Under the bluebirds

June Lockhart died last year at the age of 100. For some reason I thought I mentioned the programming tribute TCM gave to her a some months back, but a search of the blog says I didn't. In any case, I had a movie with her in it on my DVR which TCM ran before she died, but which I didn't get around to watching until rather more recently, largely because I didn't realize she had a role in it: The White Cliffs of Dover.

The star here is Irene Dunne, and as the movie opens she's working as a nurse in Britain named Susan Ashwood, tending to the soldiers who are returning home from wherever it is they were bravely fighting World War II. (The movie was released a few weeks before the D-Day invasion, so perhaps these were bomber crews or people evacuated from North Africa.) Once again, as you might guess, she's about to have a flashback as to how she wound up in the situation she's in....

Let's go back to the spring of 1914. Obviously, if you know your history, you'll know that this would be shortly before World War I began in Europe, although of course it would be a good three years before that piece of shit Woodrow Wilson got the US involved in the war. Susan, at the time Susan Dunn, is traveling on an ocean liner with her father Hiram Dunn (Frank Morgan) over to England to spend a couple of months on vacation where they'll be staying with Col. Forsythe (C. Aubrey Smith) and his family. While there, Forsythe introduces Susan to a nice youngish nobleman, Sir John Ashwood (Alan Marshal). The two have a bit of a romance, although there's the question of whether it can work out since Hiram expects his daughter to return to America with him.

Susan eventually decides more or less to elope with Sir John instead of going back to America, but she has the great bad luck of marrying John just as war is being declared between Britain and Germany. Sir John comes from a long line of men who did military service, so of course he gets mobilized, and it's off to those horrid trenches of France for him to fight.

Lots of time passes, and Sir John gets brief leave as part of a program to reunite men in service with their wives, which brings Susan to Normandy for an all-too-brief weekend together. And wouldn't you know it, but a) Susan gets knocked up that weekend, and b) it's the same time that the US announces its entry into the Great War. Sadly, Sir John won't survive the war, leaving Susan a widow and mother, but a wealthy one.

Susan's son, John II (played by Roddy McDowall as a boy and Peter Lawford as an adult), grows up on the estate next to that of the Kenneys, who have a daughter his age named Betsy (played by Elizabeth Taylor as an adolescent and June Lockhart as an adult). They're going to fall in love but, as the 1930s go on Susan understands that there's another war coming and dammit, she doesn't want her son to be involved. She already gave up one man for Britain and she's not about to give up a second. Young John, however, intends to uphold the family tradition of going into military service. Since this movie was released in the spring of 1944, and since the story is told in flashback, you know whether mother or son is going to be the one to get their way.

To me The White Cliffs of Dover was one of those obvious message movies where the point of it is to show Americans at home why the US is fighting in Europe, and why they were making the sacrifices that they were. There's nothing subtle about this one at all, and that may affect your opinion on how good the movie is or isn't. It's almost as though Mrs. Miniver wasn't enough for MGM and they had to come up with more pro-Britain stuff.

Saratoga

It's fairly well-known that actress Jean Harlow died tragically young while she was in production for the 1937 movie Saratoga. Her fans demanded that MGM finish the movie so that they could see the last footage of her, and MGM relented and used a body double and voice actress to film the remaining scenes. For whatever reason, I had never actually seen Saratoga, so the last time it showed up on TCM I made the point to record it so that I could finally strike it off the list of films I hadn't seen.

Saratoga Springs, back in the 1930s and still today was known as a resort town that spent the month of August hosting a horse-racing meet that catered to the wealthy set. So, as you might guess, the movie deals with that horse set. Grandpa Clayton (Lionel Barrymore) owns Brookvale, a stud farm breeding racing horses. Or should I say owned, because he's fallen into debt and the bank is about to take everything from him. It doesn't help that his son Frank (Jonathan Hale) has incurred heavy gambling debts to professional gambler Duke Bradley (Clark Gable). But Duke likes Gramps as well as Frank's daughter Carol (Jean Harlow) and helps them keep the farm, or at least keep being able to run it, even if they're no longer going to own it -- Duke has the deed.

Carol, for her part has gone over to Europe to become cultured, where she meets a fellow American who's apparently been trying to gain some class too, Wall Street investment banker Hartley Madison (Walter Pidgeon). The two get engaged, although Carol is adamant that she's not going to use Hartley's money to buy back the deed to the farm from Duke.

Carol studies the horse-racing racket in an attempt to win back the money she'll need to buy the deed legitimately. This necessitates her spending a lot of time at racetracks all along the east coast, so she keeps meeting Duke and his gambling friends, Jesse (Frank Morgan) and Fritzi (Una Merkel). Fritzi realizes Duke is in love with Carol, and the more Carol keeps running into Duke, the less she dislikes him, to the point where you know the two are going to wind up together in the final reel even though Carol is still engaged to Hartley.

All of this is leading up to the eventual climax at Saratoga. Huntley has bought a horse after inadvertently outbidding Duke at a horse auction. Huntley wagers that this horse will be able to beat one that Duke is backing at the big race in Saratoga. Duke, for his part, has other ideas, and Carol still has divided loyalties....

It's hard to escape the poignancy of knowing that Jean Harlow died before Saratoga was completed while watching it. Not only that, but she was already terminally ill. Still, despite her health she does the best she can with the material and gives a reasonably good performance. The only thing is, the material isn't the greatest, not that this is the fault of anybody in the cast. They're all professional, while Hattie McDaniel as a maid gets to sing a verse as the whole train car does a song, and shows what a good performer she could have been if she had been given a real chance.

