Between Two Worlds

Many years ago, I did a post on the early sound film Outward Bound which I found interesting for the way in which I felt it actually tried to use sound as a character in the movie. Outward Bound was remade as a somewhat bigger movie during World War II and given the title Between Two Worlds. I'd been meaning to get around to watching it, so the last time TCM ran it I finally recorded it and eventually watched it, wrote up this post, and saved it in drafts for you to get this post today.

The movie starts off at a travel agency in some British seaside port, presumably Southampton although I don't know that the movie makes this explicit. Various people are trying to get passage to America, something which is difficult considering the war going on. Among them Henry Bergner (Paul Henried), a former concert pianist who joined the anti-Nazi resistance in his home country but had to flee to England. He's not allowed to board, and heads home to commit suicide. As he's going through the streets, we see the car that's carrying the other passengers about to set sail get bombed in a Nazi air raid.

Cut to a shot of Henry'a apartment, where we find him having turned on the gas to off himself. His distraught wife Ann (Eleanor Parker) enters the apartment, and decides that if Henry is going to kill himself, she's going to join him because she'll have nothing to live for. Henry, for his part, tries to keep Ann from joining him, but she's insistent.

And wouldn't you know it, the next thing they know is that they're on the boat that Henry had been trying to get a ticket for, which doesn't seem to make sense at first unless of course you've seen Outward Bound before. And in any case, it's explained much earlier in Between Two Worlds than in Outward Bound what's happened. Henry and Ann are dead, as are all of the other passengers on board, although they're being carried to a sort of purgatory where they'll be judged by the "Examiner" before it's to be determined where and how they spend eternity.

The next passenger to figure out what's happened in Thomas Prior (John Garfield). He's the sort of cynical reporter who always seems to have a sharp word for everybody else but has set up such a shield around himself that he claims not to feel anything. And he's more than willing to spill the beans on what's happening even though the ship's purser, Scrubby (Edmund Gwenn), wants everybody to figure it out for themselves that they're already dead.

Among the other passengers are Pete (George Tobias), a sailor reminscent of the William Bendix character in Lifeboat; a wealthy older couple; a local vicar who winds up helping the "Examiner"; gold-digger actress Maxine Russell (Faye Emerson); housemaid Mrs. Midget (Sara Allgood); and war profiteer Lingley (George Coulouris). Eventually the Examiner (Sydney Greenstreet) shows up to deliver judgment on each of the passengers.

I think I personally preferred Outward Bound in part because I have a thing for early talkies and in part because it's a much more compact little picture at almost 30 minutes shorter than Between Two Worlds. However, even I have to admit that Between Two Worlds has much better production values. Ultimately, however, I think a lot of which version are going to prefer is going to come down to their preconceived notions of the stars playing the various characters. The role played by John Garfield is much changed for Garfield's screen persona, the role having been essayed in Outward Bound by Leslie Howard. A little bit of Garfield can go a long way, and here I think he's a bit too cynical. Somewhat like his character in Four Daughters in that regard.

Sydney Greenstreet, on the other hand is excellent in his role, as is Allgood. So it's not without reason that many fans are going to prefer Between Two Worlds. Watch both and judge for yourself.

Where's Robert Montgomery's kid?

There were a couple of movies on TCM in July that I forgot to record to my DVR, so I had to watch them off the Watch TCM app before they expired in August. One of them is Bewitched, which I believe will remain on the Watch TCM app until August 24.

The movie opens with shots of a clock and a nighttime city skyline, with a voiceover telling us somebody is going to die tonight. We then cut to a psychiatrist, Dr. Bergson (Edmund Gwenn), who is dictating notes to his secretary about one of his cases. We then go to a flashback, and it doesn't take too much to guess that the person Bergson is talking about is going to be the same person who is about to die.

That someone is Joan Arlis Ellis (Phyllis Thaxter), who lives in one of those small towns that populated American movies of the era, although this one seems to be out in California since a later train montage moves the action eastward. Joan most likely suffers from schizophrenia although neither she nor the people around her would have recognized this. But she hears voices in her head, specially the voice of another woman calling herself "Karen".

