Eight years before The Hawaiians

Charlton Heston was TCM's Star of the Month some months back, and it gave me the opportunity to record several of his movies that I hadn't seen before. Among them is Diamond Head, which, having been released by Columbia, also shows up from time to time on Cinevault Classics. Recently, I watched it, and now you get the review.

After some nice widescreen and color opening credits showing the beauty of the new state of Hawaii, we cut to a shot of King Howland (Charlton Heston) riding to his large plantation house on a horse. He's met by a local judge to discuss several things, chief among them being the fact that Hawaii is now a state (the movie was released in early 1963 but set just after statehood in 1959), so it gets to send two Senators to Washington. King would be just the person to serve as Senator.

Meanwhile, there's other exposition to be done. Also waiting for King is Laura (Elizabeth Allen), who is King's sister-in-law. King's wife and young son died in a tsunami some years back. King also has a rather younger sister, Sloane (Yvette Mimieux), who is about to come back from college on the mainland. On the ship coming back with her is an old friend of the family, Paul Kahana (James Darren), a native Hawaiian whose mixed-race half-brother Dean (George Chakiris) is a doctor of some renown on the island. Paul tells King that he'd like to have a chat with King.

Indeed, Paul and Sloane have the same thing on their mind: they've fallen in love, and would like to get married. Nowadays, that wouldn't be such a big deal. But in 1959, interracial marriage (never mind that none of the actors playing Kahanas are real-life Pacific Islanders) was something that a lot more people considered scandalous. King is somewhat more progressive than a lot of whites, and while he thinks the local country club shouldn't be closed to ethnic Hawaiians, and no problem being friends with them, mixed marriage is out of the question. Laura is even more bigoted in that regard.

Of course, we eventually learn that King is being a bit of a hypocrite in this regard. Well, a lot of a hypocrite, since he's in a relationship with a Hawaiian woman himself, Mai Chen (France Nuyen, who at least is of Asian descent). King is OK with sleeping with the locals -- and even knocking them up -- but marriage, no sirree. No wonder Sloane and the Kahanas feel so much resentment. As for King, he's worried about the whole matter of race relations and how it might affect his Senate campaign.

Diamond Head is one of those soap opera type potboilers that were a thing in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when movies were still trying to differentiate themselves from TV. One way to do so was with widescreen and lush settings in color, all of which Diamond Head has in spades. As for the plot? Oh dear. The plot twists get increasingly ridiculous, almost as much as Aline MacMahon playing the Kahana matriarch. She's also opposed to interracial marriage, but on the grounds that she sees it as destroying the native culture.

Ultimately, I think Diamond Head is more a product of its time, and a time that was soon to change really radically. Much like The Liberation of L.B. Jones from several years later that I blogged about a couple of months back, it comes across as wanting to be more daring and open-minded, but not really succeeding. Interesting, but certainly not great.

The Gentle People

A movie that I think I'd seen part of at one time several years ago is Out of the Fog. It showed up some months back as part of TCM's Noir Alley even thought it isn't really a noir. So I recorded it in order to be able to watch it in full and do a review on it here.

After the opening credits, we get a fog-shrouded pier somewhere in Brooklyn. A man walks down to where the boats are moored, and flicks a match into one of the boats, starting a fire. He then walks into Caroline's bar and restaurant, run by Caroline (Odette Myrtil) who is in love with her short-order cook Olaf (John Qualen). Olaf feels she's a bit smothering, and would rather spend time with his best friend Jonah (Thomas Mitchell), a tailor who owns the place next door. The two of them have a boat and like to go fishing together.

The man who set the fire, Goff (John Garfield) goes back into the kitchen where he starts talkin to Olaf and then Jonah when he comes in. Eventually they hear the sirens of a fire engine. Goff, having set the fire, knows fully well that the boat is on fire and whose boat it is, so he knows it's not the one that Olaf and Jonah co-own; of course, nobody else knows any of this yet or what Goff's true nature is, although for a discerning viewer it shouldn't be too difficult to guess. And it's going to be revealed anyway.

We still have a few key characters to be revealed, however. Stella (Ida Lupino) is Jonah's adult daughter. The family live together in an apartment above the tailor's shop, and Stella is getting a bit sick of this kind of life because she wants something better. She's got a nice boyfriend in George (Eddie Albert), but she wants something better. So when Goff shows up, she realizes she's going to get that excitement she's always been craving.

