An American Romance

Tomorrow's daytime programming on TCM is a bunch of movies directed by King Vidor. One that I hadn't seen before, but that was on my DVR was An American Romance, which TCM is showing at 8:15 AM. By now, you know the drill, which is that I watched it off the DVR in order to be able to do this write-up in time for tomorrow's showing.

Brian Donlevy plays Stefan Dangosbiblicek, a Czech man in the early 1890s who is emigrating to the US in part because he's got a cousin in the iron-mining part of Minnesota, the Mesabi range on the north shore of Lake Superior. He barely speaks English, and doesn't have enough money per the law on how much an immigrant should have so as not to be a burden for at least some period of time. But one of the men manning the immigration booth has pity on Stefan, who claims to be a hard worker, and sends him on his way to work -- and walk -- his way west to Minnesota.

Amazingly, Stefan makes it all the way out to Minnesota, where he finds cousin Anton (John Qualen), who does indeed still work in the open-pit iron mine, with the real thing being shown on screen here. He is indeed a hard worker, which is going to stand him in good stead later in the movie, but also wants to learn. Thankfully there's a schoolteacher, Anna O'Rourke (Ann Richards), who is willing to help him learn English, and the two fall in love along the way and get married. Anna eventually has five children: a duaghter and four sons named after US presidents.

Stefan, who along the way had his name Americanized to Steve Dangos, keeps working hard and becomes foreman at a steel mill in one of those mid-sized midwest cities. It's enough for him to be able to buy a car, but this being a car from the crank era of starting, it's still not particularly reliable. This causes him to take the car completely apart to figure out how it runs, although even that stands Steve in good stead as he comes up with an idea to start a factory of his own for new ideas in automotive engineering. This even though other companies aren't so certain of the innovations like a steel roof to keep people safer in roll-over accidents. The fact that there's about to be a Depression on doesn't help either.

And, along the way, various other parts of US history are going to intrude on Steve's story. There's World War I, which costs Steve one of his sons. At the end, there's also World War II, which is handled in a rather propagandistic manner. An American Romance was released in 1944, while World War II was still raging. It seems fairly clear that An American Romance included a fair bit into the story designed to further the war effort explicitly, or through fostering social cohesion. Just before World War II is a long sequence about the labor union struggles of the 1930s, with Steve's own son Theodore Roosevelt Dangos (Stephen McNally, still early enough in his career to be credited under his birth name Horace) on the side of the labor union.

Watching An American Romance, I couldn't help but think about some of the other epic movies about the American experience, such as Avalon. An American Romance is certainly well-made, although the story feels like a romanticized (no pun intended) version of the immigrant experience. That, and it also comes across as having to check off a bunch of boxes about what the American Dream of social and economic advancement was about for early 20th century immigrants. An American Romance isn't a bad movie by any stretch of the imagination, but it does feel a bit formulaic.

Certainly not the middle

A movie that I wasn't certain whether or not I'd seen before showed up on TCM some time back, so I recorded it: The Beginning or the End. Eventually I got around to watching it, and as far as I could tell I hadn't seen it before. A search of the blog claims that I certainly hadn't blogged about it anyway, so now that it's coming up again on TCM. it's time to rectify that oversight with this post. That airing is early tomorrow, April 4, at 4:00 AM.

The movie starts off with one of the more unique framing scenes I can think of. A time capsule is being prepared, only to be opened in the year 2446 which would from the point of the movie be 500 years in the future. A spokesman on the film in the time capsule talks about the development of the atomic bomb, and that the movie the people of 2446 would be about to watch is the documentation of that effort, how it ended that war in the distant past, and the hope that the atom could be used for peaceful purposes....

Back in the late 1930s, Matt Cochran (Tom Drake playing one of the fictional characters in the movie) is a graduate student who with some professors is working on the idea of nuclear fission. This of course results in energy being released, along with the realization that the energy could be used to make a bomb. Several of the professors of the day, like Robert Oppenheimer (Hume Cronyn) and Enrico Fermi (Joseph Calleia) feel that President Roosevelt should be informed of this. After all, war was coming to Europe, and it was pretty obvious that if scientists in America could figure all this out, certainly scientists in Nazi Germany would figure it out too.

