The Invisible Ray

TCM unsurprisingly ran a bunch of horror films last October. One that I didn't get around to watching until just before it expired from my DVR was The Invisible Ray. Having finally watched it, I wrote up this post and saved it in drafts to post at a suitable time.

Boris Karloff plays Dr. Rukh, an astronomer living in what is probably Romania together whith his blind mother (Violet Kemble Cooper) and his wife Diana (Frances Drake), who is the daughter of Rukh's deceased scientific partner. Rukh has supposedly come across some great scientific discovery, involving looking at distant galaxies as a way of seeing Earth's own past. It's a hypothesis that brings researcher Dr. Benet (Bela Lugosi) in from the more civilized parts of Europe together with his sponsors, the British Sir Francis Stevens and his wife Lady Stevens (Beulah Bondi) together with their nephew Drake (Frank Lawton).

Rukh's experiments appear to show that a meteorite hit Earth in what is now Africa some time in the planet's distant past, and that this impact produced something that people in the movie call "Element Radium X". Now, at the time the movie was made, radiation therapy was in its infancy; people knew about radium and how the Curies discovered it as well as how it killed Marie. But the movie extrapolates from that into a bunch of stuff that's factual nonsense albeit entertaining nonsense. In any case, since the source of Radium X is in Africa, everybody goes off to Africa to find it.

During the expedition, Dr. Rukh separates from everybody else mostly because the rest of the cast is as much interested in doing charity work performing medical services on the natives while Rukh is obsessed with finding that Radium X. Rukh does find the meteorite, but it comes at a cost. He gets some form or radiation poisoning which results in his having a "deah touch" in that if he touches anybody else, it quickly kills them. Benet is the only person he can tell, and Benet comes up with some sort of, if not antidote, at least a treatment that will temporarily stop the effects of Radium X.

Meanwhile, Rukh also learns that during the expedition, his wife has fallen in love with Drake, which is none too surprising considering that she pretty much only married Rukh out of convenience sinces she was stuck in eastern Europe when her father died. But apparently another effect of Radium X poisoning is insane jealousy.

Everybody returns to Paris, and Dr. Rukh's plan is to kill the rest of the people in the expedition as a form of revenge. After all, all he has to do is stop taking Benet's antidote and he'll just be able to touch them and render them really quite dead. He even fakes his own death to aid in this. But Benet is no dummy, and after a couple of murders he figures out what's going on and comes up with a way to lure the supposedly dead Rukh out of hiding for the climax....

In terms of science, The Invisible Ray is a bunch of nonsense. But it's very entertaining nonsense, thanks in large part to the acting of Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi. Thanks as well to the Production Code, you know where the movie is going to end up, but it's still an enjoyable watch.

The Very Thought of You

Another movie that I was surprised to find that I hadn't heard of before its most recent airing on TCM back in 2024 was the Warner Bros. World War II homefront film The Very Thought of You. It being from Warner Bros. and part of the old Turner Library that makes up the backbone of the TCM schedule, you'd think I'd have seen it before. But I hadn't, so I recorded it the last time it showed up. It's getting another airing on TCM, tomorrow (July 22) at 11:45 AM, so now is the time for the obligatory review.

The Very Thought of You was released in 1944, and starts off with a part of World War II that audiences of the day would have known well but not so much today: the Japanese occupation of a few of the Aleutian Islands. Any number of US soldiers were stationed there as a result (in real life Charlton Heston was stationed there), but as the attempted occupation failed the US could send many of the soldiers back stateside. Among them is a platoon with Sgt. David Stewart (Dennis Morgan) and his pal Sgt. "Fixit" Bilman (Dane Clark). They have a week's leave or so and their next deployment is going to have them ship out from San Diego, so they head down the west coast, winding up in Pasadena where David studied structural engineering at Caltech and he visits an old professor who doesn't realize David has been away for three years.

On the bus from Caltech to wherever the two soldiers are going to be staying, they run into two young women who are doing their part for the war effort by working at a parachute factore. Fixit tries to chat one of the women up, not so successfully, but it turns out that the other woman recognizes Sgt. Stewart. That woman is Janet Wheeler (Eleanor Parker), who worked before the war as a soda jerk and served Stewart pretty much every night since he was working his way through Caltech and stopped there after work for a shake. She developed a flame for him, although he doesn't quite remember her. The two men offer to walk the two women home. And then Janet offers David dinner with the family since it's Thanksgiving as well as her parents' anniversary.

