Nora Bayes

There's been a couple of days in the past year or two where the TCM lineup has been a bunch of musical biopics, of which there seem to be more than I realize. And here, by musical biopics I mean biographical movies of mostly composer/songwriter types; not movies about famous people that have for some reason been turned into musicals. Well, tomorrow, June 5, is another such day, and once again I've got one of the movies in the TCM lineup on my DVR just waiting more me to do a post on it. That movie is Shine on, Harvest Moon, which airs at 9:30 AM.

Shine on Harvest Moon is the purported story of the two people credited with writing it, Nora Bays (Ann Sheridan) and Jack Norworth (Dennis Morgan). They're certainly the ones who made the song a popular standard, although apparently in those days it was common practice for someone to buy all the rights to the song including being credited as the songwriters. As the movie opens, it's around 1905 in Milwaukee. Vaudeville is the big thing, and Jack is a single act in a traveling vaudeville show, as is Blanche (Irene Mallory), who is presented as someone you think is going to become romantically involved with Jack. Also in the show are the magician Georgetti (Jack Carson) and his ditzy assistant Margie (Marie Wilson) who eventually get married and become friends of Jack and Nora's, showing up several times throughout the movie.

Nora is only seen a bit later, when Jack sees her performing at a cabaret and realizes she'd be pefect for the sort of songs he's trying to get published. What he doesn't know is that Nora is being pursude by Dan Costello (Robert Shayne), who ones the place where Nora is performing. Nora resists Dan's advances, while Jack resists Blanche's, and Jack and Nora go off together, in part to do their own vaudeville act and in part for Jack to write songs for Nora to sing.

But what the two don't know is that they've made some powerful enemies. Costello becomes more and more successful as a producer and theater owner, while Blanche seems to become somewhat successful as a performer and wants to make certain that Jack sings with her. With that in mind, Dan pretty much blacklists Nora which effectively means blacklisting Jack too unless he wants to give in and do a double with Blanche or have her sing his songs. Even a good friend like "Poppa" Carl (S.Z. Sakall) can't help get them bookings. Oh, he does get them an audition, but Dan finds out before the scheduled time leaving Jack and Nora to audition for an empty theater.

Eventually Nora gives up and leaves Jack so that he can have some success, but we know the movie is going to have a happy ending, so Poppa Carl figures out a way to get Jack to bring Nora into the act that Dan and Blanche can't stop. They then perform the title song as well as another number, "Time Waits for No One", in a Technicolor finale (the rest of the movie is in black and white), before living happily ever after.

Or at least the movie Shine On, Harvest Moon would have you believe. Jack and Nora would get divorced and go on to have multiple spouses, while as mentioned above there's a question as to whether they even wrote the song. Indeed, the songs in the movie are mostly a pastiche of stuff from the first decade of the century. It's another of those movies that tries to bring turn-of-the-century nostalgia to audiences who were spending their time outside the theater worrying about the war raging over in Europe and the Pacific, having been released in the spring of 1944. Audiences of the day might have liked it, but it's one that, unlike Roughly Speaking, hasn't aged very well.

She Loved a Fireman

Another of the short B movies that I recorded during one of the Saturday matinee blocks some months back, was She Loved a Fireman, which runs a shade under an hour. As is once again the case, I eventually got around to watching it so that I could write this review and put it up here.

The main character is the fireman, not the she. And the fireman doesn't start off the movie as a fireman. Instead, the man in question, Red Tyler (Dick Foran) is a ward-heeler type who would be more comfortable making book and getting manicures than you'd think he'd be in a fire department. But for reasons that are vaguely suggested might be related to political corruption, he follows a fire captain, Smokey Shannon (Robert Armstrong), out of the salon where Smokey is getting a shave and Red is getting that manicure. Red thinks he's more masculine than the fire fighters, so he and his best friend Skillet (Eddie Acuff) decide to take the civil service exam to become firefighters.

The two both pass and go to the fire academy in one of the movie's better scenes showing some of the training the recruits go through. After graduation they both get assigned to Smokey's station. Red immediately makes everyone else hate him because Red thinks he's hot stuff. Meanwhile, he decides he's going to hook up with Margie (Ann Sheridan) who walks into the fire station one day. It's only later tht he finds out that this is Margie Shannon, the captain's sister. And boy is the captain none too pleased that Red is trying to pursue his sister.

Worse, Red decides he's going to cut corners so that he can get out of the station and go visit Margie. This includes some obvious foreshadowing of a shot of a hook that's supposed to keep the ladder connected to the fire truck. As you might guess, the station gets called out to a fire, Skillet is holding on to that ladder as the fire truck races to the fire, and then the ladder falls off, giving Skillet a lovely broken leg in the process.

Smokey gets Red transferred to the harbor fire station when Red should probably have been prosecuted for negligence and gone to jail for it, but then we'd have a lot less of a movie. As you might guess, there's a warehouse fire near the harbor, and both Red's new precinct and Smokey's get called to the scene. Smokey gets trapped on the roof, and this gives Red a chance to save Smokey and give the movie a happy ending.

There are a lot of problems with She Loved a Fireman, with most of the issues stemming from the fact that Red is just such a jerk of a character. You can't understand why anybody would like this guy, and then the obligatory redemption arc doesn't really work either There's some good footage of training as well as some good stock footage in the warehouse fire, but that's not enough to save the movie. Ann Sheridan was at the beginning of her career here, which is part of why Warner Bros. only put her in a trifle of a B movie like this. She's not enough to save the film either.

