The Swan of no particular color

I mentioned yesterday that there are two Grace Kelly movies on my DVR that I hadn't blogged about before that were coming up as part of her day in Summer Under the Stars. (A search of the blog suggests I haven't done a full post on The Bridges at Toko-Ri either, having briefly mentioned it a few times. But I don't have that one on my DVR yet.) Running relatively early in the day was The Country Girl; showing overnight at 12:15 AM -- so technically on August 25 on the east coast but still August 24 in the rest of the time zones -- is The Swan.

A title card tells us that the action takes place in 1910, somewhere in Central Europe, in one of those minor royal houses. Grace Kelly plays Princess Alexandra, the eldest daughter in the house. She's got two much younger brothers, who are still young enough that they need a tutor, Dr. Agi (Louis Jourdan). The matriarch of the family, Princess Beatrix (Jessie Royce Landis), is a widow, and worried about both marrying her daughter off to someone suitable and getting the family line back into real royalty, as this branch no longer rules any lands, having lost everything to Napoleon a century earlier.

Then news comes that from a monarchy rather farther west, the Crown Prince, Prince Albert (Alec Guinness), will be coming for a visit. Beatrix realizes this is a perfect opportunity to try to play matchmaker and set up Alexandra with Albert. Not only that, but the two are cousins from a few generations back, so keeping everything in the extended family also seems like a great idea. And who couldn't resist somebody as beautiful as Princess Alexandra?

Apparently, Prince Albert can. He seems more interested in all the things the kid brothers are learning, and getting out in the fresh air around where the family lives, than in Alexandra herself. It should go without saying that this greatly distresses Alexandra, but even more so Beatrix. How to get Albert to notice Alexandra? Beatrix has the brilliant idea to try making him jealous.

There's going to be a going-away ball for Prince Albert, and Beatrix suggests to Alexandra that she might try inviting Dr. Agi and making it look to Albert as though Alexandra is interested in him. That would seem scandalous, since Agi is of course a commoner and in those days the higher-ranking princes and princesses. But desperate times call for desperate measures. Things get complicated, because Dr. Agi has long held a flame for Alexandra despite knowing he could never take the initiative because of the commoner/royalty divide. Worse is that this ruse doesn't seem to get Prince Albert interested in Alexandra.

The Swan is based on a play by the great Hungarian playwright Ferenc Molnár, from whose works a bunch of great movies have been made. Indeed, this was at least the third filming of The Swan, although I haven't seen the first two. This version of The Swan tries to open things up from the stage origins in part by having the duck-hunting scene as well as Agi and Alexandra going for a carriage ride together. I don't think the movie is quite successful in overcoming the staginess, however.

Not that The Swan is a bad movie; the performances are all competent. The production values are, being an MGM movie, quite good, with lovely color and beautiful sets and locations for the establishing shots. It's just that the material feels like it would work better with the spontaneity of a live stage performance and an audience to laugh where appropriate. Watch and judge for yourself.

The Joker Is Wild

Er, not quite....

Another movie which was sitting on my DVR for quite some time is The Joker Is Wild, which got a TCM airing back in September 2021 in honor of Mitzi Gaynor's 90th birthday. In a very nice move, they even aired the interstitials Gaynor did with Robert Osborne back in 2014, which were a hell of a lot more worthwhile than Ben Mankiewicz's "insights", but that's a topic for another day.

The movie tells the story of the story of Joe E. Lewis (Frank Sinatra), not the heavyweight boxer but a singer-turned-comedian (and part-time actor) whose career started in the 1920s in Chicago. Now, as you can probably guess from the place and date, that's during Prohibition, and the Mob is involved in some way. In Joe's case, that means the club where he's performing is owned by the Mob, and the contract he's signed is one that it's going to be difficult to get out of unless his bosses explicitly send him away.

Those bosses have no such desire, while Joe wants to go off on his own, so since his contract is coming to an end, he decides to take another offer despite the bosses' plans to renew the contract whether he likes it or not. When Joe doesn't get the hint, the boss sends a couple of thugs to rough up Joe, which they do by beating him and slashing him, scarring his face and severing his vocal cords in the attack. I thought it was surprising that all of this would happen in the first 30 minutes of what would be an over two-hour movie, but in looking up the real story Lewis was slashed in the late 1920s and his career success would in fact come many years later.

In the real world, Lewis wound up with a gravelly voice, but that wouldn't do when your star is Frank Sinatra, so the movie doesn't have Sinatra change his voice all that much. Instead, it focuses more on his journey to burlesque, doing what would basically have been the bottom rung of vaudeville back in the 1920s. In burlesque, he's discovered by Sophie Tucker (playing herself uncredited), and that gets him into a career doing the nightclub circuit.

