The Bat

A movie that's suitable for Halloween although, as of the time I wrote of this post wasn't yet mentioned on the TCM schedule for October, is the Vincent Price movie The Bat. But since it was on my DVR about to expire, I made a point of watching it to be able to write up this post. And, sure enough, it wound up as part of the schedule since it is after all Halloween and this is a Vincent Price film. The Bat is showing early on Halloween at 5:30 AM.

Vincent Price plays Dr. Wells, the town doctor in one of those Hollywood small towns that's small enough to apparently have only one doctor and be close enough for people to get away to secluded cabins. Getting away is local bank (there only seems to be one bank in town) president John Fleming, who confesses to Dr. Wells that he's embezzled $1M in securities from the bank and would give up half of that to Wells in exchange for Wells helping him fake his death. Dr. Wells responds by killing Fleming, thereby saving his own life, but having the problem of being on the hook for a killing in an era where there's still a production code.

Meanwhile, back in town, Cornelia Van Gorder (Agnes Moorehead) has come to visit in order to get away from it all and work on her next book. To do that, she's rented a house owned by Fleming, not realizing or caring that the house has a history. After all, Cornelia isn't a local, so why should she believe any of the stories about what might or might not have gone on in the house? That, or the idea that there's a killer on the loose called The Bat, who has an ability to get into places humans can't? Of course, all of the servants in the house believe in it, and don't want to work in the house.

And, wouldn't you know it, but Cornelia and her secretary Lizzie actually see the hand of The Bat, before seeing an actual bat that bites Lizzie and starts flying around the house before the two women are able to trap it in a closet. The police come out, and then discover that Dr. Wells is doing scientific research that involves experimenting on bats. This last bit, combined with the fact that we already know Wells is going to have to face the Production Code, makes Wells one of the prime suspects for being The Bat.

And there's also the issue of the embezzled securities, which ties into the rest of what's going on in the movie. The viewers of course know that the deceased Fleming, who is still assumed to be off in the mountains getting away from it all, is responsible, but nobody else knows, so there are all sorts of suspects. The learn from the deceased Fleming's nephew that the house Cordelia is renting is one of those Hollywood houses that has secret hiding places, so perhaps the securities might be somewhere in the house. So all of the main characters wind up at the house, at which point the identity of The Bat is revealed and the innocent people get to have a reasonably good ending for them. The wicked, of course, get punished.

The fact that there was still a Production Code in force makes The Bat a bit of a mess. But thanks to the presence of Vincent Price and Agnes Moorehead, the film is raised above the level of schlock to something that is at least reasonably worth watching. It's not a great movie by any means, but it will certainly entertain you.

Bachelor in Paradise

Next up in the series of movies that I've got sitting on my DVR and are coming up on TCM is the Bob Hope comedy Bachelor in Paradise. It comes on early tomorrow morning (or overnight tonight, if you prefer to look at it that way) at 4:00 AM.

Hope plays A.J. Niles, and as the movie opens he's on the French Riviera. Niles is an author who has written a series of books purporting to be on the lives of various European countries, but are really an excuse to scandalize people with the steamy look at Europeans; think Peyton Place levels of scandal. Niles hasn't lived in America for a decade or so, which would imply not lot after the end of World War II since the movie was released in 1961. That being an expatriate turns out to be a big problem.

Even in those days Americans had to pay income tax on their worldwide earnings even if they didn't actually live in America (technically, you only have to file a tax return; there's a good chance an expat will fall below the tax threshold or else have paid enough tax abroad to avoid a US tax liability). Niles earns enough that he definitely would have to pay tax to the US, especially since the earnings are royalties from book sales in the US. But the plot point of the story is that Niles' accountant failed to pay those taxes for years. Even so, Niles is still liable, and owes some $600,000 in taxes. And this also means the IRS won't let the State Department renew Niles' passport. So Niles is going to have to return to America and pay off his tax debt somehow.

Fortunately, Niles' editor Austin Palfrey (John McGiver) has a brilliant idea: write a book called How the Americans Live similar to the books he's written about various European countries. Since Niles' photo hasn't been printed on the dust jackets of his books, people don't know what Niles looks like; also, he can work under an assumed name. To that end, Palfrey is going to rent Niles a house in one of those new-build suburban developments that sprung up like mushrooms in the years Niles was in Europe, this one in a Los Angeles suburb called Paradise.

