Better than stepping on somebody else's toes

I've mentioned in a couple of other movies that I've blogged about here that both James Gleason and Donald O'Connor were selected to be part of TCM's Summer Under the Stars in August 2025. As it turns out, they also did a movie together, although the structure of the movie makes their common appearance rather brief: On Your Toes.

Gleason plays Phil Dolan Sr. the patriarch of a family still trying to make it in vaudeville even though it's a dying business. Queenie Smith plays Mom, while O'Connor plays a young Phil Dolan Jr. Dad wants him to keep going with vaudeville, while Mom insists he get an education. Another of the acts in the same troupe as the Dolans has a young ballet dancer of Russian descent, Vera Barnova, although her act leaves the troupe.

In any case, 15 years pass and Phil Jr. (played as an adult by Eddie Albert) has gotten something of an education, trying to make it as a songwriter and, if possible, a "serious" composer. In a hotel lobby he runs into grifting Ivan Boultonoff (Leonid Kinskey), a composer for a Russian emigre ballet company managed by equally grifting Sergei Alexandrovitch (Alan Hale). Ivan offers to give Phil music composition lessons, although it's as much a way for him to hear Phil's ideas, and liking them, get them to Sergei. That, and get the main credit for the music since the orchestrations are going to be his. Phil's recompense, as it were, is going to be dancing a minor role in the current show.

And wouldn't you know it, but the prima ballerina of the company is none other than... Vera Barnova, also all grown up (and played by Vera Zorina). The two meet again and rekindle a friendship, although it's expected that Vera is going to have a more serious relationship with one of the male dancers. But having a friend in the prima ballerina is a valuable thing to have. With that in mind, when things go south with a male lead, Phil's vaudeville dance experience comes in handy as he knows all the dance moves for what's going to be an experimental jazz ballet.

What Vera and Phil don't know is that, for various reasons, a group of Russian agents have been brought in to assassinate the original Russian lead dancer as part of the climax to the jazz ballet. Vera and Phil do eventually learn of this plot, but it's mid-performance, forcing them to try to keep dancing long enough for the authorities to stop the murder from going forward and catching the responsible guilty parties.

On Your Toes is based on a Rodgers and Hart musical that, to be honest, I hadn't heard of before seeing the movie. Having read the reviews of the movie, it seems that enough was changed from the original stage musical -- or at least enough of the traditional songs removed -- that fans of the stage musical aren't fans of this movie adaptation. At the same time, the ballet numbers we get in the movie are apparently faithful renditions from the original stage musical, and are considered highlights. For me, not having seen the stage musical, I don't have that issue. I do have other issues with it, however, such as the grifting nature of Ivan and Sergei that it makes them both more unsympathetic than humorous.

So, On Your Toes may not be for everybody, but some people are really going to like it.

Sister Carrie

Jennifer Jones was honored last August in Summer Under the Stars, which once again gave me the opportunity to record some movies I hadn't seen before. One of those was Carrie, the adaptation of the Theodore Dreiser novel Sister Carrie.

Jones stars as Carrie Meeber, daughter in a small-town Missouri family at the turn of the century who have already had one daughter go off to Chicago for better economic opportunities. It's Carrie's turn, as her parents buy her a one-way ticket to Chicago. One the train, she's keeping to herself, except that she's pestered by one of the male passengers, Charles Drouet (Eddie Albert). Charles is a traveling salesman and is immediately taken by Carrie although he's really much too forward about it, especially for circa 1900. And he doesn't seem too happy when Carrie gets off the train in South Chicago, since that's considered the slum area.

Life with her sister isn't the greatest, since money is tight and Carrie's brother-in-law is tough in a sensible way: you have to be a bit strict to survive in such conditions. Carrie has a job as a seamstress in what is essentially a sweatshop, but injures her hand in an industrial accident and gets fired, this being the days before workers' comp and other such benefits. Carrie goes to see Charles, who takes her to Fitzgerald's, an upscale restaurant managed by George Hurstwood (Laurence Olivier).

Carrie, having lost her job, winds up moving in with Charles, which is rather scandalous. Just as scandalous is the idea that Hurstwood is also smitten with Carrie. The thing is, Hurstwood already has a wife Julia (Miriam Hopkins) and two teenaged kids. The restaurant manager job is a good one that puts the Hurstwoods on the cusp of being upper-middle-class, with the prospect of marrying off the kids to people of better economic status. But if it were to be found out that George is lusting after someone young enough to be his daughter, well that might be a problem.

