Your wacky family turns me on

A sub-genre, or maybe a plot trope, of a surprising number of movies is one where a person, usually a rich and hitherto proper man, falls in love with a woman who is either "free-spirited" or else has an entire family of unorthodox relatives. A minor entry into that field is the Lucille Ball comedy A Girl, a Guy, and a Gob.

Now, as you might imagine, Lucille Ball is The Girl, although considering how she'd later be known for her zaniness she's actually the one normal member of her family. She plays Dot Duncan, a working girl who does want to be more cultured. To that end, Dot's shiftless brother Pigeon (Lloyd Corrigan) found some opera tickets, for an entire box no less. Of course, the box has been taken out on subscription by the Herrick family, including Stephen (a young Edmond O'Brien) and his fiancée Cecilia (Marguerite Chapman), who if anything might be even more strait-laced than Stephen.

Dot gets the impression Pigeon came across the tickets by less than honest means, so she goes to Herrick's business, the shipping firm he runs together with Abel Martin (Henry Travers) to sort of apologize, and winds up getting herself hired as a secretary in the process. Of course with a young woman like this there's always the question of how long she'll be keeping the job since women generally quit to become housewives when they got married. And, as for Dot, she's got a fiancé of her own, of sorts, in the form of "Coffee Cup" (George Murphy). Coffee Cup is a would be professional wrestler, but that doesn't pay the bills in general, and certainly not enough to get married to Dot. So he did a hitch with the Navy that he's about to finish up.

Now, Coffee Cup is looking for ways to get that money to marry Dot, and Stephen isn't really doing anything to stop this since he wants Dot to be happy and has a fiancée of his own. But you know that the two are going to wind up together in the final reel. Things start going bad when Coffee Cup and Pigeon kinda-sorta cause a right in which Stephen gets knocked unconscious, so they take Stephen to the Duncan home to recover for the night. That's bad enough for Stephen, since it means he's neglecting Cecilia. And then there's the way Pigeon keeps blowing the money that Coffee Cup would use to try to get married to Dot.

More complications arise when Abel is the one person who thinks that Stephen and Dot would probably be more right for each other, so tries to push Stephen to pursue Dot even though both of them are already in relationships with other people. But again, this is the sort of movie where you known who's going to wind up with whom in the end.

I've mentioned several times how, when Lucille Ball was TCM's Star of the Month ages ago, Carol Burnett did a piece for the spotlight talking about her great friend. One of the things Burnett mentioned is how the studios, especially RKO to whom Ball was under contract, didn't quite know how to use her. This sort of comedy should have been more up Ball's alley, but then she's not really the one being asked to be zany. Also, some of the characters, especially Pigeon, are so unlikable that you just want Dot and Stephen to abandon their respective families.

But maybe you'll like A Girl, a Guy, and a Gob more than I did. Apparently the critics seemed to like it.

Fighter Squadron

As I mentioned last week, Rock Hudson is TCM's Star of the Month for November, and his movies are airing every Tuesday in prime time. This includes today, which happens to be Veterans' Day in the US, a time when TCM normally airs a bunch of military-themed movies in honor of the day. As it turns out, TCM has enough military movies with Hudson in the cast to use for tonight's prime time lineup, although the last one is Hudson's debut where he only has an uncredited bit part with just a few lines: Fighter Squadron, which is on at 5:15 AM tomorrow (Nov. 12), or the end of the prime-time lineup.

It's 1943, and war is raging in Europe. Since the western side of the Allies haven't been able to start their land invasion quite yet, at least not across the English Channel, much of the action is air raids over targets in Germany, which comes with a fairly heavy price. The planes are supposed to provide support flying in formation, and stay at a high altitude to avoide the German surface-to-air missiles. One pilot, Maj. Hardin (Edmond O'Brien), thinks these orders are the wrong ones, and that the pilots need more flexible measures for dealing with the Germans. Indeed, he had flown over China wiht the Flying Tigers, so he's already been exposed to that greater flexibility. The problem, however, is that he engages in that flexibility in direct violation of those orders.

This goes up the chain of command, from Maj. Hardin's commanding officer Col. Brickley (John Rodney), to the generals, Maj. Gen McCready (Henry Hull), and above him Brig. Gen. Gilbert (Sheppard Strudwick). McCready has some sympathy, but others point out that the flexibility also comes with a short-term cost of more planes and pilots being damaged or lost. Brickley needs to think about keeping the men under his command safe to fly the next mission. Meanwhile, the other men in Hardin's squadron, notably best friend Capt. Hamilton (Robert Stack), like Hardin.

So the higher-ups decide to teach Hardin a lesson. Col. Brickley gets a promotion, and suggests that Hardin be promoted to take his place. Now that he'll be more or less grounded and have to have these other men now under his command, perhaps he'll understand why Brickley was the way he was with Hardin. Hardin tries to be nice to his men as the bombing raids continue, but there's one catch. He still believes in the idea that the men under his command shouldn't be married, because then pilots will think about their wives and not do some of the risk-your-life things necessary to carry out the mission. Hamilton just happens to be engaged, so he heads back to America when he gets leave and gets married, although he does return to the unit much to Hardin's consternation. More raids follow up to the unit's provision of air cover for the D-Day invasion.

Fighter Squadron is nothing if not formulaic, and decidedly a product of Hollywood. There's even a daft subplot about a pilot who has a series of girlfriends, and is able to get off base to see them through the ruse of obtaining a bunch of black cats. The other pilots don't like seeing black cats and ask him to take the cats away, which gives him a chance to go off base. It's supposed to be funny, but to me it was just irritating. Fighter Squadron is well-enough made, however, and I can see why audiences back in the day might have been entertained. Better and more inventive war movies, however, have come out in the intervening years.