I also couldn't help but wonder what might have become of Harlow's career had she not died young. Sadly, I have the feeling that, as with several other big actresses of the 1930s, notably Joan Blondell or Kay Francis, World War II would have put a serious crimp in her career. She had talent, but the sort of roles that were good for her at MGM would have gone by the wayside once the more serious atmosphere the war engendered took hold.

Frank Morgan Star Vehicle?

Back in the day, the studios had access to a whole bunch of great character actors, most of whom weren't necessarily right for leading roles, at least not in the sort of prestige movies the studios put their stars in. Some of the character actors, when they did get leads, did so in B movies. Such is the case with Frank Morgan, around whom the movie Hullabaloo seems to have been designed.

Morgan plays Frank Merriweather, and as the movie opens he roaming the halls of radio station AJN looking for the talent department, as he's got a record he just knows will impress the talent scout types. But they've got enough auditions for the day, cut to bellhop Charles Holland and Virginia O'Brien of the deadpan singing routine both doing their own versions of "Carry Me Back to Old Virginny". This is really an opportunity for golfer Bob Strong (a young Dan Dailey, so young he's credited as Dan Dailey Jr.) to be introduced to the story. He's the boyfriend of Wilma Norton, daughter of one of the radio executives, who only has the job beause Wilma realizes this isn't the era where being the wife of a golf pro isn't a high-status position.

Also at the auditions, although not getting one, is Laura Merriweather (Virginia Grey), who styles herself a dancing singer, which doesn't make good radio. She tries to introduce herself to Bob, which makes Bob's fiancée jealous and basically scuppers any chance she has of getting a job. It's here that she meets Frank, who happens to be her father. He doesn't recognize her in part because he's got three ex-wives whom he hasn't seen in years because he's been trying to avoid the alimony that he doesn't have the money to pay. Together, the two go back to see Strong, who learns that Frank's talent is voice impressions. This gets him a job doing a version of Orson Welles' War of the Worlds, at which he's so good that he sets off a national panic.

This also brings all three ex-wives out of the woodwork (Billie Burke, Sara Haden, and Connie Gilchrist). Frank also fathered one child by each wife; the other two children are played by Leni Lynn and Larry Nunn. Frank needs to be able to pay off that alimoney, so all of the kids and even the ex-wives have a stake in getting Frank a job in radio. The kids, for their part, also have talent. Meanwhile, Bob has the difficult task of getting the Perkins pill company, led by Clyde (Donald Meeks) and his sister-in-law Lulu (Nydia Westman), to sponsor a new program for the network. Perhaps Frank would be a good fit for such a program. There are also all sorts of romantic complications along the way. Meanwhile, in a bit of cross-promotion for MGM, one of the episodes of the radio show has Frank doing a rendition of a scene from the then-current movie Boom Town, which Frank theoretically supplying the voices although in fact Frank Morgan was simply lip-synching to the real-life stars of the movie.

There's a fun idea behind Hullabaloo, although it's at the same time easy enough to see why MGM would only have this as a B movie and why it's not so well remembered today. Frank Morgan shows he's got talent, although he's not really a fit for lead acting. Giving audiences another chance to see a lot of routines, they way they would have in two-reelers, would have been another plus for MGM. Charles Holland, the black singer playing the bellhop, has quite a bit of talent as a singer but since this was 1940 it's obvious why he's not more famous. Virginia O'Brien's deadpan thing can be funny although I can understand why it might be an acquired taste to audiences in 2025.

Ultimately, Hullabaloo is a bit more of a time capsule than a fully coherent movie. But it's an interesting little time capsule.

Broadway to Hollywood

Mickey Rooney was TCM's Star of the Month last December, and I suppose I should probably start getting through some of the movies that I recorded not having blogged about before. First up will be one of his juvenile roles which is actually fairly brief, in the movie Broadway to Hollywood.

Rooney is, as I mentioned above, not the star here; that honor goes to Frank Morgan and to a slightly lesser extent Alice Brady. They play Ted and Lulu Hackett respectively, and as the movie opens it's probably some time in the 1880s, although I don't think everything quite fits in terms of the movie's timeline. Ted and Lulu are stars on the vaudeville circuit, which as I understand it would be the early days of vaudeville at least in the US. Ted and Lulu love each other, although Ted has difficulties being faithful, sometimes cavorting with women and sometimes cavorting with the bottle.

Eventually they have a son together, Ted Jr. (played by Jackie Cooper as a juvenile and Russell Hardie as an adult) and bring him up in the world of vaudeville, training him to become part of the act and turn it into a true family act instead of a double. Unfortunately, Ted Sr. and Lulu don't really do anything to innovate or keep the act up with the changing times, with the result that the parents become a bit less successful over time while Ted Jr. grows up to be a success on his own and having the clout to get his parents bit parts in a revue which will star him.

One generation follows the other, and Ted Jr. meets a nice woman in the show named Anne Ainsley (Madge Evans), falls in love with her, and eventually marries her, although she gets the distinct feeling tht Ted's parents don't really approve of the relationship. Perhaps she should be worrying about her husband, though, as the Hackett and Ainsley partnership seems to be going the way of the relationshp Ted Sr. and his parents had. Ted Jr. takes to both drink and women, which causes Anne all sorts of anguish, even though they have a kid of their own, Ted III (Mickey Rooney as a juvenile and Eddie Quillan as an adult). Eventually, Anne confronts Ted Jr., leading to tragedy. Ted Jr. deals with it by leaving Ted III with his parents while going off to fight in the Great War and getting himself killed in action.

