Shipmates Forever

A couple of months back, I did a post on the Dick Powell/Ruby Keeler movie Flirtation Walk, mentioning that it was going to be airing in a double feature with another Powell/Keeler movie, Shipmates Forever; in fact I had both on my DVR from a previous double feature. Going through the long backlog of movies on my DVR, I've finally gotten around to watching Shipmates Forever, so now would be a good time to do a post on it.

This time around, Dick Powell doesn't start off in the US military. Instead, it's his father, a man named Richard Melville II and played by Lewis Stone, who is in the military. Specifically, he's an admiral who has reached the age where they can't really use him on a ship any more so that he'd be better for the Navy as the commandant of the Naval Academy in Annapolis. He's about to have his last watch ceremony on board ship, and would really like his son, Richard III (that's Dick Powell, as implied above) to come down and see it.

Dick III, being played by Dick Powell, is a radio crooner who loves his father, but would really rather continue being a radio crooner since his heart isn't anywhere near the navy and besides, his radio work really pays the bills in a way serving in the navy wouldn't. But since he loves his father, he travels to port to see his father's retirement ceremony. Dad uses this as an opportunity to try to manipulate his son into trying out for the Academy. Interestingly, Dad's rather selfish treatment of his son is consistently portrayed in Shipmates Forever as a good thing.

At the ceremony, Dick III meets a lovely young woman, June Blackburn (Ruby Keeler), and immediately falls for her. In talking about joining the Navy, June mentions that she's not so certain she wants a husband in the navy, since she lost her father and a brother in the war (which of course refers to the first World War, since the movie predates the European theater of World War II). But young Dick finally caves to his father's pressure, and takes the entrance exam with the intenion of refusing his commission when he graduates.

We then get introduced to a couple of other men who also want to enroll at the academy. Coxswain (John Arledge) is already in the Navy but wants to become an officer, which necessitates getting into Annapolis. Cowboy (Eddie Acuff) is joining from Arizona, while Sparks (Ross Alexander), who has a way with the radio, is also not from a navy family.

As you can guess, all for get in, and become roommates together, at least during their first year. But young Dick is still insistent on going back to crooning after graduation, refusing the commission, so he makes himself distant from those who would otherwise be his friends. This includes even Coxswain, who really wants Dick's help in not flunking out of the Academy. Once again, Dick's actions are presented as being a bad thing. And then, to make matters worse, June tells Dick that she can't marry him if he drops out of the Academy or refuses his commission!

Of course, as you might guess, Dick is going to get a chance to "redeem" himself at the end, and given what's transpired in the first 90 minutes or so, you can guess how that's going to go. Shipmates Forever is supposed to be a feel-good movie.

For me, however, Shipmates Forever doesn't work as well as Flirtation Walk, for several reasons, and I say that as someone who didn't think Flirtation Walk holds up as well as the Warner's musicals from 1933. One is that, as I strongly implied above, Lewis Stone is just downright nasty here at times as the father trying to cajole his son into following his footsteps, and not what the son wants -- especially considering what the son wants is in no way unrespectable or immoral. Worse, however, is that Powell and especially Keeler are somewhat misused here. Shipmates Forever is somewhat of a musical, and Powell certainly gets to sing. But Keeler, known as a dancer (cue the jokes about the quality of her dancing), gets precious few opportunities to dance. And there aren't any Warner Bros.-style musical numbers here.

Shipmates Forever comes across as the sort of movie where the studio bosses saw the success of Powell and Keeler as a screen couple and wanted to put them in another movie together, but didn't really have anything ready to put them into. The result is a movie where the component parts don't really jell.

Four Daughters good, seven daughters better?

I've got a bunch of movies on my DVR that I haven't blogged about before but that are coming up soon on TCM. One of them is Raintree County, but that's currently on the schedule for July so I've decided I'm going to blog about it then. But there are two on June 18, which is why the first of them is getting a post already on June 16. That one is Seven Sweethearts, which comes on TCM at 11:30 AM on June 18.