Joan is engaged to Bob (Henry Daniels Jr.), a nice enough young man who only sees that something might be wrong with Joan when she suffers a fainting spell. Joan has another such spell and continues to hear the voice of Karen, so she tries to get away from it by walking the streets of town, which isn't enough to quite the voice. She has to get away from here, as much as it's going to hurt her parents and her fiancé. Joan decides to go to New York City, since she thinks she can be anonymous there and maybe the voice won't come back.

After the montage I mentioned above, Joan gets a job at the cigar-store counter in one of those elegant hotels the way they were in movies of the 1940s. Showing up at the counter is young attorney Eric (Stephen McNally credited as Horace). He immediately falls for Joan, not knowing Joan's secret, which kinda sort manifests itself again when the couple decide to go on a river cruise and Karen takes over for Joan acting in a way that the demure Joan never would.

Worse is that, even though Joan wrote in her letter that neither Bob nor her parents should try to find her, they have naturally been trying to do just that, with the predictable result that Bob shows up at the boarding house where Joan has been saying. Karen is none too pleased about that, so takes over for Joan again, only with it being violent this time as Karen stabs Bob dead, leading to a first-degree murder charge which means the death penalty. Joan in theory could claim insanity, but she also feels the shame of not wanting to admit anything about Karen. Besides, she's willing to die if it means taken Karen to the grave with her. Dr. Bergson is put on the case, which is how he's able to show up in the opening scene. It also leads to the climax.

Director Arch Oboler got his start in radio, and his direction of Bewitched really shows that background, making me think of another B movie, Inner Sanctum that I blogged about some time back. (I have to find that box set and start going through more of those movies, although I have enough of a backlog on my DVR.) Bewitched has a plot that's a bit ridiculous and talky at times, but it's mostly interesting thanks to Thaxter's performance. Bewitched was made at MGM, which makes me wonder why it doesn't show up all that often on TCM. But it's definitely worth watching.

Pride and Prejudice (1940)

One of the prestige movies that I had not actually seen before is MGM's 1940 adaption of the Jane Austen novel Pride and Prejudice. So the last time that it showed up on TCM a few months back, I made a point of recording it so that I could finally get around to watching it and doing a full-length post on it.

The first thing to note is that the movie is based on a stage adaptation of the novel and that other changes were made to the novel in part to get it to run in a reasonable amount of time and in part because the Production Code would have had problems in a few places. I haven't read the original book, so I can't judge how much the changes affect what Jane Austen was trying to achieve with her work. But from what I've read, the main basic plot is still there.

Mr. Bennet (Edmund Gwenn) is the father in a family that doesn't quite have the means or the social standing to be truly members of the British upper classes of the Regency era. Not that the family is poor, mind you; it's more that their situation is best described as modest. Worse is that Bennet and his wife (Mary Boland) produced five daughters, and this is an era when property couldn't really be bequeathed to unmarried women like the daughters. So the parents are desperate to find suitably men to marry their daughters off to, starting with eldest daughter Elizabeth (Gree Garson). Otherwise, a cousin they don't like, Collins (Melville Cooper) will inherit the house.

Meanwhile, even without having read the novel I know that it is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. Into the small town where the Bennets live comes Mr. Bingley, a wealthy bachelor renting one of the manor houses in the area, along with his good friend Mr. Darcy (Laurence Olivier). Mrs. Bennett immediately gets the idea of introducing her daughters to these two in the hopes that one or both of them will decide to marry a Bennet daughter.

But there are a bunch of catches along the way. One is Mr. Collins, who wants to marry Elizabeth. There's also the fact that Darcy is not really of the same social stratum as the Bennets. And then there's Lady Catherine (Edna May Oliver), who has been helping out Darcy. She's set up an allowance for Darcy, and can remove it if he marries someone she disapproves of. There are further complications involving the other sisters, one of whom is being pursued by a man named Wickham who has a bit of a past that's all kept mysterious.