Before the foxes were even little

I did a post on the movie The Little Foxes some time back. Some years late, Lillian Hellman wrote a play that was a prequel to The Little Foxes, called Another Part of the Forest. It's unsurprising that the play would get turned into a movie, and it's one I'd been curious to see for some time. Several months back, TCM finally ran it, and I recently got around to watching it to do a post on here.

The Little Foxes tells the story of the Hubbard family in a small town in Alabama circa 1900. As Another Part of the Forest opens, it's Confederate Memorial Day in the year 1880, so 15 years after the war ended. Col. Isham leads the entire town -- well, almost the entire town -- in remembering their defeat, specifically a massacre of local boys that Isham just knows someone local had to clue the Union Army into, at the local war memorial, and watching from the nearby woods is Lavinia Hubbard (Florence Eldridge), the matriarch of the Hubbard family. I metioned that almost the entire town is there. Conspicuously not there are most of the Hubbards. Oscar (Dan Duryea, who in the earlier movie played Oscar's son) shows up, but Isham tells him he's decidedly not wanted. This especially because he cavorts with a dance-hall girl.

Oscar's brother Ben (Edmond O'Brien) comes to town having been in the big city, where he was hoping to invest some money. But he was called back home by his father, Marcus (Fredric March), who runs the local dry goods store with an iron fist. Dad was ruthless in making his fortune, and he thinks that all of his kids are varying sorts of weak, and doesn't necessarily care for any of them. As for Lavinia, she seems to think the family has some sin to atone for, as she shows up at the Confederate memorial statue talking about taking some of the family fortune and using it to start a local hospital.

Rounding out the family is daughter Regina (Ann Blyth). She's been carrying on with a rather older man, John Bagtry (John Dall), who was injured in the war and who still hasn't gotten over it. Regina is hoping he'll marry her and take her away to Chicago to get the heck away from the rest of her family. Ben thinks she should marry one of the richer guys in town, but Regina is having nothing to do with that. Indeed, she's perfectly willing to use her brothers' secrets to try to get Dad to do her billing. It's clear that nobody in the family loves one another, with the exception of Lavinia. But then Lavinia is the sort of woman who, in that era, might have been a candidate for a sanitarium, if only for the rest of the family to keep her silent.

Lavinia reveals what she knows of the family secrets, which is that Marcus made the family fortune by smuggling salt during the war and then selling it at inflated prices. That too explains why the rest of the county seems to hate the Hubbards. But there's a lot more in the way of secrets, and as the family bicker with one another, those secrets are about to come out.

I mentioned at the beginning that Another Part of the Forest was based on a stage play, and once again those origins seem fairly clear. Another Part of the Forest, however, is helped by a bunch of fine performances, as well as a script that while not great, is so overripe that it makes the movie fun. The movie winds up being good, although probably not for the reasons Lillian Hellman would have wanted.

Backfire

Gordon MacRae is the honoree today in Summer Under the Stars. MacRae is probably better known for his musicals, but I don't think I've got any of his musicals on my DVR. The one movie of his that I do have on my DVR, however, isn't getting an airing on TCM tomorrow. That movie is Backfire, but I watched it anyway in order to do a post on it for MacRae's day tomorrow.

The movie opens up at a veterans' hospital in the Los Angeles area in November 1948. Steve Connolly (Edmond O'Brien) shows up, and asks one of the nurses, Julie Benson (Virginia Mayo), about one of the patients, Bob Corey (Gordon MacRae). Bob is in the hospital undergoing a series of surgeries for the injuries that he suffered during the war. Bob and Steve served together, and they had thought about going into some sort of enterprise together after the war, although Bob's injuries have put a dent in those plans. Still, Steve has been trying to get a VA loan with the intention to start a ranch in Arizona, although that sort of work is probably not so appropriate for Bob right now.

Fast-forward six weeks, to Christmastime. Bob is looking forward to seeing Steve again; in fact, he's supposed to show up both to celebrate the holiday with Bob as well as to keep Bob apprised of their business plans after Bob gets out of the hospital. Julie informs Bob, however, that she hasn't been able to get a hold of Steve at the hotel where he was supposed to be staying. Bob gives Julie a Christmas present to show his love for her, before Julie gives him a sedative to sleep.

The sedative produces delirium, and later that evening a woman comes into the room. Bob obviously thinks it's Julie, but when he's able to focus -- or thinks that he's able to focus -- he finds a mysterious stranger who isn't Julie, telling him that Steve has been in a horrible car accident and that, like Bob, shattered his spine, but wants to die. This strange woman supposedly knew Steve and gives Bob a pad on which she's written down her address, but when he wakes up the next morning nobody has any records of Bob having had a visitor overnight.

Bob finally gets out of the hospital, and is immediately picked up by the police, who take him to the homicide bureau. Now, Bob has a pretty darn good alibi in that he was in that VA hospital. Instead, the police detective Garcia (Ed Begley) wants to know what Bob knows about Steve. Before the war, Steve was a gambler who had run-ins with the law although he never went to prison; come December 7, 1941, Steve figured this would be a good time to start a new life. But he could easily have gone back to his old ways after the war. Worse, a well-known profesional gambler, Solly Blayne, has been killed, and Steve still had some contact with him, which is why he's a natural suspect. Well, that and he's gone missing.

In a totally unsurprising plot twist that would never work in the real world, Bob decides he's going to do an investigation himself and find out who the real killer was. To do that, he's going to have to find Steve first, or perhaps that mysterious woman who may or may not have visited. The murder was before Bob was informed of the accident, so Steve wouldn't have the sort of alibi Bob had. But you'd think that if Steve had been seriously injured, the authorities would have some record of the accident. Bob eventually gets help from Julie too, and their relationship is going to deepen as they try to clear Steve's name together....