Let's remake Three on a Match and subject it to the Production Code!

Quite some time back, I saw TCM running the 1938 movie Broadway Musketeers, with the brief synopsis on the TCM schedule making it sound suspiciously like the early Bette Davis film Three on a Match. Intrigued, I recorded the movie so that I could get around to watching it and see what it was really like.

The opening didn't seem like what I'd remembered from Three on a Match. Isabel Dowling (Margaret Lindsay) is a bored rich housewife married to businessman Stanley (John Litel) and with a child Judy. One night they come home from a party with Isabel mildly worried about Stanley's having to go away on business all the time, and talking to his client's wife; you can guess what Isabel thinks that means. Stanley suggests Isabel and the kid accompany him on his next business trip to the west coast. Isabel, still bored, turns on the radio....

The scene cuts to singer Fay Reynolds (Ann Sheridan) singing the same song that Isabel was listening to on the radio. Fay is a well-known burlesque singer. Well enough known, in fact, that a couple of plainclothes cops are in the audience waiting for Fay to do something obscene enough for them to be able to arrest her. Now, since this is a movie made after the Production Code started getting enforced, that's not a whole lot. Fay takes off her wrap to reveal what looks about as revealing as the top half of a bikini, although it matches the wrap in having rhinestones. Still, it's enough, and Fay winds up in jail on $300 bail.

Showing up to try to bail Fay out is Miss Connie Todd (Marie Wilson), who is a respectable secretary, although not exactly earning a lot of money. Certainly not enough to bail Fay out. But Isabel does, and she also shows up, pleasantly surprised to meet Miss Todd. As it turns out, the three women all know each other, because they grew up together in an orphanage. The go back to take a look at the old place before celebrating at a restaurant they did when they were young. At this point, the movie really does begin to sound more like Three on a Match.

The similarity is going to get a whole lot more obvious by the climax. Stanley goes off on that business trip and Fay invited Isabel and Connie to see her circle of friends. At one of these swell parties, professional gambler Phil Peyton (Richard Bond) shows up, and he and Isabel become a bit of an item, which is a problem since Isabel is already married. The two get in a car crash together, and Fay tries to repay Isabel's favor by suggesting to Stanley that Phil is really her boyfriend, not Isabel's. Stanley knows better and divorces Isabel, while constantly meeting Fay and eventually marrying her.

Isabel gets a large divorce settlment and marries Phil, who promptly proceeds to lose the settlment money gambling, and then writing bad checks, which gets him in trouble with the casino owner. Now, if you've seen the movie Three on a Match, you know that Isabel is going to get involved with the trouble, although not by choice....

Three on a Match is a great pre-Code, and unfortunately the sort of movie that you can't really do under Production Code strictures. As Broadway Musketeers shows, you can certainly try, and I suppose Warner Bros. was saving a bit of money by remaking a property they owned, but you're not going to be able to make a movie that sparkles like the original. Broadway Musketeers isn't terrible (although it should be pointed out that the movie isn't even about Broadway, either), but definitely watch the original instead. It's so much fun.

One More Tomorrow

I mentioned the other day that I had a movie on my DVR called One More Tomorrow. It's going to be on TCM tomorrow at 6:00 AM as part of a morning and afternoon of the movies of Ann Sheridan, since she was born on Feb. 21, 1915.

Sheridan nominally gets top billing, but the real star here is Dennis Morgan. He plays Tom Collier III, a playboy who lives in Connecticut in a house that's probably been in the family, and not just his outright, since his father (Thurston Hall) is the one who's the wealthy businessman. Tom is hosting a party for the swell society people, where his seeming best friend Pat Regan (Jack Carson) is serving as butler; said party is right around September 1939 when World War II kicked off in Europe. Odd for a movie released in 1946, but more on that later.

One of the guests at the party is Cecelia Henry (Alexis Smith), a gold-digger who seems intent on getting Tom for a husband; at least, she seems like she might be the right social class for him. Also showing up at the party, but not as a guest, is a crew from the "liberal" magazine Bantam, headed by photographer Christie Sage (that's Ann Sheridan). "Liberal" here means not just being openly anti-Nazi when that wasn't quite so prominent (since the movie is set before the US entry into World War II), but also papering over the evils of Soviet Communism. Tom follows Christie back to New York and the Bantam offices, and sparks fly.

Tom is eventually able to buy out Bantam, but not to neuter it. Instead, he lets the editor, Jim Fisk (Reginald Gardiner), keep the magazine's editorial line. But although Tom loves Christie and the feeling is clearly mutual, there's no way they can get married since Tom has his father and all those "polite society" people. So he marries Cecelia, and nobody lives happily ever after.

Some time passes, and Christie has dealt with the pain of being dumped by Tom by going to Mexico where she does some sort of avant-garde photo shoot (we never actually see the photos), before returning to New York to display the photos at a hoity-toity gallery. Tom gets an invite, and is planning on going, at least until Ceceli shows herself to be a controlling jerk. It's not only that, however; she impresses upon Tom the need to get rid of Pat as a butler.

Tom feels bad about having stood Christine up again, so he goes into New York to see her, although she doesn't want to see him since she can't deal with the emotional pain of his being unavailable to her. Meanwhile, back at Bantam, Jim has gotten a story about corruption in the defense procurement industry. It's a juicy one, but running it means that there's a pretty darn good possibility some of the people in Tom's social circle will be caught up in the scandal and go to prison for it. Cecelia resorts to underhanded means to spike the story.

