Ralph Bellamy is not the "other" man

If you've watched enough romantic comedies from before World War II, you'll probably have seen Ralph Bellamy as the man who repeatedly winds up second-best in the end, with the leading man and woman ending the movie (back) togehter. Recently, I saw a movie that had two women fighting over Bellamy, although it's a drama, not a romantic comedy: This Man Is Mine.

Bellamy plays Jim Dunlap, who has been married for several years to Tony (Irene Dunne) and seems to be in a happy marriage and independently wealthy: nobody seems to work, while Tony is able to indulge her hobby of painting landscapes by putting up a new canvas for Jim's birthday. (I immediately thought of Chekhov's gun, but the picture does become a real plot point later in the movie.) Tony's best friend Bee McCrae (Kay Johnson) pops in with some bad news: Bee's sister in law Francesca (Constance Cummings) is going to be coming back to town having secured a divorce in Reno, this being the days before no-fault divorce where that was the jurisdiction for one party to a divorce to head to get dissolve the marriage.

This is bad news because before Jim married Tony, he was engaged to be married to Francesca. She jilted him at the altar for reasons that aren't quite made clear, although it seems that Francesca has a habit of pursuing one rich guy after another. But Jim being left at the altar was a big scandal at the time, and even though it's been six years, the sort of set the Dunlaps and McCraes hand out with are certain to remember it. There's also the question of whether Jim still has any feelings for Francesca. But they can't stop Francesca from showing up, and she is supposedly family to Bee.

Francesca comes along, and sure enough, she starts trying to put the moves on Jim. And Jim seems OK with all of this, which frankly makes no sense. Jim goes off on a car ride with Francesca; their car breaks down; and when they show up together later everybody thinks Jim is going to leave Tony for Francesca. This despite Francesca's claims that she only wants Jim for one night to prove to everybody that she could still have him.

Jim and Tony bicker about it, with Jim eventually leaving to stay at his club, one would guess. Tony, however, comes up with a brilliant idea. Instead of going to Reno to obtain a divorce, she says at first that she's not going to do anything for six months to see if Jim and Francesca are still going to be an item. Then, she come up with an even more brilliant plan, which is to file for divorce, but in their current residence, which means she can only file on grounds of infidelity and get a ton of money from Jim and Francesca as alimony.

So how is all of this going to be resolved? Unfortunately, the ending the screenwriters pick isn't a particularly satisfying one. Even though the movie was released in April 1934, a couple of months before Joe Breen started really cracking down, the ending in This Man Is Mine feels like the sort of cop-out that writers would have had to come up with in the second half of the 1930s. This Man Is Mine is also based on a stage play, and it feels like the screenwriters did nothing to try to open the play up. (OK, there is one garden scene.) Maybe in 1930 that would have worked, but by now it doesn't. The only highlights are future B western star Charles Starrett as Bee's husband, and Sidney Blackmer in a small role as another wealthy man being pursued by Francesca.

Crazy movie

TCM's schedule for tomorrow, June 13, is listed as "classic comedies", although to be a bit more specific, it looks as though a good portion of the morning is stars who did work in the silent era before transitioning to sound. Among them is Harold Lloyd, who made the talkie Movie Crazy that TCM is running tomorrow at 11:30 AM.

Lloyd plays Harold Hall, who as the movie opens is living in the small town of Littleton, KS, with his parents. But he has a love of the movies, reminiscent of Esther Blodgett in at least the first version of A Star is Born, and hears a radio story about Hollywood needing new faces, as well as reading an article about it. So with that in mind, Harold, a would-be actor, decides that he too is going to go to Hollywood to try to make it as a star, sending the fine people at Planet Studios unsolicited photos and a cover letter.