And then George does something profoundly stupid. At the end of the day at Fitzgerald's, George makes a mistake with the time lock on the restaurant's safe, leaving him with about $10,000 that he can't get in the safe. Now, the right thing to do would be to contact the owner of the restaurant, although that would have been a bit time consuming for 1900. Instead, George decides he's going to run off with the money, but not before picking up Carrie and bringing the two of them to New York. George also rather stupidly blows through the money in double-quick time. Sure enough, Fitzgerald sends men to New York to look for Hurstwood, who can't really keep a job in the restaurant business once his past is discovered.

Things get even worse when George's son is about to get married. Julia wants to sell the house, but George has to co-sign to sell. The thing is, he's still married to Julia, despite having told Carrie that he'd gotten a divorce. And by this time Carrie has gotten knocked up. But while George keeps going downhill, there's a third act for Carrie. She lies about her past and says she's been on the stage in Chicago, which gets her a job as a chorus girl with the opportunity to move up in the world. She splits from George hoping that George's son will forgive him, and eventually becomes reasonably big in the theater world, big enough to have a name in noticeable letters on the posters. Both Charles and George see that name, and show up (at different times) at Carrie's dressing room....

I haven't read Sister Carrie, so I can't be specific on what was changed from the book to the movie, although when Alicia Malone presented Carrie on TCM she mentioned that the book had floated around Hollywood for quite some time while people tried to figure out how to make it conform to the Production Code. The movie was not a success at the box office, and having seen it, I think I can understand why. This was supposed to be a prestige production, and the leads all give good enough performances. But at the same time, it feels like there's something a bit off with the movie, like the various characters don't really have the appropriate emotional connection with each other. There's just something flat about the final product.

But give Carrie a try and see for yourself if you like it.

Oklahoma

Hollywood has a long history of finding properties from the Broadway stage to turn into movies, both dramatic plays and musicals. Making roadshow versions of big Broadway musical hits really became a thing in the 1950s, I presume as a way to try to get people away from their new television sets and to a place where they could see something BIG on a big screen and in bright, vibrant colors. Fitting very well into this cycle is the 1955 version of Oklahoma!, which will be on TCM tomorrow, September 25, at 8:00 PM.

Gordon MacRae is the male lead here, playing Curly McLain, a cowboy in the late stages of Oklahoma's being a territory, so around the turn of the last century. He rides onto the scene singing "Oh What a Beautiful Morning", as he's heading to see Laurey Williams (Shirley Jones in her film debut), whom he loves. He wants to invite her to the big box social, but she plays coy because of how slow he's been in trying to woo her. As a bit of revenge, she actually thinks of going to the social with Jud Fry (Rod Steiger), a farm hand on the farm where Laurey lives with her Aunt Eller (Charlotte Greenwood).

Laurey has a friend, Ado Annie (Gloria Grahame), and she's the woman in a love triangle as well. Will Parker (Gene Nelson) is a cowboy like Curly, and wants to marrie Annie, but her father (James Whitmore) isn't so sure as he wants someone with a not so stable profession to marry his daughter. Perhaps if he can go to the big city and show himself to be a success. Will has done that, and his first appearance in the movie is his coming home on the train from Kansas City. However, in the meantime, a peddler, Ali Hakim (Eddie Albert), has come to town, and Annie has an interest in him too.

But the main story is the Laurey/Curly/Jud storyline. Curly and Jud are entirely different, as if you couldn't tell from the casting of Rod Steiger as Jud. Jud is decidedly from the wrong social class, and you get the feeling that in a different sort of western he's be the outlaw, if you can really cast Rod Steiger in a western. He lives in little more than a shack on the farm, and he and Curly get into an argument in the smokehouse that leads to them firing their guns, although at least not at each other. We know, however, that Laurey and Curly are really right for each other, but Laurey has a really bad dream about marrying Curly and how Jud is going to react if that happens.

She was right to have that bad dream. Jud gets even nastier, leading to Curly offering to marry Laurey for protection, which sends Jud over the edge. But this is a musical, so we're going to get a happy ending that also satisfies the Production Code.

I've stated before that I'm not the biggest fan of musicals, so I'm not quite the write blogger to look to for a recommendation on a movie like Oklahoma!. The production is exceedingly well made, and according to the articles I read (I haven't seen any stage version of the musical), it preserves most of Rodgers and Hammerstein's songs, many of which have become standards. MacRae and Jones are also an appealing couple, as they can both sing as well as play convincing pioneer types.

