Mrs. O'Malley and Mr. Malone

Some time back TCM did a prime-time spotlight on some of the films of Marjorie Main. One that I had seen quite a few years back, but did not blog about at the time -- it might even have been before I started blogging -- was Mrs. O'Malley and Mr. Malone. So with that in mind I recorded it and eventually got around to watching it so that I could do this post on it.

Marjorie Main plays Mrs. Hattie O'Malley, a widow living in Proudfoot, MT and running some sort of boarding house; the Montana setting at the start is basically an excuse for Main to do a version of the rustic Ma Kettle character. She gets a sudden call from a radio program in New York which plays her a mystery song for a chance to win a cash and prize package of $50,000, which is a pretty darn big sum for 1950 when the movie was released. She's able to recognize the song, and she's invited on an all-expenses paid trip to New York to receive her winnings.

Cut to Chicago, where John J. Malone (James Whitmore) lives. He's a struggling lawyer, who owes a bunch of money largely because his big client, Steve Kepplar (Douglas Fowley), owes him. Malone had defended Kepplar on an embezzlement charge where Kepplar stole $100K from the firm run by Myron Brynk (Don Porter). Kepplar was convicted, but is about to be paroled now, and Malone would like the money he's owed for his services defending Kepplar. But Malone needs to get in line: Kepplar has an ex-wife Connie (Ann Dvorak) who wants alimony. And, besides, that $100K was never returned to the Brynk business. Still, Brynk offers Kepplar his old job back and to celebrate, they'll go to the same hotel lounge where Mrs. O'Malley is staying on a stopover in Chicago. This, as you can guess, is how the two title characters meet.

Kepplar is a no-show at the big reunion, and the natural suspicion is that he's fleeing the jurisdiction, and absconding with the $100K. His probation officer, Marino (Fred Clark), has good reason to believe that Kepplar is on the train to New York, so he gets on the same train that Mrs. O'Malley will be taking. Malone also gets on the train because he wants his $10,000, even though he should know that the money Kepplar embezzled can't be touched. The ex-Mrs. Kepplar shows up too.

Sure enough, Kepplar is on the train, disguised as a sailor and hiding in the compartment of his girlfriend Lola (Dorothy Malone). But wouldn't you know it, that night Malone returns to his compartment, which conveniently enough for the plot happens to be right next to Mrs. O'Malley's. In that compartment he finds... the undressed body of Steve Kepplar, who has been stabbed to death! Who would want to stab him, and why would the murderer want to remove his clothes? All Mr. Malone knows is that since the body was found in his compartment he's going to be the prime suspect. Mrs. O'Malley sees Malone and the body, and is willing to help in a murder mystery.

Mrs. O'Malley and Mr. Malone is another of those movies where it's easy to see why the people involved in it would want to make it; the premise of another comic murder mystery is one that has obvious appeal. Unfortunately, this one comes across as a bit too manic. Worse, Mr. Malone is just too dishonest to be a sympathetic character, as opposed to a charming person like Nick Charles. I also think it doesn't help that 1950, when the movie was released, was just about the time when stories like this would have started moving to television. So Mrs. O'Malley and Mr. Malone was underwhelming at best.

Out of the Blue

It always amazes me just how many old movies there are that I hadn't even heard of until they show up on TCM, or nowadays, I come across them when I'm on Tubi or one of the other FAST platforms. Then again, there were quite a few lower-budget studios putting out B stuff. In this case, that studio is Eagle-Lion, and the movie in question is Out of the Blue.

George Brent plays Arthur Earthleigh, a businessman in New York who can afford one of those posh apartments with an open-air balcony. He lives there with his stodgy wife Mae (Carole Landis), who wants everything in the apartment to be just perfect. She's really irritated about her neighbor, artist David Galleo (Turhan Bey). He's an artist who has a German shepherd dog that insists on burying bones on the Earthleighs' side of the balcony, and that really ticks Mae off. She wants Arthur to get their lawyer and make David get rid of the dog, which is really more of an excuse to give David the character motivation to do what he does later in the movie. Meanwhile, watching from two stories above are a pair of spinster aunt types, Spring and Ritchie (Elizabeth Patterson and Julia Dean respectively).

Mae has to go up to Connecticut to visit her sick sister for the weekend, leaving Arthur alone at home. He goes out to a bar where he meets Olive (Ann Dvorak), who follows him back to the apartment because she's generally the sort of person following on from Katharine Hepburn's character in Bringing Up Baby. For fairly understandble reasons, Arthur wants to get Olive out of his apartment, despite her claiming to have a heart condition that can be helped by copious amounts of brandy. Arthur thinks he's succeeded in sending Olive on her way, but she goes into the guest bedroom and passes out on the bed.

