Swing High, Swing Low

Fred MacMurray was honored in the 2024 edition of TCM's Summer Under the Stars, and that gave me the opportunity to record another movie that I had seen the title show up a number of times, but had never actually seen the movie: Swing High, Swing Low. Now, having actually seen it, I can finally do a post on it.

Fred MacMurray is the male lead, although since the movie was made in the late 1930s, the real star is the female lead, played by Carole Lombard. Her character, Maggie King, is working her passage as a beautician on board a cruise ship that goes from the US Atlantic coast to the Pacific and back through the Panama Canal in the days when the US still controlled the Panama Canal and had a strip of land on either side. On this passage through the Zone, she sees a soldier patrolling the shore, and he sees her. His name is Skid Johnson (that's MacMurray as if you couldn't tell), and although he's in the army, he says it's his last day as he's being demobbed tomorrow.

Maggie isn't really interested in SKid, but the next day he's driving a taxi showing Maggie and her friend through Balboa, the city that served as the Pacific terminus of the Canal Zone although today it's part of Panama City. Maggie misses her boat as a result of Skid and his friend/roommate Harry's (Charles Butterworth) showing her around town. Worse, they go to a club where Skid reveals that he's a trumpet player and Maggie reveals she hates trumpet music. But at the bar a man hits on Maggie and Skid, obviously already in love with Maggie, gets in a fight with the man, to the point that Skid gets arrested and Maggie has to bail him out. So now she also doesn't have the money to get a ticket back to America.

So Maggie gets herself and Skid jobs at Murphy's (Cecil Cunningham, a woman even though she has the name Cecil) club in Balboa, Maggie claiming that she's married to Skid. Also workin at the club is Anita Alvarez (Dorothy Lamour), who at some point in Skid's past was his girlfriend, which introduces that romantic tension that's going to drive the rest of the plot. Skid gets famous enough that he's able to get enough money to go back to New York, although it's apparently only enough money for him, not both him and Maggie. This even though by this time Maggie and Skid have gotten married for real.

Back in New York, Skid works at a club where Anita just happens also to be on the payroll. And Anita has no qualms about trying to win Skid back for herslef. Doing this, however, leads to Skid's screwing up his marriage to Maggie, and when she files for divorce, he responds by turning to drink, which threatens to ruin his career, at least until she shows up again.

My being a fan of older movies is part of why I'd always been interested in seeing this one, but I have to say that it doesn't quite work for some reason. I think it's that at times it's too serious a drama for its own good, while at the times it tries to be lighter, it's not really a comedy either. It also doesn't help that despite being about musicians, and not fully developing the characters, it doesn't have particularly memorable music either.

Swing High, Swing Low isn't a terrible movie, but if I were going to introduce people to Fred MacMurray or Carole Lombard, there are other movies I'd pick for that job.

Virtue

Recently I fired up Tubi, and one of the movies it recommended to me was one that I thought had been on the platform early but went away because the rights to show it ran out. That movie was the early Carole Lombard film Virtue, and either it's back, or it never left (or possibly I came across it on one of the other FAST streamers and now it's on a different streamer). In any case, it's there, so I decided to watch it.

There may be a problem with the print Tubi ran in that the first 60 seconds or so after the opening credits only have voice on a black screen, which doesn't seem right considering the subject material. Lombard play Mae, who as the movie starts has just been convicted on a solicitation charge in New York City, along with friends Lil (Mayo Methot) and Gert (Shirley Grey) and a bunch of others. The various prostitutes are given a choice: three months in the female work camp, or a one-way ticket out of New York. Needless to say, those who can take the hint and get out.

Mae makes her way to Danbury, CT, and getting off the train hires a taxi driven by Jimmy (a young Pat O'Brien). She doesn't quite have the money for the fare, but as the two talk, they become sort of friends. Taking the relationship farther than that is a bit off the table however, as Jimmy thinks that having a wife is only going to drag him down and take away money he needs. He's got his eye on running a service station, and has been saving up to put a payment on a half interest in one particular station.

As you might guess, Mae and Jimmy do wind up falling in love, and even tying the knot, although she hasn't yet told him about her past. Jimmy and Mae go on what is presumably going to be a brief honeymoon, but that's to Coney Island. Now, as you might know, Coney Island is in New York City, and Mae is still not supposed to be in the City. Somehow, she's recognized among the throng of people, which to me seemed like a serious plot hole because who really remembers that this is a prostitute who was arrested months ago. It's not like she's got a tramp stamp or anything like that. But when they go to the hotel for the night, there's a cop waiting for her.