It's fairly obvious, however, that Darcy and Elizabeth are going to meet and fall in love, and eventually get married at the end of the story so that audiences can have their happy ending, which was particularly important with war clouds on the horizon.

Will fans of the original novel, especially if they've seen later adaptations that are more faithful to the source material, enjoy this 1940 version? I don't know. But I can say that for people who enjoy the sort of literary adaptation that Hollywood studios made in the pre-war era, they'll probably enjoy it quite a bit. MGM, as I've said, was probably the prestige studio in Hollywood, and their production values are the kind that work exceedingly well for a period piece like this even if it's not quite the same period as in the book. They've also got a lot of stars and character actors; Ann Rutherford and Maureen O'Sullivan play two of Elizabeth's sisters, for example.

So I'd say there's a lot worth recommending in this adaptation of Pride and Prejudice.

Don't go looking for Flipper

I don't remember whose day it was in TCM's Summer Under the Stars, but one of the old Studio Era prestige movies I hadn't seen before was airing, Green Dolphin Street. So I recorded it and recently got around to watching it.

In the early 1840s, the Patourels are a well-to-do family of French Catholic descent living on St. Pierre, one of the Channel Islands which are British. Dad (Edmund Gwenn) has been married to Mom (Gladys Cooper) long enough two adult daughters, elder Marianne (Lana Turner) and younger Marguerite (Doona Reed). Dad runs a shipping company, with one of the boats, the Green Dolphin, traveling far and wide.

Also living on the island is Dr. Ozanne (Frank Morgan). He's got an adult son William (Richard Hart) who has just returned after being away, with some vague suggestion that this might be a bad omen. There is, in fact, a not-so-good man around, one Timothy Haslam (Van Heflin). He needs the services of a doctor quick, having been in a knife fight that killed a man. And he needs to get off the island, so the captain of the Green Dolphin agrees to take him to the new colony of New Zealand, where he won't have to face the law back in Europe.

Meanwhile, William has met both of the Patourel sisters. Both like him, although William clearly loves young Marguerite. But because of his father's lower social standing, it's suggested that William make his own way in the world by becoming a Navy officer first, and then he'll be OK to marry Marguerite, not that anybody mentions marriage yet.

It's not until William sails off to China that he's finally ready to think about marriage, sending some jewelry to Marguerite. But the stereotype of the inscrutable Chinese woman decides to slip William a mickey to take all his money, and William wakes up the next morning a deserter as his navy ship left port. Fortunately, the Green Dolphin is there and can take him to New Zealand too.

William meets Timothy, who has become successful in the lumber business, although that also means moving inland, which presents a problem in that they're further away from civilization and have to deal with the Maori. But William becomes successful too, ready to write back to the Patourels and ask for Marguerite's hand in marriage. Except that he gets so drunk that he accidentally writes "Marianne" instead of "Marguerite".

Lots of melodrama follows on both sides of the world. We learn that Timothy has always carried a torch for Marianne. Also in New Zealand, there's both a Maori uprising and a massive earthquake that is the highlight of the movie. Back on the Channel Islands, we learn that Mrs. Patourel had loved Dr. Ozanne when she was younger, but didn't marry him because of his social status and her parents' pressure. She and Dad die within minutes of each other, and Marguerite, being a spinster, decides to become a nun!

Green Dolphin Street is the sort of movie that MGM excelled at making. The prestige nature of it is evident from the cast, as well as the pretty darn good special effects for 1947 of the earthquake and what it does to the river. (In fact, the effects won an Oscar.) The story, however, caused a few groans for me, specifically because there are some mean plot holes here. Marianne and William return to St. Pierre a long time after Dad died, and the house is being kept up like always, with all the old servants there. Who's paying them? And did William really think he could just gallivant in and take over the old family business which certainly would have been under new ownership once Mr. Patourel died?

