King and Country

Another of the people who was honored in the 2025 edition of Summer Under the Stars is British actor Tom Courtenay. A couple of British movies that I hadn't seen before got airings, giving me a good chance to record some new-to-me stuff. One of those movies is King and Country.

The movie opens with Courtenay, as Pvt. Arthur Hamp, lying on a bed playing his harmonica, with a man just outside the room. The scene switches to reveal all of this is taking place in one of the World War I trenches, which are a profoundly brutal and uncomfortable place to be stuck: there's no place for the water to drain, and there are rats and lice everywhere. Then we see a Captain Hargreaves (Dirk Bogarde) talking to another officer about Hamp. Apparently he's on trial for his life, and at the court-martial it's going to be Hargreaves defending him.

Hargreaves is in these trenches in order to meet Hamp and talk to him, in the hopes of getting evidence to mitigate the sentence if it's not possible to get Hamp declared not guilty. This is also an excellent chance to provide some exposition and the back story to Hamp's character. Before enlisting for the war, he didn't have much of a home life, either growing up, or then once he got married. His wife having left him, that might be part of the reason Hamp enlisted. But all of the men Hamp first met at the same time he enlisted and whom fhe first served with are all long since killed in action in the war.

So maybe that's why Hamp just got up one day and started walking, possibly with the hope of getting back to London to see his mother. But it's also fairly obvious to anybody higher up that you can't just having the enlisted men doing this willy-nilly of their own volition. That's no way to run an army, especially not during a time of war. The higher brass understandably see this as desertion, and the penalty for desertion has to be death in order to discourage everybody else from trying to pursue the same course Hamp is stands accused of having done.

Hargreaves is defending Hamp, but a lot of the other enlisted men rather cynically believe that the point of a man like Hargreaves is less to give Hamp the best defense possible, but more to make everything look like it's all been done legitimately and on the up-and-up, even though in their minds the verdict and sentence have already been decided.

Eventually the court-martial itself begins, and it's clear that Hargreaves is going to go for a defense of shell shock. But the doctor, Capt. O'Sullivan (Leo McKern), does his best to dispute that, while there's a question of whether Pvt. Hamp even cares any more whether he lives or dies. The trial leads to the inevitable verdict....

King and Country is based on a novel turned into a stage play and looks a lot like it's based on a play. To be fair, however, it's not like the material needs to be opened up beyond the confines of a stage play. One thing director Joseph Losey does, however, is to use scene transitions that are photographs of the actual carnage from the Great War. This is very effective. But what is even more effective is the outstanding acting performances. This is some of Courtenay's best work, up there with The Dresser.

I'm glad I saw this one, even as brutal as it is. If you get the chance to see it, make it a point to do so.

A bridge too long

I mentioned several weeks ago how war historian Cornelius Ryan wrote the book on the D-Day invasion, The Longest Day, which was turned into an epic movie. Another of his books was similarly turned into an epic film 15 years later. That movie, A Bridge Too Far, aired as part of Dirk Bogarde's turn as TCM's Star of the Month since he was in the all-star cast. I got around to watching it not long before it went off my cloud DVR since YouTube TV only keeps recordings for nine months, but since I had a backlog of Bogarde films I wrote this post rather early and left it as a draft until a suitable time after the other Bogarde movies.

A narrator at the beginning of the movie, over newsreel-type footage of the late stages of World War II, informs us of the situation on the ground as it was at the end of the summer of 1944. The Allies had invaded Normandy in June, of course, and advanced reasonably far. But the Rhine was a major barrier because, if need be, the Nazis could just blow up all the bridges and set defensive positions on the other side. Anyone trying to cross the river would be a sitting duck. British general Montgomery came up with a daring plan that Eisenhower eventually agreed to, which was given the code name Operation Market Garden. The plan is to drop troops behind enemy lines in the Netherland, close to a bunch of important bridges. The troops are then supposed to capture six major bridges and hold them until traditional infantry coming from Belgium.

Dirk Bogarde was getting to the age where he would play the sort of military officer ranked high enough to be able to stay behind the front and come up with the overriding plan; he plays British Lt. General Browning who is more or less in command of the whole British part of the operation, even more difficult than the American part because the British are being dropped farther behind the enemy lines. Leading the men actually going in is Major General Urquhart (Sean Connery); they get the most distant bridge, at Arnhem.

As is always the case in war, large operations may seem brilliant on paper, but they're going to meet real life the minute the soldiers are expected to execute them, not that this is any fault of the soldiers. Especially when an operation is this big and is expected to run like clockwork, it should be obvious that there's a much bigger potential for things to go wrong. Indeed, the commander of the Polish forces, Maj. Gen. Sosabowski (Gene Hackman) raises objections to Lt. Gen. Browning when Browning briefs everybody on the operation. However, Browning say British intelligence believes the the Germans are badly enough off that the portion of the military defending the Netherlands is either too old or too young to put up a truly effective defense.

The date for the drop eventually comes, and as you might guess from the title even if you didn't know anything about the war, you'll guess correctly that problems do happen. Urquhart's radios don't work, and they have difficulty getting from the drop zone to where they're supposed to go. Since they can't radio, future supplies that are supposed to be dropped to them wind up with the Germans, leaving them in an untenable situation. Other portions of the operation have lesser problems, a lot of which were due to adverse weather, something you'd think the bigwigs could have predicted and planned for. Although the Allies weren't able to get to get that last bridge, there were enough successes that military historians have debated how much of a failure Market Garden was.