Jimmy decides to give her a second chance, and Mae proves to be a surprisingly good wife, saving money out of the allowance that Jimmy gives her on top of the money Jimmy himself has been saving towards buying that service station. But then Gert calls, claiming to be seriously ill and needing $200 for an operation, which she'll repay when she gets the money from her parents. Mae is dumb enough to fall for this, giving the money to her before finding out that Gert has tried this on most of the unmarried cabbies.

Mae learns that Gert has gone to Atlantic City, so she goes and finds her, where she's with her boyfriend/pimp Toots (Jack La Rue), who also happens to be Lil's pimp. Mae walks in just as Toots is strangling Gert because she tried to steal the money back to give to Mae. You can probably guess how the rest of the movie plays out.

Virtue was released in 1932, so is decidedly a pre-Code movie. It was a bit surprising to me to see Carole Lombard at Columbia, as I wondered what she did to get the punishment of being on loan to a much lower studio than Paramount. Pat O'Brien's presence also surprised me, but apparently this was before O'Brien signed on at Warner Bros. The story is not particularly lurid beyond having the main character being a convicted prostitute, although that key plot point could not have been used just two years later.

Lombard unsurprisingly does well with the material, as does O'Brien. Virtue is another of the many, many pictures that doesn't really do anything wrong, although it also doesn't do a whole lot to stand out. But it's most definitely not a bad little movie, and certainly one that's worth a watch, and not just for fans of Carole Lombard.

Night Around the Vigil

I've mentioned British author A.J. Cronin before, and his medical novels from the era just before World War II in the UK. One of the movies based on a Cronin novel that I hadn't seen before shows up on TCM a few months back: Vigil in the Night. Since the cast sounded interesting, I decided to record it to do a review on it here.

The movie starts out with a camera panning over an establishing reference sign of a Shereham County Hospital, in Shereham, somewhere in England, and the hospital's isolation ward. The attending nurse on duty is Anne Lee (Carole Lombard), working a bit past her shift at 6:10 AM tending to diphtheria patients for whom the most important thing is that their tube not becoming blocked. As I said, she's working a bit past the end of the shift because the nurse who is supposed to come on at 6:00 is late, presumably again. That nurse is Lucy Lee (Anne Shirley), a trainee nurse who doesn't yet have her "certficate". She also just happens to be Anne's sister, and definitely not as good a nurse as Anne.

Sure enough, after showing up those ten minutes late, Lucy promptly goes into the ward kitchen to make herself some tea, and the ominous music playing over the screen makes it quite clear that Something Very Bad is about to happen. That something is the kid's tube getting blocked, and the kid's arm movements make it clear that he's dying thanks to Lucy's negligence. Lucy returns to the wart to find the kid dead, which brings in all the staff. When the doctor asks when the tube became blocked, Anne lies and says five minutes to six. With that she's taking the blame for her sister, in part because she wants Lucy to get that nursing certificate, even though Lucy is insistent that she's never going to become a good nurse like Anne is.

Anne is able to get another job at a hospital in Manchester. She's happy for the work despite the matron (Ethel Griffies) being brutally honest about the working conditions. Her work takes her into the office of Dr. Prescott (Brian Aherne), chief of surgery, and Anne realizes she want to be a nurse in the surgery ward. She even sits in the gallery when the chairman of the hospital board, Matthew Bowley, is operated on, and takes a risk by suggesting that the nurses actually attending have not counted the cotton bandages properly. She turns out to be right, but Bowley's giving her a check is also a huge breach of ethcs.. Still, it brings her even closer to Dr. Prescott. As you can guess, Prescott and Anne begin to fall in love.

Meanwhile, Lucy is finally getting her certificate, and matron needs more nurses, so offers Anne a day off to bring Lucy back. The bus crashes just before another nurse can tell matron what happened at Shereham, but it also serves to give scenes of Anne having to do more dedicated nursing. Heaven knows there's going to be more of that over the course of the movie. If diphtheria, surgery, and bus crashes aren't enough, the climax deals with a meningitis outbreak.

A.J. Cronin was a doctor as well as a writer, and he had decided ideas on how the profession should be run. Indeed, watching Vigil in the Night, it sometimes feels as if "the message" is getting in the way of the story, much like with Stanley Kramer and Not as a Stranger. That's a bit of a shame, because Carole Lombard does a very fine job here. She had spent most of the second half of the 1930s doing all those screwball comedies, and wanted to show that she could really be a serious actress, which is why she made movies like this one. And she (and the film) mostly succeeds.

So if you can take that there's going to be a message practically hitting you over the head at times, I think you'll like Vigil in the Night.