Backfire is another movie that's very much of its genre. It's not a bad movie, but the plot really does strain credulity, and the movie doesn't do anything groundbreaking. A pleasant enough time-passer for a rainy day, and I don't feel like I wasted my time watchng it, but there's certainly better stuff out there.

Don Knotts takes on the generation gap

If you've seen Don Knotts movies like The Incredible Mr. Limpet or The Ghost and Mr. Chicken, you'll know that there's something quaint about them, much the way that I described the movie Yours, Mine, and Ours as an unashamedly square movie that stood the test of time much better than 1960s movies that tried to be hip. Knotts did eventually get cast in one of those movies that was trying to be hip, and that movie, The Love God?, ran on TCM not too long back.

We don't see Knotts until several minutes in. The movie instead starts with Osborn Tremaine (Edmond O'Brien), a publisher of dirty magazines that includes nearly-naked pictures of women, including his wife Evelyn (Maureen Arthur). Osborn has gotten in trouble with the law on several occasions for sending obscene materials through the mail, and as the movie opens he's before the court yet again. He gets another suspended sentence, but there's a bigger punishment for him: the Postmaster General revokes Tremaine's fourth-class mailing privleges. This is the class that allows magazine publishers to send in bulk at significantly reduced rates, and losing that privilege means Tremaine won't be able to send out his subscriptions at an economic price.

As the Tremaines are traveling back home, they enter the small town of Peacock Falls, founded several generations back by the Peacock family that is falling on slightly hard times thanks to current generation member Abner Peacock IV. Abner is an avid bird watcher and has been producing Peacock magazine, which in theory is supposed to appeal to bird watchers, but doesn't seem to have much of a subscriber base. And since it's published from an old building, the other siblings have decided to liquidate this money-losing asset unless somebody can come up with the nearly $50,000 to save it.

This gives Tremaine an idea. He doesn't want the magazine so much as Abner's fourth-class mailing permit. Osborn comes up with the ridiculous idea of buying the rights to publish the magazine and distribute it with the permit, while Abner will remain the publisher of record, since Abner has no clue that Osborn can't be a publisher. This also serves Osborn well, as the authorities wouldn't be coming after him, but after Abner instead. And to keep the authorities from coming after Abner, Osborne sends him on a wild goose chase (no pun intended) to find a famously reclusive bird in the Amazon rain forest, far, far away from civilization.

Abner returns to America, and unsurprisingly gets picked up on an obscenity charge that he knows nothing about since of course he's been in South America for months while Osborn has been the de facto publisher togther with a gangster, J. Charles Twilight. An obscenity trial is held, and an ambulance-chasing civil liberties attorne gloms on to the case. This makes Abner a national celebrity, although he vows to clear his name from the smut allegations.

However, Osborn, Twilight, and their editor Lisa LaMonica (Anne Francis) realize that Abner has to keep publishing smut in order to keep the magazine profitable and protect civil liberties. To this end, they attempt to turn Abner into a swinger, not that Abner could ever actually live like a swinger. Besides, he's got an equally square girlfriend back in Peacock Falls who is still waiting for him....

The Love God? is the sort of movie where it's easy to see why some studio execs and stars, especially those who want to be seen as adjusting to the new times without a Production Code, would think this is great material. And in some ways, casting Don Knotts is a stroke of genius, as he's about as far from a love god as anybody could cast in late 1960s Hollywood. However, Knotts turns out not to be the right person for the role, which I think needs someone who can let everybody be funny around him -- think Henry Fonda in Yours, Mine, and Ours. Instead, Knotts' nebbish persona that worked so well in previous movies leaves him looking shrill here, and the humor seems terribly dated instead.

So The Love God? is one of those movies that should probably be seen as a sort of product of a time and watched just to see how such a movie could go so wrong. But if I were recommending Knotts to someone new to movies, I'd start with one of his other movies like the two I mentioned at the start of the post.

Prowl Cars

Surprisingly, Eddie Muller has admitted that there are some movies out that that might not be quite noir. At least, that's the impression I got when he presented one of his Noir Alley selections a few months ago, a movie called Between Midnight and Dawn. It's closer to a police procedural than a true noir, but at least you can see why Muller might have selected it for Noir Alley.

Mark Stevens is the nominal star here, playing Officer Rocky Barnes, a patrolman for the Los Angeles Police Department. He's on the night shift together with his partner and good friend Dan Purvis (Edmond O'Brien); indeed, the two served together in World War II and that's given Purvis a bit of a hard edge. There's all sorts of crime that the two could deal with, although they'll ultimately deal with one particular criminal.

Meanwhile, while the men are in uniform driving around in cop cars, there are women working for the force doing things like dispatching the cops. Rocky really likes the voice of one such radio dispatcher, and would like to find out who is behind that voice. Luckily for him, he eventually hears the same voice taking dictation for his commanding officer, so he finagles his way into the office to try to meet the woman. That woman is Kate Mallory (Gale Storm), and Rocky tries to get her to go out on a date with him.

Ulimately, Kate goes out with both cops, and the threesome winds up at a nightclub run by notorious gangster Ritchie Garris (Donald Buka). He's the sort where everybody knows he's really a notorious gangster, but nobody is actually able to do anything about it because he's so good at keeping the authorities from figuring out how he's actually breaking the law. Except that he's about to get too big for his own britches.

Garris' new scheme involves getting people into big gambling debts, and then having them sign ridiculous loan deals and putting up big private property like cars and houses as collateral. When the gamblers keep gambling, they won't be able to keep up on the payments, and Garris' loan company will be able to repossess the property. This leads to a murder that sets the crime half of the plot in action.