The only thing is, this particular development caters to families, and Niles is a bachelor. Indeed, he's going to have to rent the house of one Rosemary Howard (Lana Turner), the assistant to the builder. Niles, taking the name Jack Adams, immediately tries putting the moves on Rosemary, who isn't having any of it. There's also humor in the idea that Niles has no idea how to keep house, especially in a suburb like this, as we see when he makes a mess of things with next-door neighbor Linda Delavane (Paula Prentiss).

To do his research, Niles starts offering lectures to the assembled housewives, although this winds up having the effect of changing the dynamic between various husbands and wives in the development, not always for the better. Additionally, Niles the writer has a bad reputation because of how "scandalous" those books are. It all winds up in a big court case where everything is revealed and we get to the requisite happy ending.

Bachelor in Paradise isn't the world's greatest movie, but it's better than some of the films Hope made later in the 1960s, some of which were terrible. A lot of people say, and I think I'd agree, that another really nice thing about the movie is how it looks at then-contemporary suburbia closer to how it actually was (there was location shooting in Woodland Hills, CA), and not that revisionist view of the 1960s that media wants to push today. People who like mid-century modern design will probably love the production values of Bachelor in Paradise.

Thirty Minus Eight

The second of the movies that are on my DVR and coming up on TCM is one that they showed in August as part of Jeanne Crain's day in Summer Under the Stars: Twenty Plus Two. That airing comes up tomorrow, September 22, at 6:00 AM.

Crain isn't the star here although I think she's the highest-billed woman in the cast. The lead is David Janssen, playing Tom Alder. But we don't see him for a few minutes. The movie opens up with a scene at the apartment/office of one Julia Joliet. She runs a service which handles fan mail for movie stars; I assume fans would write to a postal drop and then a service like this would pick up the mail and do whatever the agent and star want done with it. But Joliet's real purpose in the movie is to get murdered.

That's where Alder comes in. He's not the murderer; instead, he's called by one of his police detective friends to look at the case (this rather seems like a plot hole to me). Surprisingly, the place looks like the police haven't gone over it yet. And Alder isn't a police detective. Indeed, he doesn't even like to think of himself as a private detective. Instead, he's the sort of person who goes out and finds missing heirs, which really is detective work but sounds classier. All of this is likely to keep the name of one of Joliet's clients, Leroy Dane (Brad Dexter), out of the papers. And when Alder goes through Joliet's files, he finds some things that he thinks would pertain to a famous missing persons case from a dozen years earler, that of wealthy Doris Delaney.

Indeed, it was reading about the Delaney case years back in a magazine article that gave Alder the idea to become this sort of investigator. And he's about to get another case, as one Jacques Pleschette (Jacques Aubuchon), son of a French-Canadian farmer who emigrated to North Dakota, wants Alder to look for his kid brother Auguste. Searches of military records reveal that there's some weird stuff going on, and one or multiple people is being highly dishonest.

Now if you're still wondering how Jeanne Crain comes into all of this, that's a good question. She doesn't really; instead she plays Linda Foster, a woman Alder had met as she was starting as an undergrad at UCLA and he was about to start law school. Alder didn't become a lawyer because the US got involved in Korea and Alder got his letter from Uncle Sam. That's part of where the closest to a female lead also gets involved. Dina Merrill plays Nicki Kovacs. We first see her as Alder is flying to New York and she's a passenger on the same plane as him. Alder thinks she looks familiar, and he's right. A decade earlier, after he got demobbed and was in Tokyo awaiting transport back to the States, he spent an evening at a taxi dance-type place where Nicki was working, having wanted to get away from the States because.... Well, they spent the evening together and Nicki was a perfect lady to Alder, who had no interest in anything sexual.

Everything eventually comes together for a finale, but before that I should probably mention a couple of cameos. Agnes Moorehead gets one scene as Doris Delaney's mother, who has remained out of the public eye all those years Doris has been missing, but for whatever reason lets this one private investigator talk to her. And William Demarest shows up as an alcoholic journalist. Both of them steal their scenes, unsurprisingly. Oh, there's a third cameo, but not from someone who succeeded as an actor. When Alder is at the taxi dance place, an obnoxious sailor with a bunch of tickets around his neck wants to dance all night with Nicki. IMDb suggests this is a young Robert Osborne, but the voice didn't sound right. Judge for yourself.

Twenty Plus Two isn't a terrible movie, but because of the convoluted plot it certainly isn't great either. To be honest, to me it felt more like the sort of thing that in the 1970s or 1980s would have been maybe a TV movie of the week. Or, possibly more likely, one of those two-hour movies designed to be a test pilot for a possible TV series. (I'm reminded of the one-season TV series Finder of Lost Loves that I used in the February 2020 TV edition of the old Thursday Movie Picks blogathon.) Such a TV show would have been sponsored by United Airlines, considering how many shots show their planes taking off and landing.