No Man of Her Own

Another of the spotlights TCM has been running is a series of movies with stars who met each other filming the movie and eventually got married. (I believe The Silver Cord, which I reviewed a few weeks back, was part of that spotlight for Joel McCrea and Frances Dee.) One of the movies that I hadn't seen before was the 1932 film No Man of Her Own, as it's the only film with both Clark Gable and Carole Lombard. Recently, I sat down to watch it.

Clark Gable, early in his career, plays Babe Stewart, one of those professional gamblers that populated movies of the 1930s. As is often the case, Babe is part of a team, with the members of the team out to fleece rich people who are new to town and don't recognize Babe and his friends as con artists, in this case using marked decks to win big at poker. Among Babe's friends are Charlie Vane (Grant Mitchell), and the moll of the group, Kay Everly (Dorothy Mackaill).

Unfortunately, Babe and Kay -- who was apparently Babe's girlfriend at one point -- have a falling out. Also, the police, in the form of Detective Collins, are on Babe's trail. So he decides to leave New York for a while until things can cool off and he can start up the con again. He arbitrarily stops in Glendale, which is where he meets Connie Randall (that's Carole Lombard). She works in the town library, and the two fall in love. Babe decides to flip a coin over whether or not to marry her, and the coin tells him to do it. So they get married and leave Glendale for the big city.

Babe starts hosting the poker games in his and Connie's apartment, but she wonders why she never meets any of the other men's wives, and what Babe does during the day. Fortunately for Babe one of the members of the team runs a brokerage and is willing to give Babe a desk to sit at during the day should Connie ever want to call him. But eventually, Connie is bound to figure out what's going on with the rigged poker games. And when she does, she's none too happy about it.

At this point, the movie takes an absurd plot twist involving Babe going to South America for three months with Charlie and another confidant, but without Connie, because reasons that make no sense. And Charlie decides he's not actually going to take the cruise, but do something that will absolutely leave you scratching your head.

Still, No Man of Her Own is certainly a competently-made movie, with capable acting jobs from everybody. It's just that it doesn't rise to anything particularly notable beyond the Gable/Lombard pairing. And it's terribly dated, as those plot twists are probably things audiences of the early 1930s would have been OK with, but today just don't work. Watch it, and go on to the next pre-Code.

There's another movie called No Man of Her Own, from 1950 starring Barbara Stanwyck and having a completely different plot, if you're looking for the Gable/Lombard movie on DVD.

True Confession

I wanted to watch a relatively short movie the other night so that I could get to bed at a reasonable time, and decided to finish up the movies on the Carole Lombard box set I have by watching True Confession.

Lombard plays Helen Bartlett, a struggling writer married to equally struggling lawyer Kenneth (Fred MacMurray, with an odd mustache here). In the opening scene, we see that Helen is less than fully truthful, as she recommend her husband take up the defense of someone who is guilty as sin. Then she calls up her friend Daisy (Una Merkel) and gives her every lie in the book to blow off work and come visit her.

Helen decides to help make ends meet by taking a job as a secretary for the wealthy Krayler, even though she doesn't know how to take dictation and only hunts and pecks to type. It's obvious Krayler has other things in mind for her, but she takes the job anyway.

When she realizes what's up, she leaves and gets Daisy to go back to the apartment with her to get her purse and coat, but when they get back, they find that Krayler has been murdered! Even though we know Helen didn't do it, and she'd have an alibi in Daisy once the police and coroner determined Krayler's time of death, Helen decides she's going to confess to the crime so that her husband can defend her and get her off on a self-defense argument. (If the real truth came out, Helen could face perjury charges.) Once her husband wins the case, he'll be a successful lawyer and the money will come flowing in.

Sure enough, Helen is found not guilty, Kenneth becomes a successful lawyer, and Helen actually becomes a successful writer by writing about the case. But there's one small catch. A drunk turned self-styled "criminologist", Charley (John Barrymore), has a piece of evidence that would prove conclusively that Helen didn't kill Krayler. He's willing to blackmail the Bartletts to get a bunch of money so he can live high off the hog.

I found True Confession to be the weakest of the movies on the box set. The problem is in Lombard's character, who as one of those chronic liars who just keeps piling one lie on top of another, she's obnoxious and someone I wanted to see get her comeuppance. This is supposed to be a comedy, and that sort of obnoxiousness didn't really work here. Barrymore is also overacting shamelessly, and relatively irritating too. The deus ex machina that solves Helen and Kenneth's problems doesn't really work for me, either.

Still, I always like to suggest people just for themselves, and since this was on a very low-price box set, getting one dud in the set isn't that big a deal.