But there's a second plot as well, and that's Kate's relationship with the two cops. Both of them are smitten with her, but it's Rocky who has a much stronger desire for her. However, that desire isn't mutual at first. The reason is that Kate's father was on the force as well, and he was killed in the line of duty. So she doesn't want to get into a relationship with any cops, lest the man she falls in love with should suffer the same fate.

Between Midnight and Dawn is an effective enough little programmer, although it was apparently toned down quite a bit from what the producers originally wanted; thank the Production Code office for that. The two leads cops of course have to be virtuous with the bad guy getting it in the end, and that does admittedly remove a bit of the tension from the movie as opposed to having an antihero. So while Between Midnight and Dawn is watchable, there's also a reason it's not a particularly well remembered film.

Decades before Frank Abegnale

Several weeks back TCM had an evening of movies dedicated to Tony Curtis, which included a movie I hadn't heard of before, The Great Impostor. The plot sounded interesting, so I decided to watch it while it was still on the Watch TCM app.

The movie is based loosely on the life of Ferdinand Demara, a real life impostor who eventually got caught out in the early 1950s, went to prison for it, and sold his life story, since in those days there weren't really yet laws about not being able to profit from telling the story of your criminal activities. In the late 1950s a book was written about Demara's story, and with the popularity of that book came a movie. Tony Curtis plays Demara, and at the start of the movie it's the early 1950s. He's been working at a school on an island off the New England coast, and seems to be a fairly popular teacher too. But his past is catching up to him again as the authorities come for him. This causes him to reflect on that past....

During the Depression, Ferdinand had been the son of a small-town movie theater owner (Gary Merrill) who unfortunately lost the theater because of the financial situation. Young Ferdinand drops out of school to try to earn money to help the family, and eventually leaves the family to join the military. Ferdinand is quite bright, and would be a natural of Officers' Candidate School, but there's one catch: you have to be a high-school graduate to apply to OCS. The GED wouldn't be developed until World War II, so Ferdinand doesn't have any way to go back and get that diploma or certificiate to enable him to become an officer.

To get around that little problem, he takes on somebody else's identity, until he learns that the military also does background checks of would-be OCS members. Now that he knows he's going to be caught, Ferdinand decides to fake his own suicide and get out of the military, instead joining a monastery with the intent of becoming a Trappist monk. Their vow of silence will also keep the authorities from finding him for quite some time.

Unfortunately, the abbot who is the head monk at the monastery determines that Ferdinand doesn't really have what it takes to be a Trappist monk, so it's back into the real world for Ferdinand, meaning that his crimes will be discovered. However, he uses prison as an opportunity to learn how to become an assistant warden, with some help from a little more identity theft. Of course, he'll eventually get noticed again, leading to the final act as a naval surgeon in Canada during World War II.

If you can get past the idea that the timeline seems all wrong here and the questions of how he was able to evade detection for so long over and over again, there isn't a bad little movie in The Great impostor. Unsurprisingly, the sort of smooth operator role that Curtis had recently played in Operation Petticoat and Some Like It Hot comes naturally, and works well for The Great Impostor. The movie is also aided by a couple of pretty good supporting performances courtesy of Edmond O'Brien, Raymond Massey, and Karl Malden.

The Great Impostor seems to be free with ads on the Roku Channel for now. It's definitely worth a watch.

The Web

I mentioned quite some time ago that when I visited my relatives in Germany back in the late 1980s, one of the movies that one of the channels put in their late-night slot that I didn't stay up to watch was The Web. I never got a chance to see it after that, and since it was released by Universal, it's not the sort of movie that shows up on TCM. The Web finally got a DVD release last year, and I shelled out the $10 or so to pick up a copy, Eventually, I got around to watching it.

Edmond O'Brien stars as Bob Regan, a lawyer who, at the start of the movie is representing the Italian-American owner of a fruit stand in small claims court. The guy won his case, which involved a rich businessman who ran into the fruit stand and caused some damages, but that rich guy never paid up. So Bob decides to press the issue by barging in to the businessman, Andrew Colby's (Vincent Price) board meeting!

Colby is actually more impressed with Regan's chutzpah than anything else, and decides to reward Regan for it by giving him a job. Apparently Colby had an old business associate embezzle money from him and blame Colby for framing him. That man just got out of prison a few months back, and Colby is worried that the guy might come to his house to try to kill him. Perhaps Regan could serve as part lawyer-on-retainer, and part live-in bodyguard? The "respectable" uptown lawyers who handle all the business for Colby's company would find this beneath them, but an independent lawyer trying to build up a practice could use a rich client like Colby, especially when Colby is willing to pay Regan far more than the job is worth.

Now, any normal person ought to see the warning signs a mile away, and that there's a catch. But this is a Hollywood movie, and if we had normal people, we wouldn't have so much of a movie. (Alternatively, you could make the lawyer jokes about Regan, being lawyer, having no ethical compunctions that would prevent him from taking this job.) And as it turns out, there are two catches. One is that the guy who claims Colby framed him shows up, and gets shot by Regan in a way that makes it look like Regan was shooting in self-defense, only for the guy's daughter to show up some time later to contradict a lot of Colby's claims about her father.

The other catch is that Colby has a personal secretary, Noel Faraday (Ella Raines). She's young and pretty, so you just know that Regan is going to fall hard for her, even though she's technically already spoken for by Colby. This is going to make Colby jealous; in fact, jealous enough that he might just do something that will leave Regan thinking Colby's framed him, just like that other guy claimed about Colby. Fortunately, however, Regan isn't all that dumb, and his got somebody nominally on his side in the form of police detective Damico (William Bendix) who, being a Production Code-era cop, is going to be on the side of good and exonerate the people who didn't do anything wrong.