For me, however, the movie did have some problems. One is that the movie runs a bit too long at 141 minutes (and TCM didn't run the roadshow version which has an intro/intermission/exit music). Part of that is down to the dream sequence, which reminded me of the Cyd Charisse number near the end of Singin' in the Rain: it may be well done, but it feels tacked on, and runs so, so long. Some of the casting is also interesting. I mentioned Rod Steiger who I think is out of place as a circa-1900 Oklahoman, although he could certainly play hair-trigger temper types. And then there's Gloria Grahame. IMDb's soundtrack page for the movie doesn't list anybody dubbing her, and it certainly sounds like her voice. Except that she can't sing. Her musical number, "I Can't Say No", brings the production to a screeching halt.

But fans of musicals will most likely love this adaptation of Oklahoma!, and it's easy to see why.

The Fuller Brush Girl

Another movie that I've had on my DVR for several months is the Lucille Ball comedy The Fuller Brush Girl. I don't think it's coming up on TCM any time soon, but it does show up from time to time on Cinevault Classics, one of the FAST channels that's on both the Roku Channel and TubiTV, albeit with commercials. (Indeed, it's one of the movies regularly in the promos.)

The movie begins with a comedic credits sequence of Lucy trying to see cosmetics, which is what Fuller Brush girls do, although she's not actually working for Fuller immediately after the credits. Instead, she's Sally Elliot, a switchboard operator for the Maritime Steamship Company. She works there with her fiancé Humphrey, who's a filing clerk. The two together would like to buy a house in the sort of new development that appeared in Lucy's earlier movie Miss Grant Takes Richmond, but they don't make enough money.

There's a chance, however, when Sally learns that the previous inventory has been fired. There's a chance for Harvey to get a promotion. What they don't know, however, is that their boss, Harvey Simpson (Jerome Cowan), is actually using the company as a front for smuggling. He could use an inventory man who doesn't realize what's going on, and Harvey fits that role perfectly. He's surprised, however, when he gets the promotion, since not five minutes earlier he just had the boss yelling at him to get the hell out of the office.

Meanwhile, Sally being in need of a job, she tries to apply with the Fuller Brush company since her best friend also has a territory in town with them. But Sally is as incompetent as Lucill Ball's character in her previous Columbia film Miss Grant Takes Richmond, which is an opportunity to engage in some side humor of the sort at which Lucille Ball was always quite good. But there's also a plot point here.

Simpson and his wife have gotten into an argument over some of those Fuller cosmetics Sally's girlfriend had brought to Sally's old office, and wants Sally to explain to Mrs. Simpson (Lee Patrick) what really happened. In the meantime, however, Mrs. Simpson decides to oust her husband from the shipping company, which would really screw up that smuggling. So Mr. Simpson hires a burlesque girl to impersonate Sally for that explanation, and then has the burlesque girl murder Mrs. Simpson. Sally shows up as a Fuller Brush girl just as the burlesque girl has murdered Mrs. Simpson. Said burlesque performer knows Sally out and frames her for the killing. Sally and Humphrey have to solve the case while evading the police, leading to a comic finale aboard one of the steamship company's ships.

The Fuller Brush Girl was made not long before Lucille Ball decamped for TV to start I Love Lucy. Ball is in reasonably good -- and reasonably typical -- zany form here, although I will admit that I prefer Miss Grant Takes Richmond. I think that's in part because Lucy was better paired there with William Holden, and because Lucy was the only incompetent one in that movie. Here, both leads are supposed to be somewhat incompetent, and that doesn't really work as well. Still, The Fuller Brush Girl is more than pleasant enough, and definitely worth a watch.

Attack

Another movie in TCM's Memorial Day lineup that I had marked for watching was Attack. This one shows up tonight at 8:00 PM, so I made a point of watching it.

The movie starts with a pre-credits sequence in "Europe, 1944". Obviously, this is in the middle of World War II, or more accurately, in the later stages of the European theater since it's after the D-Day invasion. (Place names on the signs suggest they're in Belgium which would place things around the time of the Battle of the Bulge, except that that took place around Christmas 1944 and nothing in the movie looks like winter weather.) A platoon gets caught in a skirmish, and things go badly. Second in command Lt. Costa (Jack Palance) orders a charge that should be backed up by cover fire, but the unit commander, Capt. Cooney (Eddie Albert) inexplicable fails to provide the covering fire, leading to a bunch of American soldiers needlessly getting killed.