Not that the excitement is going to be good for her. Goff, if you hadn't figured it out, does an extortion racket on the pier, and starts extorting Olaf and Jonah for what little money they have in exchange for not destroying their boat. It gets worse when Goff discovers that Olaf and Jonah have saved a bit of money. And then Jonah realizes that Goff is trying to put the moves on his daughter and that she seems to be OK with it, which really frightens him. Eventually, Jonah and Olaf figure that the only way to save themselves from the extortion, and to save Stella from Goff, is to kill Goff. The problem is that there's that pesky Production Code, and Olaf and Jonah are clearly supposed to be the good guys in this piece.

With the cast I've mentioned, and add in Aline MacMahon as Jonah's wife, it should be no surprise that Out of the Fog is well-acted, and definitely worth watching for the performances. It has a few problems, however, that are down to the time in which it was made. One, as I already alluded to, is the Production Code, which severely constrained how Hollywood could resolve all the dramatic conflicts that Olaf and Jonah have. The other thing is that the whole production looks clearly like it was done on the studio backlot and nowhere near the Brooklyn piers where the movie is supposed to be set. (It's based on a New York stage play.)

Out of the Fog may not be a noir despite the title or Eddie Muller's showing it in Noir Alley, but it's still one to watch.

Jimmy Dolan's life

It's been over ten years since I recommended the pretty darn good John Garfield movie They Made Me a Criminal. It's going to be on TCM again tomorrow (May 2) at 11:15 AM. But I mention that more because the movie is a remake of another movie that I recently watched, The Life of Jimmy Dolan.

Obviously, having seen the remake, I pretty much knew the story, although there are some minor changes to the details since this one was made before the code really started cracking down. Douglas Fairbanks Jr. stars as Jimmy Dolan, a boxer who at the start of the movie is winning the light heavyweight championship of the world. Dolan has built a carefully crafted image of an erudite (at least for a boxer) man who loves his mother and lives as good and clean a life as you could expect from a boxer. Of course, none of that's true, as Jimmy goes up to see his floozie of a girlfriend and drink even though it's the Prohibition era.

Somehow, in addition to Jimmy's manager Doc (Lyle Talbot) and Doc's girlfriend Budgie showing up, a reporter shows up as well. That's the big problem, because while Doc will keep Jimmy's hypocrisy a secret, the reporter won't do so. In the heated discussion, Jimmy punches the reporter, who falls backward and hits his head, killing him immediately. Poor Jimmy, up for manslaughter if not worse.

Oh, and there's goin gto be worse. Jimmy is drunk and passes out, so Doc takes Jimmy's watch and girlfriend, and drives off. The police chase, and Doc crashes, killing him and the girlfriend, and burning them beyond recognition. The only issue is that watch, which doesn't get burned beyond recognition. This enables the authorities to make an identification, not having proper dental records, and declare that Jimmy died in the crash. And there's no good way he can come out and say that he's not really dead, because then he'll get arrested for killing the reporter.

Having been screwed over by his manager and his attorney, Jimmy becomes a tramp, heading west to parts unknown where his face won't be recognized and in theory he could get honest work, at least if there weren't a depression going on to go along with Prohibition. Eventually, having run out of money, Jimmy collapses at a small farm somewhere out west.

That farm is run by two women, Peggy (Loretta Young) and her aunt (Aline MacMahon). Peggy's aunt is a widow, having been married to a doctor who was doing charity work by taking custody of orphans who had some sort of paralytic disease (I don't think the disease is mentioned although I'd guess polio), fostering them and trying to show there are ways to nurse these children back to health. The doctor's death, however, means there's not much money left for the two women, and having another mouth to feed -- and and adult male at that -- is going to be an issue.

But at least Jimmy is able to do some of the work. And he might just be able to help the women out with their financial difficulties. A barnstorming boxer blows into town, running the scheme that dumb local schlubs put up entry fees and then get a substantial sum of money for each round they can complete against the heavyweight. Most of the amateurs aren't going to get through even one round, but of course Jimmy is a ringer, and surprisingly one that the barnstormer's manager doesn't recognize.

Still, Jimmy knows that if he goes into the ring there are bound to be people who do recognize him, especially Phlaxer (Guy Kibbee), a detective from back in New York who has been on the case because he knows there was something fishy about that car crash and is convinced it wasn't Jimmy who died in the crash.

The Life of Jimmy Dolan isn't a bad little early 1930s programmer, but I have to admit that I don't think it's quite as good as They Made Me a Criminal. I woud argue that this comes down to the casting for the lead role. As I mentioned back in 2012, John Garfield was exceedingly well cast for a role that requires some moral darkness. Fairbanks, on the other hand, was better suited to light romantic comedies, and comes across as a bit of a phony in the scenes where he's supposed to show his anger. I think the Dead End Kids in the latter film also work better than the too cute for their own good ragamuffins we have here.

