55 Days at Peking

This year's Summer Under the Stars concludes today with a day of films devoted to actress Ava Gardner. And concluding her day, in the wee hours of tomorrow morning at 3:00 AM (so even if you're on the west coast but only have the east coast feed it's still technically on Sept. 1) is 55 Days at Peking.

After the opening titles, voiceover narration informs us that it is the summer of 1900, a restles time in Chinese history: the Manchu/Qing dynasty was weak, having been forced to give a lot of economic concessions to the various western powers that wanted to trade with China. Originally, the Chinese government had been in a powerful enough position to bar whole families from coming over and keep the westerners isolated in special communities much like the Japanese did with the Dutch in Nagasaki. But by the end of the 19th century the west had the upper hand. This combined with a bad harvest emboldened more radical Chinese forces, in a group commonly called the "Boxers" because of their closed-fist salute. They were trying to drive the west out wholesale, and the government was in a bind because trade duties with the west and taxes on the concessions were actually bringing in a sizeable chunk of money to the Chinese treasury.

It's against that restive background that the Americans rotate in a fresh platoon of marines to the American legation in the diplomatic quarter of Peking, under the leadership of career Marine Maj. Lewis. He shows up looking for rooms at the hotel just as a Russian, Baroness Natalie (Ava Gardner) is being evicted because her visa was revoked by her brother-in-law (Kurt Kasznar) for family reasons. Maj. Lewis doesn't know much about the local politics, but he's about to learn, and fast.

The day after he arrives, the Boxers assassinate the German ambassador to China, leading to an ultimatum from Dowager Empress Cixi (Flora Robson): all of the westerners must leave. The assembled ambassadors take a vote, with all of them voting to leave except for the American who is absent because he's dying in hospital, and the British ambassador, Sir Arthur Robinson (David Niven). The other countries, however, decide that they can't afford to give up all of their concessions to the British, so they change their minds and stay. And that causes the Boxers to start besieging the city.

The westerners are badly outnumbered, but all they have to do is hold out long enough for relief to arrive, which is supposed to get to Beijing fairly soon. Except that Imperial forces are mustered to prevent this from happening, and the westerners have to hold out longer until they can somehow get someone out of the area from below and get word that relief is still needed. Against the backdrop of all this, various personal dramas play out. These include a mixed-race child, Sir Arthur's family, and the relationship between Maj. Lewis and the baroness, which is turning romantic because apparently a movie like this needs a love interest in it.

The technical aspects of 55 Days at Peking are quite good, although it's Spain substituting for China in the backgrounds. This isn't terribly important, since the besieged quarter is all sets anyhow and mostly doesn't need large vistas. The sets and costumes work well as does the music. The weakness, however, is the story, which runs over 2½ hours and sags quite a bit, especially with the baroness character who's not really needed to advance the plot. There are also enough Hollywood-style reimaginings of the history that are probably going to bother some viewers. So it's easy to see why a movie like 55 Days at Peking got mixed reviews and hurt the career of its director, Nicholas Ray.

I don't think I've done a post on a Bowery Boys movie before

And, to be honest, this review isn't going to be about a Bowery Boys movie, at least not technically. TCM has on multiple occasions run through the entire set of four dozen or so movies that the Bowery Boys made after World War II. The Bowery Boys were what eventually came out of a group of players from the movie Dead End (which I did a post on ages ago). At some point along the way, first Universal and then Monogram wound up with those "Dead End Kids" under contract, and called them the "East Side Kids". And it's one of those movies that I have on my DVR and recently watched: Ghosts on the Loose.

The movie starts with the Kids rehearsing musical numbers, led by the "conductor" Mugs (Leo Gorcey), who seems to know the technical aspects of music about as well as the rest of the kids do. Another of the kids, Glimpy (Huntz Hall), has a sister Betty (Ava Gardner in a very early role, and yes, the idea of Ava Gardner and Huntz Hall being siblings is ridiculous), and she's about to get married to a guy named Jack (Rick Vallin). Betty and Jack are going to be moving to the edge of town because that's where they were able to get a really good deal on a house.

We then learn that there's a reason for the good deal, which is that the previous owners of the house are convinced that the neighboring house is haunted. There are mysterious goings-on, but of course no actual ghosts; think the Scooby-Doo cartoons with the bad guys thinking they would have gotten away with it if it weren't for those meddling kids. The kids are about to meddle, albeit not intentionally.

Betty and Jack go off on their honeymoon, and Glimpy and his friends decide they're going to do a favor for the new couple by helping to decorate the new house for when the new couple gets home. The only thing is, they get the address wrong, and go to the house that's allegedly haunted. In fact, it's not haunted, although it has a lot of the tropes of haunted-house films like secret passages and paintings with the eyes cut out so that people can look into another room without getting caught.