Research continues on a small scale until December 1941, which is of course when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, sending the Americans into the war. President Roosevelt authorizes a covert spending of some billions of dollars for Oppenheim and the other scientists to figure out a way to weaponize the splitting of the atom, which of course has to be a controlled reaction since, if it can't be stopped during development, it's the places where the research is being done that will get blown up.

The military point man for all this is Maj. Gen. Leslie Groves (Brian Donlevy), with his second in command being Lt. Col. Jeff Nixon (Robert Walker; and again as far as I'm aware another of the fictional characters). Sites are set up in Illinois where Fermi was based; in Oak Ridge, TN; and in out-of-the way Alamagordo, NM. With a war being on, Americans are portrayed as happy to move out to help the government's war effort, although they have no knowledge of what the government is trying to do.

Now, since this is all based on history, we know that that first controlled nuclear bomb is detonated at Trinity in July, 1945. Harry Truman is at the Potsdam Conference, and it's his job to make the decision to actually use the bomb against Japan in Hiroshima and then Nagaski. Cochran is one of the civilians sent out to make certain the US bombers who have been running the mission will know how to deal with this special new kind of bomb.

The Beginning or the End is of course based on real historical events. However, liberties had to be taken with the story for a bunch of reasons. One is of course security; the movie was made only about a year after the end of World War II, and there was still a large amount that was classified and couldn't be revealed. There's also the fact that apparently, real people still alive had veto power over their portrayal in movies at the time. Several of the real scientists, notably Niels Bohr, didn't want to be used, necessitating more changes. The biggest reason, however, was the dramatic one for the perceived benefit of the audience. That's why the love story between Cochran and his wife (Beverly Tyler), as well as a secondary romance between Nixon and his girlfriend (Audrey Totter), are shoehorned into the movie.

It's these sops to the moviegoing public that make the movie one that's not so well remembered today, due to their lessening the dramatic power of the movie. It was only a few years later that Above and Beyond about the Enola Gay was released, with more realistic stuff coming out as the Cold War was winding down and culminating with the movie Oppenheimer a few years back. The Beginning or the End is competently enough made, but it does have the marks of MGM and the Hollywood studio system all over it, both for good and bad.

Barbary Coast

A few months back, I was looking through some of the offerings on Tubi, and saw an old movie I don't think I'd heard of, one with some pretty big stars in it: Howard Hawks' 1935 version of Barbary Coast. I finally got around to watching it, and it's one that doesn't have any indication of being about to expire.

Miriam Hopkins is the star here, playing Mary Rutledge. But before we meet her, we get a prologue informing us of how gold was discovered in California in 1848 and how that brought a ton of men to what the US had recently gained in the war against Mexico, and would soon become a state. Following those men is Mary, who is about to get off the boat in San Francisco in order to meet again with her fiancé, Dan Morgan. Unfortunately, she's informed by the denizens of San Francisco that Mr. Morgan is quite dead.

Taking Mary under his wing is Louis Chamalis (Edward G. Robinson). Now, if Barbary Coast were a pre-Code, Mary would have been his mistress, but the movie was released in 1935, when such a relationship couldn't be depicted. Louis runs one of the local gaming houses, and is a pretty big cheese in Frisco. So while Louis takes Mary on and gives her room and board, and presumably expects to start a romantic relationship with her, he also gives her a job as a croupier.

Of course, the roulette wheels are crooked, as that's just one way Louis makes his money and keeps it. There's not much real law here yet, so Louis has a bunch of henchmen led by Knuckles (Brian Donlevy) to mete out force so Louis can keep what's his, and he intends to get a bunch of that gold for himself without having to mine it. A lot of people are unhappy with this arrangement -- Dan Morgan would have been one such man, but he's dead now. One of Mary's fellow passengers, Col. Cobb, is also unimpressed, so he buys a printing press and vows to start a muckracking newspaper. Louis, unsurprisingly, threatens him.

That finally pushes Mary over the line, and she decides to go out by herself for a horseback ride just to get away for a day and clear her head. But the weather isn't good and, San Francisco not being a big city yet, Mary gets lost. She finds what she thinks is an abandoned cabin, except that it's being used by prospector Jim Carmichael (Joel McCrea). He lets her come in and dry off, and as this happens you know he and Mary are going to fall in love. Jim has finally hit gold, and is planning to head back to New York.