One More Tomorrow came across as a movie that was really odd in tone, and looked like a lesser print. Indeed, it felt like something that shouldn't have come out after the end of World War II, having been released in mid-1946. A search on IMDb shows that the movie was actually filmed in mid-1943 and held back for three years for whatever reasons Warner Bros. had in mind. That 1943 filming date would explain a lot of the film's politics. (If Warner Bros. had really wanted to be daring, they could have tried making Bantam a magazine that opposed the rampant corruption of the New Deal.) As it was the height of World War II, there was a sense that the Soviets, as our nominal allies in the war, needed to be made more palatable, something seen in movies like The North Star and the thoroughly revolting Mission to Moscow which completely whitewashes Stalin's crimes against humanity.

The resulting tone makes One More Tomorrow a movie that's a little tough to take. A lot of the dialog feels forced, as though everybody needs to go through the motions of making wartime propaganda. But even then, there were movies made during the war that clearly promote the war effort and do a good job of it. One More Tomorrow is heavy-handed even in that way. As a result, it's a movie that'll probably be of interest mostly to completists of one or another of the stars.

Juke Girl

Ann Sheridan was TCM's Star of the Month back in June, and I recorded several of her movies that I hadn't blogged about before. I finally got around to watching the last of them, Juke Girl.

Sheridan is nominally the star here, and certainly the title refers to her, but she's really not the star, as that honor goes to Ronald Reagan. Reagan plays Steve Talbot, a Kansas-born farmer who for the last several years has been doing the seasonal labor thing together with his buddy Danny Frazier (Richard Whorf). As the movie opens, they're walking toward the town of Cat-Tail, FL, which is the farming capital of Florida considering how many thousands of seasonal workers show up.

As for Sheridan, she plays Lola Mears, who works as a singer/"entertainer" at one of the "juke joint" bars that pop up in town to service all those migrant workers. Lola, like Steve and Danny, is itinerant, and the juke girl life is all she seems to know, except that at least she'll be able to get a similar job no matter where she goes.

Cat-Tail is one of those towns run by a company, in this case the Madden Packing company. Henry Madden (Gene Lockhart) owns the one packing place in town, and uses this to offer all of the farmers lousy prices on their crops, which really ticks off people like Nick Garcos (George Tobias). He's planning on taking his tomatoes up to Atlanta himself, but the truck he has is lousy and there's no way the tires are going to make it all the way to Atlanta, as Steve tells him. This forms an alliance between Steve and Nick.

Danny, meanwhile, has decided that working for Madden is the best way for him to get ahead, never mind the fact that Madden isn't just a hard-nosed businessman, but one who has no compunction about bending the law to get his way, considering the way his henchmen destroy Nick's tomatoes. Danny seems more ready to settle down and compromise, unlike the more idealistic Steve.

Nick has a crop of beans ready to be harvested, and is determined to get them picked and to Atlanta, even though Madden is clearly willing to resort to violence. So Nick and Steve have to use a subterfuge just to get on the road, and then even when they get to Atlanta the buyers have already heard from Madden and are extremely reluctant to buy.

But Nick is able to sell, and is then stupid enough to, upon his return to Cat-Tail, start waving around all the money he made selling those beans and getting obnoxiously drunk. Drunk enough, in fact, that I would have been happy to see somebody smack him, as he had become even more of the stereotypical lovable immigrant than he was when we first met him. Steve puts drunk Nick to bed, but Nick escapes and confronts Madden, who kills Nick in self-defense even though Madden realizes nobody will believe him. So Madden dumps Nick's body and pins the murder on Steve and Lola!

Juke Girl is an interesting movie, at least until it takes that ridiculous plot turn with not even 20 minutes to go, so it really wraps up way too quickly. Reagan and Sheridan do reasonably well with the material they're given; Whorf is actually the best; and Tobias and Lockhart are both given sub-par material. Tobias is a stereotype, and Lockhart has to overact shamelessly for his climactic scene. And the local law enforcement is expected to act out of character in the climax.

So there are certainly some flaws in Juke Girl, but it's still an interesting movie of its time. It's on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive.

20,000 Years with John Garfield

I see that I still have a couple of movies left on the DVR from when Ann Sheridan was TCM Star of the Month back in June. Among them is Castle on the Hudson. Sheridan and male lead John Garfield being Warner Bros. contract players, it's unsurprising that this one got a DVD release courtesy of the Warner Archive.

Garfield plays Tommy Gordon, a gangster living the high life who seems to get away with the crimes he commits, except for the fact that he doesn't want to commit any crime on Saturday because that's his unlucky day. (That's a lot of foreshadowing.) Sheridan plays his girlfriend Kay, who'll stick by him through thick and thin.

Unfortunately, Tommy's underlings get him involved in a crime that takes place on a Saturday night, and sure enough, the police pinch him at a high-class nightclub that's presumably a mob front. In any case, Tommy gets convicted and sent up to Sing Sing.

Tommy thinks he'll be able to waltz through prison, especially since he's got a bunch of money. Obviously he'd seen Blackwell's Island and how the gangster prisoners there were able to run the place. But the warden here, Long (Pat O'Brien) isn't about to have any of that nonsense. He's one of those wardens who actually believes in rehabilitation, but is also not a softy. Everybody gets the same level of discipline until they show they deserve more or less, and that discipline is going to rehabilitate them.