The master, if you will, of the allegedly haunted house is Emil (Bela Lugosi), and he's really the leader of a ring of fifth columnists who have been printing Nazi propaganda out of this house which Mugs and Glimpy figure out when they find a printing press in one of the basement rooms along with a bunch of said propaganda that's been left there with the baddies not expecting anybody to trespass. (Ghosts on the Loose was released in 1943; right in the middle of US involvement in World War II.) The Kids go to inform the authorities, but thanks to those secret passages it takes a while for everything to work out right in the end. Not too long however, as this is only a B movie with a running time of about 66 minutes.

After leaving the big studios -- Dead End was a Goldwyn film IIRC and the Dead End Kids made multiple films at Warner Bros. -- the East Side Kids and then Bowery Boys films became low-budget affairs with formulaic plots. Ghosts on the Loose is definitely that way, although I think it's ultimately watchable for the ridiculousness of the Bela Lugosi half of the movie. It's also not a bad way to introduce people to what Leo Gorcey, Huntz Hall, and company were all about.

One Touch of Venus

Back in April, I mentioned how TCM was running a limited series called Two for One, in which 13 film people were selecting double features to run on Saturday nights through June. It says something about TCM's budget, I suppose, that TCM is rerunning the series starting tonight. On the other hand, it gives me several Saturday posts over the next few months, as I recorded a number of the movies that the programmers picked. That starts tonight, with Martin Scorsese's second selection, One Touch of Venus, at 9:45 PM.

The opening credits are over a Greek amphitheater-style backround. It's then revealed, however, that this is a miniature, as rising from behind is Eddie Hatch (Robert Walker). He's a window-dresser in the department store owned by Whitfield Savory (Tom Conway), designing the fancy front window displays. He's called in to Savory's office, although it's not for bad reasons. Savory bought some art for the store -- specifically, an expensive statue of Venus, the goddess of love. Savory wants to do a big reveal of the statue in the department store, and who better to design everything that goes around it thatn Eddie?

Meanwhile, everybody else at the department store, like Whitfield's secretary Molly (Eve Arden) and Eddie's co-worker and best friend Joe (Dick Haymes), worry about how much the statue cost. But that's soon to become the least of everybody's problems. Eddie is doing the display, and sees what a lovely statue his boss has bought. On a lark, Eddie climbs the stepladder and kisses the statue before going back to his work. He makes a comment to himself, and a voice responds. Eddie looks and notices... the statue has come to life! Venus is played by Ava Gardner, so it's no wonder the statue was so beautiful.

Unfortunately, Venus can't really go back to being a statue. And she's fallen for the man who kissed her, I suppose like Larry Hagman and Barbara Eden in I Dream of Jeannie many years later. Venus gets off the pedestal, and Eddie realizes that when it comes time for Savory to pull up the curtain revealing the statue, there isn't going to be any statue to reveal. Of course, how Eddie could have carried it away is a question. But there's no statue, so unsurprisingly Savory suspects Eddie.

And then Eddie has his friens to deal with, including girlfriend Gloria (Olga San Juan). None of them are going to believe his story. And Gloria is definitely not going to like that there's another woman trying to steal Eddie away from her. Venus is about to make that a bigger thing for poor Eddie, as she shows up at Eddie's apartment. After several ruses to keep people from finding Venus, he decides to take her back to the department store. Perhaps when Savory finds her there the next day, she'll be able to explain things. After all, she does have the face of the statue Savory bought, and he should be able to recognize it.

One Touch of Venus is a silly romantic fantasy movie, but it's one that's more than fun enough. At the same time, however, it's the sort of fluff you probably shouldn't think too deeply about. Everybody does a good job with the material and it's entertaining, and sometimes that's all that's really necessary.

Knights of the Round Table

The story of King Arthur is one that's relatively well known. I was, however, a bit surprised to see that I had never done a post on the 1953 MGM movie Knights of the Round Table, which, as you can guess, is about Arthurian legend. It was on TCM not too long ago, so I recorded it. It's going to be on TCM again, tomorrow (Feb. 12) at 6:00 PM. So I made certain to watch it in order to be able to do a review on it here.

An opening voiceover tells us that the action is set in Britain not long after the Romans abandoned the island, which would make it the 5th century or so. Britain was in turmoil with rival warlords waging war against one another, until the king Uther Pendragon died. He left behind a pair of issue: Morgan Le Fay (Anne Crawford) was a legitimate daughter, but of course a woman. Then there's Arthur (Mel Ferrer), who was of questionable provenance. The sorcerer Merlin (Felix Aylmer) leads them to Excalibur, the "Sword in the Stone", and declares that whoever can get it out of the stone shall be King. Morgan's son Modred (Stanley Baker) tries and fails; Arthur succeeds.

Meanwhile, the French knight Lancelot (Robert Taylor) comes looking for Arthur. Along the way, he runs into a lone woman, Elaine (Maureen Swanson), who falls in love with him, and the two eventually marry, but much later in the movie. The two are waylaid by a bunch of Modred's men, but Lancelot is able to see them off, before Arthur shows up. Lancelot, not realizing who it is, challenges him to a fight which ends in a long draw, earning mutual respect. Then Elaine's brother Percival arrives, and declares that he wants to be a knight too. He's eventually going to be given the task of finding the Holy Grail.

