Youngblood Hawke

I've always enjoyed the potboilers of the 1950s and 1960s. Even if they weren't particularly good, they're interesting, and some of them can be fun. One that's a fairly minor entry in the cycle is Youngblood Hawke.

James Franciscus stars as Arthur Youngblood Hawke, who as the movie opens is driving a coal truck in his home town in Kentucky and convinced that somebody is trespassing on the family land. He gets home and tells his mother Sarah (Mildred Dunnock) about this, and she's even more ticked about it. It seems that some years earlier, before Dad died, Dad's brothers dishonestly got the mineral rights on Dad's land, which is why they're rich and she and Youngblood isn't. She could use a good lawyer, and Youngblood could have been one, except that he decided to go to college to study creative writing in hopes of starting a writing career.

And then Youngblood gets a letter in the mail telling him that a publishing house in New York liked his manuscript and is thinking about publishing it, even though he submitted it unsolicited without an agent, which seems like a very bad idea. But in any case Youngblood goes to New York and gets treated like royalty by the publisher Jason Prince (Lee Bowman), who read the book along with his wife Fannie (Eva Gabor). If Youngblood signs the contract, he'll be working with editor Jeanne Green (Suzanne Pleshette). Youngblood wants more than the "standard" advance for a first-time writer, since he's been busy working on his second novel. A compromise is reached where that extra money is to be paid out in several monthly installments. Jeanne gets Youngblood a place one floor above her in her apartment building, and she proceeds to fall in love with him.

It's the first love in an exceedingly complicated life for Youngblood. At a Christmas party, he's introduecd to wealthy Frieda Winter (Geneviève Page), who loves studly young Youngblood albeit with the catch that she got her wealth by marrying a wealthy man (Kent Smith). She does things like secure Youngblood the use of a clients swanky Manhattan apartment while the client goes out to Hollywood to make a movie, something that ticks off Jeanne. Jeanne, for her part, has been thinking about going to another publishing company.

Where Youngblood's first book was at most a modest success, his second book is a big hit, and starts to give him a swollen head. Youngblood is approached by aging actress Irene Perry (Mary Astor) who wants him to adapt the first novel into a stage play with her as the lead actress. He also gets the idea of "investing" his money in various ways, including building out on Long Island along with starting his own publishing company. But this gets him into debt, and those debts are eventually going to be called in.

Youngblood is told, much like Fyodor Dostoevsky when he wrote The Gambler, that he has to deliver his next book by a certain time or else contractual clauses are going to leave him in a very bad state. Youngblood works himself into a very parlous state, while all his romantic relationships resolve themselves to varying degrees of satisfaction.

I called Youngblood Hawke a minor entry in the potboiler cycle largely because it's both not particularly good and not memorably bad. It's just there, as it were, and lingers on for over 130 minutes. Everybody does well enough with the material they're given; it's more that it's not very good material. Poor Suzanne Pleshette is used, and the whole mining rights subplot is never really examined as much as it should be.

To the Victor

Another of the movies that was sitting on my DVR, about to expire, was one that doesn't seem to show up all that much on TCM, which is a bit surprising considering that it's a Warner Bros. film. It also doesn't have that many reviews on IMDb. That movie is To the Victor.

It's post-war France, and the authorities are still de-Nazifying the country by going after collaborators. One such collaborator is Lestrac, who will very likely be convicted on the evidence of his Swedish-born wife Christine (Vivea Lindfors). However, Lestrac has some powerful friends, and those friends are looking for Christine to prevent her from testifying. So they send someone to shoot her, causing her to run though the streets of Paris. She's obviously able to escape, considering the fact that if she weren't we wouldn't have much of a movie. (Well, I suppose we could have a movie like The Killers.) Christine runs into the Hotel Anivers, which seems to cater to the sort of American involved with rebuilding France after the war.

Or, at least, the sort of American who wants to make a buck helping to rebuild France. Holding court in a private office in the hotel is Paul Taggart (Dennis Morgan), who, as it turns out, is actually a black marketer. He takes Christine to an upper-story room, but various bad guys are able to determine their location. One tries to shoot through the door of the room, while there are snipers in other rooms who get into a firefight until police on the ground are able to shoot one of the snipers. In any case, it's fairly clear that Paul and Christine are going to have to get out of town.