But in San Francisco while waiting for the boat, he learns what Mary does for a living, and this makes the two hate each other for some reason. Mary takes all of Jim's money at the roulette wheel, while Col. Cobb decides to start on a campaign of vigilante justice to get at Louis. Mary and Jim eventually get caught in all this, and it threatens to end tragically for the two of them.

Except, of course, that Barbary Coast was released in 1935. Had it been a pre-Code, you might possibly get at least an ambiguous ending. But because of the Code, you know that Louis is going to get what he deserves for his crimes, while Mary is going to find a way to expiate her sins.

Barbary Coast is another of those movies where the big problem I have with it is the fact that the Code forces a certain ending on them. Having read a bit more about the movie, it was based on a novel with a plot that, if not entirely different, at least is able to handle things with a much more grown-up sensibility. Joe Breen and friends were apparently thoroughly displeased, and forced all sorts of script changes, which are decidedly not to the movie's benefit, which is a huge shame given the cast.

Still, that does make Barbary Coast the sort of movie you should watch to see how the Production Code could hurt a Hollywood movie.

Mary Burns, Fugitive

One of the 1930s actresses who gave a lot of fine performances but doesn't really get enough love is Sylvia Sidney. One of her films that's been sitting on my DVR for quite a while now is Mary Burns, Fugitive. So recently, I sat down to watch it.

As you can probably guess, it's Sidney who plays Burns, as she's got top billing. And she becomes a fugitive, although she's not one at the start of the movie. Instead, she's working as the owner of one of those small roadside diners that dotted rural America back in the day, kind of like the Aline MacMahon character in Heat Lighting, only Mary isn't escaping a past as far as I could tell and doesn't have the motor hotel either.

She makes the best coffee around, and one of the people who has repeatedly come through to partake of the coffee is "Babe" Wilson (Alan Baxter). Other than possibly Babe Ruth, it seems to me that a man with the nickname "Babe" back in those days was bad news, or at least so in movies. But Mary doesn't know she's in a movie, so she doesn't see the threat. Instead, she's kind of fallen in love with Babe. So one day, when Babe and a friend show up, she doesn't know how her life is about to change. Babe says he has to go to Canada on urgent business, and wants Mary to marry him and go to Canada. In fact, Babe is a criminal fleeing the law with a bunch of stolen money. Before the police can get to Babe, he shoots his partner and makes an escape, but not with Mary in tow.

The police, unsurprisingly, believe that Mary is Babe's moll, and that she knows where Babe was fleeing to. She doesn't know that second half, and since she can't give the police the information they want and didn't exactly stop Babe from leaving, they consider her an accessory to the crime and have her put in prison for 15 years. She could get a much reduced sentence, however, if only she would tell the authorities where Babe went. (As if he went one place and stayed there all this time.)

Mary can't give the authorities what they want, so they try a different tack. They arrange it so that another prisoner, Goldie Gordon (Pert Kelton), will break out of prison and take Mary with her. Mary, of course, doesn't get that it's all part of a plan by the higher-ups, who think that with Mary out of prison, Babe and his gang will find where Mary is and Babe will take the bait, allowing the authorities to catch him.

Eventually, Mary takes a job as a nurse in a private hospital, where she gets the task of tending to notoriously cantankerous patient Barton Powell (Melvyn Douglas). He's a professional explorer, going to places and then doing speaking tours. But he's had an eye operation that's left him with bandaged eyes, and being ticked at all the other nurses and their lousy coffee. Remember, as I mentioned at the top, Mary is known for her good coffee, so when Barton tries is and likes it, the two fall in love. Perhaps Mary could have a relationship with Barton, if only it weren't for Babe....

Babe and his underlings have found where Mary is, and decide to sent Babe's associate Spike (a young Brian Donlevy) to bring Mary to Babe. This is finally going to give the cops the chance, but it's also going to put Mary in some danger....

Mary Burns, Fugitive is one of those great old programmers that studios churned out in the days before television might have made stuff like this fodder for TV episodes. It's an engaging story, if nothing spectacular or ground-breaking, with good performances from all three leads and a few surprises along the way. It's definitely worth watching if you can find it.