It's going to take until the following spring for Arthur to defeat Modred and Morgan. Having done so, he can become the rightful king with all of the knights sitting around that round table. And they'll all live happily ever after. Well, of course that's not going to happen, since all of this happens with only one third of the film's running time having elapse. And we haven't even met Guinevere (Ava Gardner) yet.

Lancelot is back out on the road and comes to a castle where Guinevere is being held captive, Lancelot not realizing that Guinevere is already betrothed to Arthur. Still, he frees her and brings her back to Arrhur, thereby cementing his trust with the king. The king, however, has been fairly foolish in that after defeating Modred and Morgan and having united the island, he pardons them. They're looking for any way they can to get back at the king, and they think they've found one.

Lancelot, despite being set to marry Elaine, also pines for Guinevere, although in this movie he's utterly chaste about it because the Production Code would never let this Lancelot and Guinevere have an adulterous relationship. Still, when Modred's men find the two of them alone together, it doesn't take much for them to start gossiping and get enough people to believe that Lancelot and Guinevere have committed high treason with their relationship. It threatens to destroy all of Camelot.

Knights of the Round Table was the sort of movie that MGM was quite good at making. Here, they have the added advantage of Cinemascope, this being the studio's first movie in the wide-screen process. However, the movie feels like it's missing something. I think that's partly because the film's star, Robert Taylor, didn't particularly like making this sort of movie. Mel Ferrer is also decidedly not the right actor to be playing King Arthur.

For me, however, the bigger issue is that the movie really feels like multiple movies, or maybe an anthology story, in that the initial defeat of Modred and Morgan doesn't feel like it's at all connected with the love triangle of the second section. And then the final conflict is wrapped up rather too neatly and again in a way that doesn't feel so connected to the other two parts. At the same time, though, it's also easy to see why audiences of the early 1950s would have gone for a costume drama like this, especially one shot partly on location in vibrant color and that wide screen they couldn't get at home.

So watch Knights of the Round Table and judge for yourself.

Bhowani Junction

I mentioned recently that MGM was good at literary adaptations, especially when the studio got the chance to be glossy. As the 1950s and Cinemascope came around, they also weren't bad at location shooting. A film that fits into the latter category is Bhowani Junction.

The opening titles inform us that MGM would like to thank the government of Pakistan for allowing the studio to use one of Pakistan's railway lines as well as a regiment of the Pakistani army. The movie was made a bit less than a decade after India gained its independence from the UK and was partitioned into India and Pakistan. Since the region in the 1950s wasn't that cinematically interesting, we go back to 1947, or just before independence. Stewart Granger plays Rodney Savage, a colonel in the British Army who has just been called back to the UK. He's trying to get a mixed-race woman, Victoria Jones (Ava Gardner), to go back to the UK with him, and as he steps onto the train, cue up the flashback as to why he wants to take her back to the UK....

Britain had always used locals to help run their colonies, and with the sheer number of political subdivisions in India, this made things fractious. Things became even tougher for the Brits once they were sucked into World War II, and the Indians, under Gandhi, took their opportunity to step up the pressure on the British. Col. Savage is stationed at Bhowani, site of an important railway junction. This is where he meets Victoria, who's father is a British railway engineer who married a local woman and had a mixed-race child.

Victoria meets one of the superintendents at the railway station, Patrick Taylor (Bill Travers), who like her is mixed-race. Both of them realize the problems this presents for them, as they get the sense that they won't fit in to the new India once it becomes independent, while at the same time they know that the upper-class British represented by people like Col. Savage will look down upon them should she go to England after Indian independence. And especially so in Patrick's case there's the dilemma of whether to be faithful to his employer in the railroad, or to throw his lot in with the independence activists who are trying to disrupt the railroad. Savage has a lot fewer qualms about who to treat those who would disrupt the railroad.

And then one of Savage's men, Capt. McDaniel, runs into Victoria one night. He too is taken with her beauty, and tries to force himself on her. Victoria tries to defend herself, but winds up killing McDaniel in the process and finding herself in need of protection by the other Indians. The independence campaign grows more violent, and now they have a pawn in Victoria....

Bhowani Junction is a movie that's beautifully filmed, although one wonders how much resemblance it bears to the real situation in India just before independence. There's also the question of casting Ava Gardner as a mixed-race Anglo-Indian. Some people hew to the idea that a mixed-race character can only really be played by someone of the non-white half of the race. I'm not really one of those people, but at the same time I recognize that some stars would be much less plausible than others trying to play mixed-race. (Imagine if MGM had tried to cast Debbie Reynolds as Victoria.)