A Bridge Too Far has a bit of advantage over The Longest Day, in that there are so many points of action that a longer movie isn't quite to the detriment the way it is in The Longest Day. Having said that, however, I have a feeling the material would have worked better as a TV miniseries, with commercial breaks at suitable points to switch between the various parts of the operation. The movie is competently made, although with the number of major stars in the past, it's also easy to see why some contemporary critics thought the movie collapsed under its own weight. It definitely feels like a slog at times.

I've only read the Reader's Digest condensed version of A Bridge Too Far (seriously), and that decades ago, so I can't honestly say just how right Cornelius Ryan got things. But I think the movie is a worthy attempt at trying to document a massive military action, even if it's by no means perfect.

Der Tod in Venedig

One more of the movies that TCM showed when Dirk Bogarde was TCM's Star of the month was Luchino Visconti's Death in Venice, a 1971 adaptation of Thomas Mann's novella. As the book is only a novella, it's a relatively shorter synopsis here. Also, it's been a good 30 years since I read it (in translation although I'd like to think my German is good enough to handle it), so I can't really comment on the differences between the novella and the movie.

The story deals with a writer Gustave von Aschenbach (that's Dirk Bogarde), a widower who needs to get away from the stress of his life in Germany. He plans to go to the Mediterranean for the climate, winding up in Venice. At the hotel, where he dines alone, he sees a family at a table: a mother, several daughters, and an adolescent son (Björn Andrésen) in a sailor suit. Aschenbach considers the boy the apotheosis of the classical Greek standard of beauty.

With that in mind, Aschenbach does what any rational person would do: he starts stalking the family just so he can get glimpses of the boy. He figures out that the family is Polish, and that the boy is probably named Tadeusz, since it sounds like they're referring to him as Tadzio. Aschnebach keeps following the family until the day he dies, which you might have guessed he's going to do considering the title. (I seem to recall the death being mentioned at the beginning of the novella, but again, as I've said, I read it ages ago.)

Another theme in the movie is that, as Aschenbach is following Tadzio around, he sees signs going up in the less touristy parts of Venice in Italian warning the locals and giving Gustav the distinct feeling that there's some sort of epidemic about that the government doesn't want to tell the tourists about lest it destroy that season's tourist trade. He's right, of course, and we can presume it's that disease (likely cholera) that's going to kill Gustave.

I didn't care for the novella, because the main character following Tadzio around is frankly creepy, and not because of the homoeroticism. After all, if it were about an author stalking a girl -- think Lolita -- there would also be a serious creep-out factor involved. As a result, I was hesitant to watch the movie. And I have to admit that I have many of the same problems with the movie that I did with the novella. That's not necessarily the fault of anyone in the movie; it's that the story is one that has natural challenges in making it more palatable. Visconti tries this by turning it into a two-hour affair, with lots of languorous scenes of Venice as it might have looked circa 1910 before it got zillions of tourists of a more modest economic class, and before authorities decided to turn the place into a museum, stopping the rebuilding that was one of the things preventing the city from sinking into the lagoon.

Many of the visuals in Death in Venice are pretty. But for me it wasn't enough to overcome that ugly story.

Ill Met By Moonlight

Dirk Bogarde was TCM's Star of the Month last September, and it's taken me a while for me to get around to all of his movies that I put on the DVR. But we're getting close to the end of them, with one that I haven't mentioned yet being the World War II movie Ill Met By Moonlight. (TCM had it on the schedule as Night Ambush, but that was the title on the original American relese and, according to Wikipedia, the original US release was cut by about 10 minutes. The print TCM ran was the running time of the British version, and had the title card Ill Met By Moonlight.)

A bit of opening narration tells us how Crete is an ancient island in the Mediterranean Sea, but that in World War II it was occupied by the Nazis. Some of the Cretans joined the underground, but they were also joined by some other islanders, those being from the island of Britain. One of the Brits is a man named Maj. Patrick Leigh Fermor (Dirk Bogarde). Fermor was a real pesron, as was W. Stanley Moss (David Oxley), who wrote the book on which the movie was based. Fermor is also known by the code name Filedem. He could speak Greek, well enough to fool the Nazis, although he believes he's got enough of an accent that it would give the game away if the Nazis' Greek collaborators heard him.

Fermor tells Moss about German general Kreipe (Marius Goring), who is the head of the German paratroopers stationed on the island, presumably for running operations all over the eastern Mediterranean and disrupting the British who were still in control of Egypt at the time. Fermor has heard that the plan is to ambush Kreipe, kidnapping him and taking him to a cove where a small British ship is set to anchor, taking Kreipe to Egypt. It sounds like a daft plan but then there were a lot of odd schemes that actually did happen during the war. And this is one of them.

In any movie, there is a buildup to the actual operation, as the people carrying it out prepare a meticulous plan. In Ill Met By Moonlight, however, that planning stage seems a bit shorter compared to some other movies in the war movie, or the heist genres. Eventually, the time comes for the operation. The kidnapping seems to go OK, but then they have to get him out of the mountains to where they're supposed to rendezvous with the ship. There are a ton of Nazis looking for Kreipe. And he's got an injured arm to boot, making the operation more complicated.

