York to find out if this is true, and get her back to Boston if so.

Abigail is in fact working as "High C Susie", at the Golden Rooster, a club run by Spike (Jimmy Durante), although she's not about to tell any of her family this. Her family's support money ran out, and she needed to support herself, after all. She insists that she's had small roles in legitimate operas, and even makes the claim that she's got one tonight. So of course the rest of the family plans to stay on to see her in the opera, which is going to blow the ruse.

Except that Spike is a Jack Carson-level schemer, and knows who the biggest patron of the opera is, Mr. Patterson (Thurston Hall). He uses this info to get Abigail backstage, and from there she works her way not only on stage, but to upstage the lead tenor, Olstrom (Danish opera singer Lauritz Melchior), in a way that causes a whole lot of consternation. Olstrom would like to black-ball this unknown member of the chorus, while Mr. Patterson's son Lawrence (Peter Lawford) thinks she's carrying on an affair with Dad since she used Dad's name to get into the chorus.

Complications ensue, but in the end Abigail gets her chance to be a star while the Lawford and Allyson characters wind up together as you could probably guess. It's the sort of story that offers nothing groundbreaking, but in the right context can be more then entertaining. Unfortunately for me, this time the context is opera, something which in the movies I really don't care for. Grayson isn't bad here when she's not singing, and I suppose opera singers would like her singing. I also have to admit I've never really been a Peter Lawford fan.

Still, this isn't meant to pan the movie. It's more that it's going to be an acquired taste, appealing much more to people who like opera than to people who don't care for it so much. To be fair, I also find Grayson less irritating that Jeanette MacDonald, and either of them far less irritating than Nelson Eddy And Durante is as good here as he always is, although I'll admit that there are probably people who don't care for his shtick. So Two Sisters from Boston is one I'll give a qualified recommendation to -- if you know in advance what it's about.

Dirty Rotten Scoundrels

DirecTV had a free preview of the Epix package of channels over the summer, which gave me the chance to DVR several more recent films. Among them is Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, which is going to be on Epix2 on Sunday morning at 9:50 AM, and is also available on DVD if you don't have the Epix package.

Michael Caine, looking almost unrecognizable with his hair slicked back, plays Lawrence Jamieson, a British man living in a ritzy town on the French Riviera where he plies his trade of fleecing rich women out of their money. He's got the help of the local police chief, Inspector Andre (Anton Rodgers), at least in the form of looking the other way and not doing anything about it. His latest scam has him pretending to be a prince trying to get money out of Fanny (Barbara Harris).

On a train back from depositing money in his Swiss bank account, Lawrence meets Freddy Benson (Steve Martin). Freddy is also a con artist, but much less suave than Lawrence. Lawrence has heard of a criminal called "the Jackal", but doesn't know anything about the Jackal's identity, only that apparently the Jackal is about to set up shop in the same town where Lawrence has been working. The town isn't big enough for two con artists, and Lawrence doesn't really like Freddy anyway, so Lawrence gets Freddy on a plane out of town.

The only problem is that Freddy meets Fanny on the plane. So now Freddy has something to blackmail Lawrence with, which he's bound to do. Freddy persuades Lawrence to try to teach him how to be more elegant, and the two pull off another con. But Lawrence still doesn't care for Freddy, so the two make a wager. They'll find a new mark, and the one of them to con her out of $50,000 will get to stay in town while the other is forced to leave.

They soon meet a suitable mark in Janet Colgate (Glenne Headley), an American soap heiress. Freddy tries to pass himself off as an American navy officer paralyzed from the waist down with some sort of mental condition, needing $50,000 to see a specialist to get better. Lawrence passes himself off as Dr. Emil Schaffhusen, a Liechtensteinian doctor who could treat Freddy for that $50,000. So the game is on.

Or, at least, it is until the two find out that Janet is not in fact a soap heiress. She's the "soap queen" because she won a contest in the States, and is only on an all-expenses paid trip presumably promoting an American detergent. In fact, the only way she could get the $50,000 is to sell off a bunch of her assets. On top of this, it doesn't help that Freddy is beginning to find himself falling in love with her, while Lawrence has a strict thing against bilking people who can't afford to be the victim.

Dirty Rotten Scoundrels is a fun little movie with a lot of twists and turns, aided enormously by the two leading men. Both of them fit their parts extremely well, Caine as an elegant con and Martin with his more stereotypically American brashness. Headley is also a treat as the woman between them. It's a shame that she died much too young. The movie is also helped by the gorgeous location shooting and a really nice score.

I can most definitely recommend Dirty Rotten Scoundrels.

Thursday Movie Picks #270: Non-English movies

This being Thursday, it's time for another edition of Thursday Movie Picks, the blogathon run by Wandering Through the Shelves. This week's theme is a repeat, non-English movies. I assume it means English as in the language, or else it would be too easy to pick any three Hollywood films -- after all, Hollywood is American, not English! The only difficulty with a a theme like this is picking movies I haven't used recently, and don't want to use in the near future. So I picked three films I watched relatively recently:

Dollar (1938). Made by Ingrid Bergman before she came to Hollywood, this one has her as the wife of a business man angling for an investment in his company. The two are also involved in a complicated series of love triangles involving two other married couples. All of the couples go to a ski resort in northern Sweden, where they're supposed to meet the American cousin of one of them, who might have some money to invest, and who teaches them all a few things about relationships.