A brief opening includes some doggerel about the Dutch contribution to America, reminding us of the town of Holland, MI, which was founded by Dutch immigrants although as I understand it the demographics have changed significantly since this movie was released in 1942. Then, driving into New Delft, which I guess is supposed to be the stand-in for Holland, is New York photojournalist Henry Taggart (Van Heflin, who had just become a star thanks to his performance in Johnny Eager, although this movie was released before he won the Oscar). He's got an assignment to do a piece on the town's tulip festival, and he's looking for a place to stay.

Unfortunately for him, he winds up talking to somebody who it seems would rather give him the runaround, that being Van Maaster (S.Z. Sakall). Henry first meets Van Maaster sitting in the town square playing his oboe, while other guys in the buildings around the square play the other parts of the piece. It just so happens that Van Maaster owns the local hotel, although he really only advertises it to the people he wants to have stay in the hotel, which seems like a good way to go bankrupt quickly. Fortunately for Henry, Mr. Van Maaster is willing to have him as a guest.

Henry gets shown to his room by one of Van Maaster's daughters, who just happens to have a boy's name, because Dad, wanting a boy, preemptively gave all his kids boys' names before they were born, only for his wife to push out one daughter after another, seven in all. Henry also discovers that this is a rather odd hotel, in that there are guests who haven't paid their bills in months, and all the guests seem as happy as they would be if they were Stepford Guests.

The daughters are all unmarried, because of a family tradition. Even though five of them have boyfriends who anywhere else would be a fiancé already, in the Van Maaster family, the daughters always have to marry in age order. And the oldest daughter, Regina (Marsha Hunt), instead of wanting to get married, wants to go off to New York and become an actress. So she's thrilled that Henry is here, because perhaps he can get her out of town.

It's youngest daughter Billie (Kathryn Grayson), however, who winds up weaving the web around Henry as this magical town grows on him. He and Billie fall in love, although there's a problem in that she doesn't really want to upset the family tradition and get married first. (I also couldn't quite tell how much of an age difference there was between the seven daughters.)

As I watched Seven Sweethearts, I couldn't help but think of the Four Daughters series that Warner Bros. had recently completed. That series worked in part because it was made before World War II came to America, during that latter stages of the Depression when that sort of small-town charm still worked. But also, Four Daughters had a hard edge of drama in no small part thanks to the presence of John Garfield and being done at Warner Bros.

MGM, on the other hand, put Van Heflin into Seven Sweethearts, and seemed to be of the belief that the thing to do with this material was to pour as much of the sentimental gloop as the studio could into the material. Another review I read used the word "cloying", and oh my is Seven Sweethearts nonstop cloy. You wonder why Henry didn't throttle everyone in town on his first day in New Delft.

But then, to make things worse, since they were grooming Kathryn Grayson for stardom, they had to give her a bunch of songs to sing. Her voice doesn't really work for me, and I've always considered her an acquired taste. But her vocal stylings work even less for this sort of movie.

There are going to be people who like Seven Sweethearts. But I'm not one of those people.

Flirtation Walk

There are several movies coming up on TCM in the next two or three days that are on my DVR and that I haven't blogged about before. Two of them are part of a double bill of Dick Powell/Ruby Keeler musicals that I think were on the same double bill when I recorded them some months back. The first of those movies is Flirtation Walk, which shows up overnight between May 9 and 10 at 1:45 AM (so that's technically early May 10 in the Eastern time zone, but still May 9 in the Pacific). The second one is Shipmates Forever, but that's not getting a post of its own just yet because I've never been the biggest fan of doing multiple posts on movies from the same person or in a closely similar genre in close succession if I can avoid it. That, and there are two movies overnight between May 10/11 which aren't really related, so one of them gets a post tomorrow, May 9, with the other getting a post on May 10.

Dick Powell plays Dick Dorcy, an enlisted man in the Army who is stationed in Hawaii (this being a dozen years or so before World War II) serving under Sgt. Thornhill (Pat O'Brien). Ruby Keeler plays Kit Fitts, who is the daughter of a general who is only passing through Hawaii on his way to a posting in the Philippines, since that was a US colony at the time. Gen. Fitts is traveling with his daughter, as well as an adjutant, Lt. Biddle (John Eldredge) who also happens to be Kit's boyfriend, something you'd think might be a problem considering Biddle might be serving under his future father-in-law.

