Edison, the Man

Another of the movies that I had on my DVR that was getting close to expiring was Edison, the Man. Once again, having seen it, now you get the blog post on it.

I did a post on Young Tom Edison at the end of 2024. At the end of that movie, MGM announced that there would soon be another movie telling the second chapter of Tom Edison's life, which is of course Edison, the Man. This second chapter opens in 1929, on the golden jubilee of light to commemorate 50 years of Edison having come up with incandescent lighting. As you might guess, this is where we're going to get Yet Another Flashback, going all the way back to the early 1870s, before the invention of the light bulb.

Edison has been working as a telegraph operator, but he's an inventor at heart, so he makes his way to New York where he's got a friend, Bunt Cavatt (Lynne Overman), who suggested he come because perhaps he can set Edison up with some research space. That space is in the basement of the business owned by Taggart (Gene Lockhart with a ridiculous beard), who runs a business showing gold prices.

Edison had already invented a stock ticker by this point, but the invention was a failure. In any case, it had given him some experience with electricity which was a new thing at that time. So when Taggart's ticker fails, Edison is able to fix it, getting him an in to Western Union and its research division, run by General Powell (Charles Coburn). Working in the same building is young Mary Stillwell (Rita Johnson). As you might guess, the two fall in love and get married. (In real life, Edison was married twice; Mary was Edison's first wife who died in the mid-1880s after the action of this movie ends.)

Edison comes up with another invention that he's able to sell to Powell and Taggart for a substantial sum, which enables him to build his own laboratory in Menlo Park, NJ and bring over many of the people he had worked with at Western Union. Edison's dream is to come up with an incandescent light to replace gas lighting, although it's an intractable problem. He comes up with some inventions, but eventually he gets to the point where he's heavily in debt and he might even lose the laboratory if he can't come up with another invention to pay off that debt.

That invention isn't the electric light yet; first is the recording of sound on the forerunner of the grammophone. But he's still working on electric lighting, and Bunt is stupid enough to tell reporters that Edison has more or less solved the problem of incandescent light. So we get a sequence in which Edison and his men go through a lot of unsuccessful tries before he finally comes up with a filament that allows for a workable light bulb. But then there's the problem of the creation of the large amounts of electricity necessary to run the bulbs that would light up a whole city. Taggart is still there to oppose Edison....

Edison, the Man is a dramatically interesting movie, although by all accounts it's more or less only tangentially related to the real Thomas Edison. Sure, Edison invented a sound recorder and an incandescent light bulb, but some of the other aspects of his life, such as his being fairly vicious in enforcing his patents, is completely overlooked. Spencer Tracy unsuprisingly does a good job with his role, as do the supporting characters, although the Bunt Cavatt character is a bit obnoxious and unlikable. Edison, the Man is very much a good example of the Hollywood biopic from the era before World War II. Despite its hagiolatrous inaccuracties, it's definitely worth a watch.

TCM Star of the Month November 2023: Gloria Grahame

We started a new month last week, but because of the vagaries of the schedule the new star of the month didn't come until tonight, November 7. That Star of the Month is Gloria Grahame, and her movies will be airing every Tuesday in prime time. This first Tuesday includes one of her early movies that I had on my DVR and hadn't blogged about before: Blonde Fever, overnight tonight at 1:15 AM (so technically November 8 here in the eastern time zone but still November 7 in the Pacific). As always, seeing such a movie show up on the schedule, I made a point to watch it so that I could do a review here.

The movie starts off with an establishing shot of the Café Donay, which is somewhere on the road between Reno, the divorce capital of the world, and Lake Tahoe. It's a way-too-upscale place for this part of the world, probably because the movie is based on a play by Ferenc Molnár which I'd bet was originally set somewhere else. But since Hollywood was making it and the movie was made during World War II, and the movie deals with divorce, the action had to be moved to Nevada.

Anyhow, showing up at the café on his motorbike is young Freddie (Marshall Thompson). He's in love with waitress Sally (a young Gloria Grahame, as if you couldn't tell from the looks or the voice), but he doesn't have the money to propose to Sally. That lack of money also bugs the proprietor of the café, Peter Donay (Philip Dorn), who doesn't want such low-class vehicles showing up at the front entrance to the café. Peter is married to Delilah (Mary Astor), while Sally has a crush on Peter, who she thinks of as worldly.

Unfortunately, there's the problem that not only is Peter married, but he's not a particularly good catch as a husband. Delilah stays more because she's got a stable enough life here and because she probably doesn't want to have to start over again. The café has been in financial difficulty in part because Peter has a gambling problem, yet another reason why he's been a lousy husband even though he claims not to have engaged in real gambling in a year or two. He has, however, but a raffle ticket in a national lottery and that's going to become an important point later.

Delilah decides she's going to try to save her marriage by bringing Sally and Freddie together. On the one hand, Delilah tells Sally about all the terrible things that Peter has done, and that the likelihood is one of Peter having an affair with Sally and then moving on to yet another someone else after growing tired of Sally. She also works on the financial front partly by getting Freddie a job at the place, and partly by telling Sally about Peter's gambling problem. But then Peter's raffle ticket pays off to the tune of $40,000, which is a couple years' salary in those days, so not enough to retire on but definitely enough to start a family if it were Freddie who had the money.

There are some fairly big problems with Blonde Fever. One is that Peter is written as such an irredeemable character that we don't understand why Delilah stands by him. The movie doesn't feel like a road house in Nevada (or anywhere) either, which is again down to the difficulty of taking what was likely an upscale play and trying to shoehorn it into Nevada. The air of unreality is added to by there being next to no mention of the war. Finally, the movie doesn't seem to have any idea whether it wants to be a comedy or a drama, and consistently gets things wrong.

The few bright points are Mary Astor, who certainly tries although she's given pretty dire material to work with. There's also a supporting performance by Felix Bressart, who also does the best he can. Thankfully, Blonde Fever didn't strangle Gloria Grahame's career in the cradle. But it's not that good of a movie.