Costa obviously has good reason to dislike Cooney, and they're going to be seeing a lot of each other, and not only in combat since they're still in the same unit. When they get back behind the front lines, they're set to meet Cooney's commander, Lt. Col. Bartlett (Lee Marvin). It's at this point that we get some exposition that makes things a bit clearer, and implies that we're going to get a stage-play like drama rather than an action movie. Cooney has a prominent family, and the implication is that it's family connections that got Cooney his rank as a commander. Bartlett, for his part, is worried about what's coming after the war, as he's thinking about politics; whether this is electoral or internal military politics isn't quite clear and not that relevant anyway.

When the three men are set to meet for a poker game, a fourth is also involved: Costa's friend Lt. Woodruff (William Smithers). Woodruff is closer to neutral in all of this, although he definitely gets why Costa dislikes Cooney and shares the belief that commanding troops in battle isn't exactly Cooney's strength. With that in mind, Woodruff talks to Bartlett and asks if it would be possible for Cooney to be given a transfer to a desk job well away from the front lines, as this would be better for everybody, including Cooney. Smithers of course doesn't know about the Bartlett's ties to Cooney, and Bartlett eventually puts Woodruff off by suggesting that after the last skirmish, their platoon is going to get sent to the rear and that, besides, the war is going to be over soon anyway.

Yeah, right, although in Bartlett's defense he couldn't know that the Germans were going to stage the Battle of the Bulge counteroffensive. Needless to say, this requires more American troops at the front, so any R&R away from the action is going to have to way. Cooney's squadron advances on a village, and things don't go well when the Germans turn out to be occupying said village. Cooney on the one hand, and the men under him, especially Costa, have differing ideas on how to deal with their being under fire.

Attack is one of those movies that's gone under the radar, no pun intended, I think in part because it was more or less an independent release through director/producer Robert Aldrich. Although there are combat scenes, the movie is decidedly more of a character study, and not a bad one at that. However, it does feel a lot at times as though it's belying its stage origins.

Intriguingly, Attack doesn't have any screen thanking the Department of Defense for their cooperation in making this movie. That's because the department didn't help at all. They saw the script and how it made some of the officers look quite bad, and basically said no way in hell were they helping. In some ways I think that works to the movie's advantage, although I think it also leads to the look that is at times a bit stagey.

If you want a war movie that's not quite the Hollywood rah-rah without being as revisionist as later movies -- especially those about the Vietnam War-- Attack isn't a bad little movie to watch.

The Gentle People

A movie that I think I'd seen part of at one time several years ago is Out of the Fog. It showed up some months back as part of TCM's Noir Alley even thought it isn't really a noir. So I recorded it in order to be able to watch it in full and do a review on it here.

After the opening credits, we get a fog-shrouded pier somewhere in Brooklyn. A man walks down to where the boats are moored, and flicks a match into one of the boats, starting a fire. He then walks into Caroline's bar and restaurant, run by Caroline (Odette Myrtil) who is in love with her short-order cook Olaf (John Qualen). Olaf feels she's a bit smothering, and would rather spend time with his best friend Jonah (Thomas Mitchell), a tailor who owns the place next door. The two of them have a boat and like to go fishing together.

The man who set the fire, Goff (John Garfield) goes back into the kitchen where he starts talkin to Olaf and then Jonah when he comes in. Eventually they hear the sirens of a fire engine. Goff, having set the fire, knows fully well that the boat is on fire and whose boat it is, so he knows it's not the one that Olaf and Jonah co-own; of course, nobody else knows any of this yet or what Goff's true nature is, although for a discerning viewer it shouldn't be too difficult to guess. And it's going to be revealed anyway.

We still have a few key characters to be revealed, however. Stella (Ida Lupino) is Jonah's adult daughter. The family live together in an apartment above the tailor's shop, and Stella is getting a bit sick of this kind of life because she wants something better. She's got a nice boyfriend in George (Eddie Albert), but she wants something better. So when Goff shows up, she realizes she's going to get that excitement she's always been craving.

Not that the excitement is going to be good for her. Goff, if you hadn't figured it out, does an extortion racket on the pier, and starts extorting Olaf and Jonah for what little money they have in exchange for not destroying their boat. It gets worse when Goff discovers that Olaf and Jonah have saved a bit of money. And then Jonah realizes that Goff is trying to put the moves on his daughter and that she seems to be OK with it, which really frightens him. Eventually, Jonah and Olaf figure that the only way to save themselves from the extortion, and to save Stella from Goff, is to kill Goff. The problem is that there's that pesky Production Code, and Olaf and Jonah are clearly supposed to be the good guys in this piece.