So they go to Normandy, where they stay with some people whose relationship with Paul or Christine isn't made particularly clear. But, this is also an excuse for Warner Bros. to do a bit of location shooting on the shores of Normandy where the D-Day invasion took place and some of the scuttled ships from that era are still there as a breakwater, which is frankly the one big reason to watch this film. Paul begins to fall in love with Christine, while thinking he can get out of France by taking a job in Cairo. He doesn't quite yet know just how complex Christine's personal life is. Never mind the fact that she's married; the police detective who's been investigating the case, Beauvais (Victor Francen), also has a yen for Christine. And, of course, the Fascist friends of Christine's husband are able to determine where Christine and Paul have fled to, and show up in Normandy.

It goes on like this for an hour and a half or more, along with a whole lot of political speechifying about what morally needs to be done in postwar Europe, with the eventual climax that I suppose satisfies the Production Code.

As I mentioned in the opening, I'd never heard of To the Victor before it showed up on TCM. Having watched it, I can see why I'd never heard of it. There might be the seed of a good story here, but boy is the presentation of that story slow, combined with a whole bunch of Marshall Plan-type commentary about what needs to be done in Europe now that the war is over. There's no particular reason to care about the Viveca Lindfors character, while Dennis Morgan is entirely the wrong Warner Bros. actor to play a black marketer. It's a mess of a movie, with the one big reason to watch it being the location photography, both in Paris and especially on the Normandy coast.

The Hanging Tree

I didn't expect to do reviews of a couple of movies directed by Delmer Daves in rapid succession, but I'm far enough ahead in my scheduling of reviews that I don't get to see everything that's coming up and is on my DVR until after I've already scheduled other stuff. That, and I don't quite pay as close attention to who directs the movies that I post about, more the genres and stars. With that in mind, the Delmer Daves movie in question is The Hanging Tree, which is getting that TCM airing tomorrow, April 18, at 6:00 PM.

It's the Montana Territory in 1873, and coming into town, or not so much a town as the few buildings that serve a mining camp in gold rush country, is doctor Joseph Frail (Gary Cooper). He comes across a small cabin on a hill overlooking the buidlings and the river that the prospectors are panning, and makes a deal with the man who lives there to buy the place since it's for sale. Meanwhile, down at the river, a young man named Rune (Ben Piazza) tries to pilfer some of the gold dust from the sluice-box. He's spotted by Frenchy (Karl Malden), who tries to shoot at Rune and gets a posse of miners to go after Rune, although nobody gets a clear enough view of Rune's face to be able to identify him.

Rune, for his part gets away, but only as far as Dr. Frail's cabin. Frail extracts the bullet, which he knows is incriminating evidence although he throws it away without telling Rune. Rune can't pay for the medical services, so Frail blackmails Rune and make him serve as Frail's manservant. Unsurprisingly, Rune chafes at this, but it's basically this or the titular hanging tree since gold pilfering is seen as a capital offense around here. Frail and Rune go into town, where a bit of Frail's back-story is learned in a poker game where he wins a gold claim. Apparently, his wife and brother back east had an affair and killed themselves, so Frail burned down the house and headed west. But it shows his violent nature and gives him a reason to be a bit secretive.

Meanwhile, there's a stagecoach coming, except that it's intercepted, robbed, and the horses set free so that the coach goes careening off by itself and down a steep embankment, leaving only one possibled survivor. That survivor, the Swiss immigrant Elizabeth (Maria Schell), is found barely alive, and is taken eventually to Frail's cabin to recover. She's got serious burns and is temporarily blinded from exposure and the burns, although she does regain her vision. Elizabeth loves Frail although he doesn't reciprocate, while Frenchy has already made advances toward Elizabeth that pissed Frail off.

Frenchy and Elizabeth both want to make their own way in the world, and the best way to do so is to buy into that gold claim that Frail won in the poker game, bringing Rune along because they need more than one man to work it. They do eventually find gold, and this leeds to a drunken celebration that sets up the final conflict of the movie which also involves "Doctor" Grubb (George C. Scott). Grubb claims to be a doctor, but he's one of those phony preachers who uses the power of the Bible to treat people and tell their fortunes. He didn't like a real doctor showing up, and this is his chance to get rid of Frail once and for all.

The Hanging Tree is another of those competently made westerns that tells a reasonably good story and tells it well, although it doesn't feel like it's breaking any new ground. It's helped by a higher budget that enabled having a bunch of good actors, and a lot of location shooting. There's nothing terribly new here, but there definitely is a good deal of entertainment to be had.

Lovely views of Italy

A movie that I'd seen show up on TCM several times in the past but had never watched was The Battle of the Villa Fiorita. So as with a bunch of other movies, the last time it showed up on TCM, I decided I'd record it in order to be able to watch it and finally get it off my list of movies I hadn't seen before.