Made for Each Other (1939)

A few weeks back I mentioned the 1971 movie Made for Each Other, and how it shares a title with, but is unrelated to, the 1939 movie Made for Each Other. TCM ran the 1939 movie not long after, and it's available on DVD and Blu-ray, so I DVRed it and watched it.

James Stewart plays John Mason, a lawyer for a big New York firm. He had to go to Boston to get a deposition, and while there, he met Jane (Carole Lombard). It was love at first sight, as they got married during his business trip and John returns to the office to everybody's surprised well wishes. Not everybody is so certain the marriage is going to work however, among them John's boss Judge Doolittle (Charles Coburn) and John's mother (Lucile Watson).

Still, the newlyweds try to make a go of it despite the obstacles and hardships they're going to face. A lot of them center on money, as John is only earning enough for the couple to scrape by rather than to live in the upper-middle class lifestyle Jane thinks a New York lawyer should be living. They have a dinner party that goes wrong; John loses out on a promotion to partner at the firm; and Jane keeps pestering John to put the marriage ahead of work by getting a continuance so that they can take a honeymoon.

And then the two have a kid, which puts even more of a financial strain on the marriage. If that's not bad enough, the movie veers way off into melodrama when the kid gets sick....

By the time the infant child got sick, I found myself thinking of two other movies, Penny Serenade and Mildred Pierce, the latter because the kid has pneumonia and is in an oxygen tent. When they showed that, I was actually hoping the kid would die (as in Mildred Pierce) so that we'd get the same obstacles for the married couple as in Penny Serenade. Instead, we get a climax of trying to get serum across the country through a snowstorm, which frankly left my eyes rolling.

Carole Lombard is best known for all those screwball comedies she made, but in Made for Each Other she shows that she really was a talented actress who could do more than just comedy, as there is very little comedy here. The supporting cast also does a good job, including Louise Beavers in yet another maid role. The problem is that they're all saddled with a sappy script.

Overall, I think I'd marginally recommend Made for Each Other for people to see Lombard's against-type performance. But in that case, I'd also recommend Penny Serenade more heartily for Cary Grant's against-type performance.

The Princess Comes Across

I didn't have time for a long movie last night, so I popped in one of the DVDs from the Carole Lombard collection I bought some time back and watched The Princess Runs Across with its brief running time of just under 77 minutes.

The princess, such as she is, as Princess Olga of Sweden (Carole Lombard, doing a Garbo impersonation), traveling with her lady-in-waiting Gertrude (Alison Skipworth). They're boarding a ship to America, as Olga has signed a contract to become an actress in Hollywood films. Also boarding is King Martell (Fred MacMurray), a concertina player traveling with his manager Benton (William Frawley). He was accidentally given Olga's stateroom, but he gives it up because he's obviously smitten with her and wants to keep her happy so that she'll fall in love with him.

Another person who is on the ship is Darcy (Porter Hall). He's a blackmail artist, and he has information on both Martell and Olga. What he knows about Olga is that she's really not Olga, but a Brooklyn-born chorus girl named Wanda, who has obviously come up with a fake identity to become the latest European discovery. (You'd think the Swedish government would hve noticed that somebody was claiming to be a fake Swedish princess, but that never happens.) Darcy also knows about one of Martell's indiscretions, and tells Martell that he also has information on a third passenger. Perhaps it's the alleged murderer who was on the passenger manifest but may or may not have boarded.

If people aren't willing to pay Darcy, he's in luck in that there are a bunch of detectives from various countries on board going to an international conference in America. Darcy goes to one of those to reveal his information, but soon after that, we find Darcy's body in Olga's stateroom. Martell takes the body back to Darcy's own cabin, and when the body is eventually found, the detectives set about trying to solve the murder mystery. Martell does too, if only to save his own hide.

I went into The Princess Comes Across expecting a light comedy, and that's not what you get here. It's a lot lighter than a standard mystery, but the comedy isn't quite as glaring as in something like The Thin Man and all the imitators that followed it. In that regard it's an odd mish-mash at times, but it all comes together reasonably well in the end. There's nothing wrong with the movie, but at the same time Lombard and MacMurray will both be remembered more for other things they did. It you want entertainment that's not particularly challenging, The Princess Comes Across is certainly not a bad place to look.

The Hawk and/or the Eagle

Some time back I DVRed a double feature of World War I airplane movies off of TCM. I already blogged about Hell's Angels; the other movie was The Eagle and the Hawk.

