Mr. Soft Touch

Another of those movies that I'd seen show up on TCM and one or another of the FAST channels (probably Cinevault Classics since this is a Columbia movie), but never actually got around to watching, is Mr. Soft Touch. TCM ran it last year at Christmas, and it says something about the backlog of movies I've got that I'm only now getting around to doing a post on it.

The movie opens up with a man named Joe Miracle (Glenn Ford) in a car chase. It's Christmastime, and Joe, after escaping over a drawbridge, gives a policeman raising money a $50 bill. This being the late 1940s, it's obvious that Joe has come into a bunch of money, and since he was being chased, it's obvious that he didn't come into that money quite honestly. After escaping from everybody, he makes his way to a Mr. and Mrs. Christopher, who happen to be the brother and sister-in-law of Joe's business partner.

The Christophers are supposed to have bought a ticket on a steamer out of the country, but since it's Christmas, Mr. Christopher is making merry with a bell that's extremely loud -- loud enough for the neighbors to make a noise complaint. Worse for Joe is that the ticket the Christophers got is for a boat that doesn't leave for another 36 hours, although in their defense that was the earliest ticket they could get. A radio announcer tells us how Joe got his money, which is from the club he used to run before World War II. While he was off fighting, the mob took over the club, and Joe wanted his money back.

Meanwhile, the police come to respond to the noise complaint, and think that Joe is actually Mr. Christopher, since the real Mr. Christopher is hiding. Meanwhile, somebody calls looking for Joe, which gives him an idea. He's going to get himself arrested as Mr. Christopher, so that when he gets the sentence of a night in jail for disturbing the peace, that will keep him safe from the mobsters who have been chasing him and presumably figured out where he's hiding.

But there's a catch. When the cops came for the bell-ringer the first time, barging in on the situation is Jennie Jones (Evelyn Keyes). She runs the local settlement house, being a do-gooder trying to solve the social problems of the lower classes. While Joe is on trial hoping to be sentenced, Jennie shows up and gets the judge to remand him to her custody! Will Joe be able to get away from Jennie and the settlement house? Will anybody recognize him? Already on the case in the latter issue is reporter "Early" Byrd (John Ireland).

Mr. Soft Touch is an odd little combination of noirish crime movie mixed with a Christmas movie. It's a tough mix of tones to pull off, but everybody does the best they can with it. They're not always successful, although I think that's more down to the script. At times it's stuck in its weird mash-up of genres, while at other times it gives in too much to clichés. It doesn't take much to guess that Joe and Jennie are going to develop an attraction for each other, as well as that Joe is going to be found just in time for the climax.

Still, the odd genres put together, combined with the presence of Glenn Ford, who is always worth watching, makes Mr. Soft Touch worth at least one watch.

Johnny O'Clock

One more movie that's currently available on Tubi through the end of November is Johnny O'Clock. Since it's leaving soon, I wanted to make certain I could watch it and give you enough of a heads-up to catch it yourself.

Dick Powell, having made the transition to darker movies, plays the titular character, a man who runs a casino and lives in what seems like one of those apartment hotels adjacent to the casino. As the movie opens, we learn of an alleged gangster who was shot to death resisting arrest, something that brings police detective Koch (a young Lee J. Cobb, although this movie hows he never looked young) into the case, and eventually closer and closer to Johnny's life.

Johnny manages the casino for his business partner Guido Marchettis (Thomas Gomez, who for some reason gets credited as S. Thomas Gomez). Their relationship is a bit more complicated, however, as at some point in the past Johnny had been in a relationship with Nelle (Ellen Drew), who is now Mrs. Guido Marchettis. Nelle still holds some sort of torch for Johnny, however, as she sends him a fancy fob watch that's engraved on the back. Johnny, fairly horrified by this, gives the watch to the hat-check girl, Harriet Hobson (Nina Foch), so that she can arrange to have it returned to Nelle.

The watch never gets returned to Nelle, however. Harriet is found dead of a suicide in her apartment, having stuck her head in the gas oven and turned it on. She was in a relationship with Chuck, a cop who turns out to have been corrupt, and also goes missing. Eventually, he too is found dead, and that gives Koch the idea that either Johnny or Guido must be responsible for the killing. Worse, it's later discovered that Harriet had poison in her stomach, leading Koch to believe she was murdered too, with the oven thing designed to make it look like she had committed suicide.