Another decade or more passes, with movies taking over for vaudeville. Ted III grows up and is discovered by Hollywood to have great talent, although there's not much use for his parents. Ted III becomes successful enough that he can bring his parents out to Hollywood and give them a comfortable retirement. But, like his father and grandfather before him, Ted III lets success go to his head, having problems with both drink and women that threaten to derail his career too.

Broadway to Hollywood was released in 1933, and the first thing that I noticed is that the musical numbers in the movie are all badly filmed, as though they didn't know of the influence of Busby Berkeley and 42nd Street which came out early in 1933. Apparently, the bigger production numbers were archive footage: MGM had planned to make a sequel to The Hollywood Revue of 1929 in 1930 but never released it. Eventually, they used some of that footage in Broadway to Hollywood, which would explain what those musical numbers are so creaky. They're actually from 1930.

That fact, combined with Broadway to Hollywood being a decided programmer instead of a prestige picture, give the film an atmosphere of being not quite up to snuff in terms of production values. That's a bit of a shame, since even though the idea isn't terribly original, is one that could have wound up much better instead of a dated time capsule. Broadway to Hollywood is still worth one watch, but is definitely just a pedestrian movie in the end. Watch also for some famous names in small parts, and see if you spot Curly and Moe Howard without looking up their roles in the credits first.

Thousands Cheer

Red Skelton was TCM's Star of the Month back in April. One of his movies that I had on my DVR surprisingly enough was not shown as part of the tribute. But since the movie would be kinda-sorta appropriate for Memorial Day weekend (not that TCM is programming it), and because the movie is going to expire from my DVR relatively soon, I figure that now is a good time to blog about it. That movie is Thousands Cheer.

The opening credits of the movie announce that it's introducing José Iturbi, a Brazilian pianist/conductor who would appear in several muscially inclined movies over the next several years, and he's in the opening, leading a philharmonic concert where one of the performers is singer Kathryn Jones (Kathryn Grayson). After her musical number, she informs the audience that she's going to be taking a sabbatical from performing: her father Bill (John Boles) is a US Army colonel, and with the movie being made in 1943, it's smack-dab in the middle of World War II. Col. Jones is about to be assigned to another base, and Kathryn is going to follow him in order to provide morale for the troops stationed there about to go off to war.

One of those troops is Pvt. Eddy Marsh (Gene Kelly), who is on the same train to the base as Col. Boles. He implies to Kathryn that he loves her, not realizing that she too is going to be staying at the base, which is going to make things awkward when the two of them meet again. They do meet again on the base, and Eddy informs Kathryn that he doesn't really like the army. He was drafted, but he came from a family of circus aerialists, with the result that he feels much more comfortable up in the air than on the ground and as a result would really prefer to be transferred to the Air Corps.

Kathryn falls in love with Eddy along the way, although Eddy has a problem with the officer corps which means that by definition he also has a problem with the daughter of an officer. Additionally, Kathryn's mother Hyllary (Mary Astor) doesn't want her daughter marrying a soldier. Hyllary did so and suffered heartbreak thanks to her husband's transfers and basically being married to the military. Besides, Eddy's attitude is so bad that one wonders whether he's going to be court-martialed out of the military.

All of that occurs in the amount of running time that a movie might have if Thousands Cheer were a B movie. But it isn't, being one of MGM's big, morale-boosting films for the war effort. As such, Kathryn has to invite all her friends to help put on that big show for the soldiers about to go off to war. Mickey Rooney (playing himself) is the MC of that show, and he's brought his MGM friends (again playing themselves) to perform skits and musical numbers at the camp for the soldiers. This show-within-a-show takes the final third of the movie, with a coda at the end to resolve the main story. Quite a few of MGM's stars perform, including Skelton.

Thousands Cheer is an odd little -- or should I say big, since it runs a bit over two hours -- movie, since it's really two movies in one. Gene Kelly was fairly early in his career, but already shows his ability. However, he wasn't given a particularly interesting story in which to show that ability. It's not Kelly's fault, of course; the movie has to hit the propaganda notes of a serviceman redeeming himself by doing the right thing for his country, and it has to do that fairly briefly since we've got 45 minutes of MGM cameos to show, thank you very much.

Some of the cameos are better than others, with Frank Morgan being irritating while some of the singers do reasonably well. The aerialists might be the highlight of the camp show. That, and Mickey Rooney doing his impressions of some of his fellow MGM contract players. Not that they're notably good, but they're certainly fun. Interestingly, there's a conceit where one of the soldiers in the crowd, played by Ben Blue, goes googly-eyed over all the female singers. Except when Lena Horne shows up, but then again Horne's segment has obvious points where censors in the South could have cut so those sensitive southern moviegoers wouldn't have to see a black woman singing.

For me, Thousands Cheer comes across 80-plus years on as more of a time capsule than anything else, but it's one you may want to check out.

Piccadilly Jim (1936)

Another of the movies that I recorded off of TCM because it sounded interesting was the 1936 Robert Montgomery vehicle Piccadilly Jim. Having watched it, now I can do a review on it for you.

Montgomery plays the title character, James Crocker Jr. He's an American-born artist living in London and making a living as a cartoonist doing caricatures for the London newspapers. He's apparently able to make a pretty darn good living at it, too, since he's got a butler in Bayliss (Eric Blore), and is also able to support his father, James Sr. (Frank Morgan). Dad is an actor, or was an actor at some point in the past; he doesn't seem to have worked in quite some time and everybody calls him a ham.