Now, since Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler are top billed, you might guess that they're going to get romantically involved, and might just even wind up together in the final reel, although it's going to take several reels for them to get together for that requisite happy ending. The two characters are brought together courtesy of Sgt. Thornhill, who assignes Dorcy to be Miss Fitts' driver while she's on Oahu. Kit wants to see the island, so she orders Dorcy to take her off base to some of the more scenic spots, with the two of them winding up at a luau where it seems Dorcy already knows some of the ethnic Hawaiian locals, even singing "Aloha Oe".

But Dorcy is an enlisted man, and Fitts is not only the daughter of an officer, but a young woman who already has an officer pursuing her. So he doesn't quite understand it when he gets accused of wrongdoing and Kit says she didn't really love Dorcy. Dorcy first thinks about desertion, but ultimately decides that the way to get the respect of people like Kit and Biddle is to become an officer himself. I don't know if they had an Officer Candidates' School back in those days, but in any case Dorcy eschews this, applying to West Point instead!

Dorcy somehow gets accepted, and is good at the military stuff, to the point that by the time senior year comes along, he's considered a leader among men in his class. He's even given the job of writing the class revue for senior spring. But a monkey wrench gets thrown into the works when West Point gets a new commandant: Gen. Fitts! He brings back his daughter, who is still involved with Biddle although they're still not engaged. Nobody else at West Point knows about Dorcy's previous involvment with Miss Pitts, so when the cadets all meet her, everyone else is taken with her while Dorcy feigns complete indifference.

The other cadets, thinking Kit is so charming, decide that they want to break with tradition and include a female part in the revue, with Kit being just the woman for the part. Dorcy, of course, is mortified, and this leads to the complications that eventually get resolved in the standard-issue happy way in the final reel.

Flirtation Walk somehow got an Oscar nomination for Best Picture, although that was the first era of having 10 Best Picture nominees before it got cut to five in the early 1940s. Looking through the list of nominees (this was the year It Happened One Night won), it also looks like a fairly weak list of nominees. It's not that Flirtation Walk is bad; it's more that it pales in comparison to Warner Bros.' musicals of the previous year, and feels a lot more like a programmer than a prestige movie. I'm not the biggest fan of Ruby Keeler, but the movie doesn't give her enough to do. Ditto Pat O'Brien, since the movie in many ways seems like two movies grafted together, the Hawaii half and the West Point half.

Still, everybody is more than professional with the material they're given, and nobody really hits a wrong note. So Flirtation Walk winds up being something more than pleasant enough, and certainly entertaining for fans of musicals or romantic dramedies. But there's a reason why Flirtation Walk is less well-known than a lot of other musicals out there.

Titanic (1937)

A couple of months back, TCM aired another new-to-me movie from the 1930s that sounded interesting, so I recorded it: History Is Made at Night. It's got another airing on TCM coming up, tomorrow (March 24) at 8:00 AM, so as always with upcoming movies, I made a point of watching it in order to be able to do a post on it.

Irene Vail (Jean Arthur) is married to Bruce (Colin Clive), owner of luxury liners and yachts, but it's an unhappy marriage as she's not up on deck with him as the movie begins. In fact, she's just written him a letter telling him that she's going to try to obtain a divorce, and that she wishes she'd never met him. With that in mind, she heads off to Paris for the mandatory separation, while he's left to lick his wounds.

Well, not quite. Bruce is insanely jealous, and convinced that the only reason Irene would leave him is because there's another man in the picture. And if his employees insist that there isn't, well, he's going to create one. With that in mind, he has detectives find out where Irene is, and then sends his chauffeur there to create a situation where it looks like Irene has been having an assignation with the chauffeur, thereby destroying Irene's chance of getting a favorable divorce.

But the surprise meeting doesn't go as planned. Irene unsurprisingly resists, and another man not related to her hears it. That man, Paul Dumond (Charles Boyer) is a maître d' at a fancy restaurant in Paris. He barges in, pretending to be a jewel thief to try to save Irene. He and the chauffeur get in a scuffle before Bruce comes in, Paul pretending to take some jewels to make the lie more convincing to Bruce.