So, The Web winds it way to its ultimate denouement, which you can see coming, although the road it takes to get there is entertaining enough. If The Web had been made a decade earlier, it would have been done so as a programmer. In the late 1940s, however, with the infancy of television, programmer-type movies were starting to seem a little old and rough around the edges. Not that they're bad movies, just that they don't seem to have quite as much shine as the programmers of the 1930s did.

The Web is no exception. The four main stars fill roles which feel as though they'd been filled in a dozen similar movies, but do so quite competently and entertainingly. There's nothing groundbreaking here, but also nothing really wrong, just 90 minutes of good, solid entertainment. It's the sort of movie that would be perfect for Eddie Muller to get for an edition of Noir Alley, if he hasn't already done so.

Beware the Ides of March

I didn't intend to blog about multiple movies with Julius Caesar as a character in close succession, but the movies all showed up on one or another movie channel a few weeks apart, so we get a third film featuring Caesar: the 1953 MGM adaptation of William Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, tomorrow at 11:45 AM. (Yes, tomorrow is March 16, and the Ides of March are traditionally on the 15th. But because the 31 Days of Oscar grouping of movies by decade, as a 50s movie it had to air on a Wednesday.)

According to the Wikipedia article, this is a fairly close adaptation of the Shakespeare play, but I was in the academic track in high school that did a different selection of Shakespeare plays, so I got Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, and Macbeth instead. The movie opens not long (history suggests a year, but time is telescoped to make it seem like a couple of days) before the Ides of March on which Caesar (Louis Calhern) would be killed. He's just killed some of his biggest rivals for power in battle, and the braying mob in Rome wants him made king/dictator; as we saw in Cleopatra the idea of anybody being a king was supposed to be horrifying to republican Rome. But Marc Antony (Marlon Brando) seems to be encouraging Caesar to take the crown.

This obviously terrifies any number of Caesar's other rivals. Some of them just want power for themselves, probably recognizing that the Republic had been fatally wounded for several decades already. This notably includes Cassius (John Gielgud) and Casca (Edmond O'Brien), although not so much Brutus (James Mason) at first. Brutus is less after power than concerned about the Republic being preserved, leading to a reluctance to join a conspiracy against Caesar. But Cassius and Casca aren't stupid. They know how to manipulate people, and so make it look as though there are quite a few Romans who want Caesar to be stopped before he gets too much power. Ultimately, after a lot of soul-searching, Brutus agrees to take part in the conspiracy.

Caesar, depsite having heard the warning to beware the Ides of March, and much to the chagrin of his wife Calpurnia (Greer Garson, in a one-scene role), goes to the Senate, where he gets killed, stabbed first by Casca and then the other conspirators, before Brutus has to deliver the coup de grace that leads Caesar to utter "Et tu, Brute".

All of this occurs inside the Senate, but waiting outside is another braying mob. Brutus, the intellectual, gives an eminently logical speech about Caesar, while Marc Antony, the one person not a part of the conspiracy, knows how to whip up that mob to the point they'll turn on the people who killed Caesar. The conspirators are going to have to flee rome, but even then they're not going to be safe, as Marc Antony and the other members of the triumvirate hunt them down.

This version of Julius Caesar is probably best-known for the fact that Marlon Brando was cast as Antony. Brando is one actor who was decidedly not known for being a Shakespearean actor, unlike those British members of the cast, notably Gielgud. (James Mason had also done a fair amount of Shakespeare before becoming a movie star.) Brando was also known at the time for his less-than-stellar diction. To be honest, Brando's diction is not particularly a problem, although there are times where his delivery devolves into something like his character from The Wild One.

Unsurprisingly, Mason and especially Gielgud handle the dialog well; somewhat more surprising is Edmond O'Brien, whom I wouldn't have thought of as being adept at Shakespeare. Louis Calhern dies halfway through and gets a relatively small number of scenes, and the female roles are small and an excuse cast big names. In addition to the aforementioned Garson there's Deborah Kerr as Brutus' wife.

Overall, Julius Caesar is the sort of movie MGM was very good at producing, and the quality shines through in pretty much every scene, other than possibly the battle scenes looking more like southern California than Italy. But there wasn't much that could be done about it without busting the budget. This version of Julius Caesar is definitely worth a watch.

The Birdman of Leavenworth

During Summer Under the Stars, TCM ran The Birdman of Alcatraz; not having done a blog post on it before, I decided to DVR it. It's going to be on again tomorrow (Sept. 12) at 2:00 PM, so I watched it to do a post on here.

Burt Lancaster plays Robert Stroud, a man who was sent to federal prison for manslaughter in 1909 because he had the great bad luck of being from the Alaska Territory, which didn't have its own judicial system at the time. In 1912 he was transferred to the Leavenworth penitentiary in Kansas, which is where the story in the movie opens.

Stroud, under warden Harvey Shoemaker (Karl Malden), isn't exactly rehabilitating, instead being a constant irritation. This culminates in an incident with a prison guard during one of the meal times when Stroud stabs the guard to death, which is declared murder. He's sentenced to death, but his mother Elizabeth (Thelma Ritter) comes to Stroud's aid, eventually going to Washington DC to try to get an audience with President Wilson, who unfortunately had suffered his stroke, so Elizabeth could only be seen by Mrs. Wilson.

Still, Elizabeth is able to get somebody in the administration to have sympathy, such that the sentence is commuted to life in prison. But there's a catch, which is that like all people awaiting execution, Stroud was in a form of solitary confinement that, although unlike the stereotypical dark cell of the movies, mean he was in his cell 23 hours a day and had almost no contact with other prisoners. The commutation said that Stroud was to remain in solitary confinement until his sentence could be carried out, which is technically never. Shoemaker sees to it that Stroud isn't going to get out of solitary.