Ill Met By Moonlight was the final film together for Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, and unfortunately it's not quite as good as their earlier works. To be fair, however, many of their earlier collaborations are widely considered outstanding films such as The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp or The Red Shoes. Ill Met By Moonlight is competent enough, but something about it feels like it could have been better. I can't help but wonder whether Powel and Pressburger didn't have as much of a budget as they would have liked.

Not that Ill Met By Moonlight is a bad movie by any means; it's just that it's another of those movies that isn't as good as it might have been.

Movie Without End

Dirk Bogarde was TCM's Star of the Month last fall, and it gave me the opportunity to record several of his films that I hadn't seen before. One of these was Song Without End, which I mentioned briefly a few months back due to the short that preceded it when TCM ran it.

Song Without End is a biopic of Hungarian composer and pianist Franz Liszt. As the movie opens up, he's finished his time in Paris, where he set the world on fire with his piano concerts. He left for a village in the Alps due to the insisitence of the Countess D'Agoult (Geneviève Page), the mother of his children, who wanted him to raise his children rather than being a rock-star performer. Since then, another man, Thalberg, has become the pianist toast of Paris, so Liszt's friends Chopin and George Sand come down to the Alps to visit him. Them having visited him, it gives him the idea to go back to Paris and put on another concert to show he's the one who still has the drawing power, not this upstart Thalberg.

Liszt's concert is, a you might guess, the one that's a big hit. Among the few audience members at the concert that Thalberg ultimately cancels is Princess Wittgenstein (Capucine). She decides she should go to the Liszt concert to see what Liszt is all about. This gives the viewer the chance to listen to a lot of piano music, and it's not just Liszt's music, as he was known to promote quite a few composers, from the aforementioned Chopin to the tragic Robert Schumann and, later in the movie, Richard Wagner.

Anyhow, the Princess, having seen Liszt, falls for him just like all the girls in Lisztomania which I blogged about over the summer did. Except that there's a slight problem, which is that she's already quite married to Russian Prince Nikolai. Still, despite having children by one woman, Liszt also falls for the Princess, and follows her to Vienna looking for any excuse to do so. He then follows her to imperial Russia when the Prince asks him for a command performance for the Czar.

A further problem for Franz is that despite not being faithful to one woman, he'd really like to consider himself an observant, even devout Catholic, having thought about joining the clergy. And for Catholics, when it comes to marrige, the marriage is supposed to be eternal, only to be broken by the death of one of the partners. Just watch A Man for All Seasons. Yes, you can get an annulment, but that's only supposed to happen in very limited circumstances. Granted, for the class of people Liszt was pursuing, it was just as much political. But politics might always go wrong.

The story in Song Without End isn't the most exciting one, as Liszt was "just" a celebrity anot not a political leader, when the whole political marriage thing would carry overtones of serious foreign relations. The story is also given somewhat short shrift, which I think is a deliberate choice. Liszt composed a lot, but also performed a lot of other people's music, and there's a ton of music from multiple performers put on the screen here. If you like classical piano, you'll definitely like the music. It would just be nice if it could be in service of a better story.

Accident

Dirk Bogarde having been TCM's Star of the Month last September, it gave me the chance to record quite a few of his films that I hadn't seen before, since most of his work was in Europe. Among those movies was one with an intriguing premise, Accident.

The opening credits are over what looks like one of those large houses on the outskirts of town, with some traffic sounds in the background. As the credits come to a conclusion, we hear what sounds like a terrible crash. It is indeed a terrible crash. Hearing it and coming out of the house to investigate is Stephen (Dirk Bogarde). He's a professor at Oxford who lives in the house with his wife Rosalind and their two children, although it's about to become three.

In the car are two of Stephen's students, William (Michael York) and the Austrian Anna (Jacqueline Sassard, who must have been yet another of those Europeans that English-language studios were trying to groom for stardom since I don't recognize the name. Sadly, William is dead, while Anna is in shock. So Stephen brings Anna into the house before calling the police, and keeping Anna from having to deal with the police. Since Stephen's house is out in the middle of nowhere, the police realize that William and Anna were on their way to visit him, and ask the obvious question of why.

Flash back to the rest of the story. Stephen has already been working as a sort of thesis advisor to William when Anna first shows up, supposedly the daughter of a former prince. She's good-looking, so naturally everybody becomes interested in her. Stephen is of course already married, so he shouldn't show any interest in her. William's the right age, and he's going to be one of Anna's fellow students, so it seems more natural for him to try to start a relationship with her. Even some of Stephen's colleagues seem to want Anna.

So we get a bunch of talky scenes where all of the prinicpals are together in some fairly nice-looking locations since this is Oxford, after all, and Stephen's house has some nice gardens. Stephen goes looking for nookie while his wife is in confinement, various people keep pursuing Anna, and there's a bizarre party scene where all the men play what seems to be a British grown-up version of keep away.

And this is where I had huge problems with Accident. It's one of those movies that seems like it's trying to be daring, and a bit arthouse, with the ultimate result that it's just boring and overcomplicated. None of the characaters are worth getting emotionally invested in.

Unfortunately, when it ran on TCM, Ben Mankiewicz seemed more concerned with the fact that the film's director, Joseph Losey, was one of those Americans who left for Europe as a result of the blacklist, as though this makes the movie immune from criticism. Accident is just plain lousy. But as always, judge for yourself.

El jardinero

Dirk Bogarde was TCM's Star of the Month back in September, and one of his movies that I recorded, never having heard of it before, was The Spanish Gardnener. Recently, I watched it, and now I can do a review of it here.