With the cast I've mentioned, and add in Aline MacMahon as Jonah's wife, it should be no surprise that Out of the Fog is well-acted, and definitely worth watching for the performances. It has a few problems, however, that are down to the time in which it was made. One, as I already alluded to, is the Production Code, which severely constrained how Hollywood could resolve all the dramatic conflicts that Olaf and Jonah have. The other thing is that the whole production looks clearly like it was done on the studio backlot and nowhere near the Brooklyn piers where the movie is supposed to be set. (It's based on a New York stage play.)

Out of the Fog may not be a noir despite the title or Eddie Muller's showing it in Noir Alley, but it's still one to watch.

McQ

I briefly mentioned the John Wayne movie McQ a couple of times in the past, mostly to talk about the interesting (mis)casting of Wayne in the title role. I had never done a full-length review of the movie here, however, mostly because when I tried recording it some years back, I lost the DirecTV signal for several minutes that just happened to coincide with the end of the movie. TCM ran McQ again a few months back, so I made certain to record it in order to be able to watch it and finally do a review of it here.

As I mentioned in the opening paragraph, John Wayne plays McQ, which is really short for a full name of Lon McHugh, hence the nickname. But we don't see him for several minutes. The film starts off with a sequence where a man drives into Seattle in the pre-dawn hours and shoots dead two police officers. Then a man in a police uniform has a rendezvous with another car, delivering a satchel of some sort. For his troubles this other man gets shot as well.

It's here that McQ shows up, as the third guy was Sgt. Boyle, who was McQ's partner on the force as well as a fairly close friend. McQ is another in the long line of unorthodox police officers, living on a boat like Quincy, M.E. and engaging in a lot more violence than police in those days were purported to have used. Now, in some ways this is understandable such as when we see a hitman show up to the marina trying to kill McQ, who has to fight back, shooting in self-defense. But other times, it's the sort of violence that really makes life difficult for his boss, Capt. Kosterman (Eddie Albert).

Sgt. Boyle eventually dies, leaving behind a widow Lois (Diana Muldaur), and it's up to McQ to try to console her. That, and he has to investigate since he wants justice for his deceased partner. It seems fairly clear to him that a man called Santiago (Al Lettieri) is using his shipping business as a front to bring drugs into Seattle, and McQ is determined to bring down Santiago. Unfortunately, he's too zealous, comming violence against Santiago that he shouldn't have, forcing McQ to either resign or face desk duty.

McQ picks the former so that he can go work with an old colleague who's now a private investigator, and as he investigates he gets the sinking feeling that perhaps the police are more involved than just Sgt. Boyle possibly being a dirty cop. It also goes without saying that as McQ gets closer to the truth, he finds his life is in more and more danger. He is of course right that Santiago is involved, but it's not just the two men; that leads to the final shootout on a beach.

A lot of people, not just me, comment on the casting of John Wayne here, and I think the main reason for it is how dark the movie is. Despite the fact that there was a fair amount of violence in the westerns Wayne made in the final years of his career, most of those westerns have a somewhat lighter tone. McQ, however, is unrelentingly dark and perhaps even more violent than the westerns. Wayne would go on to make a second contemporary cop movie after this one, Brannigan, and that one despite its violence has the lighter tone that fits Wayne perfectly.

This isn't to say that McQ is a bad movie by any means. While some of the other cop movies of the 1970s are better, including I think Brannigan, Wayne does a fine job here while Al Lettieri makes a great villain again. Lettieri died much too young. The location shooting is nice, and there are some good supporting performances too.

McQ is a movie that should be seen for more reasons than just the seemingly curious casting of John Wayne as a latter-day cop. It's pretty good in its own right.

The Joker Is Wild

Er, not quite....

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Technically, nobody's forcing you to stay happy

In the last week or two, I've inadvertently watched several movies which have aviation as a theme, as we saw with Conquest of the Air which I recommended at the beginning the week. Recently, I popped in a DVD from a Universal James Stewart box set and watched You Gotta Stay Happy, which I have to admit was a new-to-me title when I first saw the set on Amazon.