David Janssen does OK; Dina Merrill and especially Jeanne Crain are misused; and, as I mentioned, Moorehead and Demarest steal the show. But even with all that, Twenty Plus Two deserves one watch.

The Swan of no particular color

I mentioned yesterday that there are two Grace Kelly movies on my DVR that I hadn't blogged about before that were coming up as part of her day in Summer Under the Stars. (A search of the blog suggests I haven't done a full post on The Bridges at Toko-Ri either, having briefly mentioned it a few times. But I don't have that one on my DVR yet.) Running relatively early in the day was The Country Girl; showing overnight at 12:15 AM -- so technically on August 25 on the east coast but still August 24 in the rest of the time zones -- is The Swan.

A title card tells us that the action takes place in 1910, somewhere in Central Europe, in one of those minor royal houses. Grace Kelly plays Princess Alexandra, the eldest daughter in the house. She's got two much younger brothers, who are still young enough that they need a tutor, Dr. Agi (Louis Jourdan). The matriarch of the family, Princess Beatrix (Jessie Royce Landis), is a widow, and worried about both marrying her daughter off to someone suitable and getting the family line back into real royalty, as this branch no longer rules any lands, having lost everything to Napoleon a century earlier.

Then news comes that from a monarchy rather farther west, the Crown Prince, Prince Albert (Alec Guinness), will be coming for a visit. Beatrix realizes this is a perfect opportunity to try to play matchmaker and set up Alexandra with Albert. Not only that, but the two are cousins from a few generations back, so keeping everything in the extended family also seems like a great idea. And who couldn't resist somebody as beautiful as Princess Alexandra?

Apparently, Prince Albert can. He seems more interested in all the things the kid brothers are learning, and getting out in the fresh air around where the family lives, than in Alexandra herself. It should go without saying that this greatly distresses Alexandra, but even more so Beatrix. How to get Albert to notice Alexandra? Beatrix has the brilliant idea to try making him jealous.

There's going to be a going-away ball for Prince Albert, and Beatrix suggests to Alexandra that she might try inviting Dr. Agi and making it look to Albert as though Alexandra is interested in him. That would seem scandalous, since Agi is of course a commoner and in those days the higher-ranking princes and princesses. But desperate times call for desperate measures. Things get complicated, because Dr. Agi has long held a flame for Alexandra despite knowing he could never take the initiative because of the commoner/royalty divide. Worse is that this ruse doesn't seem to get Prince Albert interested in Alexandra.

The Swan is based on a play by the great Hungarian playwright Ferenc Molnár, from whose works a bunch of great movies have been made. Indeed, this was at least the third filming of The Swan, although I haven't seen the first two. This version of The Swan tries to open things up from the stage origins in part by having the duck-hunting scene as well as Agi and Alexandra going for a carriage ride together. I don't think the movie is quite successful in overcoming the staginess, however.

Not that The Swan is a bad movie; the performances are all competent. The production values are, being an MGM movie, quite good, with lovely color and beautiful sets and locations for the establishing shots. It's just that the material feels like it would work better with the spontaneity of a live stage performance and an audience to laugh where appropriate. Watch and judge for yourself.

How the West Was Won

I mentioned at the start of the week in conjunction with Debbie Reynolds being TCM's Star of the Month for March that there was was at least one of her movies that I've got on my DVR and haven't done a post on before. That movie is the epic How the West Was Won. It's coming up early tomorrow morning (March 30) at 4:30 AM, so now we get the post on it.

Spencer Tracy narrates this movie that at times feels like an anthology, but is really more of an episodic movie since some of the characters appear in multiple segments, and many of the characters who are only in one segment are all part of the same family. Anyhow, Tracy informs us that it hasn't been all that long since the American frontier was conquered, and that in the early days of trying to move west it was particularly difficult, at least until the construction of the Erie Canal (completed in 1825) really made it a good deal easier to get to at least western Missouri. We then cut to 1839 for the first segment....

The first segment, called "The River" deals with one family trying to migrate west in search of more fertile land, although west here more or less means the Ohio Valley, which I'd have though was fairly comprehensively settled by 1839; Wikipedia suggests Cincinnati had already been incorprated for a generation and had a population in the mid-five-figure range. In any case, the family, the Prescotts, consists of father Zebulan (Karl Malden), mom Rebecca (Agnes Moorehead) and daughters Eve (Carroll Baker) and Lilith (Debbie Reynolds). They meet trapper Linus (James Stewart) before all of them get waylaid by some dubious pirates of the river (their leader is played by Walter Brennan). An accident in river rapids kills Mom and Dad; Eve marries Linus and Lilith heads for greener pastures.