But if you can overcome such plot holes, as well as the fact that the first half of the movie is very slow-moving (the movie clocks in at a leisurely 141 minutes), you'll find that Green Dolphin Street is a grand example of studio filmmaking near its best in the second half of the 1940s.

The Skin Game (1931)

I think I've mentioned before that I picked up a cheap Mill Creek box set of early Alfred Hitchcock. One of the movies that I hadn't blogged about before is The Skin Game, which I first saw an age ago during one of TCM's salutes to Alfred Hitchcock. So I watched it again to refresh my memory and do a post on here.

Based on a play by John Galsworthy, The Skin Game tells the story of two families. The Hillcrists are an aristocratic family, led by a patriarch (C.V. France) who owns a lot of land in this rural area and lets it out to tenant farmers who, like his own family, have been in the same place for generations. One day he sells some of the land to Mr. Hornblower (Edmund Gwenn), on the proviso that the tenant farmers get to stay in their cottages and continue to work the land.

Hornblower has no intention of doing that, however. He's a businessman, and interested in progress, having set up pottery factories. He wants those cottages to house his new factory's workers. When Hillcrist finds out he's been duped, he's displeased to no end. Worse is that Hornblower is intending to buy another large plot of land for the factory, and building the factory will really destroy Hillcrist's view from the manor house and the whole way of life in the area.

Fortunately, the land is going to be sold at auction, so Hillcrist is able to come to the auction along with an agent who is going to be doing Hillcrists' bidding secretly. Hornblower, of course, is none too stupid himself, so he does his own bidding while keeping another bidder in reserve. So when this reserve bidder winds up winning the auction, Hillcrist is at first relieved until Hornblower tells him nope, I pulled a fast one on you.

Thankfully, Hillcrist still has one trump card up his sleeve, although it's a rather dirty one. Hornblower's son Charles has married a womn named Chloe (Phyllis Konstam), and some of Hillcrist's agents have discovered that Chloe had a scandalous past, something involving getting paid to be the "other party" in divorce cases. It doesn't seem so scandalous by 2021 standards, but a century ago, among the polite classes, oh my. Hillcrist plans to use this to blackmail Hornblower: sell the land to me at a loss, or I'll reveal your daughter-in-law's secret. Predictably, tragedy ensues.

I said at the beginning that The Skin Game is based on a play, and there's a fair portion of it that's quite stagey, with few of the usual Hitchcock touches. The one place that does show Hitchcock's invention is in the auction scene, which has some mildly interesting panning and editing. But overall, this is a genre that Hitchcock doesn't seem terribly interested in, and the result is a movie that's mildly interesting but nothing great, especially not by the standards of Hitchcock.

The Skin Game is a nice addition to a box set, but don't expect typical Hitchcock.

Parnell

The movie Parnell has a reputation for being a huge misfire for its star, Clark Gable, during his days as the king of the MGM lot. It aired on TCM not too long ago and, not having done a post on it before, I decided to sit down and watch it.

Gable plays Charles Stewart Parnell, an Anglo-Irish politician who served in Parliament in Westminster in the 1880s, this being the era when all of Ireland was still a part of the UK. One of the key issues in Ireland at that time was the question of "home rule", which would have meant something somewhere betweem what Scotland has now and full independence. Parnell is seen in the film's opening raising support for the issue in America, before returning to Ireland and being arrested (at least in the movie; I can't tell whether he was arrested in real life).

There's a general election coming up, and an ambitious politician named William O'Shea (Alan Marshal) gets Parnell to endorse him. It's also here that Parnell meets William's wife Katie (Myrna Loy). She no longer loves her husband, but he's not about to give her a divorce because she's got an elderly aunt "Ben" (Edna May Oliver) and knows that Ben is going to leave a substantial inheritance to Katie that he wants to get his hands on.