However, Dad has met a nice American woman, Eugenia Willis (Billie Burke), a widow traveling with her sister Nesta Pett (Cora Witherspoon) and Nesta's husband Herbert (Grant Mitchell). Dad has fallen in love with Eugenia, but unsurprisingly Nesta has the good sense to wonder if the elder Crocker isn't the sort of smooth operator looking for a mark to marry and live off the wife's money. (Haven't the Petts heard of a pre-nup?) Dad tells them his son is a successful artist, so the Petts would like to meet him which will also serve as a way to judge whether Dad is in fact suitable for Eugenia.

Meanwhile, Jim Jr. goes out for a night on the town, which I'd guess would also serve as one of the ways he finds inspiration for the people he wants to caricature. But this time, while out, he meets a lovely young woman named Ann (Madge Evans). He falls in love with her, but she's not so quick to return the feelings. That's because there are several things he doesn't know about Ann, with the first of them bein that she is in fact engaged to another man, Lord Priory (Ralph Forbes). Jim Jr. keeps pursuing Ann, into the next day, with the result that he winds up tipsy at his meeting with the Petts, and they rightly reject the Crockers. This especially after finding out that young Jim is just a sketch artist.

The Petts go off to the Riviera, and this is the other thing we learn about Ann. She's actually the niece of Nesta and Eugenia, but Jim Jr. still doesn't know this. He, having been rebuffed by the Petts, decides to create a new comic strip lampooning the sort of rich Americans abroad that the Petts are, and this cartoon, From Rags to Riches, becomes a huge hit. Eventually, the Petts return from the Continent, and find that they're the butt of all jokes since everybody in London recognizes them as the source material for the comic strip. However, they -- and most importantly Ann -- are unaware of who the real artist behind the strip is.

Piccadilly Jim is based on a story by P.G. Wodehouse that was written 20 years before this movie adaptation. In fact, this isn't the first adaptation, as there was a silent version. There has since been, about 20 years ago, another adaptation of the material. The 1936 version of Piccadilly Jim works well, but it feels closer a lot like a programmer in tone. MGM had Robert Montgomery available, and had the rights to the story (they had planned to turn the material into a musical), and so they put two and two together.

Robert Montgomery is every bit the professional here, as is the rest of the cast. They all put in solid performances that make for a film that works, although at the end of the movie's running time it's not something that's spectacularly memorable. But when the studios were churning out as many movies as they were, "workmanlike" was part of the point. And even workmanlike work from the big studios made for a reasonably good movie.

Success at Any Price

TCM had a night of Colleen Moore movies some time back. She was a star of the silent era who lasted several years into talkies before retiring and becoming even wealthier through smart investments. One of her final movies was Success at Any Price. Since it sounded interesting, I recorded it and recently got around to watching it.

The movie starts off in late 1927, a half dozen years or so before the picture was released. A headline in a newspaper refers to a gangster named Martin killed in a gangland shooting. He was fabulously wealthy, but had a kid brother Joe (Douglas Fairbanks Jr.) who wasn't so wealthy. Joe has a girlfriend Sarah (that's Colleen Moore) who works as a secretary at an advertising agency and is doing reasonably well for on of those working girls who is presumably going to quit the workforce when she gets married and starts a family. Joe wants to get the money, and vows to do whatever it takes, at least legally, to get it.

Sarah's job is working for Merritt (Frank Morgan before he moved to MGM). Merritt takes an interest in Sarah, but it seems more because he's interested in all of the secretaries. Sarah isn't interested in the advances, but is able to get Joe a job with the agency. Joe, meanwhile, grates at what seems to him like the evils of networking: all those men who went to college and were in fraternites are able to use those connections to get ahead in the business world while people like him languish because the college boys look down on them.

Eventually, Joe has a blow-up with Merritt, but Sarah is able to get Joe a second chance. That chance involves coming up with copy not for Wham, but for a cold cream used by the upper classes. ("If you ain't eatin' cold cream" is not exactly winning ad copy.) While Joe is in the office trying to come up with the copy that would save his job, in walks Agnes (Genevieve Tobin), who is Merritt's current mistress. Joe is immediately taken with Agnes, largely because she's the sort of upper-class woman who uses the cold cream Joe is trying to advertise. He gets the job back, and starts to become more successful. Successful enough, in fact, that he can start calling on Agnes, which is a problem when Merritt walks in on him.

And then an establishing shot shows a calendar for 1930. Everybody watching the movie when it was first released would have recognized that this means the stock market crash of 1929 has occurred, and with that, a lot of people are in financial trouble. Among those in trouble are the company, as well as Merritt personally. Joe sees this as a chance to move up in the company, eventually driving Merritt out and even getting Merritt's old girlfriend Agnes. But will he be happy with the newfound success?

Success at Any Price is the sort of movie that was common during the Depression, looking at the business world while also portraying the rich as not necessarily being well off. Some of it is skewering the rich, while sometimes I wonder whether movies like this were trying to send the message to the working classes that they should be happy with what they have because the rich aren't happy either.

Douglas Fairbanks does well, as does Moore, but I can't help but think that this sort of material would have worked better had it been made at Warner Bros., which had the reputation for making social issues movies. Not that Success at Any Price is bad; it's just that it doesn't really rise above the standard for the genre. It's definitely worth one watch, however.

The Cockeyed Miracle

I've mentioned before in conjunction with quite a few movies how the Production Code can be a problem with forcing a certain plot resolution on the film, with the only question being how the movie actually gets there. I couldn't help but have similar thoughts as I was watching the 1946 film The Cockeyed Miracle.

