Edison, the Man

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cynthia

Somehow I also wound up with a whole bunch of movies that starred the reliably bland actor George Murphy on my DVR, and it's not as if he was ever TCM's Star of the month. One of those movies is Cynthia, a light family drama trying to restore some sense of normalcy following World War II.

Cynthia is played by an adolescent Elizabeth Taylor, although we don't see her at first. Instead, we meet her parents, Larry Bishop (Goerge Murphy) and Louise (Mary Astor) when they were college students before they got married and Cynthia was born. Louise was a musician and Larry a med student in 1930 both hoping they'd be able to go to Vienna to study their respective fields, with Larry making money in the summer by working at the hardware store back in his home town of Napoleon, Ill., one of those small midwestern towns that consistently shows up in movies like this. But the two fall in love and get married, which in and of itself is not a big deal. However, Larry knocks up Louise, and the two need to support themselves somehow, which necessitates moving back to Napoleon.

Worse, Cynthia has been a sickly child, with the result being that she's been sheltered her whole life, and her parents feeing trapped in Napoleon. Indeed, stupid Larry, despite having three years of college education, hasn't even bothered to get any better job than still working at the hardware store, and the family have been living in the same rented house for the past 16 years or so.

Cynthia too is getting to the age where she sees all the nice experiences that the other kids her age have had the chance to do, like going to school dances or performing in the school play. This latter even though Cynthia seems to have some musical talent that she inherited from Mom and takes lessons from a local music professor Rosenkrants (S.Z. Sakall). Matters reach a head for the family when the guy who owns the house decides he needs to sell, which may necessitate the Bishops having to move out if they can't come up with the down payment.

And then one day Ricky Latham (Jimmy Lydon), who dropped out of school to join the navy and presumably fight World War II, returns to town in the hope of finishing up his high school, which is another plot point that makes no sense. The guy would have to be at least 20 now, much too old for Cynthia or high school in general. But he takes a shine to Cynthia, and she might get to go on her first date to the big high school prom. That is, if she's healthy enough to do so. She hasn't really been sick for a year now, but suddenly, with all this activity, she might be coming down with another flu....

Cynthia is one of those MGM movies that you can see fitting in with what Louis B. Mayer wanted to do: good family values in a wholesome package, with some added post-World War II escapism. If these are the worst problems a family has, things can't be too bad, much like the Andy Hardy series that was by this time winding down. Unfortunately, for me the whole thing strained credulity. Cynthia really couldn't be that sickly, and the people around the Bishops, especially Larry's sister (Spring Byington) and her doctor husband (Gene Lockhart), couldn't be that impolite. Everybody tries, but Cynthia is another of those movies that ultimately falls under the weight of a saccharine script.

Don't call me Byron Barr

Tonight into tomorrow brings the second night of Barbara Stanwyck's turn as TCM's Star of the Month. One of her movies that I hadn't seen before and recorded the last time TCM ran it is The Gay Sisters. It comes on as part of the Star of the Month salute tomorrow (March 13) at 1:00 PM, so I made a point of watching the movie to be able to do a post on it here.

The movie opens with a brief establishing scene set about 25 years before the main action. As the movie was released in 1942 and set more or less at that time (possibly just before Pearl Harbor although World War II doesn't play into the action), that means the opening is set in the mid-1910s, which is the run-up to World War I. The Gaylords are one of the richest families in America, and the current patriarch, Penn Gaylord (Donald Woods), has a wife and three young daughters. Or should I say had a wife. She was somehow traveling alone on the Lusitania, which as we all know was torpedoed and sunk in the Atlantic. Eventually the Americans entered the war, and Daddy Gaylord for some weird reason went off to fight despite having those three young daughters and presumably being the same sort of captain of industry as Jerry Lewis in Which Way to the Front. Dad gets it in France, leaving the thre girls orphans.

Two dozen years pass, and probating the will has been a nightmare. Apparently, somebody over in France claims that Papa Gaylord wrote a codicil before getting killed in action in which he gave ten percent of the family fortune to a French children's charity. The remaining Gaylords back home naturally contested this, and somehow international legal delays have dragged the case out for all these years, while the Gaylord sisters grew up and slowly lost the estate's cash. They have, however, held on to the land, because family tradition has it that land is more important than money.

The three sisters are Fiona (Barbara Stanwyck), the eldest, who is foster mom to an orphan child Austin; Evelyn (Geraldine Fitzgerald), who married an English nobleman and has come back to America in the only sop to the fact that there's now another war going on in Europe; and Susie (Nancy Coleman), who got married except that it's one of those loveless marriages she'd like annulled. Her unseen husband is willing to do it for a price, but since the money has been spent on contesting the will, Susie doesn't have the money. So although she's in a relationship with painter Gig Young (the print TCM ran has the character being played by the Gig Young who became a prominent supporting actor; he was born Byron Barr and took his stage name from this character although I don't know if he did that before the movie was first released or TCM only has a re-release print). Complicating matters is that when Evelyn returns to America, she sees Gig and starts pursuing him.

But since Barbara Stanwyck is the star here, she gets the biggest complication. That comes in the form of Charles Barclay (George Brent), who is contesting the will on behalf of that French charity. Of course, he really wants the land the Gaylord house is built on because he's a land developer who has bought all the surrounding land in order to be able to build a skyscraper. He also seems to know quite a bit about Fiona's past. More, even, than Fiona's first lawyer Gibbon (Gene Lockhart) who gets replaced with Ralph Pedloch (Donald Crisp). Even the poor foster kid gets dragged into all of this.

The Gay Sisters was based on a novel that I'm guessing was popular at the time to the extent that you can see why a studio would want to turn it into a movie. However, something goes wrong in the adaptation, which I think is the screenplay since it seems to go all over the place, with the reveal of Fiona's past being a bit bizarre. And if the Gaylords were supposed to value land over money, couldn't they have just given up that ten percent right at the beginning?

Still, The Gay Sisters isn't a terrible movie. It's just not what you'd want to show as the first movie for any of the main players involved.