The chauffeur was only knocked out in the scuffle but Bruce kills him, telling the police that it was Irene's new lover who did it. Meanwhile, Paul has taken Irene to his restaurant for a meal, and the two fall in love. So when Irene shows back up at her hotel, she finds the chauffeur dead and that Bruce has made it appear that Paul is the guilty party in a way that nobody will be able to convince the authorities otherwise. Bruce uses this to blackmail Irene into going back to New York with him.

Eventually, Paul discovers Irene's real identity, that she's married to a wealthy man in New York, and heads across the Atlantic with his head chef Cesare (Leo Carrillo) to try to find Irene. He gets a job as maître d' at a fancy New York restaurant after saving it from bad business decisions, and sets out trying to do something to get Irene to discover the restaurant, since he doesn't know where in New York she is.

Unfortunately, Bruce learns that the police have found the man they're looking for, or the man they think murdered the chauffeur, even though we know it's neither Paul nor the actual killer. But Bruce is again able to use this to find Irene and blackmail her. Either she goes to Paris to save her lover, agreeing in the process to stay with Bruce, or her lover gets the guillotine. Bruce celebrates by taking her out to dinner, which just happens to be at Paul's restaurant.

So why have I titled this post "Titanic (1937)"? Bruce heads to Paris on the Hindenburg, since one of his ships is going to be trying to break the transatlantic speed record, and he wants to be in Le Havre to meet the ship. Irene takes the boat, with Paul following going with her to testify at the trial. And when Bruce finds out the truth about Irene's lover, he's perfectly willing to have his ship hit an iceberg!

History Is Made at Night is an interesting movie, although I had a problem with the severe plot hole that accompanies the climax of the movie. After the Titanic sank, rules were changed in order to make certain all transatlantic liners would have sufficient lifeboats for everybody on board. So the idea that anybody would be forced to stay on board for lack of space in the lifeboats is totally wrong. But the rest of the movie is pretty darn good, being an interesting mix of romantic drama, disaster movie, and some noirish elements even though noir wasn't really a concept back in 1937.

Boyer and Arthur make an appealing romantic couple, and Clive, who died much too young not long after this movie, is quite good as the nasty jealous husband. It's one that got a DVD release from Criterion and doesn't show up very often on TCM, so now is a good time to watch it.

Three Comrades

In looking through the movies on my DVR, I noticed something that's coming up on TCM, so I figured I'd watch it now to do a post on it: Three Comrades, which airs at 6:30 AM January 30.

The movie starts off with an establishing shot that has the words "Nov. 11 1918" written in the clouds. Now, if you recall your history, you'll know that this was the day on which World War I ended, although at the time the movie was released it was still known as the Great War because the European theater of World War I was still a year away from kicking off. Als, if you paid attention to the opening credits, you'll have spotted the name Erich Maria Remarque, writer of All Quiet on the Western Front, so you can guess that this is written about Germans. Sure enough, we see a group of German officers and flyboys hoping that real peace can come to the world.

Among the flyboys are three who hope they can keep up their friendshpi and hope that in the new Germany they can put the skills they learned in the military to good use as auto mechanics. Those three are Erich Lohkamp (Robert Taylor), Gottfried Lenz (Robert Young), and Otto Koster (Franchot Tone). They meet up again in early 1920, and Otto actually has a car of his own, so they not only do an auto-repair business, they try to make money on the side by using the car as a taxi. While out for a joyride one day, they get in a race with a car that has a female passenger, Patricia Hollmann (Margaret Sullavan). Patricia was part of one of the pre-war noble families, but the war destroyed all that, and she's reduced to trying to get a sugar daddy (Lionel Atwill) to bankroll her.

All three of the young German friends like Patricia, but it's Erich who really falls in love with her. Eventually, he's convinced by his to try to start a relationship with Patricia, who loves Erich in return, even though Erich thinks his low social class will hurt him with Patricia. But no, she really loves him, so the two decide to get married.

The two go on a honeymoon someplace on the German coast that really looks more like the Northern California coast, but that's beside the point. It's not a happy honeymoon, however, as Patricia collapses with what is presumably tuberculosis although I don't think that's actually named in the movie. Dr. Jaffe (Monty Woolley, who only has a couple of scenes) is called in, and tells Erich that Patricia really needs to get to a sanitarium, the sooner the better.