The plot deals with the Griggs family that has two adult children, led by patriarch Sam Griggs (Frank Morgan). He's a shipbulider, but getting up there in years and beginning to suffer some age-related health problems. His wife Amy (Gladys Cooper) loves him, and isn't worried about the prospect of illness forcing Sam to retire, since they've saved up some money. Unfortunately, she doesn't know that he's put it in a real estate investment that may or may not pay off, but in any case even if it pays off later, the money is still in an illiquid asset. Sam gave the savings to his best friend Tom Carter (Cecil Kellaway) to buy a plot of land, but the only possible investor wants to see that the land will stand up to the storms that hit the coast.

As for the adult children, Jennifer (Audrey Totter) is in love with an assistant professor at the local college, Howard (Richard Quine before he became an director). He's got a chance at a full professorship, but it's at a school out west, and there's the question of whether she should leave and split up the family with a sickly father, or wait for Howard to come back in a few years. The son, however, is the more immediate problem.

Jim Griggs (Marshall Thompson) would like to be a shipbuilder like his father, but economic circumstances have so far required him to work at his father's fish-packing plant. But on the day that the action in the movie opens, he comes running home with a letter from a shipbulider over in London in the UK. They've got a prospect for a job, but he's going to have to set out for England in fairly short order, and to do that he needs the money for the transatlantic passage. In theory, the family has the money, but that's because Sam is the only one who knows that the money has been invested in a still-illiquid land deal. He can't get the money right now.

Things really change when he goes up to bed. He comes down and sees... his father Ben (Keenan Wynn). This is a problem because Ben has been dead since Sam was a young man, and for Sam to see Ben now means that Sam is really quite dead too, not that the rest of the family is aware of it just yet. Ben has appeared as a sort of ghost, but really with the intention of taking Sam to the next world.

As a ghost, he does have the sort of supernatural powers that allow him to do the sort of things that those of us on this side of life to attribute to ghosts or other phenomena of which we're not yet aware. One thing that Ben might just be able to do is to conjure up a storm, so that the prospective buyer of the land will see his question answered of how the land will stand up. Ben, having done that, satisfies the buyer, who writes a check for the purchase price of the land. All of the Griggs' money problems will be solved!

Except that Tom has a change of heart. Since there was no actual contract signed between Tom and Sam, there would be no theoretical legal recourse for Sam to get the money back even if he were still alive. With him being dead and Tom being the only one to know about the agreement he and Sam had, it would be easy for Tom to be evil and take all of the money from the land deal. There is, however, the question of whether the Production Code would allow that....

The Cockeyed Miracle is based on a stage play, and it's extremely easy to see the stage origins watching the movie. A lot of it is based in the parlor/living room of the Griggs house. However, since the story deals with ghosts, it's a lot easier for a movie to deal with the technical problems of trying to portray ghosts than one can do on the stage.

That having been said, the cast does a pretty good job with the material, led by Frank Morgan who is clearly the star here. With a star like Morgan and not anybody bigger, it's obvious that this is more programmer material than prestige movie, and the movie often feels like it has the production values of something more limited. That's not to say it's a bad movie; it does well with its limited aims. At the same time, though, it's also not the sort of movie I'd recommend to people who aren't necessarily fans of old movies: the production values seem thoroughly stuck in the 1940s when the movie was made. It's the sort of thing that could probably stand a remake.

The Emperor's Candlesticks

I've argued before that certain studios back in the Golden Age of Hollywood made certain types of films better than others. Warner Bros., for example, was so good at the gangster and social commentary movies in the 1930s. MGM, on the other hand, was more suited to high-class stuff. A good example of this is The Emperor's Candlesticks.

The movie opens in Vienna sometime during the late 19th century. Russia still had a tsar, and the Tsar's son Peter (Robert Young) is on a secret visit to Vienna for a masked costume ball, togther with his adjutant Baron Suroff (Frank Morgan). A group of rebels are looking for Peter, and when they see him enter dressed as Romeo, they send a young woman dressed as Juliet (Maureen O'Sullivan) over to Peter's box. She captivates him, and he goes off with her.

But it's a trap. She's really Orlich, the daughter of a prominent Polish opposition figure, Poland having been completely divided and eaten up in the early 1790s, not to regain its independence until after World War I. She takes Peter to a safe house where the other conspirators hold him and Suroff hostage. Orlich's father is in prison in Russia, scheduled to be executed in a few weeks, and the Poles want him pardoned. So they force Peter to write a letter to his father telling of the captivity and asked the tsar to pardon Orlich.

But what does any of that have to do with the candlesticks, and the two stars who are credited above Robert Young? One of those stars is William Powell, playing Baron Wolensky. It's going to be his job to smuggle the letter into Russia and get it to the Tsar. Thankfully, he's given the perfect hiding place to keep that letter from getting noticed. He had a visit scheduled with his friend Prince Johann (Henry Stephenson), who would like Wolensky to deliver a pair of candlesticks to Johann's girlfriend in Russia. The candlesticks, dating back to French King Louis XV, have a hidden compartment that would be perfect for hiding the letter where nobody will find it.

The other star is Luise Rainer, playing Countess Mironova. Like Wolensky, she's a secret agent, but in the service of the Tsar. She's been given information that Wolensky is actually a particular agent whose identity the Tsarist secret police had previously not known, and she's given a letter to bring to Russia to tell that to the police. She, too, visits Johann, and Johann determines, not knowing anything about either of his two guests being secret agents, that it might be better to have a woman deliver those candlesticks. There goes Wolensky's hiding place.