The movie opens up at the British consulate in Madrid. A young boy, Nicholas Brande (Jon Whiteley), is looking out the window while the executive secretary converses with him. Behind closed doors, we here a conversation between the ambassador and Nicholas' father Harrington (Michael Hordern). The ambassador is berating Harrington for a bunch of reasons, such as Harrington inducing his wife to leave him, which is why Dad is raising the boy alone. Meanwhile, Harrington gets sent to a job at some backwater on Spain's Mediterranean coast.

It might be good for young Nicholas, because there's a change of environment in more ways than one. Dad thinks Nicholas is sickly, which is why the kid hasn't been sent to the sort of consular boarding school that the children of all the other people in the Foreign Service get sent to. Instead, Dad's been home-schooling the kid. Nicholas isn't really sickly at all; it's just Dad's way of being overprotective.

Dad earns enough that he can employ the Garcias, a butler/chauffeur (Cyril Cusack), and his wife Magdalena as a maid. The previous occupants didn't keep up any sort of garden at all, which for Harrington just won't do. So Harrington sets about hiring a gardener. He finds one in young José (Dirk Bogarde), and José takes to his work.

Nicholas being cooped up in the house all day because fo his alleged sickness, and because he doesn't have any positive male role models in his life, Dad being overbearing and Garcia coming across as a bit mean, Nicholas starts to put José on a pedestal. This makes Dad exceedingly jealous, and Dad does everything he can to try to break of the relationship the boy is developing with José, despite the fact that José is probably the best thing for Nicholas. Meanwhile, Garcia figures out what's going on, and takes the opportunity to frame José while taking advantage of the Brandes.

The Spanish Garderner is based on a book by A.J. Cronin, a British author I've mentioned a couple of times before in regards to his medical-themed novels that were turned into movies. Cronin also had a decided moral view, and that unfortunately serves to make The Spanish Gardener a bit of a strident movie in the sense of the viewer getting the point already while the movie feels it needs to tack more on to make the viewer understand.

The other problem with the print that TCM ran is that the movie was filmed in Vistavision and Technicolor, but the print is in 4:3 and the colors look quite faded. A restoration, if possible, would definitely be in order.

Bogarde doesn't do a bad job, although it feels like he isn't being challenged. That, and pretty much nobody in the movie is convincingly Spanish. Taking all that in mind, it's not hard to see why this one isn't so well known to American audiences.

HMS Defiant

I recorded several movies from when Dirk Bogarde was TCM's Star of the Month, and now I'm getting around to watching another of them that I had never seen before it showed up: that movie is Damn the Defiant!.

The movie starts off with a title card informing us that the action is taking place in Spithead, England, in 1797. We then see a small landing boat heading from the HMS Defiant anchored just offshore to the harbor. On that boat is the captain, Crawford (Alec Guinness) and his second-in-command, Lt. Scott-Padget (Dirk Bogarde). If you've seen the 1935 version of Mutiny on the Bounty, you'll know that this is a press gang, looking for innocent people to be forced into serving on a ship that doesn't have enough of a crew. As you can guess, the good people in town are absolutely not thrilled to see a press gang showing up.

Meanwhile, hiding out in the basement of one of the taverns is a group of sailors, some part of the Royal Navy's Channel Fleet and some part of the Mediterranean Fleet. One of the leaders of this group, Vizard (Anthony Quayle), informs us that the sailors are looking for better conditions at sea, and that they're willing to "strike" if necessary, which really means a mutiny. Vizard and the rest of the cabal obviously don't want it known what's going on.

Back to the officers of the Defiant. It's really Scott-Padgett's job to impress those sailors into duty. Crawford is ashore because his wife and son live in Spithead. The younger Crawford is hoping to follow his father into service, being fast-tracked into the officers' corps unlike those poor seamen who were pressed into service. These scenes also serve to set up part of the dramatic conflict, which is that Crawford is the "humane" officer while Scott-Padget is an absolute dick, even though one does need quite a bit of discipline to be able to go out to sea and then fight the upcoming threat of the French.

The Admiralty has indeed allowed the younger Crawford to join his father as a midshipman, and the Defiant soon sets sail for the Mediterranean. Capt. Crawford doesn't want Scott-Padget to show any favoritism to the younger Crawford, so the lieutenant responds not only by not showing favoritism, but by showing anti-favoritism, treating him so badly that the captain starts looking for ways to get his son off the ship.

Matters come to a head when Capt. Crawford falls ill, and has to give command over to Scott-Padget. He's so bad to the sailors that they finally decide to mutiny in a move not related to the more general mutiny Vizard and his men had been planning at the beginning of the movie and that, as far as they know since there was no good way to communicate with other ships in those days, has not yet taken place.

Damn the Defiant! is a well-made entry into the historical naval genre. I don't know that there's anything terribly original. I made a comment once about one of the submarine movies that there's only so much you can do in the confined spaces of a submarine. Likewise, there's only so much you can do on a Napoleonic era ship, both because of the confined spaces and because of the historical limitations. Not that there's anything particularly wrong with these constraints; it's just that if you're looking for something truly original, you'll be hard-pressed to find it in pretty much any naval movie.

Despite those constraints, Damn the Defiant! is one that absolutely deserves a watch, in no small part thanks to the fine performances from its leads. It's definitely one to look out for.