You'd think the family would be happy to do their part for the war effort; if you remember the old Fox film Sunday Dinner for a Soldier this sort of thing was a pretty big deal. But the Wheelers are a dysfunctional family. Dad (Henry Travers) seems to have been a bit of a failure as a man, although the way the family can afford a nice middle-class house would suggest not. Mom (Beulah Bondi) can have a nasty temper and is unhappy that Janet brought a stranger home, even though you'd think it would be easy to explain his presence. There's an older brother who isn't serving because he supposedly flunked a physical, and older sister Molly (Andrea King) who married a sailor hastily before he went off to war and, thinking she'll never see him again, has decided to see a series of other men in the meantime.

As you can guess, Janet and David fall in love, but half of the Wheeler family is not only unhappy with this, they're willing to try to sabotage the relationship! It's really surprising for a movie from this era that family members would be doing such things. Janet has a quickie marriage to David before he goes back off to fight again, and even gets knocked up on one of their two brief honeymoons, yet still Mom and Molly try to make Janet's life hell to the point that Janet moves out and keeps the pregnancy a secret from Mom and sister. And then Molly's husband shows up, which really starts to change things....

The Very Thought of You is a dated movie, having been released in the autumn of 1944. It's the sort of homefront stuff that ultimately has a happy ending that audiences of the day clearly would have identified with. Audiences 80 years on probably won't, which doesn't make the movie bad so much as a bit more difficult for some people to get into. The stars do a good enough job, and I suppose I should also mention Faye Emerson as Cora, Janet's co-worker from the beginning of the film, who also winds up in a subplot relationship with the Dane Clark character. Henry Travers, unsurprisingly, is as good as ever here.

Although The Very Thought of You is a decided time capsule, it's one interesting enough to merit a viewing.

The Unholy Wife

I've reviewed a couple of the movies that Diana Dors made in her native Britain, and she was certainly a capable enough actress. Hollywood eventually came calling, but unfortunately she didn't get the best material during her time in Hollywood. One of those Hollywood movies ran on TCM some time back: The Unholy Wife.

The movie starts with Phyllis Hochen (Diana Dors) telling a priest that she knows that according to his book, what she did was wrong. At this point, we get a flashback of exactly what it is she did that was wrong.... Phyllis is in a big house, where she lives with, among other people, her mother-in-law Emma (Beulah Bondi). Emma hears gunshots, and is scared out of her wits. Phyllis suggests that there might be a prowler, and Emma has already called the police.

The "prowler" in question is in fact not a prowler, but a man known to Phyllis named Sam Sanford (Tom Tryon). Sam, as we soon learn, is having a torrid affair with Phyllis, which is a problem since she's already married. A sheriff's deputy comes, bringing along another man, Fr. Stephen Hochen (Arthur Franz). Yes, that's Phyllis' brother-in-law, and Emma's son, who has become a Catholic priest. And despite his vows to be a man of good faith, Fr. Stephen doesn't seem to like Phyllis one bit, thinking that she's out for something. And maybe she is, although that's something we'll have to find out later in the movie.

Phyllis' husband Paul (Rod Steiger) is fairly wealthy, owning a good-sized vineyard and not having to share it with his brother since brother is part of the Catholic clergy. He married Phyllis some time in the past, Phyllis being a widow already with a young son. It's a bit of a difficult marriage since the two seem to have married on impulse and only afterwards discovered that they have some compatibility issues. It's these that lead to Phyllis taking up that affair with Sam, a hired hand on the vineyard.

Eventually, Phyllis comes up with a scheme to get rid of the scheme, involvinv having Sam come back to the house again and act as the prowler since Emma already knows the house is prone to a prowler. Only this time, when Phyllis tries to shoot at the prowler, she's not going to shoot the phony prowler, but her husband. And she'll have a perfect excuse of whom to blame -- that burglar who isn't really a burglar, and whom nobody is going to be able to find for obvious reasons.

Except that when Phyllis shoots, she doesn't shoot Paul, but one of Paul's friends who showed up unannounced at the house knowing that Paul kept the doors unlocked. Phyllis has to think quickly, and comes up with some wacky scheme that will have Paul take the blame, only for it to be found out after the trial that Paul is in fact innocent. Everybody gets off. Well, not quite, of course, since there's that damn pesky Production Code.