One day, during one of Stroud's exercise hours in the courtyard, a storm comes up breaking several tree branches. One of those branches hass a bird's nest with a baby sparrow in it. Stroud takes that orphaned bird back to his cell and nurses the bird back to health. This leads to Stroud getting a couple of canaries, with other prisoners (including one played by Telly Savalas who earned an Oscar nomination for his role) getting canaries too. But an avian illness strikes, and the birds start dying. Stroud has to do what research he can on the illness and guess at remedies, eventually finding one.

This brings him some notoriety outside of the walls of the penitentiary, as he's been writing letters and articles to a bird lovers' magazine. One of his readers wonders about this mysterious Stroud, eventually writing and finding out that Stroud is in fact a prisoner at Leavenworth. A new federal Bureau of Prisons is formed, threatening to take away Stroud's birds, and this woman, Stella Johnson (Betty Field) and Elizabeth start another publicity campaign to save Stroud's birds. As part of the campaign, Stella marries Robert, which absolutely pisses Elizabeth off (one wonders what sort of relationship mother and son had in real life, as apparently Mrs. Stroud really did cut off all relations with her son after this marriage).

The denouement of it all is that Stroud does lose his birds when he gets transferred to Alcatraz (Wikipedia claims it's because some of the scientific equipment he'd been allowed to procure was being used as a distillery, something the movie obviously completely overlooks), where he meets warden Shoemaker again. No birds here, although Stroud would eventually be called the "Birdman of Alcatraz" when a writer named Tom Gaddis (Edmond O'Brien) wrote the book by that title.

In some ways, there's not a whole lot going o in The Birdman of Alcatraz, which shouldn't be surprising, since Robert Stroud spent 40-some years in solitary confinement of one form or another. So we get a lot of confined sets in which not a whole lot can happen. Instead, this is a movie for the performances, which are uniformly quite good. Lancaster is excellent as Stroud, and Thelma Ritter earned her sixth and final Supporting Actress in a much darker role than normal as Stroud's mother. Malden is also quite good.

The movie's only drawback is that it runs right around two and a half hours; considering the relatively limited subject material, a script clocking in at about two hours probably could have been written. Even then, the movie doesn't really feel like it's going on a long time, which is down to the strong performances.

The Birdman of Alcatraz did get a DVD release, although the TCM Shop claims it's on backorder.

Well-made submarine movie #8782578923782587924657962794

Another of the movies I only recently got around to watching after having recorded months ago is Up Periscope. It's another of the many movies available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive.

The scene is 1942, somehwere in the Pacific. Paul Stevenson (Edmond O'Brien) commands the Barracuda, a submarine patrolling the ocean but currently staying underwater and not moving to avoid detection by the Japanese. Unfortunately they've got an injured seaman aboard, and having to stay motionless delays their getting back to Hawaii to get the seaman to hospital. This delay results in the guy dying.

Stateside, in San Diego, Navy Lt. (JG) Kenneth Braden (James Garner) is frolicking on the beach with Sally Johnson (Andra Martin). They only met a week and a half earlier, but with a war on, Kenneth thinks the time is right to ask Sally to marry him. She demurs, suggesting that she needs more time. Unfortunately for Kenneth, this more time is interrupted by his receiving orders to report to Hawaii for a mission. Not that he should be surprised, of course, considering he's in the Navy.

As you can probably guess, Lt. Braden is going to get assigned to the Barracuda, or else we wouldn't have had that opening scene. Before that, however, we learn the nature of of Braden's mission. This being 1942, the tide of war hasn't yet begun to turn, and the Japanese are able to send coded messages to all their ships in the Pacific courtesy of a radio relay in the Marshall Islands. The Americans have been spectacularly unable to break that code, so they'd like to send a frogman ashore to the island where the Japanese have that radio station, and get pictures of the codebook.

It seems like an impossible mission, and to be honest there are a lot of problems along the way. Braden is roomed with first mate Lt. Carney (Carleton Carpenter) and Lt. Malone (Alan Hale Jr.), but isn't allowed to reveal the nature of his mission to them. Only Cmdr. Stevenson knows, and he's strict but fair. As an example, when Braden proposes the submarine drop him off 500 yards from shore, Stevenson is aghast because this means going in to the lagoon where there's a perfectly good chance he could be trapped.

On the way to the island, they have to surface to refresh the air supply, and on one of those surfacings, they're spotted by Japanese planes who strafe the sub, killing Lt. Carney among others. Of course the sub survives, because we wouldn't have a movie if it had been destroyed before getting to the island for Braden's mission. Get there they do, and Stevenson has more bad news for Braden. He's only got 18 hours to do the mission, and if he's not back to the sub by that time, they'll leave without him.

I've commented before on other submarine movies that there's only so much you can do in a submarine movie because you simply can't open up a submarine to more sets. In the case of Up Periscope, the writers tried to broaden things by adding the Braden character, giving a good half-hour climax on land and the typical suspense of the ship waiting for him and whether he'd get back to the sub on time. (You can probably guess how that's going to end.)

Still, Up Periscope works, largely because most of the submarine movies I've watched have worked rather well. Garner does a more than adequate job as Braden, and O'Brien is equally good as Stevenson. As for the rest of the cast, they're in supporting roles and don't do anything to detract from the movie. This being a submarine movie, there's nothing special here, but also nothing wrong. If you want to see an entertaining World War II movie you haven't seen before, than Up Periscope is certainly worth a watch.

The Rack

I mentioned earlier that I recorded quite a few of the movies that aired during TCM's tribute to May 2019 Star of the Month Paul Newman, so I'm getting through them slowly. The most recent watch was The Rack.

A bunch of people are waiting at an airport for a military plane bringing a group of POWs from the Korean War home. Among them is Capt. Edward Hall, Jr. (Paul Newman). He's the son of army colonel Edward Hall Sr. (Walter Pidgeon), and also had a brother who died in the war, leaving behind a widow in Aggie Hall (Anne Francis).