Alice in the Cities (1974). Wim Wenders' tedious movie about a photojournalist returning from America to Germany, who gets stuck with a bratty, faux-precocious child in tow when another traveler says she'll meet up with him on a flight the next day but doesn't. The journalist tries to find the little girl's grandparents, not having much information to go on. I didn't care for any of the characters, and wondered why the man didn't take the girl right back to the police after she escaped and returned to him.

Andrei Rublev (1966). A series of short stories involving 15th century Russian icon painter Rublev, who lived in Russia at a turbulent time in its history. This is considered one of the all-time greats by a lot of people, but I have to admit I found it underwhelming. It doesn't help that it runs a good three hours.

Mother Didn't Tell Me

Another movie that I watched over the weekend was Mother Didn't Tell Me, which is available on DVD from Fox's MOD scheme.

Dorothy McGuire plays Jane Morgan, a working girl who gets sick with a hacking cough one day and has to see a doctor right away, which is how she ends up at the office of Dr. William Wright (William Lundigan). Jane comes across as a bit selfish, as she's ticked at how long she's made to wait, never mind how many other patients were in the waiting room. She's also selfish enough that when she gets home, she calls up trying to get the doctor to come over for a house call!

It's obvious, however, that she actually is just falling in love with the doctor despite having only seen him the one time. They start seeing each other, but the good doctor often seems to get called away on important calls. Still, Jane thinks she'd be willing to get married to him. His mother (Jessie Royce Landis), however, isn't so sure. Apparently, it takes a special class of woman to be a doctor's wife, dealing with all the sudden absences, and Mrs. Wright doesn't think Jane has it in her. Plus, there's the fact that William knows a female medical student Helen (Joyce Mackenzie) that Mom thinks is better suited to being a doctor's wife since Helen is planning to become a doctor herself.

Still, Jane eventually does get married to the doctor, figuring she can make herself such an important part of his life that it will paper over the hurt of all those sudden house and hospital calls. Unsurprisingly, things go bad the very first time Jane tries to host a dinner party and William isn't able to make it. It's up to another doctor's wife, Maggie Roberts (June Havoc) to try to comfort Jane and get her to see the reality that she's going to have to make compromises.

Eventually, Helen finishes her residency, comes back to town, and takes a job as Dr. Wright's partner! Jane gets the distinct idea that William is going to leave her in favor of Helen, so decides to take matters into her own hands by leaving William first, a decision which makes no logical sense.

In fact, much of the movie makes no logical sense. It's dated, which is no big thing since I'm used to watching old movies. The idea that it takes some special class of woman to marry a doctor seems silly, yet it's the entire premise of the movie. Jane is so flighty that you just want someone to shake some sense into her, while Mrs. Wright's motivations seem to take a sudden turn in the final act.

Mother Didn't Tell Me may be an interesting time capsule, but it's not a particularly good movie. As always, however, you should probably judge for yourself.

Northwest Passage

Another of my recent DVR watches was Northwest Passage.

Robert Young plays Langdon Towne, who is returning to his hometown of Portsmouth, NH in the late 1750s after having been expelled from Harvard. He and town drunk "Hunk" Marriner (Walter Brennan) decide the best way to deal with their troubles is to drink them away, so the two get good and drunk, saying some insulting things to a couple of British soldiers that requires the pair to beat a hasty retreat.

The two go out into the wilderness, Langdon being a budding artist who wants to do sketches of the Indians. But if you'll remember your history, this is during the French and Indian War, when the British and French (who still owned Quebec) were using various tribal groups as proxies to attack each other. Langdon and Hunk run into Robert Rogers, who had been given the task by one of the British generals of training a raiding force, eventually known as Rogers' Rangers, to help deal with the Indian raids. The big problem is that they'll be going into fairly inhospitable territory in what is now the Lake Champlain region as well as northern Vermont.

Eventually the plan is to raid a settlement at St. Francis, on the St. Lawrence River downstream of Montreal, which is probably supposed to be more of a psychological victory than a real military victory. Langdon and Hunk, having joined the Rangers, set out with Rogers on the dangerous march north. They have to watch out for both the Abenaki tribe as well as any French in the area, while also having to deal with a lack of food. Indeed, part of the plan for the mission is to raid the fort at St. Francis to get food for the return voyage.

In what is probably the high point of the movie, Rogers' men raid St. Francis and rout the inhabitants, also freeing some English settlers who had been taken prisoner. But they find that there's almost no food to take with them. And Langdon has been shot in the belly. Rogers' plan is to go overland to Fort Wentworth, in what is now northern New Hampshire, a march of about 150 miles. But can the men, who are growing increasingly disaffected thanks to the lack of food and what they see as Rogers' dictatorial ways, handle the march?

Northwest Passage is based on a 1936 book of the same title that deals both with this campaign and Rogers' later time out west looking for the Northwest Passage, hence the full title of the movie, Northwest Passage (Book I - Rogers' Rangers). The movie only deals with the French and Indian War, with a closing scene in which he tells his men they're going to be going out west (in real life, Rogers did go west to quell the Indians in the area around what is now Detroit). Apparently there were plans to make a second movie that never materializes, probably due to the intervention of World War II.