In prison, Tommy becomes friends with Steven Rockford (Burgess Meredith), who is planning an escape. Steven sets up the plot such that Tommy should be able to escape with him, but then Tommy realizes that the planned break is on a Saturday. Fat chance of Tommy taking part in it. And sure enough, the plot fails, with Steven getting killed by the guards in the process.

Tommy may not exactly be a model prisoner, but he is at least more docile from the time he spent in solitary and the other indignities that Warden Long visited upon him for not wanting to go along with the prison rules. And Long eventually thinks that perhaps even someone like Tommy is being rehabilitated.

But then poor Kay is the passenger in a car crash that nearly kills her. Tommy gets a telegram, and Long rather bizarrely gives Tommy a one-day furlough -- on the honor system! -- so that Tommy can go to New York and see Kay before she dies. Some of Tommy's enemies see him and set up an attempted hit, which is foiled by... Kay, who shoots Tommy's enemy dead. Not that the authorities are going to believe any of this, even if Kay should survive.

If the plot sounds familiar, that's because Castle on the Hudson is a remake of Warner Bros. pre-Code movie 20,000 Years in Sing Sing. It's basically a programmer for Garfield, who was a rising star at Warner Bros. from the very beginning of his career, as well as for Sheridan, running about 77 minutes.

Even though it's just a programmer, having the cast that it does ensures that it's a pretty good movie. It might be better remembered if it weren't such a close remake of 20,000 Years in Sing Sing, which had even bigger stars, but that's unfair to Castle on the Hudson. It really can stand on its own, and the movie's big fault, that furlough, is a problem in both movies.

So you should probably watch both Castle on the Hudson and 20,000 Years in Sing Sing, and judge for yourself.

Wings for the Eagle

One of the movies that TCM ran during the Star of the Month salute to Ann Sheridan that I hadn't blogged about before is Wings for the Eagle. It's available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive collection, so I recently sat down to watch it and do a post on it here.

Dennis Morgan plays Corky Jones, a habitual shirker who BSes his way through an encounter at a gas station where he meets Roma Maple (Ann Sheridan). Roma is the wife of Brad (Jack Carson), who just happens to be an old classmate of Corky's from college as well as a former football teammate who would be 4-F because of a knee injury. Corky would be prime draft material, and plans to keep himself out of the draft. (It should be pointed out that World War II has not started at the beginning of the movie, although you could be forgiven for not realizing this. The attack on Pearl Harbor comes up halfway through the movie or so.)

One way to get out of the war effort is to be involved in an essential industry, and the Maples happen to live near one of those essential industries, the Lockheed aircraft plant. So Corky decides he's going to get himself a job there to be able to stay out of the war. Brad, for his part, seems to have less earning potential because of that knee injury, and that's a constant source of tension between him and Roma.

Corky does get a job at the plant and, because he's rooming with the Maples because of the housing crunch, that really puts a strain on Brad and Roma's relationship. They decide to separate, which lets Corky think he can put the movies on Roma. He also moves out, getting a room in the house of one of his bosses, Jake Hanso (George Tobias). Jake has a son in Pete (Russell Arms) who is studying to be able to join the Air Corps, since the modern-day US Air Force would only be organized as such after World War II.

Disaster strikes when it comes to light that Jake's citizenship papers never came through; the aircraft plant being "essential" for the war effort, it's no place for legal aliens, even if they've been living in the country long enough to have an adult son who got his citizenship by virtue of having been born in America. Jake starts running a lunch joint across the street from the plant, while Pete says to hell with joining the Air Corps; any country that would treat Dad the way it did doesn't deserve Pete.

Meanwhile, Corky's being an even smoother operator in trying to woo Roma than you normally get from a Jack Carson character, so the roles are somewhat reversed here. Not that Brad is out of love with Roma, but their situation is complicated until Brad is finally able to pass the application test to get a job at the aircraft plant. The Japanese finally attack Pearl Harbor, and that changes everybody.

Wings for the Eagle was released in July 1942, so right in the middle of World War II and a time when the audiences on the home front needed a lot of cheering up. As such, the movie is pure wartime propaganda, with the need to inculcate a desire to serve crowding out more important considerations like a good story. I found the whole thing fairly cringeworthy, with neither of the male leads particularly likeable. Some people might enjoy the movie for its contemporary look at the early stages of America's involvement in World War II, but I think that's about it. Still, as always, you may want to watch and judge for yourself.

Not quite Tallulah Bankhead in Faithless

Zachary Scott, Ann Sheridan, and Lew Ayres (from left to right) in The Unfaithful

A couple of months back, Ann Sheridan was TCM's Star of the Month, which gave me the chance to record a bunch of movie available on DVD from the Warner Archive but that I hadn't blogged about before. Among them is The Unfaithful. So I recently rectified that situation and watched it to do a post on here.

Sheridan plays Chris Hunter, who married her husband Bob (Zachary Scott) just before he went off to World War II. The war is over and he's been back, working as a builder and flying to various places on the west coast supervising the construction of suburban housing developments. While he's away this time, Chris is invited to a party held by Chris' cousin Paula (Eve Arden) to celebrate her divorce.

Chris returns home from the party to find a man waiting outside her house. He forces her into the house, and in silhouette we see what appears to be a struggle between them before Chris kills the man. Bob returns from Oregon the next morning to find the police at his house, with bad news for him.