Jerry (Fredric March) and Henry (Cary Grant) are a pair of trainees in the British air corps, or whatever it was called before the RAF. On one of their training flights together, Henry crash-lands their plane, much to Jerry's consternation. The result is that when the rota is prepared for the next round of reconnaissance flights, Jerry is one of the pilots, but Henry's name is nowhere to be found. Henry blames Jerry for this. Anyhow, Jerry flies his first mission, and it's successful, except that as part of the dogfighting with a German airplane, Jerry's observer (the man with his eyes to the ground doing the actual reconnaissance work) gets hit and during a loop-de-loop, falls out of the plane to his death. Jerry is none too pleased about it.

Jerry keeps flying missions, and he keeps having the terrible luck of losing observers, to the point that he loses five in two months. Attrition among the air corps is so high that pretty much any available hand is brought it, and that eventually means that Henry is back with the reconnaissance team. And he gets paired with Jerry, something which makes neither of them happy.

To be honest, I found The Eagle and the Hawk to be less of an action movie and a bit closer to a character study of two men who are turned cynical by the violence of war. Fredric March, unsurprisingly, is excellent in his role, as he had had more than enough opportunities over the course of his career to play men with hardened hearts. Grant, on the other hand, is usually remembered for much lighter fare, so it's easy to forget that he had a couple of hard-boiled men like his Henry. This is one of the movies that shows just how good of an actor Cary Grant was.

Adding to the cast is Jack Oakie as another pilot whose role in the movie is to provide the lighter moments. Carole Lombard gets fourth billing although she only has a few scenes when Jerry has leave in London. Even thouse scenes are well-handled, as Jerry has to face a kid who wants to see one of those pilots that people back home are putting on a pedestal. Jerry knows he's no hero.

The Eagle and the Hawk is available at the TCM shop both as a standalone, and in a couple of box sets.

Breakfast after love

I mentioned some time back that one of my DVD purchases was a Carole Lombard box set. One of the movies on it I hadn't heard of when I bought the movie was Love Before Breakfast.

Lombard gets top billing as Kay Colby, a New York socialite who is engaged to Bill Wadsworth (Cesar Romero), a middle manager in a petroleum company. HOwever, the engagement it about to hit a snag, as Bill is to be sent to Japan for two years in an executive capacity that would mean more money and a better position, except that he's going to be away from his fiancée for those two years. Now, if you watch the opening credits you'll note that Romero is billed third, behind Lombard and Preston Foster, which should perhaps give you an inkling that there's something about the relationship that's just not meant to be.

As for Foster, he plays Scott Miller, the head of the petroleum company who has transferred Bill to Japan. On the night that Bill is to get on the boat (you'd think he'd take a train across country and then the boat from San Francisco to Japan), Scott runs into Bill and Kay, helps Bill get on the boat, and then invites Kay to dinner! Not only that, but Scott starts putting the moves on Kay! Wow what an operator.

Eventually Scott reveals that he bought the company just so he could transfer Bill and try to pursue Kay without interference from Bill. Kay, for her part, is understandably pissed about it, and the discussion in the restaurant eventually leads to a fight between Scott and some college football players that leaves Kay with the black eye you see in the poster. Kay still wants Bill, although that opinion is about to soften when Bill telegraphs Kay that he likes his position in Japan and is going to stay the two years.

At that point, Kay thinks Bill is giving up on her, so she reluctantly turns to Scott, agreeing to marry him even though she's open that she doesn't love him. One can guess that she's going to try to turn the tables on Scott. Scott relents slightly: he's willing to bring Bill back to the States so that Scott can prove that he's really the right one for Kay.

It goes on like this, up until the fairly sudden resolution. Love Before Breakfast is a reasonably good idea, but I found that it's one of the lesser Lombard movies I've seen. I think this has a lot to do with the fact that none of the characters are particularly sympathetic. Scott is obviously a jerk if he's willing to buy a company just so he can screw another man out of his girl. But when Kay says she's willing to marry Scott, she too changes and becomes rather less likable. Bill, for his part, is too much of a weakling in the final scenes after he comes back to the States.

It's nice, though, that a movie like Love Before Breakfast is available on a box set with a bunch of other movies, even if it is a bare-bones set. The TCM Shop also says that Universal's MOD scheme has released the disk as a standalone, although that's rather more expensive.

It's because they're stuffing

I recently watched We're Not Dressing off my Carole Lombard Glamour Collection box set. The movie is rather the curiosity.