Not that the three friends have the money for this. And they're also coming up against the political realities of early Weimar Germany. It's a volatile place, what with Germany having been defeated in the war and a lot of people chafing at the reparations, even though the real disasters of the 1923 hyperinflation still hadn't occurred. In any case, there's already political street violence, and it does eventually touch the three men. Gottfried believes in the teachings of a radical pacifist, and that's dangerous, as the proto-Fascists want to shut down such political expression, by force if necessary. (They didn't have social media giants to shut down such speech under the guise of "fake news" back in those days.) Gottfried gets shot and killed, although fortunately this is after Patricia has gone off to the sanitarium so she doesn't know about it.

What she does learn is that she needs an operation, because in those days a vague operation could apparently cure any serious illness other than cancer, which would invariably kill you within months. However, the operation involves her having to remain nearly still for weeks on end, and she may not be able to follow medical instructions....

Three Comrades is one of those movies that has all the gloss MGM could offer, although I couldn't help but feel that it was a bit of a mess. The plot twists of Patricia falling ill and then needing an operation felt more like a soap opera to me than what is supposed to be a serious film. MGM was also never the best studio to handle the sort of serious social commentary that's on offer here with the backdrop of Weimar political violence, so I felt like there was an earnest tone that didn't quite fit the material.

That having been said, there is the MGM gloss, which is definitely a sign of quality production values, while the cast also do the best they can with the material even if some of them are miscast. (Guy Kibbee in a supporting role is most definitely not German, but he's as professional as ever. And there are a lot of people who praise the movie much more highly than I do, so it's definitely worth a watch to judge for yourself.

Joan Crawford doesn't quite meet Stephen King

A few months back TCM had a birthday (I think) programming salute to Margaret Sullavan. One of her movies I hadn't seen before was The Shining Hour, so I recorded it in order to be able to watch it later.

Joan Crawford is the nominal star here, not Sullavan, although it's a bit more of an ensemble cast as the two male leads are just as important and we see one of them first. That one is Robert Young, playing David Linden. The Lindens must have become wealthy enough for them to be famous just for being famous, as David is flying cross country having heard the news of yet another marriage for his brother Henry (Melvyn Douglas). Indeed, it's the gossip among some of the other passengers on the plane, and the sort of marriage to an alleged chorus girl that David wants to stop.

In fact, the supposed chorus girl isn't quite a chorus girl, but still a performer. Olivia Riley (that's Joan Crawford) does the sort of finer dancing that you see when movies of this era visit a high-class nightclub and have a couple perform a ballroom type dance. They're nowhere near as good as Vernon and Irene Castle, or even Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, but they're good enough to get gigs like this club where Henry saw Olivia and fell in love with her. Olivia, for her part, likes Henry as a friend, and likes his positive attitude. It's easy to see, however, why other members of the family might not approve of the marriage.

That especially goes for Henry and David's nasty sister Hannah (Fay Bainter), who you might think is channeling Judith Anderson's performance as Mrs. Danvers in Rebecca, except that this movie came out two years before Rebecca. But you wonder if Hannah ever loved a man, and that's why she's so damn bitter. Anyhow, she does her best to make Olivia feel unwelcome. The one person who has complete sympathy for Olivia is David's wife Judy (Margaret Sullavan). Judy feels that they're in the same situation, as Judy is in a marriage that in her view has become the sort of loveless marriage that is a trope of movies like this.

Meanwhile, the Lindens own a bunch of land and farm it, with Henry planning to subdivide some of it so that he and Olivia can have a nice house of their own. While that house is being built, one of the workers, Benny Collins (Frank Albertson), tries putting the moves on Olivia, which is a big mistake. Worse, it's David who spots this and stops it, which leads to him developing feelings of his own for Olivia, which may be mutual. That's bad for the marriage between David and Judy, and bad for the marriage between Olivia and Henry. But worst of all is that Hannah is still there, waiting for the right opportunity to drive Olivia away. And you won't believe how Hannah tries to do it.