With the help of the family lawyer, Larry Hannaford (Lew Ayres), Chris gives a statement about the killing that clearly makes it out to be self-defense. But if that were the case, we wouldn't have much of a movie, would we? So we know that something more is going to happen. Eventually, we hear from Martin Barrow (Steven Geray). He's an art dealer who has... a really bad bust of Chris' head. (Unfortunately, I don't have the movie on DVD, and I couldn't find an image of the bust online.) That in and of itself would be no big deal, but it turns out that the bust was sculpted by... the guy she killed!

There, as you can see, is the problem. The idea that the guy she killed in "self-defense" now has some holes in it, and any bright and ambitious prosecutor should be able to find this out in the investigation into the man's death. To make matters even worse, Barrow and the dead guy's wife want to blackmail Chris for a substantial sum of money not to have the information be made public.

But it's not just the public Chris would like to keep the information a secret from. The thing is, Chris really did have an affair with the dead guy while Bob was away fighting the war. In her defense, it was a whirlwind romance that Chris and Bob had before he left, something that was not uncommon in 1941/2, and just as a fair number of servicemen picked up war romances or even war brides, the women back home still had physical needs.

Now, if a lot of this sounds like The Letter, that's not by coincidence. Warner Bros. wanted to revisit the material, although in this case the screenwriters changed enough of it to avoid having it be a full remake of The Letter. Still, anybody who watches is can't help but make the comparisons, and judge the movie in that light.

That's a bit unfair to The Unfaithful, because while it's not quite as good as either version of The Letter, it's not exactly a bad movie in its own right. If it has flaws, it's that it runs too long (it should probably have been written to clock in at about 90 minutes instead of close to 110), and, surprisingly, Eve Arden. I think she's supposed to be playing the same sort of sounding board she did in Mildred Pierce, but where it worked well in Mildred Pierce to break up the tension, The Unfaithful is more of a straight drama instead of a melodrama, and Arden just doesn't work quite as well here.

Still, The Unfaithful is absolutely worth watching for the performances from the other three leads, and for its all around solid production, especially for people not particularly familiar with Ann Sheridan.

Ma Kettle Meets the Bowery Boys

Ann Sheridan was TCM's Star of the Month back in June. One of her movies that I hadn't blogged about before is Angels Wash Their Faces. It's on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive, so I recently watched it to do a post on here.

Sheridan plays Joy Ryan, elder sister of high-school aged Gabe (Frankie Thomas). Gabe is set to get out of reform school, and he's going to live with Joy, their parents presumably being dead. In order to help Gabe, they're moving in to a new for him neighborhood. While they're moving in, a gang called the Termites (played by the Dead End Kids, who would go on to become the Bowery Boys) shows up and make themselves mild pests, although truth be told they're really not malicious, they just need some guidance.

The Termites decide to admit Gabe as a member, something that I'd think Joy wouldn't like just out of fear, but she doesn't seem to mind. One of the initiation rites involves making Gabe think the other guys are about to set him on fire, only for them not to. These guys ought to be old enough to know better than to play with fire, but then we wouldn't have much of a movie. They're in the basement of a building they think is abandoned, but the building owner Kroner finds out and wants them to stay out.

But it gives Kroner an idea. He's working for Martino (Eduardo Ciannelli), a mob leader who is burning down storage facilities his group owns for the insurance money -- they leave boxes filled with junk in the facility and take the good merchandise out, but collect on the merchandise. With Gabe recently having been released from reform school and the Termites playing with fire, Martino decides he can get Gabe blamed for the fires and sent to jail for arson.

Of course, the scheme doesn't quite work out that way. The fire spreads to a tenement building full of apartments, and in one of them is one of the Termites' friends, Sleepy Arkelian, who has a "glandular" issue as well as needing to use crutches. He burns to death in the fire, with Mrs. Arkelian (Marjorie Main) watching. Gabe is tried and convicted , and although the Termites know Gabe is innocent, they have no way of proving it.

That is, until the annual "Boys' Week" is announced. This is an initiative spearheaded by the mayor (Berton Churchill) to get adolescents interested in civics. One lucky young man who passes all the tests will get the chance to be honorary mayor for a week. The Termites think if they can get their member Billy (Billy Halop) named honorary mayor, the Termites can use the mayor's real powers to get the dirt on whoever really set the fires, with a little help from Joy and her boyfriend Remson (Ronald Reagan), son of the District Attorney.

Sheridan and Reagan are the nominal leads here, although the movie really belongs to the Dead End Kids. The movie starts off a bit slowly, but once we get to Billy trying to run for honorary mayor and then he and his "cabinet" of fellow Termites (plus Leo Gorcey's sister played by Bonita Granville), the movie gets really fun, even if the Termites take the law into their own hands (well, mostly; an obscure law not enforced in decades is a plot point) with surprising results.

Sheridan, and even more so Reagan, don't have much to do here, with Reagan more or less reprising his not-really-a-lead role from Girls on Probation. What what they do do they do just fine. The adult supporting actors are all quite good, although poor Marjorie Main has to overact pretty severely.

When the Dead End Kids were at Warner Bros., they got put in some pretty darn good vehicles, and while the others may be technically better thanks to having bigger stars, Angels Wash Their Faces still does quite well for what it is. It's definitely worth a watch.