There's not much plot for the first 15 or 20 minutes. Bing Crosby plays Stephen, a sailor on the crew of the yacht Doris, owned by Doris Worthington (Carole Lombard) and her uncle Hubert (Leon Errol). Stephn sings some songs while playing a concertina. Hubert is getting drunk, while going around the ship with Doris' friend Edith (Ethel Merman), and Doris is watching all the proceedings which also include a dancing, roller-skating bear. Eventually, drunk Hubert goes onto the bridge and the charts get blown overboard, while Hubert's drunken antics screw with the wheel, ultimately leading to the Doris running aground.

Ah, but they're lucky in that there's a tropical island nearby. So the main characters along with two princes pursuing Doris (one of whom is a young Ray Milland) wind up there, with Stephen having to take charge because the idiot rich people don't know how to survive on a desert island. They make do as best they can.

It turns out that the island isn't quite deserted. Oh, normally it has no permanent population, but there are two biologists researching the local flora and fauna. These are played by George Burns and Gracie Allen, so you can imagine how much research they were getting done. Doris meets them and gets them to help her try to turn the tables on Stephen, although the two are really falling in love along the way.

I said at the beginning I found this a curious little movie. That's because it seems uncertain of what it really wants to be. Bing Crosby is the lead here and he gets to do a lot of singing. It's supposed to be a comedy, although Lombard is here not in the full comic flower she'd be in a lot of her other movies. (Looking at her filmography, though, I think it's really that her next movie, Twentieth Century, is the one that made her a screwball star.) Not that there's much drama, it's more that the script seems rather muted regarding her character. Burns and Allen on the one hand, and Errol and Merman on the other, both seem to have been shoehored into the movie to make it almost a revue.

I went into We're Not Dressing expecting a typical movie, with a bit of a screwball plot. That's not what I got out of it, so on first viewing I was underwhelmed. However, if you watch it for its various pieces instead of a coherent whole, you'll probably have a better experience. Burns and Allen in particular are in fine form.

Hands Across the Table

TCM is running a night of Carole Lombard movies tonight, so I made a special point of watching Hands Across the Table off my cheap Lombard box set since that movie kicks off the night at 8:00 PM.

Lombard plyas Reggie Allen, a working girl working a humdrum life as a manicurist. (To be honest, I wonder how humdrum it could really be considering the size of her apartment.) The shop she works in is on the ground floor of a hotel, so all sorts of rich men come to the place and get a manicure as part of their routine. Among them is Allen Macklyn (Ralph Bellamy), a pilot. Well, ex-pilot, since he had a crash and is aralyzed from the waist down, confined to a wheelchair. Reggie goes up to his suite and does his nails, and finds him to be a nice guy. Marriage material? Well, it is Ralph Bellamy. This even though Reggie is open about the fact that she only plans to marry for money. Allen likes this honesty to the fact that he falls in love with Reggie.

On the way out Allen's suite one day, she runs into Ted Drew III (Fred MacMurray). He's acting like a spoiled rich playboy, and Reggie doesn't like him one bit because he says nothing in that first meeting to indicate that he's rich. And then he calls for an appointment, specifically looking for Reggie since he's obviously fallen in love with her. Reggie doesn't like him -- until she finds out that he's from a rich family. Obviously she can learn to like him in that case.

So Reggie and Ted go out for a night on the town, in which Ted gets drunk to the point of passing out and misses his boat to Bermuda. You see, he was supposed to go away for a couple of weeks because his fiancée's family is redoing the house. Oh yeah, and he has a fiancée. But he doesn't even have cab fare to get back to a hotel, so he spends the night at Reggie's place.

It turns out that Ted isn't rich at all. His family was at one time, but the lost it in the crash of 1929. Ted isn't even suited to holding any sort of job, which makes you wonder how he got along for the previous five years since the movie was released in 1935. But Ted is clearly in love with Reggie to the point that he'd think about getting an honest job, while Reggie has conflicted feelings about Ted. And of course there's poor Allen back at the hotel; you know he's not getting the girl at the end. Predictable consequences ensue.

Hands Across the Table is formulaic and certainly not bad, but it's also a movie that I had some problems with. The big one is that Ted's character is written to be such a jerk that it's difficult to figure out why Reggie would fall in love with him. There are also various minor plot holes that it should be easy enough to suspend disbelief over (such as the previously mentioned size of her apartment), although there were enough of them that I kept noticing them. Still, Lombard gives a profeesional role, while a young MacMurray does just fine. Poor Ralph Bellamy is given yet another thankless role but pulls it off.

The supporting cast has Marie Prevost as Reggie's annoying coworker who believes in numerology, and Ruth Donnelly as Reggie's boss who seems more interested in finding Reggie a husband than in whether Reggie does her job well. Astrid Allwyn plays the fiancée. All of them do well, even though Prevost, like Bellamy, is given some really thankless material.