Ah, but the Countess' maid is corrupt. She's got a boyfriend who is a thief, and plans to steal the Countess' jewels. He does steal them, but they're found rather quickly. However, he also steals the candlesticks, and gives them to the maid to fence. She takes them to Budapest, and thus begins a cross-continent hunt by Wolensky and Mironova to find the candlesticks. Unsurprisingly, they also develop romantic feelings for one another along the way.

The Emperor's Candlesticks is one of those period pieces that was perfect for MGM's sense of style, with the prop and costume departments making the movie look more lavish than it really is. It's too bad, however, that the source material from which the movie comes is rather threadbare. Robert Young and Frank Morgan are underused, while there's really less going on between Powell and Rainer than first meets the eye. However, Powell especially is so charming, and Rainer suitably exotic, that it's easy to overlook all of this and just see a movie that is an eminently watchable programmer.

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.

Casanova not of color

Gary Cooper was pretty good at comedy, as can be seen in movies like Ball of Fire. But like many other actors, there are movies where his comedy doesn't quite work. In Cooper's case, that movie is Casanova Brown.

Cooper plays the title character (nicknamed Cass), a professor of English who, at the start of the movie is returning home to his small town in Illinois from New York City after having done research for a book on his namesake, the famous lover. However, he's apparently returning home an unhappy man.

Some time later, he's about to get engaged to Madge Ferris (Anita Louise), the daughter in a family where the wealth apparently goes from one daughter to the next, as she and her mom have control of the family wealth, much to the chagrin of Madge's father (Frank Morgan), who has been trying to get money out of them to no avail other than a small weekly allowance. Cass claims to have no need of the money and can support Madge on his professor's salary.

But something comes up. Mr. Ferris is at Cass' house shortly before the weding, and when Cass' mail is delivered, Ferris looks through the mail for Cass should there be anything important. Of course there is; a cryptic message from a maternity hospital up in Chicago, telling him he really needs to get his ass up there and see one of the doctors. Cass says at first that it's probably some sort of bizarre advertising campaign to intimidate people into contributing, before eventually he tells the true story.

Back in New York, he made the acquaintance of one Isabel Drury (Teresa Wright), also the daughter of wealthy parents, and fell in love with her. The two get married right away, somethinmg Isabel's astrology-believing mother (Patricia Collinge) thinks is a disaster. Worse for Cass, Isabel's mom hates smokers, and Cass smokes. He decides to hide his cigarette, and when he does it, the foreshadowing is pretty obvious. The cigarette butt in his pocket is going to ignite to comedic effect. Except that in this case the cigarette butt burns the entire house down, leading the Drurys to get Isabel to annul the marriage.

No wonder Cass was unhappy when he returned home. But apparently Cass and Isabel were married long enough for them to have sex, and just that one time having sex would have been enough for Isabel to get knocked up in a way that the Production Code would approve of. But why would Cass be getting a letter from a maternity hospital in Chicago, when the Drurys are from New York? In any case, Cass is going to have to go up to Chicago to resolve the situation before he can get married to Madge.

What Cass finds is that, indeed, Isabel had a baby; her rationale in having it in Chicago is that it was much more likely Cass would come up to deal with the situation. The hospital wants Cass' medical information as a formailty in putting the baby up for adoption. When Cass finds that out, he's horrified: this is our baby, Isabel, not just yours.

In order to keep the baby from being adopted, what does Cass do? Why, kidnap the baby and take it to a hotel, something that I thought would have violated the Production Code and required Cass to spend time in jail, even if he is the little girl's father. But he insists on being a good father, even though this being a movie from the mid-1940s, a single man knows nothing about parenthood.

It's an interesting premise, and one that's based on a play from 15 years earlier that had already been turned into a movie. But in Casanova Brown, the premise winds up falling flat. I think that's because I found the film rather uneven in tone. There's a fairly slow and long buildup to Cass kidnapping the baby, and then the movie becomes much wackier, giving the hotel maid (Mary Treen) and bellhop (Emory Parnell) who help Cass take care of the baby no realistic character motivations for why they'd help Cass in a scheme that at first glance looks criminal.

Gary Cooper does about as well with the material as one could hope for, not being helped that his character too turns on a dime. Teresa Wright is underused, and Patricia Collinge is just irritating. It all adds up to a movie that in my mind is a bit of a misfire. Casanova Brown really needed somebody like Preston Sturges to make the material work. But, as always, you should probably watch and judge for yourself.

Secrets of the French Police

I didn't mean to blog about another Gregory Ratoff movie today after having mentioned one of his appearances yesterday, but it turned out that Secrets of the French Police was next up among the movies I recently watched.

The star here, if you will, is actually Gwili Andre, one of those Europeans (Danish, in her case) who was brought over in the early sound era to be a studio's new exotic star, although in her case it didn't quite work out. She plays Eugenie, a flower-seller in Paris, although we only see her after an introductory scene. A French policeman has been killed, but his funeral is secret because of the work he was doing investigating an organization of some sort.

Investigating this murder is François St. Cyr (a surprising Frank Morgan), and suspicion is going to fall on Hans Moloff (Gregory Ratoff), but more on him in a bit. Leon Renault (John Warburton) is a pickpocket who is in love with Eugenie, although her father doesn't like the idea because, well, who would want their daughter to marry a criminal. Of course, Dad isn't actually her real dad but her adoptive father, as Eugenie was a war orphan from Russia in the previous war.