TCM Star of the Month June 2020: Ann Sheridan

Ann Sheridan (l.) and Ronald Reagan in Kings Row (June 9 at 8:00 PM)

We're in the first full week of a new month, which means it's time for a new Star of the Month. This time out, it's Ann Sheridan, whom I mentioned a few months back as the "Oomph Girl". Her movies are going to be airing every Tuesday in prime time, starting this Tuesday with a bunch of her early roles. The night kicks off at 8:00 with Black Legion, a movie I blogged about eight years ago.

As for the rest of the month, it seems to be organized thematically rather than chronologically, as June 9 has Sheridan in a bunch of her dramatic roles not in any particular order. These include what might be Sheridan's most promient picture, Kings Row, at 8:00 PM June 9.



On the 30th we get Sheridan in a night of movies with frequent co-stars. This includes Humphrey Bogart, who is of course the star of Black Legion which I mentioned above. But the two are also in another early movie in both their careers, San Quention, which is on in the overnight hours, so technically July 1 on the east coast, at 1:45 AM. There's also James Cagney in the surprisingly rarely shown City for Conquest at 8:00 PM on the 30th.

Woman on the Run

I don't think I've done a full-length post on a noir in a while; the one Noir Alley selection I've mentioned recently is the remake of M. With that in mind, I watched Woman on the Run recently.

We don't see the woman at first; instead wee see her husband, Frank Johnson (Ross Elliott). He's out in San Francisco one evening walking their dog, when he sees a car pull up in a public park, and the passenger get shot! Unfortunately, the driver, who was apparently the shooter, saw Frank, and took a shot at him before driving off. The police, led by Inspector Ferris (Robert Keith), ask Frank if he can identify the shooter, telling Frank that this was a gangland hit. Frank understandably fears for his life, so he flees when he gets the first opportunity.

It's at this point that the police interview the man's wife, Eleanor (Ann Sheridan). To say that she's less than cooperative is an understatement. Apparently she's estranged from him because he's an unsuccesful artist, or at least one that doesn't have the ambition to sell his work even if it wins prizes. Eleanor doesn't like the police, either, so when the police wants to use her as bait to try to bring in her husband, she too takes the opportunity to flee, by going up to the roof.

She's not the first person to have that idea, as when she opens the window to the roof, she's met by intrepid reporter Dan Legget (Dennis O'Keefe), who wants a scoop on the story. He's willing to keep her one step ahead of the police, and is also willing to help her find her husband. As he helps her, however, we learn that he's got ulterior motives.

As for Eleanor, she meets a variety of people who tell her a lot more about her husband than she knew, and it causes her to start thinking about whether she should make another go of her marriage to him. It goes on until a climax at a beachfront amusement park, and... well, I'm not going to give the story away.

Woman on the Run is a fine entry in the noir cycle, with a good performance from Ann Sheridan, who at this point was trying unsuccessfully to resurrect her career. O'Keefe does well, and the supporting cast has a bunch of people who get pretty much just the one scene, but take it for all it's worth; among those are Steven Geray and John Qualen. The other big plus is all the San Francisco location shooting.

Woman on the Run was in danger of being lost for years, as Eddie Muller mentioned in his Noir Alley synopsis. His Noir Foundation helped restore the film, and they've put out a DVD of it with extras that's rather pricey for a short (77-minute) film. The TCM Shop also lists a cheaper DVD, and reading the IMDb reviews, that sounds like a copy of the lower-quality older print.

Letter of Introduction

It's often said that honesty is the best policy. A movie in which following that policy would have save a lot of characters a lot of grief is Letter of Introduction.

Kay (Andrea Leeds) is a struggling actress who lives in the same apartment building as platonic friend struggling ventriloquist Edgar Bergen (yes, playing himself). They arrive home on New Year's Eve to find that their apartment building has caught fire. Edgar goes in to save Charlie; Kay wants to get a letter of introduction that supposedly means a lot to her. However, she's thwarted by the fire and helped by dancer Barry (George Murphy) who lives just across the street. The two fall in love with each other.

As for that letter of introduction, it's to prominent actor John Mannering (Adolphe Menjou) who left the stage for screen stardom and in the years since has gone through a series of wives, about to be married to the latest, Lydia (Ann Sheridan). Kay makes her way to John's apartment and is eventually able to give him that letter, which states that before John became a star he had fathered Kay by his first wife, since deceased. John and Kay divorced before John knew Kay was pregnant, so this is the first he's heard of having a daughter, while Kay only learned who her father really was when her mom died the previous year.

At this point, father and daughter ought to try a bit of honesty. Lydia unsurprisingly things Kay may be John's next girlfriend; after all, John has gone through a series of wives. If John could have just told Lydia how he's only just found out he's got a daughter by his first wife, it would be a shock to everybody but they'd all muddle through. He doesn't however, and that causes a couple of scenes of problems before Lydia up and dumps her fiancé.

As for Kay, she's got that boyfriend in Barry, and when Kay starts spending time with John, he understandably gets the impression that John is trying to horn in and make Kay his girlfriend. Barry, as you can expect, is none too happy about this. If Kay had told Barry that John is actually her father, he would have had a much easier time than even Lydia dealing with it. But Kay doesn't say anything either.

John is able to get Kay her big break on the stage, but at the cost that he's going to have to take the male lead, something he feels he's no longer equipped to do. He's planning to reveal the truth about Kay at the curtain call on opening night, but what if something intervenes?