As for the movie we have, Northwest Passage isn't a bad movie, but one that I felt could have been a lot better. The big problem I have is that it runs 128 minutes, with a lot of nothing happening since the soldiers have to make a long march north to St. Francis, followed by one back to New Hampshire. The march back goes on and on, and still relatively little happens. I can't help but think they could have come up with a way to make this 20 to 30 minutes shorter which would suit the movie artistically. Of course, the location shooting and Technicolor probably demanded a longer movie to make a spectacle the public would want to go see.

Northwest Passage has been released to DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive Collection. The TCM Shop claims it's on backorder, which has never made sense to me with the MOD titles; it seems to be readily available at Amazon.

Marlowe

My attempts to free up space on my DVR continued over the weekend; this time one of the movies watched was Marlowe.

The movie starts off with a sequence of a man hiding in the bushes taking photographs of a man and a woman together. You get a fleeting glimpse of the photographer, and you might think you've just seen Philip Marlowe. But you'd be wrong. Marlowe is back in Los Angeles and is only going to have anything to do with all this later. Philip Marlowe (James Garner) is Raymond Chandler's private detective who appeared in other movies like The Big Sleep, and back in Los Angeles Marlowe is approached by Orfamay Quest (Sharon Farrell). She's looking for her brother Orrin, who moved out west from Kansas and hasn't been heard from by his family for quite some time.

Marlowe finds that he was supposed to have been at a hotel, but when he searches through the register and goes to the room Orrin is supposed to be in, only to find another man, Grant Hicks (Jackie Coogan). The manager hadn't been much help, and was trying to call some guy named "Doc". Marlowe pumps Coogan for information and gets none. When he goes to leave the hotel, he finds that the manager has been stabbed to death, with an icepick to the base of the brain! But it turns out that Hicks does have information, calling from a hotel closer to Los Angeles.

That information turns out to be a check receipt to pick up a bunch of photographs after they've been developed. But Marlowe gets attacked by a woman and when he comes to he finds that Hicks has also been killed with an icepick. Fortunately they're able to get the license plate of the woman's car, and Marlowe gets the photographs, which are of TV star Mavis Wald (Gayle Hunnicutt) and gangster Sonny Steelgrave (H.M. Wynant). Presumably Orrin is trying to blackmail somebody and that or another somebody is killing either to get the photos or to stop the blackmail some other way.

Also investigating the case are the police, in the form of detective Lt. French (Carroll O'Connor) and his second-in-command, Sgt. Beifus (Kenneth Tobey). Mavis doesn't want Marlowe involved, but the advertiser backing her TV show wants no controversy so gives Marlowe carte blanche to keep going. It all gets complicated, but Marlowe eventually does get the case to unravel.

Marlowe is a reasonably good movie, for two main reasons. One is James Garner, who fits the role well. This was several years before The Rockford Files, but Garner hits the right tone of sarcasm and cynicism for an updated version of the character. The other stars add nice support. I haven't mentioned Rita Moreno as Mavis' friend Dolores, or Bruce Lee in a cameo who gets to do his martial arts before coming to a stupid end.

The other reason to watch Marlowe is for the look at late 60s Los Angeles. Marlowe's office looked darn familiar, which is because it's in the Bradbury Building, a frequent location for shooting. Classic movie fans would probably most recognize it as the building where David Wayne hides in the 1951 version of M. But the seedy hotels of the era are well depicted, as is the set design.

Just don't try to pay too much attention to the mystery plot of Marlowe, which I found wasn't quite satisfactorily wrapped up. It's also too complex for its own good. But the movie as a whole works if you want to sit back with a bowl of popcorn and watch.

Briefs for September 8, 2019

Carol Lynley, the actress probably best known for playing the singer Nonny in the 1972 movie The Poseidon Adventure, died on Tuesday at the age of 77. I didn't mention it earlier mostly because of a fortuitous bit of scheduling on TCM's part. Tonight's prime time lineup is a pair of movies starring Lumley, scheduled long before she died. The two movies are Bunny Lake Is Missing at 8:00 PM, followed by Blue Denim at 10:00. I really didn't like Blue Denim, in which Lynley gets knocked up courtesy of Brandon De Wilde who tries to get her an illegal abortion. But some of you might. I'm assuming the movie intros were done quite some time back and that TCM will have an extra card inserted announcing Lynley's death.

Tonight's Silent Sunday Nights lineup is three shorts starring Charlie Chaplin, running from midnight to 2:30 AM. Unfortunately, TCM's online schedule lists all three as starting at midnight, while my DirecTV box guide lists only A Dog's Life, having it be a 2-1/2 hour movie that runs from midnight to 2:30 AM. I suppose that means it doesn't matter which order they air in, as you'd get all of them if you record it.

Speaking of recording, I'm constantly running out of room on my DVR. I recorded several movies off of FXM that I was going to blog about. But it turns out that Kangaroo is one I blogged about five years ago, while several others are out of print on DVD. So I guess I'll be blogging about more movies only available on streaming. And wouldn't you know it, none of them seem to be coming back up on FXM soon. One movie back on FXM that I did blog about ages ago is Night People, which will be on tomorrow at 3:00 AM.

None Shall Escape

About a year ago, TCM ran a Sunday night double feature of movies with the theme of going after Nazi war criminals after World War II. I had held off on doing a review of None Shall Escape because when I first checked, it was not available on DVD. But it got a release courtesy of Sony's MOD scheme earlier this year, and now I can do a post on it.