Hands Across the Table was cheap for the price of the ultra-cheap box set I got, what with no extras and movies on both sides of the disks. But if you just want to see the movies, that's not a bad way to go.

Man of the World

Another of my recent DVD purchases was the ultra-cheap Carole Lombard Glamour Collection, a box set of six movies on two double-sided DVDs. (I said it was cheap; no extras as far as I can tell.) The first of the movies I watched off it was Man of the World.

The movie is old enough that Lombard isn't the star; that honor goes to William Powell who would become Lombard's future husband. He's seen in the opening scene walking along a Paris boulevard, where he's stopped by an American abroad asking him, "I remember you! Aren't you so-and-so?" Powell insists that no, he's actually Michael Trevor, and not this other guy. And Michael actually has the identification papers to prove who he is. But the exchange foreshadows that Michael Trevor isn't all he's cracked up to be.

The next scene confirms it, or should to anybody with normal intelligence, that Michael isn't the best of people. He meets with another American abroad, Harry Taylor (Guy Kibbee). Apparently, Michael knows of a scandal sheet in Paris that prints stuff about Americans for the benefit of those Americans living in the city. They have some information on Harry that Harry wouldn't want to see in print, and Michael can fix it with the publisher that the story won't get printed. It's just going to take a tidy sum of money.

Any sane person would recognize that this is blackmail, and unsurprisingly, we later learn that Michael is one of the publishers of the scandal sheet. Harry seems too stupid to understand this, however. Not yet related, Harry is in Paris with his niece Mary (that's Carole Lombard), who is engaged to Frank (Lawrence Gray). She's lovely, and interested in learning a bit more about Paris from Michael.

Michael, meanwhile, isn't alone at the scandal sheet. He's got two partners in crime in Irene (Wynne Gibson) and Fred (George Chandler). They find out about Mary, and they want Harry to con her, because there's much more money in conning a young woman than in conning her fiftysomething uncle. Michael doesn't want to do it, but eventually does, only to find himself falling in love with her.

Man of the World is in many ways predictable, at least up until the last reel. I don't know if it's fair to call the movie formulaic if only because it was early enough that this was before there would have been a formula to follow. Still, the movie meanders slowly before getting to its destination, which I found a bit of a problem. It just doesn't sparkle the way many of the other early 30s movies about con artists; it feels a bit flat. All of the actors do a professional job, so I'm not quite certain why everything feels a bit off.

Having said that, though, the movie is one of six on a cheap box set. If you don't care for this one, you're probably going to like at least another of the six.

Nothing Sacred

It looks as though I have never blogged about the screwball comedy Nothing Sacred before. It's airing tonight at 8:00 PM, and is one of the funnier movies you'll see.

Carole Lombard stars alongside Fredric March, but more on her in a bit. March plays Wally, a bombastic newspaper reporter somewhat reminiscent of Clark Gable's character in It Happened One Night. He gets taken in by a story about some foreign potentate who is in fact a hoaxster, and gets in trouble with his editor (Walter Connolly, who happened to play Claudette Colbert's father in It Happened One Night) for it. To get out of the doghouse, Wally figures he needs the next big story, which he finds when he hears about Hazel (Lombard). Hazel is a small-town girl from Vermont who gets diagnosed with a rare case of radium poisoning and doesn't have long to live. She's never been to the big city, so she'd like to see it before she dies. This is perfect for Wally, who can get the story.

So Wally brings Hazel and her doctor (Charles Winninger) to New York, at which point a media frenzy erupts. Just like the circus surrounding somebody sympathetic (at least in the eyes of the media) like Amanda Knox, everybody begins to fall over themselves to show how much sympathey they have for her. You've got the high society of New York all the way down to the Girl Scouts, all impressed with Hazel's bravery in the face of death. And then Wally and Hazel learn the stunning news: she's really not sick with radium poisoning, and is not going to die. This presents a rather big problem, since everybody in the country has been following her story waiting for her to die. What to do? The other problem is that along the way, Wally and Hazel have begun to fall in love.

Nothing Sacred is a tremendously funny comedy which lives up to its title: the movie holds nothing in reverence. The small-town Vermonters are lampooned. But so are the allegedly sophisticated big-city people, who are shown to be just as gullible as they would argue the small-town folk are. The media's role in fomenting all of this frenzy -- something which clearly still goes on to this day -- is also lambasted. Viewers of today watching Nothing Sacred might find that some of the material veers into politically incorrect stereotyping. After all, back in the 1930s they didn't have quite the sensitivity towards black people that Hollywood would show today. But the movie is still amazingly funny.