Maureen O'Hara stars as Moira, an upper-class British woman married to Darrell (Richard Todd) and with two youngish children Debbie and Michael who can afford to go to boarding school and even have a horse! But life for Moira is boring since Darrell isn't the most exciting person. So when the two go to a concert and Moira is introduced to to pianist Lorenzo (Rossanno Brazzi), she immediately falls for him and the two start an affair that results in Darrell basically kicking Moira out of the house and sending her to live with Lorenzo at his palatial estate near Lake Garda in northern Italy.

The two kids get back from school and find out that Mom has left them, and they're not very happy about it. So, like any good kids, the decide that they'd like to see Mom and convince her to come back home. Of course, there's the difficulty of just getting there, since this is the mid-1960s and they're young enough that independent international travel is a big deal, never mind the expense that results in them selling Debbie's horse which becomes a plot point later in the story.

But, the two kids are able to run away from home and somehow Dad never really seems to worry where they are since the trip is an overnight one. But in any case, the two kids are able to find the Villa Fiorita and see their mother again. Mom and her paramour put the kids up since it's not as if they can do anything else, at least not until they can contact Darrell who might be able to come and get the kids. In the meantime, the two British kids get to meet Lorenzo's daughter Donna (a young Olivia Hussey), and the kids all become friends of a sort.

Meanwhile, the kids have a plan to bring Debbie and Michael's parents back together, which basically involves going on a hunger strike, or at least not eating this newfangled Italian food that's totally alien to the two British kids. Debbie is too young to realize that this isn't a complete hunger strike in that the kids are supposed to be sneaking food in from elsewhere, and rather stupidly gets pissed when she catches Michael and Donna eating. Oh, and kissing, too. Debbie does get a local priest involved in things, though, even though the family is Protestant (a bit humorous, I found, considering Maureen O'Hara was fairly prominently Irish).

Things continue to escalate until Michael and Donna decide to run off and get in a small sailboat on Lake Garda just as a storm is about to come up. Michael may have learned the basics of sailing, but he's not that good a sailor.

For some reason, I went into The Battle of the Villa Fiorita expecting something like one of those light comedies of the 1930s where the kids of a widow(er) or divorced parent find another person who would make just the right partner for their parent, and work to bring the two leads together in the final reel. The only difference being that in this case the two right partners are supposed to be the original mother and father. However, The Battle of the Villa Fiorita is a straight-up drama, with some melodramatic elements in it. That drama doesn't really work for me, and the kids aren't all that appealing. Italy is lovely, however, even though the print TCM ran doesn't do it justice.

But maybe The Battle of the Villa Fiorita will work better for some of you than it did for me.

Tribute to a Bad Man

Another movie that's coming up on TCM that was on my DVR for a while is Tribute to a Bad Man, which will be on this afternoon (March 21) at 4:15 PM. So, as always with that in mind, I sat down to watch the movie in order to be able to do the post on it here.

Don Dubbins provides the narration, as he plays Steve Millar, a young man originally from Pennsylvania who in 1875 moves west, making it out to Wyoming and the horse ranch owned by Jeremy Rodock (James Cagney). Although as the narration tells us, Steve at first knows nothing about Rodock or his reputation, or even much about horse ranching. Steve is a bit of a naïf, and has the good fortune -- or maybe the misfortune -- of running into Rodock just after Rodock was shot chasing horse rustlers. Steve removes the bullet from Rodock and brings Rodock home. Like Androcles and the lion, Rodock is grateful enough to offer Steve a job on the ranch.

The ranch has a bunch of men working for Rodock, led more or less by wrangler McNulty (Stephen McNalley). There's one woman on the ranch, Jocasta Considine (Irene Papas), whom Steve mistakes for Mrs. Rodock. In fact, there is no Mrs. Rodock. Jocasta escaped war in her native Greece, but had to do things she's not quite proud of to survive in America, which is why she's escaped to this isolated ranch in Wyoming. Jocasta understands that Steve is not right for this place, and in return, Steve develops a bit in the way of feelings for Jocasta. Since she's the only woman around, it's not just Steve who is going to develop feelings for her. But we're getting ahead of ourselves.

