More World War II intrigue in the desert

I hadn't really thought about it, but the North African campaign of World War II was the setting for a whole bunch of movies, either obvious war films, or films that deal more with the political intrigue in the region against the backdrop of the war. (And then there's movies like Benghazi that deal with what the war left behind.) I would assume that part of it has to do with the sense in the US that North Africa is somehow exotic and therefore cinematically interesting. A movie in the second group that's been sitting on my DVR since 31 Days of Oscar is the 1943 version of The Desert Song. It's getting another airing on TCM Nov. 10, at 12:30 PM, but I'm putting it up two days early because I've got a post for another movie showing up on TCM later on November 10.

The action opens in the the summer of 1939, so just before World War II breaks out in Europe. The opening scenes are in Geneva, where future Allies and the future Axis powers are freely able to mingle since Switzerland remained as neutral as they could be considering that within a year they'd be completely surrounded by Axis powers. A company is trying to finance the building of a railway through the French colonies Sahara from Casablanca to Dakar, which necessitates going around what one map shows as the Río de Oro: for those who don't remember their history, that's part of what in those days was Spanish Sahara, to be annexed by independent Morocco in the 1970s although that's controversial for reasons not having anything to do with the movie. Anyhow, although the French are trying to build this railroad, foreshadowing clearly implies that the Nazis are really trying to get control of it.

Meanwhile, construction of the railroad is slow because of constant interference from an ethnic group called the Rifs. The Rifs are more or less being impressed into service and don't like that, hence the guerrilla attacks. The Rifs are led by a mysterious man named El Khobar; the French under military commander Col. Fontaine (Bruce Cabot) would really like to know who he is.

In town, there's also American journalist Johnny Walsh (Lynne Overman), who tries to get interesting stories from the region out to the world, although it's difficult considering the censorship from the colonial authorities. Johnny has a friend in adventurer Paul Hudson (Dennis Morgan), who fought presumably on the republican side in the Spanish Civil War and is in Morocco as a nightclub singer and pianist. Also doing the nightclub thing is Margot Bendits (Irene Manning), who sees the poor Rifs about to be hauled off and shows some sympathy for them by offering them her glass of water.

El Khobar goes to meet the leaders of the various Rif tribes out in the desert, and even though he's wearing a cloth to cover most of his face it's oh-so obvious that El Khobar is in fact Paul Hudson. The brings up an interesting dilemma. El Khobar seems to be a bit of a criminal at the very least, but since he's the lead and this is a light drama musical it doesn't seem as though there could be any way for the male lead to meet a bad end in the last reel. So how are things going to be resolved? Also, there's the question of how Paul gets all the time to be in so many different places, although that's something that's never really explained in movies like this.

Along the way, Paul and Margot become romantically involved, while Col. Fontaine also has a yen for Margot. He's nominally the antagonist for much of the movie, at least until he learns that he's been played the fool by Nazis. As best as I can tell, the movie ends sometime before the Nazis invaded France and, as you might guess, the good guys defeat the bad guys and the right people get the chance to live happily ever after, or at least as happy as could be with a war on. There's also the chance for Morgan and Irene Manning to perform several nightclub-style musical numbers.

The Desert Song is based on an operetta by Sigmund Romberg that had already been turned into a film once before at the dawn of the sound era. Obviously, since this version is from 1943 and deals explicity with the war, there's a lot that's been updated. It's not a bad movie, although it's decidedly Hollywood. Part of the fun for me was seeing all of the California locations doubling for the Moroccan Sahara. I could swear I've seen some of those rock formations in other movies. Morgan is pleasant enough, a capable if unspectacular actor. The Technicolor is very nice in this print.

Ultimately, this version of The Desert Song is entertaining enough although also not anything that's going to be thought of as an all-time great movie. It's definitely worth a watch, even if it's not the sort of thing you're going to thing of coming back to watch again and again.

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.