Even so, The Life of Jimmy Dolan is definitely worth a watch, and you can see why Warner Bros. would want to trot this property out again for Garfield.

Maybe they should have tried actually being merry

TCM ran a hodgepodge of 30s movies about odd relatives and living situations some months back, and one of the new-to-me movies I recorded that day was The Merry Frinks, selecting it, because the interesting cast is headlined by Aline MacMahon and Guy Kibbee.

MacMahon plays Hattie Frink, the mother in the family. She's married to Joe (Hugh Herbert), a chronic drunk who is a sportswriter at one of the city's newspapers; which one doesn't matter because he's lost jobs from one after the other. They live with his mother (Helen Lowell), a bitter hypochondriac who wants to boss everybody around.

Worse than that, however, is the Frinks' three adult children. Emmett (Allen Jenkins) is a communist lawyer (complete with portrait of Stalin; imagine Hollywood trying to portray a Nazi lawyer complete with portrait of Hitler with such a gentle touch) who loudly spouts slogans and lost his office for non-payment of rent. Then there's daughter Lucille (Joan Wheeler), who fancies herself a singer and has a sleazy boyfriend she insists is going to get her an audition at the radio station. Finally, there's Norman (Frankie Darro), who technically isn't an adult since he still has to go to school but skips every day.

Into all of this comes Uncle Newt (Guy Kibbee), who is presumably Grandma's brother-in-law. Nobody's seen Newt in decades, and here he is on their doorstep with all of his trunks claiming to have been in New Zealand after a lifetime spent in other places that would have seemed incredibly adventurous back in the early 1930s. Newt likes Hattie as the only relatively normal and nice member of the family.

So it shouldn't be much of a surprise that when New dies suddenly, it's revealed that he rewrote his will. In fact, he had spent all that time in New Zealand and the other places, and has a good half million (in 1930s dollars) in stock, which he leaves entirely to Hattie. But there's a condition that would never have stood up in probate court, I think. She has to abandon the rest of the family, never to see them again.

She's happy to do so, living a life she could never have dreamed of before. And unsurprisingly, the rest of the family falls to pieces without Hattie around, and wants her back.

There's a good premise behind The Merry Frinks, but a serious problem. All of the Frinks other than Hattie are beyond obnoxious, to the point that you want them to suffer and Hattie never to see them again. Their obnoxiousness goes on far too long before Guy Kibbee shows up, and he's not in the movie nearly long enough.

The Merry Frinks is on a double feature DVD with Big-Hearted Herbert, another movie starring MacMahon and Kibbee. That one is far better.

While the Patient Slept

Quite a few years back, I mentioned that Warner Bros. put out a series of short mystery films as part of a cross promotion called the "Clue Club" mysteries. The movies aren't related to each other in any other way, but one of those B mysteries showed up on TCM recently: While the Patient Slept.

An elderly businessman is believed to be on the verge of death, and all of his relatives as well as some other important people like his lawyer are at his mansion waiting for him to kick the bucket. He gets a telegram with some unexpected news, and this causes him to have a stroke -- but the stroke doesn't kill him. So the old man's doctor sends over Nurse Keate (Aline MacMahon) to take round-the-clock care of the old guy.

Needless to say, all the man's relatives want to talk to him; they're all cousins to one another. One guy is calling in an outstanding loan; there's also the old guy's lawyer, and so on. The old guy is in bed in a bedroom that seems to have been converted from a library or something because it seems to be way too big and right off the greatroom. So in any case there's a lot of traffic outside his room.

And then, suddenly, a shot rings out! And one of the cousins dies! And pretty much everybody in the house could have been a suspect. The police send over Detective O'Leary (Guy Kibbee), who obviously has a past relationship of some sort with Keate, and not just because MacMahon and Kibbee had starred together in Big Hearted Herbert a year earlier. As O'Leary tries to solve the case, he and Keate trade one-liners, helped by the fact that O'Leary's deputy is played by comedic character actor Allen Jenkins.

To be honest, I'm being a bit vague on the plot largely because the plot isn't the real reason to watch this one. It doesn't really matter who did it, because the real reason to watch it is the banter between MacMahon and Kibbee. They're both in good form, although they'd probably be in better form with a more original plot. The rest of the cast of character actors is professional but not something you're going to remember years from now.

While the Patient Slept is the sort of movie that belongs on a box set, although as far as I can tell it's only available on a standalone DVD from the Warner Archive collection.