Somebody tries to steal some of Rodock's horses again, so Rodock sets up a posse to find out who did it, which offers Steve the opportunity to see just how hard a man Rodock can be. To be fair, horses are his lifeblood, and stealing the horses would be like rustling cattle. But still, Rodock can be quite harsh. Suspicion leads to the Petersons, a family who used to work for Rodock but had a falling out. Rodock has been trying to drive the Petersons off their land, without success. They've got a son Lars (Vic Morrow) who is an adult but who, like Steve, is a bit too young to be in such a range war.

McNulty is another of the men who's interested in Jocasta, and is more open about pursuing her than Steven is. This really pisses Rodock off, and Rodock gets in a fight with McNulty and gives Steven the responsibility of making certain McNulty leaves and doesn't come back. McNulty is unsurprisingly none too happy about this, and decides to get revenge on Rodock by stealing Rodock's foals and treating the horses worse than your average rustler might. This leads to a climax, although you might figure out how things go considering the narration at the beginning of the movie.

James Cagney did make a couple of westerns in his career, although the western is a genre with which he's not generally associated. That having been said, Cagney was of course a fine actor, so when he's given an intelligent script like this he has no difficulty handling it. In fact, Tribute to a Bad Man is as much of a character study that just happens to be placed in the context of an old western as it is a traditional western. Don Dubbins does well enough as does the rest of the supporting cast, although this is really Cagney's movie.

The Very Thought of You

Another movie that I was surprised to find that I hadn't heard of before its most recent airing on TCM back in 2024 was the Warner Bros. World War II homefront film The Very Thought of You. It being from Warner Bros. and part of the old Turner Library that makes up the backbone of the TCM schedule, you'd think I'd have seen it before. But I hadn't, so I recorded it the last time it showed up. It's getting another airing on TCM, tomorrow (July 22) at 11:45 AM, so now is the time for the obligatory review.

The Very Thought of You was released in 1944, and starts off with a part of World War II that audiences of the day would have known well but not so much today: the Japanese occupation of a few of the Aleutian Islands. Any number of US soldiers were stationed there as a result (in real life Charlton Heston was stationed there), but as the attempted occupation failed the US could send many of the soldiers back stateside. Among them is a platoon with Sgt. David Stewart (Dennis Morgan) and his pal Sgt. "Fixit" Bilman (Dane Clark). They have a week's leave or so and their next deployment is going to have them ship out from San Diego, so they head down the west coast, winding up in Pasadena where David studied structural engineering at Caltech and he visits an old professor who doesn't realize David has been away for three years.

On the bus from Caltech to wherever the two soldiers are going to be staying, they run into two young women who are doing their part for the war effort by working at a parachute factore. Fixit tries to chat one of the women up, not so successfully, but it turns out that the other woman recognizes Sgt. Stewart. That woman is Janet Wheeler (Eleanor Parker), who worked before the war as a soda jerk and served Stewart pretty much every night since he was working his way through Caltech and stopped there after work for a shake. She developed a flame for him, although he doesn't quite remember her. The two men offer to walk the two women home. And then Janet offers David dinner with the family since it's Thanksgiving as well as her parents' anniversary.

You'd think the family would be happy to do their part for the war effort; if you remember the old Fox film Sunday Dinner for a Soldier this sort of thing was a pretty big deal. But the Wheelers are a dysfunctional family. Dad (Henry Travers) seems to have been a bit of a failure as a man, although the way the family can afford a nice middle-class house would suggest not. Mom (Beulah Bondi) can have a nasty temper and is unhappy that Janet brought a stranger home, even though you'd think it would be easy to explain his presence. There's an older brother who isn't serving because he supposedly flunked a physical, and older sister Molly (Andrea King) who married a sailor hastily before he went off to war and, thinking she'll never see him again, has decided to see a series of other men in the meantime.

As you can guess, Janet and David fall in love, but half of the Wheeler family is not only unhappy with this, they're willing to try to sabotage the relationship! It's really surprising for a movie from this era that family members would be doing such things. Janet has a quickie marriage to David before he goes back off to fight again, and even gets knocked up on one of their two brief honeymoons, yet still Mom and Molly try to make Janet's life hell to the point that Janet moves out and keeps the pregnancy a secret from Mom and sister. And then Molly's husband shows up, which really starts to change things....

The Very Thought of You is a dated movie, having been released in the autumn of 1944. It's the sort of homefront stuff that ultimately has a happy ending that audiences of the day clearly would have identified with. Audiences 80 years on probably won't, which doesn't make the movie bad so much as a bit more difficult for some people to get into. The stars do a good enough job, and I suppose I should also mention Faye Emerson as Cora, Janet's co-worker from the beginning of the film, who also winds up in a subplot relationship with the Dane Clark character. Henry Travers, unsurprisingly, is as good as ever here.