Nora Bayes

There's been a couple of days in the past year or two where the TCM lineup has been a bunch of musical biopics, of which there seem to be more than I realize. And here, by musical biopics I mean biographical movies of mostly composer/songwriter types; not movies about famous people that have for some reason been turned into musicals. Well, tomorrow, June 5, is another such day, and once again I've got one of the movies in the TCM lineup on my DVR just waiting more me to do a post on it. That movie is Shine on, Harvest Moon, which airs at 9:30 AM.

Shine on Harvest Moon is the purported story of the two people credited with writing it, Nora Bays (Ann Sheridan) and Jack Norworth (Dennis Morgan). They're certainly the ones who made the song a popular standard, although apparently in those days it was common practice for someone to buy all the rights to the song including being credited as the songwriters. As the movie opens, it's around 1905 in Milwaukee. Vaudeville is the big thing, and Jack is a single act in a traveling vaudeville show, as is Blanche (Irene Mallory), who is presented as someone you think is going to become romantically involved with Jack. Also in the show are the magician Georgetti (Jack Carson) and his ditzy assistant Margie (Marie Wilson) who eventually get married and become friends of Jack and Nora's, showing up several times throughout the movie.

Nora is only seen a bit later, when Jack sees her performing at a cabaret and realizes she'd be pefect for the sort of songs he's trying to get published. What he doesn't know is that Nora is being pursude by Dan Costello (Robert Shayne), who ones the place where Nora is performing. Nora resists Dan's advances, while Jack resists Blanche's, and Jack and Nora go off together, in part to do their own vaudeville act and in part for Jack to write songs for Nora to sing.

But what the two don't know is that they've made some powerful enemies. Costello becomes more and more successful as a producer and theater owner, while Blanche seems to become somewhat successful as a performer and wants to make certain that Jack sings with her. With that in mind, Dan pretty much blacklists Nora which effectively means blacklisting Jack too unless he wants to give in and do a double with Blanche or have her sing his songs. Even a good friend like "Poppa" Carl (S.Z. Sakall) can't help get them bookings. Oh, he does get them an audition, but Dan finds out before the scheduled time leaving Jack and Nora to audition for an empty theater.

Eventually Nora gives up and leaves Jack so that he can have some success, but we know the movie is going to have a happy ending, so Poppa Carl figures out a way to get Jack to bring Nora into the act that Dan and Blanche can't stop. They then perform the title song as well as another number, "Time Waits for No One", in a Technicolor finale (the rest of the movie is in black and white), before living happily ever after.

Or at least the movie Shine On, Harvest Moon would have you believe. Jack and Nora would get divorced and go on to have multiple spouses, while as mentioned above there's a question as to whether they even wrote the song. Indeed, the songs in the movie are mostly a pastiche of stuff from the first decade of the century. It's another of those movies that tries to bring turn-of-the-century nostalgia to audiences who were spending their time outside the theater worrying about the war raging over in Europe and the Pacific, having been released in the spring of 1944. Audiences of the day might have liked it, but it's one that, unlike Roughly Speaking, hasn't aged very well.

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.

Two Guys from Milwaukee

In getting through the backlog of movies that I've watched off my DVR but have yet to do a post on, it's time to write about one of those movies that shows up on TCM often enough but that I'd never gotten around to watching before, Two Guys from Milwaukee.

The movie technically starts off at Pennsylvania Station in New York, although the opening scenes are really on a train. The two important passengers on that train are Prince Henry (Dennis Morgan) of one of those central European monarchies that in real life would have been overrun by Soviet-backed Communists a year or two after the movie was made, together with his advisor Count Oswald (S.Z. Sakall). Henry is on a goodwill tour of America, before his country votes on a plebiscite regarding whether to stay a monarchy. Henry thinks that if the vote is going to be rigged, he's going to want to meet real Americans.