Stewart plays Marvin Payne, a cargo pilot who has just flown into New York and shows up at a hotel looking for a friend of his who is able to get a cheap rate on one of the rooms because Payne always leaves well before checkout time. Meanwhile, also showing up at the hotel is Dee Dee Dillwood (Joan Fontaine). She's one of those flighty heiress types who were common in screwball comedies of the 1930s, but this movie was released in 1948. She's finally agreed to get married to lawyer Henry (Willard Parker), but she doesn't really want to do it. So she runs out of the bridal suite and into... the suite that Payne has for the night.

Dee Dee obviously doesn't want Payne to know the truth of what's going on, and doesn't want to get caught by Henry either, so she makes Payne's life a bit of a living hell by delaying him from getting out of the room. She's like to go west like Payne is, but of course Payne is running a cargo airline, and they're not supposed to take paying passengers. So Dee Dee winds up becoming technically an employee of the company until she can get off in Chicago.

Payne co-owns the company with "Bullets" Baker (Eddie Albert), who at this point in his career was playing sort of the lighter and not quite so oily Jack Carson types. He's the co-pilot for the flight, and in order to make a little extra money, he too takes on a couple of illicit passengers. There's a newlywed couple (Marcy McGuire and Arthur Walsh), and an embezzler (Porter Hall) who had a blonde secretary. Dee Dee is a blonde, too, although I'm giving a bit away, not that she's an embezzler. Rounding out the cargo is a coffin with a dead body that needs to be at its funeral in Los Angeles by a certain time, and a cigar-smoking chimpanzee.

If you've seen any of the 1930s screwball comedies, you can figure out much of what happens well before it does. Dee Dee doesn't stay in Chicago, getting back on the plane instead, and then further west the plane has to make an emergency landing, where everybody is forced to spend a night on a farm owned by Mr. Racknell (Percy Kilbride). Payne and Dee Dee find out that night that they might just be in love. Since they're the two leads, we sort of expect them to get together in the final reel, but how is that going to happen.

You Gotta Stay Happy is modest stuff for both Stewart and Fontaine. Not that it's terrible; it's more that the material is old-fashioned and uninventive. Both players try their hardest and the movie is entertaining enough for one watch, but it's also the sort of thing that's forgettable after you've watched it. I'm glad it's on the box set, but I don't think it's something I'd pick up as a standalone unless it was at bargain bin prices.

I'll cry some day or another

Susan Hayward made a whole bunch of melodramatic potboilers in the 1950s and 1960s. Some of them were even based on real events, such as I'll Cry Tomorrow.

Hayward plays singer Lillian Roth, although we don't see Hayward at first, as the story briefly starts with Lillian's childhood. Her mom Katie (Jo Van Fleet) is a stage mother, pushing Lillian into performing on Broadway, even though Lillian would rather play with neighborhood friends like David. If there was any upside to the pushing, it was that it provided Lillian with the opportunity for a career, as she would become a successful singer and actress.

Adult Lillian still loved David (played as an adult by Ray Danton), and he can help her career because he's an entertainment lawyer. But Mom doesn't like him, thinking he'll slow down Lillian's career, so she tries to sabotage their relationship. Worse, David gets some sort of sickness that kills him at a young age, dying in hospital while Lillian, who was going to marry him, is performing so she can't be by his side when he dies. She drowns her sorrow in drink, meeting hard-drinking serviceman Willie (Don Taylor). Their nights out on the town lead to more drinking with the two even getting married one one of those benders, Lillian only realizing the next day that she's married.

But the drinking is beginning to have a negative effect on Lillian's life. Eventually the marriage breaks up at which point Lillian meets Tony (Richard Conte), who is also an alcoholic but who knows that he can't have another drink. If she learns one thing from her relationship with Tony, it's not that she shouldn't be drinking, but that she should be hiding her drinking so that everybody will be thinking she isn't drinking when in fact she is. (Good luck with that.)

Lillian's life gets enough out of control that she thinks about throwing herself out of the window of one of those crappy old hotels that seemed to dot New York in old movies, but of course she doesn't do it. Instead, she winds up going to Alcoholics Anonymous.

I'll Cry Tomorrow is a movie that I found a bit odd for a whole bunch of reasons. It was made at MGM, and despite Hayward's scenery chewing, the MGM portrayal of alcoholism seems a bit too neat and tidy. Hayward's acting also causes the movie to veer into unintentional comedy at times, and the movie is certainly unsubtle. Hayward also did her own singing, which isn't bad but not something she could have made a career out of.

I'll Cry Tomorrow is certainly worth one watch, although I'm not certain it's one I'd want to revisit. It got a release to DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive, but oddly enough it's one of those that's available at Amazon but not currently at the TCM Shop.