One interesting thing is that the print TCM ran had both a Universal and a Paramount opening sequence. Now, it's well known that Universal (well, MCA) got the TV rights to Paramount's talkies up through 1949, and there are any number of movies that have a modern Universal opening before the old-fashioned Paramount opening. Mary Burns, Fugitive, however, had the old early 1930s opening from before the mirrored-ball. Kind of an odd surprise.

The Errand Boy

It's been a couple of months since the last time I popped in one of the DVDs from my Jerry Lewis box set, so recently I decided to watch The Errand Boy.

The movie starts promisingly enough, with a montage of how Hollywood makes movies, with pretty much nothing being real. We then move to Paramutual Studios (spelled this way as an obvious referent to Paramount which released the movie), ron by the Paramutual family which is headed by Tom (Brian Donlevy), with his wife Helen (Kathleen Freeman) also on the board). Apparently, the studio is doing well at the box office, but is not making as much money overall as it could because there's some sort of money wastage occurring on the lot that they can't figure out.

So, the board hires an analyst to watch the doings at the lot to determine where that money is being wasted, but the analyst says that he can't do the job, because everybody will recognize him. They need somebody secret that nobody will suspect of being a glorified spy. Thankfully for the board, trying to paste up a billboard just outside their office window is one Morty Tashman (Jerry Lewis). He is, as you can guess, thoroughly incompetent at the job.

The Paramutuals decide he'd be perfect for the spy job, and hire him on the spot, with him to report to Dexter Sneak (Howard McNear). Dexter, for his part, puts Morty into the studio messenger/errand service, where Morty's unsuspecting boss will be Grumpy (Stanley Adams).

At this point, the plot stops dead in its tracks, and we get an excuse for a bunch of sketch comedy from Jerry Lewis. We never really learn what's causing the leak in the studio's finances, and, to be fair, that's not really the point of the movie but more of a macguffin. But in any case, it's hard to give much of a lengthy synopsis to The Errand Boy.

Unfortunately, the sketches on the whole don't work as well as in the earlier The Bellboy, and with a relatively plotless movie unlike Cinderfella, the movie winds up being a lot less than perhaps it could have been. Some of the skits do work well, such as one the studio water tank, but others either don't work (the wacky-named characters whose names nobody can pronouce), and others are just oddly out of place (the juvenile basketball team).

The Errand Boy is a movie that's good to have as part of a box set, but I don't think it's ever going to be remembered as one of Jerry Lewis' finest hours.

Boxing Finds Andy Hardy

TCM did a programming tribute to Mickey Rooney on the centenary of his birth last September. One of the movies that I hadn't blogged about before which they ran is Killer McCoy. So I DVRed it and watched it to do a post on here.

Rooney plays Tommy McCoy, a young man who makes money for his family selling newspapers, because it's not as if his parents are bringing in any money. Mom (Gloria Holden) is a housewife, while father Brian (James Dunn) is a former vaudeville star waiting for a comeback that's never going to come. Dad deals with this by drinking and wasting whatever money the family does get. But the local church hosts a boxing night with entertainment, that entertainment being Brian and Tommy doing a dance number.

Not long before, Tommy had gotten in a scrap with another newspaper seller who he thought was honing in on his territory, Tommy ignoring licensing laws. That other guy shows up at the fights, and Tommy challenges him to a fight, which he wins. That gets the notice of lightweight prizefighter Johnny Martin (Mickey Knox), who barnstorms the country and invites Tommy and Brian to be part of the performance.

Eventually Mom dies, with Dad missing out because he's too busy getting drunk at all the bars on the road. Johnny also loses a fight, and announces his retirement to start up a ranch with his wife, leaving Tommy to try to start a career in boxing. Tommy has some success in the ring, but Dad is taking all the purses and gambling on the horses with numbers runner Jim Caighn (Brian Donlevy), even eventually selling Tommy's contract to Jim.

Tommy has a big fight lined up, but the opponent has to back out injured, so who gets brought in to replace the guy by Johnny Martin, who's gone broke and needs the money despite being badly out of shape. Tommy wins the fight, but it comes at the cost of killing Johnny with a punch, giving Tommy the nickname "Killer McCoy".