Showing up at Penn Station and not realizing that a celebrity is about to get off the train is cab driver Buzz Williams (Jack Carson). He doesn't know anything about royalty, and if anything has mild contempt for them. In a plot twist that's fairly obvious, Henry decides he's going to escape from the train and pass himself off as a regular American, only to wind up taking the cab driven by Buzz. Unfortunately, Henry forgot to get any money when he absconded from the train, which is going to make paying for a cab difficult, as well as paying for dinner or getting a hotel room or anything like that.

Buzz lives with his sister Nan (Rosemary DeCamp), and since Henry has lied about where he was from and just happened to pick Buzz's hometown as where he is from, Buzz takes Henry home with him. Buzz also has a girlfriend Connie (Joan Leslie), and Buzz suggests the idea of a double date as Connie has a girlfriend Polly (Janis Paige).

As you might guess, Henry and Connie begin to develop feelings for each other, which is a problem since she's already got a boyfriend who's done nothing wrong, and because of that upcoming referendum. If monarchy wins, Henry getting married to a foreign commoner might be a problem. Meanwhile, there's still the issue that Henry is technically missing. Because this is a programmer, however, we know that it's going to resolve all its problems with a requisite happy ending.

Two Guys from Milwaukee is, as I just mentioned, little more than a programmer of the sort that Warner Bros. and the other studios churned out in the years before World War II. This one, however, was made just after the war, in 1946, so it does have the feel of being a bit out of place. That's not to say it's a bad movie, of course. Dennis Morgan and Jack Carson work well together, and the movie has a fun little coda at the end. But the sort of monarchy that Henry was a part of would have been destroyed by the recently-ended war, and the consequences of that are totally glossed over. Still, Two Guys from Milwaukee is entertaining enough, and definitely worth one watch at least.

One More Tomorrow

I mentioned the other day that I had a movie on my DVR called One More Tomorrow. It's going to be on TCM tomorrow at 6:00 AM as part of a morning and afternoon of the movies of Ann Sheridan, since she was born on Feb. 21, 1915.

Sheridan nominally gets top billing, but the real star here is Dennis Morgan. He plays Tom Collier III, a playboy who lives in Connecticut in a house that's probably been in the family, and not just his outright, since his father (Thurston Hall) is the one who's the wealthy businessman. Tom is hosting a party for the swell society people, where his seeming best friend Pat Regan (Jack Carson) is serving as butler; said party is right around September 1939 when World War II kicked off in Europe. Odd for a movie released in 1946, but more on that later.

One of the guests at the party is Cecelia Henry (Alexis Smith), a gold-digger who seems intent on getting Tom for a husband; at least, she seems like she might be the right social class for him. Also showing up at the party, but not as a guest, is a crew from the "liberal" magazine Bantam, headed by photographer Christie Sage (that's Ann Sheridan). "Liberal" here means not just being openly anti-Nazi when that wasn't quite so prominent (since the movie is set before the US entry into World War II), but also papering over the evils of Soviet Communism. Tom follows Christie back to New York and the Bantam offices, and sparks fly.

Tom is eventually able to buy out Bantam, but not to neuter it. Instead, he lets the editor, Jim Fisk (Reginald Gardiner), keep the magazine's editorial line. But although Tom loves Christie and the feeling is clearly mutual, there's no way they can get married since Tom has his father and all those "polite society" people. So he marries Cecelia, and nobody lives happily ever after.

Some time passes, and Christie has dealt with the pain of being dumped by Tom by going to Mexico where she does some sort of avant-garde photo shoot (we never actually see the photos), before returning to New York to display the photos at a hoity-toity gallery. Tom gets an invite, and is planning on going, at least until Ceceli shows herself to be a controlling jerk. It's not only that, however; she impresses upon Tom the need to get rid of Pat as a butler.

Tom feels bad about having stood Christine up again, so he goes into New York to see her, although she doesn't want to see him since she can't deal with the emotional pain of his being unavailable to her. Meanwhile, back at Bantam, Jim has gotten a story about corruption in the defense procurement industry. It's a juicy one, but running it means that there's a pretty darn good possibility some of the people in Tom's social circle will be caught up in the scandal and go to prison for it. Cecelia resorts to underhanded means to spike the story.

