Dulcy

I've mentioned when I reviewed a movie like The Owl and the Pussycat how there are certain characters who are just so obnoxious that the character would be better as the victim in a murder mystery. I couldn't help but have the same thoughts as I was watching the movie Dulcy.

Dulcy, played by Ann Sothern, is Dulcy Ward, the kid sister of Bill Ward (Dan Dailey, credited here as Dan Dailey Jr.). We don't see their parents, but presumably the parents left them loaded since they've got a big New York place, servants, and a place on a lakeside island up in the mountains. In any case, it's Bill we see first, trying to take a shower in the morning but being foiled by Dulcy's having tried to "fix" the boiler, a fix that only makes things worse. And, as we'll see over the course of the movie, it's not the only thing Dulcy makes worse.

Bill works in advertising, seemingly running his own agency. This has enabled him to meet lovely young Angela Forbes (Lynne Carver), daughter of an aircraft executive Roger (Roland). Indeed, Bill is engaged to Angela and is about to meet the family as they (Mrs. Forbes is played by Billie Burke) return from a transatlantic cruise. (The movie was released in 1940, by which time Europe was already at war again, but is based on a play by George S. Kaufman from before he met either Edna Ferber or Moss Hart.) Also on the boat is inventor Gordon Daly (Ian Hunter).

Gordon is working on a new sort of aircraft engins that probably violated the laws of physics, but is in some ways just a macguffin for Gordon to be able to meet the Forbes family as part of Dulcy's creating all sorts of complications. As you might guess, Dulcy sees Gordon's invention and thinks that Mr. Forbes would be the perfect person to talk to since Gordon needs venture capital. You might also guess that Dulcy is going to fall in love with Gordon along the way.

Now, that island vacation home I mentioned earlier comes into play. Bill is hoping to win Roger's approval for the marriage by inviting the Forbes family for a vacation there. Dulcy, of course, screws things up first by driving the boat to the island like a maniac. Then, she schemes to get Gordon onto the island with his invention so that he can have a chat with Forbes to try to get him to back the new engine. This, unsurprisingly, doesn't go well at first.

Further complicating matters is one Schuyler van Dyke (Reginald Patterson). He's the not-quite-sane brother of a wealthy man, taking his brother's plane for a flight and crashing it into the lake thinking it's a sea-plane and not a land plane. He also claims to be rich, so when he hears about the new engine he starts acting like a big shot investor and offers to get in on the plan in a way that would screw up what Forbes could do if he wanted.

Now, in a movie like Dulcy, she's supposed to be a sympathetic character despite her screwing everything up; also, everything is supposed to come out right in the end. Now, that latter half is in fact the case. But I found Dulcy to be so obnoxious that it made the movie difficult to watch. Somebody should have smacked her upside the head, or at least done what Bette Davis does to Miriam Hopkins at the end of Old Acquaintance. But no, that doesn't happen here at all. Then again, the original play was first staged in 1921, and audiences of the early 1920s may have enjoyed such a character a lot more than I did.

Piccadilly Jim (1936)

Another of the movies that I recorded off of TCM because it sounded interesting was the 1936 Robert Montgomery vehicle Piccadilly Jim. Having watched it, now I can do a review on it for you.

Montgomery plays the title character, James Crocker Jr. He's an American-born artist living in London and making a living as a cartoonist doing caricatures for the London newspapers. He's apparently able to make a pretty darn good living at it, too, since he's got a butler in Bayliss (Eric Blore), and is also able to support his father, James Sr. (Frank Morgan). Dad is an actor, or was an actor at some point in the past; he doesn't seem to have worked in quite some time and everybody calls him a ham.

However, Dad has met a nice American woman, Eugenia Willis (Billie Burke), a widow traveling with her sister Nesta Pett (Cora Witherspoon) and Nesta's husband Herbert (Grant Mitchell). Dad has fallen in love with Eugenia, but unsurprisingly Nesta has the good sense to wonder if the elder Crocker isn't the sort of smooth operator looking for a mark to marry and live off the wife's money. (Haven't the Petts heard of a pre-nup?) Dad tells them his son is a successful artist, so the Petts would like to meet him which will also serve as a way to judge whether Dad is in fact suitable for Eugenia.

Meanwhile, Jim Jr. goes out for a night on the town, which I'd guess would also serve as one of the ways he finds inspiration for the people he wants to caricature. But this time, while out, he meets a lovely young woman named Ann (Madge Evans). He falls in love with her, but she's not so quick to return the feelings. That's because there are several things he doesn't know about Ann, with the first of them bein that she is in fact engaged to another man, Lord Priory (Ralph Forbes). Jim Jr. keeps pursuing Ann, into the next day, with the result that he winds up tipsy at his meeting with the Petts, and they rightly reject the Crockers. This especially after finding out that young Jim is just a sketch artist.