The movie, which was released in early 1944, starts off at a war crimes trial in Warsaw some time after the Nazis have been defeated, so it's already a pretty daring premise. On trial is Wilhelm Grimm (Alexander Knox), who as a Nazi commander in a certain portion of Poland. People are going to testify as to his war crimes, starting with the local Catholic priest, Father Warecki (Henry Travers), so cue the flashbacks....

Warecki actually knew Grimm back in the day long before the war began. At the end of World War I, their village had been part of Germany, since Poland was partitioned in the late 18th century and would not become an independent country again until the end of World War I. Warecki was already the parish priest, while Grimm was the town's German teacher. Grimm went off to fight in the Great War, returning home disillusioned and having lost a leg. He had left a fiancée in Marja (Martha Hunt), but decided not to marry her and knocking up another young woman who commits suicide. Wilhelm is forced to beat a hasty retreat and go to Munich where his brother Karl (Erik Rolf) lives.

Karl is the second witness. He saw Wilhelm's turn to Nazism and is horrified by it, being a staunch opponent of the ideology. But Karl's son, named Wilhelm like his uncle but called Willi, likes his uncle and thinks Uncle Wilhelm has the same humanity as everybody else. The Nazis' inexorable march to power continues, and once the Reichstag fire occurs, Karl realizes he has to get out of Germany, planning to go to Vienna (of course not knowing what would happen to Austria five years later). But he doesn't make it to Vienna as Wilhelm has him arrested and sent to a concentration camp.

The final witness is Marja, who details Wilhelm's time as the commander of their village where he was put as commander once the Nazis took over Poland. Wilhelm is brutal to the locals seeing them as an inferior race, while looking to gain revenge on the people he knew earlier. Worse, his nephew (Richard Crane) is all grown up and just as bad as his uncle. But the nephew falls in love with one of the local girls and starts to develop a bit of humanity.

None Shall Escape is another of those movies with a fascinating premise, being set after a war that's still going on while the movie was being made. In some ways that leads to the natural problem of being propagandistic. But for the most part it's no more heavy handed than any other World War II movie made during the war. Alexander Knox is excellent as the embittered man who turns to hate, while everybody else does reasonably well, even those like Travers who I thought was miscast.

I can definitely recommend None Shall Escape to anybody who wishes to watch it.

Fort Vengeance

I'm continuing to try to get through the backlog of movies I've got on my DVR, and today's selection is Fort Vengeance.

Dick (James Craig) and Carey (Keith Larsen) Ross are a pair of brothers who have been forced to escape north to Canada thanks largely to Carey begin a serial idiot who among other things cheats at poker, constantly making Dick pull Carey's irons out of the fire. As an example of Carey's nastiness, the two wake up to a couple of Indians off in the distance, and Carey shoots him utterly unprovoked! They're going to have to keep running.

Fortunately for them, they wind up at a fort manned by the new Northwest Mounted Police, the forerunners of the Mounties. The two look to enlist in the quasi-military force and while the commander is reluctant at first, he eventually lets the brothers sign up. Dick is a model soldier, while Carey continues to be a jerk.

Canada of the time (late 1870s) is trying to maintain better relations with the various tribal bands than the US had, and there are some tribes that have migrated north from the US. The Blackfoot leader Crowfoot (Morris Ankrum) wants good relations with the Canadians, while Sioux leader Sitting Bull (Michael Granger) has fled the US and is more willing to attack whites, especially after the companion of the Sioux that Carey shot in the opening of the movie sees Carey in the Mounites!

Carey has more nastiness coming, too, when he sees one of the Blackfoot store some beaver pelts in a hidden location, and convinces a trapper to steal them and pass them off as his own! And the payment the trapper gets is to get shot by Carey! Now, thanks to the Production Code you know that Carey is going to have to get his comeuppance, so the question is how it's going to happen.

Fort Vengeance is Saturday matinee entertainment, and not much more. There's nothing demanding here, and probably not much historical accuracy either. (I did, however, go down a rabbit hole of trying to figure out exactly what flag would have been flying in parts of Canada that were not yet provinces but after the 1867 law that made Canada a Dominion within the British Empire. The Maple Leaf flag wasn't used until the mid-1960s; the movie uses a straight Union Jack.) Rita Moreno has an early role, while Reginald Denny has a late role. The color is bad because the movie is in Cinecolor and not Technicolor. Overall it's OK for one watch, but not something I'd particularly revisit.

If you want to judge for yourself, the movie is on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive Collection, Warner apparently having gotten the rights to the Allied Artists pictures at some point.

Winsor McCay

Tomorrow morning at 7:00 AM, TCM is running a two-hour block called "The Cartoons of Winsor McCay. McCay was a cartoonist who, in the early 1910s, started making a series of animated films. This was extremely difficult, because he started in the days before cels were invented. Cels were used when you had things in the background that were static: you could make one image to be the background, while the characters or things that moved would be in the front. Before cels, the entire image had to be re-drawn for every frame.

McCay apparently made ten shorts, of which some only survive as fragments; TCM's synopsis implies that all ten are airing. I know TCM ran at least some of them in the past, as I saw How a Mosquito Operates and Gertie the Dinosaur on TCM, but I don't remember when. At any rate, all of the movies should be in the public domain since they were all made before 1924. Here's Gertie the Dinosaur, which combines live-action and animation as there's an extended establishing sequence at the beginning.