The next morning Arthur finds out what has happened. Worse, Olive has completely rearranged the furniture, which is going to piss Mae off when she finds out. And then to complicate things further, when Arthur more forcefully tries to evice Olive he accidentally strikes her, causing her to faint and pass out on the ground. Arthur thinks she's died, and decides that the best thing to do is deposit the dead body on David's side of the balcony. David has a string of women visiting his place to do modeling work for him, such as current client Deborah (Virginia Mayo).

David finds the body, but also realizes that Olive is not in fact dead, a fact which is very useful because he now has a way to get back at Arthur and Mae, by blackmailing Arthur into allowing David to keep his dog, as well as making Arthur think the police are on to him. The two biddies upstairs see the body and naturally call the police, since there's been a string of murders in the neighborhood. As you can guess, things get rather complicated, although everything mostly works out for the good people in this story.

Out of the Blue is a movie that may work for the right sort of person. To be honest, the comedic premise isn't a bad one, making me think of The Trouble With Harry, although in that case Harry was really most sincerely dead. The issue I had with the movie, however, was the Olive character. She gets so obnoxious that it's difficult to have sympathy with her. It's almost as though I would have been OK with if it she actually had died. And since the story is basically one extended joke, it can be a bit tough if you don't like the character at the center of the joke.

But again, I can see why some people are going to love a movie like Out of the Blue, so watch for yourself and reach your own judgment.

I was an American Spy

Another movie that I put on my DVR because it sounded moderately interesting was the World War II docudrama I Was an American Spy. Recently, I got around to watching it, so now is the time for me to do a review on it.

The movie opens with US Army 4-star general Mark Clark as himself informing us that we're going to see the true story of one Claire Phillips (Ann Dvorak) and hoping that, if Americans should ever be faced with such danger again, would respond with as much courage as Claire did. More amusingly, however, is that Clark seems to keep looking off to the side, when it suddenly hit me that Clark is likely looking at cue cards! Clark was no professional actor or even voiceover guy.

Flash back to the morning of Dec. 8, 1941, in Manila, which was part of the US territory of the Philippines at the time. Now, you'll recall the date of Dec. 7, but since Manila is something like 18 hours ahead, the attack on Pearl Harbor occurred in the early hours of Dec. 8 Manila time, and most people wouldn't have heard about it until the following morning. Needless to say, when Claire wakes up, the place is a mad-house. She works at a nightclub and has a foster daughter, and everybody is telling her to get the hell out of the Philippines since it's clear the Japanese are going to attack.

Claire is obscenely naïve, however, for a woman working in a place like this. She's got an American soldier boyfriend in Sgt. John Phillips (Douglas Kennedy), whom she's been hoping to marry. She thinks she can just call up the base and get in touch with him. Eventually, he does show up, but it's only to let her know briefly they're going to be split up. Claire, her daughter, and a Filipina friend leave Manila, but they're well behind most of the westerners when an American GI drives by in a jeep to inform them he's part of the mop-up crew. Still, by some miracle, Claire is spotted and reunited with Sgt. John just long enough for them to get married.

Some time later, Claire is rescued again, this time by a band of American guerrillas who, for whatever reason, all got separated from their units and escaped to the jungle hills from where they're doing what they can for the war effort. Claire, still being an idiot, wants to go down the hill to look for her husband, but the guerrilla commander, Cpl. John Boone (Gene Evans), tries to inform her of the danger. Eventually they do go down the hill, only to find the Japanese forcing a bunch of soldiers on what we now know as the Bataan Death March. Amazingly, Sgt. John is among them. But he tries to stop for water and gets shot by the Japanese for his troubles. That night, Claire shoots a Japanese soldier.

Cpl. John tells Claire that what the guerrillas really need is intelligence. Claire thinks she can provide that, as the Japanese are less likely to suspect a woman and because she's less use to the guerrillas in the jungle than she is trying to gather intelligence. So she decides to get herself smuggled back into Manila, taking the code name "High Pockets" when Cpl. John sees her stashing stuff in her bra!

In Manila, Claire is able to get the passport of a former Italian friend, since deceased, and pass herself off as Italian which will allow her to stay in Manila since Japan and Italy were fellow Axis countries. Claire sets out to gather intelligence, and is quite good at it, at least until the Japanese suspect something is going on and set out to find High Pockets.

I Was an American Spy is a decided B movie, the sort of thing that a decade or two later probably would have been churned out as a TV movie of the week. There's nothing special here, but the movie is at least moderately entertaining.

Another of those "Not best suited to MGM" movies

I've mentioned before how MGM was one of the top studios in the pre-TV era of Hollywood, but also how certain types of movies didn't really work at MGM because the studio seemed incapabale of making a movie not be glossy. Another movie that I think fits into that mold is the melodrama A Life of Her Own.