The election of 1885 produced a hung parliament, in which William Gladstone's (Montagu Love) party won the most seats but did not have a majority, in no small part because the Irish party that Parnell led won the vast majority of the Irish seats. Parnell used this to try to get Gladstone to get a home rule bill passed. However, it wasn't going to be easy as Parnell had some powerful political enemies.

One was a man named Pigott, who forged some letters ostensibly from Parnell that showed Parnell supporting the murder of a prominent British official in Ireland, something that could have had Parnell facing charges of conspiracy to commit murder himself. He calls for a trial in the Commons and wins. The other enemy turns out to be William O'Shea.

Katie, as mentioned, felt herself in a loveless marriage to William that she could not get out of. She sits in the gallery in the Commons and watches Parnell's great speeches, and when the two meet again a friendship develops that grows into something more than friendship. Now, this is a 1930s MGM movie, so they weren't about to give the whole story, which is that Parnell was the father of three of Katie's children while she was still married. Eventually, William has had enough and tries to blackmail Parnell, who refuses, letting William make the affair public.

As I said at the beginning, Parnell was Gable's biggest flop during his 1930s stardom at MGM. To be honest, though, it wasn't nearly as bad as I would have thought. It's certainly not without its flaws, notably that it's way too talky and Gable was probably not the right actor to be playing Parnell. He really should have been playing somebody more radical. The love affair isn't much of a love affair, and the Irish scenes are your typical Hollywood doe-eyed view of Ireland.

Still, if you don't know much about the drive for "home rule", which I didn't, a movie like Parnell isn't a bad place to start before looking for the real history. It's available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive should you wish to watch it for yourself.

For Heaven's Sake

A movie that recently got taken out of the Fox vaults for running on FXM is For Heaven's Sake. It's going to be on again tomorrow morning at 6:00 AM, although apparently not for some time after that.

Clifton Webb plays Charles, an angel who has a problem he has to deal with down on earth. Apparently one of the junior angels, "Item" (Gigi Perreau), has gotten it into her head that she wants to be born. And, she's found the perfect couple to be born to, the Boltons. Jeff (Robert Cummings) is a successful theater director, while his wife Lydia (Joan Bennett) is the female lead in all of their plays. They live in a deluxe duplex in Manhattan with enough servants that Item thinks they'd make great parents to her.

There's just one problem. Jeff is definitely married to his work, and Lydia is dedicated to the stage even if she's more than ready to take a vacation. Starting a family seems not in the cards, and if they can't resolve whether to do another play, who knows if the marriage will survive. Not that Item cares; she's insistent upon their being her parents, and she's not going to leave. Charles and his partner Arthur (Edmund Gwenn) are sent to fetch Item.

Eventually Charles comes up with an idea. Item knows that if the Boltons can just have one more successful play, that will satisfy them enough and bring back the spark to their lives such that they'll start a family and Item can be born. Charles is going to "materialize" in human form and use his powers to persuade Jeff and Lydia to do the new play and start a family. Not that it's going to be easy.

Charles shows up at the racetrack as a rancher channeling Gary Cooper, and has a "chance" meeting with Jeff and Lydia that convinces them to offer a new play written by their friend Daphne (Joan Blondell) for "Slim Charles" to back. Not that he has the money having just come down from heaven. But Charles goes down to the Bolton's farm for a weekend to discuss the play. Daphne is very clearly attracted to Charles, which presents all sorts of problems. Among them is her ex-boyfriend Tony who doesn't want anybody else to have Daphne. Charles wins a bet with another rancher that results in the other guy backing the play and getting the profits, and Charles winning a $10,000 consolation. Tony reports Charles to the IRS, threatening to scupper everything.

For Heaven's Sake is a pleasant enough diversion, although in terms of angel movies there are a lot of better movies, starting with The Bishop's Wife and Here Comes Mr. Jordan. Still, you could do worse than to waste 85 minutes with For Heaven's Sake. You know it's going to have a happy ending, but how it gets there is the fun part. Clifton Webb's attempt at playing a Texan, or some sort of rancher, has to be seen to be believed. Edmund Gwenn is good, as always, and I really liked the plot twist of bringing in the IRS. Perreau comes across as a bit too cloyingly precocious, but that's in part because the character is written that way.