Seeing him in burlesque is a slumming socialite, Letty Page (Jeanne Crain). She meets Joe after the show, and the two start an on-again, off-again relationship. Meanwhile, Joe rises through the ranks, thanks to a show that involves dancers and a piano accompanist, Austin Mack (Eddie Albert). The show also involves a lot of drinking, something to which Joe turned in much higher quantities to deal with the physical and emotional scars of having been attacked. Joe thinks of marrying Letty, but he can never quite bring himself to pull the trigger. World War II decides the issue for him, as Letty goes to Washington where her father has taken one of those dollar-a-year jobs, while Joe and Austin go on a USO tour.

One of Joe's dancers is Martha Stewart (the actress, not the domestic lifestyle expert), who is played by Mitzi Gaynor, thus the showing of this movie to honor Mitzi. Martha had become a slightly larger part of the act than the other dancers when she shows herself adept at comedy, but that's the extent of the relationship. That is, until Joe decides he's finally going to pull that trigger with Letty, only to learn she's already gotten married. So after the war he marries Martha, but they each have their own careers and Joe's drinking is getting progressively worse.

The Joker Is Wild is another challenging performance from the 1950s for Sinatra, who had wanted to change his image leading to take the role of Maggio in From Here to Eternity back in 1953 and jump-starting his career. It gives Sinatra some chance to sing -- he even sings an Oscar-winning song, "All the Way" -- but it's much more of an uncomfortable character study at the same time it's a biopic. Synopses that refer to The Joker Is Wild as a musical are, I think, not quite accurate.

In any case, Sinatra is up to the task and gives another good performance. Gaynor and Albert are also pretty good in support. The only thing that would be nice would be to have color; it also doesn't help that Paramount provided TCM with a panned-and-scanned print. Still, The Joker Is Wild is definitely worth a watch.

Ladies in Retirement

One of the new-to-me movies that I had the chance to record during 31 Days of Oscar back in April was Ladies in Retirement. Recently, I sat down to watch it and do a review of it here.

Ida Lupino plays Ellen Creed. She's a single woman in mid-1880s England who works for Leonora Fiske (Isobel Elsom). Fiske is a former actress who apparently could afford to retire fairly well, as she's got a nice house in a rural part of County Kent, and not just Ellen living with her but maid Lucy (Evelyn Keyes). However, things aren't going so well for Ellen as she gets a letter from London.

In that letter, a landlady informs Ellen about Ellen's two sisters, Emily (Elsa Lanchester) and Louisa (Edith Barrett). Both of them are apparently "dotty", more than the aunts in Arsenic and Old Lace but not quite as insane as the aunts' nephew who thinks he's Teddy Roosevelt. In any case, Ellen seems to be the only one who can take care of her two sisters as they cause problems everywhere else they go and the landlady is threatening to call the police and have the sisters sent to an asylum.

Another problem for Ellen shows up, although she doesn't know about this one yet. A man from Gravesend not too far away shows up, and rather rudley asks Leonora if he could borrow £12. Tha man is Albert (Louis Hayward), who claims to be Ellen's nephew, which would be by a fourth, unseen sibling who must apparently be dead or else that sibling should be helping to take care of Emily and Louisa. But enough thinking of possible plot holes. Albert leaves before Ellen sees him, although he's going to come back later on and we learn that he's in much deeper financial difficulties and embezzled from the bank's till to get the money so the police are after him.

The police might be about to be after Ellen, too. Not because of the two sisters, at least not directly. Ellen asks Leonora if the two sisters can come to visit, Leonora not knowing about the sisters' mental state. Leonora would be thrilled to have more guests, at least until she finds out the truth about them and wants to be rid of them while Ellen is scheming to come up with a way to get them to stay on permanently.

Ellen's ultimate plan is to send everybody away from the house for a day and, while alone with Leonora, kill her and claim that Leonora sold the house to her. Of course, it's a scheme that wouldn't work in real life, and definitely isn't going to work here since the Production Code would never allow it. Oh, it does seem to work for a while, but Albert returns, romances Lucy, and together the two of them start snooping and guess the truth about Ellen. Not that Albert can do much about it since he's got his own legal problems, of coures.

Ladies in Retirement was originally a stage play, something which is fairly obvious considering how much of the movie is set inside the house. But director Charles Vidor does a good job of opening up the action, and plays aren't necessarily a bad thing, especially if they're not stagey. Unsurprisingly, Lupino gives a good performance, and the movie is mostly about her character. The ending may be a bit of a problem for some, but then they had to come up with something that would placate the Production Code office. (I couldn't find what differences there are between the movie and the play.) Definitely worth a watch.

If you're wondering why TCM was able to show Ladies in Retirement in 31 Days of Oscar, it's because the movie got an unsurprising nomination for its black-and-white art direction as well as a more surprising one for the score.