Tommy tries to quit the ring, but needs the money and so goes back to Caighn, who still has Tommy's contract. Caighn offers Tommy a secluded training sight at the house of a Mr. Carrson, and while training there, who should show up but Carrson's daughter Sheila (Ann Blyth)? She's being educated at a private school and didn't know anything about Tommy's presence, so she's miffed, but once things get ironed out, the two fall quickly in love. Very much complicating matters is the fact that Sheila shows Tommy a picture of her father, who is... Jim Caighn, not that you couldn't have figured that one out.

Meanwhile, back in the ring, Tommy has a killer right hand, but Caighn has come up with the idea that he should avoid using it to get rich bettors to think that Tommy is just a palooka, with Caighn making a killing off of them. Caighn also finds out his daughter is seeing Tommy, and is none too pleased with it because he doesn't want his daughter to know the truth about him. (It turns out she already does, but has never let on to Dad that she does.) One of the bettors finds out about Caighn's deception, and kidnaps Brian and Sheila to force Tommy to throw the fight.

The story in Killer McCoy is not particularly special; in fact the movie is a remake of The Crowd Roars which I have not yet seen. Despite the silly ending, Killer McCoy is worth a watch thanks to the fine performances of Mickey Rooney and Brian Donlevy. As for Dunn, people will probably come to diametrically opposed views on him. He's such a jerk that some people are probably going to hate him, while other people will probably have some sympathy for the fact that his life has been empty for years and has nothing to live for other than his son's success.

The boxing scenes are also well-photographed, although as someone who's not a fan of boxing I don't know just how inaccurate they are. The dance number at the beginning, to "Suwanee River", was directed by a very young Stanley Donen, and a young Shelley Winters has a bit part.

Killer McCoy received a DVD release courtesy of the Warner Archive.

Impact

Another movie I recently watched to try to make some space on the DVR is Impact.

The movie starts off a bit less than promisingly, with some dopey narration defining the title of the movie for us: "Impact, the force with which two lives come together. Sometimes for good, sometimes for evil." We then meet Walter Williams (Brian Donlevy). He's a businessman in San Francisco who's been doing well for his company buying up factories. He's got a wife Irene (Helen Walker) with whom he's planning on going away for a bit. But we soon learn that things aren't quite as good as they seem. Irene is feigning illness, because she'd really rather be spending more time with the man with whom she's having an affair, Jim Torrence!

Anyhow, Walter drives off on one of his business trips that's supposed to end with him picking up Irene. But at the appointed spot, who meets him but Jim, who claims to be one of Irene's cousins that Walter has never met, and since Jim is heading the same way as Walter, perhaps he could drive Jim part of the way. This, as you can probably guess, is a ruse, especially when we see Jim releasing some of the air from one of the tires. Jim's plan, which Irene is in on, is to kill Walter when he stops the car to change the tire!

The two men get out to change the tire, and Jim hits Walter with a crowbar, pushing him down a hill, and then getting in the car and driving off. But Jim isn't careful enough, and crashes into an oil tanker, causing a fiery crash that kills him. Everybody naturally believes when the crash is found that Walter has died, because why would anybody suspect anything else?

Walter, however, hasn't died, but just got concussed. When he comes to, he hops on the back of a moving van, eventually ending up in the small town of Larkspur, ID. When he finds out about the car crash that everybody believes killed him, he feigns amnesia while trying to figure out what to do next. (Amazingly, nobody recognizes him despite his face having been in the newspaper.) He becomes a mechanic for service station owner Marsha (Ella Raines), and the two fall in love despite the fact that Walter can't follow through since he's still married.

Eventually, Marsha convinces Walter to deal with the secrets he's hiding, so he goes to San Francisco and reveals he's still alive. But Irene has a trick up her sleeve, suggesting that Walter had gotten in an argument with her, leading authorities to believe that perhaps Walter had planned to kill Irene and Jim. Amazingly, it's Walter who's going to have to stand trial.

Impact is a pretty good movie, despite the fact that I couldn't help but think there were a lot of plot holes. In addition to nobody recognizing Walter, parts of the trial seemed rather unrealistic. But suspend your disbelief and there's a farily entertaining movie. Donlevy in particular does well, as this is mostly his story. The two women are also good, Walker as the villainess and Raines as the good girl. The movie runs a bit longer than it probably should at 111 minutes; if the script could have been tighter we'd probably have an even better picture.

Impact is available on DVD should you want to watch.