As has happened several times in movies, especially in movies of the 1940s, the dead girl has a sibling who suddenly comes to the big city to try to find out what happened to her sister and hopefully win justice in the case. In this movie, that sister is Nancy Hobson (Evelyn Keyes). Making things more complicated, Nancy finds herself falling in love with Johnny. Johnny eventually finds the same is happening with him, not that he wants it, as he's smart enough to know how much danger this will put Nancy in. So he tries to put Nancy on a plane out of town for her own safety, only to become a victim of a drive-by shooting just as he's heading out of the airport.

It's a bit of a complicated plot that Johnny O'Clock has, and to be honest that's not always to the movie's benefit. Thankfully, everybody in the cast show themselves to be quite good at the sort of material they're given, making the movie better than it probably has a right to be. It's stylish, and definitely a nice entry to the noir cycle, something that Eddie Muller should probably show if he hasn't done so already.

The Desperadoes

Randolph Scott made enough westerns in his career that it's easy for a company to put out multiple box sets of his westerns. I got through all of the films on one of the Scott box sets I had, and some time back bought a second. I recently got around to watching one of the movies off that box set, The Desperadoes.

The first thing that surprised me is that the movie is in Technicolor, something I wouldn't have expected from Columbia producing what is really little more than a programmer during the height of World War II. But since Natalie Kalmus' name is on the credits, we know this isn't a colorized movie. Also mildly surprising is the cast, since two of the players were about to go on to bigger things.

Anyhow, as for the plot, it involves the town of Red Valley, Utah, during the Civil War. The local bank gets robbed, causing the settler depositors to question their confidence in the bank. Have no fear, says proprietor Clanton (Porter Hall); he's getting a better safe -- and indeed, there is a scene of the new safe arriving. But we also see in a brief scene where he's talking to livery stable owner Willie McLeod (Edgar Buchanan), this robbery is really an inside job by the two of them and an outlaw gang.

Randolph Scott is not, in fact, a member of that gang. Instead, he's the local sheriff, Steve Upton. He wasn't in town for the robbery because he was trying to catch some wanted criminals. To make matters worse, Steve was waylaid out in the wilderness by Cheyenne Rogers (Glenn Ford). Cheyenne was supposed to be one of the gunmen in the robbery, imported from well away so that nobody would recognize him, but he got delayed by the loss of his horse, and had to steal Steve's instead.

So when Rogers gets to town, using an obviously phony name like Bob or Bill Smith or somesuch, Willie's niece Allison (Evelyn Keyes) immediately figures something is amiss. That's because she recognizes the sheriff's horse, wondering why somebody else would be riding it. Worse for Cheyenne is that the lady who is in charge of the gambling at the saloon, calling herself the Countess (Claire Trever, future Oscar winner) knows Cheynne and knows of his criminal past.

Still, Cheyenne stays in town, in part because the Countess thinks she caused Cheyenne to go bad back in Wyoming. And then there's the Sheriff, who knows Cheyenne and either doesn't know about Cheyenne's past, or doesn't care about it now that Cheynne is trying to get on the right side of the Production Code again. Complicating matters is that the Countess is also in love with Cheyenne, although he and Allison fall in love along the way. And then one of the gang members who actually robbed the bank outs Cheyenne, which puts him and the sheriff in danger.

As I said at the beginning, I was kind of surprised to see The Desperadoes in Technicolor, since for a 1940s western it's little more than standard stuff. At least when they got past 1953 and the introduction of Cinemascope, you can understand the programmer westerns wanting to use color to show off those wide vistas and compete with television, largely in black and white at the time. Although The Desperadoes is fairly standard, that doesn't mean it's a bad movie by any means. In fact, it's quite competently made, and will definitely entertain any fan of the western genre. It's not quite as good as the darker and more psychological westerns of the 1950s, or the A westerns, but it holds its own as a movie to watch on a rainy day or if you want something shorter.