Although The Very Thought of You is a decided time capsule, it's one interesting enough to merit a viewing.

Scenery vs. Story

Tomorrow (July 18) on TCM is a morning and afternoon of the movies of Constance Ford. One of the movies airing happens to be on my DVR from a recent showing, so I watched that movie: Rome Adventure, which will be on at 4:30 PM.

Ford is in a supporting role, as the real star is a woman who gets an "Introducing" credit, a young Suzanne Pleshette. She plays Prudence Bell, who at the start of the movie is an assistant librarian at a conservative women's college in New England. So conservative, in fact, that they ban books like Lovers Must Learn, which is a bit of an in-joke since that's the book on which the movie is based. Prudence has suggested to one of the students that the student read it, and this ticks off the faculty council enough that they're going to fire her. Prudence, however, knowing that, quits before they can fire her.

Prudence's plan is to go off to Italy to learn about love, which seems a bit nuts because who knows where she's getting her money from, and it's not as if she's got a place to live once she gets to Rome. Well, I suppose she's getting her money from her wealthy parents. At the pier, the Bell parents run into a Mrs. Stilwell, whom they met at a charity function and whose son is also heading off to Rome to study the ancient Etruscans. The younger Albert Stilwell (Hampton Fancher; for some reason I was thinking this was Chad Everett whose name appears down the credits) is actually standing right next to Prudence on the boat, so Mrs. Bell tries to hook the two young Americans up. However, Prudence misreads the signals and turns to the passenger on the other side of her, an Italian named Roberto Orlandi (Rossano Brazzi).

Both of these men are decent people, but since neither of them are at the top of the credits, we can guess that they're not going to wind up with Prudence in the final reel. But Roberto is so good that he directs the two Americans to the villa where he rents a room from a contessa, and both of them take him up on the offer to take rooms. (How many bathrooms did those old villas have?) Among the younger set of Americans living in the villa is Don Porter (Troy Donahue), who is finishing up his graduate degree in Rome. We first meet him as he's leaving the villa in a huff, having learned that his girlfriend Lyda (Angie Dickinson) is dumping him to spend time in Switzerland.

Now, Troy Donahue is top-billed, with Angie Dickinson second, but because of Pleshette's "introducing" credit and the fact that she's clearly the lead here, you know who is going to wind up with whom. Don falls for Prudence, and the feeling is mutual, and he starts showing her around Italy, even though by this time Prudence has gotten a job at the American bookstore run by Daisy Bronson (that's Constance Ford). How Prudence can just take the time to go traipsing around Italy and blow off her job is another unanswered question.

But Rome Adventure is one of those movies where you don't really care about the plot. It was released in 1962, at a time when travel to Europe still wasn't such a common thing, so movies like this set in "exotic" locations in lovely color were still a bit of a big deal in allowing American moviegoers to see these places as glamorous. I think I said in my post about Three Coins in the Fountain that somebody must have seen Roman Holiday and thought that what was needed was Technicolor and widescreen. It's a thought that's not wrong, but a movie still needs a good plot, or else you just have a Traveltalks short. Rome Adventure, I'm sorry to say, doesn't have that plot.

So watch Rome Adventure for a look at Italy as Americans might have wanted to see it back in the early 1960s. Just don't expect a good story.

The House of Color

Some months ago, TCM ran The Red House, and since it had an interesting synopsis and cast, I decided to record it. Unfortunately, it aired on a day when the DirecTV box guide screwed up the schedule, so I recorded the wrong thing. And then I noticed that I have a copy of it on one of my Mill Creek box sets -- the movie having been produced by United Artists, it presumably wound up in the public domain after 28 years. So I put that DVD in and watched the movie.

The movie is set in one of those rural areas where there's a small town, and a lot of farm types on the outskirts of town that send their kids to the school in town, only the movie is current enough that everybody goes to school by bus. One of those farm families is the Morgans, who have a farm far enough out that not a lot of people come to visit, as well as a fair amount of forest that Dad wants to keep everyboy off of. That may be a bit odd, but there's more to the oddness about them than that. Father figure Pete (Edward G. Robinson) and mother figure Ellen (Judith Anderson) adopted Meg (Allene Roberts) when she was just an infant and her parents suddenly picked up and left to go work on farms in the south during the Depression, leaving the kid behind. The parents died not long after, so Pete and Ellen eventually adopted little Meg.