Letter of Introduction is generally good, although I found the plot to be formulaic and the character motivations questionable. As I've been saying throughout this post, if everybody could just be honest, they wouldn't have had the problems they do and there would be a lot less heartache. The story is by no means bad; it's just that I wanted to shake these people and scream "You idiots!"

The supporting cast all does well. Edgar Bergen, of course, gets a lot of opportunity to do his routines with Charlie McCarthy, and these are one of the highlights of the movie. Eve Arden plays Cora, who also lives across the street from Kay and took Kay in after the fire. She winds up being the voice of common sense and best friend to Kay, getting some good one-liners along the way too.

Unfortunately, the print I saw was terrible and I think it had a few scenes cut out. Not that that was enough to make the straightforward storyline unintelligible. Letter of Introduction is available on DVD, although I have no idea about the quality of the print.

City for Conquest

Since I got an Amazon gift card for Christmas, I used it to buy, amont other things, the TCM Greatest Gangster Films Collection: James Cagney, one of those four-movie box sets TCM promotes. I'd already seen three of the movies, but I wanted White Heat on DVD, and certainly didn't mind having the other three on DVD too. The one I hadn't seen before is also one that's not really a gangster movie (although there are a few gangsters in smaller roles): City For Conquest.

We start off in New York City in what looks to be about the turn of the century, maybe a bit later (the presence of gaslights in some scenes makes a bit fuzzy the exact dates the various scenes are supposed to be set). An omniscient narrator type (Frank Craven) talks up the city, and then introduces us to three kids: Googi, who's already a bit of a thief; Danny, who's already good with his fist; and their female friend Peggy. After this brief expository scene, we fast forward to sometime close to the present day (that being 1940, when the movie was released).

Danny is all grown up, and likes to practice boxing at the gym. He's a darn good boxer, having won the amateur Golden Gloves. But he has absolutely no desire to go into the professional game. Instead, Danny lives with his younger brother Eddie (Arthur Kennedy at the beginning of his film career), a gifted musician who is studying at the music school while trying to write his symphony to the "city of conquest", obviously meaning New York, and obviously patterned on Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue". To help support himself, Eddie gives music lessons. Danny, for his part, drives a truck on construction jobs to support himself and Eddie. Unfortunately, Eddie is about to have his scholarship to the music school cut due to the economic situation. Googi (Elia Kazan when he was acting before he became a director) continued with his petty crime, eventually becoming a gangster and getting sent up the river, although he's about to return home much to the delight of Danny. Peggy (Ann Sheridan)became an excellent dancer. She's also become Danny's girlfriend, much to the disappointment of her mother.

Things are about to change for all of them, when Peggy goes off to a dance competition at one of the night spots, where she dances with Murray (a very young Anthony Quinn) and does such a good job that Murray wants to take her on the road with him, the way that Vernon and Irene Castle did back in the 1910s. Danny eventually decides to get into the professional boxing game in order to support his brother, since Danny believes in Eddie's symphony. And Googi, decidedly a supporting character, helps support Danny's boxing career as best he can, to the point of betting against the champion who is backed by another gangster, when Danny finally does well enough to get a title fight. Unfortunately, the title fight goes badly because the champion's trainer cheats and puts rosin on the boxer's gloves, resulting in Danny's vision being completely screwed up during the fight and Danny going blind afterwards!

There's a happy resolution at the end, as you can probably guess. But getting there is supposed to be the fun. The getting there, however, is where I had some problems with the movie. Danny and Peggy are supposed to be a romantic item, but the spend much of the movie apart, and the way the movie switches back and forth between their stories came across to me as disjointed enough to me to result in a bit of a mess. That's a shame, because the movie is actually filled with solid acting performances. Cagney is as good as ever, while Ann Sheridan is good too. Anthony Quinn is wonderfully slimy, and Arthur Kennedy immediately shows why he was to become such a successful supporting actor. One name I haven't mentioned is Donald Crisp, playing Danny's boxing manager.

Ultimately, City for Conquest is the sort of film that I don't think I'd pay the bigger price tage that the Warner Archive Collection would want for a single movie, but one that I'm more than happy to have as part of a box set that doesn't cost much more than any of the Warner Archive discs.

Torrid Zone

This week's installment of TCM's "Star of the Month" look at pin-up girls brings us an actress known as the "Oomph Girl": Ann Sheridan. Her movie Torrid Zone will be running early tomorrow morning (or overnight tonight depending upon your point of view) at 3:30 AM.

Pat O'Brien is the one we see first, playing Steve Case. Steve is the manager of a series of Central American banana plantations in one of those places that gave us the term "banana republic". Steve seemingly runs not only the plantations, but also the entire country. He's got a lot of problems with local revolutionaries led by Rosario (George Tobias); problems with Anderson, a crappy manager at one of the plantations out in the sticks; and problems with Lee Dorsey (Ann Sheridan). Lee is the femme fatale, although she's not quite fatale as she is a con artist who will steal the workers' money in fixed card games. Steve is trying to get Lee deported from the country and back to the States, although she clearly doesn't want to go. And if she does have to go, she'd rather go south to wherever in South America. Probably that place Jean Arthur and Rita Hayworth ended up in Only Angels Have Wings or something similar.