Somehow, the studio gets the wrong photos, because Harold with those glasses isn't what you'd think of as a matinee idol, yet he gets asked out to Hollywood for a screen test. On his first day at the studio he has no idea what he's doing or where to go, but a director, seeing him, gives him a job as a walk-on extra in a scene of the latest movie of Mary Sears (Constance Cummings). Now, you'd think that Harold being big on Hollywood and reading those old-style movie magazines, he'd know what Mary Sears looked like and possibly even that her next movie was going to star her as a Spanish lady, complete with brunette wig. But Harold seems oblivious to this or even how to act, completely screwing up his one scene to the point that the director doesn't want him on the lot any more.

That night, Harold gets caught in a rainstorm and loses a shoe right outside Mary's house, not realizing that this is Mary's house or that she's a star. Worse, since Mary isn't wearing the wig from her role, she's in her naturally blonde hair. But she takes to him, especially when Vance (Kenneth Thomson), the male lead in the movie she's currently making, shows up unnanounced to her house. Mary doesn't exactly get along with Vance outside of work because he drinks way too much and is also terribly possessive, thinking Mary should be in love with him and that if he can't have Mary, nobody else can. So Vance is going to be after Harold for the rest of the movie thinking that Harold is trying to horn in on Mary.

Harold's screen test turns out to be an absolute disaster, while Mary decides she's going to have a bit of fun with Harold. Harold likes both blonde Mary and the actress playing the Spanish lady, somehow still not knowing these two are the same woman. Mary obviously knows this, so she picks on unsuspecting Harold, although she really does like him and is looking out for his best interests as much as she can. Eventually everything comes together when Harold, trying to escape studio bosses, wanders on to the set where the climactic scene of Mary and Vance's movie is being filmed. Harold and Vance get in a fight for real, although the studio people don't realizes the two men dislike each other intensely and are not really acting.

I mentioned a few months back when I did a post on Sidewalks of New York how poor Buster Keaton got put in a bunch of lousy stuff at MGM once he lost his creative freedom and after talkies came along. Things weren't quite so bad for Harold Lloyd, although Movie Crazy is definitely not up to the level of Lloyd's silent movies. Lloyd shows that he still had a flair for designing visual gags, but the movie as a whole has the tendency of feeling more like a collection of scenes than a fully fleshed-out feature-length plot. Still, Lloyd and Cummings have the talent to pull off material like this, making the movie more hit than miss, even if not quite a classic.

Guilty Finger

I've mentioned on several occasions how it was not uncommon for British producers in the 1950s to bring over an American star and make a movie that, with the American star, could be more easily sold to American distributors. I've found that a lot of these movies are interesting, if somewhat flawed. An excellent example of this is Finger of Guilt.

Richard Basehart plays Reggie Wilson, who at the start of the movie is seeing a doctor because he thinks he might be losing his mind. Flash back to what happened that brought Reggie to this doctor in the first place. Reggie was a film editor in Hollywood who had to move to England after a scandal that fairly obviously should have been blacklisting, especially considering that Finger of Guilt was directed by one blacklisted American (Joseph Losey) and written by another (Howard Koch). But since this is the mid-1950s and the British producers presumably don't believe that they could openly discuss the blacklist and get an American distributor, the scandal involves romance with another man's wife.

Anyways, Reggie came to a studio in London, and under the tutelage of producer Ben Case (Roger Livesey) became an executive producer himself, while marrying Ben's daughter Lesley (Faith Brook). Ben and Reggie are locked in a struggle with each other and with the money men backing the film over whether the latest project, "Eclipse", should be filmed in one particular way or another. The movie even has an American star in the form of Kay Wallace (Constance Cummings), who had a thing for Reggie back in the day.

And then Reggie starts getting bizarre letters from some woman, Evelyn Stewart (Mary Murphy), who claims to know Reggie, and who claims to have had a torrid affair with him, one that she can prove. And it looks like she's willing to blackmail him over it. The reason I say those letters are bizarre is that Reggie has no memory of ever having seen Evelyn.