This brings her under Moloff's eye. He's decided he's going to scam the remains of the Romanov family out of the wealth that they had been able to get out of Russia before the Bolshevik revolution. So Moloff kidnaps Eugenie and hypnotizes her into believing she's the Grand Duchess Anastasia. The police can't investigate openly, so St. Cyr asks Leon if Leon would be willing to break into Moloff's house in order to find out what's going on; apparently Leon is as good a cat burglar as he is a pickpocket.

Secrets of the French Police is an odd little movie, because there's a lot going on here in a very short (58 minutes) movie, so a lot is left either relatively unresolved or unsatisfactorily resolved. The movie isn't helped by the fact that Andre wasn't much of an actress, although in her defense she spends most of the movie in a Trilby-like trance.

But there's also a lot interesting in the movie, with the mansion sets and Frank Morgan not playing rascally but straight. And the story apart from the stereotyped hypnosis angle certainly has some fun aspects to it. Just don't expect anything particularly great.

Warner Home Video released this one to DVD as part of the Forbidden Hollywood collection, on Vol. 10. By this time, they were running out of famous pre-Codes to pacakage together, as you can see by the titles in this volume.

Yolanda and the Thief

Er, not that Yolanda....

Another of my recent movie watches was the Fred Astaire musical Yolanda and the Thief.

Fred is obviously not Yolanda; that honor goes to Lucile Bremer. She plays Yolanda Aquaviva, the daughter in a very rich family in the Latin American country of Patria, who is the heir to a fortune when she reaches her majority. That's just about to happen, as she's graduating from a convent school to go back and live with her Aunt Amarilla (Mildred Natwick) who has been the custodian of the fortune. Unfortunately, Yolanda has spent so much time in the convent school that she knows next to nothing about the big wide world out there.

Enter Astaire. He's Johnny Riggs, on a train in Patria together with his friend and partner-in-crime Victor Trout (Frank Morgan). He reads a newspaper about the newest head of the Aquaviva family, which of course gives him the idea of parting her from some of that fortune. Of course, every man in Patria knows the Aquavivas, it seems, and their wealth allows them to run it and be sort of above the law.

Johnny and Victor go to the front gate of the Aquaviva mansion and when Johnny is able to get on the grounds, he finds that Yolanda is having a crisis. She's obviously devoutly Catholic what with this being 1940s Latin America and her having spent all that time in the convent school, so she's praying to an angel statue, and that's where Johnny gets his idea: he's going to pretend to be Yolanda's guardian angel!

This being an MGM musical with Fred Astaire in the starring role, and thanks to the Production Code, you know that Johnny isn't going to get away with fleecing Yolanda, so there have to be complications. One is that Johnny finds himself beginning to like Yolanda, even though he's trying to get her to sign over power of attorney to him. The other complication is a Mr. Candle (Leon Ames), who takes the satchel containing Yolanda's stocks and bonds after Johnny drops it on Victor's head, knocking Victor out. He seems to know a lot more than he's letting on.

To be honest, the story in Yolanda and the Thief is a bit tedious and much too slow. The is made up for by the dance numbers, which are exceedingly colorful, especially the "Coffee Time" number near the end. There's another dance number in the middle that dance fans will like, but I felt went on much too long. And Bremer is miscast, being much too old for the role. Having the film depend on her naivete is also a mistake, as there certainly would have been a transition period before Yolanda was given full control over the family fortune.

Yolanda and the Thief is one of those movies you probably need to watch for yourself and come to your own opinion on. It wasn't my cup of tea, but it may be yours.

Mayors Go Wild

While making the 1935 movie Call of the Wild, Clark Gable had an affair with his co-star, Loretta Young, that resulted in her getting knocked up, going off in private for several months to have the child, and "adopting" the child. Fifteen years later, the two stars would be reunited for the movie Key to the City.

Young plays Clarissa Standish, the mayor of Wenonah, ME, one of those medium-sized towns that populated Hollywood movies and which there seem to be too many of compared to the US population as a whole. She's in San Francicso with a whole bunch of other mayors from similarly made-up medium-sized towns for a convention. (The US Conference of Mayors claims to represent 1400 mayors of cities with populations of at least 30,000; I don't know how many cities of that size there were back in 1950 when Key to the City was released.). Mayor Standish is there presumably to look into the latest in fire trucks of something. But a lot of the mayors seem to be there more to schmooze and party.

One of the mayors in the latter category is Steve Fisk (that's Clark Gable if you couldn't tell), mayor of Puget City, CA. He was a longshoreman and worked his way up to mayor. Having gotten into politics this way, he's not as secure in his position as somebody like Clarissa who is the niece of a federal judge (Lewis Stone). As for Steve, he's there with his fire chief(? -- why would the fire chief be there?) Duggan (Frank Morgan in his final movie; this one was released after he died).

Steve and Clarissa meet and it's love at first sight, although there are going to be complications along the way. A bunch of the mayors go to a nightclub where the star attraction is the dancer Sheila (Marilyn Maxwell). Steve unintentionally starts a riot that results in a bunch of people getting hauled into the police department, where Sgt. Hogan (James Gleason) tries to keep the mayors' predicament from becoming public.

Of course, things do go public for both Fisk and Standish. It's a bigger problem for Fisk, since he's got strong political opposition back in Puget City, where Taggart (Raymond Burr) is trying to get some sort of housing development nixed in the short term so that he can get his contractors the contract to build it, or something like that. By this time, Clarissa has agreed to marry Steve, so she follows him to Puget City where he tries to salvage his political career.