The Petts go off to the Riviera, and this is the other thing we learn about Ann. She's actually the niece of Nesta and Eugenia, but Jim Jr. still doesn't know this. He, having been rebuffed by the Petts, decides to create a new comic strip lampooning the sort of rich Americans abroad that the Petts are, and this cartoon, From Rags to Riches, becomes a huge hit. Eventually, the Petts return from the Continent, and find that they're the butt of all jokes since everybody in London recognizes them as the source material for the comic strip. However, they -- and most importantly Ann -- are unaware of who the real artist behind the strip is.

Piccadilly Jim is based on a story by P.G. Wodehouse that was written 20 years before this movie adaptation. In fact, this isn't the first adaptation, as there was a silent version. There has since been, about 20 years ago, another adaptation of the material. The 1936 version of Piccadilly Jim works well, but it feels closer a lot like a programmer in tone. MGM had Robert Montgomery available, and had the rights to the story (they had planned to turn the material into a musical), and so they put two and two together.

Robert Montgomery is every bit the professional here, as is the rest of the cast. They all put in solid performances that make for a film that works, although at the end of the movie's running time it's not something that's spectacularly memorable. But when the studios were churning out as many movies as they were, "workmanlike" was part of the point. And even workmanlike work from the big studios made for a reasonably good movie.

The Cheaters

I recorded quite a few movies last Christmas and have been watching them before they expire on the DVR as they only last nine months. While I suppose I could write up the posts and save all of them for December, obviously the time at which they expire from the DVR is well before TCM's December schedule will be known. So I wouldn't know if all of them are going to be showing up on TCM this Christmas. (Then again, some of them, like My Night at Maud's back in August, are only set at Christamstime and not really Christmas movies.) The latest of the movies, which is definitely much more of a Christmas movie, is The Cheaters.

J.C. Pidgeon (Eugene Pallette) is a New York businessman who's fallen on hard times. That's in part because the rest of his family -- wife Clara (Billie Burke) and daughter Therese (Ruth Terry) especially, along with lazy brother-in-law Willie (Raymond Walburn) -- are profligate spenders to the point that they've spent him into near bankruptcy and a string of process servers coming to J.C.'s office. The only saving grace is that J.C. has a rich uncle Henry out west who is on his deathbed. J.C. has sent son Reggie out there to butter up Henry in the hopes that perhaps Henry might remember them in his will and secure the family's finances.

J.C.'s family are about to make his life more difficult. Therese has a boyfriend Stephen who's serving in the Army and is coming home for the holidays (the movie was released in 1945, just as World War II was ending, but was based on a play written before the US entry into the war), and she wants to impress him. To that end, she insists that the family take on a "charity case" for the holidays, as that's what all the rich people do. In the announcements in the newspapers, they read of a Mr. M., who was a former matinee idol on the stage before getting in a car crash that led him to drink, costing him his acting career. Mom loves the idea of having an actor, so they pick that case. Cut to a scene of Mr. M., real name Anthony Marchand (Joseph Schildkraut), renewing his Actors Equity card.

And then Henry actually dies. Reggie was there for the reading of the will, which was a huge problem for the family. Mercurial uncle Henry apparently believed in charity cases himself. He was so taken by one such case, a showgirl named Watson from 30 years earlier when she was just a child actress, that he left the entire will to her instead of his nephew since Henry had the good sense to understand that Clara is a spendthrift. However, there's a catch, which is that Henry doesn't know what happened to Watson, so if the executor can't find the woman in question, the money will revert to J.C. With that in mind, J.C. comes up with the plan to find Watson himself and keep her incommunicado until the "reasonable" period of time to find her passes.

This is where the family's having taken on a charity case might just help. Marchand, being an actor, has access to Actors Equity and can use that to find her. Willie approaches her and says she's a long-lost cousin, and would she like to spend Christmas with the family. Not that she knows the ruse, although Marchand does. Everybody decamps to a cottage out in the country, and the rest of the movie deals with which secrets will be found out, as pretty much everybody in the movie is keeping things hidden.

I mostly liked The Cheaters, even though everybody here is being a bit dishonest at heart. You get the impression that none of these characters is going to use the money honestly and that frankly, Uncle Henry had the good sense not to bequeath it to J.C. and his side of the family. However, the acting overcomes the script problem, and the Christmas theme softens a lot of the greed.

The Cheaters was made at Republic, and because the cast is mostly people who didn't get to be leads in movies at the biggger studios, it's easy to see why the film became forgotten over the years until TCM resurrected it 15 or so years ago. But it's definitely worth one watch. Not as good as, say, It Happened on Fifth Avenue, but still enjoyable enough.

More Ferenc Molnár

Hungarian writer Ferenc Molnár wrote a lot of works, mostly plays, that have been turned into movies on multiple occasions, as we most recently saw with Blonde Fever. A movie that I had recorded not knowing that it was based on yet another work by Molnár is The Bride Wore Red. Having finally gotten around to watching it, now's the time to do the review on it.

In Trieste, Italy, two upper-class gentlemen go slumming, the Count Armalia (George Zucco) and his friend Rudi Pal (Robert Young). The restaurant they go to has a bunch of women who are barely scraping by in life working there, and Armalia suggests that, Pygmalion-style, he could turn one of these women into a proper lady with the right clothes, grooming, and accent. Needless to say, we're going to find out if that is in fact the case, as the scene cuts to a singer at the club.