One More Tomorrow came across as a movie that was really odd in tone, and looked like a lesser print. Indeed, it felt like something that shouldn't have come out after the end of World War II, having been released in mid-1946. A search on IMDb shows that the movie was actually filmed in mid-1943 and held back for three years for whatever reasons Warner Bros. had in mind. That 1943 filming date would explain a lot of the film's politics. (If Warner Bros. had really wanted to be daring, they could have tried making Bantam a magazine that opposed the rampant corruption of the New Deal.) As it was the height of World War II, there was a sense that the Soviets, as our nominal allies in the war, needed to be made more palatable, something seen in movies like The North Star and the thoroughly revolting Mission to Moscow which completely whitewashes Stalin's crimes against humanity.

The resulting tone makes One More Tomorrow a movie that's a little tough to take. A lot of the dialog feels forced, as though everybody needs to go through the motions of making wartime propaganda. But even then, there were movies made during the war that clearly promote the war effort and do a good job of it. One More Tomorrow is heavy-handed even in that way. As a result, it's a movie that'll probably be of interest mostly to completists of one or another of the stars.

Wings for the Eagle

One of the movies that TCM ran during the Star of the Month salute to Ann Sheridan that I hadn't blogged about before is Wings for the Eagle. It's available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive collection, so I recently sat down to watch it and do a post on it here.

Dennis Morgan plays Corky Jones, a habitual shirker who BSes his way through an encounter at a gas station where he meets Roma Maple (Ann Sheridan). Roma is the wife of Brad (Jack Carson), who just happens to be an old classmate of Corky's from college as well as a former football teammate who would be 4-F because of a knee injury. Corky would be prime draft material, and plans to keep himself out of the draft. (It should be pointed out that World War II has not started at the beginning of the movie, although you could be forgiven for not realizing this. The attack on Pearl Harbor comes up halfway through the movie or so.)

One way to get out of the war effort is to be involved in an essential industry, and the Maples happen to live near one of those essential industries, the Lockheed aircraft plant. So Corky decides he's going to get himself a job there to be able to stay out of the war. Brad, for his part, seems to have less earning potential because of that knee injury, and that's a constant source of tension between him and Roma.

Corky does get a job at the plant and, because he's rooming with the Maples because of the housing crunch, that really puts a strain on Brad and Roma's relationship. They decide to separate, which lets Corky think he can put the movies on Roma. He also moves out, getting a room in the house of one of his bosses, Jake Hanso (George Tobias). Jake has a son in Pete (Russell Arms) who is studying to be able to join the Air Corps, since the modern-day US Air Force would only be organized as such after World War II.

Disaster strikes when it comes to light that Jake's citizenship papers never came through; the aircraft plant being "essential" for the war effort, it's no place for legal aliens, even if they've been living in the country long enough to have an adult son who got his citizenship by virtue of having been born in America. Jake starts running a lunch joint across the street from the plant, while Pete says to hell with joining the Air Corps; any country that would treat Dad the way it did doesn't deserve Pete.

Meanwhile, Corky's being an even smoother operator in trying to woo Roma than you normally get from a Jack Carson character, so the roles are somewhat reversed here. Not that Brad is out of love with Roma, but their situation is complicated until Brad is finally able to pass the application test to get a job at the aircraft plant. The Japanese finally attack Pearl Harbor, and that changes everybody.

Wings for the Eagle was released in July 1942, so right in the middle of World War II and a time when the audiences on the home front needed a lot of cheering up. As such, the movie is pure wartime propaganda, with the need to inculcate a desire to serve crowding out more important considerations like a good story. I found the whole thing fairly cringeworthy, with neither of the male leads particularly likeable. Some people might enjoy the movie for its contemporary look at the early stages of America's involvement in World War II, but I think that's about it. Still, as always, you may want to watch and judge for yourself.