Those pastures take her to Saint Louis in 1850, where she's workin as an enterainer who finds out that she's somehow inherited a gold mine out in California. So as with Westward the Women mentioned recently, she has to go west to California to take possession of the mine. She's followed by some suitors, notably professional gambler Cleve Van Valen (Gregory Peck).

Back to Eve's side of the story, when the Civil War comes she's got an adult son Zeb (George Peppard). Linus and Zeb both go off to fight, but when Zeb sees the hell that war truly is, a confederate he meets (Russ Tamblyn) suggests the two of them desert and go off somewhere together. But there's a lot more tragedy to come.

After the Civil War, the Transcontinental Railroad gets built. Zeb is still in the Army, now in the cavalry, trying to keep the peace with the various Indian tribes despite the fact that Mr. King (Richard Widmark), the man from the railroad, wants to get the track laid and who cares what the Indians think.

Finally, after leaving the Army, there's one last segment that reunites the two branches of the Prescott family. Lilith is forced to sell her home in San Francisco, deciding to retire to a ranch in the Arizona territory. But she's old, so she invites her nephew Zeb, by now married (Carolyn Jones playing his wife) to come along and run the place. When they get to Arizona, Zeb runs into Gant (Eli Wallach), an outlaw who's there to try to steal one of the shipments of gold.

It's easy on watching How the West Was Won to see why it was such a massive commercial success when it was released. The story is actually fairly pedestrian, but the movie was made in Cinerama, so I can only imagine how spectacular it must have been to see the movie as it was intended to be seen in the original Cinerama.

Unfortunately, however, most people don't have the sort of curved screen necessary to see Cinerama in its original aspect ratio and presentation format. In days past, this meant that TV presentations would be cut down, and there would be severe crease-like lines where the various segments of the print were supposed to meet up. Nowadays, restorers have tried to solve that problem through the use of the "smilebox" format that attempts to replicate the experience one would have had in the theater where the left and right edges of the screen are closer to the viewer than the middle.

I'm sorry to say that this doesn't quite work. First, I get the impression that the smilebox format is really more curved than it needs to be. Some of the photos I've seen of Cinerama screens do show a clearly evident curve, but not as much as the smilebox format has. The bigger problem, however, is how translating Cinerama to the smilebox distorts motion. I've always felt like there was something off in Cinemascope backgrounds when there are scenes with long panning in that the motion in parts of the background don't look quite right. In the smilebox format, this is much more severe, almost like what you'd see if you were moving around a sphere with stuff being reflected off of it.

But if you're the sort of person who doesn't tend to notice such distortion, or if you ever get the chance to see it in the original Cinerama (I don't know how many Cinerama screens still exist; would it be possible to translate Cinerama to an IMAX screen?), give How the West Was Won a chance. It's certainly a spectacle.

Mrs. Parkington

I've argued before that there's a certain sort of opulent movie that MGM was quite good at making. An excellent example of this is Mrs. Parkington.

Greer Garson plays Mrs. Susie Parkington, a widow living in a big house in New York City in 1938, complete with servants and the works. It's Christmas Eve, and she's brought together all of her descendants to come celebrate the holiday with her. Her daughter Alice (Gladys Cooper) is stuck up and doesn't like the children caroling outside her house or her Mom's dogs. Her grandson-in-law Amory Stilham (Edward Arnold) is a businessman with two adult kids, Jack (Dan Duryea) and Jane (Frances Rafferty), who is about to be engaged to be married to Ned (Tom Drake). Amory's wife has a sister Madeleine (Lee Patrick), who has gotten serially married, currently to rancher Al Swann (Rod Cameron). Most of the relatives don't care much for the matriarch, only for her money; the exception is Jane.

So when Jane tells her great-grandmother that she's planning to elope with Ned, Susie starts thinking back to when she got married.... She was living out in Leaping Rock, Nevada, as the daughter of a woman who runs the local rooming-house, which serves as the place where a bunch of workers at the silver mine live. That mine is owned by Maj. Augustus Parkington (Walter Pidgeon), who is a bold risk-taker as a businessman, skimping on mine safety to get the silver out more quickly. Sure enough, a mine accident kills not just the workers but Susie's mom, so the major marries the orphaned Susie and brings her back to New York.