The story in Bhowani Junction is absorbing enough for what it is, although again I have a feeling some people are going to have a decided problem with the way it tackles (or sidesteps; this is MGM, after all) difficult issues. At the same time, Hollywood of the mid-1950s was probably never going to come up with something truly authentic. In that light, Bhowani Junction definitely succeeds within its genre. Whether that genre is to your particular case is another issue.

My Forbidden Past

Ava Gardner was TCM's Star of the Month last month, and that gave me the chance to see one of her films that I hadn't watched before: My Forbidden Past. I'm glad I watched it, but not for the reasons the studio would have wanted back in the day.

Gardner plays Barbara Beaurevel, a young belle in turn-of-the century New Orleans. The movie starts off with having a torrid but illicit relationship with Dr. Mark Lucas (Robert Mitchum), who is some sort of research scientist at Tulane University. Mark is about to go to South America for a couple of months on a research expedition of some sort that's not explained, and he'd like Barbara to go with him and perhaps they can get married down in South America or even on the ship since the captain could perform the ceremony.

Of course, there's a catch. Barbara doesn't have any money, even though she lives in one of those grand old houses that the antebellum upper crust of New Orleans lived in. And it's not even her house, but that of her aunt Eula (Lucile Watson). Eula lives there with her son Paul (Melvyn Douglas), and the two of them most definitely don't approve of Barbara's relationship with Mark, him being a northerner to boot, oh the scandal. Barbara plans to elope, but Paul catches her packing her bags, and blackmails her into staying, writing a letter to Mark instead telling him she can't go and that she'll marry him when he gets back.

Of course, any sane viewer would recognize that Paul isn't about to let Barbara out of the house to deliver that letter, and that when he himself offers to deliver it, you know he's delivering it straight to the circular file. But Barbara doesn't get this, and won't be able to understand why Mark, upon his return, thinks Barbara jilted him.

Before that return, however, two things happen. One is that Mark marries the first reasonably good-looking American woman he meets in Latin America, returning to New Orleans with a wife Corinne (Janis Carter) in an entrance that surprises Barbara when she goes to the boat to meet Mark. The other is that a lawyer comes to the Beaurevel house looking for Barbara. Apparently Barbara had a grandmother with the forbidden past of the title, being engaged in some sort of activity that Eula finds so shocking that one doesn't even mention the name of this woman. (I think the family tree would require this to be Barbara's maternal grandmother, because otherwise it would be Eula's mother-in-law. In fact, since Barbara and Eula share a surname but the dead woman doesn't, that would make it the mother-in-law of Eula's brother-in-law.) The last member but one of that line of the family recently died out in California, leaving Barbara as the closest living relative, and set to inherit almost a million bucks, which is quite a sum of money for 1900.

Eula and Paul don't want Barbara to take the money, because everyone will find out where the money came from and this will somehow make the family's social status go down the drain. Barbara has the understandable idea that she doesn't want to be poor any more, and takes the money. And when she finds out a few months after that Mark has gotten married, she comes up with a plan to use that money to get Corinne out of the way.

If the movie wasn't ridiculous enough before that, it's about to get a whole lot more ridiculous, and that's why I enjoyed the movie. This is supposed to be some sort of serious melodrama, but everything is more like an absurdist comedy, even though that's decidedly unintentional. Mitchum is badly miscast, while Gardner does the best she can with the material. Watson is pretty good as the evil matriarch, if not to the level that Madam Konstantine was in Notorious. And Melvyn Douglas looks like he went back and rewatched Mildred Pierce so that he could learn to play the slimy, smarmy schemer role that Jack Carson so brilliantly portrayed. I don't know that Douglas got to play too many roles like this, and he runs with it for all it's worth.

As a serious picture, My Forbidden Past isn't all that good. But as unitentinal comedy, it's a blast.

Whistle Stop

Not noticing anything on my DVR that was coming up on TV tomorrow, I decided to turn to my Mill Creek "Crime Wave" box set with 50 public domain movies. Since I've only gotten through half a dozen or so of them, I've got a lot left, and picked Whistle Stop.

Whistle Stop has an interesting cast in that it has Ava Gardner as the female lead, on the way up about a year before The Killers would jump-start her career. (The movie has a 1945 copyright, but IMBd gives a January 1946 release date.) Gardner plays Mary, returning to her sleepy hometown of Ashbury MI after spending some time away. This is the sort of station where you have to flag down the train to get it to stop, although it seems surprisingly big for such a town. Mary returns to the rooming house where she had apparently lived, one run by the Veeches (Florence Bates and Charles Judels). Dad drinks a lot and works at the train station, and has an adult son in Kenny (George Raft, who by the mid-1940s is definitely on the way down in his career), who drinks a lot and plays poker. They've also got an adult daughter who's engaged to be married.

Kenny apparently used to be Mary's boyfriend, and he's none too happy seeing her come home from the big city wearing a fur coat, wondering who would give her such a pricey gift. Mary, for her part, may or may not want Kenny back, even though he doesn't seem to have changed his ways at all. So she starts taking up with Lew Lenta (Tom Conway), who runs the sort of nightclub that you'd think they don't have in a sleepy town like Ashbury that only has a whistle-stop train station. But if the town didn't have such a club, we wouldn't have any romantic involvement for the finale. Working for Lew is a bartender Gitlow (Victor McLaglen), who also happens to be reasonably good friends with Kenny.