Cloud Captains

During 31 Days of Oscar, one of the movies that I recorded was Captains of the Clouds. Having been made at Warner Bros., it's unsurprisingly available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive, so I recently got around to watching it and doing a blog post on here.

Dennis Morgan plays Johnny Dutton, a bush pilot in northern Ontario circa 1939 who is in love with Emily Foster (Brenda Marshall), the daughter of a manager of one of the camps which the bush pilots support. His plan is to marry Emily and start an airline. When he tries to deliver a team of huskies to one of the bush camps, he finds that he's been beaten to the punch by Brian MacLean, James Cagney), who was able to do it more cheaply. Tiny (Alan Hale Sr.), British expat Scrounger (Reginald Gardiner), and Quebecker Blimp Lebec (George Tobias) also have gripes about how Brian has been undercutting them.

And then we meet MacLean, who isn't just a ruthless businessman, but one who takes risks in his flying and doesn't do things by the book. Of course, this is going to turn out to be the right thing in the final reel as with all those "unorthodox cop" movies, but boy is it going to cause heartache for everybody involved along the way. Indeed, it nearly kills Brian when he gets hit in the head by the still-rotating propeller of his plane.

While Brian is unconscious and recuperating, the other pilots find his notebook with a business deal that they pull out from under him and thereby force him into partnership. Brian, for his part, gets to know Emily better, and realizes that if Dutton marries her it's going to ruin his life and dreams for that airline. So Brian marries her to prevent this, but of course Dutton doesn't understand and basically disappears.

Sometime in 1940, during the Battle of Britain, Brian and the other pilots hear Winston Churchill's speech about "We shall fight on the beaches", which triggers some patriotic instinct in them, so they try to join the RCAF as fighter pilots, doing this by literally landing their bush planes on an RCAF base outside Ottawa. They're too old, and frankly, their nation probably needs them as bush pilots helping keep all the northern raw materials operations going, not that the recruiters are going to get them to understand this.

Instead, the RCAF officers suggest that they become pilot instructors. The RCAF have definite methods of how pilots should operate in combat and bombing missions, but MacLean thinks that these methods aren't going to work out in the real world, so he teaches the guys in his planes how to do things by the seat of one's pants. This results in getting one of the student pilots seriously injured, so the RCAF understandably court-martials MacLean, dishonorably discharging him and getting his civil aviation license yanked.

However, some time later there's a serious plane accident that results in a bunch of death among the pilots whose job it is to fly the planes made in Canada over the Britain. They need new pilots. Blimp and Scrounger sign up for this duty, while MacLane sees this as his chance for redemption.

Captains of the Clouds is an interesting movie for a bunch of reasons. It was made with a lot of help from the RCAF, with real officers and flight footage. It was apparently produced in late 1941, just before the US was pushed into World War II, but released in February 1942, which is why there's a bit in the pilot graduation ceremony about the Americans who join up to help Canada and Britain. A few months later they'd all be in the US military. The movie is made in Technicolor with a lot of location shooting, and this too is really nice to see.

On the bad side however, is Cagney's character. He's irritating and seems to have an utter lack of common sense, as when he's rejected from being a fighter pilot for being too old. Also, when he's court-martialed, he and Tiny respond by trying to strafe the graduation ceremony, with terrible consequences! I don't understand why the guy doesn't wind up in jail.

But if you're looking for a snapshot of World War II that doesn't get shown as much as some of the other war movies, or a prestige film that doesn't show up as much as others from the same period, Captains of the Clouds is absolutely worth a watch.

Out west with Patricia Neal

One of the movies I DVRed during Patricia Neal's turn as Star of the Month on TCM was the western Raton Pass, being interested in the idea of Neal having done a western. Recently I sat down to watch it.

The first theme is one which shows up in a whole lot of westerns: the cattle baron who owns a lot of land versus the homesteaders who are closing in on that land. In Raton Pass, the ranchers are portrayed by Basil Ruysdael as dad Pierre Challon and Dennis Morgan as his son Marc. They own land on both sides of Raton Pass, and on some of the less productive land in the middle, there's the homesteaders, led by Pozner (Louis Jean Heydt). Pozner and his friends don't like the Challons, and for good reason since they think the Challons are taking all the grazing land and the water.