Thursday Movie Picks #269: Hostages

This being Thursday, it's time for another edition of Thursday Movie Picks, the blogathon run by Wandering Through the Shelves. This week's theme is hostages, which sounds like a theme we've done before. It isn't necessarily too hard to come up with three movies that have hostages in them; coming up with three I haven't used recently is a bit harder. But not too hard:

The Terrorists (1974). Terrorists have kidnapped the UK ambassador to "Scandinavia" (the movie was filmed at Oslo's former airport but the actual country isn't named), while another related group of terrorists have hijacked a plane and landed it in the capital city. Head of security Sean Connery has the task of making certain the hostage situation at the airport is resolved with a minimum of death.

Split Second (1953). Stephen McNally and Paull Kelly play a pair of men who have just busted out of jail and carjack a group of people to a Nevada ghost town where they're supposed to be picked up. The catch is, this ghost town is now on a military range where the government is going to be doing an above-ground nuclear test at the crack of dawn. So everybody better get out of town in time. Among the hostages are Keith Andes and Alexis Smith.

The Taking of Pelham One, Two, Three (1974). Robert Shaw and his gang of criminals hijack a New York subway train and threaten to shoot one passenger per minute if they don't get their demand of $1 million and safe passage. High-ranking transit cop Walter Matthau has the job of defusing the situation, saving the passengers, and catching the crooks. A taut, atmospheric thriller.

The Dresser (1983)

I don't normally like to do posts on movies only available on streaming if they aren't coming up on TV, but I've got an almost full DVR as well as a bunch of recently-watched movies about World War II that I want to space out, so today's post is going to be about The Dresser, out-of-print on DVD but available at Amazon prime video.

The movie starts off near the end of a performance of Shakespeare's Othello at a theater somewhere in England in the early part of World War II. The curtain comes down, and we know that we've got a towering actor at the head of the company as Sir (Albert Finney, whose character is only called "Sir") starts lecturing the other actors about their performances. But we get hints that all might not be well when he goes back to his dressing room. His longtime dresser, Norman (Tom Courtenay) seems to tend to Sir either more like a mother or possibly a gay lover than an employee of many years. (They're not actual lovers; Sir is married to another member of the company referred to as Her Ladyship, played by Zena Walker).

The company has to take a train to Bradford to perform at their next venue, this time the play being King Lear, a fact that Sir doesn't seem to remember. And he's so full of himself that he takes the company for a leisurely walk down the station platform, forcing Norman to try to get the train from leaving the station. It's yet another sign there's something wrong with Sir.

But the real problems are going to come once they get to Bradford. Sir is in the market square, and suffers some sort of attack that alarms everybody and has him winding up in hospital. Surely the show can't go on with Sir in hospital. But Sir decides that he's going to check himself out against medical advice, and return to the theater which is his one true love. Nobody thinks that Sir can go on, but dammit if Norman isn't going to try, even though Sir seems unable to remember his entrance cue. And even if there's an air-raid.

There's really not much more than that to the plot of The Dresser, being a bit less of a story than a look at the workings of a stage company as well as a character study of Sir and Norman. In that regard, Finney and Courtenay are both excellent, and while both of them got well-deserved Oscar nominations, I think I prefer Courtenay's performance, with Finney's being a bit too over the top at times, possibly a bit of a fault of the script for writing the character that way. The supporting performances are quite good too, notably Eileen Atkins as Madge the stage manager.

If there is one fault with the movie it's that it made me think at times of Finney's following movie, Under the Volcano. Sir's illness/madness, and Finney's portrayal of it, are at times just as uncomfortable to watch as Finney's alcoholic in Under the Volcano, never mind how good the performance is. The Dresser at least doesn't have the idiotic ending that Under the Volcano does.

The Dresser is an excellent movie that rightly got a lot of recognition from critics and the awards bodies when it was released, but for whatever reason doesn't have such recognition today. Well, that might be a bit unfair, as it was based on a stage play and remade as a TV movie a few years back; that one does seem to be in print on DVD. In any case, if you get a chance to catch The Dresser, I strongly recommend it.

There's Always a Woman

During Summer Under the Stars, TCM ran a day of films devoted to Melvyn Douglas, whose very broad range goes from dramas like Hud to screwball comedies. Something much closer to the lattter is There's Always a Woman.

Douglas plays Bill Reardon, a private detective who doesn't particularly like it. Part of that is because he preferred his old job as an investigator for the district attorney, while the other part is because the business is failing due to lack of clients. His wife Sally (Joan Blondell) got him to start his own detective agency in the first place, and wants him to keep at it.

Bill goes out to approach the district attorney about getting his old job back, and wonder of wonders, a woman walks in the door looking for a detective! Lola Fraser (Mary Astor, which made me think a bit of The Maltese Falcon) is worried that her husband is cheating on her with his old girlfriend Anne (Frances Drake). Lola would like a detective to tail the husband and see what's going on. Sally sees that there's good money in this, so she's willing to take the job, even though she doesn't know the first thing about being a detective. That, and the first night of surveillance involves going to an expensive club, and Bill definitely does not know that Sally has taken a client.

At the club, we see a complicated love triangle as Anne has a fiancé in former gambler Jerry Marlowe (Robert Paige), so there are all sorts of reasons for sparks to fly. Except that the sparks don't fly there, but at the Fraser apartment, where the husband gets shot to death. Sally has a feeling she knows who did it, and actually calls up one of the papers to give them her story.