Joan Crawford, as I understand it, felt like MGM was deliberately giving her poor roles in her last few years to try to get rid of her, which is why she felt Mildred Pierce, her first film at Warner Bros., was so important. Having watched The Shining Hour, it's easy to have sympathy with Crawford. The movie is a thoroughly silly potboiler, and I don't mean silly in a good way here. Well, maybe I do for Hannah as a character since she's so nuts. But everybody else is weighed down by the material. I wonder if that's because one of the screenplay credits goes to Ogden Nash of light verse fame. I wouldn't expect him to be good at writing this sort of movie. The actors do the best they can with the material, however. And, since this was made at MGM, it has extremely high production values. But if anything, it's the sort of movie that should be watched to study how films can go wrong.

Living on Velveeta

I mentioned last month when Kay Francis was TCM's Star of the Month that at some point in the past, possibly even before I started this blog, I had seen the movie Living on Velvet that was airing as part of the tribute, but that I had never blogged about it. So I made it a point to record that movie, and then sit down to watch it and do a post on it here.

Kay Francis gets top billing, but the real lead here is played by George Brent, whose role at Warner Bros. was to make his female leads look good, first Kay Francis, and then by the late 1930s Bette Davis. Brent plays Terry Parker, a professional airplaine pilot back in the days when the profession was rather more dangerous than it is now. Indeed, Terry is at the controls of his plane in the opening scene when it crashes, killing his parents and sister but not him, since otherwise he couldn't really be the lead in the movie. Terry then goes overseas to fly as we learn from a series of newspaper articles, first to the Far East and then Venezuela where he keeps getting in trouble because of hs desire to live the sort of life he wants to.

After a year of this, he's returned home to New York where he flies in an air show, in a plane that's owned by his friend "Gibraltar" (Warren William). Gibraltar is one of those gentlemen pilots, one of those idle rich who has his own plane more to impress the society types than to be truly adventurous. Gibraltar invites Terry to one of those society parties of the sort we saw at the beginning of One More Tomorrow, this one hosted by Amy Prentiss (Kay Francis) and her aunt Martha.

Amy and Terry meet, and she's taken by him, not minding that he was a pilot even if he doesn't want his past reputation to precede him. She's so taken by him that she leaves the party to go out for a night on the town. This, even though she's supposed to be Gibraltar's girlfriend. It only takes that one night for Amy and Terry to realize they want to marry each other, and Gibraltar is even generous enough to let the couple live in his house out on Long Island for a ridiculously low rent even by 1930s standards.

Of course, part of the implied agreement of living out on Long Island is that Terry will settle down and get the sort of job where people commute to and from Manhattan by train and play bridge on the way in and out since they all take the same train in and out every day. Terry has never even played bridge, and still has dreams of going back to being a pilot, even though he doesn't have the money for a plane and there's no way he can support Amy on that sort of income.

Amy, wackily enough, continues to support her husband despite her desire for him to get a more regular job. It's only when he sells some stock and uses the proceeds to try to start that airline business rather than renovating the house and saving for a rainy day that she finally thinks of leaving him. But you just know that the first time there's an emergency, she's going to go running right back to him....

Living on Velvet was released in 1935, and feels like the sort of movie that Warner Bros. would try to force upon Kay Francis to try to get her to ask out of her contract since they knew they were soon to have a new queen of the lot in the form of Bette Davis. Kay, unlike Bette or Olivia de Havilland, didn't rebel much, so she got stuck in some lesser movies, as well as this one with ridiculous character motivations.

However, there are definitely things worth watching in Living on Velvet. Kay Francis was known as a clotheshorse, and at the final party, she's wearing a dress that's extremely backless. It's possibly even more backless than the one that Jean Harlow wore in Dinner at Eight where she tells the joke about not being able to expose her skin, only to turn around and show that backless dress. The other highlight is when Kay and George Brent have that night on the town. Kay recites the "30 days hath September" poem, and when she gets to April, George's character notices the speech impediment and comments on it. The fact that Kay Francis would be willing to do such a scene is a bit surprising.

Living on Velvet is a typical lower-tier programmer from the era. It's certainly not terrible, but there's not all that much special about it.

Moonrise

Another of the movies that I recently got around to watching to try to free up some space on my DVR is Moonrise.

In a prologue, we see the silhouette of a man being hanged for murder, while kids beng kids, taunt the son of the hanged man, Danny Hawkins. For whatever reason, these kids being kids are far worse than in real life, and the taunting continues into adulthood, as they all believe that Danny has "bad blood". The taunting is led by Jerry Sykes (Lloyd Bridges), a man that as it turns out a lot of people have a reason not to like.