There, Parkington builds Susie a big house and introduces her to the Baroness Aspasia Conti (Agnes Moorehead), who loved Augustus in the past and, as a companion to him, helps Susie adjust to her new life. It's a difficult life for her, as the members of the Four Hundred, the social elite in New York, blackball Augustus for his actions in the Civil War that killed an ancestor of one of the Four Hundred, as well as his business practices.

Those business practices have continued to the present day; even though Augustus is long dead, Amory has been running the family business and speculating with the business itself, to the point that he's lost some $30 million that he's not going to be able to replace. The auditors are going to find the hole, arrest Amory, and bring shame to the Parkington family. In fact, that's why Ned wants to elope with Jane: he's seen Amory's criminal actions, and doesn't want to have to testify, thereby hurting his wife-to-be.

The financial hole could be plugged if the company could float an issue with Mrs. Parkington's fortune, but when she puts it to a vote of the other heirs, they all say no, because they want to keep their inheritance. It prompts Susie to have another flashback to the time when she finally reformed her husband's own shady business practices, as well as to a time after her son's death when it seemed another woman might take Augustus away from her.

Mrs. Parkington is a workhorse of a movie, taking a fairly familiar story idea -- the elderly person looking back at his or her very eventul life -- and imbuing it with all the class MGM could bring to it. Walter Pidgeon especially, and to a lesser extent Garson, were solid if unspectacular actors who could take this sort of material and make a professional, quality product. Both leads are the sort of actor it can be a bit hard to warm up to, not because of anything bad they're doing but because they're working with material that's really of its time. Everybody else is frankly much too old to be playing the characters they are, at least if you believe the opening that implies Mrs. Parkington is in her 80s, but they all do well enough, Arnold taking the honors among the supporting roles. But it's Greer Garson's movie all the way, even more than Pidgeon's.

Mrs. Parkington is available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive.

Not as magnificent as legend has it

Another recent watch off my DVR was The Magnificent Ambersons, the 1942 movie that is probably best remembered for the fact that the studio edited it over the objections of its director, Orson Welles.

Dolores Costello plays Isabel Amberson, daughter in a wealthy family in Indiana in the late 19th century. She's being pursued romantically by Eugene Morgan (Joseph Cotten), but Cotten makes the mistake of getting drunk while serenading her, which cases her father to break off the engagement. Instead, Isabel marries Minafer (Don Dillaway), while Eugnee goes off to become a success in life.

Roughly two dozen years pass, to around 1900. Isabel has an adult son George (Tim Holt), and they live in the old Amberson mansion together with Isabel's sister-in-law Fanny (Agnes Moorehead). Eugene, for his part, has become relatively successful as a manufacture of the new-fangled automobile. He's a widower with a daughter Lucy (Anne Baxter) who is about George's age. George has been spoiled rotten, and thinks that automobiles are an idiotic idea. Worse, he gets it in his head that Eugene has only returned for two reasons, both having to do with Isabel: one is that Eugene might still love Isabel; the other is that George thinks Eugene is fishing for an infusion of capital, specifically, Isabel's inheritance.

Idiotic George, for his part, announces that there's no way in hell he's going to do real work, either taking a profession like the law or doing manual labor. Instead, he's going to be a yachtsman or something; how the hell he ever thought he was going to make ends meet living like this is a mystery. General scuttlebutt is that George and Lucy would make a good couple, and they do go riding together, but Lucy wants a stable future, not a flake with no idea what he wants to do in life. George's father dies, revealing that there's not much to inherit, and to keep Isabel from Eugene, since the two really did remain friends, George takes her on a long trip which effectively kills her and depletes the family fortune.

The Magnificent Ambersons isn't a bad movie, but it's not without its flaws, and those aren't necessarily due to the editing. Welles insisted on using all sorts of camera tricks, and most of them not only add little to the movie, they detract by making the camera tricks the focus of the movie and not the plot. The story and acting are good, although George is an irritating enough character that at times when he's on the screen I found the movie a bit tougher to watch.

Supposedly, the original cut of the movie flopped badly in previews, which is why RKO edited it down by chopping about 50 minutes and leaving us with an 88-minute movie. Would Welles' original vision be better? I wouldn't be surprised if it would. But I also don't think it would be the masterpiece a lot of people believe it would have been. My guess, since none of the cut footage is known to survive, is that the original cut probably did need some editing since it came in at nearly two and a half hours, but that it wouldn't have needed to be cut down to 90 minutes. Also, the studio did have the impetus of that disastrous preview showing, Welles' going over budget, and changing tastes thanks to the American entry into World War II. And as I said above, The Magnificent Ambersons is still pretty good.