This is a problem for Bill, since the district attorney assigns him to investigate the case. And Sally isn't about to stop doing her own investigating, since she still has Lola as a client. So you can imagine where the comedy is coming from for the rest of the movie as husband and wife both investigate, with Bill trying to stop Sally from investigating, and Sally's moves constantly but unintentinally making life difficult for Bill.

Don't think too much about the mystery in There's Always a Woman, because that's not really the point of the movie. It's more about the give and take between the dueling investigators, and in that it works quite well. Every time I've seen Douglas in light comedy, he's been quite good, and that's the case here. Blondell worked especially well with Cagney back in the early 30s, but here she's able to work off of Douglas well too. She's not quite ditzy in a Gracie Allen way, just well-meaning but having everything backfire.

There's Always a Woman is a fun little comedy from the late 1930s that really deserves to be better known. It's on DVD courtesy of Sony/Columbia's MOD scheme, but that means it's a little pricey.

TCM's new themes for September 2019

Left to right: Richard Widmark, Linda Darnell, and Sidney Poitier in No Way Out (1950), on tonight at 8:00 PM

Now that we're done with Summer Under the Stars, it's time to get back into all of the monthly programming themes that are on the TCM schedule ten months out of the year when they don't have Summer Under the Stars in August or 31 Days of Oscar in February. The first of those is a new Star of the Month. This time, that's Sidney Poitier, and his movies will be running every Tuesday in prime time, starting tonight at 8:00 PM with his debut, No Way Out.

Wednesdays and Thursdays see what TCM is describing as a salute to the centenary of United Artists, although I'd really break it up into two separate spotlights. Wednesday -- starting in the morning and not with prime time -- is the traditional spotlight if you will, with a broad range of movies. Prime time is roughly chronological with silent films tonight, although the daytime schedule for Wednesday has early talkies, so not quite chronological. The Thursday prime time lineup will be James Bond movies, since those were distributed in the US by United Artists (and later MGM/UA after the merger). Those go in chronological order, too, starting with Dr. No this Thursday at 8:00 PM.

Friday nights will feature another spotlight, on college football in the movies. There are a lot to choose from, at least in the studio era when college football was bigger than the pro game. On three of the four Fridays, Ben Mankiewicz will be sitting down with a guest host to discuss the movies. Note that the overnights between Friday and Saturday still have TCM Underground, so this spotlight is an abbreviated one.

The Saturday morning block also returns, with the Bowery Boys taking the 10:00 AM Saturday slot. I was wondering if TCM would be doing an abbreviated set of Bowery Boys movies, since this Saturday's selection is Dig That Uranium! from 1956, but on the 20th they go back to Jinx Money from 1948.

Logan's Run

I saw back in July that I had never blogged about Logan's Run before, so when it was on the TCM schedule then as part of the salute to science fiction, I decided to record it to do a post on it here.

Of course, this is one that most people probably know the basic story of already. Michael York plays Logan, a 26-year-old who works as a sort of policeman in a post-apocalyptic domed city in 2274, together with his partner Francis (Richard Jordan). They and a bunch of other people are on their way to a ceremony called "Carousel". It's something designed for people who have turned 30, and are at "Lastday". These people go onto the carousel, and some sort of ray from above strikes them dead, "renewing" them for the next generation of people. And people actually watch this, screaming "Renew! Renew!"

The first obvious thing to think is that there are people who just don't believe in "renewal", and would like to live more than 30 years. Sure enough, there are people who try to avoid Carousel, called "runners". Logan and Francis' real job is to find these runners and do away with them, in part to keep people from finding out that the whole renewal thing is a bunch of nonsense.

As you can guess, there certainly are people around who understand it's nonsense and would like to run, and Logan is about to meet one of them in the form of a date the computer that runs the city selects for him, Jessica (Jenny Agutter). She's got an ankh around her neck, as did the runner that Logan just killed, and she talks openly about not wanting to die at 30.

Logan is summoned by the computer, and told that there are apparently some runners who escape, and that they've made it to a place called "Sanctuary". Logan is given the job to find Sanctuary -- and destroy it. And just to mess with Logan, the computer advances Logan's life clock by three years, meaning he's going to be at Lastday soon. It's this that makes him decide that perhaps he's really going to become a runner himself and stay in sanctuary.

But there are problems. One is that the people who help the runners certainly aren't going to want to help Logan, understandably believing that he's a spy to rat them all out. Indeed, one such person, Doc (Michael Anderson Jr.) tries to kill Logan. There are also the other police, including Francis, who are going to do whatever they can to stop Logan.

Somehow, though, Logan and Jessica not only get past all the police, but get out of the dome, which they at first think means they've made it to Sanctuary. Except that there aren't any people here, and only the ruins of Washington DC. Until they find one crazy Old Man (Peter Ustinov) and all his cats. (Where the Old Man gets his food from is not answered.) Logan decides that perhaps he should bring the Old Man back to the city and let everybody know there's life after 30.

Logan's Run is a movie with an interesting premise, although the movie that we get is something I have quite a few problems with. I'm not the biggest fan of dystopian movies, and Logan's Run has the added issue that there's no logical way this particular dystopia could have developed. Contrast this with something like Soylent Green, based on overpopulation. How anybody gains the institutional knowledge to keep the supercomputer running is never addressed, or the breakdown of the family structure. And how did they kill off the vast majority of the population that was over 30 to get down to a population of only young people.