There's a long scene at the county fair, which doesn't seem to serve much purpose, although it does have a few things happen. First is that somebody takes Gitlow's handgun off of him, pick-pocket style, and plants it on Kenny. Mary is able to find it and take it off of Kenny, and one presumes she gives it to Lew, as Lew eventually winds up with the gun when the real action begins. The other big thing to happen at the fair is an accident in which a young woman falls off the dance platform, suffering a serious injury that she blames on Kenny, to the point that when Kenny finally visits her in the hospital, she goes stark raving bonkers with rage.

The subplot of Kenny's sister getting married, at least, has a bit more of a payoff. Kenny and Gitlow miss the wedding because Gitlow gets a call on the morning of the wedding that he should bring Kenny over to Lew's club so that the two can kiss and make up, well, without the kissing of course. Now, the logical course of action would be for Kenny and Gitlow to point out that they're about to go to a wedding, and could the reconciliation wait until after the wedding. But no. They're stupid enough to go to the club, where somebody has committed a murder with Gitlow's gun. Since he'll be the prime suspect, they flee, but the police have already been called. They try to escape the police but their gas tank gets shot, and eventually Kenny gets shot in the arm too. Thankfully they're able to hop a train.

But there's still a production code out there, which means that something is going to have to happen to exonerate Kenny and bring out the real killer, something that happens when Gitlow goes back to Ashbury.

I found as I was watching Whistle Stop that I had the same problem a lot of the IMDb reviewers had. The movie only runs 81 minutes, but it takes about an hour for the real action to begin. The first hour is slow and introduces characters who don't much matter and events that don't make much sense (such as the injured woman). Mary also has character motivations that don't make much sense: why did she return to town in the first place, and then why did she take up with Lew. The finale only partially makes up for the slow first hour.

Whistle Stop is one of those movies that's nice to have on a cheap box set, but even this cheap box set has had better movies of the ones I've watched.

For those who like Tennessee Williams

Another of my recent watches off the DVR was The Night of the Iguana.

Richard Burton plays Rev. Lawrence Shannon, who at the start of the movie is an Episcopalian minister in some middle-class parish of the sort that David Niven had in The Bishop's Wife where everybody seems to attend services. Shannon, however, has some sort of breakdown when he's about to deliver one of his sermons, which results in going on a rant and getting dismissed from this particular congregation.

Cut to Mexico, at some point in the future. Shannon has apparently been down here for quite some time, never having been able to get a minister's post with another congregation. He's leading a tour of little old (well, middle-aged) ladies from Texas, a tour that includes one student, Charlotte (Sue Lyon). She's constantly leading him on, and he seems to be OK with it.

The woman who organized the tour, Miss Fellowes (Grayson Hall), understandably thinks Shannon is the one responsible for the way the relationship between him and Charlotte is going, and to be fair, in some ways he is. But she's also a prudish little biddy who's going to be complaining about the smallest thing. What she's doing on a tour like this, I'll never know.

Then again, I don't really know what everybody's doing in a movie like this. The tour is scheduled to go to Puerto Vallarta, which was apparently a backwater at the time. Shannon commandeers the bus and takes it from the hotel in downtown Puerto Vallarta to a ramshackle resort run by a woman with whom Shannon had a previous relationship, Maxine Faulk (Ava Gardner). He then steals the bus' distributor so that the tour can't leave.

Fellowes and Charlotte and Shannon and Faulk go through a lot of overheated Tennessee Williams dialogue, but if that's not enough for you, they're joined by sketch artist Hannah Jelkes (Deborah Kerr) and her elderly grandfather poet who should have been in a rest home decades earlier, Nonno. Hannah obnoxiously touts her and her grandfather's talents, while tending to Shannon, since she's the one who realizes how broken he is.

The tour group is able to get the distributor back and escape, while Shannon and the other two women do things for another half hour, as if the movie hasn't gone on long enough, until it reaches a conclusion of some sort.

As you can probably tell, I didn't particularly care for The Night of the Iguana. It's partly down to the dialogue from Tennessee Williams, which possibly works better on a stage, although I haven't seen the play either. It's not helped by direction from John Huston, who turned this into another of his indulgent movies. I couldn't help but think of Under the Volcano, which had an excellent performance from Albert Finney, but a Hustonesque ending that nearly sinks the film. The performances here are adequate but not quite as good as Finney's, and Huston thankfully has to hew at least somewhat to Williams' script.

Still, The Night of the Iguana definitely isn't going to be for everybody. If you're a fan of John Huston or Tennessee Williams, you'll probably like it; otherwise, I'd suggest starting with something like The African Queen for Huston and Suddenly Last Summer for Williams.