The Unholy Wife has multiple flashbacks, which doesn't help the story one bit, making it convoluted and hard to follow, as well as feeling rather contrived. Rod Steiger is much too good for the material, while poor Diana Dors doesn't really get to show what she was capable of the way she had done in the UK to get to Hollywood in the first place.

Still, you may want to watch The Unholy Wife once just to see how Hollywood didn't know how to use Diana Dors properly.

Back from Eternity

It's been over 14 years since I blogged about the Lucill Ball movie Five Came Back. I knew that it was remade in the 1950s, and that the remake, titled Back from Eternity, showed up a lot on TCM because both versions were made at RKO. But, for whatever reason, I had never watched Back from Eternity before. So the most recent time it showed up, I finally recorded it so that I could do a post on it here.

Having already seen Five Came Back, I already knew the basic plot of the movie. Robert Ryan stars as Bill Lonagan, pilot for an airline that's reduced to flying Americans down to some tinpot little South American country, in this case with the fictional capital city of Boca Grande. On this particular flight, he's got a new co-pilot in Joe Brooks (Keith Andes). There's also the motley assortment of character types on this particular flight, all of them with back stories, but with those stories not always being the reason they're on the flight. The Spanglers (Beulah Bondi and Cameron Prud'Homme) are the elderly couple where the husband is a college professor taking a research trip; Jud (Gene Brooks) is a wealthy businessman engaged to Louise (Phyllis Kirk); young Tommy is the son of a gangster who has just been killed, with one of the gangster's underlings, Boswick (Jessie White) taking him out of the country to shield young Tommy from the news; Rena (Antia Ekberg) is the requisite woman of ill repute being sent to South America; and Vasquel (Rod Steiger) is a political revolutionary wanted in Boca Grande and who is to be delivered there by Crimp (Fred Clark).

The various passengers already start having interactions on the way down to Boca Grande, such as one reading a newspaper that has a story on the death of Tommy's father. Prof. Spangler also mentions the natives they'll be flying over, a bunch of headhunter types who have a way of shrinking the heads of the people they capture and turning them into talismans. The exposition is also a form of foreshadowing, as you might be able to figure out even if you hadn't seen the movie Five Came Back and didn't know the plot synopsis of the movie. Soon enough, the plane hits rough weather, and you know that's going to drive the plot.

Sure enough, the plane is forced to crash land, and the plane is somewhat damaged. The radio, for example, is no longer working, while one of the engines went out. However, it's not so damaged that the plane is irreparable. They might be able to fix it just enough to get off the ground again and go to their destination. And they're going to have to do that too, since they're way off course and nobody is going to know exactly where they went down in the storm.

Time is of the essence, as they didn't pack enough food for the reason that they didn't expect to be in the jungle for possibly weeks. More importantly, though, are those headhunters they only expected to be flying over. You have to know that they're going to figure out these Americans are in their midst, and they're not going to let the Americans stay there peaceably. And to make matters worse, the characters begin to have conflicts with one another. Louise looks like she might like co-pilot Joe more than she does her fiancé, while Jud, Vasquel, and pilot Bill don't see eye to eye on who should be in charge.

And then when the plane does get repaired, there's a catch. It's been damaged enough that the plane will only be able to take five passengers to Boca Grande. And who should have the power to make those life and death decisions?

Back from Eternity isn't a bad movie, and it would probably have a better reputation if it were an original story instead of being a remake of a movie made in Hollywood's annus mirabilis of 1939. It also has a bit of a TV movie feel in terms of production values, having been made near what was the end of the road for RKO. Still, the acting is pretty good, and the movie is definitely worth a watch.

The Shepherd of the Hills (1941)

During the last free preview weekend I had, over Thanksgiving, I recorded a bunch of movies. A lot of them were more recent, but off of StarzEncore Westerns I recorded the 1941 John Wayne version of The Shepherd of the Hills.

The movie is based on a book from the early part of the 20th century and had already been filmed at least once before, as a silent, although Wikipedia says there are substantial plot changes from the book which, in any case, I haven't read. John Wayne plays Matt Matthews, a man in the Ozarks who spends a lot of his time mourning his dead mother, and cursing his absent father, since Dad was nowhere to be found when Mom got sick and died so Matt blames the missing father for Mom's death. But this conflict comes up a bit later in the story.