That woman is Anni Pavlovitch (Joan Crawford), and after her number, the count calls her over to give her the chance to test his theory, unbeknownst to Rudi. He'll get some good clothes for Anni and come up with a new identity for her, and then send her off to a resort in South Tyrol, which is part of Italy but has a large German population thanks to it having been part of Austria until the end of the Great War. Anni agrees to the proposition, giving her two weeks at a hoity-toity resort, but on the agreement that the count get her a red dress that will be hers to keep.

Cut to the train to the resort, where Anni, now named Anna Vivaldi, gets off, greeted by the telegraph operator/chauffeur Giulio (Franchot Tone), who was of course Joan Crawford's real-life husband at the time. Giulio is a relatively simple man, and you can guess that he's going to fall for her and that Anni is going to have mixed feelings about which man to choose.

OK, I'm getting a bit ahead of myself, but you know there's going to be another man. Before that, however, we learn that there's going to be at least one person at the resort who knows Anni's secret, that person being one of the chambermaids (not Armalia, who isn't there), which is a big problem since Anni is supposed to be a different social class from the chambermaid. As for the other man, that unsurprisingly turns out to be Rudi, who is at the resort together with his fiancée Maddalena and her father, an admiral (Reginald Owen).

You'll note I mentioned that Rudi is engaged, which presents further plot complications as it won't do for an engaged man to fall in love with one of the other guests at the resort. At the same time, however, it comes up with an interesting dilemma, which is whether Rudi will still love Anni if he finds out she's a working girl, or whether Anni will run off with Giulio. Quite a few of the comedies of the late 1930s had rich guys falling for working women where we knew they were supposed to wind up together in the final reel.

That having been said, The Bride Wore Red doesn't quite sparkle for some reason. I'm not quite sure why, considering the provenance from Ferenc Molnár, together with a very creditable cast. It's also the sort of material that was well-suited to MGM and their production values. But for whatever reason, it consistently feels slightly off, probably because Joan Crawford is never really convincingly Italian.

That's not to say The Bride Wore Red is bad; it's more that everybody in the cast had other stuff that they could point to as better. Still, Joan Crawford fans will definitely like this one, and it's another good example of how MGM seemed more able to put glitz on a movie than possibly any other studio in the golden age.

Hal Roach remakes My Man Godfrey

Another of the movies that I recently watched off my DVR is Merrily We Live, which I think got a TCM airing during a Constance Bennett day in Summer Under the Stars. I'd never blogged about it before, which is why I made the point of recording it so I could do a post on it here.

We start off with the hired help, led by Grosvenor the butler (Alan Mowbray), being irritated because all the good silver is missing. That's because the lady of the house, Mrs. Kilbourne (Billie Burke), has had a bad habit of bringing in "forgotten men", not that this movie uses that term the way My Man Godfrey did, and trying to reform them. One of those tramps decided to walk off with as much of the silver as he could carry. So it's going to be a nice surprise for the family when they have their breakfast this morning and have to use whatever utensils are at hand.

In addition to Mom, there's the father (Clarence Kolb) who's big in business and trying to get in with the politicians who hold sway; an adult daughter Geraldine "Jerry" (that's Constance Bennett if you couldn't tell) who is as close to a rational person as you'll find in this family; adult son Kane (Tom Brown) who looks like he's never worked a day in his life; and the stereotypical bratty teenage kid Marion (Bonita Granville), a few years older than the Virginia Weidler character in The Philadelphia Story and not nearly as charming. At least they're all able to convince Mom not to bring in another tramp.

Cut to a winding mountain road that seems to be much too far away from the house where the Kilbournes live for the story to work. Wade Rawlins (Brian Aherne) is driving a jalopy up the road, and stops to get water for the car's radiator, at which point the car rolls backward off a cliff. Rawlins walks down the hill to call for help, and apparently the first house he finds is the Kilbourne place. He tries to ask if he can make a phone call, but Mom is so ditzy that she winds up hiring Rawlins on as a chauffeur before he can explain who he is and what he wants.

Jerry already has a guy pursuing her in the form of Herbert wheeler, but we see that he's pursuing her too fast and how Rawlins has to save her from Wheeler's advances. It's obvious that Jerry is going to fall in love with Rawlins by the end of the movie, although she doesn't know it yet. Meanwhile, Dad is going to be hosting an important dinner, but Marion decides she's going to be a jerk and bollix things by having Rawlins get invited to the dinner when everybody in the family thinks he's a tramp.

Merrily We Live is the sort of screwball comedy that wouldn't have been so bad if it came out two years earlier, before the release of My Man Godfrey, in which case it would be the sort of movie you could look at and see why My Man Godfrey was the better movie. Unfortunately, it came later, so it's hard not to think of producer Hal Roach as ripping off My Man Godfrey. The other problem Hal Roach had is that I don't think he ever really had a particularly big budget to work with. Everything here feels slightly threadbare.

Still, Merrily We Live isn't exactly a bad movie, it's just that there are so many classics of the genre, a standard which Merrily We Live doesn't quite reach.