For Heaven's Sake is available on DVD at Amazon courtesy of Fox's MOD scheme, but for some reason doesn't show up at the TCM Shop, which is why I was thinking it might be out of print. To be honest, I'm not so sure I'd spend MOD prices on it, but I've also seen a lot worse.

70 years before AMC

Coming up overnight tonight (or very early tomorrow morning, I suppose) at 3:30 AM as part of TCM Underground is The Walking Dead. No, not the AMC TV show, but a 1936 movie with a completely different premise.

Ricardo Cortez plays Nolan a defense attorney we see at the beginning of the movie defending a guy who is ultimately convicted and sentenced to a long sentence by Judge Shaw. The man whom Nolan was defending was apparently part of the racketeering gang that seems to plague cities in films of the 1930s, and Nolan isn't just the defense attorney, but the brains behind the criminal organization. (What sort of criminality they engage in isn't exactly explained.) So when one of their men gets sent up, they're none too happy about it, and want to get Shaw out of the way.

Cut to the institute of one Dr. Beaumont (Edmund Gwenn). He'd probably be a mad scientist in any other movie, but he's supposed to be the good guy here, having an animal heart beating under glass in his laboratory, with assistants Jimmy (Warren Hull) and Nancy (Marguerite Churchill) who are in love with each other. This brief scene is only an establishing scene for Beaumont's presence which is to be much bigger later.

Meanwhile, back to our racketeers and their plan to do away with Shaw. They hire one John Ellman (Boris Karloff), who had been sentenced by Shaw a decade ago and only recently got out of prison. He's to work ostensibly for a private detective, watching Shaw's house, but what he doesn't know is that he's being set up as the patsy for when Nolan's men murder Shaw and dispose of the body in Ellman's car. However, Jimmy and Nancy see the bad guys putting Shaw's body in Ellman's car, and Ellman sees them drive off, so he knows he's got witnesses who can prove his innocence, if only they'll show up at his trial. Yeah, right. They're too afraid to speak up, so Ellman is convicted and sentenced to the electric chair, with Jimmy and Nancy only showing up to clear Ellman on the night of his execution.

They're too late, but Dr. Beaumont makes a special request. He wants the body, and brings Ellman back to life! Like I said, he is a mad scientist, but he's supposed to be the good guy here. He's just doing research, wanting to find out from Ellman what death is like, and what there is on the other side. Ellman is having none of that. Although he claims Beaumont, as well as District Attorney Werner are his friends, he also knows his enemies when he sees them, as when he first meets Nolan after being brought back to life. Not that Ellman has any idea how he knows any of this. And not that Ellman is even fully alive. He really is the personification of the "walking dead", looking alive but only being there to make certain the bad guys get what's coming to them, which starts to happen with one fishy unexplained death, and then another.

The Walking Dead is a weird little movie, the sort of thing you just know that Warner Bros. churned out simply to have enough material to play as the second bill under one of their prestige movies, and probably never gave another thought to. The people actually working on the movie, however, clearly did care. Karloff is good in a difficult role that requires him to be befuddled in the first half and have a mostly blank expression in the second half. Ricardo Cortez is slick as usual, which perfectly fits the character. Gwenn is oddly cast, but it's the sort of casting that works for the movie. Direction is handled by Michael Curtiz who could simply have done a workmanlike job and have the movie look like any other B movie, but decided to use a bunch of interesting camera angles and lighting techniques. Sure, the plot of The Walking Dead is nuts and takes too much time to get to the good part, but the movie is still quite interesting.

I'm not certain whether The Walking Dead is available on DVD. Unfortunately, the Amazon link at IMDb leads to a search on the phrase "walking dead", which of course yields a ton of hits for DVDs of the TV series. TCM's schedule page, as well as their search, also leads to hits on the TV series.