Modesty Blaise

I've briefly mentioned the movie Modesty Blaise on a couple of occasions, I think most recently when Dirk Bogarde was TCM's Star of the Month and this was one of the movies that did not air during the tribute, it having been distributed by Fox. It happens to be back in the FXM rotation, and it airs again tomorrow, December 21, at 9:05 AM, so I watched it to do a review. (It will also be on early on Christmas Eve.)

The movie opens in Amsterdam with the sort of nonsense epsionage tropes common to movies of the era, such as ridiculous costumes and coded speech to deliver something through multiple middlemen. The eventually gets to a building in the city where presumably the final drop is supposed to happen, but instead the building is blown up, killing a British agent. Sir Gerald Tarrant (Harry Andrews), chief of the Her Majesty's Secret Service, is called in to discuss what to do next.

This bit of espionage involved diamond shipments to a Middle Eastern emirate in exchange for British firms getting the rights to drill the oil the emirate has. Sheik Abui Tahir (Clive Revill) it the former head of the country, and could be vital in getting back into power to secure those leases. He's also the foster father of a former supercriminal Modesty Blaise (Monica Vitti), who has allegedly gone into retirement. So a call is put out to her to see if she'll do the job and get those diamonds where they're supposed to go.

However, there's a catch. In order to come out of retirement, Modesty wants full immunity, and the ability to work with a former partner, Willie Garvin (Terence Stamp). One big issue, however, is that Willie is supposedly in South America, and will be difficult to find. Of course they do find him, and he joins the case.

However, there are powerful interests trying to stop the delivery of those diamonds. Since this is nominally a spy movie, there has to be a mastermind working from a secret lair. That's Gabriel (Dirk Bogard), together with psychotic killer Mrs. Fothergill (Rossella Falk) from his island lair somewhere in the Mediterranean. One running joke throughout the movie is that Gabriel wants to carry out his plans on a budget; after all, he didn't get wealthy by spending that much money.

But there's somebody else interested in stopping Modesty, which is Sir Gerald himself. Together with one of his agents Paul, who used to be a boyfriend of Modesty, they trail Modesty and Willie and try to mess up her plans. It's no skin off their teeth if Modesty and Willie meet their ends.

Modesty Blaise was based on a British comic strip that was first conceived in the wake of the earliest James Bond movie. As such, the production design has a very over-the-top look that certainly works in portraying the utter unrealisticness of the whole story. However, the movie as a whole got mixed reviews, and it's not hard to see why. The story itself is muddled and complicated, and a lot of the time it feels like the parts aren't working together as well as they did in the more coherent Sean Connery Bond movies. It's as though Modesty Blaise would predict the parody of itself that the Roger Moore Bonds tended towards. On the bright side, in addition to the production design it mostly looks as though the cast is having fun making this, especially Bogarde.

If you're looking for a spy spoof movie from the 1960s you haven't seen yet, Modesty Blaise isn't half bad. If you're looking for a tense Cold War spy movie, however, this isn't it.

The Password Is Courage

I mentioned at the beginning of the month that the Dirk Bogarde film The Password Is Courage was getting two airings in September: one as part of the Bogarde tribute, and a second as part of a night of World War II prison break movies. That second airing is overnight tonight at 3:15 AM (or early tomorrow in all of the continental US).

Loosely based on a real-life person, that person is Sgt. Maj. Charles Coward (obviously, played by Bogarde). Coward had been captured by the Germans while the British were trying to get their troops out of France before Dunkirk in the spring of 1940, and with a bunch of other soldiers sent to one or another of the POW camps that the Nazis had set up. Of course, like all good officers, Coward has a duty to try to escape, and his first escape is in France, where, at least in the movie, he's mistaken for a German officer and awarded the Iron Cross!

For this, Coward gets sent to Stalag VIII-B, a POW camp in what is now southern Poland, although at the time it was the very eastern portions of Germany. Coward continues his escape attempts, bribing Nazi guards for the materials necessary to build a giant tunnel out of the camp and on to the Czech protectorate, and hopefully to freedom somewhere. The POWs are used to do work details, and this along with more bribes enables Coward to get out and go to the nearby village, where he meets up with optometrist Irena (Maria Perschy), who is a member of the Underground. In the movie, Coward and Irena fall in love, although this is one of the many things in the movie that did not happen in real life.

Eventually, it comes time for the escape, although one of the things making it more difficult is the fact that most of the prisoners speak no German. At least some of them speak languages of one or another Nazi-occupied country, especially French, which enables them to fake work permits claiming these folks are from France. But not being able to speak German is still a real problem, especially for Coward. And not that any of the men in the POW camp could have known it, but their escape was planned for a date only a few months before the camps were liberated.

To be honest, there's not all that much to the plot of The Password is Courage; it could easily be summed up as "soldiers get captured and constantly try to break out of POW camp". That having been said, for the genre it's pretty well done. If it's not well known today, that I think is down to the fact that it was made by MGM's British unit with Dirk Bogarde being the only really well known name, and even he wasn't that big a star here in the States. And with a looming trend toward bigger war movies with action and color photography, it's no wonder The Password Is Courage fell by the wayside.

It also doesn't help to look up Charles Coward, as doing so turns the movie from a well-made example of a genre into something formulaic that ignore's a much more interesting true story. The work camp where Coward was sent was not far from Auschwitz, and the real-life Coward spoke German, which made him useful as a liaison between the German authorities and the soldiers and Red Cross. Coward got himself smuggled into Auschwitz, and used the papers and effects of dead soldiers and laborers to smuggle Jews out of Auschwitz. That, rather than a straightforward attempted escape story, seems like it would be for more worthy of a movie, although I suppose in the early 1960s that wouldn't have been considered commercial enough.