The biggest bright spot is the sets, but that's not enough to raise a movie beyond mediocre. Watch Logan's Run once because the plot is famous, and then strike it off your list.

Treasures from the Disney Vault, September 2019

It seems as though it hasn't been very long since the last installment of Treasures from the Disney Vault on TCM. That's probably because even though the installments come roughly once a quarter, the last one was at the end of June while the current on is at the beginning of September. Namely, Leonard Matlin will be around to host the movies again tonight.

The night starts of with what is technically an animated feature, Fun and Fancy Free at 8:00 PM, although it's really an anthology of two shorter stories and the second one, "Mickey and the Beanstalk" has some live-action mixed in courtesy of Edgar Bergen. It's also one of the lesser Disney animated movies.

Probably the best known movie of the night is The Love Bug, at about 9:39 PM after a one-reeler to kick off the 9:30 PM slot. Dean Jones winds up in possession of Herbie, a Volkswagen Beetle with a mind of its own. The two team up for some big road races. The movie was popular enough that it spawned a whole bunch of sequels.

After starting My Three Sons, Fred MacMurray pretty much gave up serious dramatic films and enjoyed the much lighter, lower-pressure stuff he did at Disney, such as The Happiest Millionaire, which is coming on at 11:45 PM. As for the rest of the night's films, I don't recall Snowball Express or The Misadventures of Merlin Jones, so I can't say much of anything about them.

The World War II Blogathon: Millions Like Us

September 1 marks the 80th anniversary of the start of World War II, so Maddy over at Maddy Loves Her Classic Films and Jay over at Cinema Essentials started the World War II Blogathon. My entry for the blogathon is an interesting movie made in Britain at the height of the war, and set on the British home front: Millions Like Us.

The movie starts off with a montage of scenes set in the summer of 1939, so just before Germany invades Poland, setting off the European theatre of World War II. The main focus is on the Crowson family, led by dad (Moore Marriott) with his adult daughters Celia (Patricia Roc) and Phyllis (Joy Shelton) and a housekeeper. It's a happy if not particularly healthy existence which is about to be blown up by the start of the war.

Eventually, Britain's men go off to fight, leaving a shortage of workers in pretty much every industry. Dad becomes a member of the Home Guard, the rough equivalent of the civil defense that you see James Cagney as a member of in the short You, John Jones. As for the women, the government has a plan for them.

Since the government needs labor in the defense industry, they set up a labor board to more or less draft unmarried women into service on the home front. (You may recall from the Powell/Pressburger film A Canterbury Tale how the Sheila Sim character is part of the Women's Land Army, a similar body that sent women to work in agriculture to replace the men who had gone into war.) Phyllis is able to get a position in one of the women's auxiliary forces, but Celia is sent to a factory in the middle of nowhere, where the almost all-woman workforce (there are a few male managers) live in dorms crammed two to a room. Among the other women with Celia are the down-to-earth Gwen (Megs Jenkins) and Jennifer (Anne Crawford). She clearly came from a much higher social class and really doesn't want to be here at the factory.

Frankly, none of them would be there given the chance, but there's the war on, so everybody tries to make the best of it. The manager, Mr. Forbes (Eric Portman) apparently knew Jennifer before, and he knew that deep down inside, she can do the work if she puts her mind to it. Celia meets RAF flyer Fred Blake (Gordon Jackson) when a group of men from the nearby air base visit the factory to see the vital material the women are making for their planes. Eventually Celia and Fred start a relationship that's not going to be easy.

There's a lot to like about Millions Like Us, especially as an American looking at how the British really saw themselves during the war (the movie was released in 1943). It's much different from the US since they were a relatively tiny island and actually under attack from the Nazis in a way that America never really was. There are several tropes, notably the air-raid, as well as the dance between the workers and the soldiers. But it's a really nice slice of life movie.

Millions Like Us got a DVD release courtesy of Reel Vault.

Not part of Kirk Douglas day

This last day of TCM's Summer Under the Stars is dedicated to actor Kirk Douglas, still alive at 102 unless he's died very recently and the death hasn't been announced yet. I should mention that among the movies airing is Town Without Pity at 6:15 PM. It's one that I haven't seen in many years, and seems to be out of print on DVD. Douglas plays a lawyer for the US Army who gets the task of defending some soldiers stationed in Germany who are being brought up on rape charges, accused of having raped one of the locals. The thing I remember most about the movie was the way translation of German was handled, in a very heavy-handed voiceover that didn't work well.

Anyhow, not having looked far enough forward on the TCM schedule to see that Douglas was going to be honored today, a few weeks back I decided to pop in one of the DVDs from the Kirk Douglas box set I picked up a few months back and watch For Love or Money, a 1963 film which shares its title with several other movies. So that's the Douglas movie you're getting a post on today, even though it's not airing on TCM.

Douglas plays Deke Gentry, a San Francisco lawyer and best friend of wealthy playboy businessman Sonny Smith (Gig Young). They're out on their yacht one day when a helicopter shows up overhead, with the equally wealthy Chloe Brasher (Thelma Ritter) as the passenger. She needs to see Deke about an urgent matter involving her daughters.

Chloe is a widow, and provisions were made in her husband's will regarding the three daughters, who are all very headstrong and not about to follow their mother's advice. According to the will, they've got trust funds set up for them, but the daughters will be cut off from the trust funds if they don't get married to people Mom considers acceptable. So Mom wants Deke to convince the daughters to accept him as the new trustee on the fund, and to marry the husbands she's selected for them.