Nothing Sacred is also in very good Technicolor, as you might have guessed from the photo above. (Indeed, it's nice to have the establishing shot of Rockefeller Center as it was back in 1937 in such nice color.) Tonight's TCM showing may or may not be that brilliant. In the past, all the prints have been fairly low-quality, as the movie fell into the public domain somewhere along the way. However, the movie has apparently been restored, and we may be getting the restoration print tonight.

Alfred Hitchcock does a screwball comedy

Really. As part of Carole Lombard's day in TCM's Summer Under the Stars, you can watch Mr. and Mrs. Smith overnight tonight at 1:00 AM.

Carole Lombard and Robert Montgomery star as Ann and David, an upper-class married couple in New York who like to throw the sort of barbs at each other that you could imagine William Powell and Myrna Loy doing. In one of their mock arguments, David tells Ann that, yes, if he had to do it all over again, he'd marry her again. Little does he know that he's going to have to. Into each of their lives that morning walks Mr. Deever, a justice of the peace from Ann's hometown out west. He has the sad news of telling each of them that, due to a technicality, their marriage is not actually legal, and that they're going to have to have another ceremony. David, having been apprised of this news at his office, decides to play a bit of a practical joke on Ann, but he doesn't realize that she's been told until it's too late. Ann knows they're not legally married, and that he's not trying to get her to marry him the way he said he would.

So Ann acts as though the two never even thought they were legally married, and threatens to go off with David's law partner Jeff (Gene Raymond). It's up to David to try to win Ann back. But this being a comedy, you know that all of the attempts are going to go wrong, such as when David takes Ann to the hole-in-the-wall restaurant where they went on their first date all those years ago, only to find that things have changed.

Alfred Hitchcock was great at black comedy. Mr. and Mrs. Smith isn't black comedy, but a straight-up screwball comedy. I don't think that screwball comedy best suited Hitchcock's abilities, although that doesn't mean that this is at all a bad movie. In fact, if you didn't know that this had been directed by Alfred Hitchcock, it would come across more as a perfectly good movie, and not one of a great director's lesser efforts. Carole Lombard and Robert Montgomery were both well-suited to this sort of elegant comedy, and it shows. So don't think about Hitchcock, sit back, and enjoy this good movie.

Lady By Choice

I said that I wasn't going to do a full post on I Married a Witch because I had already planned to do a post on another movie. TCM is showing several Carole Lombard movies tomorrow, and one of the lesser-known of those movies is Lady By Choice, which is on at noon ET tomorrow.

Carole Lombard plays Alabam Lee, a fan dancer who is constantly getting in trouble with the law because the vice squad considers her act offensive. In court, she meets Patsy Patterson (May Robson), a chronic drunk who's ended up in court as often as Alabam, if not more, for drunk and disorderly behavior. Alabam's manager (Raymond Walburn) has a bright idea to help her image: Mothers' Day is coming up, and Alabam should "adopt" an old woman in order to make her look more serious and conscientious. Patsy has been sent to an old folks' home, and the two women, having already met, seem like perfect candidates for each other.

Alabam takes custody of Patsy, but things quickly turn serious, at least in the sense that what was originally intended as a public relations stunt becomes a real relationship. The two women become friends, and Patsy begins to look after Alabam like a mother, discovering that Alabam's manager is robbing her blind, getting the money back (well not quite; Patsy wins the money gambling), and trying to help Alabam become a serious entertainer by getting her acting and singing lessons. Alabam isn't exactly talented enough for this, though, and problems develop when Alabam falls for Patsy's lawyer Johnny (Roger Pryor). Patsy leaves Alabam and Alabam finds herself forced to return to her burlesque act, but seeing the sacrifice Alabam is willing to make, Patsy tries to devise a scheme to get Alabam and Johnny together after all....

Lady By Choice has a title that sounds like Lady For a Day, and the same actress playing both ladies. Indeed, Robson's Patsy acts a lot like Apple Annie from the earlier movie. And, Alabam is similar to Glenda Farrell's Missouri (and they both are named after states!) Another similarity is that both have Walter Connolly further down the cast list (Lady for a Day as Robson's presumptive in-law; Lady By Choice as the judge). So perhaps it's all those similarities that have caused Lady By Choice to be not so well remembered. After all, it's not the original. Having said that, Lady By Choice doesn't deserve to languish in relative obscurity. It's a pleasant enough movie, if not quite as good as the original. May Robson was good enough at playing these older women that she doesn't miss a beat, while Lombard had a great flair for comedy. Lady By Choice isn't available on DVD, however, so you're going to have to catch the rare TCM showing.