This being hillbilly country, there's not a whole lot of respect for the government, specifically the revenuers, who harass the poor people for liking the wrong sort of alcohol -- they should drink wine instead like the good rich folk do. Jim Lane is one of the many moonshiners, living with his adult daughter Sammy (Betty Field). He gets shot at by one of the revenuers, but, in a stroke of good luck, another man just happens to be pasing through. That man, Daniel Howitt (Harry Carey), saves Jim's life and decides that he's going to think about settling down in this neck of the woods.

After Matt's mother died, his Aunt Mollie (Beulah Bondi) and Uncle Matt (James Barton) took over the old homestead where young Matt's mom and the rest of that part of the family lived. They haven't done much with it, however, because of young Matt's continuing to mourn for his beloved mother. Aunt Mollie, for her part, tries to point out that she did a lot of the taking care of he sister, since young Matt was too young to do so at the time. But I bring all of this up because when Howitt lets it be known that he'd like to buy some land here, Sammy suggests buying what had been young Matt's home.

This would also serve the purpose of giving young Matt a little bit of money to get started in life, which in Sammy's view would be perfect because she's in love with Matt and this would enable him to marry her. Matt, for his part, is aghast at the idea, because in his mind he can't escape the past and has no intention of ever selling his mom's house. (The one thing you can argue in his defense is that the house might be a good place for newlyweds to start married life, although it would have to be a different set of newlyweds from Matt and Sammy. Matt is going to continue to curse the world, especially Daniel, whom he sees as an interloper.

Everybody else, for their part, sees Daniel as a kind and generous man, willing to overpay for that house and even willing to donate money to see that Granny Becky Matthews (Marjorie Main) can get cataract surgery to restore her eyesight. That brings about the final dramatic conflict of the movie, which you might be able to see (no pun intended) coming a mile away.

The Shepherd of the Hills is a rather different movie for John Wayne. He had spent almost all of the 1930s making B westerns on Poverty Row before being made a star again with Stagecoach. It's easy to see why a movie like The Shepherd of the Hills would wind up on a westerns channel, although it's not a traditional western. There's also a magical nature to the movie that isn't like Wayne's work up to that point. But because of the nature of the story, that unreality -- like a story not bound by place or time -- mostly works.

Wayne, I think, is not quite rightly cast here; he does well with his material but after Stagecoach he always looked a little older than he was and the story really needs somebody younger. Young Matt needs not to have been an adult when his mom died, and the timeline doesn't seem to work here. But again, Wayne does well, as do the other actors. They're also well served by the Technicolor photography, which I think was a first for Wayne.

As I said earlier, I haven't read the book, and I haven't seen any of the other movie versions either. But this version of The Shepherd of the Hills stands on its own and is definitely worth a watch.

Maid of Salem

A couple of months back, I mentioned the Claudette Colbert box set that I picked up. One of the odder entries in the set is Maid of Salem, which I recently watched.

Colbert plays Barbara Clarke, who lives in Salem, Massachusetts in 1692. Now if you know your history you'll know that's the year of the infamous Salem witch trials. Barbara lives with her aunt Ellen (Louise Dresser) and the two work as candlers, making candles for the rest of the village in exchange for the goods and services they need. Ellen is being pursued romantically by Miles Corbin (Sterling Holloway), a cow herder who has ambitions of getting some good land with a sizable amount of livestock.

Among the people to whom the Clarkes sell their candles is the Elder Goode (Edward Ellis), who seems to have the only slave in town, Tituba (Madame Sul-Te-Wan). We see Tituba doing a bit of palmistry to tell the fortunes of a bunch of the town's women, which ticks the Elder off to no end when he finds out. What terrible idle, gossipy women! Indeed, even his own wife (Beulah Bondi) is in on it.

Another of the Clarkes' clients is Jeremiah (Halliwell Hobbes), who lives a bit outside the village on a hilltop that looks entirely too high for Massachusetts. He lives alone, but things lead Barbara to believe he's not along right now, and wouldn't you know, she's right. Jeremiah's nephew Roger Coverman (Fred MacMurray) is there, having fled Virginia where he's considered a rebel. Because he's a wanted man and there's a reward on his head, he's more or less hiding out. But he falls in love with Barbara, and the feeling is mutual.