That's not going to be easy. Daughter Bonnie (Julie Newmar) is what nowadays would probably be a social media influencer, except that they didn't have social media back in 1963. She's a fitness/beauty geek who's got $1/month subscribers the accounting of which is bringing her into trouble with the IRS. Agent Harvey Wofford (Dick Sargent) is assigned to the case, and he just happens to be the man Mom has selected for her! Jan (Leslie Parrish) is into beatnik artist types, and Mom thinks she should marry old friend Sam (William Windom). The biggest hurdle, however, is with eldest daughter Kate (Mitzi Gaynor). Mom's pick for her is... Sonny Smith. Finally to make certain things go as planned, Mom has a private detective Joe (William Bendix) assigned to watch everything.

Unsurprisingly, things don't go as planned, and you can probbly guess how. Getting Sonny to meet Kate hits a bunch of snags, and Deke realizes he's beginning to fall in love with Kate. Meanwhile, Jan sees Sonny, and perhaps she's going to fall in love with him instead of Sam. Now, I'd think that Mom should OK with Kate marrying a nice staid lawyer. And if she picked out Sonny as a husband for one of the daughters, why is it a bad thing if it turns out that another of the daughters were to marry him. But that would ruin the premise of the movie.

For Love or Money is formulaic, but it's a formula that works well enough for undemanding entertainment. Kirk Douglas didn't make very many comedies in his career, but he handles the material just fine. The three daughters are nice to look at, and the older stars (Ritter, Young, and Bendix) all fit their roles like a hand in a glove. There's nothing special here, but also nothing wrong.

The Douglas centennial box set isn't overly expensive, and with as many movies as you get, spending a few bucks for a formulaic trifle like this is no waste.

House of the Damned

I've mentioned on quite a few occasions how Fox distributed a bunch of short B movies during the years that Cleopatra was in production. Many of them were directed by Maury Dexter, and those are generally interesting even if flawed. Another one that's been in the FXM rotation recently is House of the Damned.

Ron Foster plays architect Scott Campbell, who gets a call from his boss Joseph Schiller (Richard Crane). Apparently there's a castle-like home up the California coast that was owned by an old lady who went crazy and has been under lease for years. The lease is up, so would Scott go up to the place and do a survey on it to see if it's suitable for further use? So Scott and his wife Nancy (Merry Anders) jump in their car and go for a spin.

Things seem a bit odd even before they get to the place. They have trouble finding the place where they're supposed to get the keys, and when they're on what they think is the right road, there's a makeshift "dead end" roadblock. But it's the right road, so, having found the castle, they head back to the real estate agent to get the keys. The only thing is, they find that the roadblock they moved has been put back into place!

They get into the castle, and it's one of those big old empty houses where you just know things are going to happen to make the main characters wonder whether or not they're alone. Sure enough, that does happen as, when they're asleep, an unseen hand takes the keyring with all the keys. And when the couple wake up and find the keys, they realize that two of them are missing so there are two rooms they can't get into.

Then Joseph's wife Loy (Erika Peters) shows up. The couple was supposed to show up together, but she went on ahead, foreshadowing that something that never really gets fleshed out is wrong with their marriage. Joseph shows up, but nobody can find Loy. And her car is still out front. What's going on?

House of the Damned is a movie with a reasonably good premise that is ultimately undone somewhat by the fact that as a shortish B movie there's really not a whole lot going on. Some of the sets looked familiar, and when I looked it up on IMDb I found out that my suspicion was confirmed: Filming was done in part at the Greystone Mansion, which director Dexter also used in The Day Mars Invaded Earth.

House of the Damned is available on DVD from Fox's MOD scheme (although I should point out that with the purchase by Disney I have no idea if the MOD scheme will continue, or for how long). Unfortunately, those MOD DVDs always seem to be a bit pricey. This and some of the other Dexter movies really ought to be put in a box set together.

Briefs for August 29-30, 2019

So Paul Lukas was today's star in Summer Under the Stars. I saw that I Found Stella Parish was on the schedule, and thought about putting it on the DVR to watch and do a post on. But I made certain first to check whether I had done a post on it before. Sure enough, I had, back in July 2014. I wrote at the time that the movie didn't seem to be available on DVD. It has since received a DVD release courtesy of the Warner Archive collection, in August 2015. So if you want to watch it whenever, now you can.

Tomorrow's star is Susan Hayward, who appeared in any number of potboilers back in the late 50s and early 60s, as I mentioned when I blogged about Back Street back at the end of July. That one isn't on the TCM schedule, but among the schedule are Ada at 12:30 PM, which I mentioned not too awful long ago, and Stolen Hours at 10:30 AM. That one is a remake of the old Bette Davis vehicle Dark Victory. At 10:15 PM is House of Strangers, which may be a TCM premiere since the daily schedule doesn't have a plot synopsis.

For those of you with the Starz/Encore package, you've got two chances to watch the 1991 version of Cape Fear tomorrow on StarzEncore Classics. One is early, overnight tonight at 12:37 PM, so many of you will likely miss it by the time you read this post. The second airing is at 2:29 PM. I wouldn't normally mention it, except that TCM is running the original over the weekend, at 8:00 PM Sunday as part of a double feature of "Psychological Thrillers". Both versions are available on DVD.