The Angel Wore Red

Today is Ava Gardner's day in Summer Under the Stars. There's a documentary at 8:00, as well as a movie that aired just last month, The Angel Wore Red. It's going to be on overnight, or early tomorrow, at 4:00 AM.

The setting is an unnamed Spanish city in 1936; if you know your history, that means the start of the Spanish Civil War. This is a city run by the Republican side. Working in the city is American radio correspondent Hawthorne (Joseph Cotten), who wishes that he could get a human interest story to report on. And boy is he about to get one, with the city about to be besieged and a human drama about to break about among all the chaos.

Arturo Carrero (Dirk Bogarde) is a priest in the city, but one disillusioned with the Church taking the wrong side in Spanish politics, since there are lots of poor people that the Church is doing nothing to help. He leaves the priesthood, although nobody outside the bishop (Finlay Currie) and one or two other priests know. This presents a serious problem because the new local administration is seriously anti-clerical, planning to arrest all the priests and destroy the cathedral. The cathedral holds a religious relic, the blood of a local saint, and the bishop gives it to another priest, Canon Rota (Aldo Fabrizi), to store for safekeeping.

Arturo tries to escape in civilian clothes, but the government is spending all its resources on finding the two priests who escaped the government roundup. You'd think they would have more important stuff to deal with. But apparently, that relic is very important, as the locals believe that whoever has it can't be defeated. That may be nonsense, of course, but the fact that the locals believe it is a powerful motivator, which is why the Republicans want it.

Arturo eventually meets Soledad (Ava Gardner), who works in a local cabaret that is still going as though there's no civil war on. She shelters Arturo, at least until the noose become so tight that there's no hope of escape. Arturo gives himself up and Soledad, having sheltered him, is going to be in trouble too.

The authorities at first want Arturo to come up with the goods as to where that relic is, not believing that he had oh-so conveniently left the priesthood and has no idea. Ultimately, with not just Arturo in custody, but a lot others as well, and the Nationalists closing in, the local administration under military commander General Clave (Vittorio De Sica), comes up with an idea: use the prisoners as cannon fodder!

The Angel Wore Red is a perfectly reasonable premise, but one that becomes a bit muddled in the second half, largely because it's trying to do too much. There's the war story, the love story, and Arturo's personal struggles with his faith versus the Church hierarchy. I found it all fell a bit short. Part of that is due to Cotten's character. Cotten himself isn't the problem; it's the fact that this character is too convenient to have and be in places where a real correspondent wouldn't have been allowed. In fact, I think the script as a whole lets everybody down.

But judge for yourself. It's going to be on tonight, and it's avalilable on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive.

An MGM melodrama

I mentioned many years back when I blogged about Johnny Eager that there's something about the gloss that MGM pictures had that comes with a side effect of making certain pictures look not quite right. Another good example of this is East Side, West Side.

Barbara Stanwyck plays Jessie Bourne, who has lived in New York all her life and tells us in a prologue that the city isn't quite as glamorous as outsiders might think; after all, the people in New York have day-to-day lives, too. In Jessie's case, that means marriage to investment advisor Brandon (James Mason), and weekly trips to her parents' place every Thursday night for dinner. At one of those dinners, Brandon gets a call that his business colleague needs to see him before a board meeting the next day, so he's going to have to leave early while Jessie goes home to wait up for him.

Brandon doesn't get in until 4:00 AM. He's spent some time at a swanky nightclub after the meeting, which involved talking to a woman Rosa (Cyd Charisse). Rosa has other guys pursuing her, and one of them eventually took a slug at Brandon. Since Brandon is well-known in his field, and a playboy, and the fight happened outside, it made it into the paper, which ought to be much to Jessie's consternation. Except that she's seen this sort of thing before. She knows that Brandon has had difficulty staying faithful, especially in the case of a former flame Isabel (Ava Gardner).

Well, formerly former. Isabel has come back to town with the intention of taking Brandon away from Jessie! As for Jessie, she meets Rosa, whose boyfriend Mark (Van Heflin) is about to get back from Italy having done government business in the post-war transition. Except that for Mark, this is really only a relationship of friends; he likes Rosa as a friend but not as a girlfriend. But when he meets Jessie, he could fall in love with her if only she weren't already married to Brandon.

This love quadrangle results in Isabel getting murdered, Jessie and Brandon being considered suspects, and Mark (a policeman before going off to World War II and Italy) solving the crime, all in the space of one reel. Now that Isabel is out of the way, what will happen to Jessie and Brandon's relationship?

The problem I had with East Side, West Side is that it all seems too pat and sterile. There's a long lead-up to the murder which occurs less than a half hour before the end of the movie. And as I said, it's amazing that Mark is able to solve it so quickly. Brandon seems to be almost a cardboard cutout and not a real character, with James Mason practically sleepwalking his way through the role.