Don't call it "Slander"

In TCM's 31 Days of Oscar, we're about to get up to the letter L, which includes the movie Libel, on tomorrow morning at 6:00.

Paul Massie plays Jeffrey Buckenham, a Canadian pilot on a layover in London. While in a pub, he sees a TV program about the gret old manor houses of Britain. This episode focuses on Sir Mark Loddon (Dirk Bogarde) and his wife, Lady Margaret (Olivia de Havilland). That's something which really intrigues Jeffrey, for reasons that will become clear in a short while.

The Loddons have periodic guided tours of the estate in order to defray the costs of living there, and Jeffrey comes to one of those tours, more as a way of seeing Mark in the Loddons' private residence after the tour. It turns out that both Mark and Jeffrey served in World War II, and wound up in the same POW camp. Mark's bad experiences in the camp resulted in his only having sketchy memories of a lot of things that happened when he was younger before the War, which would explain why he doesn't recognize Jeffrey despite the fact that they escaped together.

When Jeffrey sees Mark's hand and sees that Mark has lost the first joint on one of his fingers, his suspicions are confirmed: this isn't Mark Loddon, but an impostor, Frank Welney. Frank was the third member of the escape, and an actor who had lost a joint on that finger. In Jeffrey's view, Frank's actions during the escape were less than honorable and resulted in Mark's death. So Mark writes an open letter to one of the Sunday tabloids.

Mark doesn't like that the letter was printed, and especially doesn't like the resulting publicity. In theory, they could just ignore it as the writings of a crank, but then what effect would it have on Mark and Margaret's son? So Mark makes the difficult decision to sue for libel, since the libel laws in the UK are rather more generous toward the putative victim than in the US. But the problem with taking the case to court is that a whole bunch of uncomfortable stuff is going to come out into the public, and with Mark having all sorts of memory holes thanks to that POW experience, who knows what's really going to come out.

Sir Wilfred (Robert Morley) is Sir Mark's barrister, while Hubert Foxley (Wilfrid Hyde-White) is Jeffrey's. At the trial, we get the views of both Jeffrey and Mark about what heppend both while they were in captivity, and that pivotal escape attempt, told in flashback. It's clear that Jeffrey thought even while they were all in captivity that Welney was a chancer who was trying to learn as much as possible about Mark's past life in order to kill Mark when the opportunity presented itself and take over Mark's identity. That opportunity would, in Jeffrey's view, present itself during the escape attempt.

Libel is a well-acted movie, albeit one with what seemed to me a glaring plot hole. Surely the British military would have had either fingerprint records of everyobdy under arms, or dental records, or both, in order to aid with identification of the killed in action if dog tags or other ID went missing. It should have been a fairly simple thing to check against those records. (A quick search suggests the US Army started fingerprinting soldiers all the way back in 1905; I couldn't find similar information for the UK.) I had other problems with the script, too, which is a shame since the actors all did a fine job.

Libel was produced by MGM's British arm, so it's no surprise that the movie has received a DVD release from the Warner Archive.

Cast a Dark Shadow

Dirk Bogarde was born in March 1921, but for some reason, TCM is running a non-birthday salute to him tomorrow morning and afternoon. That tribute starts at 6:45 AM with Cast a Dark Shadow.

Bogarde plays Edward Bare, who at the start of the movie is married to the much older Monica (Mona Washbourne). She's a rich but childless woman who got her money from the family department store. Edward is decidedly not rich, living off of Monica's money and looking for a way to get at that money permanently. What he doesn't know is that Monica is looking to change her will to put Edward in it in a big way.

Monica brings over her solicitor Philip Mortimer (Robert Flemyng), who lives in the same small English country town as them and one that happens to have a surprisingly large number of large houses. Monica talks to Philip about redoing the will, which he technically has to do since Monica is of sound mind. But he sees that Edward is not a nice guy and does everything in his power to get Monica not to change the current will.

For better or for worse, Monica doesn't change the will. That's because Edward overhears Monica having a conversation with Philip about changing the will, and comes to the mistaken conclusion that his wife is writing him out of the will, not into it. So Edward has to set his plan into motion of killing his wife and making it look as though she had an accident with the gas fireplace.

Philip sees through all of this, but the coroner's inquest doesn't, and Edward is a free man for the time being. But he's not a wealthy man yet. As already mentioned, the will that didn't get amended only left the white elephant of a house to Edward, with the money from the department store being left to Monica's spinster sister in Jamaica (still a British colony at the time) until she dies, at which time Edward will finally get it.

But Edward, needing a cash infusion, decides that he has to go looking for another rich older lady. At one of those fading seaside resorts, he meets Freda Jeffries (Margaret Lockwood). She's a widow who inherited a bunch of money from her late husband, but she insists that she'll only mary Edward if they're equals, in it "pound for pound" as she says, each spending their own money.

Edward has to keep up the ruse that he's got money, and we of course expect Edward to start trying to come up with a way to get rid of Freda and get her money. Freda figures out pretty quickly that Edward doesn't really have much money at all, but something more alarming comes along, which is another rich woman with money, Charlotte Young (Kay Walsh). Edward seems to be falling in love with her. Edward's trying to bilk her out of money is one thing to Freda, but having a romantic relationship with her? No way, even though Freda doesn't particularly love Edward any more.