Before the POWs can go home, they have to spend some time at the military hospital to be debriefed by army psychologists and the like. While Ed Jr. is watching a movie, another soldier comes up to him, and puts a noose around his neck with a placard reading "TRAITOR". Oh dear, somebody has something against poor Ed. It's not just this one man, either. Ed is uncomfortable being back home, and feels like his father isn't making things any easier for him. Just wait until Dad finds out about what happened over in Korea.

Apparently during the debriefings, enough evidence was obtained to lead military authorities to believe that Ed Jr. collaborated with the Chinese who were holding them prisoner, and this is a really serious offense. Dad can't believe this, as he raised his two sons to be perfect little soldiers. Surely when they hold the trial, the truth is going to come out and Ed Jr. is going to be exonerated.

The trial begins, with Lt. Col. Wasnick (Edmnod O'Brien) defending Capt. Hall, and Maj. Moulton (Wendell Corey) prosecuting the case. It's a difficult defense, as Capt. Hall has admitted that he did the things he's accused of, although he says that he felt it was the only thing he could do to help the men in his command. Wasnick obviously doesn't believe any of this, and he's going to do everything he can to debunk Hall's defense when he takes the stand.

The Rack is another of those movies that's well-made, but which kept striking me as having something not quite right about them. One of the big things for me was the scene resolving the relationship between father and son, which came across as really artificial.. Something also felt off about the trial, although that's probably because it was a military trial, which does have different rules from civilian justice. But where did they get all the evidence that the Chinese would certainly have kept?

However, Newman gives a very good performance and his clearly on his way to becoming a star in the early picture. The supporting cast is also pretty good, even Pidgeon who is normally a bit too stolid for my tastes. There's a nice early supporting role from Lee Marvin, and James Best (Roscoe P. Coltrane from The Dukes of Hazard) and Cloris Leachman have bit parts.

The Rack is available on DVD from the Warner Archive, and isn't a bad little movie.

In which yours truly takes a decidedly minority opinion

I've never taken part in the "Blind Spot" blogathon where people take up the challenge of seeing a bunch of well-known and highly-rated movie that they've never seen before. If I did, one of the movies I could have used this year would have been Sam Peckinpah's 1969 western The Wild Bunch. However, I have to say I was decidedly underwhelmed by it.

There's really nothing wrong with the story. William Holden plays Pike Bishop, an outlaw at the end of the old west era who's looking to score one last haul with his gang so he can go into retirement. The gang includes Dutch (Ernest Borgnine); bothers Lyle (Warren Oates) and Tector (Ben Johnson); and Mexican Angel (Jaime Sanchez). Pike and the gang are planning to rob a railroad payroll in south Texas.

Waiting for Pike's gang is bounty hunter Deke (Robert Ryan). He's able to disrupt the robbery enough to kill a couple of minor members of Pike's gang, but Pike and the big names escape with at least some of the loot. Except that when they get to Mexico they find that it's not loot at all, but steel washers instead of silver coins. They're going to have to do yet another robbery if they want to retire.

Meanwhile, the gang has temporary sanctuary in Angel's home village where a brutal revolutionary officer has taken over. Pike offers to steal a bunch of guns from a US military transport in exchange for a substantial sum that will allow everybody to retire. But he's worried that the general is going to try to fleece him, and he still has to worry about Deke and his gang, who probably don't have any qualms about crossing the border to get him.

In addition to a reasonably conceived story, I also have no issue with the actors. I enjoy all of them, and nobody here is noticeably obnoxious. The Mexican general is a clear bad guy, but that's the way the character is written and not a problem with the actor (Emilio Fernandez).

So what did I dislike about The Wild Bunch? I think it all comes down to Sam Peckinpah's direction. The movie is known for its violence, which was fairly extreme at the time. Now, I don't have any particular problem with gratuitous violence -- I happen to love Bonnie and Clyde, for example, which to me seemed just as violent as The Wild Bunch. And frankly I'd much rather watch gratuitous violence than gratuitous sex. The problem I had was the way Peckinpah filmed it. People get shot and fall off rooftops. No big deal there. But almost invariably, Peckinpah has them fall off in slow motion. Other people who get shot standing (or sitting) on solid ground also die in rather florid mannerisms.

Peckinpah also drew the story out with some flashback scenes that reminded me of one of the problems I had with Marathon Man. Also, the movie is quite languid for much of the running time, telling what is probably a 100-minute story or so in an excruciating 144 minutes. Finally, this being the late 1960s, there are a bunch of those pointless zooms that I like to rail about in movies of the late 60s and early 70s. Here they were really noticeable and served no discernible artistic purpose.

Still, almost everybody else loves The Wild Bunch, so this even more than most other movies is one I'd suggest you watch and make your own decisions about. It's available on Blu-ray at a fairly moderate price.

Warpath

For those of you in the US who have the Encore package of channels, you have a chance to catch the western Warpath tomorrow morning at 9:00 AM on Encore Westerns. I don't think it's available on any video format, so those of you without the Encore package are probably out of luck.

Edmond O'Brien stars as John Vickers. In the opening scene, he shows up at some stereotypical old west town, where he finds a man and questions him. Then Vickers gets in a gunfight with the man and shoots him dead after the other guy draws on him first! Thankfully the local marshall will testify to the fact that Vickers was drawn upon and shot in self-defense, as it will allow him to leave town without such icky inconveniences as having to stand trial. It turns out that there's a train depot in town and a bunch of cavalrymen are going to be getting on the train there. Vickers is planning to join them. But before that he meets lovely Molly Quade (young Polly Bergen), who is being harassed by drunk Sergent O'Hara (Forrest Tucker). Vickers stands up for Molly and gets in a fight with O'Hara, winning the fight.