And yet, through all this the movie is very pretty to watch. It's photographed in nice black-and-white, with attention paid to the details of the Bournes' luxurious duplex apartment, as well as the nightclub and Brandon's office. Even the poor side of New York, where Mark and Jessie's characters grew up, looks too nice. Compare it to the place on the wrong side of the tracks when Dana Andrews' character returns home to his parents in The Best Years of Our Lives, which seems much more real. All of this sheen is hiding a by-the-numbers, pedestrian film.

East Side, West Side is available from the Warner Archive. But it's really one of those movies that would be better off in a box set.

The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean

Last night, I finally got around to watching The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean, which I had DVRed back when it was on TCM as part of 31 Days of Oscar, that's how long ago it was. It's available on DVD from the Warner Archive, so I'm OK doing a full-length blog post on the movie. Unfortunately, I can't say the movie is worth watching.

Paul Newman is Roy Bean, who at the beginning of the movie rides up to a brothel in the middle of nowhere in west Texas, west of the Pecos River. He boasts of having robbed a bank, at which point the men and women in the brothel assault Roy and shake him down (literally) for his money, before putting a rope around his neck and having a horse drag him off to his death. Except that the rope snaps and Roy, tended to by Maria Elena (Victoria Principal), recovers. Obviously he wasn't happy with the way he was treated, so he goes back to the brothel and kills the people there.

He finds there was a law book in the brothel, so he turns the place into a saloon/court, calling himself the "Law west of the Pecos". People get brought into his court, and he sentences them to hang, with little or no rhyme or reason. Along the way, he acts like a complete self-righteous jerk, reminding me of the portrayal of Theodore Roosevelt in The Wind and the Lion. (The movie has one scene praising Roosevelt as the best president the country has had.)

Bean also has a thing for singer Lillie Langtry, even though he's never seen or heard her, there not being any movies or records for him to see or hear. But still, he just knows she's unbelievable beautiful and dammit, he wants to see her. This actually leads to Bean's downfall, as his rival Gass (Roddy McDowall) is elected mayor while Bean is away trying to see Langtry in San Antonio.

After Bean is forced out of town, there's a wholly fictitious sequence about the next 20 years ending in the 1920s; in fact, Bean died peacefully in 1903. But in the movie, Bean gets to return to take the town back from the evil Gass.

Sadly, I found the movie wholly unfunny. Paul Newman's Bean (to be fair, it's not Newman's fault, but that of the screenwriters) is, as I said above, a total jerk who shows no respect for the rule of law and is basically a self-centered totalitarian. And this is presented as a good thing; we're supposed to have sympathy for him and root for him. And the whole Lillie Langtry thing was overdone to the point that I didn't give a crap about Bean's creepy obsession. Apparently, the real-life Langtry did visit Bean's town (which had been renamed Langtry) after Bean's death; that's the closing scene in the movie and Bean is portrayed by Ava Gardner. In fact, a number of well-known actors get small parts in which they only appear in a couple of scenes. Anthony Perkins gets one scene when he's burying the original brothel people; Jacqueline Bissett shows up for the last third as Bean's daughter. But overall, I found this Roy Bean such an irritating character that I just wanted to smack him.

Perhaps you should judge for yourself, however; maybe you'll like the movie. There are enough reviewers on IMDb who do.

Seven Days in May

Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas in Seven Days in May (1964)

Another movie that I have surprisingly never blogged about before is Seven Days in May. It's showing up overnight tonight at 2:15 AM on TCM, so now would be a good time to blog about it.

The movie starts off with scenes of people picketing outside the White House for and against President Jordan Lyman (Fredric March). It seems as though he's negotiated a controversial nuclear disarmament treaty with the Soviet Union, and gotten it through the Senate, with the result that it's had a disastrous effect on his popularity. Apparently, the people who opposed the treaty believe that the Soviets won't honor it. To be honest, the premise may be a plot hole, in that there would have been a very low chance of ever getting a treaty like this through the Senate, since a lot of the Senators would rightly understand that it would get them voted out of office. They, after all, can see how unpopular this is making the President. But ignore that gaping plot hole, and you're in for a pretty entertaining movie.

Anyhow, after the establishing scene, we meet our two other main characters. Col. Casey (Kirk Douglas) is the adjutant to General Scott (Burt Lancaster), who is presumably on the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Casey, in his job, sees some odd things cross his desk. First is a betting ring on the Preakness Stakes; there's talk of odd troop transfers and a base in Texas; and something called "Ecomcon", which is obviously an acronym for something, and whatever that something is, it's got to be nefarious. Col. Casey decides to do some discreet investigating, and he discovers enough to realize that there is indeed something serious, and that General Scott is trying to keep him in the dark. Eventually, Col. Casey suspects that the generals are planning a coup for the coming Sunday, and that the President is obviously in grave danger!