Cast a Dark Shadow is a moderately interesting movie, although there's a twist 15 or 20 minutes from the end that makes things a bit over the top. The performances are about as good as you can expect from the script, and having a second wife who sees through her husband and isn't exactly a lady is a really nice touch too. The whole time I was watching it, I got the impression I was watching a filmed version of a play, which turns out to be the case, although there's a fairly substantial amount of opening things up.

One interesting thing is that there is a birthday person in the movie, although it's not Dirk Bogarde. Kathleen Harrison, who plays Monica's made, was born on February 23, 1892. But the rest of the day's schedule is not a birthday salute to her.

Cast a Dark Shado is not yet on DVD, but according to the TCM Shop, the Cohen Collection is putting out on a double feature in April.

The Angel Wore Red

Today is Ava Gardner's day in Summer Under the Stars. There's a documentary at 8:00, as well as a movie that aired just last month, The Angel Wore Red. It's going to be on overnight, or early tomorrow, at 4:00 AM.

The setting is an unnamed Spanish city in 1936; if you know your history, that means the start of the Spanish Civil War. This is a city run by the Republican side. Working in the city is American radio correspondent Hawthorne (Joseph Cotten), who wishes that he could get a human interest story to report on. And boy is he about to get one, with the city about to be besieged and a human drama about to break about among all the chaos.

Arturo Carrero (Dirk Bogarde) is a priest in the city, but one disillusioned with the Church taking the wrong side in Spanish politics, since there are lots of poor people that the Church is doing nothing to help. He leaves the priesthood, although nobody outside the bishop (Finlay Currie) and one or two other priests know. This presents a serious problem because the new local administration is seriously anti-clerical, planning to arrest all the priests and destroy the cathedral. The cathedral holds a religious relic, the blood of a local saint, and the bishop gives it to another priest, Canon Rota (Aldo Fabrizi), to store for safekeeping.

Arturo tries to escape in civilian clothes, but the government is spending all its resources on finding the two priests who escaped the government roundup. You'd think they would have more important stuff to deal with. But apparently, that relic is very important, as the locals believe that whoever has it can't be defeated. That may be nonsense, of course, but the fact that the locals believe it is a powerful motivator, which is why the Republicans want it.

Arturo eventually meets Soledad (Ava Gardner), who works in a local cabaret that is still going as though there's no civil war on. She shelters Arturo, at least until the noose become so tight that there's no hope of escape. Arturo gives himself up and Soledad, having sheltered him, is going to be in trouble too.

The authorities at first want Arturo to come up with the goods as to where that relic is, not believing that he had oh-so conveniently left the priesthood and has no idea. Ultimately, with not just Arturo in custody, but a lot others as well, and the Nationalists closing in, the local administration under military commander General Clave (Vittorio De Sica), comes up with an idea: use the prisoners as cannon fodder!

The Angel Wore Red is a perfectly reasonable premise, but one that becomes a bit muddled in the second half, largely because it's trying to do too much. There's the war story, the love story, and Arturo's personal struggles with his faith versus the Church hierarchy. I found it all fell a bit short. Part of that is due to Cotten's character. Cotten himself isn't the problem; it's the fact that this character is too convenient to have and be in places where a real correspondent wouldn't have been allowed. In fact, I think the script as a whole lets everybody down.

But judge for yourself. It's going to be on tonight, and it's avalilable on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive.

Frankly, my defiant....

A few weeks back, TCM ran a night of movies set in the British navy of the Napoleonic war era. One that was new to me was Damn the Defiant! It's available on DVD, so I'm OK doing a full-length post on it.

The movie starts on shore in Spithead, England in 1797. There's a scene reminiscent of the 1935 Mutiny on the Bounty, with a press gang going around to all the local hangouts to get able-bodied men to serve aboard the British navy ships. Right away, you can understand why nobody would want to serve in a navy like that. But beyond that, we hear some of the people in a cellar already talking about a mutiny that's being planned for all the British ships in the Channel fleet.

One of those British ships is the HMS Defiant, captained by Capt. Crawford (Alec Guinness). He's got orders from the Admiralty, which involve going to the Mediterranean and meeting up with some ships there. His second-in-command, Lt. Scott-Padget (played by Dirk Bogarde and always referred to as Mr. Scott-Padget) is angling for a command of his own, not knowing that the men under his command are planning to take that away from both him and Crawford. Scott-Padget treats all the men terribly, with dozens of lashes for even minor offenses. Not only that, but Crawford's young son is serving in a junior capacity, and Scott-Padget treats him badly, too.

Meanwhile, there's a problem with the mission. Apparently, Napoleon's power in the Mediterranean has grown to the point that most of the British ships have left for the Atlantic, which means that Crawford's mission to rendezvous with a particular ship at a particular point isn't going to succeed: the ship has already left. Scott-Padget wants to change the mission, which could be a problem if the original mission turns out still to be feasible. But in the late 18th century with its limited communication, who knows?

Further complicating matters is that in the first skirmish with the French, the Defiant captures a French officer who claims that Napoleon is planning an invasion of England. (Bloody likely that is.) Will the involuntary sailors want to go on a mutiny if it makes it more likely that such an invasion will go ahead, hurting their families back home?