One person, however, who doesn't seem to dislike Jerry is local teacher Gilly Johnson (Gail Russell). She was all set to get married to Jerry, while Danny kind of likes her. At a dance, Jerry teases Danny one time too many, and and Danny responds by picking up a rock and hitting Jerry with it. Unfortunately, this is enough to kill Jerry, and in a panic, Danny doesn't know what to do, although he's fortunate that the exchange took place in a swamp so nobody will find the body for quite some time. The bad news is that Danny accidentally left his pocket knife at the scene, and it's a very distinctive knife.

With Jerry out of the way, Danny tries being nice to Gilly, and she likes his niceness. But Danny is also racked by guilt, and to be fair, he probably should since he killed a guy, even if the guy was a fairly distasteful person. Danny's guilt causes him to do some rather nasty things like get in a car accident, kick a hound dog that finds Jerry's body, strangle the deaf-mute (Harry Morgan) who finds the pocketknife, or jump off a Ferris wheel because he thinks the sheriff is on to him.

Eventually, the sheriff does figure things out, but this is an odd little backwoods Virginia town in that the sheriff and others have weird views of justice and salvation based on 19th century romanticism. Danny doesn't really have bad blood, you see, since the killing Dad committed was understandable: a doctor's malpractice led to the death of Danny's mom, and Dad killed the doctor in a revenge killing, and turned himself in. If only Danny can turn himself in in the same way, and not all handcuffed and everything, perhaps the jury will have mercy on him. (We don't actually get to the trial and justice portion of the story, since that would have required the movie to adhere to the Production Code.)

Moonrise is an odd little movie, in that it seems more about the visuals, and in some ways a psychological look at the main character, than it does about the actual story, which is fairly pedestrian. Physically it's a nice movie to look at, if you can overlook that story. Dane Clark isn't the world's best actor by any stretch of the imagination, and while he doesn't do badly, many of the supporting actors are just as much worth watching. I haven't mentioned Rex Ingram, as one of those solitary wise black men, along the lines of Juano Hernandez in Stars in My Crown. Ethel Barrymore has one scene as Danny's grandmother and unsurprisingly nails it.

If you're in the mood for something slightly off Hollywood normal, but not too far off, then Moonrise is definitely worth a watch.

Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now

There are multiple different movies with different stories but having the same title, Mannequin. Recently, I watched the 1937 Mannequin.

Joan Crawford stars as Jessie Cassidy, a woman working in some sort of garment factory and supporting an entire family of Mom (Elisabeth Risdon), Dad (Oscar O'Shea), and bratty kid brother Clifford (Leo Gorcey). Dad and Clifford are both layabouts that don't seem to want to work for anything, and Jessie is really beginning to get sick of that. Thankfully, she's got a boyfriend in Eddie Miller (not the self-styled King of Noir and played by Alan Curtis) whom she likes and who wants her to marry him, so she does.

At their wedding dinner, Jessie and Eddie are in a restaurant where another of the patrons is John Hennessey (Spencer Tracy). He came from the same neighborhood as Jessie, but worked like a dog to make it to where he is now, which is pretty darn well-to-do in the shipping industry. But he visits his old roots, I guess trying to remind himself of where he might wind up if he's a slacker. He sees Jessie and immediately falls in love with her. But he's lso a fundamentally decent guy and is never going to try to woo Jessie because it would be wrong to pursue a married woman.

Jessie gets a new and better-paying job in the Gebhart Follies as a chorus girl, and finds that Eddie is almost as bad as her father and brother, always having some sort of get-rich-quick scheme that is of course never going to work. As an example, he gets some friends to lend them their apartment because they're going away for a few months or something, but never tells Jessie, so when the friends come back and want their apartment, Jessie and Eddie are out on their keisters. Who would stay married to somebody after an incident like that.

Eventually there's going to be one such incident too many, but the one that comes really takes the cake. Eddie decides on a sort of reverse Palm Beach Story. He and Jessie should get divorced so that Jessie can have a quickie marriage to Hennessey, and then take Hennessey for a bundle in alimony, after which Eddie will be on easy street. Jessie is unsurprisingly appalled, and this finally gets her to leave Eddie. She doesn't run to Hennessey, however, because she never loved him, just considered him a decent person.