What's a colonel to do? Good loyal American that he is, he goes to a commanding officer. No, not his own commanding officer in the form of the General, since that would give the game away, but the Ultimate Commanding Officer, the Commander-in-Chief himself. The President and his advisers himself are obviously reluctant to believe that there could be a coup being plotted, since this means there are some serious consequences. But, they're not imprudent, and they decide to do some subtle investigation of their own, as well as taking steps to ensure that President Lyman won't be where the generals can keep him hostage. One presidential aide gets a confession from an admiral who is now stationed off Gibraltar, but unfortunately he's killed in a plane crash trying to return from Spain. Another Lyman supporter, Senator Clark (Edmond O'Brien) goes to Texas to investigate the new base, and gets held on a trespassing charge. It's becoming more and more clear that there is a coup being planned, but can the President and his advisors prevent it?

There's one other thing that could stop it, which is indiscretions on the part of General Scott. It turns out that he had had an affair with socialite Eleanor (Ava Gardner), and that she's got a bunch of love letters that, if they were ever made public, would doom the General. Col. Casey knows Eleanor, and tries to get the letters for her, even though it's going to mean possibly ruining the friendly relationship he has with her.

Seven Days in May is a movie that is immensely engrossing and entertaining, set against the unsettling unasked background question of whether any plot like this is possible in the real America. Just consider how many people believe in nonsense conspiracy theories about the assassination of President Kennedy, or the birth certificate stuff about Barack Obama, or the phony documents about George W. Bush's National Guard service. With the exception of hanging all the events on the hook of a treaty that I think would never have gotten passed by the Senate, the story is well-done, and the cast is uniformly excellent. Career supporting actor names I haven't mentioned are Martin Balsam as the aide who dies in Spain; John Houseman as the admiral from whom Balsoam extracts a confession; and Whit Bissell as a senator who seems in on the machinations of the generals.

Seven Days in May is part of a Burt Lancaster box set that the Warner Archive put out.

The Bribe

I mentioned The Bribe a few weeks back when it was getting an overnight airing on TCM. It's airing again this evening at 6:15 PM, and deserves a viewing if you didn't watch or record the last showing.

Robert Taylor plays Rigby, a US agent investigating an international smuggling ring that's taken him to some God-forsaken Central American banana republic, where he's fallen in love with another of the expats, Elizabeth (played by Ava Gardner). The only thing is, she's married, and Rigby is investigating her husband. Not only is an illicit affair a big problem; she just might be guilty too. How did Rigby get himself into this? Well, a flashback will tell us all.

As I said, Rigby is investigating smuggling, specifically smuggling surplus US Army gear that's no longer needed now that World War II is over, but which presumably any number of groups in Latin America would love to have. Rigby was sent to meet Elizabeth precisely because the US government suspected her husband, Tug, played by John Hodiak. (They presumably didn't expect their agent to fall in love with the guy's wife. They should have watched Notorious first.) Anyhow, Rigby goes down to Central America where he meets Elizabeth, but also gets waylaid by the mysterious Mr. Bealer (Charles Laughton). Somehow, Bealer knows the real reason Rigby is down there, and offers Rigby a cool $10,000 to stop the investigation -- that was a lot of money back in the late 1940s, especially in some banana republic.

Obviously, there has to be somebody else in on this whole thing. But who? One obvious place to look would be at the other expats, which is where the businessman Carwood (Vincent Price) comes in. Rigby suspects him and, posing as a vacationer here for some serious sport fishing, goes out on a boat trip with Carwood. Carwood rather dumbly tries to knock Rigby overboard "accidentally", which is a sure sign that he must be guilty of something else. And I don't think we'd get this movie over with in under two hours if that something weren't the same arms racket that Tug is involved in.

Alfred Hitchcock said that the "uranium ore" that Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman were investigating in Notorious was really just a macguffin -- they could have been investigating anything, as long as there was some excuse to use her as a spy to get at Claude Rains. To be honest, a lot of what happens in The Bribe feels the same way to me. Investigating arms smuggling is really a pretext to have a movie about... well, I'm not quite certain what it's about. Forbidden love, of the sort that Dana Andrews felt toward Gene Tierney in Laura? Or maybe it's a character study. Or perhaps my feelings about there being a macguffin in The Bribe are simply wrong, and MGM was trying to make a crime movie without any ulterior motives.

As far as crime stories go, The Bribe is moderately entertaining. Robert Taylor feels mildly miscast here, much the way he was as Johnny Eager several years earlier. I supose that could just be a problem with the fact that The Bribe is MGM's attempt to make a high-minded crime picture. Ava Gardner and John Hodiak are also OK. I've never really thought of Hodiak as the greatest of actors, so his being just serviceable is not a problem. Gardner, I suppose, should have been better. Vincent Price is always enjoyable to watch, and Charles Laughton is the real treat. His character is somewhat reminiscent of the one played by Sydney Greenstreet in Flamingo Road, only with a little more vitality. As you can see from my constant mentioning of other movies, The Bribe feels a lot like something that's been done a dozen times before, but is done reasonably well.

The Bribe got a release to DVD as part of the Warner Archive collection, so you can still see it if you miss today'showing.