Key to the City is one of those many post-World War II movies made at MGM which seem to have gone wrong somehow. I don't know if it's just that they didn't change with the times quickly enough or whether they were more concerned with the Freed Unit musicals, but increasingly when I watch MGM's A movies from this period they all seem to have something not quite right about them. In this case, Key to the City really feels like a movie that would/should have been made before the war. A decade later, however, and everything feels perfunctory and sterile. The movie also feels like it's got some sort of bad plot hole that made what's supposed to be a farce ending tediously unfunny for me.

Still, Key to the City is filled with competent performances by aging character actors who try their best in the supporting roles, only to be brought down by a subpar script. It's available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive collection, so you can judge for yourself.

Honky Tonk

Another movie I recorded during Summer Under the Stars that's available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive is Honky Tonk.

A prologue of sorts introduces us to "Candy" Johnson (Clark Gable). He's a con man working the old west with his best friend "Sniper" (Chill Wills). The latest town has finally cottoned on to their schemes, and are about to tar and feather the two men and run them out of town on a rail. Somehow, however, they're still stupid enough to let Candy talk his way out of the situation. So Candy and Sniper head off to the next town, with Candy claiming he's going to go straight. Yeah right.

On the train to their next destination, Candy meets the lovely Elizabeth Cotton (Lana Turner). She's grown up in Boston, and is coming out west to the town of Yellow Creek, NV, to meet her father the Judge (Frank Morgan) who is a justice of the peace in the town. Candy, liking her, decides that this is probably a good place to settle down. When they get off the train, he meets the judge, and realizes that this guy is an old friend of his, a fellow con artist who is taking kickbacks. But the judge wants better for his daughter. He knows that Candy is no good for her, even though the judge is still willing to consider Candy a friend.

Sure enough, Candy isn't able to stay on the straight and narrow, winning a casino pretty much right away by committing a con in a game of Russian Roulette. This leads to bigger and better things, with Candy basically becoming boss of a booming town, with Brazos (Albert Dekker) as his sheriff enforcer. Meanwhile, an old flame of Candy's, "Gold Dust" (Claire Trevor) shows up to warn Elizabeth about marrying Candy, but Elizabeth wants a good life, so she tricks Candy into marrying her.

Eventually, the Judge has pangs of conscience, and he starts dealing with the good government types, led by the widow of the former town preacher, Mrs. Varner (Marjorie Main) to turn the tables on Candy and the rest of the corruption going on in Yellow Creek. But Brazos and his men in particular aren't about to let that happen.

Honky Tonk is a movie that came across to me as something more than a programmer, but not quite a prestige movie. It felt to me much as though there was no new ground being broken here, but just MGM putting a movie into production to give audiences something from their stars that would entertain the audience. There's nothing wrong with that as not every movie can be a masterpiece. And certainly, Honky Tonk entertains. It's just that as I was watching I couldn't help but feel like I'd seen all these plot lines before, even though I'd never actually seen Honky Tonk.

So, if you want undemanding, solid entertainment, I can certainly recommend Honky Tonk. The studios certainly knew how to produce such entertainment back in the day.

Boom Town

When Clark Gable was honored in Summer Under the Stars last month, one of the movies TCM ran was 1940's Boom Town. It's going to be on TCM again tomorrow morning at 8:00 AM, and is available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive anyway.

Spencer Tracy plays "Square" John Sand, an independent oil driller in a town in the Texas oil boom of the 1920s. Unfortunately, he doesn't have enough money to buy the equipment to drill deep enough to extract the oil. He's in luck though, as he runs into, quite literally, Big John McMasters (Clark Gable). McMasters has more money than Sand, whom Big John calls "Shorty", and Square John misunderstands as thinking that he's got enough money to buy the equipment from local outfitter Luther Aldrich (Frank Morgan). So the two go into business together.

Square John was hoping to earn enough money to bring his girlfriend out to Texas so he could marry her, but therein lies a tale. Big John goes into town and runs into a beautiful new stranger, Betsy (Claudette Colbert). He falls in love with her immediately, and the feeling is close enough to mutual that the two actually get married that night. There's just one problem: Betsy was Square John's girlfriend. As you can imagine, this is going to drive a big wedge into their relationship. Eventually splitting up their partnership.

Each man goes his merry way, with Square John eventually working for an American extractor in one of the Latin American dictatorships where the fear of nationalization is omnipresent. Big John winds up in New York after first going through Square John's South American field, and then becoming an oil magnate in Oklahoma. Big John wants to go to New York and get involved in the refining (and later stages) part of the oil industry because he's always looking for new fields to conquer. In fact, it's because he wants to take on new rival Compton (Lionell Atwill), having met Compton's beautiful factotum Karen (Hedy Lamarr, who gets billed above the title even though she doesn't appear until more than halfway through the movie).

Anyhow, Square John's job gets nationalized out of existence, so he winds up in New York City too, and goes back into partnership with Big John, and Luther surprisingly in tow. It's a short-lived partnership, however, as Square John sees Karen for what she really is....

Boom Town is an interesting, sprawling movie that generally does well despite having some flaws. Claudette Colbert is one of those actress for whom it seems tough to wipe all teh glamor off. She does as well as she can, and it's not her fault, but at times she seems like a fish out of water in the oil towns. The movie also careens from one part of the plot to the next; unlike something like Cimarron the material here either calls for a more intimate story or fcusing only on the McMasters character's lifespan. And the ending came across to me as a bit unrealistic.

Still, with all that, Boom Town is an excellent example of the sort of quality work a studio like MGM could put out with its stable of actors and people behind the camera. Its pluses outweigh its minuses and the film ultimately works as a whole, and is thoroughly worth a watch.