This causes Roger to stray from the confines of his uncle's property, and people start seeing him, thinking they've seen the devil. This, combined with Tituba's fortune telling and practicing of some elements of the traditional African culture that have still been handed down since she's probably only a second-generation slave, and reports of witchcraft in other parts of the Massachusetts colony, lead to the eventual accusations of witchcraft that tear the village asunder.

Ironically, it's the Elder Goode's own daughter Ann (Bonita Granville) who sets the ball rolling. She's stolen one of Dad's books on how to deal with witches, and thinks it would be interesting to find out what it's really like to be bewitched. Of course, when she strts acting bewitched, she can't tell everyone it's just a lark since she'd get in big trouble with her strict father. So she starts rumors as to who's bewitched her. The town's citizens quickly realize that it's better for them to make false accusations before other people can accuse them.

Among the people accusing Barbara is her own cousin Timothy. He thought he saw Roger although he didn't know Roger's real identity of course. He also sees Barbara practicing a dance Roger had taught her that definitely wouldn't be allowed in Salem. He puts two and two together and immediately suspects something's wrong. The fact that Barbara is a bit of a free spirit doesn't help her cause. Barbara, for her part, could produce an alibi in the form of Roger, but since he's a fugitive she doesn't want to get him caught and extradited back to Virginia where he'd probably hang anyway. (Or at least that's what we think; there's one scene in which we discover that the new governor will be pardoning the rebels.)

Maid of Salem is odd in that when I think of Colbert and MacMurray being paired together, I think of romantic comedy, and something fairly light. Not the Salem witch trials. Now, the material is somewhat lighter than The Crucible or any more modern retelling of the trials would be, but still, there's some fairly dramatic stuff here. There's a lot of obvious Hollywood here, most notably Colbert, who looks more like a star than 1690s.

But although Maid of Salem is always a Hollywood product, it's still quite an interesting movie, and not a bad one. It's also always timely, whether you have Arthur Miller reworking the Salem witch trials to be an allegory about the Red Scare of the 1950s, or whether you can compare it to the deplatforming movement coming from the opposite political direction that's going on today. Definitely worth a watch.

Back to Bataan

One of my recent DVD purchases was this four-movie set of John Wayne war pictures. First up from the set is Back to Bataan.

If you remember your history of World War II or have seen enough other movies, you'll recall that the Philippines were a US possession until after World War II, and that Japan invaded and ultimately took the islands a few months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, leading Douglas MacArthur to declare "I shall return!" The movie starts off with a brief scene of the US retaking the islands, flashing back to the start of the war in the Philippines.

John Wayne plays Col. Madden, who leads a bunch of US troops, which include Filipinos, such as Capt. Bonifacio (Anthony Quinn). The Japanese come, and while MacArthur retreats, Madden is ordered to get to the Filipino resistance and help them in their guerilla actions against the Japanese. Bonifacio is taken prisoner, ultimately being forced to take part in the Bataan Death March.

During the retreat, Madden and his men run into American schoolteacher Bertha (Beulah Bondi). The Japanese had stopped at her school and taken it over, hanging the principal for not taking down the American flag. Of course, the real reason for having Bertha and this school in the movie is because the schoolkids are going to make an appearance later in the movie.

The resistance goes on for about two and a half years, before MacArthur does in fact return at Leyte. But to prepare for the invasion, Madden and the Filipinos are going to have to hold off a bunch of Japanese troops, a lot more in fact than Madden has at his disposal....

Back to Bataan is in many ways a standard-issue war movie, which means that there's nothing particularly notable here, either good or bad. Part of the reason for that is that the movie was released in June 1945, and while production was going on, actual events in the war were overtaking the production, notably the liberation of the POW camps where the Bataan Death March participants were interned. All of this means that the plot, while not incoherent, seems definitely quite simplified. Then again, to be fair, American audiences in June 1945 probably weren't looking for their war movies to be particularly complex.

As for the actual box set, the one I got has two DVDs with two movies each; each DVD having its own spindle. (Some of the reviews on Amazon suggest different packaging, although with Amazon's movie reviews you often get reviews of different released mixed together.) I don't think there are any extras, but for the price you can't really expect extras. If you like war movies and/or the movies of John Wayne, this is definitely a box set for you