That fight is ultimately a bit of a problem, because Vickers is on his way north to the Dakota Territory to enlist with Custer's 7th Cavalry. O'Hara, for his part, is already an officer in the 7th. And more interestingly, Vickers was an officer in the Civil War, and a good one. But when he gets to the fort to enlist in the cavalry, he insists on starting off as a private. Clearly Vickers has some sort of ulterior motive.

Sure enough, it turns out that he killed the guy back in the opening scene because that guy was one of three people who ambushed and killed his fiancée several years earlier. Vickers basically lost the will to do anything other than find the people who killed her, and has spent all these years trying to find the three guys who did it. He has reason to believe that the other two are in the 7th Cavalry, which is why he's come here to enlist and presumably why he doesn't want any of the responsibilities of being an officer getting in the way.

Vickers gets put in O'Hara's batallion, and the two quickly develop a mutual hatred for each other. O'Hara doesn't care for Vickers largely because of that fight, while Vickers is beginning to get the distinct feeling that O'Hara might have been one of the three guys who killed his fiancée. Oh, there's also the fact that both of them have taken a liking to Molly. Molly's father Sam (Dean Jagger) seems to prefer O'Hara to Vickers.

I mentioned a few paragraphs ago that these folks are part of Custer's 7th Cavalry. That name Custer (played here in a small role by James Millican) is important, because anybody who knows their American history will know that Custer was the general who led the cavalry into the disastrous battle at Little Big Horn where he and his men were wiped out by the Sioux. So we can expect that there are skirmishes with the Sioux in this film, and that the looming battle is going to play an important part in the plot. There's really no other reason to have Custer as a character in a western.

Everything comes together when a bunch of settlers come out looking for a cavalry escort to the lands they're settling. O'Hara has deserted because he is in fact one of the people who killed Vickers' fiancée, while Vickers is leading the settlers. Who should show up in the migration but the Quades? Sam has good reason for taking up with these people moving further west. But before that can happen the Indians raid the wagon train and take all of the key characters hostage....

There's a lot going on in Warpath that's been seen in a whole bunch of other westerns. There's nothing particularly wrong with Warpath, but there's nothing particularly noteworthy about the movie, either. Pedestrian sounds like it has negative connotations, so I don't think that's the word I'd want to use to describe this movie. It's competently made, and certainly entertains, but at the same time there's something about it that just doesn't make it particularly memorable. Still, I think fans of the genre will enjoy this one. It's also in very nice Technicolor, although it was done a few years before Cinemascope came around to make the scenery really stand out.

A Cry in the Night

I could swear that I'd already blogged about A Cry in the Night before. A search of the blog, however, claims that I haven't. It's airing tomorrow morning at 7:30 AM on TCM, so now would be a good time to do a post on the movie.

The film starts off late one evening on a Lovers' Lane type place where all the teens and other people who want to make out in secret congregate -- nobody's going to let out the other people's secrets, lest their own secrets be relesaed, too. Among the neckers is young Liz Taggart (Nathalie Wood), daughter of police detective Dan (Edmond O'Brien). She's here with her fiancé Owen (Richard Anderson), but hasn't had the courage to tell Daddy about Owen yet; she knows he won't approve. But that's soon about to become the least of her problems. Hanging around all those couples is Harold Loftus (Raymond Burr), engaging in some voyeurism. His actions are heard but not seen, and Owen gets out of the car to figure out what's going on. At this point, Harold hits Owen over the head, knocking Owen out. Harold then takes Owen's car, with Liz in it! The other lovebirds flee, not wanting to be caught making out or accused over what happened to Owen.

Eventually, Owen is found by a cop, and brought to the station, where the night captain on duty (Brian Donlevy) thinks Owen is drunk. The doctor diagnoses a concussion and some short-term memory loss, and when all that clears up, Owen is able to tell them what happened, and how the police must have a kidnapping case on their hands. Worse than that, it's the kidnapping of a member of a cop family. Worst of all, it's the daughter of a cop who's going to go through the roof when he discovers that his precious little daughter was making out on a lovers' lane with this Owen guy; kidnapping only makes it that much worse.

Ah, but back to Harold the kidnapper. He's the much more fun character than Detective Taggart. He's taken Liz to his hideaway, an abandoned foreman's shack in a disused brickworks. He's not just a kidnapper; he's a psycopath, too. Apparently, he's never been with a woman before, as he has no idea of how to treat Liz. At times he's almost trying to romance her; when she undesrtandably refuses his romances, he goes ballistic. Harold is the way he is in part because of his mother Mabel (Carol Veazie). He lives with her and supports her, and when he doesn't come home that night, having kidnapped Liz (of course, Mom knows nothing about this), Mabel calls the police! The police aren't that stupid, and eventually are able to put two and two together and figure out that perhaps they and Mabel are interested in the same person.

If A Cry in the Night has one problem, it's that it was made during the era when the Production Code was still being enforced; that means that there's really only one possible outcome. The brickworks, however, provides a nice backdrop for the eventual climax, somewha reminiscent in terms of industrial imagery of the refinery in White Heat or the industrial-sized gas tanks in Odds Against Tomorrow. Burr had played psycho bad guys in several earlier movies, and is pretty good here. Nathalie Wood's purpose in the movie is little more than the damsel in distress, and she pulls off that role well enough. O'Brien is OK if a bit too strident as the angry cop, while Carol Veazie gets the fun stuff as the mother who's given her son issues. A Cry in the Night is another of the many movies that's nothing particularly groundbreaking, but is quite enjoyable.

As far as I know A Cry in the Night has not received a DVD release, so you're going to have to catch the TCM showing.