I mentioned that Steve was having problems with Anderson, which brings us to the actor who gets top billing: James Cagney. Cagney plays Nick Butler, a man who had formerly managed plantations for Steve, and was quite a good manager, being able to put out all the metaphorical fires quite efficiently. Steve wants Nick to return to work for him, but Nick is insistent upon returning to the States, even though Steve is willing to pay him big money to go back to work for him, at least during the present crisis. Nick gets on the boat to go back to the States, and runs into Lee, who is of course not there by choice. So Nick helps Lee escape and she goes back to dry land. Unsurprisingly, Nick winds up back on dry land himself, and with Lee again.

You can probably guess while watching this thatthere's not going to be a movie is Nick doesn't eventually agree to go out to that plantation in the middle of nowhere. You can probably also figure out that when Nick does go, Lee is going to figure out a way to get there. When Nick gets there, there's another problem: Anderson's wife Gloria (Helen Vinson) is disillusioned with her ineffectual husband, and seems to take a shine to Nick. Finally, one more problem that was foreshadowed at the beginning of the film is that Rosario breaks out of jail and stirs up his revolutionaries again.

Torrid Zone has a stellar cast. But the end result is one that I found underwhelming. The movie moved along slower than you'd think from the plot, and the characters just didn't appeal to me. Several of the reviewers on IMDb have compared this film to His Girl Friday, which was released the same year as Torrid Zone. But something about the three main leads in that one, and especially the underlying plot of the condemned prisoner, sparkles in a way that Torrid Zone just doesn't. As always, however, watch and judge for yourself.

The TCM Shop advertises Torrid Zone as being available as part of a James Cagney box set; I didn't check to see whether it's in print on a standalone basis.

Apparently I haven't blogged about Kings Row before

A search of the blog claims that I've never done a full-length post on Kings Row before. It's airing tonight at 10:00 PM on TCM as part of a night of "Bob's Picks", so now would be a good time to do that full-length post on the movie.

The movie is set late in the 19th century and at the beginning of the 20th in the fictional small town of Kings Row, which really could substitute for any small town anywhere in the country, bet it Peyton Place, NH, or the small Mississippi town in Intruder in the Dust. The story is told more or less in three parts, with the first part introducing us to the various protagonists as children. There's Parris, who lives in a big house with his grandmother; Drake, who's going to receive a stipend from a trust fund when he grows up; Cassie, the doctor's daughter; and Randy, the daughter of a railroad worker who lives on the "wrong" side of the tracks. Not that it matters to the kids, who have always been less conscious of class than the adults. Randy likes Drake, while Parris and Cassie have a crush on each other. The latter relationship is much to the chagrin of Cassie's father, Dr. Tower (Claude Rains). Rumor has it that Cassie's mother is not right in the head, and that's had an effect on Cassie. Or, at least, the doctor thinks it has, so he eventually pulls Cassie out of school and the others only see her through upstairs windows.

Fast forward to when everybody is a young adult. Drake (now played by Ronald Reagan) is now living off that trust fund, with a fashionable carriage and chasing after the fashinable women. Randy (Ann Sheridan) still lives with her father in a ramshackle place on the other side of tracks. Cassie (Betty Field) still lives as a recluse with her father, while Parris has decided to study medicine to become a doctor, and is doing so with Dr. Tower. This gives Parris the chance to try to see Cassie, although Dr. Tower strictly forbids it. This, even though Cassie wants to see Parris. But is she going crazy, just like everybody rumored about her mother? Eventually, two tragedies happen. One befalls Drake when the bank manager at the bank where Drake's trust fund is administers runs off having embezzled all the money, leaving Drake penniless. The other befalls Parris and Cassie when there's a murder-suicide at the Tower residence involving the doctor and Cassie.

Parris gets an opportunity to study psychoanalysis in Vienna, presumably under a youngish Dr. Freud. Drake goes off to work at the rail yards with Randy's father, which allows Drake to discover that Randy was really the girl for him all along. They fall in love and have plans for the future, but those plans change when there's an accident at the railyard and Drake's legs get pinned. Dr. Gordon (Charles Coburn) is called in and he decides to operate -- by amputating both of Drake's legs! (This leads to the classic line, "Where's the rest of me?" when Drake discovers he's an amputee.) Randy writes to Parris in Vienna for help, since the amputation has left Drake bitter and feeling no hope for the future. Parris returns and finds that Drake's isn't the first amputation in town, and that perhaps Drake's amputation wasn't medically necessary. So what's going on here?

Kings Row is the sort of movie that makes you wonder what Douglas Sirk would have done with the material if he had been around in Hollywood and getting prestige movies to direct in the early 1940s. By the end of the movie, the material really does get to be that over the top, although not in a bad way. Cummings and Reagan both have roles that test the limits of their acting abilities. Both strive valiantly, but ultimately come up a bit short in spots. It's not quite a big deal with Cummings since his character goes away for much of the final third of the movie, while Reagan's difficulties in playing characters with a really dark part is particularly noticeable after the amputation when he's supposed to have no hope. Reagan was always more suited to play the equanimity he shows when he first takes the railroad job, the "I'm not going to let this get me down" attitude that allows his affable nature to shine through. When something finally dows get him down, in this case the amputation, Reagan looks like he's going through the motions.

Still, Kings Row is a very entertaining movie in part because of the material, and in part because it's Ronald Reagan trying to pull off this material. The TCM Shop is offering the movie on DVD as part of one of their four-film box sets, this one of Ronald Reagan movies. I don't know if it's available on a standalone DVD.