This all gets distressing enough that Reggie decides to investigate. The letters have a Newcastle postmark, so he and Lesley go up there to continue their investigation. Eventually Reggie does find Evelyn, and as a way of trying to get to the bottom of the matter, the two go to the local police station where Reggie is seriously thinking about pressing charges. Lesley, for some reason, goes somewhere else to wait for Reggie. The matter with the police is inconclusive, and when Evelyn runs into Reggie that evening, she convinces him to go to the pub with her. Why he does so makes no sense to me. Of course, Lesley sees this and it convinces her that her husband is a no-goodnik.

Unfortunately, Reggie's going into the pub is the beginning of a long denouement that just doesn't make any sense in terms of the plot or character motivations. There's the makings of a good mystery in the movie, but it feels as though Howard Koch didn't know how to resolve it and came up with a thoroughly unrealistic resolution.

All of the players do their best with the sub-par material that they're given. And it's always fun to see the inner workings of a studio put on film. But the pieces of Finger of Guilt, when put together, just don't quite add up.

Four years before the heat of the night

Jane Fonda was one of the stars in this year's Summer Under the Stars on TCM. That gave me the chance to record the movie In the Cool of the Day, not having done a post on it before. Recently, I watched it to do a post on it here.

Fonda, wearing a God-awful black wig, plays Christine Bonner, a young woman with some sort of chronic health issue with her lungs married to New York-based editor Sam (Arthur Hill). Sam is from a fairly well-to-do background, considering the fashionable Westchester County house his father (Alexander Knox in a brief role) lives in. Coming over to visit for some sort of business is Sam's London-based colleague Murray Logan (Peter Finch). Somehow it gets suggested that Sam and Christine come over to visit and perhaps do some traveling together.

Unfortunately, nobody here has a happy marriage. Christine, as I mentioned, is ill although it doesn't really show until the end of the movie. She feels she needs a meek husband which Sam provides, even if it's not a marriage with much love in it. Murray has marriage difficulties, too, although of a different kind. He and his wife Sybil (Angela Lansbury) had a child together, but the family got in a car accident one evening. The kid died and Sybil was left with scars that she notices even if the rest of us don't. And she blames Murray for it.

So you can probably guess what happens the next time Murray and Christine meet, which is that they begin to develop feelings for each other. Complicating things is the fact that Sam had to stay behind in New York thanks to his father having a health issue. Still, the Logans decide to go forward with their plans for a trip to Greece, with Christine tagging along sans husband. It seems rather awkward to me, but what do I know?

This being a Studio Era movie, it turns out I knew a fair bit. Of course Murray and Christine's feelings for each other are going to deepen, especially when you see that Sybil is increasingly shrews and seems like she doesn't even want to be on this trip at all. Apparently there's somebody out there who doesn't want to see Greece at all.

Eventually Sybil meets another Englishman, Leonard (Nigel Davenport), who is nice to her and she decides to go running off with him to the Riviera, leaving Murray and Christine to see the beautiful sights of Greece alone together. But Sybil also decides she's going to write to everybody and tell her her opinion of what she's seen between Murray and Christine. This ticks off Christine's mother (Constance Cummings) enough that she flies over to Greece to see Christine, who clearly doesn't want to see her mother.

One day Murray and Sybil are preveted from seeing the sights by a rainstorm. This is considered somehow extremely dangerous for Christine's health, for no good reason other than we need her to fall ill for the purpose of the plot. Sure enough the couple drives around in the rain (and not even in a convertible), and disaster ensues.

Jane Fonda and Angela Lansbury haven't had anything good to say about In the Cool of the Day, and I can't say that I blame theme. It's a pallid mess of a movie that has a whole lot of nothing going on, feeling like it's overlong even though it runs less than 90 minutes. You especially have to feel for Jane being forced to wear that awful wig for no good reason. There was location shooting on Greece, but the cinematography doesn't look as good as it might have.

In the Cool of the Day is one of those movies to watch only if you're a completist of one of the cast members, or if you want to see how a movie can go badly wrong.