Into all of this walks lovely Ann (Patricia Neal). Ann falls in love with Marc, and the two have a whirlwind romance that leads to marriage. Marc's late beloved mother, God rest her soul, apparently had an agreement with Dad that when Marc got married, the whole ranch would legally be deeded over to Marc and his wife. But the love isn't to last.

The ranch is in some need of money, and when railroad man Prentice (Scott Forbes) comes into the picture needing a right of way for the new rail line, Marc sees the chance at money. But Ann is even smarter and more ambitious than Marc, and decides she'll make the bargain with Prentice. Of course, her bargain involves co-owning the ranch with Prentice, not with Marc.

Marc gets the brilliant idea that he can sell, and then go in with the homesteaders to block off Raton Pass, meaning that all the cattle on what's now Ann and Prentice's ranch can't get back to the other side, forcing them to sell cheaply and reducing the value of the ranch which Marc can then get back. Of course, the homesteaders aren't necessarily going to be interested in this, considering they don't care for the Challons.

Ann, for her part, has a trick up her sleeve too. She hires gunman Cy Van Cleave (Steve Cochran) as her new ranch foreman. He has no qualms about resorting to violence to get what's best for, well, seemingly the ranch, but more importantly him. He convinces the sheriff that Marc is rustling cattle by blocking off Raton pass, and kidnaps Pozner into testifying to this. It all leads to the climactic shootout.

Raton Pass is another of those movies that's not really doing anything particularly new, but is entertaining enough. It's mildly odd seeing Patricia Neal in a western, but even more jarring for me was the presence of Dennis Morgan, who I thought was not particularly well cast. He does his best here, and even though he's not great, he certainly doesn't sink the movie.

If you want to see a good example of a studio system western, you could do a lot worse than to watch Raton Pass. It's available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive.

In This Our Life

I mentioned last week that I apparently haven't done a full-length post on In This Our Life before. It's coming on tonight at 8:00 PM as part of the salute to Star of the Month Olivia de Haviland, and it's worth a watch.

Bette Davis stars as Stanley Timblerlake, sister of Roy (that's de Havilland); both are nieces of Uncle William (Charles Coburn). Stanley is engaged to Craig (George Brent), while Roy is already married to Peter (Dennis Morgan). But Stanley decides she'd rather have Peter, so she schemes to get him, and then runs off to the big city with him! Once Peter's divorce from Roy is finalized, he and Stanley get married, but Stanley continues to be a controlling blankety-blank. In fact, she's so controlling that poor Peter decides the only way out of this marriage is to kil himself! Meow.

So Stanley comes back to her old home town. By now, Roy is doing well for herself by having fallen in love with Craig; after all they were both screwed over by Stanley. Craig is a prosperous lawyer, helping out young black clerk Parry (Ernest Anderson), who has dreams of going on to law school to become an attorney. (Pretty daring stuff for a 1940s film, to be honest.) Not that Stanley is any more racist than the rest of American society; she's just a selfish controlling you-know-what. So one night Stanley has a little too much to drink, and gets into an accident. What's the easiest thing to do? Why, blame it on the young black kid!

All along the way Stanley has been enabled by her uncle William, as the family was wealthy and Stanley was more like her mother (William's sister). But this time when she tries to get help from William, there's a plot twist, that allows Bette Davis to have one of her better screen rants.

Supposedly Bette Davis didn't think much of In This Our Life, but I think that's quite unfair. Sure, it's a melodrama, but it's a really fun melodrama, and one that gives Davis a chance to strut her stuff in spades. It's only natural that she takes the chance and runs with it. Everybody else does well, although George Brent and especially Dennis Morgan don't have much to do. This one is Davis' picture all the way.

In This Our Life doesn't seem to be in print on DVD.