Hennessey, however, finds out that Jessie and Eddie split, and starts looking for Jessie, who didn't leave any forwarding address. Eventually, however, Hennessey finds her working as a department store model (hence the title Mannequin) and starts putting the moves on her. Jessie refuses at first, since of course she doesn't love him the way he loves her, but Hennessey keeps trying and Jessie eventually decides that even if she doesn't love Hennessey, she likes him and there is financial security in being Mrs. John Hennessey.

Except that the longshoremen have a way of going out on strike. Hennessey has always tried to give his workers a fair deal, but eventually even his employees go out on strike. Since Hennessey has all his capital tied up in his business, it threatens him with bankruptcy. Worse, nasty Eddie shows up to tell Hennessey about the proposition he had made with Jessie just before she divorced him, to try to get Hennessey to believe that's the only reason Jessie married him.

Mannequin is a competent little programmer. It's certainly not the best thing in the careers of either Joan Crawford or Spencer Tracy, although to be fair this was just before Tracy won his Oscars and just a couple of years after he moved over to MGM, so he wasn't getting just prestige roles yet. Both pull off their parts just fine, although the story at times leaves a bit to be desired. Curtis is suitably nasty, and young Leo Gorcey is already ready for the Bowery Boys.

People who like 1930s movies or like Joan Crawford will enjoy Mannequin if they're looking for something new to them; for people newer to classic films I'd start with more prominent titles.

One little point of trivia: the brothers of two prominent character actors named Frank show up: Frank Morgan's brother Ralph plays Hennessey's right-hand man, while Frank McHugh's brother Matt is another of Hennessey's underlings. Apparently they were in two other movies together as well.

A Farewell to Arms (1932)

I'm not the biggest fan of Ernest Hemingway, and perhaps that colors my view of the 1932 adaptation of his novel A Farewell to Arms. It's going to be on TCM tomorrow afternoon at 6:15 PM, so you have a chance to watch and judge for yourself.

Gary Cooper plays Lt. Frederic Henry, an American who decided he was going to go off and have some adventure by taking part in World War I on the Italian front as an ambulance driver. He's stationed with Rinaldi (Adolphe Menjou), a surgeon who has fallen a bit for one of the British nurses, Catherine Barkley (Helen Hayes), but not anywhere near the opint of it being serious.

Frederic meets Catherine, and sure enough the two fall in love, even though both of them know how forbidden this is. Catherine's best friend Ferguson (Mary Phillips) isn't so sure about the romance. Eventually, Catherine is assigned to a hospital in Milan, well behind the lines, so that she won't be able to see Frederic any more.

Frederic and his crew go on a mission that takes them close to the front lines, where they're going to have to hunker down in a basement while the Austrians are dropping bombs. One of those boms hits close enough to the house Frederic is in, resulting in substantial leg injuries. He gets sent to the hospital in... Milan. Gee, who could have guessed?

So of course Frederic and Catherine meet again, and they get secretly married by a priest, something which as I mentioned before is highly against regulations. Now being married, they can actually have sex, which serves here to facilitate the plot point of Catherine getting pregnant, because you didn't think Frederic was going to get pregnant, did you? Frederic is malingering and a nurse, finding all the alcohol he's been imbibing, sends Frederic back to the front. Catherine goes off to Switzerland to have the baby.

Catherine writes to Frederic, but Rinaldi, in a total dick move, intercepts the letters and, instead of censoring them, has them returned to sender without Frederic ever knowing Catherine has been writing him! Frederic, meanwhile, has been writing to the hospital in Milan, but of course Catherine is no longer there, and didn't leave a forwarding address. Eventually Frederic decides he's going to resort to desertion to find Catherine, with tragic results.

Apparently there's more going on in Hemingway's novel A Farewell to Arms than there is in this movie, which might explain why the 1957 film version runs almost two and a half hours. This one is a shade under 90 minutes, but even that feels long since the movie is overly talky. Cooper and Hayes do about as well as you can expect with the material, but the script certainly doesn't help them. Hayes, in particular, is not well served by the finale.

Still, A Farewell to Arms is the sort of movie you'll probably want to check out for yourself.