Damn the Defiant! is a movie that seem to me to cover a lot of the same ground as any of the other movies I've seen about that era of the British navy. And yet, the whole time it seemed to be doing what it did very well. I also found something interesting in the inversion from Mutiny on the Bounty of having the first officer be the martinet instead of the commander. Guinness and Bogarde are quite good, and the technical aspects are well-done too, with the possible minor quibble that I highly doubt British ships of that era were that well-lit. (But that's probably a problem with movies in general considering how much light they needed to shoot scenes.)

For anybody looking for a lesser-known movie about the navy in that era, I can highly recommend Damn the Defiant!

It's a very very very fine house

Many years ago, probably August of 2009 since that seems to be the last time it was on TCM, I saw the movie Our Mother's House on TCM. It's one that I'd always wanted to see because when we were kids there was a paperback copy up on the bookshelf, and I always remembered the auther for his impsoing-sounding surname, Julian Gloag. The movie itself turned out to be wonderfully creepy, and I've been waiting for it to show up on TCM again so that I could do a blog post about it. It's finally back on the TCM schedule for this evening at 6:00 PM. You'll definitely want to catch it since it's been five years since the last showing and it doesn't seem to be on DVD.

The setting is one of those big old London houses which look more appealing than they really are, as this one houses a single mother and her seven children. The mother is sickly and eventually dies, which poses a serious problem. The older kids realize that when the authorities learn of Mom's death, they're going to split up the siblings and send them to various homes, which none of them really want at all. So the oldest kids learn how to forge Mom's signature so they can continue to cash the benefit checks, and bury Mom out in the back garden and turn the place into a bit of a shrine.

I told you it was creepy. Ah, but it's going to get more creepy. They have to keep up the fiction of Mom being alice, which is tough because you do have people who are going to be coming to the house and because the younger siblings have understandable difficulty with things like reality versus fantasy and because young kids are notoriously bad at keeping secrets. You can only imagine the mental pressure that the older siblings put on the younger ones to keep their existence going. And when another kid shows up to the house having run away, that threatens to blow the whole thing up too.

But that's eventually not the biggest of their problems. Just as the social workers are about to figure out what's going on, who shows up but Dad (Dirk Bogarde), who's been out of the picture for years. Or, at least, he claims to be Dad, and that's the problem. In theory, he might be able to help support them, but on the other hand, he might give away their secret since he's an adult and much better equipped at dealing with the outside world than the kids are. Worse than that, he knows some secrets about their mother, which causes the older siblings to become increasingly paranoid of him.

For me, Dirk Bogarde was the only recognizable name in the cast. But this isn't a movie about the actors so much as it is about the story, and it's a story that works well, being as disturbing as it is. From an outsider's point of view, the kids have serious problems, and yet we can't help rooting for them to get away with their ruse, as far-fetched as it is, because that's all they know. (The question of what happens when they grow up is left unanswered.) There are movies out there that are objectively better made, but in terms of entertainment value you could do far worse than watching Our Mother's House.

So Long at the Fair

A search of the blog suggests that I have never done a full-length post on So Long at the Fair before. It's airing again this evening at 10:15 PM, so today's a good day to blog about it.

Simmons stars as Vicky, a young Englishwoman who is traveling to Paris with her brother Johnny (David Tomlinson) to attend the World's Fair. (It's been long enough since I saw the movie that I don't recall whether it's the 1889 or the 1900 Fair; IMDb reviewers suggest both.) They get rooms in a hotel and see some of the sights of the exhibition. What a nice trip! Of course, we know that something's going to happen. The next morning, Vicky goes to her brother's room. Instead of her brother, she finds a bathroom! That's odd. Well, she could have gotten the room numbers wrong; such things have been known to happen. But in this case, she can't find her brother at all! Oh my, that's a problem.

Faced with a brother who's missing, Vicky does what any sane normal person would do. She asks for help. However, the folks at the hotel show her that her brother is not in the register, while that room he was supposed to have has always been a bathroom. How could he ever possibly have taken that room to sleep in? Going to the authorities doesn't help, either, as Vicky is unable to provide any evidence that she even came to Paris with a brother. In fact, Vicky, we're beginning to wonder whether you're sane at all!

This is a premise that has been used in several movies that I've mentioned in the past. Probably most notable is The Lady Vanishes, where Margaraet Lockwood can't prove to anybody that Dame May Whitty existed, at least until Michael Redgrave comes along. In Dangerous Crossing, it's Jeanne Craine on a boat with a husband for whom there's no evidence of his existence. All such movies have one big issue: how to make the conspiracy theory plausible. After all, there has to be some conspiracy if our heroine isn't insane.

In the case of So Long at the Fair, if I think too hard about it, I find that the conspiracy to keep Vicky from learning about her brother is ludicrous. There's no way that many people could pull it off, and no good reason for them to want to. True, they do claim to have a reason at the end, but while it explains the difference, I don't think it explains the motivation for not telling Vicky. That having been said, I think So Long at the Fair is also part of a genre of film that shouldn't be looked at quite as seriously for plot holes. We can enjoy The Lady Vanishes, or any of Hitchcock's "wrong man tries to prove his innocence" movies, despite the fact that most of them strain credulity. And in that same light, So Long at the Fair is really a pretty good movie. Simmons is fine as the woman who can't find her brother, while Dirk Bogarde plays the kind man who eventually starts to believe her. There's nothing too taxing here, but some good entertainment.

So Long at the Fair has been released to DVD in Europe, but I don't know if it's received a DVD release in the US.