The movie starts off with Lily Brannel James (Lana Turner) taking a taxi in her small city (I'd call it a small town, but the buildings are too big for that) to the train station to catch a train to New York City where she's bound to make it big, and everybody in town knows it. Or at least, that's the sort of town it is. In the next scene, Lily is already in New York, sitting in the waiting room of the modeling agency run by Tom Caraway (Tom Ewell). She has to wait a while to get Tom's attention, but he does hire. Coming into the office at the same time is veteran model Mary Ashlon (Ann Dvorak), whose career has passed its peak.

The two wind up going out on the town together that night, making it a double date with lawyer Jim (Louis Calhern) and ad exec Lee (Barry Sullivan). Mary has too much to drink and winds up back in her upper-floor apartment with Lily, chewing Lily out on the grounds that Mary thinks Lily is trying to take her boyfriend away from her. The next morning, Lily walks into the office to hear all the other models talking about the news that Mary has killed herself by jumping out of her apartment window!

Since Lana Turner is the star of the movie, we know that she's going to make it as a model; as she starts to climb the ladder of success, she's accompanied by Jim, who sort of takes Lily under his wing. Meanwhile, he has a client, Steve Harleigh (Ray Milland), who is a copper miner from Montana and visiting New York on business reasons. Steve and Lily spend time together on a purely platonic basis since he's already married and realize that they can never have a real relationship even though they do start developing feelings for each other. So they part as friend when Steve goes back home.

Except that business is going to bring Steve back to New York, and this time he's even unhappier than he was the first time he was in New York. Steve may have fallen out of love with his wife Nora (Margaret Phillips), but then we learn what really happened between Steve and Nora: the two of them got in a car accident that was Steve's fault but it was Nora who wound up an invalid. To make matters worse, Nora decides to come out to New York since she hasn't seen him in a while and his birthday is coming up. Lily is the one who's going to be left out. Or will she make Steve and Nora confront the truth?

Part of the problem with A Life of Her Own is that it's the sort of melodrama that would have been better suited to Warner Bros. instead of MGM, where everyone can't help but be a bit too high-class for the material. But another part of the problem with the movie is that it was made while the Production Code was still utterly in effect. The material here really needed to be handled differently, but any of the ways to make it work better would have run up against the Code Office. (Indeed, reading up on the movie, the Office had issues with earlier drafts of the screenplay.) The cast tries hard, and it's not as if the movie is bad by any means. It's more that it's not quite right.

Still, A Life of Her Own probably deserves being seen in part to see how the Production Code could screw up a movie and in part for the professionalism of all involved.

Love Is a Racket

I've said on a lot of occasions how I like Warner Bros.' B movies. They also had a lot of good programmers in the 1930s, with a good example of this being a movie I recently watched off my DVR, Love Is a Racket.

Jimmy Russell (Douglas Fairbanks Jr.) is a reporter stereotyp, as we see when he gets a call waking him up at 5:00 -- PM, not AM. He writes the Broadway gossip column for one of the New York newspapers, and has a roommate in the form of Stanley Fiske (Lee Tracy), whose purpose in being there is never really quite mentioned. Also showing up at the apartment is Sally Condon (Ann Dvorak), who really holds a torch for Jimmy. But he's got a bit more of a torch for young Mary Wodehouse (Frances Dee), an up-and-coming actress.

Mary, for her part, has a couple of other guys interested in her, notably Broadway producer Max Boncour (Andre Luguet), as well as gangster Eddie Shaw (Lyle Talbot). One of Eddie's current rackets involves the dairy business, and in fact Jimmy has heard some gossip that might help blow the racket wide open. But Jimmy doesn't want to report it, in part because that's not his beat, and in part because it's not confirmed enough. One of Jimmy's colleagues, however, does try to report it, and Jimmy has to do some fast work to spike the story.

But the dairy racket is not the real thrust of the movie. That thrust involves Mary, who lives with her aunt and has been living beyond her means. She's written a couple of checks that are going to bounce, so somebody decides to be a good Samaritan and cover the checks for her. Of course, it's not all altruism. As you might be able to guess, it's Eddie who bought the checks, and he wants something back for having done so, which is specifically Mary as his girlfriend.

Jimmy isn't about to let that happen, so Eddie, who has decamped to Atlantic City, sends Mary a telegram threatening her, and Jimmy, being chivalrous, tells Mary he'll try to help her. But it's a ruse, and Jimmy is detained in Atlantic City by one of Eddie's underlings. He is able to escape and get back to New York, but when he goes to see Eddie, he finds that Eddie has just been killed!

As you can see, there's a lot going on in Love Is a Racket. To be honest, it's doesn't all quite mesh. But director William Wellman and his cast approach the material with such verve that they make this little pre-Code an eminently interesting watch. Objectively, it's not the world's greatest movie by any stretch of the imagination, but you could do a lot worse than Love Is a Racket.