As you can probably guess, there's more going on than meets the eye. And about to come into the family and find that out is Nath Storm (Lon McCallister). He meets Meg on the school bus one day, and takes a liking to her, although he's already techincally got a girlfriend in Tibby (Julie London). But Nath winds up working for the Morgans, and seeing Meg more often, he finds their relationship deepening.

I mentioned that forest earlier. Pete has hired another young man, Teller (Rory Calhoun), to watch for trespassers and keep them off, with a shotgun if necessary. And Pete pretty much means everyone, including Meg. Meg has heard rumors of a red house somewhere deep in the woods, and wants to know if there really is one. Not only that, but she wants to know why her adoptive father wants to keep everybody away from that red house. Nath is willing to help her, or at least help get her out of jams, but doing so is going to put him in danger too. But you know everybody is going to wind up at the red house for the movie's climax, where the plot will finally be resolved.

The Red House is an interesting movie in some ways, in that it combines gothic drama with a bit of a thriller. Considering Edward G. Robinson being in the lead, it's unsurprising that he gives another competent performance. But as I was watching it, I couldn't help but feel as though there was a lot less going on than meets the eye. I think it's the sort of movie that had it been made back in the 1930s, it probably would have been made strictly as a B movie. But with more independent producers and a star of Robinson's caliber, they obviously wanted to make something more serious, extending the movie to about 100 minutes, which makes it a bit too slow.

Still, The Red House is definitely worth a watch, especially if you can find a better print than on the Mill Creek DVD.

Parrish

Quite some time back I DVRed Parrish, and put off watching it because I wasn't ready to sit down for another 135-minute potboiler. I finally got around to watching it, however, and since it's available on DVD from the Warner Archive, it's time for a review on it.

Parrish is a young man, last name McLean, played by Troy Donahue. He's the son of widowed Ellen (Claudette Colbert in her final film). They're moving to Connecticut, where Ellen has gotten a job on the tobacco farm run by Sala Post (Dean Jagger). Actually, she's not working on the farm; she's going to be a sort of governess to Sala's wanton daughter Alison (Diane McBain), who is about to return from boarding school and whose mother died when Alison was young.

Putting Parrish in the same house as Alison is a no-go for Sala, so Parrish has to live with one of Sala's managers, Teet Howie (Dub Taylor), who himself has a daughter Parrish's age in the form of Lucy (Connie Stevens). They quickly fall in love, but she's got a secret boyfriend in one of the sons of rival tobacco grower Judd Raike (Karl Malden), who wouldn't be one bit happy with his son seeing a lower-class woman.

Anyhow, Parrish learns about the tobacco business from Sala and Teet, and finds that he's got a bit of a knack for it, even though he knew nothing about growing tobacco when he started. Mom, meanwhile, starts seeing Raike, trying to do it secretly despite the fact that everybody in the valley knows what's going on. Parrish has dalliances with both Alison and Paige (Sharon Hugueny), who is the daughter of Raike.

Eventually, Mom marries Judd Raike, who offers Parrish a job in his tobacco empire, which is ruthless. Judd won't stop at anything to ensure he gets his hands on the tobacco he needs, and by anything I also mean that he's perfectly willing to do illegal things. Parrish still has a lot to learn about the business, and anytime there's something he hasn't learned, his new stepfather gets really pissed, over-the-top jerk that he is. Raike's sons hate Parrish, but their daughter likes him. To make matters worse for Parrish, one of the Raike sons marries Alison!

Parrish decides to join the navy, and after his hitch (and not looking a day older, of course), he decides that he's going to take on Raike by going into business with Sala, who is now retired what with his daughter married off but likes Parrish enough and wants somebody to take on Raike enough that he's willing to let Parrish get what is essentially a zero-interest loan on the use of the land. However, Raike has bought up all the labor. Alison, now realizing she's in a loveless marriage, might be able to help.

It goes on like this, as I said at the beginning, for a good 138 minutes. Or a not-so-good, depending on your opinion. I called it a potboiler, and boy does it boil. Troy Donahue is as good as ever here, which of course means not particularly good but nice for the ladies to look at. Karl Malden is hissably nasty, although it's hard to believe anybody could be that much the stereotype of the evil businessman. Jagger is unsurprisingly quite good, and Colbert does the best she can with the material. None of the young ladies does much to distinguish herself, however. One plus is the nice cinematography and color; much of the filming was done on location in Connecticut.

Parrish is definitely a product of its time, and is I think the sort of movie you really need to be in the right mood to watch.